#this just is manifestly not the case

[unimportant-ramblings]

I'm so sorry guys I know that everyone knows this here but the rhetoric of "alw is closing Phantom Broadway for Bad Cinderella" will in fact kill me

[qqueenofhades]

I don’t have any words right now for what’s happened. Where in the fuck do we go from here?

I don't know. I really, truly don't know. We can't sugarcoat how bad things are going to get, and we can't pre-emptively give into it anyway. This is going to be an unprecedented time in American history (if, sadly, not world history) and the forces conspiring to make you obey will gain much of their power from you doing so in advance, without a struggle. It seems fair to say that America as it has always been historically constituted is over, and may not return in our lifetimes, but we also do not know that for a fact. If nothing else, the fascists will find it very hard to cancel competitive elections, and we cannot sit back, throw up our hands, conclude that voting is clearly meaningless, and let them do that. There are a lot of other things that we need to do, but that's one.

There are various postmortems to be written and nits to pick, but Harris was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could in 100 days. Even her critics agree she ran a pretty much flawless campaign. But this country simply decided that a well-qualified black woman could not be preferred over the most manifestly and flagrantly unfit degenerate to ever occupy the office. They decided this for many reasons, not least because large swathes of the country now live in curated misinformation bubbles that, under Government Czar Musk, will only get much, much worse. They were helped by the cowardice and complicity of the "mainstream media" that could have ended Trump's career exactly like they did to Biden after the first debate, but chose to preserve the profits of their billionaire oligarch owners and did not do so, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and normalization at every turn. They also hounded Biden relentlessly over the four years of his presidency, never reported on the good things he did, and drove him to the historically bad approval ratings lows for a president who was by any metric, quite successful (and will quite possibly be our last ordinary American president for a very long time). Along with the searingly ingrained racism and misogyny and misinformation, Harris could not overcome that.

Democrats clearly had a messaging problem, but it's also true that the country, quite simply, does not care about "democracy" when the economy is perceived to be at stake. Not to over-egg the Hitler parallels, but yeah. This is how Hitler returned to power in 1933 -- on the backs of widespread economic collapse of the Weimar Republic; voters decided they just didn't care about the overtly fascist stuff, which he then proceeded to you know, do with genocidal vigor. Except the American economy in this case was actually doing well, which makes it even more baffling and indefensible. Enough people simply memory-holed Trump's crimes (aided at every turn by SCOTUS, Mitch McConnell not convicting him after January 6, Merrick Garland being far too slow and timid, the corporate media), liked the racist fascist behavior or felt that it wasn't a dealbreaker, and decided that in this election, he was the "change" candidate. It's insane by any metric, but that's what happened.

The country is deeply sick. We do not know what will happen. It's going to get bad. Barring a miracle, we will not have federalized abortion rights again in my lifetime, and there will be widespread attacks on public health, women's rights, immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable people. Even and especially the ones who voted for Trump. Never Thought Leopard Would Eat My Face, etc. Alito and Thomas will swiftly step down and allow their seats to be replaced by 40-year old wingnuts hand-selected from the worst the Federalist Society has to offer. SCOTUS is gone for the next generation at least. There is very little prospect of it being ever fixed in the foreseeable future.

Trump will never face a scintilla of consequences for his previous crimes; all the open federal cases will be closed as soon as he takes office and fires Jack Smith. The best we can hope for is that he dies in office, but then we get Vance and the cadre of alt-right techno billionaires ruled directly from the Kremlin. Putin is celebrating this morning and with good reason; he's gotten everything he wants. Trump will egg on Netanyahu in Gaza and abandon Ukraine. Democracy across the world will remain even more fragile and badly under threat. Authoritarians will be empowered and American withdrawal from international systems will percolate in very dangerous ways that cannot and will not be fixed in the short run. I really hope all the leftists who celebrate this as the "defeat of the genocide candidate" will enjoy all the genocide and suffering that's about to come. And yes, I do think the Israel-Palestine war fucked us in a large way. Jewish voters perceived the Democrats as insufficiently pro-Israel due to the presence of far-left antisemitism, even as the far left attacked the Democrats relentlessly and never targeted the Republicans. Arab voters abandoned them, possibly deservedly. What would have happened without the war? We don't know. You get the historical period that you get. Netanyahu and Trump can now do anything they want. Hope it was worth it.

As I said, I can't sugarcoat it. We are going to be paying for this in some form for the next decade, and probably longer. I'm not as absolutely shattered as I was in 2016, but I am much, much angrier. We all thought, we all hoped, America was better than this. It isn't. That, however, is something that has also happened before. What we decide to do next will shape how the next chapter unfolds.

This would be a great time to stock up on needed medicines, renew your passport online, and anything else you need to do in preparation for next year. Many of us simply do not have the wherewithal, whether financial or otherwise, to leave the country. I don't know what will happen with me. I don't know what will happen to any of us. This was utterly avoidable and yet, America didn't want to avoid it. At some point, there's nothing else you can do. You can point to media cronyism, Russian influence, etc etc., but the fact that two of the most qualified presidential candidates who happened to be women have now lost to Trump twice makes it unavoidable. The virulent rightward shift of young men (of all races) in particular paints a grim picture as to how the reactionary misogyny of the 21st century is going to essentially undo most of the progress for social and gender equality in the 20th. The patriarchy has been a problem for most of human history. Doesn't really seem like it's going to change.

The end result of this, however grim: we're still here. We are still living within our communities. If (and this is a big if) Democrats can retake the House, they can put some checks on the process for the next two years. At this point, we are in full-out buying-time, trying-to-prevent-the worst mode. We could have continued fixing things, but we won't be doing that. We will only be trying to preserve ourselves and our friends and our smaller spheres of influence. It sounds very trite to say that we have to have courage, but we do. There's not much else.

It's going to be an awful winter. We have two and a half months to see this coming and know how bad it's going to be, and... yeah. I don't know how soon the buyer's remorse will inevitably set in, but it will. Tough luck, people. You voted for him. You get the country that you decide to have. But the rest of us are also here, and what Gandalf says is still true. We wish the Ring had never come to us, we wish none of this had happened, but we still have to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

I don't have a lot more. I'll probably be logging off for a while. I don't need to look at the internet for.... yeah, a long time. (Will I do it anyway? Probably.) I don't know what else to leave you with, aside from again:

Do not obey in advance. Do not act as if everything is foreordained and set in stone. Fascist regimes end. They always do. We are going to have to figure out how, and it will suck shit, but the alternative is worse.

Take care of yourselves. I love you.

[neil-gaiman]

These are impressive, by author Steve Erickson. A small sample, but please go and read the whole:

WE DO NOT HAVE THE LUXURY OF CONFUSING AN IMPERFECT CHOICE FOR AN UNCLEAR ONE Any dispassionate observer can reasonably conclude Biden should drop out of the campaign. It’s not ageist to suggest that though he’s not too old for the job at the moment, he will be sometime in the next four years, and from a political standpoint his age now so permeates the collective perception of him that nobody can see him straight; his poll numbers are almost perversely at odds with everything about his job performance. But presently every indication is that Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, and sometime soon it will be time for the rest of us to just shut up about it. Whatever one thinks of his age or Israel policy or Afghanistan withdrawal or anything else, he’s still the only one of the two prospective nominees who will defend your right to call him unfit for the job. Now and then a choice can be at once profoundly imperfect and manifestly clear anyway. WE DO NOT HAVE THE LUXURY OF DEUS EX MACHINA While wishing Trump to be accountable before the law, we must accept that any trial or decision by a higher court is unlikely to spare the country what it karmically doesn’t deserve to be spared: a national political referendum on who we are as a people. Otherwise Trump will evermore in the eyes of history — not to mention his supporters, who will find a way to believe it in any case — be martyr to a systemic technicality. Trump needs to be rejected electorally by every single patriot who can drag her- or himself to the polls to do so. Which brings us to the final resolution....

[zvaigzdelasas]

[The Economist is Private UK Media]

Making someone do porridge (or “eat rice and beans”, to use the Korean expression) for expressing their political views is [...] not generally associated with [South Korea]. Yet Lee Yoon-seop, a South Korean poet, is currently languishing in prison for just this. The 68-year-old was sentenced to 14 months in November for threatening South Korea’s “existence and security”. His crime? Writing a poem in praise of the North.

The law used to prosecute Mr Lee, the National Security Act (nsa), is designed to protect South Korea from spies and traitors. But it also bans South Koreans from visiting or making contact with the North, reading or watching North Korean media or saying anything good about Kim Jong Un’s [...] regime. Though South Korea replaced its former military dictatorship with a democracy in 1987, such restrictions on free speech show that some of the generals’ autocratic tendencies endure.[...]

The NSA was modelled on a law designed to quash pro-independence activities during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Since 2003 there have on average been more than 60 NSA prosecutions a year, often for pretty clear espionage cases. A businessman and an army officer were arrested for allegedly selling military secrets to North Korea. Soldiers in the South have been prosecuted under the act for endangering morale by distributing pro-North propaganda.

But the NSA is too often used to prosecute satirists and raid the homes and offices of leftists. Some cases have been ridiculous. Kim Myeong-soo, a PhD student, received six months in prison and a two-year suspended sentence for selling books on North Korea that were widely available in public libraries. A South Korean woman was given a two-year sentence, suspended for four years, for owning recordings of 14 North Korean songs.

This is not Mr Lee’s first offence. But the claim that the sexagenarian posed a threat to South Korea is absurd. His ode was published on a North Korean website. Access to such sites is banned by the NSA and forbidden from a South Korean IP address. [...] It consists of a list of South Korean problems that Mr Kim, in the poet’s view, would instantly solve given the chance.

Mr Lee’s real offence appears to have been believing his own nonsense. By contrast, police decided not to investigate a man under the draconian law for selling shirts with a smiling Mr Kim and the slogan “Walk a flowery path, comrade”. That was OK, officials said, because he was selling them to make a buck.

Worse, the issue points to a broader authoritarian tendency in the South. Its president, Yoon Suk-yeol, often demonises his political opponents by calling them “anti-state forces”, a phrase lifted directly from the NSA. Unfavourable press coverage is routinely labelled “fake news” and the offices of offending outlets have been raided. The administration and its allies have sued more press outfits for defamation—which in South Korea can be a crime even when the offending words are manifestly true—in Mr Yoon’s first 18 months in office than any of its three predecessors did in total.

Yet even a more liberal government would be unlikely to remove the NSA’s illiberal clauses. No administration has made a serious attempt to address it in 20 years. There is no significant political support for scrapping the law [...]. The current administration at least flirted with allowing South Koreans access to North Korean media, but recently abandoned the idea. [...]

Mr Yoon talks often about South Korea’s democratic values. They are at the heart of his pitch for the country to be a strategic link between East and West, developed and developing countries. For that reason alone he should take them more seriously. South Korea is undoubtedly a democracy, but not a terribly liberal one so long as it locks up old men for their dotty opinions. Reforming the NSA would be a better rebuttal to the sentiment Mr Lee expressed than banning it.

22 Jan 24

[with-my-murder-flute]

I'm still kind of puzzled at the people who think Thara was confused about whether Iäna was into him.

I think he knows. That the answer is yes. That's why he freaked out so hard.

And like, he's Thara, so he was definitely open to the possibility that he was wrong and Iäna didn't like him. Outing and embarrassing himself to no purpose would be bad.

But the scarier answer (and the one he wants) is yes. In which case his first reaction is: "I would be trapped into having to insist that he had made a terrible mistake and having to leave."

He's not some big dummy who doesn't know what gay sex is. He's had previous relationships. There's a reason the possibility occurred to him!

I think this is him being scarred. And scared. He absolutely knows that his society, religion, vocation, and hierarchical superiors all deplore marnae. And on top of that, he has very personal trauma that says initiating intimacy with a man is a great way to kill him.

To have a forbidden relationship, you need to give society the appearance of plausible deniability. Oh, we're not gay, haha; there's some other totally believable reason for what we're doing. Just bros! Gal pals! Hahaha.

Thara specifically says: “And was that denial the truth? Had he recognized my alarm? Or was he denying preemptively so that he didn’t have to admit the truth, either?”

The truth is that he's been gone on Iäna since their very first meeting. And he suspects that the truth is, Iäna's into him too.

It's a possibility he isn't closed off from, but rather, one he is choosing to turn around and walk backwards into. It's a practiced form of self-deception, an incremental movement towards something so frightening and painful that he instinctively flinches back from it.

What he did, by not asking, was keep the opportunity open. Because he was having fucking panic attacks over the very idea of it, and manifestly not able to seize it right there, right then. And then kept coming back to Iäna while their denials got steadily less plausible.

In other words, it's exposure therapy. He's deliberately and methodically exposing himself to the thing that scares the shit out of him. It's the same thing as choosing to make his pilgrimage to the top of the Sanctuary's roof when the stairs are scary, he doesn't like heights, he already finds its gardens restful, and he goes there all the frigging time to see Ulzhavar. It's not comfortable! It's not necessary! But he's very very good at forcing himself into situations other people would run from.

Maybe I'm just too much into queer trauma and self-deception and navel-gazing and this is basically equivalent to being a big dummy in other people's books. But what I see in his relationship with Iäna is Thara playing a chess game against himself. And Iäna is the prize.

[whetstonefires]

oh hang on so Oliver Twist as a book is largely about child labor, right.

like the commonality between the workhouse, the abusive apprenticeship, and the pickpocket gang is that Oliver is being exploited. for his labor. and Fagin's gang while crossing the line into illegality and therefore in some ways the most dangerous is also the most pleasant of the three.

and ofc which i have underconsidered until now, child labor was fully legal at the time and a major political issue--the 1833 Factory Act had only just recently outlawed employing under-nines on the factory floor, or working 9-13 year olds more than 9 hours a day, and 13-18 year olds more than 12.

it was a struggle to enforce and it was controversial.

so. Fagin's gang replicates that factory owner-child laborer relationship on a tiny, illicit scale, where the kids are taking all the risks and doing all the work and he's getting most of the profit, and it's not fair, but oh he's giving them food and a place to sleep and wouldn't they be worse off without him? (they would is the thing. but does that make it okay?)

with the goal of this being that next time Dickens' milquetoast middle-class readers encountered an argument for the benevolence of a guy employing child labor to maximize his profits they might go, hey! that's not true, he's just like that crook Fagin!

but of course this kind of political messaging works best when it can't be too readily clocked as such--if Fagin was obviously a stand-in for a respectable capitalist, a lot more of the readers would be comfortable excusing him.

which is why he's Jewish, and why the text belabors that point so obsessively--antisemitism is being used as a lever to discourage the public from identifying with Child Labor Exploiting Guy and to characterize his desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of others as greedy, selfish, and illegitimate.

i could never quite figure what the point of using that stock character in that context and so emphatically was. especially after learning that, having had it extensively explained that it was harmful to actual Jewish people to go so hard on this in such a popular novel, Dickens was like 'oh my bad' and walked it back a bit.

because in that case the antisemitism obviously wasn't an end in itself? but if it was incidental flavor, why so much?

but as a screen for his political agenda, it makes sense. using judaism to code an antagonist's profit motive as illegitimate had a long literary history already, but in this case Fagin was already manifestly a criminal so it was like. why.

anyway this isn't about justifying charles dickens' artistic choices that even he somewhat regretted. it's a bit about how easy it can be to fail to put together context even when you have all the pieces, especially at a remove from our own lived experience.

and a bit more about how the tools we use for political ends should be carefully inspected. no matter how ordinary and unremarkable they seem when we pick them up. because we might be missing different historical context due to being embedded in it.

[transingthebourgeoisie]

I will never understand why people keep recommending linux mint to people. people keep saying oh it's like windows and like. they are literally just wrong; every time you tell someone Mint is like Windows you are setting them up to spend 20 minutes on Mint and then run into an obstacle and pay for a windows license. no matter what kind of mediocre UI they dress it up with, despite everything, it is a linux distribution and thus, crucially: not windows. It's popular I guess so it's better than hyperspecific micro-distro of the week or, arch, because people keep recommending arch for some unknowable reason.

I'm going to be real here: if you are new to this just use ubuntu. ignore everyone else. if looking at the gnome GUI makes you want to start killing hostages like it does for me, you can just get it packaged with KDE by default and that's a very familiar and intuitive UI to a windows user. it's called Kubuntu they put out their own little thing and everything it's easy. and unlike mint, it's vastly more likely to just, actually work, and be compatible with software. it will be a learning experience; you are switching to a fundamentally different OS, one that still has deep roots in enthusiast preferences and a whole different crop of bizarre decisions that made sense to some guy who thought the GUI would be a passing fad. and that's fine. you had to learn all this for windows too, you just did it when you were like 7. stick with it and it'll make sense quickly even, as unlike windows, Linux is highly transparent in most cases; it will usually tell you what the problem actually is, even if you don't understand how to fix it.

speaking of which: don't be afraid of the terminal. It's daunting, it's initially opaque, and yes, it is entirely possible to horrifically mangle your install with it. You cannot be afraid of it. you don't have to learn every facet of it; frankly I hate the thing and I refuse to accept any distro where it is expected that the user crack open the console to do basic tasks. Ubuntu - or yeah mint I guess - do not require this. 9 times out of 10, you will use the terminal to enter one command that you stole off a tech support forum where the kind of people who use Arch have magically fixed the incredibly specific problem you're having 13 years ago and it still works. I have been using linux semi-regularly (yeah yeah I still have a windows 10 install sue me) for a year now, and barring one particular incident attempting to install GZDoom where it was manifestly my fault, that has been the extent of my interaction with the terminal. I have opened it like 3 times total.

I highly recommend learning what the basic structure of a command is - get a general idea of what it is doing. you don't have to be able to write these things from scratch, but getting just that basic understanding will make your life so much easier. here's a first step for you: if you see 'sudo' in a command, that means the command makes use of admin authority, and will bypass any protections or restrictions on what it is trying to do. scary! it is the effectively same thing as when you click on a program on windows and it throws that shitty little popup window asking if you're *really* sure you want to run the program as admin. not scary; you do that all the time.

linux is more consistently and straightforwardly usable than it has basically ever been; if you are willing to spend a week or so getting used to it, you'll do fine. if you have a spare drive - hell even a USB stick, you can literally boot into Linux straight off USB, it's that easy, - you can dual-boot and still have a windows install to fall back on in case you absolutely positively just need something to work or just cannot get it to run on linux.

[vickyvicarious]

Something I noticed is that Dracula has now resorted to killing his aides when he can to cover up his tracks and make it look like a human did it, he didn't use to do that, so Jonathan kept interviewing them

I suppose it depends to an extent on who you consider Dracula's aides. Because we see him deliberately turn on people who have unintentionally aided him (the Demeter crew), who have been forced to aid him (Jonathan), and who have aided him but then turned on him (Renfield). Jonathan's the only one who gets out alive from that, and it's largely due to Dracula's personal like for him/schedule constraints.

But even if we limit the category to people he has hired to do a job for him and who know who he is, I still think he has done that previously. Or rather, he had plans to do that, or at the very least was prepared to do so as needed. It just depends on what his main goal is at the time. I feel like I've talked about this earlier this year, but I can't find it right now, so let me just restate.

On looking at it I found in certain places little rings marked, and on examining these I noticed that one was near London on the east side, manifestly where his new estate was situated; the other two were Exeter, and Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.

On May 7, Jonathan notices several key locations marked off on Dracula's map. His arrival to Whitby is marked off, as is his first estate in London. But so is Exeter, where both Jonathan and Hawkins live. Unlike the other circled spots, Dracula never goes to Exeter. So why circle it?

One explanation which at least partially explains this: I think he deliberately chose a lawyer who wasn't based in London, in order to minimize the chances that local people would notice said lawyer going missing and connect it to the latest client arriving in town. Because it is very evident that he always intended to kill Jonathan. The man was not meant to leave the Castle, one way or another. Dracula had his whole letter scheme to disguise that fact and to separate Jonathan's disappearance from the time spent with Dracula (the cover story was obviously 'something happened while traveling home'). But if that failed and Hawkins seemed likely to raise any kind of stink, I think Dracula would have happily gone and killed him. But the man didn't contact him again about Jonathan so he didn't have to bother with that.

Similarly, Dracula doesn't kill any of the people who moved his boxes. But the thing is, that would have drawn way more attention. He didn't know that Jonathan was following his paper trail and interviewing them all, and killing a bunch of people all of whom worked for him would have been way more suspicious than just leaving them alone and hoping no one found out. So that's what he did! Not killing these people was the smarter move as far as he could see, the best way to hide his tracks. No need to have murders associated with him in England; he wants to be an unnoticed predator and to leave behind the place where everyone is onto him. Even if people still think he's human, getting associated with murders isn't a look he wants.

He's thinking long-term when he arrives in London. And he may well still have the idea of coming back and killing people later, when they're no longer so associated with working for him, but certainly in the moment it doesn't make sense to do so. Similarly, it didn't help him when leaving Transylvania. The people who work for him there are either scared enough or willing enough to do what he says, so why deprive himself of this resource in case he needs it in future? There are plenty of others to hunt instead, and no one he needs to hide his tracks from. The Demeter served a function too - first, he wanted a ghost ship so he could get ashore more easily. Second, he probably wanted to tank up before arriving in England so that he could fully use all his powers both to manipulate the weather for the crash and to shift to wolf form to get ashore. Once he's starting killing some of them, better to kill all of them so no one can tell the tale. Also, I bet he wanted to let loose and in the middle of the ocean was a good place to do so without causing any harm to his future plans.

This time around is different. He knows he's being hunted, so he's not worried about drawing attention. It's already on him regardless. All he cares about is hiding the exact information of where he's gone in order to slow them down, and the surest and most convenient way to do that is by killing the man who arranged it for him. So he does.

He is resorting to it, but not necessarily because he's finally driven to it when he normally wouldn't do that, so much as because the situation now makes it a more reasonable choice for him. I think it would have been just as much an option on the table the entire time for him.

[serial-serializednovelreader]

Nova’s Notes - Dracula Daily - July 20

In which Seward completes his thought (it only took him *checks notes* TWELVE days to cook it up but it’s here)…

Again, Seward uses a lot of ableist language in this entry that I do not relish. There is also implied animal death (not “shown”, just said to have happened) and mention of drugging someone. To get around this, I won’t quote these parts and will only describe them as little as I can (under the cut). I’ll also post this with the appropriate tags. If I don’t see you in this one, I hope to see you in a bit of a lighter entry! Your mental health matters <3

“Visited Renfield very early, before the attendant went his rounds. Found him up and humming a tune. He was spreading out his sugar, which he had saved, in the window, and was manifestly beginning his fly-catching again; and beginning it cheerfully and with a good grace. I looked around for his birds, and not seeing them, asked him where they were. He replied, without turning round, that they had all flown away.”

I know we have a lot to get to, but at least I finally have an answer as to how he’s catching flies — sugar! That makes sense! (Yes, that is what I’m focusing on, no I’m not sorry about it — I’ve been asking Seward about methodology for WEEKS and he just got back to me with this /j) I do wonder where he gets the sugar to spread though…I suppose if Seward is supporting his “pet endeavors” to this end, he is probably allowing him to keep sugar for this purpose. I guess that makes sense. I’m also just imagining Renfield dancing around and humming while spreading sugar…a fun image, to be sure.

Here’s where it gets bad. Last warning, y’all!

What’s not fun is that we can’t see where the birds went. And Renfield isn’t forthcoming on where they went….the fact he won’t turn around while speaking to Seward is telling in and of itself.

So Seward looks further about the room and sees two signs that point to Renfield lying about the birds flying away: feathers scattered about the room, and a drop of blood on his pillow.

Not a good sign!!! Not a good sign at all!!!! I knew this was coming, but I do love that Stoker *evokes* the message of what happened, rather than outright saying it by showing the image of blood and feathers. The art of show don’t tell comes into play once more.

A bit later in the day at 11 a.m., an attendant affirms what Seward already knows: those birds did not just “fly away”. How do they know? Well, Renfield is now sick and is…throwing up feathers. Yeah, this isn’t good.

Twelve hours later, we get an update: that Renfield was given some medication to put him to sleep and Seward took his notebook to read.

Ok, so initially when I read this I was like, “he drugged him without his consent???? To take his notebook???? How DARE he????” And yes, we can definitely look at it in that light, but before doing so, I’d recommend reading this post with the note at the bottom by @rosetyler42 (and also has really good points by @animate-mush for the later points in this post, which I’ll also address). TL;DR, the point raised is that there’s a good chance Seward actually gave Renfield the medicine to help him go to sleep because of his illness. I agree that he likely has food poisoning after what he’s eaten and, as someone who’s had this, you do not feel very good! It would make sense that Seward — as a doctor — would give him medication to treat it, though in this case, the treatment would likely mean putting him to sleep for a time. With all of the nausea and pain he’s in, that actually has some sense to it.

Of course, in the meantime, Seward *will* take the opportunity to read Renfield’s journal. He may be treating his patient (and whether you believe he actually is treating him, or that he solely drugged him to get the notebook is your choice — I know he hasn’t being the most ethical person lately), but he’s not going to miss the chance to peek through the personal belongings while he can! That’s just how Seward is.

Note: this next part is where he uses the majority of his ableist language. I don’t mention it in my thoughts, but wanted to give a heads up for anyone who hasn’t read the entry yet and was wondering where this starts.

Seward finally completes his thought (and I can’t really skate around the implications, so apologies for this): Renfield is setting out to absorb as much life as he can, and he intends to do this by way of a mini food chain, with him as the top predator. Seward is quite interested in what would have been his later steps, and if anything scientifically important could be achieved by this.

Yes, this is where he brings up vivisection, but as the post I linked states, this is more of an example of what was considered to be a strange scientific method that turned out to be useful, rather than him wanting to perform this on Renfield. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that he brings up vivisection as his first thought is…strange, I won’t deny that. But I think it’s more his brain nerding out on science things, rather than wanting to do a vivisection. What he does what to do is get to the heart of what Renfield’s science could be capable of, if anything. However, and this is important to note, he won’t do that because he is not willing to go this far into unethical territory by continuing the experiment. Why? There’s not enough sufficient evidence to indicate positive results, as evidenced by this passage:

“If only there were a sufficient cause! I must not think too much of this, or I may be tempted; a good cause might turn the scale with me, for may not I too be of an exceptional brain, congenitally?”

(Lol, yes Seward you’re smart too <— edit: he actually means out of the norm/neurodivergent here, not smart) He also speculates on the value Renfield places on a human life — many or just one. I do think this is interesting to consider, as some of us humans do eat meat! I don’t like where Seward is going with this though!!!

I do like where he closes this train of thought with:

“He has closed the account most accurately, and to-day begun a new record. How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?”

That…that is very profound, Seward. You didn’t have to put that in your musings about Renfield, but you did. Something that I enjoy about Seward’s character is that he likes to get lost in philosophical musings and this is a good example of that.

“To me it seems only yesterday that my whole life ended with my new hope, and that truly I began a new record. So it will be until the Great Recorder sums me up and closes my ledger account with a balance to profit or loss. Oh, Lucy, Lucy, I cannot be angry with you, nor can I be angry with my friend whose happiness is yours; but I must only wait on hopeless and work. Work! work!”

Oh, Seward! And here we reach the root of the problem, one he’s been avoiding talking about for a long time: Lucy. After all, this whole experiment-fiasco has been a distraction to keep himself from thinking of her. But what has that done for him, truly? He still ends up thinking about her, regardless. It breaks my heart a bit that he called her his new hope and that he had to begin anew after that 🥺 it’s never good to put hope as a person but…I understand what he means and it hurts!

Seward comparing God to a “Great Recorder” who will “sum up his account” is so interesting to me! It’s cool to get an insight as to his perspective on religion and how he thinks of it in a more “logical” way (and I do understand he could just be using a metaphor here, but I do think this is his logic and that’s fun to think about lol).

Finally, I love that while he still feels hopeless and bogged down by the fact that all he has to look forward to is his work, he emphasizes that he’s not angry at Lucy *or* Arthur. He wants them to be happy! It doesn’t mean he won’t still be sad, though :(

In the end, he wants a cause like Renfield has — a “strong” one he can turn to that will give him “happiness”. Will that give him real happiness though? Because Renfield sure doesn’t seem happy after his illness today. I’m just saying…

That’s all for this one! Will be putting out the others soon — sorry for the late entry on this one.

[shinyhappygoth]

A field guide to weird quasi-human beings in The Magnus Archives and The Magnus Protocol

Because I've seen plenty of people going "This statement/case prominently features weird people, must be the Stranger!" It is not that simple, my friends!

The Stranger specializes in people who aren't just odd, they approach the Uncanny Valley from either side. Either they are almost but manifestly not quite human, or are clearly not human but are human-shaped enough to produce that same human-but-wrong reaction. Mannequins, dolls, automata, people like Breekon and Hope who actively seem fake and feel wrong when you touch them. They definitely exist, and although not human, they are still people, with distinct personalities. (Please note that just having a clown theme does not guarantee that one belongs to the Stranger! I would be inclined to say that Mr. Bonzo is too inhuman to qualify for this one, besides the fact that we've already seen him to have aspects of the Slaughter and the Buried, depending on whose experience you're looking at.)

The Lonely frequently features unpeople. They may look entirely human, or they may just be cloaked figures with Greek drama masks, but their distinguishing feature is that they are not anyone. They have no inner life or personality, and if you break their surface they may turn out to be physically empty. They sometimes speak pseudo-linguistic babble, particularly if there's a crowd of them; individuals may speak intelligibly, but tend to repeat sentences robotically.

The Spiral features people who seem human, at least at first (they may or may not stay this way), but who mess with your sense of reality in some way. We all know the Distortion, but we've also seen Father Burroughs' encounters with Father Singh and the altar server, both of whom looked human but acted wrong and led him through unreal scenarios. In MAGP 7, "Give and Take", the volunteers individually seemed normal enough, perhaps a bit oddball, but they multiplied exponentially and made things increasingly surreal and there was no proof they were ever there...

The other powers have their avatars and assorted weirdos, of course, but they can largely be judged on their actions. The three above are the big ones.

[celticcrossanon]

Hello Celta,

You and Mad World Tarot are the only two tarot readers that describe and pick up on Haz brattish energy. She did a reading on January 24th, that looked at the political fallout from the Jamaica pop up visit. Right away she picked up Haz energy, RX KOW, the ruckus fire starter. It was the last stand, the BRF and Haz, 9 of Wands. Granny PROMISED me I’ll be King of the Commonwealth. As an aside, is this why Charles asked his mom specifically if she can declare him head of the commonwealth?

Anyway in answer to the question, Will Haz face any consequences, he emerges as the Prince of Wands, facing away from the situation and leaving the tarot spread. So he faces some loss, and is reduced in rank since he enters as the RX King of Wands and leaves as the Prince of Wands.

I think the Foreign Office and the British government are spitting bullets, particularly Rishi Sunak. They cannot be happy with this. When William was sounding the alarm during and after the Caribbean tour, the other BRF family members were mocking of him. Now they know the malicious Sussex squad is a reality, and were behind those attacks. I honestly hope the government does take action, even if Charles doesn’t. And what a time to do this, when the king and the POW are out of commission on medical leave.

Hi Anonymous Retired,

I think that Jamacia stunt has quite a few political implications. I hope the government does take some sort of action on it. As to what they do, I will leave that up to them.

I think the timing was deliberate. I think it was a clumsy PR attempt to show how loved the Harkles are by the Commonwealth Realms and therefore they should immediately be back in the BRF, especially in the current time of need. Too 'pushy' for me, and manifestly untrue, as if the Harkles were that loved and that important they wouldn't be in the 6th row in the movie theatre. The photo with the Prime Minister is another case of PR spin, I think, although it has been somewhat effective imo.

The Head of the Commonwealth of Nations is a symbolic position that is voted on by all the Commonwealth Nations. It is not something like a patronage that King Charles can hand over to Harry.

"Head of the Commonwealth

His Majesty King Charles III is Head of the Commonwealth.

The role:

is an important symbolic one

has no maximum fixed term

is not hereditary, and future Heads will be chosen by Commonwealth leaders."

from https://thecommonwealth.org/about-us

As for 'King of the Commonwealth', no such position exists or will ever exist. The King of the UK is the Head of State of the Commonwealth Realms, but that position goes with being the monarch of the UK. It is not something that The King can peel off and give to whoever he likes. That is like saying that The King could make Harry the Defender of the Faith or any other position that is tied to being the monarch of the UK.

If the other members of the BRF are just now waking up to the Harkle malice and their use of their extreme fans to manipulate the media, then all I can say is that it has taken them a while. I was appalled by the lack of support from the BRF for Prince William and Princess Catherine during their Caribbean Tour, and I hope it comes back to bite them hard in the future.

[meimi-haneoka]

heya cinzia! hope you're having a lovely day. i'm sorry i'm always bothering you with questions 😅 but do you know if there are any forums or communities for ccs fans other than tumblr? i've been a fan for so long but always too intimidated to make ccs friends ;;

Hiiii Doublechocolate!!

I'm quite fine, I'm recovering from a nasty cold! 😅I hope you're having a lovely day too!

You're not bothering me at all 😁 Truth to be told, I probably am not the best person to answer to this question because I've quitted several CCS communities long time ago. They were all becoming full of bullshit, so to speak, and you perfectly know what I'm talking about. I became tired to waste my words and effort in places where there are so many people, each one with their biased ideas and prejudices and in many cases completely unwilling to spare a bit more effort to understand a story, so quick to label it as "boring" or "not making sense".

The only community I still am present in (but I rarely write in anymore) is the Tomoeda server on Discord: the admin is a dear friend and she and her collaborators are managing the community in a healthy way, so I still feel comfortable being there. I've been able to talk about Kaito and Akiho (up to a certain extent....) without any problem and for me this became basically a decisive factor in choosing any place/community where I can talk about CCS with other people. Truth to be told, the community is a bit "dead" now that the manga is over and there isn't a monthly chapter keeping things exciting every month, but we're all expecting the 2nd season of the anime to hopefully revive things. The link to join is here: https://discord.gg/CFgHGFS .

Nowadays I prefer staying on my personal accounts on Twitter/Tumblr/Bluesky. If people are interested in what I say and find some worth in my posts, they will come to me and start an interaction on their own. I'm frankly at this point very very very wary about seeking interaction first, in this fandom. It happens only with people I can see are manifestly Kaito/Akiho fans. I can't even trust my fellow SyaoSaku shippers anymore, because despite the characters, that's not a guarantee that they'll be accepting of my own views and favorite parts of the story at all. I've learned the hard way that just because someone loves a series or their characters doesn't give a shred of guarantee that person will be sharing the series' same wholesome views and messages.

[nicnacsnonsense]

At the end of “Selfless” Anya says that her whole life she’s just clung to the first thing that came along, but that’s just… manifestly not true?

You could make the case that’s what happened the first time she became a vengeance demon, that she had just broken up with her boyfriend (by turning him into a troll) and immediately hopped on the vengeance demon gig when it was offered and turned it into her whole personality. But that’s not what happened with her relationship with Xander. He wasn’t just an opportunity that came along, she picked him to go to prom with because she found him the most appealing of the guys in the school. And rather than clinging to him, she left town for a while when she heard about the mayor, and then came back later to try to pursue a relationship again. And then while she was still in the relationship with Xander she started working at the Magic Box and ended up making that just as large a part of her identity as her relationship with Xander, so which one are we claiming she was clinging to? And even when she became a vengeance demon a second time I wouldn’t call that clinging to the first thing that came along, that was her regressing to old habits looking for comfort while she was heartbroken. And she definitely didn’t cling to it.

It makes sense to me that she might be having an identity crisis in that moment, and it makes sense that she wouldn’t want Xander specifically to be the one to comfort her right now given where their relationship is currently at, but the rest of it just isn’t true.

[jessicalprice]

Gus

So to understand Gus’s role in my household, you have to understand my other cats. 

This is Lucy:

She was a tiny little shelter kitty when I adopted her, and it very quickly became apparent (this was in the before times, when I went to an office every day) that she could not be an only cat, because she was deeply sad and anxious being left home alone all day.

So I adopted a kitty she had been fostered with, who’d been kind of the big sister to the other foster kitties. Molly was very maternal, and helped my small orange fluffhead with navigating life.

Molly died from cancer when Lucy was 9. 

Lucy was pretty distraught. She stopped eating and spent her time wandering the apartment, searching and calling for Molly.

So I decided she needed a little brother (I wasn’t going to try to replace her big sister). A big, sweet, silly teddy bear of a little brother who’d keep her busy. Up until that point, I’d assumed all my kitties for the rest of my life would be shelter cats, but in this case I needed a pretty specific temperament, so I went to a Maine Coon breeder who focused primarily on temperament rather than size or coat patterns. 

And that was how I got Max. 

Lucy was very “thanks, I hate it,” at first, but she was annoyed, and annoyed is better than grieving yourself to death. And she comforted him when he would get scared the same way Molly had comforted her, and heaved a lot of big resigned sighs, and let him cuddle with her as long as he bathed first. 

So just as we were going into pandemic lockdown, I moved in with a dear friend, into her tiny rental house with a beautiful fenced in backyard and her two dogs and her cat. 

Lucy pretended to hate it (although she adored my friend), but Max was the happiest he had ever been, and probably the happiest he will ever be. He had a giant dog bro-friend, and my friend’s kitty was the cool older girl he had a little-boy crush on, and her elderly chihuahua was the matriarch of the household whose approval he desperately wanted but whose food he felt compelled to steal. He had a safe little Eden to explore with his friends. And he had two moms!

It was a pretty great year and a half for both of us, but I think I can safely say that it was absolute bliss for Max. 

And then I bought a house and we moved out. 

And Max spent several weeks in my closet, with his face to the wall, all day. He’d come down at night and eat, but he was obviously, manifestly depressed and grieving the loss of all his friends.

And then my housemates moved in, with their 18-month old boy kitty, and Max came out of his closet and was pretty happy again. They weren’t intending to stay long, though.

I knew Lucy and I weren’t enough for him. His ideal world is probably a commune with like at least 5 or 6 other people and 20 dogs and a whole bunch of cats (he LOVED fostering kittens when we were living with my friend) and probably some chickens and goats and maybe a pony. He has a lot of love in him and it’s more than Lucy, who’s a senior kitty, and I can satisfy.

When he’s lonely, he starts bothering Lucy a lot to play with him or cuddle him when she wants to sleep.

So I adopted Gus, Max’s cousin, who was about 18 months younger than Max. 

The thing I didn’t know when I arranged to adopt him was that during the pandemic, the breeder sold a lot fewer cats than usual, so she ended up with a house full of Maine Coons. She admitted to me that she didn’t have time to pay as much attention to the older kittens because she was focusing on the younger ones.

Gus’s siblings had all been adopted, so he was the only one left from his litter.

And it became apparent that he had been DESPERATE to be adopted, or at least to have SOMEONE pay attention to him.

Picture the little boy at the orphanage carefully making sure he is perfectly dressed every day and talking to himself in the mirror all gosh darnit, you are smart and you are handsome and you are HIGHLY ADOPTABLE and today is going to be the day. 

He had the most profound Polite Little Chap energy you’ve ever seen.

He was perfectly behaved for the entire five-hour drive back from the breeder’s, and then I put him in the guest room and gave him an hour to get used to the room and decompress, then went in there. 

Video here.

He was not sure if this was for real, or forever, but he was determined to make a good impression and not put a foot wrong and prove he was HIGHLY ADOPTABLE gosh darnit. 

Is this string for me? Do you want to play? Let me show you how good I am at playing! I can play very dramatically but will never, ever claw you! May I touch you? May I rest my head on your knee? Is this okay? May I headbutt you? 

He was so desperate to prove he was a Good Boy and I kept trying to communicate to him that he didn’t have to prove anything, I had already adopted him. 

If I looked at him, like at all, he would start treading the floor and purring.

I had planned to give him 3-5 days of adjustment time in the guest room, and in the house when Lucy and Max were locked up, before introducing him to Max, but Max was being all MAX WILL LITERALLY DIE IF HE DOESN’T GET TO MEET THE BABY and Gus was purring and headbutting the door, so I let them meet on Day 2. 

There were maybe 20 seconds of hissing and then they were best friends.

Growing up with like 30 other Maine Coons had given Gus pretty exquisite cat social skills, so he won cranky, suspicious Lucy over with shocking quickness.

He decided his goal in life was to be everyone and everything’s support animal, including machines like the dishwasher. Sometimes it makes a squeaking noise when it changes cycles and he always goes running over and puts a paw on it and makes encouraging chirps, like you’ve got this, friend, you can do it!

Anyway, the moral of this story is that every other cat I have acquired has, in some way, been for the benefit of Lucy and I hope she appreciates that. 

[hedonistbyheart]

I have a lot of feelings about the contrast in Hobie’s expressions here:

He looks manifestly worried once Miles has gone on ahead. 

There’s definitely a level of just keeping an eye on Miguel in the way Hobie stays in the back while Gwen and Miles talk to Miguel as well, he’s demonstrative enough that Miguel gets annoyed too, even though he says nothing and is greyed out the whole time. He’s expecting things to blow up and he’s watching in case they need him. Miles does, as it turns out. 

[schraubd]

Bruen's Goose Continues To Not Apply to the Gander

The thing about the Fifth Circuit's recent ruling that the Second Amendment gives men under domestic abuse restraining orders an inalienable right to bear arms is that it is (a) insane and (b) absolutely defensible under the Supreme Court's Bruen decision. This is because the Bruen decision will regularly and predictably lead to insane results.

That said, I did want to flag something in the opinion that I've picked up on before -- namely, the inconsistent commitment to Bruen's supposed prohibition on weighing or considering "social policy" considerations. Judge Wilson, writing for the panel, expressly cites to this portion of Bruen, saying that while the prohibition on gun possession by domestic abusers "embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society ... Bruen forecloses any such analysis in favor of a historical analogical inquiry into the scope of the allowable burden on the Second Amendment right." This principle is, perhaps above all else, the crux of Bruen's standard -- no matter how ridiculous, or absurd, or unfair, or chaotic the policy outcomes are, courts are not permitted to "weigh" them against the historical limitations that bounded the Second Amendment. The latter begins and ends the conversation.

Again, that principle is absurd. But it's Bruen's principle, and the Fifth Circuit gleefully cites it to explain why the prospect of terrified and murdered women can play no role in its legal analysis. But what happens if the historical arguments seem to counsel permitting more sweeping gun regulations than conservative jurists might like? All of the sudden, those social policy considerations come roaring back into view.

Addressing the historical precedents which did clearly envision government's authority to disarm "dangerous" persons, Judge Wilson explains that such exceptions must be narrowly construed so as not to apply to the case of domestic abusers. Why? Because, he asserts,

the Government’s proffered interpretation lacks any true limiting principle. Under the Government’s reading, Congress could remove “unordinary” or “irresponsible” or “nonlaw abiding” people—however expediently defined—from the scope of the Second Amendment. Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?

I take no position on whether the government's interpretation is so expansive. But note that this line of argument is expressly an analysis of the proper policy sweep of government regulation. We should tailor our interpretation of the Second Amendment's scope so as to avoid a policy outcome whereby too few people are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms; to avoid an outcome where the government is permitted to disarm people who these judges think it would be manifestly unfair to have their gun rights taken away.

This is exactly the sort of policy analysis Bruen purports to forbid, only here the "policy" concerns are ones counseling in favor of greater freedom to bear arms rather than reduced freedom to bear arms. Perhaps it seems absurd to permit the government to take away arms from people just for getting a speeding ticket. But so what?  Bruen was emphatic that this sort of social policy assessment has no role in Second Amendment adjudication. If the historical analogues give the state that sort of latitude, then that is supposed to end the conversation. Again, it is baked in the Bruen cake that it will lead to results that may appear to modern eyes ridiculous, because Bruen expressly instructs courts that they aren't allowed to care about those consequences no matter how absurd they might seem to be.

But as the Fifth Circuit's ruling makes clear, the Bruen prohibition on weighing policy consequences is, unsurprisingly, a one-way ratchet. Conservative courts will portentously declare that Bruen forbids them from considering the disastrous consequences of countless terrified or murdered women if it means taking away domestic abusers' guns -- but if history and tradition start to point towards enabling gun restrictions that the right finds too onerous, then all of the sudden we get a screeching parade of contemporary policy horribles that are treated as legally dispositive. This is what generates such well-deserved cynicism about the state of the judiciary today -- it's not just that the legal rules the governing class of jurists announce are absurd, it's that these jurists do not even pretend to be bound by them the second they prove inconvenient to their underlying politics.

The other thing to note about this case is that, if the Supreme Court reverses it -- and they might -- their reasoning will almost certainly purport to be based on some alternate assessment and reading of the historical sources. But this will be a naked smokescreen, and everyone will know it. If the Court reverses the Fifth Circuit here, it will be entirely and solely because the Court finds it too unreasonable and intolerable to permit domestic abusers free reign to carry arms -- a contemporary policy judgment anyway you look at it, no matter how much effort is or isn't expended to cloak it in some faux-historical garb. None of these judges abide by the rules they purport to lay out.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2icluJG