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misfitwashere · 1 month ago

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January 28, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 29

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term prepared by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. The plan called for dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with officers loyal to an extraordinarily strong executive. It called for that strong executive to take control of the Department of Justice and the military and then, once firmly in power, to impose Christian nationalism on the country.

The members of the Heritage Foundation who wrote Project 2025 are closely aligned with Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s Danube Institute, and their plan looks much like his erosion of democracy to create a dictatorship that enforces white male Christian patriarchy. On Monday, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times reflected on the influence of Hungary on the American right wing, posting: “it has always been wild to me that the model these guys have for the united states is a country that would rival mississippi for poorest state if it became part of this country.”

Once people heard about Project 2025, they came out strongly against it. Trump then maintained he knew nothing about the plan, although many of the people involved in it had been part of his first administration.

On January 24, Nik Popli noted in Time magazine that a number of the people who wrote Project 2025 have been tapped to serve in Trump’s second administration and that nearly two thirds of the executive orders Trump has signed either mirror or partly mirror the plans in that nearly 900-page document. “The real shame is that on the campaign trail, Trump did not level with Americans,” Skye Perryman of the legal organization Democracy Forward told Popli. “He didn't seek to try to convince Americans that this was his agenda. He acted as if he didn't have anything to do with Project 2025, when we know and have seen that he's really seeking to accelerate that agenda.”

On Monday, January 27, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued to agency heads guidance for how to implement what was, in Trump’s first term, known as “Schedule F,” a plan to replace the nonpartisan civil servant system established in 1883 with people loyal to Trump. As soon as he took office, former president Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F, but it has come back in Trump’s second term as “Schedule Policy/Career.”

The plan strips tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections. Don Kettl of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy told Erich Wagner of Government Executive that the new rules say “the responsibility of people in the executive branch is to do what the president says, as he decides it should be done, and anyone who doesn't is subject to firing…. It’s a flat-out assertion of presidential authority under Article II [of the Constitution] that I’ve never seen put quite so broadly.”

Today, the Trump administration sent an email blast titled “Fork in the Road” to federal workers offering to let them resign and keep their pay until September, a transparent attempt to clear places for loyalists. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that this sure looked like Elon Musk was “spiking the ball,” as this was the same subject line he sent to Twitter employees when he bought the company. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looked at the buyout proposal and noted that “zero legal authority exists to do this.”

Last night, legal commentator Joyce White Vance detailed the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the Department of Justice. On Monday, Trump’s acting attorney general fired more than a dozen lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of now-president Trump, after reassigning many more. In a statement, an official for the department said that the acting attorney general “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” In a masterpiece of gaslighting, the statement added: “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

Vance points out that “[a]n administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties.” She continues: “The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.”

Trump appears to be trying to gain control over the military and turn it into a political instrument. In his inaugural address he said he would free the U.S. military “to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.” But, in fact, the stated mission of the U.S. military is “to deter war and ensure our nation's security.” Those two statements are not the same thing.

As Michael T. Klare wrote today in The Nation, the focus of Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, former Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is not to ensure the nation’s security, but to fight “the ‘Marxists’ in government, the media, and civil society who, he claims, have instilled ‘wokism’ in the US military—that is, a commitment to racial and gender diversity.” When Republican senators balked at confirming Hegseth, Trump’s allies forced him through by a vote of 50–50, with Vice President J.D. Vance, who shares Hegseth’s right-wing religious extremism, casting the deciding vote.

Today, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, and Alex Horton of the Washington Postreported that Hegseth has stripped retired former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley of his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and ordered an inspector general to investigate his behavior. Trump appointed Milley but came to despise him because he stood against Trump’s unconstitutional orders.

While strafing the independent civil service, the Justice Department, and the military, the administration is also working to strengthen the hand of the president. Over the weekend, Trump openly broke a law passed by Congress in 2022 to limit his ability to fire inspectors general, and when met with shrugs by Republican enablers, the administration moved to bigger power grabs.

It is ignoring a 1974 law that says the president must disburse monies appropriated by Congress, passed after President Richard Nixon tried to override the power of Congress by “impounding” the money it appropriated for things lawmakers thought would benefit their constituents. Federal money, after all, belongs to the American people. The authors of Project 2025 insist that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and that the president can decide simply to stop funding the things Congress deems important, thus reducing Congress from the lawmaking body the Constitution established to a sort of advisory body.

When Trump tried this in 2019, impounding money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions in order to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, the House of Representatives impeached him. Although Republican senators agreed Trump was guilty, they acquitted him, fearing that convicting him would hurt their party in the 2020 elections.

On Friday the Trump administration froze all foreign aid appropriated by Congress. “We get tired of giving massive amounts of money to countries that hate us, don't we?" Trump said on Monday, but the truth is that American soft power has been crucial in maintaining U.S. global influence since World War II. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called it “dumb and murderous,” adding: “Tons of kids are just going to die needlessly” as U.S.-funded food supplies for famine-stricken Sudan stop. “The terrorists will benefit” as U.S. money for prisons holding ISIS members dries up. “The point of all this is to destroy U.S. power in the world,” Murphy wrote. “That primarily helps China, who is INCREASING its aid programs as we disappear. China—the place where all of Trump’s billionaires make their products and want deals to open markets. Think there’s a connection?”

International aid groups that depend on U.S. funding appeared shocked. "The recent stop-work cable from the State Department suspends programs that support America's global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill," said InterAction, the largest alliance of international aid organizations. "This halt interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease. It stops assistance in countries critical to U.S. interests, including Taiwan, Syria, and Pakistan. And, it halts decades of life-saving work through PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health program started by President George W. Bush] that helps babies to be born HIV-free.”

International aid organizations hoped the decision would be reversed, but on Monday night the Trump administration accused the leadership of USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, of trying to get around its order to freeze all foreign aid, and it placed dozens of career officials on administrative leave. Still, after an outcry, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio today announced a temporary waiver for certain “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” although what that means is unclear.

On Monday, Trump’s White House budget office went even further in strengthening Trump. It ordered a pause on all federal government grants and loans, requiring them all to guarantee that they ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and stop spending for clean energy initiatives. According to Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, the memo sent to government agencies said programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Josh Chafetz wrote: “There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is being spent…. And it's hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have.”

Today, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters: “Last night President Trump plunged the country into chaos…. The Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country. In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and, most of all, American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas…. Funds for things like disaster assistance, local law enforcement, rural hospitals, aid to the elderly, food for people in need, all are on the chopping block.” “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional,” Schumer said; “they are the law.”

While it is unclear what this freeze covers, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post says there is general agreement that it includes discretionary spending, including the Head Start early childhood development program and WIC, the nutrition program for mothers and infants. Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) wrote that Trump’s order is “illegal & dictatorial & Americans will die as a result.”

Senator Angus King (I-ME) called Trump’s impoundment of all federal grants and loans “blatantly unconstitutional.” “This is a profound constitutional issue,” he continued. “What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress…in the history of the United States.”

This evening a federal judge issued a stay to stop the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of federal monies. Judge Loren L. AliKahn of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has paused the measure until Monday evening while she hears arguments concerning it.

Today, CNN host Jim Acosta, a Trump critic, announced on air he was leaving the channel after its management tried to move him to a middle-of-the-night slot. “People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump,” Acosta said. “Actually, no. That moment came…when I covered…President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island’s political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I’ve always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN and I plan on…doing…that in the future. One final message: Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message: I will not give in to the lies. I will not give into the fear. Post it on your social media.”

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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moontyger · 25 days ago

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What the Musk-Trump administration’s first two weeks in office have communicated with gut-wrenching clarity is that the coup attempt on January 6, 2021 has never stopped.

What’s more, that coup looks very much like it is now succeeding, thanks to the fawning, yawning complicity of the supine media, timid Democratic leaders, Republican sycophants and the obliviousness of an electorate apparently unbothered by the slow-motion destruction of their own democracy. And the people being targeted by Musk and Trump are not the “Deep State” or those participating in the non-existent “invasion” at our borders. No, those directly in the sights of the demolition team setting charges at each of the foundations of America’s strength are none other than you and me, the American people.

The efforts by the Trump team to supplant the role and authorities assigned to Congress, to illegally shutdown whole federal agencies, to oust government employees en masse and to champion culture war witch hunts are little different from attempts to use violence to stop the transition of power in 2021.

The reason the law protects civil servants from arbitrary, partisan termination is because our elected representatives determined it was in our interests to immunize them from the ebbs and flows, passions and stupidities of American politics. When they are systematically fired or forced out of office—as is happening this week across the government—our voice as an electorate is being ignored.

So, too are our basic interests as people. Was it in our interest for the head of the Federal Aviation Administration to be forced out of office, just days before the horrific crash that sent a passenger jet and a military helicopter plunging into the D.C.‘s Potomac River? Is it in our interests for Trump to fire FBI officials simply because they were enforcing laws our representatives put in place to protect us? Simply because they were doing their duty?

In the same vein, it is our interests that are put at risk when the White House illegally stops funding programs created and funded by the Congress to serve us. (These risks will be compounded further should Musk and his gang of vandals succeed in seizing control of the mechanisms by which the U.S. government pays its bills—which they are trying to do and which has already led to the resignation of one high level Treasury Department official.)

It is not just insane that Trump’s team is in the midst of a vendetta against people and agencies who serve the vital interests of our country. It is not just outrageous that they feel empowered—whether by the people or a Supreme Court that last year sent a message that our presidents are more like kings than public servants—to do so. It is also deeply damaging.

Take the effort that gained steam on Monday, in contravention of numerous laws, to cut funding and perhaps even erase the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is not simply an effort to cut back on our foreign aid spending—which is less than that of every developed country in the world as a percentage of GDP—nor does it just hurt friends and allies in need around the world. It hurts us. It eliminates our influence and leverage and increases that of our rivals in Beijing, the Kremlin and elsewhere.

But, then again, everything that is being done benefits our adversaries. Our plans for “territorial expansion” are a license to Russia to continue its aggression in Ukraine and for China to make its inevitable move against Taiwan. Our trade wars weaken our alliances and send a message that we are further abandoning the international system we fought two wars and spent a century working to help build. That’s not just foreign policy peacocking. That’s our country being stripped of vital protections in an ever-more perilous world.

#US politics #US coup #current events

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promisecitymoments · 2 years ago

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What is Promise City? An Examination of the Modern Lie

It was the middle years of the 21st century. As the world fell deeper into disorder and chaos, a resolution was passed by the UN - build impenetrable fortress-cities, one for each region of the world. Sworn to perpetual neutrality and serving as a grand, living repository for all cultures and peoples, Promise City is the jewel of the United Nations Megacity initiative, and home to upwards of eighty nine million people.

It is called home by people from every corner of the world, who speak every language, making it a wildly diverse place. The City was planned from the ground up, fanning out from its centre in the First District, now called the High Rise.

The City is divided into 13 Districts, each of which serves a different purpose. From the desolate and collapsing streets of the Basilissa Exclusion Zone to the highly pedestrianised and narrow backroads of Nihonmachi District, the purpose and peoples of the City can change on an almost street-to-street basis.

Most of the Districts are partially built on or straddle the river Vitae, a huge estuary which has been artificially widened as the years have passed to accommodate the continuous traffic going to and from the City's major industrial centres and the ports of the world. It didn't start with the name, but was rechristened when its expansion began, for from the beginning it was intended to be the City's primary artery, the vein that pumped its lifeblood to its heart.

The dream of Promise broke under the weight of the modern world as the global scene made slow steps towards order and peace and a new agent of governance emerged. It took cues from the chaebol conglomerates of the Korean republic, the zaibatsus of the new Japan, the oligarchic kleptocracies of Russia and the runaway monopolies of America.

It became something new, with power transcending that of national governments. It became the modern multinational corporation, an organisational and logistical superstructure with fingers and operations all across the globe, their origins swaddled in mystery and their servants in the hundreds of thousands.

The concept of the nation-state is now a joke, a foreign idea taken seriously only in corners of the world that the average metropolitan never needs to think of. And the worst part? The people of the ever-shrinking middle class were more than keen to look the other way, as long as the wages were good and the abuses were just out of sight.

In Promise City there emerged three corporations of supreme importance.

The first was Byzantion Security Systems, an electronics, military technology and communications magnate. It was the first among equals, the largest company in all the world.

Second to it were two, ÆSIR Arms and Machinery and Tlalocan Ltd., companies which both survive on the military-industrial complex that has ripped the third world asunder. Each was like a kingdom, an empire unto itself, their CEOs like Gods among men. Their employees numbered in the indirect millions, in every corner of the earth, in every business imaginable. In the modern age, it is almost impossible to do business without crossing one of the Three, or, failing that, without crossing another of the major corporations in the world.

Their positions as the leaders of the world seemed unshakeable. They could not be touched, no matter what resistance was mounted against them. Public or private, it seemed like nothing could be done to halt the corporations.

Then came October 21st, 20XX. Judgement Day.

The City ground to a halt that cold autumn afternoon, forced to watch as a monstrous machine brought entire blocks down in its rampage. Thousands were killed in the District of Paxtonville and the High Rise almost immediately, and further thousands were displaced all across the rest of the City.

With the sudden and violent dissolution of the Byzantion Group by its former CEO/CSO Alexios Konstantinatos, a power vacuum unlike anything as seen in living memory was suddenly created in every corner of the globe.

Infrastructure totally broke down wherever Byzantion’s influence could be felt, the company’s assets were suddenly fair game to anyone who could scrape up the funds and hundreds of thousands of people, involved with the corporation at every level of production and distribution, were suddenly without work.

The world economy quickly crashed with this essential link in the global chain removed. It’s been a year and though the company’s rivals have moved fast, they are only now starting to put the pieces of the world back together.

Trade is still limited to short distances through motor convoys and trains, with international shipping having all but ceased except in cases of extreme duress, such as the humanitarian crisis and complete breakdown of civil order faced here.

In the rubble, the UN has stepped in to revive the now-paralyzed City authorities and rebuild the City’s domestic law enforcement unit, the Promise City Police Department (PCPD). However, their influence is far from absolute - running the streets are gangs of every shape, size and stripe, from typical criminal groups preying on vice and need to organised groups of political agitators and to fringe sects of complete extremists.

There is no more global order. Stability is a myth, a thing of the past. Rubble and seemingly endless corpses have done nothing to stymie the ambitions of pushers and hustlers, those obsessed with status and wealth. At the end of the day, there are still plenty of jobs out there that need doing, and plenty of people willing to risk it all to do them. The world is rudderless, the City insane…

… and in this madness there exist chances one can only dream of.

#cyberpunk #fiction #unreality #future #city #futuristic #Promise City #original character #sci fi #urban decay #literature #ttrpg #mecha #high tech #low life #tw: disasters #tw: mass casualties

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crazy-pages · 1 year ago

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In order

Something, not a complete fix, but something. Wouldn't happen under Republicans.

Actually very big and important. Republicans would do the opposite.

Minor relative to the scale of the problem, but nevertheless necessary and important. Republicans wouldn't do this do.

This one is actually a bandaid and propaganda spin on a colossal Democratic fuckup and lie, but it's also a bandaid that wouldn't happen under Republicans. Basically the US (specifically the Obama administration) promised this forgiveness a long time ago (to way more people than this) on an income basis and to long serving public servants. Then loan servicers lied to the government to avoid the low income debt forgiveness, and the government itself deliberately made a byzantine set of hoops to jump through so that their own public servants (hundreds of times more than the number finally getting their promised forgiveness here) didn't get it. This is ... honestly almost nothing, but again, better than Republicans.

This is just a call for action, no actual funds or resources dedicated as of yet. We wouldn't get even that under Republicans, but I'm going to call this one a non-entity until actual support results from this.

Genuinely a huge and important thing; comes with a capitalist caveat from the Republicans for its bipartisan support - the US government is making it much easier for corporations to deduct R&D costs from their taxes in the short term. However that's ... not entirely a bad thing? If dismantling the existing short-term profit-seeking system is off the table, this is a way to promote long-term R&D that's been dying in the US economy, at the cost of further reducing the corporate tax burden. It's better than most bullshit corporate tax cuts, at least. Republicans wouldn't bother with bipartisan negotiations and the child tax credit as cover for this though, they'd just pass the tax cut.

So like, is almost half of this angry bullshit that should make you mad, by mass? Yeah, it is. Let's be honest about that. But also some of it is actually extremely important and simply would not happen under Republicans.

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new regulation to limit bank overdraft fees. The CFPB pointed out that the average overdraft fee is $35 even though majority of overdrafts are under $26 and paid back with-in 3 days. The new regulation will push overdraft fees down to as little as $3 and not more than $14, saving the American public collectively 3.5 billion dollars a year.

The Environmental Protection Agency put forward a regulation to fine oil and gas companies for emitting methane. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas, after CO2 and is responsible for 30% of the rise of global temperatures. This represents the first time the federal government has taxed a greenhouse gas. The EPA believes this rule will help reduce methane emissions by 80%

The Energy Department has awarded $104 million in grants to support clean energy projects at federal buildings, including solar panels at the Pentagon. The federal government is the biggest consumer of energy in the nation. The project is part Biden's goal of reducing the federal government's greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030. The Energy Department estimates it'll save taxpayers $29 million in the first year alone and will have the same impact on emissions as taking over 23,000 gas powered cars off the road.

The Education Department has cancelled 5 billion more dollars of student loan debt. This will effect 74,000 more borrowers, this brings the total number of people who've had their student loan debt forgiven under Biden through different programs to 3.7 Million

U.S. Agency for International Development has launched a program to combat lead exposure in developing countries like South Africa and India. Lead kills 1.6 million people every year, more than malaria and AIDS put together.

Congressional Democrats have reached a deal with their Republican counter parts to revive the expanded the Child Tax Credit. The bill will benefit 16 million children in its first year and is expected to lift 400,000 children out of poverty in its first year. The proposed deal also has a housing provision that could see 200,000 new affordable rental units

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imspardagus · 4 months ago

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Brass rubbing

I am crying a lot just now. Something sad happens, or is even hinted, on the TV and the next thing there are tears rolling down my cheeks and I am having to breathe around heaving sobs. I see some small act of kindness and I’m welling up. Or I am halfway through a story that I am telling Bruce or David or Aiden and suddenly I am gulping back emotion. I tell myself I don’t know why.

Nor do I know why, given that, and given that I know that, I sat down again this afternoon to watch Brassed Off.

That may seem like a back-handed way to make a recommendation but if you haven’t seen Brassed Off, you should make a commitment to yourself to do so. The music alone is to die for: colliery brass bands showing their versatility and their unalloyed commitment to, and the sheer power of, music. But the performances, from the like of Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald, Ewan McGreggor and Stephen Tomkinson, to name just four, are so real, so invested, that they make you shudder when you watch them.

Because, without straying more than a footfall within the comforting boundaries of sentimentality on which America has pitched its camp, this film tells, with grim humour, a heart-rending tale of ordinary people who have never had much but are on the verge of having what little they have scraped together ripped from them to serve a cynical political agenda. The music is pretty much all they have left. It’s about people. Hurt people who don’t know really how to express their hurt.

They are a mining community. A mining community in the 1980s. And therefore nothing more than pawns in the hands of an indecent, snobbish, money-grubbing and repressive elite to whom they represent only a rabble, cannon fodder to be extinguished in a war against a perceived enemy, the National Union of Mineworkers.

At the time when this was set, I was advising the Certification Officer for Trades Unions on the law that he was duty bound to apply. So I saw, from somewhere slightly off centre but still on the stage, the political game being played out by that shrieking middle class dogmatist, Margaret Thatcher, who, as luck would have it, had been provided with a pantomime villain in the form of Arthur Scargill to justify her crusade against ordinary folk. I saw the cynical manipulations that gave rise to the setting up of the so-called “Union of Democratic Mineworkers”, a set of basically well-intentioned, hard-working men too naïve to see how they were being used.

I saw Matt Wake, the avowedly “independent” Certification Officer at the time and as decent and straight a public servant as any you will ever find, subjected to the most egregious pressure from departmental civil servants to reach the conclusion that the UDM was not the fabricated “staff association” that it so manifestly was but instead the full-blooded trade union that it just was not, so that the flailing Conservative government could use it as a wedge to drive into the heart of the mining communities.

I would not be surprised to have it confirmed that that episode contributed significantly to Matt’s death not so long after. He was a good man. As were most of the people in those mining villages. Not perfect, human. And deserving of human respect. Which they never received.

There was at the time the news, of course, and the harrowing TV footage of vicious clashes between angry miners and heavily armed police officers, but, thank God, I was spared the reality of living in the midst of it. TVs were mercifully small back then and had a way of containing the awfulness of what they were presenting. Still, it was bad enough just seeing what they showed (I rather doubt that the BBC would be so open in its coverage now).

Which is why I found a lump of outrage rising in my gorge last week when Edward Leigh chose to announce to the House of Commons that he was a Thatcher groupie, even to this day. Edward always confounds me. A man who perpetually looks like stewed red cabbage, that is the least of his faults. But against all odds, in my mind at least, he turned out on the Conservative benches as a compatriot when Clare Short brought her International Development Bill to the House. By then I was her legal adviser and this Bill was by far the best thing I had ever been involved in. It made me feel that my job was worthwhile. Clare and I both knew that it could be overturned at any time in the future by the harbingers of the exploitative malice that it was outlawing but it was worth raising the shield of decency, just in order to put the corrupters to the trouble of tearing it down. What I did not expect was to find Edward Leigh supporting it.

I still don’t understand. But it means I cannot quite despise him as I would despise anyone else who tried to make Margaret a saint. She never was. Thatcherism is a myth invented by political commentators. Margaret was a frightened little girl, in way out of her depth and taking advice from industrial failures. She just had the good fortune to be the best game in town for a set of self-interested rich guys who wouldn’t even get a seat at the table in today’s billionaires’ garden party. She play a good part but the kindest thing we can say about her is that she was used by a group of moribund fat cats.

Brassed Off is the opposite of all that and it is a bit too safe. Sherwood captured some of the abiding damage that Thatcherism did to the mining communities. But still Brassed Off is gold. It reflects the heart of a people being almost ritually disembowelled but not prepared to surrender their humanity. It is painful. And you should watch it and weep.

There are lessons that offer themselves from history. The appalling futility of loss in the First World War. The fight to restore decency in World War II. Yes, Brassed Off is, on one level, just entertainment, but it also serves as a reminder that if we ever forget the humanity of the people we disagree with we lose our humanity too. It goes for our own people, it goes for immigrants and refugees, however they arrive, it goes for populations facing aggression because of their political ambitions or just because they are different, or believe in different things, or because they are in the way of territorial or economic ambition.

These days, of course, there would be the environmental arguments for closing down the pits, and the Tories would, inevitably, weigh in on the side of the profiteers who wanted them and the other fossil fuel industries kept alive to fill their boots and offshore bank accounts.

But the truth remains the same. It is not the decision that counts, it is how you treat the people affected by it. We lose our sense of humanity at out peril.

There are only people.

#Brassed off #Humanity #People

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dnd4adults · 5 months ago

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Tales from the Great Library

Deep and Creeping

Dawnfire Keep

Only half as ancient as Alekhandir, Dawnfire Keep was raised in alliance between the great Drakhonia, protecting both from threats originating in the Ashen Waste. The Wyrmsong River grows wide, shallow, and chattery here, flowing around a rocky island in the landscape. It was upon this island Dawnfire Keep rose above the wilderness, guarding the river's only passable ford.

The original stronghold has grown over centuries into a major castle, being the only line of defense against the monster-crawling east and western civilization. Troglodytes, in particular, issue from the shattered eastern landscape, massing for irregular assaults against Dawnfire on moonless nights.

Governance of the keep is decidedly martial. The castle exists as if in a state of perpetual siege, with continuous rationing, spartan furnishings, and orderly duty filling every day. Knights and paladins hold the highest standing, followed by squires, sorcerers/wizards, and clerics. Pages and common fighters hold similar standing with armorers, weapon makers, and specialty tradesmen. Everyone else shares the lowest status, collectively considered servants.

Mechopotomus Rex makes regular runs between Dawnfire Keep and Alekhandir, bringing badly needed provisions from the city. Similarly, a dragonborn trade caravan travels down from Drakonia each month, bearing martial resources and support. In fact, Dawnfire Keep, not Alekhandir, is home port for Mechopotomus Rex. There's a flooded cavern with portcullis on the south side of the island, wherein the riverboat was originally constructed, and receives ongoing maintenance and repair.

From the cavern there’s passages leading upward, carven through the rock of the to sunlit chambers, courts, and gardens. Beneath its visible structure Dawnfire Keep includes a tangled warren of subterranean chambers, passages, and store rooms. Most were carved by living hands, but not all. Enormous quantities of food, water, and other supplies are housed in this three-dimensional maze of cellars. So, too, are criminals, prisoners, and the occasional captured monster.

All meals are prepared in public kitchens scattered throughout the castle, and are served communally, in commissaries associated with each kitchen. Kitchens operate day and night, accommodating the needs of a castle under siege, serving major meals at dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight. Every resident of Dawnfire is guaranteed two meals a day.

PERSONALITIES OF DAWNFIRE

Lord Command Ignatys (Paladin - Conquest)

Among the most highly decorated of living dragonborn warriors, Ignatys is said to have had more dragon than born in his hatching. He's commanded Dawnfire Keep for the past twenty years and, in that time, has personally led a dozen incursions, rooting out troglodytes lairs all over the eastern plains. Said to be humorless, impartial, and a stickler for regulation, Ignatys is a tireless military genius.

Leorin the Lion (Bard - College of Swords)

Noted for his skill with twin blades, handsome figure, and stirring voice, this half-elf is something of a legend in Dawnfire Keep, seeming a hero out of song come to life. A golden boy, indeed, it seems there's nothing he can't do; sing, fight, make love to men and women. Lord Commander Ignatys has grudgingly bestowed the office of Castellan on Leorin, making him responsible for all the peoples who find him so popular.

Mull Meadowsweet (Fighter - Champion)

Mull's a proud member of the Dawnfire Pages, running messages and errands all over the keep -- a very important job, indeed. In a place as big as Dawnfire, getting orders back and forth quickly is super critical. So's helping people find their way around the place, because it's pretty easy getting lost when you're new. Amiable to a fault, this halfling most often attends guests who won't be used to the keep's militant atmosphere.

PRECIOUS PROVISIONS

The affairs of Dawnfire Keep are far too important for anyone of note to take interest in four scholarly travelers out of Alekhandir looking for some village noone's ever heard of, but that's hardly the point. Dawnfire is a last bastion of civilization, a base in which adventurers can equip themselves for wilderness adventures ahead.

Mull helps the men find needed vendors within the castle, cutting down the time commitment of locating them considerably. Andros directs nearly everything to Magares family accounts, presenting Writ, Pedigree, and Letter of Credit:

Common Gear: 3 riding horses (75 x3 = 225 gp) 1 pack mule (8 gp) 3 tents (6 gp) 7 day's feed for all mounts (14 gp) 7 days' rations for five (2.5 x 7 = 17.5 gp) Personal Gear: Andros - Sell detect magic scroll - Buy earth tremor and snare Hyram - Buy potion of animal friendship Khazpar - Buy shortbow and walloping arrows Teddy - Buy map of Upper Wyrmsong and orb of direction

With Dorrik's help, Mull Meadowsweet can arrange for everything to be ready and delivered, ready-to-go in twenty-four hours' time. As it's nearly dusk already that'll be the day after tomorrow, giving the men an entire day at Dawnfire before setting out again.

What passes for guest accommodations in Dawnfire Keep turn out to be an unused level in a barracks structure known as House of the Cock. Its east-facing side stands over a low court including roosters, who crow out the approach of every dawn. Guardsmen keeping dawn watch are quartered in House of the Cock, assuring they have no excuse for being late to duty. Guests are roused out early, as well, so the first sight to greet them through the curtainless window is sunrise over the shattered eastern landscape.

Sleeping late is permitted for guests, if they choose, but they'll miss dawn’s meal, having to wait for noon. The keep becomes bustling active during daytime, as well, so additional sleep's unlike to last very long at all.

There's little in the way of entertainment for passing the time at Dawnfire Keep. Guests and residents, alike, are assumed to be engaged in efforts to defend the civilized west against eastern monsters at all times. Most of them actually are, because even free time in the castle serves the cause in some manner:

Dawnfire Library is a source of information on all manner of monsters as well as the various means of their destruction, with special emphasis on the horrors from the Underdark. There are several open air courts or "greens" for martial training throughout in castle, with different locations devoted to archery and missile practice, melee practice, horsemanship, and gymnasion with wrestling, pugilism, and baths. Twelve shrines, each dedicated to one of the celestial gods, may be found within Dawnfire Keep. Offering a prayer at each in the proper order between dawn and dusk confers a bless lasting 24 hours on those who follow the proper path. Quest for the Vault: According to legend, the builders of Dawnfire Keep included a hidden vault within its walls. Their greatest treasures are hidden there still, free to the person or persons who successfully find and open the vault. Running the Gauntlet: The Gauntlet is an underground obstacle course set with an ever-changing array of tricks, traps, and illusory monster perils. Those who wish to improve their skills may run the gauntlet as a training exercise. At midnight, competitors attempt to run the course with genuine perils for significant reward. The lone individual who completes the entire course wins 500 gp. A team completing the course wins 100 gp each.

Those who demonstrate distinction in any of these pursuits earn the privilege of dining with the Lord Commander. During the course of that meal Ignatys does his best, convincing winners to join the Dawnfire Knights.

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govmattus · 11 months ago

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Matt Field For Governor Of Utah

I’m Matt Field and I am running for Governor of the State of Utah because I feel compelled to do so. I’m not special, though I think my mom said I was a couple times, and I think a lot of people could do and do Govmatt.org Morality Over Monarchy, Root Out Corruption Matt Field for Governor of Utah better than what I hope to achieve…I mean that as sincerely as possible and hope others will run for governor, other state positions, and local offices to promote and uphold morality. It isn’t because what I’m going to present is solely my idea and it is so great that you should have a poster of me in your room…no, that’d be terrifying! What I will present are proven solutions to the issues we have in government and throughout our lives. These concepts are essentially natural laws that will help improve our lives in drastic fashion if we can get them implemented. They will seem extreme measures but if you haven’t noticed, morality has almost been completely.

When I was in college, I had the idea to run for governor at some point in my life…I even made a Facebook page not long after I graduated that I left up for a very short time and then promptly took it down. I took it down because I began to realize that at before too long, I’d be married, have kids, and have a life I wouldn’t want disrupted by the chaotic world of politics. You don’t have to believe me but I still want the same thing. I want to live my life without making it more complicated. I truly don’t want public attention and I seriously worry about the safety of my family in the pursuit of such a position. Government has become more and more authoritarian. Government officials have entirely forgotten that they aren’t the boss. They no longer act as servants that actively serve and accommodate the people. They have fully transformed into the monarch of our nightmares that will stop at nothing to take your money and wield power against you to service whatever purpose they deem worthy. I believe this is one of the reasons many of our best won’t run for office and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it makes me nervous.

However, how long should you wait for something to be done right before taking action yourself? I have reached out to politicians to address the ever-pressing matters of our day with no response and if I get a response, they talk about themselves for ten paragraphs before telling me they can’t help me. We may have a vote but does the sanctity of that vote actually make a difference to our elected officials?

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the fact that we have problems throughout our state and political system; the question that is constantly present, is can we actually come to an amicable solution? Is there a way to remove emotion for a moment to review the current conditions of our state and country? Can we attempt not to be offended, in either taking offense ourselves or for others? Are we really so far gone that we can’t listen to what others are saying and then follow it up with an actual discussion toward a solution? Most importantly, are we able to recognize what morality is and persevere to uphold it? I really don’t know but I hope we can. https://govmatt.org/blog/news/matt-field-for-governor-of-utah

Morality has been neglected and grossly manipulated through the years. What is perhaps not realized, is that when the government passes a law to protect or ensure something for someone, thing, or entity, it has endorsed it by making it legal. The first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, or bill of rights, were largely written along moral principles that should be inherent to all. However, many subsequent amendments, laws, and policies reject the overwhelming tone of morality in pursuit of something easier and more politically accommodating. In the State of Utah, we need to change this…we need to realize that morality is worth fighting for and work to uphold it.

It reminds me of a time when I was defending the libertarian view with illegal drugs with a friend of mine in college. I had been taught in one of my econ classes that if drugs were made legal the government would have more purview over it and, thus, be able to regulate it more effectively. Many of these arguments made sense to me but my little friend was on the side of morality. She understood that by making illegal drugs legal that it would create a pseudo and artificial morality which would undermine the truth. She was right, as I researched it further I found many others understood the argument the libertarian view presented, agreeing with it, but recognized it’s potential to erode society and undermining actual morality.

Vote Matt field for Governor of Utah! A visionary leader with a proven commitment to serving the community. Matt field's platform prioritizes each sector education, healthcare, economic prosperity, & etc. With integrity and innovative solutions, he'll ensure a brighter future for all Utahns. Make your voice count, vote Matt field for progress and inclusivity. Visit now @ https://govmatt.org/

#utah governor primary results #matt field utah #matthew field #utah governor #matt field

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eveningramblerouser · 1 year ago

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The Voice Referendum Review

Finally discharged from my electoral duties, I reckoned my first post would be about the conduct of the 2023 referendum. Not just the political campaigns, but the work of all the key players.

Part 1: Our Humble Servants

As the Australian federal electoral agency, the AEC was tasked with the delivery of Australia's first referendum since 1999. While considerably easier than a standard election (no Senate preferences!), there was still the issue of setting into motion the largest logistical operation in Australia.

Overall, the AEC did an excellent job in rolling out the referendum - more than 20 rural voter services were set up in Western Australia alone, little changes to polling premises were made, and the public was well-informed on what to expect on polling day. Their social media presence was probably the best seen of any government organisation, with a clear aim to inform as many twitterers and facebookers as possible. Pre-writ enrolments were finished before close of rolls, and the scrutiny was done as quickly as possible. All in all, one of the best electoral events in modern history.

The only issue I could find was small, but prominent: the ticks and crosses debacle. It all came out of an interview that Tom Rogers, the Electoral Commissioner, gave on Sky News. While the rules have in place for 30 years, it gave plenty of concern, especially among No voters, that the AEC could provide an inaccurate count. However, while the controversy was there, actual informality rates were less than one would find at a general election, most likely due to the AEC's urging for people to write either Yes or No (as well as the fact that it was on the ballot paper).

Part 2: Our Loyal Activists

As expected, the major political figures in the Voice debate were Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton – Prime Minister and Prime Minister-hopeful. However, like the republican referendum, the Voice referendum had its own specific leadership teams to help fuel debate in Australia.

On the Yes side: Linda Burney, Marcia Langton, Thomas Mayo, and Patrick Dodson.

On the No side: Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price, and - to a lesser extent - Lidia Thorpe.

Probably one of the most prominent strategic issues for the Yes campaigners was the influence that Lidia Thorpe had on the debate. While far across the aisle from Price's perspectives, she was able to promote the "Progressive No" vote, as she was of the view that the advisory body would do little to right the wrongs that have plagued the area of Aboriginal affairs within Australia. With that, with every conservative voter that they helped sway with their "just an advisory body" line, they alienated a staunch progressive voter.

What also didn't help is that two of the major campaigners were devout ALP members, with Burney having served as National President prior to her parliamentary career. If you were of the view that the Voice was another Canberra-based bureaucracy with a love for red tape, the idea of it being created by Labor probably did nothing to sweeten that thought.

Additionally, there appears to be a bit of fatigue regarding how to campaign for referendums. The double majority rule means that traditional marginal seats are obsolete and there's a higher bar to clear. The Yes campaign did well in inner-city regions, and especially in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. However, in my opinion the No campaign was a lot more prudent with their resources, focusing on South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania, as they had much smaller populations to target, but were worth just as much value as the Eastern Seaboard. Their targeted advertising in WA resulted in 13/15 electorates voting no in the referendum, even in seats that have been considered safe Labor seats.

Part 3: Our True Reaction

As with all political campaigns, the media took sides. The opinion columns in the Daily Tele, the Herald Sun, the West Australian and News Corp metropolitan papers generally favoured the No side, while the columnists at the Guardian, The Saturday Paper, and the Nine Papers (SMH, The Age, etc.) generally supported the Yes case. However, unlike traditional election campaigns, media analysis showed news reporting to be generally neutral in tone.

And then the referendum came and went. People had their names ticked off and cast their votes. If you were lucky, you got a sausage for your duty. If you were invested, you tuned into the television and watched the results come out.

And the result was shown simply:

39.94% in favour, 60.06% against.

0 states in favour. Referendum not carried.

And then the politicians made their statements, people went on social media to make their statements. Overall, the feelings on the No side were akin to a sigh of relief, having decisively blocked what they saw as unnecessary red tape. On the Yes side, people were considerably more upset, with some people seeing it as the end of Aboriginal reconciliation. Many progressives saw the vote as conclusive proof that Australia is a racist state that can't find a path to progress. Put simply, emotions were mixed. A few Aboriginal leaders called for a week of silence, due to the impact the campaign and ballot had on people's lives, and people were genuinely distressed because of the referendum.

However, I do want to point out one response from the Saturday Paper, as their first post-referendum issue's front page simply read "No.". While probably trying to show either despair in the newsroom, or solidarity with those who called for time to heal, it's pretty hard to swallow from a business gaining comfortable revenue from nearly a million readers, mostly left-leaning folk from the upper-middle class. I'd say it summarises the reaction on the Yes side quite well. At the core is a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and communities who reckon they need a break from the intense pressure that was put on them by both campaigns, and outside of that is a network of white activists and criers and Naarm Settlers™ who were very keen to cry for a community they've barely interacted with because of a cause they didn't pitch.

What's next for the realm of Aboriginal affairs is unclear. The government has stated that the Voice isn't the end, but as of 2024 there's been little discussion post-referendum, except for a few alcohol restrictions in towns such as Carnarvon, WA. But even without an advisory body, there are plenty of tools in the arsenal that could be used to help close the gap. While current governmental bodies have come under scrutiny, they're still there, and can be tweaked and altered if our elected representatives see fit.

We'll just have to see if either side of the aisle is willing to do it.

#auspol #voice to parliament #australia #politics #october 2023 #the saturday paper #referendum #alp #labor #anthony albanese #ausgov #albanese government

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misfitwashere · 1 month ago

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January 20, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 21

The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”

As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any gift or title from a foreign leader or government, “written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track the purchases of this coin, meaning it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him.

Former Trump official Anthony Scaramucci posted that “anyone in the world can essentially deposit money” into the bank account of the president of the United States.

On Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own coin. It took the wind out of the sales of Trump’s coin, although both coins have disclaimers saying that the coins are “an expression of support for and engagement with the values embodied by” the Trumps, and are not intended to be “an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” Her cryptocurrency was worth more than $5 billion within two hours.

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration, who left after criticizing Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his businesses, wrote to CNN: “America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering…. Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.”

At a rally Sunday night at the Capital One Arena in Washington, Trump highlighted the performance side of his public persona. He teased the next day’s events and let his audience in on a secret that echoed the “neokayfabe” of professional wrestling by leaving people wondering if it was true or a lie. After praising Elon Musk, he told the crowd “He was very effective. He knows those computers better than anybody. Those vote counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide. So it was pretty good…. Thank you to Elon.”

This morning, hours before he left office, President Joe Biden pardoned several of the targets of MAGA Republicans, including "General Mark A. Milley, Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee.” Biden clarified that the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” He noted, “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”

But, he said, "These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances." He later pardoned his siblings and their spouses to protect them from persecution by the incoming president.

Before he left office, Biden posted on social media: Scripture says: “I have been young and now I’m old yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken.” After all these years serving you, the American people, I have not seen the righteous forsaken. I love you all. May you keep the faith. And may God bless you all.”

This morning, members of the far-right paramilitary organization the Proud Boys marched through the capital carrying a banner that read “Congratulations President Trump” and chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Two days ago, Trump moved his inauguration into the Capitol Rotunda, where his supporters had rioted on January 6, 2021, because of cold temperatures expected in Washington, D.C. Even with his supporters excluded, the space was cramped, but prime spots went to billionaires: Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook, Google chief Sundar Pichai, TikTok chief executive officer Shou Zi Chew, and Tesla and SpaceX chief executive owner Elon Musk, who appeared to be stoned.

Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who launched the Fox News Channel in 1996, was there, as were popular podcaster Joe Rogan and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.

Although foreign leaders are not normally invited to presidential inaugurations, far-right foreign leaders President Javier Milei of Argentina and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni were there, along with a close ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping.

The streets were largely empty as Trump traveled to the U.S. Capitol. Supporters watched from Capital One Arena as Trump took the oath of office, apparently forgetting to put his hand on the Bibles his wife held. After Vice President–elect J.D. Vance had taken the oath of office, sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had sworn in Trump, the new president delivered his inaugural address.

While inaugural addresses are traditionally an attempt to put the harsh rhetoric of campaigns behind and to emphasize national unity, Trump’s inaugural address rehashed the themes of his campaign rallies. Speaking in the low monotone he uses when he reads from a teleprompter, he delivered an address that repeated the lies on which he built his 2024 presidential campaign.

He said that the Justice Department has been “weaponized,” that Biden’s administration “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” that the U.S. has provided “sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals,” that the government has “treated so badly” the storm victims in North Carolina,” and so on.

Fact-checkers at The Guardian noted the speech was full of “false and misleading claims.”

Trump went on to promise a series of executive orders to address the crises he claimed during his campaign. He would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” he said, and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” (Border crossings are lower now than they were at the end of Trump’s last term.) He promised to tell his cabinet members to bring down inflation (it peaked in 2022 and is now close to the Fed’s target of 2%), bring back manufacturing (the Biden administration brought more than 700,000 new manufacturing jobs to the U.S.), end investments in green energy (which has attracted significant private investment, especially in Republican-dominated states), and make foreign countries fund the U.S. government through tariffs (which are, in fact, paid by American consumers).

He also vowed to take the Panama Canal back from Panama, prompting Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino to “fully reject the statements made by” Trump, and Panamanian protesters to burn the American flag.

With a declaration about the Pennsylvania shooting that bloodied his ear, Trump declared that he believes he is on a divine mission. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

After his inaugural address, former president Biden and former first lady Dr. Jill Biden left, and Trump delivered a much more animated speech to prominent supporters in which CNN’s Daniel Dale said he returned to his “lie-a-minute style.” He rehashed the events of January 6, 2021, and claimed that then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi is “guilty as hell…that’s a criminal offense.”

But the bigger story came in the afternoon, when Trump held a rally at the Capitol One Arena in place of the traditional presidential parade. Supporters there had watched the inauguration on a jumbotron screen, booing Biden and jumping to their feet to cheer at Trump’s declaration that he had been saved by God. In the afternoon, Elon Musk spoke to the crowd, throwing two salutes that right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, interpreted as Nazi salutes.

Trump and his family arrived after 5:00 for the inaugural parade. The new president spoke again in rally mode after six, and then staged a demonstration that he was changing the country by holding a public signing of executive orders. Those appeared to be designed, as he promised, to retaliate against those he feels have wronged him. Among other executive orders, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, drawing approving roars from the crowd.

As Jonathan Swan of the New York Times noted, “Signing executive orders and pardons are two of the parts of the job that Trump loves most. They are unilateral, instantaneous displays of power and authority.” After signing a few executive orders for the crowd, Trump threw the signing sharpies into the crowd, and then he and his family left abruptly.

Back at the White House, retaliation continued. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of the January 6 rioters who had been convicted of crimes related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, including Enrico Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

His pardon also included Daniel Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered cardiac arrest and a traumatic brain injury. “Omg I did so much f---ing s--- r[ight] n[ow] and got away,” he texted to his gang. “Tazzed the f--- out of the blue[.]”

Trump signed an executive order that withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization, another that tries to establish that there are only two sexes in the United States, and yet another that seeks to end the birthright citizenship established by the Fourteenth Amendment. He signed one intending to strip the security clearances from 51 people whom he accuses of election interference related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has ordered that an undisclosed list of Trump appointees immediately be granted the highest levels of security clearance without undergoing background checks. He also signed one ordering officials “to deliver emergency price relief.”

Behind the scenes today, officials in the Trump administration fired the acting head of the U.S. immigration court system as well as other leaders of that system, and cancelled the CBP One app, an online lottery system through which asylum seekers could schedule appointments with border agents, leaving asylum seekers who had scheduled appointments three weeks ago stranded. Trump officials have also taken down a government website that helped women find health care and understand their rights. They have also removed the official portrait of former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley from the hallway with the portraits of all the former chairs…now all minus one.

But for all their claims to be hitting the ground running, lawyers noted that some of the executive orders were poorly crafted to accomplish what they claimed—an observer called one “bizarre legal fanfic not really intended for judicial interpretation”—and lawsuits challenging them are already being filed. Others are purely performative, like ordering officials to lower prices.

Further, CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported that almost an hour after Trump became president, “current and former Pentagon officials say they don’t know who is currently in charge of the Defense Department,” a key position to maintain U.S. security against adversaries who might take advantage of transition moments to push against American defenses.

Bertrand reported that the Trump transition team had trouble finding someone to serve as acting secretary until the Senate confirms a replacement for Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Trump’s nominee, former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth has had trouble getting the votes he needs, although tonight the Senate Armed Services Committee approved him by a straight party line vote.

Bertrand notes that two senior department officials declined to take on the position. The Trump administration swore in Robert Salesses, deputy director of the branch of the Pentagon that focuses on human resources, facilities, and resource management—who has already been confirmed by the Senate in that position—as acting Defense Secretary.

Beginning tomorrow, the Republicans will have to deal with the fact that the Treasury will hit the debt ceiling and will have to use extraordinary measures to pay the obligations of the United States government.

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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genevalentino · 1 year ago

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#BadActors #certifiedelectionswithno'chainofcustody'#DeepDive #DEEPSTATE #DemocratParty #DemocratPartycollapse #DonaldTrump #Electionprocess #electionreform #FakeNews #http://www.freepressfail.com #impeachmentprocess #KariLake #LessGovernment #MoreGovernment #RepairtheRepublicanGOP #securingelections.GeorgeSantos #specialmagistratesystem #TuckerCarlson

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littlechinesedoll · 3 years ago

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Harvest Festival drabble

Part 1 tumblr | ao3

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Above are some screenshots from Justice League Unlimited Season 3 episode 2, “For the Man Who Has Everything.” Edited Clark to be older. It’s something to go with the fic. It was part of the inspiration for this chapter.

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Bruce has an appointment with his Kryptonian doctor the day after their Union. Kal makes excuses for Bruce with the Medical Guild and instead, on the days after their Union on the Harvest Festival, he lets Bruce feign illness.

Their reproductive endocrinologists are furious. It will take weeks of additional medication to get Bruce to release another batch of ova. This angers Kal, and he tells the doctors that even if they plan to only store their reproductive material for later insemination, he lies and says he and Bruce have not decided yet on bringing forth children.

“You’re not getting any younger, Kal-El,” says the lead doctor.

“Well then, let’s hope my young mate doesn’t become a widow so soon,” Kal sneers.

It’s as if these doctors believe a Union is only for rearing children. Indeed, Krypton needs children, and it is their job to make sure that Unions are successful at reproducing, raising these children, and repopulate the planet. But Kal will not give this planet his children.

Bruce sequesters himself in Kal’s home, staying out of sight of the public. It’s a grand house provided by the government since Kal is of a high rank. Floor to ceiling windows overlooking the farm about to be harvested. It’s a reprieve for him that the workers don’t ever bother the councilor’s new mate.

He’s largely left alone, except for the servant girl he’s been given by the High Council, a rankless named Ona, who’d mistakenly told him about being medicated without his knowledge. (1) He can see she’s honest and hadn’t known he’d been kept in the dark, so he keeps her. She’s the one who turns away visitors, who are mostly of the same rank as Kal, and receives their gifts when they’re at the door, wishing to meet Kal’s mate. She tells them he’s unwell and cannot entertain guests.

She helps him dress since he knows Kal likes the flowing, floor length robes on him when he comes home. He’s told her that he can dress himself, but she insists on doing everything for him (people under Alfred weren’t even like this—didn’t find joy in serving) to make up for her inability to keep her mouth shut. But Bruce has told her that had been a good thing. (And Bruce secretly likes the corset like things she laces up in the morning—if he’s gonna be depressed, he might as well look good.)

“Please take me with you!” Ona begs her master late in the night before he retires. Bruce had confided in her earlier that day that they won’t be staying on Krypton.

Kal never intended to keep her longer than he and Bruce were staying. “Ona, Bruce has more on Earth than I do here. He’s basically a prince,”

The girl falls to her knees. “Please,” she cries. “This is the kindest House I’ve ever served. Please don’t leave me. I will swear I will take great care of Master Bruce,”

Kal sighs. The only way she’ll be protected is if a House receives her, therefore giving her a name and a sigil. But Kal isn’t the head of his House. It’s not his decision to receive a rankless. So he concedes. “Alright, you can come with us,”

Ona sobs in relief and gratitude.

Kal tells her that Earth can change her, that if she wants to serve them, she will have to do as he says, and promise to do one thing for him.

She agrees to obey.

Kal gives her a necklace with a blue crystal pendant. He tells her it’s to protect her and she can only take it off if she’s willing to carry the burdens and responsibilities Sol, the yellow sun of Earth, will bestow her. She immediately puts the necklace on. All she wants is to serve the House that has been nothing but kind to her.

What surprises her, when Kal helps her off the floor, is that he tells her that on Earth, if in the future, she wants to stay but be released from Kal’s House, to be released from the invisible chains of a rankless, all she has to do is ask, but she must keep the necklace on no matter what.

Ona vows to him as her master to never take it off and watches her master’s back as he leaves. She’s just been told she can have her freedom. She doesn’t know if she wants it.

A week after the feigned illness, Bruce pleads for Kal to let him go back to Earth. He can’t bear to be on Krypton any longer, and that��s not just the homesickness talking. Kal pulls the strings a man of his rank can manage and arranges for a journey to Earth without it alerting the High Council, and the Agricultural Council, which he heads.

This of course, displeases the High Council when it’s reported to them almost a week later after they’ve left, that Kal-El together with his mate and servant, has left the planet for Earth. Their displeasure further grows when they learn of Kal-El’s refusal to comply with the reproductive program he had agreed to, and the disrespect he’s shown the team of doctors assigned to manage the course.

Bruce requests they go to Kal’s childhood home.

They arrive in Smallville without fanfare. The house Kal grew up in is more of a bachelor’s country home, surrounded by vast fields of crop, much like his grand home on Krypton, that he cares for himself. Jonathan and Martha Kent joined their creator decades ago, just after Kal had gotten used to his abilities in his mid-twenties. The morning after, Bruce stands in front of their gravestones, out on the property under an apple tree.

“You raised a wonderful son, Mr. and Mrs. Kent,” Bruce says as he lays down a wreathe of flowers. “I’m glad to have met him,”

Kal wraps arm around his mate, hand around a him as he brings him closer. “They would have loved it if you called them Ma and Pa,”

Bruce leans his head on Kal’s sturdy shoulder. “Ma and Pa,”

Ona is a busy bee. After teaching her the basics of caring for a Terran home, Kal realizes she’s a quick learner and takes to everything with ease. He has to tell her to sleep at noon after lunch or else she’ll clean the entire house from top to bottom despite having already cleaned after breakfast is served.

She’s at Bruce’s beck and call, serves their meals after Kal cooks, cleans up after them, and only sleeps after both have retired to their room, and wakes up before the sun is up to help Kal with the farm.

A week after arriving on Earth, Bruce has one of his most emotional bleeds. It’s three days of non-stop crying. Kal doesn’t leave him alone for a second.

Bruce tells him there’s more blood than usual, but there isn’t. The cramps don’t let him get out of bed and Bruce doesn’t feel like the hot water bottles and painkillers are doing anything. Kal holds him and massages his belly and his lower back in attempt to ease the aches.

“I don’t want to go back,” Bruce says, when all that’s left on his pads are spots, and he snuggles further into Kal’s warm embrace. “Please don’t take me back,”

Kal cradles his mate and kisses his hair. “Never,”

They agree on a schedule. A week out of every month, Kal goes back to Krypton to resume his duties. As a representative of Krypton to Earth, Bruce gathers it’s much like being an ambassador of a country in another land. Kal tells him, he’s slowly transferring his duties and is requesting for more assistants and delegating more work to them, without telling them of course, with the plan of a surprise resignation once everything has settled into a new routine. Kal plans to commit to being Krypton’s envoy on Earth full time, together with his cousins, Kara Zor-El and Van-El. (2)

The time Kal spends with Bruce though, is time Kal uses to make up for his mistakes. He lets Bruce choose whether or not they sleep in the same bed, every night. He treats it like they’re not married yet, like’s he’s courting Bruce according to human customs by taking him out on dates, bringing him places he thought he’d never get to visit or see even with money, bringing him flowers from exotic places and chocolates from Europe, or food from Bruce’s favorite places out of the country. They watch movies together, cook together, redecorate the Kent home together, go shopping (Kal finds shopping a nightmare because Bruce doesn’t know when to stop), have picnics on the farm, watch stars. Through all these activities, they stay in Smallville, and Bruce asks his side of the family not to disturb him.

They don’t have sex.

Growing up on Earth, Kal’s Terran upbringing and the traditions and strict rules of Krypton often clashed. He had never engaged in any physical intimacy with anybody, believing he should respect the way of his home planet. He agreed to the reproductive program believing it was right. But the longer he kept the secret from his soon to be mate, the more he questioned the rigid rules of Krypton’s culture. And then he saw the disappointed face of his mate when he learned of his betrayal.

At the turns of the moon, Bruce bleeds and never misses. After that first bleed, Bruce doesn’t anymore come to him to ask for comfort. Instead, he takes pain killers for the cramps and goes on to work and go about his days like the cramps didn’t incapacitate him the first time Kal held him through it.

“I didn’t want to think about it,” Bruce answers when Kal asks, one day when they’re snuggled together on the couch watching some nature documentary on Discovery. “I want to go back to Gotham now,”

Kal chuckles. “Trying to escape the sun, are you?” he jokes, pressing a kiss to Bruce’s temple.

Bruce shrugs. “Maybe,” he looks up at Kal and jokes, “This Kansas sun is way too much for my sensitive, porcelain skin,”

A bubble of laughter erupts from the Kryptonian. “I’ll need to provide better shade then,”

In time, Kal will propose marriage to Bruce the Terran way. He’ll have to save up for a ring, set up something romantic and fancy, and kneel in front of the love of his life at sunset, and ask him to marry him.

---

Notes:

(1) in the series Krypton, a rankless Kryptonian is one without a sigil or a House (or not allowed to use the sigil of their House if stripped of rank), and a guild. They are mostly used for labor and menial jobs. A guild is like a career. Kryptonians are made and created for their guilds. Their lives are planned out before they’re created, since children are formed in labs—Kryptonians do not reproduce sexually. The House El is from the Science Guild since Kal’s parents are scientists. Jor-El may have been involved with Earth sciences since he brought the issue of seismic activity to Krypton’s High Council. Lara Lor-Van/Jor-El may have been involved with technological advancements. Kal-El is now involved in agriculture which is also a branch of science that deals with food production—a farmer like his foster parents on Earth. I decided to adopt this because Justice League Unlimited inspired me and because it’s what Clark grows up on Earth with.

(2) Van-El is Clark’s dream son in the JLU S01E02 “For the Man Who Has Everything.” He was voiced by Josh Hutcherson.

there’s a lot of stuff about Ona, but I wanted to explain the culture of Krypton because drama!!

#superbat #clark kent #my fic #fanfic #superman #batman #bruce wayne #no capes #fanfiction #omegaverse #mpreg

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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 4 years ago

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Was Napoleon a tyrant? I don't necessarily think he was: at least, I believe he was a better alternative to the absolute monarchs he was fighting. But there are those who disagree. What are your thoughts on the subject?

This is a can of worms to be sure.

I mean....how are we defining the word tyrant? All monarchs are tyrants to someone. Monarchy, by its very nature, is tyrannical in one way, shape, or form, no matter who is at its head. Even in the more neutered forms we see now days with the British. The Queen still exerts a ridiculous amount of power, all things considered.

Napoleon was no better or worse than any other monarch in Europe at that time. Indeed, better than some, worse than others. Because you know, he was human!

This got VERY long. SO LONG. Choice excerpts from below the cut:

"'Power was encroaching with large strides behind the words order and stability,' as Thibaudeau put it."

"(And I suspect he was concerned about seeming too eager for power/setting up a monarchical system. Fouche: You're about as subtle as a canon going off right next door. Napoleon: Hush.)"

"Theeeeeen the little bastard (affectionate) became Emperor."

"Napoleon Vs. Jeff Bezos: fight! fight! fight! (I'm putting my money on Napoleon.)"

tl;dr: a more or less benevolent emperor who had his faults and who was intimately aware, for better or worse, more than most monarchs, that the head is only tenuously attached to the body. (Skim to the bottom for my thoughts on the personal things i.e. how I interpret Napoleon's actions and brain)

But, more seriously, as with most absolute statements, I am opposed to calling him a tyrant because it is reductive and serves no purpose except to make broad sweeping political statements that I believe are far more about the person making the statement exemplifying their modern political, republican position (as in, actual republican-I-support-the-existence-of-republics not the gop) rather than expressing any sort of truth about the past. (wHaT iS tRuTh.)

For historical purposes, it can over-simplify the situation and lead to skewed interpretations of events because you're coming in with this word that has a lot of modern, 20th and 21st century baggage to it.

And, because these people are coming in with this big, bad word of tyrant as a label for Napoleon, it doesn't allow them to engage with the nuance and complexities of his reign.

Anyway.

Napoleon, as emperor, supported centralized power held in his own hands, with support from other governing bodies (senate, council of state etc.). However, Napoleon had a lot of influence in the structuring of these governing bodies and the subsequent appointments as a means to exert control over entities that would otherwise be able to act somewhat independent from him and impinge his power.

We see this consolidation of power beginning, obviously, under the consulate. 'Power was encroaching with large strides behind the words order and stability,' as Thibaudeau put it.

There was the whole theatre around the Tribunate offering to extend Napoleon's tenure as First Consul for another ten years as a means of thanks/showing gratitude for all he did for France (Fouche was like: fuck that, let's just make a statue of the guy). Napoleon played the part of Humble Servant of the Public and refused both statue and the ten year extension. (Very Julius Caesar: You all did see that on the Lupercal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?)

In actuality, though, he was pissed because he wanted it extended for life.

This resulted in the Council of State deciding "independently" (i.e. Napoleon wasn't present but he sure as hell influenced that Council session) to hold a plebiscite in order to ask The People two key questions: 'Should Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?' and 'Should he have the right to designate his successor?'

Napoleon nixed the second question saying to Cambaceres, 'The testament of Louis XIV was not respected, so why should mine be? A dead man has nothing to say.' Which is to say, he knew people would vote for him to be Consul for life, but the prospect of him choosing a successor, a la the Roman Empire, and having that choice be without input from the people and respected upon his death? Less clear.

(And, I suspect he was concerned about seeming too eager for power/setting up a monarchical system.

Fouche: You're about as subtle as a canon going off right next door.

Napoleon: Hush.)

For the Plebiscite, there were around 3.56 million votes for Yes to the question of Napoleon as consul for life and only around 8,300 for No.

The turnout rate was 60% which is uhh...impressive! (To be fair, there was no real evidence of tampering with the vote. Unlike in subsequent Plebiscites, such as the results for Do We Make Him Emperor, which were absolutely doctored. But, considering the highest turnout ever seen in the French Revolution was around 30/35%, double that is certainly something.)

Lafayette was pissed with this. He kicked up a fuss in the Senate and wrote to Napoleon saying that his 'restorative dictatorship' had been well and fine for now but has Napoleon thought about restoring liberty? and that he was certain Napoleon, of all people, wouldn't want an 'arbitrary regime' to be installed!

Napoleon: Bold of you to assume that, Lafayette.

There were, at this time, some mumblings and grumblings about tyranny from the liberals and those still wanting to continue the experiment of the French Republic, to be sure. They increased as time went on and Napoleon's power continued to consolidate.

Theeeeeen the little bastard (affectionate) became Emperor.

Lafayette: WhAt Is tHiS??

Napoleon: Look into my face and tell me honestly that you are shocked.

His government, as Consul and as Emperor, was centralized and very top-down in how it operated. Little was done without Napoleon's input.

The seemingly democratic institutions that had propped him up into power were retained and Napoleon used them as a means to facilitate his rule. As noted earlier, Napoleon had a heavy hand in appointments and the processes in place to fill various offices. Nothing was really...independent of him and his influence.

Though, in terms of Image Building of Empire, Napoleon worked hard to try and maintain the façade of impartiality as emperor. That he was head of state, sure, but all state apparatuses operated independent of him.

(Why is Napoleon's hat so big? because it is full of lies supporting the imperial image making machine.)

That said, when it came to filling those offices, Napoleon focused on merit more than anything as he wanted his governing officials to be capable, hardworking and, above all else, loyal.

(A good quote from Napoleon in one of his more Eat the Rich moments of the consulate: 'One cannot treat wealth as a title of nobility. A rich man is often a layabout without merit. A rich merchant is often only so by virtue of the art of selling expensively or stealing.'

Napoleon Vs. Jeff Bezos: fight! fight! fight!

(I'm putting my money on Napoleon.) )

This is getting really long and I feel that I've not addressed anything in a useful manner, but am I going to stop? No.

Napoleon, himself, at least in 1803, did express some conflicted views about assuming an imperial title. To Roederer he said, 'So many great things have been achieved over the past three years under the title of consul. It should be kept.'

Cambaceres said to Napoleon that upon assuming an imperial title 'your position changes and places you at odds with yourself.' No longer are you merely a public servant, an upholder of the Republic's ideals. Now you are a man wearing a crown, trying to be the upholder of the Republic's ideals.

(nb: I feel that duality is something Napoleon never fully got a handle on. He would veer strongly into authoritarian monarch then have moments of Rousseau-ian Idealism.)

Napoleon was insistent that his rule be a parliamentary monarchy (keeping the governance framework implemented in the Constitution of Year VIII, if I am not mistaken. But don't quote me on that.) and that the French were not his subjects but his people.

So, the imperial government worked thus with the Legislative process divided between four bodies:

Council of State which would draw up legislative proposals,

Tribunate which could debate on legislation but not vote on it,

a legislative body which could vote on legislation but not discuss it, and

Senate which would consider whether the proposed legislation conformed to the Constitution.

The Senate and the Legislative body could, theoretically, curtail Napoleon’s freedom/power. However, considering the fact that he was involved in the appointment process of these offices, and the general rhythm of daily governance, how much power they were able to exert over him was limited.

(This is at his height! Of course, towards the end we see a shift in that. But that's largely tied up in his military defeats and the British banging the door knocker demanding to be let in. Also they brought with them some friends. You might have heard of them? Bourbons?)

The initial terms the Senate brought to Napoleon with their offer of accepting him as a hereditary monarch included, but weren't limited to:

liberty cannot be infringed

equality cannot be jeopardized

sovereignty of the people must be maintained

the laws of the nation are inviolable

all institutions were to be free from undue imperial influence (e.g. the press)

the nation should never be put into a position where it needs to behead the head of state. Again.

Napoleon was uh. Not best pleased with this and had a new version drafted up that included acknowledgement of the sovereignty of the people, but a lot of the other things (e.g. freedom of the press) were cut out.

Yet, Napoleon maintained certain parts of the French Revolution's values which were reflected more in the 1804 Code Napoleon and other legislative and legal pieces than in the initial terms of Senatorial acceptance of his imperial title.

Some of the things enshrined in the Code that were carry-over from the Revolution include, but aren't limited to, the abolition of feudalism, equality before the law, freedom of conscience (to practice their own religion), gave fixed title to those who had bought church and émigré lands during the 1790s, and the equality of taxation was maintained (tax those aristos and the church). Also, there was affirmation of the idea of careers being "open to talent" rather than an accident of birth (as touched on above).

The Freedom of Conscience clause in the Code was a further formalization of several Articles Napoleon amended onto the Concordat in 1802. The Articles guaranteed the principle of religious toleration and made the Protestant and Jewish churches similarly subject to state authority (alongside the Catholic).

These are just a brief summary of some of the more liberal/revolution-informed aspects of Napoleon's governing.

The non-liberal ones I believe we're all pretty familiar with: suppression of the free press, roll-back of rights for women (women are for babies!), reinstatement of slavery (which he later reversed circa 1810/12-ish), top-down Emperor-has-final-word approach to ruling (Napoleon was all about Authority From Above, Trust From Below) etc. etc.

At the end of this, I would say Napoleon's empire falls into that "benevolent monarch" situation. For a given value of "benevolent." As stated at the start, he was like most other monarchs in Europe at the time. Better than some, not as great about certain things as others.

Really, it all ties back to Order and Stability.

Napoleon's assent, and his approach to strong, centralized ruling, was a result of uncertainty and constant government change over ten years of revolution alongside the growing belief, by 1803, that a republic like the Romans or Greeks was not going to happen any time soon. Not without constant warfare and the forever looming threat of a Bourbon restoration.

In addition, Napoleon was doing imperial drag. (If that makes sense.) He was dialing the notch of Emperor up to 11 - being the most emperor of all emperors. So, state control was absolute because he couldn't show any signs of weakness - either in his own body, his familial body, or the body of state. The court protocols were intense and over-the-top at times because he had to prove he was not just a second son of a parvenu lawyer from the sticks. No! he was worthy of this pomp. He was worthy of imperial majesty. He was worthy of the crown and scepter.

Napoleon was not raised to be anything other than a military officer and a middle-class head of a family (would have been a MASTER at doing Sunday Dad Puttering About the House). When he dawned the mantel of power, particularly that of empire, he had to make it up as he went along. For such a self-conscious and proud man, this was difficult. He never wanted to misstep and be embarrassed - on a personal level, political or military.

At the same time, he was reared on Rousseau and Revolution so still had those values and ideals imbedded in him, and those fears and memories. Napoleon knew as well as any Frenchman that a monarch's head is easily removable should it become necessary. Therefore, he sometimes ran roughshod over the liberty to ensure security. For better or worse, that was the choice he made.

Napoleon was a flawed leader with a complex approach to governing that was focused on a centralization of power within him while, at the same time, trying to be the Successor of the Revolution, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. Layers! Like an onion.

His approach as emperor really was within the realm of normal-for-the-times when compared to most other monarchs on the European stage in 1800. He also granted liberties to his people that were unheard of in other countries.

I feel like all my Napoleonic ramblings end with the same message: Dude was nuanced. Dude was complex. Dude did good things and bad things. Dude helped people and hurt people. Dude contained multitudes. Because he was simply human, at the end of the day.

ANNNNNNND we are done.

Gods bless all y'all who made it this far.

Have my favourite picture of Napoleon at Tuileries as a prize.

hmm that beautiful heavy, handed symbolism.

#napoleon #napoleon bonaparte #ask #reply #napoleonic #history #19th century #imperial myth making #napoleonic identity

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 4 years ago

Text

Burn The Bread Book: Industrial Communism Will Not Liberate You

The True Cost of Bread

For years I've watched a man drive his pick-up truck into the forest around me and cut down all the trees that aren't legally protected. So, every tree that isn't a pine or an oak. The moment a carob or olive or hawthorn or mastic or strawberry tree grows big enough to burn, he cuts it down and drags it away for firewood. He even fells trees I planted, while smiling and waving at me like he’s doing me a favor. I glare at him silently but don’t say a word, knowing he has the full power of the state behind him.

He uses the wood to fuel his traditional bakery which has several large outdoor ovens. The much-loved industrial product he produces is bread; a product that has rapidly replaced all the native food-bearing plants of the area as they’ve been cut down to make room for wheat fields.

The villagers are proud of the bakery because it attracts visitors from all over the island and thus creates further opportunities for them to earn profit. The local bureaucracy; the democratically-elected village council, gives the baker free reign to do as he pleases since so many livelihoods depend on his bakery.

Because the baker cuts everything down as soon as it reaches human height, the trees never get big enough to fruit, so they don't spread their seeds and grow new trees. The forest slowly dwindles to nothing but pine trees and can no longer sustain most animal life. The climate dries, the soil erodes, the air grows stagnant and depleted of oxygen. All that’s left in the few remaining forests that haven’t been bulldozed to grow more wheat is a sterile pine desert.

The baker will soon no doubt lobby the village council to allow him to harvest the pine trees too, otherwise the all-important bakery will cease to be operational when he runs out of legal trees to fell.

In just a few years, all the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained the people in the area for millennia are wiped out and replaced with a consumer product that is made from a single grain crop. A thriving ecosystem has been replaced with a wheat monoculture that could collapse at any moment and take the lives of everyone it feeds with it.

It’s worth noting that the baker, like most people in my village, and in fact most people on the island, considers himself a communist. The village has a ��communist party” clubhouse and they always elect “communist” local leaders and vote for “communist” politicians in the national elections.

Any anarchist worth their salt has no tolerance for these faux-communists, or “tankies” and their brand of collectivist-capitalism because they cling to money, states and rulers and really only embrace Stalinist politics because of the promise of cushy government jobs for them or their relatives.

The Stalinist politicians openly buy votes by promising jobs in the public service to their supporters. A job in the public service here is a guaranteed free ride for life for you and your family, with the salaries multiple times higher than private sector salaries and benefits out of the wazoo - including multiple pensions. They get a full pension for each gov sector they worked in, and the more connected civil servants are rotated through jobs in multiple sectors in the last few months leading up to their retirement to ensure the maximum pay-out possible.

I’m confident anyone reading this knows Stalinism is designed to enrich the bureaucrat class and give them complete control over the state’s citizens. No anarchist sees that shit as communism. But in a “real” communist society; an “anarcho-communist” society where money, state and class have been abolished, the local baker would presumably still bake that bread, and since it would be offered freely to everyone far and wide, he'd need to bake a lot more of it and thus need more wood. More forest would be razed to keep the bread production going. Everyone living in the village and anyone passing through, and people in faraway cities will expect to have as much gourmet bread on their plates as they desire. More bakeries would need to pop up on the mountain as demand rises for delicious bread in the cities below, with the rural population working hard and doing their duty to feed the hungry urban population.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into envisioning how the workers seizing the means of production would end the environmental devastation this bread production brings to the mountain. I struggle to see any scenario where communism would stop the devastation being wrought on the ecosystem. The forests would continue to be razed to ensure production won’t slow down.

Free bread for everyone today means no bread (or any food) for anyone tomorrow as the top-soil washes away, the climate warms, the wildlife goes extinct, and the whole mountain rapidly turns to desert. It’s inevitable that soon even wheat will cease to grow in the fields surrounding the village.

Regardless of the economic system in place, the villagers being able to consume as many fresh loaves of baked bread as they can carry means all the forests in driving distance of the village are eviscerated, eventually all the fields become barren, the crops fail, and everyone starves. This is already well on its way to happening, and switching to a communist mode of production would do nothing to allay this inevitability.

“How would you feed people then, genius?” I hear you scoff. The answer is simple; tried and tested for millennia. I wouldn’t feed people. People would feed themselves instead of expecting others to labor to feed them; an entitlement that arose with industrial civilization. People would be inclined to protect the forests instead of bulldozing them for the supposed convenience of industrial food production if they picked their food directly from those forests everyday.

They’d protect the forests with their very lives because they’d need the food that grows in the forests to survive without industrial farms, bakeries and factories outsourcing food production and then hiding the ecocide they cause just out of sight of the villages and their carefully manicured streets.

Bread and other industrial products alienate us from our ecosystem and cause us to stop caring about how our food is produced, so long as it’s there in the store when we want to eat it. Putting food production back into the control of the individual is the only way to preserve the ecosystem. Direct food is the only anarchist mode of production. When other people are tasked with growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths or the mouths of their loved ones. Food harvesting needs to go back to being a way of life for every able-bodied person, rather than something industrial farm workers are tasked with to serve an elite class of privileged office workers who are completely disconnected from the food chain.

All over the world, complex centuries-old polyculture food-forests that sustained countless lives for generations are destroyed by the arrogance of industrial production, replaced for a short while by a wheat or corn monoculture so people can pick up their bread down the street from their home or workplace instead of muddying their feet to gather food from the wild as their ancestors did. This convenience seems like “progress” to civilized people, at least until the destructive industrial agriculture process renders the wheat fields infertile and farms all over the world are turned into a vast uninhabitable dust bowl. A sustainable way of life that kept us alive and thriving for centuries has been tossed aside in favor of a short-lived attempt at industrial convenience that has already proven itself a horrible failure; bringing us and every other lifeform to the verge of extinction.

Industry is not sustainable. Industrial systems are all destructive. Communism, capitalism, fascism, they’re all founded on ecocide. The authority of the baker is upheld over everything else because domesticated people would rather consume “free” industrial bread for a few years than unlearn their destructive consumerist habits. If we are to survive these times of devastating ecological collapse, humans need to go back to fostering vast food forests as our ancestors did for millennia; producing and gathering our own food without destroying the very ecosystem that gives us life in the name of luxury and convenience.

"The People's" Authority: How “Anarcho-Communism” is Authority-Forming

If someone kept cutting down all the trees to bake bread, the people who depend on the forest to survive would of course have to intervene to stop the loggers from destroying the forest and thus killing their way of life.

This happens in rainforests today where indigenous people who have been let down by the state gleefully issuing licenses to corporate loggers, and turning a blind eye to illegal logging, instead take matters into their own hands and shut down the loggers using force.

They put their lives on the line to do this, and a lot of them are killed by the loggers who value their profits over the lives of indigenous people. They know if they don’t act to stop the loggers, the forests they call their home will be decimated and their way of life will have been destroyed forever. They’ll be forced into the cramped cities and have to labor all day everyday to buy the bread and beef that stripped their forests bare.

So how would an anarcho-communist society deal with someone who cuts down all the trees to bake bread? In an anarcho-communist society, everyone will be environmentally conscious and consume sustainably, right...? No. Not if you’re engaging in any kind of critical thinking.

Loggers can only destroy forests at the current explosive rate if the society imbues them with authority. If they have no authority, there's nothing stopping others from using force to end their pillaging of our natural resources. Without the authority of civilization behind them, the loggers have incredibly diminished power and no real motive to risk their lives to fell trees.

Anarcho-communism is an industrial ideology based around the notion of seizing the means of production and then running the factories, saw mills, oil rigs, mines and power plants democratically. Industrial civilization is an incredibly totalitarian authority that is nevertheless upheld by “anarcho”-communist theory, even though anarchists supposedly oppose all forms of authority.

In an industrial communist society, much like in a capitalist society, logging is necessary to further the industrial production the society is built around. As long as production drives the system, trees will have to be felled for all kinds of reasons: from lumber and paper production to making way for crops and cattle.

So, logging is highly valued by the people that uphold the industrial society, and in a real world scenario, these “anarcho” communists would have to take measures to protect loggers from repercussions from a small, uncivilized minority – the indigenous inhabitants of the forest. These measures are, by any definition, an authority. A monopoly on violence. A state in everything but name.

But since the loggers are providing this valued service to good, decent, reasoned, educated, domesticated, egalitarian, democratic, civilized anarcho-communists in big shiny cities who are accustomed to a litany of luxury consumer products being delivered to their doors everyday… Decidedly authoritarian methods will need to be taken to ensure the anarcho-loggers can do their anarcho-work without facing retaliation from the “primmie” forest dwellers. These methods can easily be justified in the ancom’s mind; there’s nothing an ancom loves more than to “justify” authority with their mighty reasoned logic™️.

So when faced with the conundrum that the anarcho-communist city needs lumber, paper, corn and meat, and the only thing standing in the way of production is a few indigenous tribes, the ancom will put their anarcho-Spock ears on and declare: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Just as capitalist and socialist states today violently suppress the indigenous people who take action to shut down logging and mining operations that quash their way of life, the anarcho-industrialist will send a red-and-black army in to escort their red-and-black bulldozers and discipline anyone that interferes with the will of “the people”.

The indigenous inhabitants of course won’t give a shit that their forests are being felled by communists rather than by capitalists. They won’t give a shit that the bulldozers are now owned collectively or that the land they’ve lived on for millennia has now been designated as belonging to “the people” (the civilized voting majority) instead of to the state or to capital.

The forest that nurtures the indigenous people and their children is still being decimated to maintain the destructive lifestyles of apathetic city-dwellers. Their lives are still being ended because to civilized people, they’re a backwards, regressive minority standing in the way of progress... Damaging the revolution, inhibiting the growth of their glorious egalitarian civilization. The educated, “progressive” majority outvote them. Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?

Civilized people always have pushed the notion that the “common good” or the good of the many will always outweigh the needs of individuals or small groups of people, ever since Aristotle, in his "The Aim of Man” wrote:

"The good of the state is of greater and more fundamental importance both to attain and to preserve. The securing of one individual's good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine." Communism is even more adamant in this “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences.

This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevitably resisted. If people won’t consent to being displaced from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded “kulaks” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “reactionaries” and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.

Industrial goods are valued by industrial society over the forest and its inhabitants because domesticated people want to eat bread and microwaved pizza and the real cost of those products (environmental destruction) is of no real concern to industrial society beyond empty gestures like an occasional “save the rainforests” or “go vegan” banner.

The inhabitants of the forests and their strange foreign culture are too far removed from the busy cities for the average urbanites to involve themselves in their plight. Even the civilized rural people who live around the forests are forever striving to urbanize their villages in the unending quest for upwards mobility. In my experience, they’ll happily trade every tree in sight for a gourmet bakery, Apple Store or coffee-shop so they can feel as civilized as the people in the big cities who tend to look down on them for being “hillbillies” or “country bumpkins”.

“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college.” (From RollingStone.com.)

The settler-farmers who are burning what’s left of the Amazon rainforest to the ground say they’re doing it for their children... To make the cash to pay for their children to be educated and get good jobs in the city. It shouldn’t be controversial for me to say civilized people value their civilized life and will always put their civilized needs before the needs of uncivilized others.

Civilized people can relate to their civilized neighbours who have the same struggles as them: paying their bills, educating their kids, buying good insurance, washing their car, deciding where to go on vacation, renovating their kitchens, choosing the next Netflix show to binge watch... So it’s not surprising that they’ll do everything they can to prop up civilized people and kick down the uncivilized people who stand in the way of their quest for ever-increasing industrial comforts.

I can already see the denial stage setting in on some of your faces as I type: “But us anarcho-communists aren’t like capitalists, we’re good caring people. Humane people. We’ll make industry green, we’ll manage the forests in a sustainable manner using direct democracy, unions, unicorns and equality!”

Why would anyone swallow that crock of shit? Why would thoroughly domesticated people used to all the comforts of destructive industrial civilization suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy? Why would 7.7 billion people suddenly change how they live because anarcho-communism has been declared? How would ancom civilization make industry “green” when it’s clearly demonstrable that all industry is destructive to the environment and to wild people, and modelling a society on an industrial system has had disastrous results throughout history, regardless of what the attached ideology was named?

All controlled mass-society, including every historical experiment at building a communist society has created authority; bodies of people that hold power over others. That power grows over time and takes the “communist” society further and further away from its revolutionary origins. Every indication is that authority would continue to be manifested with industrial anarcho-communism. There is no evidence that anarcho-communism would avert authority when it’s so dependent on destructive, exploitative, alienating, domesticating industry and the control and domination of a global population of workers.

All Industrial Goods Free for All People: A Recipe for Disaster

In communism everything is free for the taking and resources are often treated as if they're infinite. If you decide you need something, you take it from the communal store. Kropotkin said no one has the right to judge how much an individual needs, except the individuals themselves.

Since most reds hold that resources should be allocated according to “need”, decisions would need to be made to determine who in the community has “need” of the biggest shares of resources.

I know most ancoms, like Kropotkin, claim every individual will just take whatever they “need” (want) from communal stores, but I'm going to cry foul on that because it's really not practical in an industrial society. Resources aren't infinite and no one is going to spend their life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the communal store with a dumpster truck and says "I need your community's entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up". For some reason ancoms think assholes would cease to exist in a communist society. Why would anyone work their asses off, wasting their life away doing menial manual labor just to watch some shitlord drive away with everything they produced because he announced he “needed” it?

“But as woke anarcho-communists in an advanced fully-automated luxury communist society, labor will in fact be quite limited and fun because we can divide duties between all our comrades! And profit will no longer be a concern since everything we make will be given to anyone that wants it free of charge, so we don’t need to worry about marketing our products and that will further minimize the amount of labor we’ll do, giving us ample leisure time to enjoy the fruits of our production!”

For the purposes of cold-hearted mockery, I’m slightly paraphrasing an ancom who responded to an early draft of this piece. What fantasy realm are ancoms living in where all the massive problems posed by industrial production (including the ongoing extinction of near-every lifeform on Earth) will evaporate when you remove profit and marketing from the equation?

I keep saying this in my writing but here I go again: In an industrial society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not decrease; it increases. If everyone in the world suddenly has free and equal access to the mountains of wasteful shit that Western consumers consider necessary to life, not only would production need to massively increase, but we would run out of resources to exploit much more rapidly.

That’s assuming anyone would even want to work in the mines and factories in a supposedly equal society if they no longer had guns to their heads. Why would anyone go back down into that mine once their chains are broken? Does anyone honestly think those Congolese kids give a shit if you have a new phone every year? Should they really be expected to sacrifice themselves for your entitlement? So you can continue to live in luxury with all your little conveniences?

In a real world implementation of industrial communism, communities will no doubt quickly impose limits on what can be taken from communal stores after a few people take way more than they have any right to and other people go without as a result, despite them laboring for hours a day to produce those goods. Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?

Industrial society right now is fed by the ceaseless labor of billions of exploited people in the Global South. People are forced to toil in mines from childhood to procure the materials that other people (also including children) then assemble into consumer goods in factories, all for starvation wages. This is debilitating, dangerous work that leaves the people who do it sucked of their youth after a few years.

Anyway, let’s play along with communist mythology for a bit to get to my next point. In an ideal communist society (where I guess minerals are somehow found equally all across the planet and not overwhelmingly located in the Global South as in the real world), outsourced labor would presumably go away because communists would never exploit workers in distant lands (who ever heard of an imperialist communist, right? Right??) So instead production would need to be localized, and then the goods would be distributed according to need.

For resources to be allocated according to need, you'll have some kind of deciding body in place to judge what each person's needs are; what resources each person should be given.

There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s “needs”, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties they throw, how many friends they have and thus might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the size of their garden, the type of insulation their house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop myself.

Giving bureaucrats this power will no doubt mean certain favored groups / individuals will be rewarded and less desirable groups / individuals will be neglected, or even punished. This is the nature of authority. You’ll need a body of full-time bureaucrats to collect all this data and measure how it should determine your share of the pie, and those bureaucrats are going to have biases. If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases. And you'd still need bureaucrats to collect the data and feed it to the computer. Then they could easily feed incorrect or selective data to the computer because of their biases.

It's always felt like a recipe for corruption and exploitation to me for a bureaucracy to determine someone’s worth... Which is probably why Kropotkin stipulated that everyone should be able to just take whatever they themselves decide they need from the stores.

Of course, the real solution would be to not base your proposed utopian society on industrial production in the first place... Promising industrial production will be unlimited because everyone will voluntarily agree to work real hard in the factories and mines and slaughterhouses and the goods will be distributed to everyone everywhere somehow while maintaining a sustainable ecological green solarpunk paradise just makes you a smug fucking liar. No different than a grinning politician promising to give us freedom, liberty and prosperity if we vote for him.

The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value / worth to assign to them as a person.

If you're going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving someone who does the same job (or a much easier job) more than you because of potentially biased reasons?

Regardless, anarcho-collectivism still only really values the workers who are most willing to submit to the factory grind and put in the most hours. Anarcho-collectivism still holds ecodical industry and luxuries for cityfolk up above all life on the planet... So that 19th century ideology isn’t going to save you either. Throw it right in the trash with the bread book because this “reform-industrial-society” charade isn’t helping when the planet is on fire.

If industrial communism were actually implemented in the real world, you can be relatively certain that some kind of authority would need to be put in place to prevent bad actors from showing up at the store and taking a community’s entire monthly production. People would need to police the store and judge whether someone is worthy of taking as much as they’re taking. They’d need to become authorities, upholders of law and order. Purveyors of “justice”.

Let’s be clear now because I know a lot of red anarchists are going to try to “justify” this authority as being “necessary for the good of society” as they will do. Policing who can take food and how much they can take is a clear authority. Not a “justified” authority, because such a thing simply does not exist.

And this store-policing is not the anarchist tactic of “direct action” either, let’s make that clear right now, because it’s a frightenly common misunderstanding with red anarchists. Creating a police force has nothing to do with direct action.

Direct action is an isolated use of force unconnected to institutional systems of power. People who engage in direct action are not appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy. Their action is not legitimized by anyone and they receive no protection or reward from an authority as they take the action. There’s no monopoly on violence being granted to them by an authority, so there’s nothing to guarantee their safety from retaliation if the action fails or succeeds.

There’s no institutional power-imbalance being created when someone takes direct action against an authority. The authority already created the power imbalance, and your direct action is a form of defense to shield you, your ecosystem or your community from that imbalance.

Direct action is an entirely anarchist tactic, but pinning badges on people, officiating them, and giving them the authority (and the monopoly on violence) to police a store and withhold food and products from certain people for whatever reason has nothing to do with anarchy. Building a hierarchy like this has nothing to do with anarchy.

Police officers and judges (authorities) ruling over a communal store is authoritarian. An officiated police force is a completely different thing from the isolated use of force by a lone actor or a small group of actors to preserve life and combat authority (direct action).

Creating a police force, even if it’s formed of volunteers, even if they were elected, even if they make decisions collectively, even if their uniforms are red and black, even if the officers placed on duty are regularly rotated, is authoritarian by any definition. There are no anarchist cops. An “anarchist cop” couldn’t be a bigger oxymoron.

Here’s an example of direct action: me punching a logger who is cutting down my favorite tree. This action is completely removed from structural systems of authority because I have no authority or structural power behind me. There’s nothing legitimizing my use of force or giving me a monopoly on violence. My use of force doesn’t extend beyond my own two fists. Since assault is illegal, and his logging is legal, the logger has the full authority of the law behind him, so any action I take to oppose that authority is punching up. It’s fighting to curve a gross power imbalance. It’s anarchy.

In this civilized world, I could be severely punished by law enforcement for using force to stop his desecration of a forest. As the state gave him his logging permit, he has authority over the forest and every life that depends on the forest to survive. He punches down every time he fells a tree. He is the full embodiment of archy. If I choose to stand in his way, there’s no state behind me, no court, no police force. Me physically stopping a logger from felling trees is an isolated use of force to strike back at a system of authority. The logger destroys life for profit, and if I take action to stop him because I don’t want to see the forest become a barren desert, I don’t become a state or any kind of authority based on that decision to fight back.

Forming a police squad and a bureaucracy to patrol and govern an officiated communal store, appointing authorities to sit and judge how much each individual deserves to eat, on the other hand, creates legitimized systems of power and an institutional monopoly on violence. It creates a state, or at the very least a proto-state that will later develop into a full-blown state as the bureaucracy grows.

The German philosopher Max Weber defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. State violence, whether it’s committed on behalf of the state by a politician, a judge, a cop or a logger, is always a legitimate force. Any violence the state does is immediately “justified” simply by virtue of it being dispensed by a legitimate state actor who is doing it for the good of the state and its authority.

A logger with an official permit to slice up a forest is thus fully justified in the eyes of society to do as much harm to the forest as is deemed necessary by the authorities who granted the permit.

A state exists wherever an authority can authorize and legitimize violence. There is no way for an anarchist to “justify” a coercive, authoritarian institution such as a police force that will no doubt be biased against minority groups and lead to the accumulation of power by the dominant group, and abuses of power by the people doing the policing. Even if minority groups are involved in the police force, the majority group will still oppress their groups.

A society that mass-produces goods and distributes them in communal stores will manifest itself as a state, regardless of Kropotkin’s insistences that everyone will work voluntarily and then take whatever they want from the stores. There’s no practical scenario where industrial labor is truly voluntary. There’s no practical scenario on this Earth of rapidly diminishing returns where “free” stores won’t need to be policed to deny unlimited goods to individuals and groups who the governing body decides are less worthy of the fruits of their labor.

Anarcho-communism simply isn’t revolutionary as long as we are depleting all our resources in the name of industrial civilization; something anarcho-communism demands as an industrial, work-based ideology that revolves around civilizing the land and its inhabitants in order to extract resources and labor. There’s nothing revolutionary about continuing the global ecocide under the guise of democracy. Every anarchist should understand the difference between isolated force and authority, but very few self-identifying social anarchists seem interested in this and are content prating on about “justified authority”, debating “how an anarcho-communist police force could work” and excitedly discussing Chomsky’s latest speech telling them to vote for a lesser-evil neoliberal politician.

I know I sound bitter, but I’ve been disillusioned with the majority of red anarchists I come into contact with for years now and they only seem to get worse as industrial society plods on and the sands and seas climb further up our necks.

Anarcho-communism is not the solution to fighting authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. A sparkly new paint job. There’s a reason so many ancoms strive to “justify” authority. They don’t actually care about reaching for anarchy.

Is Communism Always Authority-Forming?

In my mind, communism can only work outside of industrial mass society. A small community gathering or growing supplies and freely sharing them with the rest of the community. Each community trading with other small communities. Marx and Engels ironically dubbed this hunter-gatherer form of society that had long existed in human history as “primitive communism” and suggested it was inferior to their advanced industrial communism that valued the factory and centralized city life above all else.

Mass industry requires mass agriculture, mass labor, mass transport, mass resource extraction, mass construction, mass policing, mass military... Mass society and will only lead right back to capitalism and statism because it's so unwieldy and authority forming. Any communist tendency built around industrial exploitation is going to create all kinds of fucked up hierarchies and just lead us right back to the apocalyptic status quo.

Most communists I’ve talked to about this are unable to accept that some people will still act like assholes if capitalism collapses, which I’d probably find endearing if these people weren’t such giant assholes themselves; calling me a privileged reactionary for daring to suggest their blessed ideology might have some flawed logic. They insist everyone will cease being selfish assholes once capitalism is done away with because “assholes are only assholes as long as capitalism pits them against each other.”

Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with. That doesn't go away overnight. But even without consumer culture to guide them, people are still completely capable of being assholes. Going back to before mass-society even existed, people would murder each other and take their stuff. They'd raid each other's settlements, they'd steal their children, they'd fight over territory and cultural differences. These aren't things that were invented by capitalism and they won’t go away just because communism is declared.

People aren't inherently just or unjust. Humanity is not good or bad. Every person is an individual, each with different experiences, motivations, traumas. Communism expects everyone to be altruistic. Capitalism expects everyone to act out of greed and self preservation. Neither is true because both are ideologically driven worldviews that attempt to define human nature in order to instruct us how to behave by instilling us with their morals. People are greedy, people are generous, people are kind, people are mean-spirited. Every person in the world is all of these things and more. People are not defined by one single personality trait their entire lives.

I’m haunted by every shitty thing I’ve ever done and I’m sure I’ll do more shitty things yet, despite my best intentions. No one is above making mistakes. Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned. There are people in our lives that we trust and people we can’t stand to be around. Not everyone is deserving of the products of our labor. Some people in the world will always try to exploit you, even if they already have everything their hearts could possibly desire. Some people will be kind to you no matter how big an asshole you are.

I’ve been accused by communists of being cynical, of being “regressive” and “counter-revolutionary” because I don’t buy into the communist notion that humans are inherently good and they just need the right industrial system to bring that good out of them.

Any society where I’m expected to just sit back and watch as a logger destroys my ecosystem because he’s serving the “greater good” isn’t a society I want any part of. I value my autonomy over the desires of traumatized workers pushing buttons for 8 hours a day in a city far-removed from me. I’d rather take the logger’s chainsaw away than fiddle my thumbs as he takes everything I know, and to hell with whatever bureaucratic process enshrined him with the right to decimate the forest to give bread to the workers. Fuck the workers and their bread and their fully-automated luxury communism and their divine democratic rights.

There’s simply no reason to believe exploitative assholes will go away if communism is ever enacted.

There’s a man I know who constantly exploits me for my labor, and I always go along with it. He dangles a carrot on a stick in front of me every time; promising that after I help him, he’ll hook me up to his well so I can have free water for my trees. For years he’s made this promise.

I’ve spent countless hours doing dangerous work for this guy with no reward. He always disappears after I do the work without giving me what he promised. Then the next week he wakes me up again at 6am on a Saturday by honking his horn, apologizes for not getting around to hooking me up to the well yet, saying he was too busy or in the hospital or had a family emergency, promises he’ll do it this week, and then I’m hanging off a cliff or a roof repairing pipes for him all day while he barks orders at me.

I do it because I’m a fucking pushover who can’t say no to people due to my ridiculous kind nature. But whenever I ask him for anything, I’m met with a blank stare, an abrupt subject change or a sorry excuse. I was stranded a two hour walk down the mountain last week when my car broke down, and he drove right around me and didn’t even slow down. When I saw him later, he swore on his life that he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes. I nodded and shrugged.

Communism wouldn’t stop this lying dipshit from exploiting me; he’d still need someone to fix his leaky pipes, start up his diesel generator, saw off the upper branches of his olive trees and climb shoddy makeshift structures for him regardless of the economic system in place. He’d still give me a sob story about his painful ulcer and I’d still do the hard work to spare him the pain of doing it himself. He wouldn’t stop being an exploitative asshole just because democracy is installed in the workplace. He wouldn’t start practising mutual aid when he goes to great lengths to avoid all work and shames other people into doing it for him.

Red anarchists throw every insult in the book at me when I voice my doubts about their wistful ideologies; condemning me for being critical of the amazing breadman Kropotkin or their “green industry” tsar Professor Bookchin... It’s hard to give my perspective as an indigenous anarchist to these people who are so hostile to any worldview that doesn’t validate their luxurious industrial lifestyle and their driving desire to make that lifestyle more democratic in order to receive a bigger share of the pie.

Between the shouts of “reactionary lifestylist” and “dirty primmie” they lobby at me, I try to explain my perspective to them. I see suffering in the world and I want to make sense of it. I’m not satisfied just handwaving it away and clinging to fanciful utopian ideologies designed to energize European factory workers from the 1800s. I don’t believe red-industry will cure society of all its ills and free humans from their chains.

The warehouse I’ve worked in for more than a decade will not become magically liberating if I’m given the power of democracy. It’ll still be a miserable fucking place filled with toxic pesticides that are slowly killing me.

Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that just amounts to "no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so". They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism. I’ve really run out of patience for that line of thinking. It’s no different than a 7 year old trying to win an argument by insisting “because my dad said so”... But when it comes down to it, that’s all most reds can do. Quote their heroes and cling to the hope that they’ll be proven right some day. That hope is what keeps them going as their miserable civilized lives burn the world up. “All our suffering will end once we have democracy in the workplace”. Those poor, deluded, hope-filled souls.

Everything I know tells me industry cannot be made "green" any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods and distribute them to millions or billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems and human lives. Ancoms are not magical beings that can somehow escape the consequences of this because they're supposedly "good" and “egalitarian”.

If anarcho-communism were ever attempted, half the "nuances" it has will be thrown out for being fantastic, half-baked and impossible to implement in an industrial mass-society. Compromises will be made to make the system functional. A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because:

a) Resources aren't infinite.

b) Industrial output has a high 'hidden' cost, and most importantly:

c) Work isn't voluntary.

No matter how much you swear you’ll make labor democratic, no one is working because they really want to. They’re working because the system requires them to work to survive. No amount of democracy will stop the system from asserting its authority on everyone inside its suffocating walls. Abolishing the borders between territories will do nothing if industrial civilization continues to box us in and starve us if we dare to resist its rule. If we can’t escape civilization, the whole world is nothing more than one big prison.

Civilized people labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories and warehouses in "a communist society" is if they are forced to by the system. No free hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes, weedkiller and AAA batteries. It's something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system.

Industry is a clear authority and anarcho-communist theory is completely oblivious to that. Anarcho-communism is nothing more than an attempt to reform the tyranny of civilization to give it a sly smile. It’s the anarchist version of Barack Obama promising change but just delivering more of the same and expecting you to celebrate it.

Seize the Means of Destruction! (And fucking burn it to the ground…)

Ancoms insist “people would choose to produce only what is needed” in an anarcho-communist society. That word; "needed" is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being "needed", but almost none of the things defined as such are actually needed. This is why industrial communism isn't really compatible with anarchy: anything and everything will be defined as "needed" by domesticated people, no matter how authority-forming the things are. If it means they get to keep consuming, anarcho-consumers would happily define everything from pesticides to slaughterhouses to automobile plants as “needed”. This is the power of democracy. Whatever narrative the collective adopts becomes the official, approved narrative and anyone questioning it will be seen as subversive and dangerous and a threat to order and common decency.

This "needed industry" argument is a lot like the "justified authority" argument a lot of red “anarchists” keep making to uphold every shitty authority they cling to all the way up to the state, prisons and the police.

Usually they’ll just rename these authorities “the commune”, “the social re-integration facility” and “the peacekeepers” and be satisfied that they’ve come up with a real change. It's meaningless. Domesticated people will not allow themselves to see past the carefully manufactured alienating world they’ve inherited. Very few civilized people are willing to risk losing what they perceive as the great comforts imbibed to them by industrial civilization.

Even if they recognize how strangling these “comforts” actually are to them and everything else on the planet, instead of rejecting them outright, they draw up elaborate plans to reform the way those “comforts” are produced and dispersed. Most of these plans, when deconstructed and debullshitted, ultimately amount to little more than slapping the word “anarcho” in front of everything and trusting it’ll be all good because it’s anarchized now.

People thrived without industry and agriculture for millennia. Civilization has led to the extinction of near everything on the planet. 99.9% of industrial goods are not "needed" by humanity, they're wanted.

Ancoms aren't going to suddenly decide to give up their phones, Doritos and washing machines when they find out they're environmentally destructive. They'll just rubber-stamp all the things they want as "needed", “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” or “green” and call it a day. And we’ll be expected to keep working our miserable jobs and like it because now they’re anarcho-jobs in an anarcho-society with anarcho-exploitation and anarcho-masters.

Keeping people in the mines and factories building those consumer goods that "the people" decide they "need" will require massive authority that will be just another iteration of capitalism in all but name. Just like “communist” Russia and “communist” China and “communist” North Korea. Not a trace of communism will survive once industrial civilization is done grinding everything up. There’s nothing about “anarcho-communism” that will spare it from the same fate. Claiming to be anti-authority rings hollow when you cling to authoritarian industrial civilization, workerism and all the other authorities ancoms at large decide are “justified”.

A bureaucracy will always be instilled in an organized mass-society and this is why industrial communism isn't tenable. It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been manifested as a perverse collective-capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism. The bureaucracy will quickly morph into a state, and by definition the society will no longer be communist. But of course, it’ll keep calling itself “communist” and ensure the distinction between capitalism and communism remains paper-thin so people won’t be able to envision a better world than the brutal industrial wasteland we’ve all been born into.

Any system that allocates resources and polices people is functionally a state, regardless of what it brands itself as.

All implementations of industrial society have failed to liberate people, instead making their lives more and more miserable with each stage of industrialism, and to claim that attaching “anarcho” to the front of an industrial system will make a difference is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Communism has never succeeded at liberating us historically and will not suddenly succeed just because you promise you’re better than other communists and you and all your super-libertarian ancom comrades will pick up cans of paint and make all the chimney stacks bright green.

Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy. Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.

Without this bureaucracy, the society would descend into anarchy. Yes, wonderful, amazing, freeing anarchy. The very thing every red fears most because it would mean they’d no longer get to forcibly structure society and people around their sacred ideology and force their authority and morality on them. Domesticated people sit trapped in sterile little boxes, fed a steady drip of pesticide and high-fructose corn syrup as they labor, consume, consume, consume and then die.

This isn’t life. This isn’t anarchy. This is a waking nightmare, a depraved hell-world that has all of us thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it acceptable. Branding it “communist” or “libertarian socialist” or “democratic” or “egalitarian” or “decentralized” or “anarcho-communist” will not end the nightmare. It will not stop the planet-wide ecocide civilization has wrought on all living things. The means of destruction being controlled by industrial workers instead of industrial bosses will not stop the ecocide.

Seizing the factories and making them democratically managed as all reds yearn to do won’t do anything to save us from violence, misery, alienation and eventual extinction.

The only way to destroy authority is to burn industry to the ground before it devours every last lifeform on the planet.

The only chance we have to survive what’s coming in the next few years as our ecosystems are collapsing all around us is to tear down every factory and close every port and slice up every road until civilization is in ruins.

But in all honesty, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to watch television and sip iced tea and we’re going to wait for the end. I’m going to keep watching in silence as the local bread man fells the last remaining wilderness.

Maybe the planet will recover somewhat in a few millennia and maybe the next lifeform that evolves will have more sense than the desertmakers. This is the last hope I cling to.

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anakinisvaderisanakin · 4 years ago

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Introductions (AU; the government are introduced to the Emperor’s right hand man)

Emperor Palpatine sat at the helm of the table, his expensive ornate satin cloak pulled up to cover his deformed features. He had made a rare exception to the never appearing in public rule, if only to summon his little group of closely affiliated followers for a less than chummy supper. The Coruscant sun had already begun to set, its pinkish rays disappearing behind the skyscrapers visible from the large single viewport of the Emperor’s dining hall. Two months had passed since the fall of the Republic. Two months since the war came to an end, two months since the Jedi were declared traitors and executed en masse. Two months since Palpatine declared himself dictator, since his regulations had begun being pushed onto all known systems. Two months, and Governor Tarkin had thought himself to be lucky with his role.

A few faces, he recognized. Former admiral Wullf Yularen was a welcome addition despite being a bit below the required rank, fighting the just fight against outliers and naysayers. Orn Free Taa was a more unfortunate case (he had likely invited himself by flattery and empty promises), while Vizier Mas Amedda was an obvious presence. Sate Pestage, Janus Greejatus, Ars Dangor, Kren Blista-Vanee and Verge’s smug faces had Tarkin fighting the urge to roll his eyes at their insipid subservience. Artist Eveli Charis was, Tarkin figured, the most surprising member of the meeting - serving as the only female face of the small crowd. Her aside, and finance minister Gagh rounded off the gathering.

These people were - each in different ways - the most influential people of the new Empire.

“I have not gathered you simply for the sake of sharing a dinner in the wake of our victory. Indeed, I have been wishing to relay to you my plans for the grand future of our Galaxy,” said Palpatine suddenly, his voice gravelly and his gnarly hands reminiscent of claws where they rested against the table cloth.

Tarkin thought he could see a pair of golden eyes gleaming beneath the shrouded darkness of Palpatine’s hood, but chalked it up to a trick of the light. Instead, he focused on the hand stitched embroidery of the Emperor’s burgundy robes. The man had always had an affinity for fancy dress.

“It is clear that you shall provide eyes and ears for me, and I trust you to fulfill your duties towards the Empire, and subsequently to me. However, I’m afraid I must offer you a small surprise.”

“Another, Your Highness?” Tarkin said with an amused smile, and he couldn’t help but feel triumphant when Palpatine let out a pleased cackle in response.

“I’m afraid so, Governor. Surely, you shall all take this little revelation in stride. Are we not in dire need of powerful allies?” he responded, gesturing with one clawed hand towards the Vizier who stood poised by the doorway.

On each side of the hydraulic sliding doors themselves, a royal guard clad in crimson stood at a patient salute. The Emperor’s personal bodyguards, their faces cloaked and hidden from view much like Palpatine himself. Their presence was an odd mixture of reassuring and oppressive, Tarkin had decided. But he saw no reason to fear them, given his own standing with the Emperor. If anything, he benefited from their presence as protectors.

“Will you reveal to us this secret, Your Highness?” asked Charis, her expression curious and incredulous at once.

“My child, have you not been taught the virtue of patience?” was Palpatine’s response; a thinly veiled insult that put her in her place, as she shrank back in shame and lowered her head in an obedient bow.

“Forgive me my insolence, Your Highness,” she offered, apologetic and the Emperor simply shrugged her words off.

“Think nothing of it. You are correct, it appears to me that I have unfairly omitted mentioning this to either of you. Alas, it is time I remedy this arrogance.”

Tarkin noted how the Emperor turned his head briefly, giving the Vizier a barely perceptible nod and the man stepped back. On cue, the guards uncrossed their electro-staffs and parted to the sides. Confusion seemed to overtake most of the party’s faces, as the doorway slid open with ease - only to reveal a man. Clad in black armour with red and silver accents; broad shouldered, tall and visibly disdainful towards his company. He stalked wordlessly up to Palpatine’s right hand side, where he lingered - gloved hands folded in front of his hips, legs wide apart. His eyes were glowing, an amber shade to their irises, a bloodshot sclera. The man’s face was scarred, rugged; and the only visible emotions seemed to be anger and resentment. One single dark blonde curl fell over his creased forehead.

But that wasn’t the oddity. Someone in the company - Tarkin suspected it to be Yularen, judging by the tone - gasped.

Indeed, it was difficult not to recognize the young man by the Emperor's side - the Emperor, whose features had twisted into a toothy grin. The man said nothing, taller than Tarkin remembered him. Something warped and cruel and twisted distorting his rather handsome features into something unrecognizable, all charm vanquished. He was pale, peering in distaste down at the dining party as if they were beneath him. It didn’t sit right with Tarkin, given that they all knew who he was and what his past profession up until about two months ago would have been.

Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker had joined them for supper.

“May I introduce to you Lord Vader,” said Palpatine, breaking the eerie silence. “Some of you may believe you are familiar with this man. I assure you, you are mistaken. The man whom you may recall is long gone. Lord Vader has seen the error of his ways, and accepted the Jedi traitors for what they are. He came to my aid during the assassination attempt ordered by master Windu.”

Tarkin listened closely, but he was not the only one who seemed unable to tear his gaze from Skywalk-- Vader’s stern features. He looked so much older than his age, as if he had seen a million lifetimes of suffering pass him by. His hollow eyes seemed haunted, but their inherent glow was more reminiscent of a predator locked in a cage. Simply biding his time, waiting for the opportune moment to pounce. Still, he made no move and did not utter a single word.

“Lord Vader has turned out to be, much like you, one of my most trusted advisors. He is my right hand man, and while I have neglected to provide him with an official rank - he outranks every single one of you. It is my belief that only he has the means to do what needs to be done,” the Emperor continued.

Yularen seemed to shift uneasily in his seat, his eyes wide and a blunt disbelief etched into his aging features.

“You wish to speak, Colonel?”

Tarkin heard himself say; wondering if they were the only ones present - apart from the Emperor himself - who had maintained some sort of personal relationship to the man Palpatine had renamed and retooled so viciously.

“No, Governor. I--” he began, but was immediately cut off by Palpatine.

“You are wondering how the man you knew as a Jedi could turn on his own kind, is that not so? You are surprised to see that his loyalty towards the Empire could outweigh his loyalty towards his kin. Am I correct, Colonel?”

Yularen seemed to pause a bit longer than required, but gave a curt nod as he found the voice to speak up.

“Yes, Your Highness. I am merely… surprised, as you put it,” he said as a manner of surrender.

“It is understandable that you would be shocked. Should you like to speak of your own decision, Lord Vader?” the Emperor drawled, his voice menacing and sing-songy at once as he gestured to offer Vader the opportunity to speak.

“No,” the young man simply said, standing so still that his lips barely even seemed to be moving; his gleaming eyes scanning each and every person present before it landed on Tarkin - the only man who’s amusement outweighed the concerns. “I believe my actions will speak for themselves, as will your evident trust in me, my master.”

The voice was a bit deeper and gruffer than Tarkin recalled it - but that could be maturity - but its monotone quality was new. Vader spoke as if the words held no meaning to him, as if whatever he said was pointless and a waste of breath. As if his words were unbefitting of anyone but the Emperor. Yet, at the same time, he was matter of fact and to the point. A quality Tarkin had enjoyed in the past, and one he presumed Yularen had as well.

“Oh, I implore you to amuse this unspoken inquiry, Lord Vader,” Palpatine pressed, and as much as it came off as if being in good faith, it was an obvious demand no loyal servant could ignore.

“As you wish, my master,” Vader simply obeyed, his burning eyes still holding Tarkin’s in a cold, disgruntled stare. “I was the single man to commandeer the troops as they marched on the Jedi temple. I surveyed the situation, and I made sure not a single soul present escaped their fate. I am prepared to do whatever it takes to serve my Emperor, and I will not be frowned upon by the likes of you.”

The last word was delivered with such pure, unbridled loathing that it seemed to lower the temperature of the room by several degrees by proxy of mere intent. Vader nonchalantly folded his arms over his chest, lips drawn into a thin line and the perpetual scowl of his forehead had already begun to carve out fine lines in their wake. Palpatine was still sneering, grimy teeth bared in a ferocious grin.

“As you can see, Lord Vader’s conviction is admirable and undeniable. He has proved himself worthy of my trust, and so, I expect you to follow my example accordingly. I expect you to show him the reverence he requires,” the Emperor concluded, that odd glow to Vader’s eyes mirrored by his as he briefly peered up from beneath his hood - this time, it could be no trick of the light.

“I trust your infallible judgment, Your Highness,” Tarkin finally said, being the first to accept the new norm. “I may not be completely assured of Lord Vader’s motives as of yet, but he shall gain my respect when he has proved himself worthy of it.”

“My friend, you need not fear. However, I understand your concerns, and I have no doubt that you will come around quite soon,” said Palpatine, and while there was malice to the tone, he was also unusually honest and benevolent.

Tarkin suspected that was entirely on him, and their long history as colleagues and friends. He nodded, glancing over at Vader whose eyes regarded him still. Their gaze was arduous, and heavy, and vile - but that seemed to be their natural state, rather than any personal vendetta.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” was Tarkin’s only reply, and he shot a defiant glare back at Vader. “You are much too gracious.”

“Will you cease your repulsive display?” Vader snapped, and while Tarkin at first almost expected Palpatine to defend him; he found that the Emperor seemed humored enough by the obvious insult to allow the man to finish his trail of thought. “The Emperor will offer you no favours based on your fawning. You embarrass yourself, Governor.”

“Now, now, Lord Vader. I believe such childish bickering belongs elsewhere,” he finally shushed, as Vader relented like an obedient school boy fearing punishment. “However, I must agree. It would serve you well to evolve your attempts at flattery into a less… tacky matter.”

That triggered a reaction from Vader, as one corner of his lips twitched briefly upwards in a mocking, superior half smirk. He said nothing, but the triumph in those golden eyes spoke for itself.

“Now, with this out of the way, I wish to return to the matters at hand - but there is one more thing I wish to clarify. Lord Vader will not tolerate any mentions of the man you might recall him to be. He is no longer the naive child of yesterday. There will be a penalty for such insolence - no matter whom it may derive from. Lord Vader is a reinvented man. You shall address him only as such, and by no other name. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” was the singular response - and a brief hint of delight, and perhaps relief, crossed Vader’s scornful face.

“Very good,” said the Emperor with a cackle.

__________

I am not generally a fan of suitless Vader, but this idea came to me and it kinda required that so I went with it for once. Enjoy!

Ao3 link below:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32029582

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