#wrong! that's how it is in normal communist societies!

[blurrymango]

"Capitalism is the root of all evil" motherffuckers when I put them into this fun machine.

[psychabolition]

Why and how do you reject diagnoses , treatment and recovery?

The why is answered quickly ,. For a lot of us "treatment" doesnt help or actively harms us . Its not uncommon to face psychiatric abuse as part of your treatment plan: including conversion therapy, physical violence, social ostracization /isolation, stigmatization or severe side effects from psychiatric drugs which can include brain damage and death .

So how do we stop thinking that we need treatment from professionals to feel better and to lead a life that we enjoy when we know it doesnt help us ? The biomedical model and its logic make us feel this way. We're told that we have an illness that causes our pain and that can only be treated by doctors and psychologists. But this model is inherently contradictory and that we have an "illness" thats the cause of our pain has never even been scientifically proven . If youre labelled with depression you dont have low serotonin, if youre labelled with schizophrenia theres no genetic defect, if youre labelled as adhd/autism your brain doesnt look different than the brain of people without the label. "mental disorders" are not an "illness" by medical standards.

Also, the logic of the model doesnt really make sense. Your 'mental illness' can never "cause" anything because its solely a descriptive label (every psychologist will admit this !! - all diagnoses are just a list of descriptions of specific behaviors/experiences/ways of thinking), its never the reason for anything. I think we need to avoid the circular logic of "well i do x because i have y condition (which was diagnosed based on clinician observations of x) and my brain is simply broken in a way requiring me to submit to expert clinical management and surveillance". I think its highly misleading to talk about symptoms of an illness since saying 'I am suicidal because Im depressed' is the same as saying 'Im suicidal because Im suicidal'(remember: its only a descriptive label!!) - it doesnt explain anything. I think its really unhelpful and also simply not scientifically backed up to think about any experiences/struggles/distress that we have no matter how unusual/painful/norm deviation as an 'illness' of our minds/brains.

The way I depathologize myself and reject the (bio)medical model is by saying that I think of a lot of the experiences that got me diagnosed and that also made me label myself as "ill/disordered" as simply a deviation from "neuronormativity" (=whats societally deemed 'normal' to think/feel/do depending on your assigned gender/age/socioeconomic status/...). So when I say that "Im neurodivergent" what I mean is that I "deviate from neuronormativity". And when people are not neurodivergent I say that theyre "neuroconform" - which simply means that they manage to conform to what society expects of them .

If you define neurodivergency in this way it includes 1) suffering more severely in our current society than others do 2) being neurodivergent because of positive experience and/or negative experiences that youve made 3) your neurodivergency also includes experiences that havelnothing to do with the reason why you got labelled as ill/sick/dysfunctional/disordered . Like being politically radical in some way - like for example if youre a communist or an anarchist or queer or simply just very different and norm deviating . 4) it includes queerness that is currently pathologized (I like to use the concept neuroqueer).

These new concepts and understanding of myself made me get better in the sense that I trusted again, after years, that only I know whats best for myself . And to be true medication and therapy has only ever harmed me and made me get worse. I can now ask myself whats actually causing my pain and struggles, and its never been my own brain that simply " reacts wrong " . When Im doing really bad it always has a real cause in my real life and theres always something that can be done (even if this means overthrowing the current social order in society)

[darkmaga-returns]

Children in the US are raised to be communists. Most of the parents are too and don’t even know it. It doesn’t matter if you send them to public or private schools as all the education degree-granting schools bias the learning process against the competitive capitalist “liberal” or open-minded society. Instead, the curriculum is less about learning about reality and is heavy on propagandizing children against capitalism and towards communism.

American society teaches hatred and distrust of everything capitalist, even though its benefits are all around us—helping to feed, clothe, house, and protect us. In contrast, the government screws up virtually everything it lays its hands on and charges us double to do so.

I remember when I was a child my mother would retrieve the morning milk, just outside the back door, from the “milk box.” I don’t remember how old I was when I finally asked how the milk got there, and my mother told me that the milkman put it there. I think I had previously chalked it up to something akin to Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and when I realized how dark and cold—even snowy—it could be outside early in the morning, I was amazed!

Today, on the drive to work, I heard an otherwise intelligent retired athlete say the following:

If you are a billionaire sports team owner you obviously have screwed a lot of people over, but in the case of building sports stadiums, taxpayer subsidies are needed because they create jobs.

Everything about that statement is wrong and ignorant. People become billionaires because they serve their customers well. They outcompete others in serving customers. They normally create tons of high-paying jobs too, including for our retired athlete.

The exception to this rule is when billions are made from special privileges from the government, like taxpayer subsidies! Taxpayer-funded stadiums are the classic case of a losing proposition for the local economy and taxpayers as study after study has demonstrated. Only a few benefit from the subsidies, including the billionaire team owners!

[mithliya]

How did you figure out/come to terms with being a lesbian? If you don't mind me asking. It was difficult enough for me to and I am very lucky with where I live/my parents not being deeply religious. I can imagine it was even more difficult for you

my parents aren’t religious either so that wasn’t a problem for me! but yeah it was hard to figure things out since i’m from quite a religious and homophobic society. it was also additionally more difficult bc of me having faced trauma when i was in my early teens, which added to the confusion i felt.

idk i think just knowing of other lesbians and having read other lesbians’ experiences helped me realise it more, but i recall feeling a way about this one girl in class and when i told this guy that pressured me to be with him, he was like “now u can finally understand how i feel about u” (bc i genuinely did not understand the concept of attraction and would always question him on it). that was what made me realise i’m into women.

it took me a while to then realise that women are like ACTUALLY attracted to guys. i just thought it was normal to find guys ugly and their bodies unattractive and to find kissing and romance cringe and nothing interesting (actually i thought maybe that made me demisexual or asexual, i didn’t even consider that maybe i’m just attracted to women & not men). i remember doing those quizzes and the kinsey scale test and so many tests repeatedly and one day i just thought to myself “i think i’m a lesbian”, i was 18 at the time and it was the first time i even allowed myself to consider it bc i didn’t even want to consider that i’m not into guys before then. i remember feeling like i got a really high fever and almost paralysed, like this massive panic that i only ever felt one other time in my life (when i realised that i erased that something extremely traumatic had happened to me). i cried and freaked out and panicked and wished it could change but i already knew for sure at that point that if nothing i had done in my life managed to “fix” this and make me into men, then nothing will. then when i first kissed a woman & we had sex, i knew there was no way i was anything but a lesbian bc even tho she was awful in bed and annoying and it wasn’t a good sexual experience, it felt.. right. it didn’t feel like i was doing something unnatural or forced for once.

luckily my mom accepted me pretty quick. i never told my dad but sometimes i feel like he knows, but i dont plan on sitting down & coming out to him ever bc he’s homophobic. in general, my situation is quite atypical for my country bc i come from a non-religious & communist family (from my mom’s side, which is the side i’m close to) and having experienced trauma and such, so i don’t have the same experience with coming out & realising my sexuality as the average bahraini lesbian. i never thought homosexuality was wrong and i was that one person fighting everyone else in class for saying being gay is a mental illness or a result of bad upbringing (& then running away crying bc they’d all gang up on me to say it is unnatural etc). the hardest part for me was coming to terms with not liking guys bc i realised i could never have a normal & complete life in my country and it made me realise that even if i WANTED to live in bahrain, i won’t be able to be happy there and would probably kill myself if i have to stay there and be closeted again.

so.. basically i had to do some introspection and gain some self-awareness and actually think about it, and then i had to listen to my feelings for once.

[whitefang1971]

Oh these huge pieces of the puzzle fit together so nicely don't they, circular, linking us all together stronger and tighter. If your of the fighting thinking mindset to fight to unify through peace, trying to steamroll over the bad beliefs of our great but two sided past, and do it aggressively enough to command power but evade the corrupt law.

I firmly believe that the accordance to try to live freely in an unfree world made our young brothers mindset evolve...

In a great way really.

How many great young African Americans come out of a horribly corrupt justice and punishment system and strike forth majesticly into the unknown of aggressive tactics, yet still not break the constraints of what those who hold the power call normal society...

This man is much much more an intelligent hardened fighter then us....

It's why we need to resurrect these great peoples spirit, all of us, and not look down on them for what we misconstrued as what was actually true.

It's why at University I read him and Chi Guerrero

God, I remember buying Chi's book..

It was even red on the cover. It was at a book sale on campus.

Looked like it was communistic, if you know what I mean

Back then we werent allowed to be affiliated with Russia or communism. I wasn't sure why, really.

I love their writers and musicians and composers to death, you know...

Cold war was over ....

Still had that feeling that the man was going to start watching me in the bushes...

And Malcolms book had the same feel.

Like I was doing something wrong.

Odd, like my mother, who loved the civil rights movement, was hiding him from me.

Sometimes those forks on the road come together marvelously....

[papirouge]

You say that people should get over communism because it’s been dead for years, when the USSR fell in ‘91. Millions upon millions of people alive today remember communism. That’s not to mention other ex communist countries like Cuba. So I think they all have a right to be worried about communism when governments all over the world are adopting policies that are communist-esque like the crack down on free speech. You tell people to get over an ideology that has murdered millions not that long ago but you still call whites “white devils” and all kinds of bs for stuff Western Europeans did even further back. You clown on racists (as you should) while also inadvertently being racist yourself by calling whites names and constantly commenting on how western white society is inferior. (Remember saying some bs like “unwashed white asses” and other shit like that?) You’re extremely hypocritical in other areas of your beliefs as well, which would normally be ‘fine’ since everyone is a hypocrite to an extent. But you’re also extremely arrogant. You mention that social media is a massive stumbling block for Christians, which it is, only for you to spend hours on this hell site every day uncharitably hounding people and calling them demonic. Wake up. Everyone, including those you deem demonic/demon possessed can be redeemed. Maybe read the sermon on the mount again and work on forgiving your enemies. Thinking that someone’s soul can go to hell before dying is a thought from Satan. He’s stopping people from trying to save those who are under heavy spiritual attack. Go to church. Your discernment is clearly not developed enough to tell the difference between something from the Holy Spirit vs something from a demon. Which is fine, most people’s discernment isn’t very well developed either ( me included )

.....this post has to be one of the most glaring example of projection & gaslighting, but before I eat you out alive; one question : don't you find ironic of accusing *me* "uncharitably" hounding people & being arrogant when it's you who's been popping on my inbox to lecture and call me names? 🙃 lol You're not the first nor the last one trying to gaslight me like that, and I always found this glaring lack of self awareness fascinating lmao

You guys are obsessed to point out the horror of Communism because that's the only political movement whose main culprit were White. I said what I said and you will cope. I will refuse to care like that about communism precisely like you don't care like that about King Leopold II killing 6 millions Congolese. Sorry but you guys are not special. The only people who can whine about communism are those still living in the handful of countries left with a communist regime. If you're not, than shut up and stop acting like you were a victim of an overall dead political regime that has no impact on your life.

Leave me alone with your communism trauma and go bother Lenin or Stalin in their graves. You're not impressing anyone with your "oh but millions are dead" ..we learned that stuff in school, thanks. I'm from Africa and I literally have no lesson to take about harmful ideologies killing (my) people. Unlike Communism, racism is well alive in most countries. And yet I'm not here constantly whining about it. If you were familiar with my content (which I know you're not) you'd know that I'm not one to constantly flaunting about my race or dive into (anti black) racism discourse. So if I'm not one to whine about racism like that while being a racist, that's actually pretty logical and not hypocrite?? like, that's actually being able to cook a dish AND eat it. Like, you really thought you were UNO reverse-ing me but you still don't make any sense, I- 😭

Now, about that so called freedom of speech and me being (allegedly) racist.... 🤭 You see anon, my toxic trait is that I hardly bother denying wrongful claims about me, and I couldn't care less about being called a racist, but I just found your claims very nonsensical. If I was really racist, why would I need to add "White" before devil? I'm asking because I've seen actual real anti white racists for whom being White = being a devil in and of itself. If I thought every Whte person was evil, why would I put "White" before "devil"? maayyyyybe would it mean that I don't think that White people are not evil just for being White...? ever thought about that...?🤯 Also it's interesting how you seem somehow more bothered about the names I've been calling those evil White people rather than the reason why I did call them like that...🤔 Because I don't call regular White people like that. There had to be colonizer, racists, people who did VERY wrong things, etc. I'm sure you're one of those people who don't consider racism a big deal UNLESS it's to bring it up to whine about anti White racism uwu oh and I never said "Western White civilizations were inferior"....like- please- just stop making shit up, this is embarassing.

THEN, when you tried to go for the "you're so unloving and uncharitable" route that's when I definitively knew you were full of it and had absolutely NO IDEA of what you're talking about because I beefed with SO MANY CHRISTIANS over how we -as a community- should stop harassing/cussing people over their sins (gays, trans, criminals, etc)😭 That's precisely because I think that NO ONE is beyond repentance that I'm against death penalty or gun violence. THIS IS LITERALLY MY PINNED POST - like??? are you new??? The only time I go off against people and call them names is against Christians because our expectations/responsibility is actually higher ; we are expected to do better because we're supposed to know God. I will never understand where the idea that Christians should be "nice" EVERY TIME came from - especially when confronted to blasphemers, people twisting the word of God or harming innocent people. It's actually biblical to rebuke and separate the goat from the lamb. Being nice =/= being loving. Wake up.

And one last thing that tells me you're either illiterate or a liar : I never said social medias were a stumbling block in and of itself. I't's about I've always been clear that I was talking about WORLDLY ENTERTAINMENT. Actually, I vividly remember making a post about the ambivalence of the internet/social medias that could be used either for wonderful things (such as Christian channels that could virtually reach BILLIONS of people) or the worst (trash tv shows, Netflix, porn, etc). I didn't dunk on the medium (tv, computer, social media) but rather the MEDIA

"Thinking that someone’s soul can go to hell before dying is a thought from Satan" WRONG. The very Bible said people in the end times will get dreams and visions. Having visions of hell fits.

TL;DR : my actual discernment is pristine and developed enough to clock 5 things about your lame message :

🚩you have no idea what you're talking about. You don't know my blog, my opinions, whatsoever, and just made shit up along the way to milk the crux of your issue with my take on Communism.

🚩The way you're linking lack of freedom of speech to communism shows you have no idea what communism is. The media & social platform silencing citizen journalists & whistleblowers are NOT communists (a PRIVATE company such as META gathering so much power & citizens private information would NEVER fly under Communism, genius). The ongoing censorship of social media & MSM is actually a sign of late stage capitalism but you guys are too much of capitalists simp (to whom any form of criticism of capitalism wouldn't occur in their mind), cannot handle.

🚩people like you who won't shut about the "right to freedom of speech" will be oddly very patronizing of others exercising theirs

🚩you're one of those Christians who never learned to think by themselves and think being not nice or not going to church is a bad thing. Thank you for confirming me once again how right I am for choosing to be homeschooled by the Holy Spirit

🚩for having such wack "evidence" of my racism, you either have a very flawed reading comprehension, or a pathological liar. NGL my heart swings between both possibilities

[lookwhatilost]

to return to this thought and keep it relatively brief, tumblr 2011-2014 wasn't what most people outside tumblr thought it was. The popular perception outside here was that it was some sort of sjw hellhole, when in reality, it's better thought of at the time as a warzone, with no particular side really having total control of the site. i would say that until 2014, in general, the anti-sjw side was winning, and of course the "hipster side of tumblr" (read: normal people who use instagram now) was always the biggest, and the "fandom side" could go either way depending on which part of the fandom you walked into.

within the sjw side of tumblr, you had a lot of different factions, which more or less unified into one unruly chaotic blob sometime around 2017-ish. but in 2014, the anime communists were still a relatively small faction on the site, and the bigger names on the sjw side were people like medievalpoc, who was notoriously exposed as lying about their ethnicity and for getting a significant amount of the history wrong or oversimplified (the blog's theme in case you forgot, was to point out non-white people existing in european history). other things are a lot like how people might imagine – great focus placed on offensive jokes, on particular approaches to social issues, things like that. but what might surprise people who didn't use tumblr at the time, is that a lot of the people who were in that sjw side were very different to the outside perception of tumblr as being soft and sad about having ~le fee fees hurt~, but were actually extremely aggressive people, o, were just people who held a real life ideology that basically matched the people who say, comment on youtube and say that huey's ronald reagan speech in the boondocks represents them perfectly.

something changed around 2015-ish. whereas before, most people would respond to someone saying "cisheteropatriarchy sounds weird lol" or "these critical theory texts sound a little goofy" with defensive and earnest explanations of why you only think this because of a particular bias society has inspired in you, the freedom to actually be able to make fun of this stuff developed. I remember distinctly posts about bikini bottom written in the style of critical theory discourse at the time, and in fact, this is the year that gave us the actual term discourse as it's used on the internet now! it comes from here, of this era! it was a term that was used by tumblr leftists to make fun of what tumblr leftism was like, primarily arguments after argument after argument over the most inane shit (yes, even to us) with no resolution in sight, but also over things you were convinced had to be important, melded together with the inane shit in a way where nobody could cleanly separate the two. hence, why it just got reduced to the discourse chef meme image, to sort of sum up a general frustration with what existed at the time.

this transition from the earnest white feminist posting to aggressive irony leftism never actually stopped, it just kept going and going and going, until now on you can use homophobic slurs and tell people to kill themselves and it's generally socially acceptable. not to say current tumblr is good or a haven of epistemic perfection, but it's stupid in different ways than most people imagine because almost nobody has actually ever used tumblr, and so most people can't imagine what it was actually like.

it's quite bizarre that this is one of the most influential websites and subcultures of all time, but also is barely actually known and understood by nearly anyone, and almost all of this is because this website has like the worst fucking SEO ever, and whenever I want to find an old, famous post, no I can't lol, I feel very very lucky whenever I manage to locate a post from the old days that sums everything up for me (I have a particular favorite about discourse flip flopping). it's not documented well. there are popular tumblr posts out there – in fact, I can even think of ones that I wrote and are spread around in screenshots – that only make true sense in the context of what other posts were popular on different dashboards at the time, and that's knowledge that's almost completely lost to time and that you had to be there for. everything else important about tumblr is even more poorly documented. i think the internet would be a very different place if tumblr had had good SEO all along.

[greenfiend]

@beso194

Okay your wish is my command!

Stripped

This is a song about intimacy and sharing your true self. I find it SO fitting because of the following reasons:

The dark undertones. It sounds creepy as hell at times. "Stripped down to the bone" almost sounds gory.

The sexual undertones: it's called "Stripped" after all. ST5 will be much more mature.

Talk about escaping to another land: "come back to the land... where everything's ours... for a few hours".

Lyrics like "let me hear you make decisions without your television... let me hear you speaking just for me". This of course means being authentic and non-conformist. Again a huge overall theme of the show!

2. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

Dreaming is commonly referenced within ST. We know the show likely isn't just all a dream but... it's possible something similar is going on.

This song is about humanity as whole including the darker sides (like ab*se).

In my opinion, this song is about coping the best you can with the unpleasant sides of humanity "hold your head up, keep your head up".

3. Holding Out for a Hero

This one I think is fairly self-explanatory. With all the references to heroes! To me it ties in perfectly with both Mike being Will's hero, and also with my theory on Will having DID and many characters being his alters. For people with DID, alters are essentially their "heroes" protecting them from trauma and ab*se.

4. Enola Gay

Enola Gay is both a song about the first atomic bomb used in an act of war called "Little Boy" AND it's considered a GAY ANTHEM by many.

This song was what made me realize that the writers compared Will to "Little Boy". I talk about this more in this post.

Some VERY relevant lyrics to ST:

The mention of 8:15 and "that's the time that it's always been". Alluding to time being frozen.

Communication through the radio.

"Conditions normal and you're coming home" aka finally returning from the UD.

5. Always on my Mind

The lead singer of this band is openly gay. If you listen to the lyrics, they perfectly fit Mike's perspective and how Will has "always been on [his] mind" this whole time...

"If I made you feel second best, I'm so sorry I was blind. You were always on my mind. You were always on my mind."

6. Strangelove

So there's layers to this one.

First off the obvious: The title is about a "strange love" aka something that's not accepted by society and is considered a "sin".

Secondly, it's likely a nod to the movie Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove is about The Cold War, America vs. USSR/Russia (a common theme in the show).

"A film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button -- and it played the situation for laughs. U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripper goes completely insane, and sends his bomber wing to destroy the U.S.S.R. He thinks that the communists are conspiring to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people."

Speaking of "precious bodily fluids"...

7. Tainted Love

Another gay lead singer! And again there's layers here:

Tainted love as in a sinful love/homosexuality

Tainted love as in an ab*sive relationship (I'm not talking about Byler)

Tainted love as in a partner transferring HIV/AIDs... they are "tainted". In fact, one cover of this song was created to raise funds for HIV/AIDs. x

(I also added Shake the Disease by Depeche Mode for similar reasons).

8. It's a Sin

Simple explanation: this song is about the religious guilt accompanied with being gay. The church set comes to mind...

9. Turn Back the Clock

I chose this one specifically for these lyrics:

I wish that I could turn back the clock Bring the wheels of time to a stop Back to the days when life was so much better

10. Policy of Truth

THIS ONE!

So I believe that when Will told Mike "it was a seven. The demogorgon got me." He was actually telling Mike a major secret in code. Him telling Mike the truth lead to everything happening within the show.

Will was terrified of the consequences of him telling Mike the truth and that led to him "vanishing". I'll probably elaborate more on that eventually...

It's just time to pay the price For not listening to advice And deciding in your youth On the policy of truth

Some posts I made about that: here and here.

11. Here Comes the Rain Again

(No more videos :( I've reached the Tumblr limit).

I chose this one again for a few reasons:

The rain mention. "Here comes the rain again... falling on my head like a memory". There's a frequent association with water and Will's trauma.

Alluding to the rain scene...

The song is specifically about depression

The mention of wanting to be lovers...

12. Electricity

This one is simple. It's about electricity. I theorize that sexual electricity will be a major aspect of ST5. I talk about that in this post.

13. Let My Love Open the Door

A perfect resolution to the associating Will and Mike's love with opening doors. Also with lyrics like this:

When people keep repeating That you'll never fall in love When everybody keeps retreating But you can't seem to get enough

It's hard to imagine this song won't be used. Again, I talk more about all of this in this post.

14. Forever Young

Self-explanatory I think. Will and Mike will find a way to be "forever young" aka remain themselves and keep their interests. This also would fit perfectly if they do symbolically "die" (I don't think they'll literally die to be clear).

Just a playlist of songs I think will make an appearance in ST5.

I have very specific reasons for each one.

[potteresque-ire]

Concerning the incredibly far and deep reach of CCP’s propaganda, the narratives the government can spin and call the truth; does ‘the common normal populace’ actually know what’s really going on?

Hello everyone!!! Happy Chinese New Year!!

I’m grouping these asks because if I hear them correctly, they’re all related to this question: how much do people in China know about the atrocities committed by their government, and why don’t they do something about it?

It’s a difficult question, isn’t it? A potentially upsetting one too, just to think about. My answers are more opinion-based, more personal this time. Since there’re no polls about what people know, they have to be based a little more on my own impression, which has more chances of error. Please bear with me and proceed with caution ...

As with people in most countries, what people know is hugely dependent on individuals. Specifically, re: politics, I can think of at least three reasons why people don’t have the facts

1) they have limited access to information 2) they’re being lied to about what they know 3) they’re not interested in current affairs.

1), of course, is what most people think about when it comes to China. You’re right, Anon(s), that VPN use is indeed rampant in the country and is essentially an open secret; there’re no official numbers but surveys have estimated the number of users can be up to 100 million, most of them being youngsters. They use it to do exactly what most of us would imagine: gain access to things they don’t have otherwise. Instagram has been (sporadically?) blocked since 2014 September and so while users may have set up their accounts while being overseas, it’s indeed, (very) possible, that they’ve set up and maintained their account under VPN use.

Wait, you may ask, so you mean the Great Firewall of China doesn’t exist?

That’s exactly the official stance. Not because of private VPN use, but because individuals/companies can apply for a license via their telecommunications company to visit all internet sites. Hence, the government’s claim that the Great Firewall doesn’t exist—you’ll be let through as long as you ask (and we’ll watch your every step)! There are also no explicit laws prohibiting the use of private VPNs; only a handful of arrests associated with private VPN use have been made and only since 2019, and the punishment is considered light—no imprisonment, just fines. It is, in contrast, against the law to *provide* private VPN services, and while companies have been shut down, the crackdown has still been incredibly sluggish by Chinese government’s standards, especially when the Xi regime has made its intention of banning VPN known and directives have been issued for that in 2017.

Why has VPN continued to enjoy this “grey existence”? Because without VPN, a lot of foreign businesses would leave—some, for example, require the most efficient online tools developed outside China to track the foreign markets, and talents have rejected job offers in the country when they realised they couldn’t get on their favourite social media. The science and tech sectors also rely heavily on VPN—programmers relying on Google to search stackoverflow, for example, to find known solutions to bugs. 

VPNs have also served political purposes—Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-critical communities all over the world are all painfully aware of the Chinese government’s practice of hiring its own collection of internet commentators (”50 Cent Party”), and at times, mobilising their youths (gamers, fan circles) to scale the Firewall and astroturf, throw insults at the “CCP enemies” and bomb message boards with pro-CCP messages.

Also, a significant fraction of VPN companies, both in China and overseas, have been reported to have Chinese ownership, by companies with government connections. These VPN services provide a false sense of security for those who do not enjoy having big brother peeking behind their backs while acting as surveillance tools that extend beyond the country.

(Please be careful about free VPNs).

The next question: If until now, users of private VPNs only rarely get into trouble, what’s holding them from scaling the Great Firewall and learning the facts?

It is this: the law isn’t about “climbing the wall”, but what one does outside the wall.

Article 6 of the 2016 edition of Cybersecurity law states the following: 

第六条　国家倡导诚实守信、健康文明的网络行为，推动传播社会主义核心价值观，采取措施提高全社会的网络安全意识和水平，形成全社会共同参与促进网络安全的良好环境

Article 6: The State advocates sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct; promoting dissemination of the core socialist values, adopting measures to raise the entire society's awareness and level of network security, and forming a good environment for the entire society to jointly participate in advancing network security.

What this article implies is this ~ legally, Chinese citizens are bound to the Chinese government’s rules of good internet conduct, regardless of whether they use VPN to get on the internet. As with many Chinese laws, however, the vagueness in wording invites more questions than answers. Is it getting on Twitter, a banned website, “sincere, honest, healthy and civilized network conduct”? Obviously, it’s illegal to interact with other users about the Xinjiang’s internment camps, but what if one only goes there to talk about their favourite stars, because on Weibo supertopic they can’t even mention the stars’ name, can’t ahkgkhagjkfaskjgdf about their favourite fics? What if one goes there to discuss a M- or E-rated fic? Where is the line drawn and given its vagueness, will that line move tomorrow? How?

Most people, therefore, have opted to simply stay away from VPN. After all, China offers its own version of many of the fun websites out there (Weibo-Twitter; Instagram-Oasis; Tiktok-Douyin; Youtube-Bilibili). For those who do use VPN, they tend to stick to websites that are unlikely to cause issues (such as Instagram; Instagram became an issue when Hong Kongers started to upload information about the protests on there).

Now, let’s proceed to 2): People don’t know the facts because they’re being lied to about what they know.

There’s a difference between having access to facts and knowing that they’re facts. This is among the most painful lessons, perhaps, for those who followed the politics of the United States in the last few years (please forgive me for the US-centric-ness of the following few paragraphs!). Even with equal access to identical information, people can vary a LOT in their understanding of what are facts and what are lies.

This illustrates the power of propaganda—and propaganda in the US isn’t even centralised. Some media outlets and individuals (political leaders and analysts) have more say on what should be viewed as the truth, but parties without significant power—small foreign and domestic interests, fringe political organisations, conspiracy theorists, regular folks—have also made critical contributions to the “fake news” phenomenon in the US. There haven’t been apparent coordinations between these parties;  little concerted effort has been made to create one coherent story out of the many tales told.

In China, the propaganda effort is centralised, coordinated, free of distractions from competing story lines. The One Story the government decides on is repeated, over and over again, on newspapers, in shows, in textbooks, on signs on the streets, on social media. To put it another way, when it comes to political discourse, the country is designed to be an echo chamber with 1.4 billion people. Over time, the One Stories inevitably become firmly held beliefs—so firmly held that even if the people are exposed to facts, they no longer believe in them.

This is especially true when the source of the facts are countries with strong traditions of freedoms of speech and press, where the facts are often laid out with a critical eye to the administration and with vastly different opinions attached to them. While we view the latter as evidences that the values we embrace are alive and well—a critical eye to the administration means the Fourth Estate is doing its job, and the different opinions means freedom of speech gets to live another day—people who haven’t been exposed to these values tend to interpret these things as signs of weakness of the government. They may think the Chinese government is better than its counterparts elsewhere because no one is penning scathing criticisms against it. They may think the Chinese government is stronger because it unifies the opinions of their people—the failure of which, they’ve been taught, would lead to social chaos and economic free-fall.

The Chinese population has also been “immunised” against the truths that may be exposed about their government by a propaganda talking point used since Chairman Mao’s days—that the “Imperialist” western world, particularly the United States, is always scheming its downfall. The phrase often used is 美帝亡我之心不死 (”The heart (intention) of Imperialist US to bring us down will never die”). Unfavourable truths exposed must therefore be part of the “bring down China” scheme. This decades-old demonisation of the political apparatus of the US and Europe also prepares the people to accept what most would see as outrageous conspiracy theories: for example, in March 2020, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the US Army intentionally planted COVID in Wuhan during the 2019 Military World games. “Foreign interference” becomes a frequent and convenient scapegoat for policy decisions gone wrong, sometimes to a (somewhat) hilarious effect ~ for example, a Taiwanese journalist calculated the cost required for the CIA to fund the 2019 Hong Kong Protests, as the Chinese government had claimed—and it turned out that the CIA was too poor to do it. 

(Many of us in the US would probably laugh at the idea that our government is capable of secretly paying 2 million foreign-language speaking strangers to show up together in one march.) (It can’t even get the COVID relief payments to its own people right over a period of months.)

(Fun trivia for turtles! As 美帝=“Imperialist US” is the synonym of a feared, imaginary super-villain—super organised, super efficient, super everywhere and super impossible to take down—c-BJYX, the indestructible No. 1 CP fandom in China, has been nicknamed “美帝 cp” by those not so enamoured with it.)

Finally, there’s the psychological factor. Once a set of beliefs becomes personal truths, listening to alternatives can be very upsetting (for those in the US: imagine the blue voting block made to listen to Fox News). Hence, even when people gain access to the facts later—for example, when they study/work abroad, even emigrate—they often don’t take advantage of the access. Instead, they remain logged in in the Chinese social media sites where they’re comfortable with not only the politics but also the language and the friendships they’ve built, and continue to immerse themselves in an environment heavy with CCP propaganda. They remain defenders of the Chinese government; some have even gone out and harass people who disagree with it, in the name of freedom of speech that their country of origin never offered to them.

Censorship, of course, is an important component of building a One Story echo chamber, and I should add a note about it: censorship in China comes in vastly different strengths. The restrictions on LGBT+ issues, for example, are fairly lax, relatively speaking—“homosexuality” remains a term one can find on their internet and a topic the administration continues to address, and while BL dramas are censored, their adapted versions, along with highly publicised discussions of their original material, have so far been tolerated. The strictest form of Chinese censorship would’ve allowed neither: any mention of the 1989 June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre , for example, is immediately removed, including any hints that the event may have happened. When the former leader of the Chinese government, Jiang Zemin (江澤民), was rumoured to have passed away, the censorship apparatus went so far as to remove all mentions of Jiang, which also happened to mean “large rivers”. Chinese netizens therefore joked that major rivers had ceased to exist in China that day, as one couldn’t find any information about them online.

(LGBT+ activists have therefore remained optimistic about the future of their campaign, despite the current state of affairs. To put it simply: the Chinese government has bigger fish to fry. Sexual minorities haven’t had major clashes with the administration, haven’t embarrassed the Chinese government with their demand for rights as the ethnic minorities—the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Mongolians etc did. Political dissidents, including the millions in Hong Kong, are also (far) ahead in the ranking of fish size.)

For most issues, the censorship effort sits somewhere in the middle and is often inconsistent over time. The people, therefore, often have knowledge that an event has happened — even when the event is considered, beyond the Great Firewall, damaging to the reputation of the Chinese government. However, critical information is often missing in their knowledge, or is heavily distorted. For example, overseas Chinese citizens have insisted that the motivation of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests was economic, echoing the longstanding CCP propaganda that Hong Kongers have been jealous of China’s prosperity (reality: China’s GDP per capita was $10,268 USD in 2019, and Hong Kong’s, $48,713—more than 4 times higher). They missed out a critical fact: while the fast economic growth of China has created some unease—Hong Kongers have always known the Chinese government has only tolerated them and their freedoms for their ability to generate wealth—what has truly ignited Hong Kong’s anger is the Chinese government’s violation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, and the terms it had agreed upon to get back the then British crown colony. Hong Kong hasn’t been demanding autonomy and freedoms because it’s a troublemaker, but because these things were promised to the city as conditions of the 1997 handover. As residents of the world’s third largest financial centre, Hong Kongers are diligent drafters and executioners of contracts (which international treaties are) and above all, faithful believers of them. For an asker (the Chinese government) to claim a contract as “historical”  because it has received the goods (Hong Kong) and no longer feels a need to pay (allow Hong Kong 50 years of freedoms and autonomy) is offensive to the principle, the very heart and soul of the city. 

(Gg’s former boss was a Hong Konger, and his experience working for him was a rather accurate reflection of Hong Kong’s view on business. What made an impression to Gg—that the posters should be without rips and misprints, even if these imperfections were not the fault of the design company—is a no-brainer to the Hong Konger in me reading the interview. Delivering high quality goods and services isn’t an act of kindness but rather, of professionalism and respect for the contract.)

(This interview is a highly recommended read, for those who’ve missed it!)

(One more example of “conveniently missed critical information”: remember GG’s show on Chongqing? Did you know the underground bombing shelters were not built by the Communist government, but the Nationalist government that was still ruling China during WWII?)

Anyway, where was I?

Right. We’re getting to 3): People are not getting the facts on the political situation in China because they’re not interested in current affairs.

Some—well, many— people are not interested in politics.

Some of you may be thinking: well, I’m not interested either. I follow politics because it’s important.

Why is it important? Because political engagement means you can do something about the many ills of the society, speak for those who cannot, force the government to change by voting, by voicing your opinion, by going to marches and protests etc.

What if you follow politics and still can’t do most of these things? What if, if you do choose to do these things, the price you pay may be astronomical? Will you still follow politics or devote your time, your energy to something else, something you’ve got more control over, something that won’t be as saddening, frustrating because it’s something you can actually change?

3) is therefore intricately related to why people often don’t do anything, even if they manage to find out about the facts.

There’re no national elections in China. Marches and protests are practically banned because while the Chinese Constitution guarantees the freedom of assembly (as it does freedom of speech and press; Article 35), it also explicitly states that "Citizens of the People’s Republic of China, in exercising their freedoms and rights, may not infringe upon the interests of the State, of society or of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” (Article 51) — ie. the freedoms and rights only go as far as if they do not stand in the government’s way. Social media and all communications platforms are under constant surveillance, and so only opinions tolerated by the government is allowed... 

And so, the fact, social ill that has broken your heart—you can’t tell for sure if it isn’t talked about because the government has censored it, how many people know about it and more importantly, how many among the people who know about it will agree with your take. If you break your silence and voice your concerns, how many people will have your back, even if you also conceive them as victims of the social ill? If the social ill is the lack of rights of a minority group, for example, will they appreciate your speaking out, or will your “rocking-the-boat” make things even worse for them? A heavily watched net means communications with the oppressed/vulnerable social groups are often filled with obstacles, if not outright impossible. You don’t know how these groups feel; you don’t even know how many affected individuals are there. You watch the and news and shows and they all talk about how wonderfully things are going; how everyone seems so hopeful and positive and happy with their lives—are you the only person feeling that way? Are you wrong? If you speak out then, will you be yelling into the void, or worse, yelling at the police who “invites” you for a chat in the police station? To speak for those who do not have a voice to speak, are you ready, willing to take the risk of also becoming one who no longer has a voice to speak? Is your family ready? 

To put it another way: the opportunity cost of “doing something” about the political situation can be astronomically high in China, compared to the opportunity cost of us doing something similar in our own country. 

If I want to support the LGBT+ population in my part of the US, for example, I can do so effectively with minimal investment and most importantly, with minimal risk. By pasting a rainbow flag on this Tumblr post, for example, I’ve already signalled to those who need support on this issue that I’m ready to give mine. And this “signal” of mine will join the hundreds and thousands on the site, collectively telling the activists doing the “on the ground” fighting that they’re not alone; that they have my vote of support. I pose no danger to myself in doing so; no one will accuse me of, arrest me for infringing upon the interests of the State and the Collective. The rainbow flag, a display of my stance, will not turn into a blurred blob the next time I look at it, transform overnight from a symbol of solidarity to a warning sign to those who may wish to join the cause. There’s no danger for me, even, to carry an actual, huge rainbow flag to Pride, perform my activism in person. I don’t have to worry about my phone already giving away my identity as a protester to the government, especially in post-COVID times. I don’t need to watch out for plain clothes pretending to be my allies. I don’t have to look at the many surveillance cameras present and wonder if I’ll get blacklisted as a troublemaker.

Am I still being tracked and taken pictures of? Possibly. But for this cause, at least, I’m not afraid that these information will be used to arrest me. If I were arrested, I know there'll be lawyers and activists who would come to my aid. LOUDLY. ANGRILY.

I’m not afraid. Period. I’m having fun. And I doubt I can say the same if I try to carry a rainbow flag to Tiananmen square and march there.

This vast difference in the opportunity cost of taking political action is the reason why I’ve refrained from demanding those who live under authoritarian dictatorships to stand up for their neighbours who’ve been oppressed / bullied by their governments. I’ve refrained from criticising them for looking away, minding their own business. Do I wish they’ve take action? Of course I do. Am I aware that their lack of action is potentially more harmful because of the frequent atrocities happening around them? Yes. But I also understand that going on a fight is far more frightening when one doesn’t even have a sense of how many will join their side of the fight; I understand that fighting for what one deserves—freedoms, rights, justice—should never equal martyrdom, and just because a regime has elected to put equal signs between the two doesn’t mean those equal signs should ever be there. I remind myself that, to ask the people in any authoritarian dictatorship to stand up for a political cause is to ask them to make sacrifices that we, as people in relatively free societies, do not need to make when standing up for the same cause. In a country where a father demanding the truth about the milk product poisoning of his own son got jail time for “eliciting social disorder”, to stand up for even a single issue, no matter how small that issue is, requires courage that I’m not sure I have.

I can’t ask anyone to do anything I may not be able to do myself.

And this is why I, too, have chosen to support these people, even if many of them are single-issue activists, even when many support the Chinese government on other issues that matter. For example, the late Dr Li Wenliang, one of the eight COVID whistleblowers in China who passed away from the disease, was an opponent of the Hong Kong Protest, but I still (greatly) appreciate, respect him for what he did. As long as they’re not actively helping the government to cause (more) harm to others, as long as their cooperation with their government falls within what is demanded of them as citizens, they have my support. Why? Because most people who speak out in China cannot afford to stand up for more than one cause before it becomes dangerous for them. Because even if it’s only a tiny vulnerable social group, one small minority that makes a tiny step towards more rights, more freedoms, more justice, it’s still a victory in a country where rights, freedoms and justice are luxury items for those with neither political nor economic power. Because those who’re not part of the ruling class cannot afford to cherry pick their allies, cannot afford to in-fight when the ruling class already holds absolute power. Because I still believe in pay-it-forward, that most people who’ve benefited from someone standing up for them, even for one small incident, one minor cause, is more likely to stand up for someone else.

This is, admittedly, not always an easy choice to make—not for me, at least. I do get frustrated, can’t help but think at times that those who subscribe to and spread propaganda are, to a certain extent, corroborators of the atrocities committed by their government. (So, to those who’ve felt this frustration, you’re not alone!). And the Hong Konger in me has every reason to be furious with everything about China right now—all I could think of, when I listened to Gg singing 異鄉人 Foreigner the other night, are all the Hong Kongers fleeing the city now, as refugees, because of their political beliefs.

But for now, I’m hanging on. I’ve been able to tell myself that given the country’s political reality, given its tradition of collectivism (which tends to view confrontational dissent with scorn), the paths to freedoms, to equal rights and acceptance, will not be the same as what I’ve seen, what I’ve wished for. They’ll likely be slow; They’ll likely be long and winding, taking three steps forward and two steps back; they’d likely be unexpected in places, offer us surprises —

And since it’s Chinese New Year / Valentines and I’m feeling brave (irresponsible?), I’d venture a little bit of speculation and say this ~ yes, I’ve wondered if one of these many paths may be trodden, intentionally or not, by two beautiful male idols and their millions of turtles. Is it wishful, fantastical thinking? I’d be the first to admit the answer is yes. But the BJYX scheme has been so well executed as of now, so effective that I can’t help but wonder if it’s leading towards some sort of a goal, whether devised by the humans involved or by the gods/Fates who, as c-turtles have said so romantically, have been writing an original BL story with our favourite boys. The goal may be personal —simply two people being able to act more like themselves again under the spotlight—or a bit more ambitious…

… Because the sneakers + ice-cream post did catch my attention (will probably have to devote a post on that?). Another small incident that has caught my attention, unrelated to Gg and Dd but can significantly change the path they may be trodding, is this — in June 2020, People’s Daily, the state controlled newspaper, boasted its country’s increasing friendliness towards the LGBT+ communities on Twitter . While the tweet was met with skepticism and soon removed, the message it sent is this: the Chinese government may have figured out the the Western world (in particular, the younger generations) view LGBT+ rights as a measure of progressiveness. While I’m still leaning towards the government maintaining a tight grip on LGBT+ rights within its borders, with the strengthening call to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics because of the country’s poor human rights record, I can see a glimmer of possibility that the same government may do the unexpected and cater to the queer community for the sake of propaganda.  As I mentioned, the queer community hasn’t caused much headache for the Chinese government, and so it’s far more likely to be chosen as the “benefactors” of such a “we’re a human rights champion too!” propaganda campaign than, say, ethnic minorities and political dissidents. Promoting dissemination of core socialist values has always sat high on the CCP’s agenda list, and its target audience has always included foreign, non-Chinese populations; this effort is known as 大外宣—“The Great External Propaganda”. And who better to cast as leads of an international propaganda campaign on LGBT+ rights than two of its own stars who’ve already demonstrated loyalty to the government, who’ve already garnered international fame from a TV series widely viewed as queer, and who may actually be queer?

(And if—if!!!— this ever happens, may I ask everyone to please consider doing the following? Please do not feel a need to express gratitude. Please do not act as though it’s a gift. Celebrate as you would celebrate anyone in a free country exercising their birthright to live, to love the way they want — no less than that, no more than that.)

(For those who’ve asked ~ as international fans, not allowing the CCP to modify our expectations of how a government should behave may be one of the most effective ways to protect Gg and Dd.)

(I call this learning from the best: get the goods we want (more rights for the people in China), refuse to pay the cost (subscribe to CCP’s propaganda), and RUN! ❤️💛💚)

[antisocial-hatred]

questions for my fellow antisocials

I'm working on a post that will explain AsPD in detail, including some sort of personal experience but mostly focusing on data and statistics. Since great part of the knowledge we have of the disorder is collected from criminals' behavior, I wanted to add insights regarding people with AsPD who can function in a society (more or less). I will accept every answer but I'd prefer if the edgy teens and the "I'm the worst case of psychopathy my therapist has ever seen" stayed out of this, and please try to be honest about your own experience, it’s not a race to see who’s worse off Here are the questions, you can answer to all or just a few ofc: 1. Do you have any other disorder? 2. How would you describe the way you perceive feelings? We all know our emotions are toned down, but where do you feel them? Most neurotypicals identify an energy in correspondence of the heart, while for me it's more like I know I'm feeling something but I can't really place it anywhere in my body, so i's kinda as if I rationally know I'm sad but I don't feel the "sadness" physically. I've definitely felt some emotions tho, it just happens very rarely and I was wondering if maybe it was related to AsPD. 3. Have you ever felt love for a person or do you just view relationships as a contract, because you think someone may deserve your time and effort? Again, to me it's like I generally know I love that person and sometimes I actually feel it, for a couple of minutes. 4. At what point in a relationship would you break up? 'Cause we often say that as soon as the contract isn't beneficial anymore we hop out, but at the same time we like chaotic situations and can tolerate more stress than the average person (and also I personally hate opening up with someone, so if I choose a person I'll try to make it work 'til the end). 5. Do you think you can spot a person with AsPD by their appearance? They usually say we have a creepy stare, a controlled body language or those "Sanpaku eyes" which I don't quite get tbh, although I've been told before that my eyes look "weird". I think I can spot people with AsPD by their looks but manly by the way they approach and by what they say during conversations, for example a controlled body language, avoiding sharing personal infos, people pleasing and not moving the eyes much are indicators for me; anyway my biggest concern is about eyes, 'cause NTs seem so bothered by them and I don't really see anything wrong, do most of them look plain normal or am I missing something? 6. Where do you stand on the political compass? Do you usually have strong opinions or do you stay in the middle? I'm an anarcho-communist and very opinionated, since it's the only way I remember what I can morally tolerate 7. Do you feel anxiety, fear and panic, if so at what intensity and for how long? 8. Do you find yourself making better choices than neurotypicals thanks to your ability to act rationally? 9. Have you ever been spotted manipulating someone? If so, how did you react? 10. Do you have trouble using social media? Do you have a different approach based on your followers/the main topics discussed on the social media? 11. Do you need to "recharge your social battery" after spending time with people? Do you experience distress after masking (= putting a mask on to make social interactions) for too long? 12. Which are the most common myths about AsPD, false or not? If you need something to start with: misrepresentation in media, stigma and ableism (psychopaths are sadistic monsters who like to hurt people, empathy is necessary to be a good person...), general beliefs enforced by science (psychopaths tend to say "uhm" more often, psychopaths have a lower resting heart rate and less emotional responses than neurotypicals...), you can even just share a fact and say if it applies to you 13. What are the least discussed symptoms of AsPD? 14. Do you tend to sympathize more with the victim or the abuser? Please elaborate also based on the gravity of the crime and the way it touches you personally (for example if it’s a trigger or you’re involved somehow) 15. Do you say “sorry” often? Does it bother you to say it? Would you describe yourself as hostile? Thanks for your time and hope you enjoyed answering, follow me if you want to stay updated on the post :D

[sirensmojo]

“KINDRED”, 2 - Tommy Shelby x Reader

Summary: Tommy meets a librarian that he discovered to be the chief of an underground organisation. Needing man enough allies to dirty their hands in the battle against Oswald Mosley, he shakes hands with the devil. Feelings intertwine with business, a mix that leads to unalterable ends...

Warnings: Swearing, romance, fluff.

Word Count: 6K+

❰ ​Previous Chapter

(...) 

Several days later.

You were walking London’s street with the confidence of someone that ruled the place. Your back, straight, your head high as the air moved your hair gently, as if you were starring in an old Hollywood movie. 

Your suit fitted you perfectly, a little loose so you were comfortable. You were wearing the jacket closed, one hand in your pant’s pocket as the clicking sound of your high heels resonated against the cobblestones of the empty streets.

It was early in the morning, so early the thick mist nearly extinguished the cigarette hanging on your red painted lips, but your gaze was already as determined as one can be. 

‘This day will be great’ was the mantra you were singing in your head. You were supposed to open the library in less than an hour now, and you had to meet with your new employees to discuss the rules before opening.

You thanked God some of them were already a part of your organisation, which made it easier as they knew the way things needed to be done under your management. 

Entering the building, the women were already waiting, in uniform and standing in a perfect line side by side. 

You offered them a warm smile coming closer to them as you took your woollen coat off.

“Misses and Madams, let me welcome you to the Bridgehead Library. Now, you may or may not know me, I’m Y/N, you, strong fighter for women’s rights & aspirant to a world where we would walk the streets unafraid of any danger. Because we know how it is, for those of you that are single moms, for those of you that were disowned by your own family, those of you who don’t want to get married.” 

You paced back and forth in front of the aligned women, looking at each one of them straight in the eyes, as talking with a firm and confident tone.

“You’re not taken seriously, you’re misused and abused. You fear the barmaid will not serve you a drink cause no man stands on your side, you fear the man that is staring at your body will be lurking in the shadows, following you, and rip off your clothes when you’ll be in an empty street.”

You stop in front of a face you saw in the files of Thomas Shelby while doing some research on him. You identify the individual as Ada Thorne, born Shelby, Tom’s sister. 

“Well, you should know, for as long as you're willing to work here, none of the things mentioned before should ever happen to you. And your family will be fed and more... I guarantee you fifteen pounds a week. If anything… A-ny-thing may happen to you due to your gender, consider turning to Bridget, we will find a solution.”

You motioned to a blonde-haired woman sitting legs crossed at the principal desk to their right. Her hair was middle length and perfectly waved to one side as the other was tucked behind her ear. 

The named Bridget glanced up to you before colliding her lit matchstick with her cigarette. 

“You’re under my protection, use my name for doing whatever pleases you, whenever you want. This is your ticket to a brand new life, for all of you. And all of us, together, we can achieve great things. If the counsellor job isn’t enough for you, I invite you to turn to Ana.” 

You pointed a brunette on your side, her facial expression was passive & aggressive, but for some reason, it was comforting. As if you knew you were in security in her presence. 

“Now, as for the library…” You gave your instructions. 

As soon as you finished your speech, it was 7, the hour of the opening. 

The day was slow at the beginning, but soon enough the library was packed. Not only by people here to find a book, but packed with numerous women, all in a single file that led to a small room at the back of the first floor that had been designated as Ana’s office.

It was almost impossible for Ada not to wonder what was going on. 

Were all these women wanting to find another job than counsellor?

All employees tried their best to keep quiet the visitors, following your orders, but as Ada was passing by the single file to pick up and put back books, she could hear murmurs. 

The individuals were talking about politics, but something so far from what she had ever heard.

Some were talking about the tragic death of a certain Emily Davison before the war at the Derby Epsom and how they rallied the WSPU(Women’s Social and Political Union). 

Others were talking about a recent speech by Emmeline Pankhurst to which they couldn’t assist due to coppers. The Shelby sister surmised that woman must be the leader of the political party given the amount of respect they paid her. 

No need to say Ada was drowning in a tide of data and names she vaguely heard of before.

She didn’t pay that much attention to the women’s cause. Even after the death of her Freddie, after which reality smacked her back into the world she was living in. 

It was either her family or her convictions, as being a Shelby meant drifting from the oppressed to the oppressor. But she was so focused on not being a Shelby that she closed herself to other opportunities. 

She wanted to be a part of something bigger and better to help those in need. But she ultimately admitted to herself she needed her family in order to survive, which led her to jump off the communist boat.

But a part of her was always keeping her beliefs close to her heart. 

(...)

*The library, fourth floor*

You turned the keys in the lock, opening your door’s office. You switched on the light and when turning back, stumbled on a man sitting crossed legs, at the edge of the sofa.

When he was sure he made his presence known, he lied backwards, extending one of his arms on the armrest, his head held high.

He was dressed in an elegant dark blue suit, white shirt, the chains of his watch knotted around one of his buttons with a fine red & blue tie around his neck.

Right above his upper lips was a full mustache, and as your gaze reached his dark eyes, you glimpsed the stranger’s neat hair flattened backward.

“What a surprise.” You let out, walking to the desk as if it was normal for him to be here. You then hung your coat on the coat rack, turning your back at Mosley.

“A good one, I hope.” The man put on his fake smile, lying eyes everywhere he could on the woman’s silhouette in front of him.

“Always, Mr Mosley. How could you be any other thing than a pleasure to see,” you came back to where he was and sat in one of the armchairs ahead “and meet.” You added, offering him a smile.

“It’s a shame we never had time to properly exchange--”

“That’s why you crept into my office.” You cut him and nodded to herself, your knuckles hitting on her thigh.

A chuckle escaped the man’s lips before he stared even more at the light-haired woman.

“It is to be said, your name doesn’t get quite unnoticed in society or amongst politicians.” 

“So you’ve heard of me, even more charming.” Your voice dripped with sarcasm.

 If he thought he could cajole you that easily, he was wrong.

“Not only have I heard of your deeds, Miss you, but I’ve been reported daily about the people you keep company with.” He stated as if it was normal for him to send people spying on whoever.

You remained silent, waiting for the man to say more. 

He was gauging your reaction towards his words, lurking at any sudden change in your expression, but you kept on an unreadable face. Mosley tilted his head to the side, curiosity animating his iris.

“Leading me to question the nature of your relationship with Mr Thomas Shelby.” He continued, squinting his eyes.

“Perhaps socialists are your thing?” He spitted that last part with all the distaste he felt toward both the worker class and Tommy.

By the way your piercing eyes didn’t flinch a bit at his sneaky comment, Mosley surmised you weren't impressed, which eventuated in him smiling while keeping up the stare.

“Did you come all the way down to my library to give me a lecture on your inauthentic Dasein, Mr Mosley? There are doctors for that.”

A rictus at the corner of your lips distracted the eyes of the man in front you, who unwittingly broke the stare.

You won.

You took great delight in the void of Mosley’s expression that surely didn’t understand what you just said. 

“Oh, beg pardon. Perhaps I’m using concepts you don’t understand.” You didn’t even cover the fact you were making fun of his ignorance, your eyes still as sharp as razors.

“Don’t you know Heidegger, Mr Mosley? He discusses a neat difference between what he calls Sein, that covers what Is, what constitutes human existence with the Dasein that covers the phenomenological analysis of human existence. In other words, he says there is a gap between how things are and how we perceive them.” 

You got up and walked to your desk, making sure to pass by him pretty close so your perfume would meet the man’s nostrils. 

You then opened the ceramic piece in which you kept your cigarettes, and as you grabbed one, you concluded.

“When it may seem to you something is occuring, that doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. It just means your senses want to believe it is happening for numerous reasons, but the main one is almost always the fear of something. You don’t believe it wittingly of course, it’s your inconscient working. But still, you just confided in me an unconscious worry named Thomas Shelby.” You ignited your cig.

By using a psycho-philosophical reference, you were showing him your hand, how studious you were, which meant he couldn’t look down on you or intimidate you easily. 

His attempt to pressure you wasn’t working. And you were setting the standards high.

Mosley didn’t miss any of your movement since you got up. Eyeing you top to bottom. It was crystal clear your monologue satisfied him the most. He, that considered you as illegitimate of the high-society status you had been given. 

Perhaps he was wrong?

“May I add, no offense here, that whatever concerns him, or me doesn’t concern you a bit? I’m afraid you came here in vain.” You smacked her lips at the end of her sentence, faking to be annoyed by the fact he lost his time coming here.

“I found you, Miss Y/L/N, I found you.” He repeated, fluttering his eyes as tilting his head to the side.

His way of intensely eyeing the individual he was speaking to would be quite uncomfortable for you if you hadn’t been a woman in a man’s world for so long.

No wonder why this man was so feared and yet adorned. His whole character emitted mysteriousness while arousing wonder and curiosity. It was hard, nearly impossible to read his face or even get in his mind, but you didn’t need that to face him head-on. 

“And to answer your question, no. Socialists aren’t my thing, Kings are.” His brows raised at the end of your sentence.

You stared at each other some more, Mosley trying to discover the implied meaning of your sentence as you were internally laughing seeing him struggle.

“Anyway, I hope you’re finding our city to your liking. You’re from Birmingham after all.” He paused and got up, walking closer to the door with a hand in his pants pocket.”Talking of which, may I ask why not opening in a library there?” It was obvious the displeasure he felt towards your decision.

“I’ll call it ‘modern conquering’.” You responded with enthusiasm.

(...)

Ada poured wine into two cups when hearing the keys turning in the lock of her house. She first thought it was Ben, her lover coming back from his office, or wherever he was working as they weren’t truly speaking of work when together.

Her eyes widened at the sight of her brother when she turned back to the entrance of the living room. “Tommy?” Her high pitched tone expressing her surprise. 

“Let’s sit down, Ada.” The man always looked worried and thoughtful, but this time it was different, his eyes were actually reflecting emotions, which usually never are. 

“What’s happened”

Tommy came nearer the table and pulled a chair for his sister, without looking at her. “Sit down, eh?” He repeated before sitting down himself.

Ada didn’t stop looking at her brother, she knew him too well. Something wasn’t right. She pulled a chair for herself. 

Tommy tried his best to look at the face of his sister while talking but he just couldn’t, his eyes kept drifting away. “Ben younger is dead. Someone put a bomb in his car.”

As the brunette wasn’t talking, her mouth slightly opened in shook, he kept on talking, “I don’t know how you felt about him or how bad this is going to hurt, but whatever happens just remember you have a baby inside of you.” He pointed to her tummy.

His sister let her back hit the chair noisily, searching the void for answers. “God.” She hardly sighed. “Anyone you touch. Which means anyone I touch. Which means anyone any of us touch. He never knew I was pregnant… I hadn’t told him.”

Tommy that was looking at her to support her pain, once again looked down hearing the hard truth. 

“God, I didn’t love him.” She sighed heavily. “But I liked him. He was decent and good. And I wasn’t gonna marry him. The baby was a mistake but that’s okay… because I didn’t ask anything of him. God he didn’t deserve us.” A tear rolled down her cheek before she exhaled loudly again.

“Well I’ve spoken to his family. They’re going to take care of the funeral” Tommy said as Ada sniffled. “It will go down as an IRA assassination of a British military officer.” He felt the need to divulge her all he knew.

“But what was it really?” She calmly asked, looking intently at him her head tilted to the side.

Tommy smacked his lips and breathed deeply. “It was�� a consequence of good intentions. My good intentions.” 

She scoffed.

“I pushed him to report on the fascists. I thought it was the right thing to do. And as a result, Section D or the Branch or intelligence had him killed.”

She scoffed again, looking away this time.

He abruptly took back in hands his beret he previously dropped on the table and started fidgeting with it, looking down. “There was a kid, died in the explosion. He was ten years old. It’s funny isn’t it, how it works?” He cleared his throat and got up, starting to move forward the door.

“No, Tommy.” 

He stopped, his back still turned to the woman.

“Don’t give yourself this excuse. “ Ada’s eyes were filled with tears, some of which hurtling down her face to her chin.

“He was ten years old. if I would stuck to what I do, he’d still be kicking a ball in the street. It’s funny isn’t it?” The meaning of his words was amplified by the thunder rumbling outside. 

(...) 

Days later.

It was the end of the day, employees had started to leave when Ada came to the entrance.

“Can I get the changing room keys?” She asked Bridget, who was sitting behind the desk, lost in a book.

“Ada Shelby? Miss you would like to borrow you a moment.” She pointed to the stairs behind her. “She’s waiting for you.” The desk lady invited the woman standing in front of her to get on her way.

Ada rolled her eyes at the mention of the Shelby name. “It’s Ada Thorne.”

The light-haired woman smiled at Ada’s comment.

She got up to the second floor and then to the third one before she wondered what her boss had to say that somebody else couldn’t tell her.

Ada rapidly caught sight of the wooden door at the end of the long corridor. She stops walking when hearing voices, a male and a female one. She stops, not wanting to get into their intimacy, but the door wasn’t completely closed, which allowed the voices to slip out pretty clear.

Not too long after she heard steps approaching and moved backward, so it didn’t look like she was eavesdropping. The door ultimately opened, and the fascist man she saw only once before with Tommy passed by her, without even glancing her way.

She knocked on the door and cleared her mind.

“Come in.” 

She cleared her throat. “Miss Y/L/N, am Ada Thorne, you asked to see me?” She peek into the room. 

“Yep, come in. Take a seat.” You motioned your hand that was holding a cigarette to the chair in front of her. 

Her back flat against the backrest, your E/C’s eyes entered those of the Ada’s.

You were searching for the same light that was twinkling in Thomas’ eyes, in vain.

“Do you know who I am, Ada? I can call you that, right?” 

“I heard about your achievements in Paris. What you did for women.” The brunette answered, uncertain of where this discussion was going.

“Do you know what I do?”

At the question, the woman ahead of you didn’t know what to answer.

Was there even a correct answer for that?

Of course, she knew part of her activities was illegal, she wasn’t blind. And, come on! She was a Shelby too, she could feel those things thanks to her brother’s choice of life. 

But what her boss wanted her to say, exactly? And for what reason? 

“You’re talking about the illegal part?”

“The criminal one” You snapped back.

Ada’s eyes widened.

“I surmised you didn’t. Why did you think there were that many women in here today? I offer them jobs in my London’s counterfeit money’s enterprise.” You leaned forward to Thorne, squeezing the cig into the ashtray. 

You crossed the fingers of both your hands together. “You don’t really want to work here.” You forced out the words as if to convince Ada.

“Understand this library covers an underground organisation that is beyond you. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not particularly involved in the “business” of your own family. Tommy gave you a title in it but still, you’re here, working in a library to prove yourself something.

Why would I want someone like you in here? Someone that is unsure of what they are, what they want.” 

The venom entered Ada’s ear going directly to her chest, depriving her of oxygen for a short instant. But her eyebrows surely knitted in anger. 

“Stop acting like you know everything when it is clear you understand nothing.” She gained composure again.

“I heard, you didn’t even want to be a Shelby in the first place, running away from your home and your family.” You nodded, your eyes still deep into Ada’s.

“You ‘hear’ things and you take it as the absolute truth? And you’re the leader here.” Thorne chuckled to herself, her eyebrows raised high.

You sneered at the comment.

“What is the problem with my family anyway? If you want to fire me because I’m a Shelby then just do it. I’ll not come burning your library if that’s the matter.” 

The librarian cackled, putting your head into your joined open hands, elbows on the table. “God! No! That’s not that. It is more about the fact that the first time you’re getting involved in that kind of organisation it’s not your brother’s. Not your family’s.” 

Ada looked away, realizing what the light-haired woman meant. She, who never was included in the family business, rather by choice than by abandonment of her family, was employed in a pseudo library that was covering for dirty activities.

“It’s ironic indeed. But what makes you think I wouldn’t want to work here knowing the truth?”

You shrugged. “You never worked with your brothers. Even your aunt, Polly is actively working there.”

“It was my choice.”

“So you’ve changed your mind.”

Ada dismissed the talk, another question seeming to be more urgent:

“But why didn’t you just let me be unaware of all this and be like the others.” She retorted.

“Because you’re not ‘like the others’. You’re a Shelby and a Thorne. Your brother is sitting at the House Of Commons amongst politicians while getting his hands dirty here and there, and your deceased husband was a very known communist leader. You’re everything but random, understand that.” 

“So you’re telling this to me out of goodness?” She laughed at you without even hiding her reluctance toward this eventuality. 

“Respect.” You rectified with a solemn tone. 

The brunette stops laughing, her expression becoming serious again. She didn’t quite get your the true motives, but she had other questions.

“What are your relations with my brothers, are you enemies?”

“No.”

“Allies, then?”

“No.”

Even if you told Ada about the true roots of this library, she wouldn’t talk about the arrangement between her and Thomas. It wasn’t your place to do so, and you didn’t think Ada needed to know, at least for now.

“It’s not like you’re going to get your hands dirty anyway, but if anything should happen to me, they will associate you with me, so they’ll come for you.”

“Who’s they?”

“Coopers, I don’t have them in my pocket.”

Thorne seemed to be in her head, probably rethinking her intention to keep working here as a counsellor.

“You were already working here with the old owner so I’ll let you choose rather you want to stay or leave. But don’t stay because you want to prove something to yourself, or your family. I don’t need a crybaby. If the communist cause you defend isn’t matching with the cause I fight for, leave.” 

Your words cut in pieces the thick atmosphere that had settled between the two women.

(...)

Thomas convened a family meeting.

Everyone was already waiting for him at the pub. Charlie Senior and Curly were sitting at a table drinking from the bottle, while Johnny Dog and Jeremiah were sipping on whiskey at the counter, next to Aberama Gold, too occupied looking at his future wife Polly. 

She were sitting at a table with her son and his wife, Gina.

As Arthur and Finn passed the door, the oldest Shelby got behind Michael and didn’t miss the occasion to stumble wittingly on his cousin’s chair, pulling away the younger’s back from it. 

Next, he hassled to sit near the counter, pouring himself some liquor that he drank in one go. Finn reluctantly came and sat at the table between Gina and Polly.

Tommy finally arrived, walking around the table to place himself in front of everyone. 

“First of all, an apology from Lizzie. She can’t be here. Charles has a violin concert. Also, welcome to Mr Aberama Gold. He and Polly are to be married in three weeks with my blessing. From now on, Aberama will be welcomed at our meetings. First item: business. A bereavement. Colonel Ben Younger, who may perhaps have become a member of this family, was taken from us, four days ago, by dark forces. We’ve made some investigations, we think we know who planted the bomb. In the meantime, our thoughts are with Ada and the baby inside of her, who may one day, sit at these meetings but… Hopefully under happier circumstances.”

“Let’s drink to happier circumstances.” Pol’ offered while pouring some whiskey in her and Tommy’s cup.

“Yeah.” Arthur agreed, raising his glass. “To Ada.” He added, soon joined by all the people in the room.

Tommy coughed at the burn of the whiskey and continued his speech, “Item number two: an announcement regarding Michael.” He coughed again as if to release some tension in him, his hand rose toward the younger Gray. 

“Before you go on, Tommy, there’s something I’d like to say, to the whole family directly, regarding finances and the future of this company.” Michael stated, getting comfortable in his chair, and from the corner of his eye, he could see his mother glaring at his wife.

Gina ignored her, looking down and smoking a cigarette.

“According to your own estimations, this new venture of the delivery and shipment of opium will bring into the company around £2 million per year. Therefore, due to the amounts involved, I think this company should be restructured.” He continued, looking fearlessly at a pissed Tommy.

“Michael. I think this can wait ‘till outside the family meeting.�� His mother tried to postpone the confrontation.

“Restructured in what way?” Tommy asked, not because he was genuinely interested, but because he needed to know if Michael’s betrayal had limits. Which it didn’t have.

“Because of the amount of money involved, shipment and dispatch will become the primary source of income in the company. It’s simple mathematics.” Gina proudly announced, deciding to match her husband’s audacity as she looked Thomas the wrong way. 

Her husband got up, going behind her as he placed his hands on both her shoulders rubbing them gently. “With the help of my wife, I will organise an expansion into America, where the narcotics business is just beginning to grow. I have very good contacts in Detroit, New-York, Boston, who I’ve already spoken to about this. And Gina has family who are very experienced in this kind of business.”

It seems like the woman surely gained composure thanks to the assurance in her husband’s voice because she finally decides to look back at Polly, who was staring at her the whole time with an unpredictable longing to plant her butterfly knife in her. 

Gina, quickly glanced away as if to snub her husband’s mother.

“According to the conversations I’ve had with them, with a regular supply of pure opium from China, within a short space of time, the American narcotics business will bring in $20 million per annum. Enough money for you to enjoy an easing burden you all now feel. See, I know that the scars and the wounds, they’re on the inside, not on the outside. And as a member of the new generation, I am able to take that burden off your weary shoulders. A new decade is coming. There’ll be new opportunities and new territories, more money than we’ve ever had before.” 

He stops looking around to everyone to pause on his cousin only.

“Tommy, you can still do the good work that deep down you want to do. Mum, you can get married and live in that big house.” 

Polly happily glanced at Aberama, letting herself dream of a good life for a second. 

“Arthur, you can be the man that Linda wants you to be.” 

“Fuck Linda.” Arthur interrupted.

Michael turned to Finn, walking toward him to rest behind the seated man, grabbing his shoulder and shaking it proudly.

“Finn, you’ve proved yourself. You’re part of the new generation. You could come to New-York with me.” Michael finished his speech. His wife handed him a file that he gladly took in hands. He walked to Thomas and dropped the file on the table that rested between them two. 

Tommy’s eyes went to the file before lifting to Michael’s determined face.

“Here is my proposal. A full restructuring of the company. I will be managing director… and you can be non-executive chairman. But under an assumed name to protect your reputation. I found the name of a dead man. You will be registered as Mr Jones.”

He turned toward the other people in the room. “You will each receive a percentage of the profits as an annuity. And you will no longer have to engage in any of the associated activities.” 

Michael then grabbed the file to hand it to Tommy.

“Take a look at the future, Tommy. At least read it with an open mind.” 

The head of the Peaky Blinders paused, looking at Michael intensely before taking the file. “It’s cold in here, Michael.” He finished, turning to the fireplace and throwing the catalogue there. 

Johnny Dog let out an excited laugh, surely due to the heavy atmosphere the two cousins had settled. 

“Tommy the Americans want to deal with me.” Michael’s jaw tensed as his voice raised with impatience. 

“Item number three--” Continued Thomas as if nothing happened. But he was cut off by Gina’s venom:

“Tell him the truth.” She seemed unsatisfied with the way his husband chose to handle the situation. Tommy’s eyes hassled toward the young woman, speechless. “Go on. He can take it.” She continued.

His eyes went back to Michael that looked away, immediately, as if he didn’t want to come to this end.

“Tell me the truth, Michael.” Tommy encouraged, exasperated by this whole scene.

“The Americans don’t want to deal with an old-fashioned backstreet razor gang. Those days are done.” Michael gained composure again, looking blankly at Tommy.

The latter couldn’t even correctly react that some men entered the pub, needing some help to handle Bartley, who was convinced he was still at war. Everybody got out of the room in a hurry except for Michael, Gina, Tommy & Pol’.

Passing by Michael to get out, Arthur leaned to his ear slowly, “Fuck the Americans.”

Tommy turned around, hand on the wooden piece as he was leaning above the fireplace, looking intensely into the orangish flames.

“I’m doing this for you Tommy. It’s time… And you know it.”

The concerned one, closed his eyes taking a deep breath in and tried to calm his nerves and think. But nothing came to him, he couldn’t even properly swallow how much Michael’s betrayal had extended, the worst was that he was sure, it wasn’t the end of it. His cousin probably wanting to take everything from him slowly he surely voluntarily omitted things. 

“Tommy, Mum’s leaving. John’s dead. Arthur needs help. Ada’s man was killed in your own backyard because you fucked up.” Now that there weren’t people to impress, Michael let the anger he felt toward his cousin’s actions.

The elder blue-eyed man couldn’t stay calm a second more, he abruptly turned around, grabbed the bottle of whiskey that was on the table and violently threw it in the fire, creating the flames to only grow bigger. Gina was scared, she held her chair with tightened hands and Polly and she jumped with surprise on their chair.

He turned again to Michael as the latter held him a butterfly knife already open.

“Go on, Tom. Go on cut me. Like the good old days. Or… See this for what it is. A natural succession that someday must happen” His arm going down again.  

At this point, the Shelby brother had calmed down, finding funny the proposition he was offered. His lips smacked and breathed deeply, looking at anything but his opposant. He shook his head in disbelief, “I gave you an opportunity, Michael. You betrayed me. Don’t be here when I get back.” He looked at his younger cousin, deceived by him and angry at himself.

After losing $2 millions in the Wall Street crash., Tommy gave him an opportunity to come back to England and pay him what he owed him, but even there, in the boat, Michael met with people that are Shelby’s family enemy. When that happened, Tommy gave him the benefit of the doubt. And now this? Michael went too far, and this time Tommy will not close his eyes on it. The only reason his cousin was still breathing was that he's Polly’s son.

He walked around the table and addressed Gina, smacking his fingers as he pointed her, leaning forward. “You. You can tell your family--”

“Let me guess.” She interrupted him, the same satisfying face she had at the beginning of the meeting. “Don’t fuck with the Peaky Blinders.” That wasn’t a question.

Michael grinned, as Tommy quickly got out of the pub. 

“Right?” Gina mockingly asked.

(...)

Tommy was spending most days at the House Of Commons lately doing speeches in favor of fascism to the greatest pleasure of Mosley. 

That day, he was there from early in the morning to the evening. It was already around 10, but his assistant opened the door to his office, saying someone was there but without having an appointment. 

“Who it is?” He asked, raising a brow, one of his hands went in his pocket to check on his watch.

“The librarian.”

It’s been nearly two weeks since your last meeting and at the simple mention of you, he would find his blood boiling in anticipation of the wave of feelings you brought him.

His pulsions talking for him, the Shelby brother ordered to let you in without questioning why you were here that late.

“Mr Shelby, you asked me to get information about a certain Michael Gray?” You came in like a tornado, your voice filled with sarcasm mixed with enthusiasm as you were the one pushing him to act on his cousin’s betrayal weeks ago.

How ironic was it that he had to learn the hard way you had been right since the very beginning,  you surmised something must’ve happened between the younger gray and him given the determined words he’d written on the note he left at the library sat in one of the two chairs facing his desk. “No time for formalities.” You agitated the folder in her hand.

He almost gasped at your movements, he had forgotten how sensual you were.

Whenever they would meet, you would succeed to arouse something in him, maybe even igniting a fire that couldn’t be found when you weren’t around. 

“You might want to read that!” You nodded to yourself, your brows raised high as if you detained the most important information of the decade.

“You do me the lecture.” His playful tone made you look up to him. Your head tilted at the sight of the glasses hanging on Tommy’s nose as you released a little “huh” from your lips.

He squinted his eyes, not knowing why the actual fuck did you do that. Did you just judge him or was he dreaming? 

He took off the glasses and placed them on the table, not wanting to deal with that face you just made again, all while remaining silent and invited you to begin.

You clicked your tongue in disapproval. “Do you think it’s going to be free, Mr Shelby?” You looked intensely at him, your own eyes devoid of emotions.

He hated the fact you were able to just erase your emotion from your face and your eyes as he desperately wanted to see things in them. But him being him, he too put on an expressionless face.

“What do you want?”

“Everything, but you can’t give that to me. So I’ll just answer ‘whatever’.” 

He frowned, not understanding her point.

“When I’ll need something, you’ll be answering present without the option to say no.”

He remained silent, quite taken aback by how forward you  was. His jaw clenched, tension building up in the room. If stares could send lightnings, they’d both be nothing but a pile of ashes by now.

Reading his silence, you deduced it means he was alright with the deal and proceeded to answer his previous wish, do him a lecture.

“It is written here that Gina Gray’s family isn’t rich, but they weren’t starving either…” You begins. You then allowed a sweet “bla-bla-bla” to come out your lips as passing over the words searching for a specific part.

Tom didn’t miss your deeds a bit. From the enthusiastic tone in your voice to your serious face. He looked at the way your were sitting, legs crossed with the file on your thighs as you was slightly leaning forward. 

No wonder your were excited to show him your findings while handling business like a boss. He caught himself thinking your were cute. 

It was the first time he’d seen your that commited. He’d seen you focused, but you were always passive whereas now, your seemed completely into what your were talking about.

“The part that interests us is this one ‘Has an uncle that meets up at the docks several times a week with a group of people being a part of the drugs industry. It seems they cover their activities by the image of a protestant group and illegally sends rifles under God’s cause to our beloved Scottish friends, in other words, the Billy boys. And this, on a daily basis.” 

You patted the paper.

“It is written here, they counted around 6 boats per month, Tom.” You raised your kindling gaze to the icy blue-eyed man. 

He paused, his lips slightly opening before sliding a hand on his face and looking down.

It seems Tommy didn’t believe what he was hearing.

He leaned on the desk and opened the wooden box where his cigarettes were. 

His back harshly met his chair as he stared at the woman, blinking.

“I’m serving it on a plate, to you, Thomas.” You”d serenely let out, as if you understood him without having him saying anything. “Just deal with it.”

“How much do you trust this contact?” 

“I trust him with my life.” You responded.

With this partnership, he didn’t proceed the same as usual by offering something in return. He didn’t have the time to give you a proper offer that you'd already started to work in favor of his plan against Mosley, so this relationship was more based on the trust they have into each other rather than a commun exchange of services.

Today was the first time you’d ask him to return the favor, and it was today as well that the man had to wittingly choose to trust her blindly.

He coughed and lighted his cig, and put an elbow on the wooden desk as he was still deeply in thoughts.

You got up, moving slowly and leaned on the desk, hands flat on it, her face not even a centimeter away from his. “If you don’t trust that,” you pointed at him and then at you, “end it.” You finished.

The mood automatically shifted due to the tension that has quickly installed between the two individuals. 

Not for even one second did you imagine things to get this sensual. Here you were, desperately searching other's eyes out of each other’s grip.

Tommy’s eyes hungrily drifted to your lips, and stayed there more than it should’ve.

You moved back and turned your heels, leaving the room.

Too much in too little time. This. What that even was, and what did it mean?

This was the reason why you never got emotionally involved in business . But that was different now. But for you, that always kept the idea that the past wasn't supposed to repeat itself, the present was slapping maybe too hard.

Thank God you succeeded at getting out, not because of Tommy, but utterly because of yourself. If you had stayed so much as one second more, you didn’t know what you would’ve done, or maybe you did know but preferred to bury it away.

It was easier that way.

Following Chapter ❱

[rametarin]

And the evil red horse to the whole equation: As the Weimar Republic was experiencing its own problems, the grating problems caused by economic starvation due to Imperial Germany's WW1 reparations and losses as the losers, they also had to deal with the communists conspiring to take over land, institutions and engage in mafioso behavior.

The communists were under a radical set of values that involved a singular society, "The People," and casting off all previous cultural ties (or so they said. The reality was it was Russo-Supremacism using the language of communist radical revolution.) The Russo-Supremacist Red Faction was sweeping westward and nipping at the heels of every left leaning population and educational institution as they started taking and converting businesses by force.

Germans had just got done being shit on and cursed for being German and made economic peasants and debtors as a people for the last few years to decades (depending on when we're taking our sample) and what communism promised was absorbing them into yet another borglike extension of communism plagued by infighting and deficit of resources, which also would curse their German origins as vile bourgoise and demand they start learning Russian. They knew this. Because it was happening elsewhere.

The Nazis came to power out of fear of the imminent Soviet creep, which WAS in fact working to do to them what they eventually did to Poland, East Germany and other now post-Soviet parts of East and Central Europe. If the Nazis didn't come to power, the Communists WOULD have taken the rest of Germany, too. The Nazis were the resistance to the communists, which were vying for power both legitimately in the civic side, and illegitimately as guerilla gangs beating up non-communists in the streets.

When a communist sneers at a Nazi, it's not because of their horrible inhumane views about non-whites (though that is a good reason a NORMAL person despises the Nazis.) It's because they dared to rebuke communism. And that carries on today with how Russia is speaking of Ukraine. Tankies and Soviet Sympathizers and covert Russosupremacists have always said this shit. And they haven't stopped saying it since the Nazis became a thing.

Turning the short lived, ineffectual, histrionic and deadly Nazi regime into this larger than life spectacle has only been so successfully mainstream and universal because it fit the propaganda needs of three specific parties.

1.) The western warhawks, which have been more right-wing historially but engaged with by the leftists because what the Nazis stood for was wrong. The Western Warhawks will put a moral stance to it and often cite it being ungodly and evil as a reason it was opposed, with religious implications. The western leftists will emphasize the evils, specifically, of white supremacism and racism.

2.) Tankies, Russo-Supremacists and Socialist Sympathizers, who emphasize that the Nazis were right-ring (they weren't exactly, unless you define any militarism as right-wing) and cite capitalism as the reason everthing went to shit, and then it's to be inferred that socialism and communism (in that order) are a solution to these social ills, rather than what accelerated and acerbated them.

3.) The Jews, who hold a place under both the religious right and the leftist social scientists propaganda, and for themselves. The religious right cite the importance of the Jewish people in Christianity and have often tied the tragedy of the holocaust to bible prophecy, scavenging off the event to argue biblical prophecy is on the horizon and real. The more leftist socialist use for the Jews as propaganda is to beat the drums about the evils of white supremacism, European colonialism, xenophobia and antisemitism as a specific and grevious teller that you're an unforgivable monster that must be routed out, socially ostracized or reputationally destroyed and given a free pass to be "punch first, ask questions later" about. And the Jews, who cite the holocaust as evidence of persecution above and beyond what should rationally be directed at them.

So you have the right wing, left wing and an influential, objectively wronged and traumatized minority (one of many) telling their stories about how horrible the Nazis are for their own specific reasons, all seeming to be in agreement and corroborating eachothers stories and reasons, even if they seem slightly out of sync and discordant in tone if you get to the granular emotional spectrum surrounding the facts, and what each side emphasizes on.

And also why despite Ukraine suffering catastrophic losses at the hands of the Soviets, or other places losing more of their population, you barely hear about those groups. And why the Jewish story gets so much press in comparison to the losses the Nazis inflicted on other groups.

So because of it, the overarching hatred for the worst of white supremacism, the Nazis as a concept and culture being the worst of what white supremacism has to offer, the objectively factual reality of the harm the Nazis inflicted, you wind up at a place where it seems every flesh and blood human being in Germany preceding and flowing into Nazi Germany, seems like an utter monster of a person from an irredeemable monster of a culture. None of these parties that have an agenda to wag a finger at white supremacism or white supremacists have any inclination to use a scalpel instead of a broad brush and every reason to imply there's virtually no difference between the Nazis of the 1930s and 40s and any given group of white people, today, but the supposed powder keg of their hatred being lit and showing their, "real face."

When in reality, the German people on the whole were victims of post-imperialism, suffering under an ineffectual republic and economy, and then being parasited on from the inside by communist guerillas that promised to unmake everything they were from behind curtains and slowly change them inside out.

How could they NOT reach for the hands of whatever tyrannical, delusional bullshit artist promised them a way to retain the image of their culture, language and ethnic identity (two things which modern people concede are important for people, today, so long as they aren't white) when faced with a rapidly closing window before violence fell upon them?

You can learn a lot about people by studying the German situation pre-WW2, during and post-WW2. But unfortunately, few go beyond the few truths of "racial supremacism bad" (most stop at 'white supremacism bad') and "fascism bad." But some people want the lessons to begin and end there.

Those people are usually communists. So, y'know.

Thank you for defending Nazis. They're just little guys. Just misunderstood, with genuine grievances. I noticed you accidentally forgot to defend child rapists. Dumb commies like you are all the same 🙄

Piss on the poor! Also I'm not a commie and never claimed to be one.

[baeddel]

Actually out of curiosity wrt like the stuff you've talked about recently, what are your particular thoughts on things like spiritual ecology and our consciousness in relation to our environment?

This is something that I’m like, pretty much at the beginning of figuring out lol but yeah thats something I’m really interested in... I kinda joke that I’m a ‘secular animist’. My big inspiration is Boris Arvatov who talked about the need to make inanimate objects that could act as ‘co-constructors of socialist life.’ His idea is a little different to the kind of animism in House where Houses have essentially always been sentient but their sentience has been disavowed, and they were able to stage a sort of epistemic revolution that rendered their sentience visible; they join the socius or the moral community. For Arvatov (and Rodchenko) it is rather the case that the objects that we have around us are made to be slaves, completely passive, and we have to make objects which are active, which he called the New Industrial Object. This new object “metaphorizes and organizes the body” (Christina Kiaer, 2009), where the human and the inanimate become entangled by a total interactivity. I do not just manipulate the object, the object manipulates me, it transforms me and my consciousness.

I think there are already such objects; the best example is the wheelchair. If I lose the use of my legs, I can no longer walk. When I get in the wheelchair, it’s not that everything goes back to normal and I go back to walking. It reorganizes everything about me. I encounter new alien pleasures, I make room for an alien desire; the feeling of cobbles under my wheels or of soft grass, the exchange of trust and intimacy when I let my partner push. At the same time, all of society in turn is reorganized by the wheelchair: steps become ramps, stairs become elevators, hinges become motors.

But while Arvatov had a good imagination, it didn’t go far enough, because if you think about this for long enough you begin to realize that every object is such an object. You see, Heidegger has this famous line of argument about the hammer. For him, an object like a hammer has a special kind of being which he calls ‘readiness-to-hand’. I think he’s operating on an Aristotlean metaphysics where being can be passive or active (ie. a leaf has passive being, to use Sachs’ example, but a plant has active being, because it actively photosynthesizes). For Heidegger, we can begin to encounter the active being of the hammer by hammering, “hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer”, in a way that only contemplating the hammer wouldn’t. He calls the being of the hammer ‘readiness-to-hand’, a being which can be picked up and used.

But it isn’t just hammers that are ready-to-hand; we are ready-to-hand. I talked before about how trained dogs who try to solve problems will eventually give up and look at their owners. To this extent, I am actually an expression of the dog’s phenotype (this is called an ‘extended phenotype’). So my dog, when trying to reach a toy that’s on the desk will first try reaching with his jaws, then try reaching with his paws, and when he still cannot reach, will look at me and I will get it for him; the dog manipulates me and discovers my readiness-to-hand. Not only dogs do this; in our bodies there is alien dna which we inherit from our ancestors, viruses which are inseparable from the human genome, etc., and all of these have a measurable effect on the decisions we make even though they aren’t, in contemplation, transparent to us. We encounter them only when actually coming under the influence, however slight that influence is. The extreme form of this is toxoplasma, a brain parasite that infects rats and reorganizes their desires; it makes them insatiably attracted to cat piss, which they actively seek out; thus obsessed, cats easily find and prey on it, and the parasite can transfer to the cat where it is able to reproduce.

But when I was talking about this before, @wrong-shaped pointed out that I was making an arbitrary distinction between things which are inside the body and things which are outside the body. A table does much more to organize my desire than any virus. How much time do I spend putting things on tables, leaning on tables, and so on? The table cannot be a sufficient cause of my leaning on the table, but it is a necessary cause. In this way the table acts to organize my desire around itself; it encounters my readiness-to-hand.

An inanimate object’s activity can be more or less. A painting wrapped up in an attic somewhere gets very little opportunity to express its being; and it expresses its being differently to a human, who likes to gaze on the pigmentation, than it does to a dog, who likes to smell the linseed oil. Here we return to Arvatov and the call to make new objects. Isn’t it really the case that most objects are straw dogs, which we use and discard? Though they express themselves, they organize our desire, we encounter them, the extent to which we are really co-creating life with them is minimal. At the same time, the commodity-form, which these objects express, treats us like straw dogs; though we express ourselves through it, it uses us and discards us. So we encounter each other in a confusing soup of subjugation. The exit will be, as in House, both a communist revolution and an epistemic revolution.

[king-killaway]

It's hard to talk about how badly this country, (Untied Sates) has brainwashed its citizens without sounding like a conspiracy theory nut or something of the like.

Every single media that's ever been released by a studio with ties to anything with public opinion is completely Pro-USA propaganda.

The best examples of this is any action movie that uses the US military. Movies that require government approval. And I don't mean, "yeah you're good you didn't screw up a couple of facts", I mean a whole damn, "good you paint the US as the good guys and everything else as bad and evil."

News stations that get funding directly from in House politicians or hell even the ex president (I'm looking at you Fox News).

All of it is subtle too. The propaganda begins at an early age here in the "good ol' US of A", reciting the Pledge of Allegiance from kindergarten everyday up until high school. To the very addition of seminary classes in said high schools even though there's supposed to be "Separation of Church and State".

Even simple things such as ad campaigns that bombard you daily to the point you only take in what they're saying subconsciously. Its become such a normal thing to hear about the newest model of the iPhone that you don't even realize they make them to break in a year or two, just to extort you of your money.

Its fabricated into the very veins of this country that if you "just work hard enough" you can do anything, be anyone. Lies. It's all lies intentionally written to make you feel guilty about being "lazy" because you're not successful, when in reality if you're born poor you'll likely never move any higher on the class scale.

Public education was a driving force of what our country was founded on, but is public education free? No. Not even mandatory education such as grade, middle, and high schools are free. If you send even just one child to school K-12 you'll spend around 200$ to 3,000$+ per year just to have one child in "free public education", and that's just the known costs. More are hidden away in your taxes.

Healthcare is an utter sham. Private pharmaceutical companies are outright inhumane and unethical, but under the facade of Capitalism are completely normalized.

Similarly, privately owned and run prisons are just slavery 2.0. Using underpayed labor to make things like the licence plates on your car. Or forcing them into unsafe working environments, "volunteering" them as firefighters and construction workers. Most prisoners make around 0.25 cents per hour of work and spend almost all of that back to the private prison system for basic necessities like hygiene items. When prisoners are released back into the general public, they've received almost nothing to help them rehabilitate into society and are then brought back into prison for repeating crimes. It's a purposely built cycle to keep minorities suppressed and felons, most of which are there for nonviolent offenses, unable to return to society and reliant on the prison system. The system that then thrives via a workforce that will never deplete and cannot legally unionize.

Engrained even further is the idea of a Nuclear family, an idea only ever truly accomplished by already well off straight white citizens. It is then therefore fault on the individual for failing to meet society's standards of a successful life. May poor and marginalized families are unable to meet this unnecessary standard, specifically Latino families are targeted the hardest by this. It also demonizes any families that have gone through a divorce or families that live in two separate parts of the world.

Christianity is the standard in the US, this is evident from any piece of government document you read. It's a line in the Pledge of Allegiance, which as already mentioned is in itself propaganda dug into child from the moment they start school, "In God We Trust". However, allegedly you have freedom of religion, meaning you can freely practice any religion in the United States without persecution, but that doesn't mean its without bias. Specifically Muslims and Jews are targeted the worst here, especially after 9/11. (Which if you really dig into that event's history you find some pretty fucked up shit the US did, which included the funding and gifting of money, weapons, and military training to ISIS.) Events that you will likely never learn about in a textbook.

You'll also probably never learn about the true extent of the Red Scare on US soil in a textbook either. When US military would stalk and murder suspected "Communist" in its own country. Most of which who died were in fact not Russian Spies, but rather protesters of the Cold War. Plenty of which had access to the creation and distribution of media, specifically movies. Plenty of directors in Hollywood were killed for no other reason that because someone who didn't personally like them called in and accused them of "Communist behavior".

Need I remind people that the holiday of Thanksgiving exists? The celebration of death and plauge to Native Americans within their own homes because of colonization. That before Black Africans were shipped over as property, Natives were originally used as slaves and brutality murdered.

That last year police started riots at peaceful protests, well within constitutional rights, and to top it off the ex president started an insurrection which led to the storming of November 3rd.

And this is all just the tip of the iceberg that is USA propaganda, a system built around keeping minorities from being able to accomplish anything with first "proving" themselves worthy. A system built around Wealthy Christian, White Nuclear families and little room for anyone else. An entire country built on over inflated pride and ego without the guts to own up to its mistakes.

The United States is broken and the first step to fixing this country is to understand what's wrong.

[undefined5posts]

Credit: Jordan J. Lloyd

I've been trying to dive deeper into politics, discover the genuine roots of our society, the origins of our beliefs, and the consequences of our economic system. It's a big, long, wide journey and through multiple sources such as articles, images, videos and multiple social media platforms, I've been trying to educate myself more on important subjects.

Communism, capitalism, libertarian, conservative, the left, the right, the history, the impact. It is scary to commit to everything because once you start, you simply cannot stop, once you start waking up your conscience about the horrible reality, the lies, the truths, you cannot put it back to sleep. You can't just ignore prejudice, especially when you're extremely conscious of it's omnipresence. I have continually tried to build my own opinions all while actively creating bullet point arguments in my mind because I just know that at some point I will have to defend my thinking, and I want to do it right.

Now, I am so far from being enlightened, I am a beginner and an amateur in all of those themes, but I am trying, which is the only way to start and grow.

So to tell you about my beliefs, I am a militant human rights activist, I believe in equal opportunities regardless of gender identity, sex, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race and disability. This is a fact, not a belief, but the system was obviously not built to protect all people, its wasn't created to serve everyone equally but to grant a privilege to some and harm others. The current state of the world is not a slip, an accident or a misfunction of our brilliant system but a testament of it operating remarkably well. I believe that equity leads to equality, and I believe that we cannot "fix" methodologies that were immorally created with absolutely no honor whatsoever. I believe in reproductive rights, in legal, safe abortions for anybody who needs one. I believe in the decriminalization of marijuana. I believe that the death penalty is a despicable punition that should be banned as soon as possible. I believe in defunding the police and the military. I believe that it is a shame that I even have to talk about police brutality, I don't want to have to say that it is one of the most horrible things our world has originated, I feel extremely dense when I do because it seems like the most obvious certitude and I refuse to believe that this is a controversial statement. I believe that everything I have just stated, along with many more, isn't anything grand but the bare minimum, the bar is low, and yet, we still have the fight for basic human decency.

Humanity has become an option. We have normalized supporting people that represent everything wrong in this world under the name of tolerance. The left has never claimed to be tolerant towards hateful beings, We have never accepted homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism and sexism. We cannot, for exemple, accept nazis, as too much tolerance inevitably leads to intolerance. This picture explains it perfectly:

I consider myself a communist/ socialist. The two terms still confuse me a little, some say they are the same, some say they differ quite a bit. What I know is that socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. At the end of the day, the final result and goal is a stateless, moneyless and clasless society that will provide to each his need.

Our capitalistic society has brainwashed us way more than you may think. It is the root of so many of our issues, the underground demon of our problems. Every idea, thought, belief, and misconception of ours were all affected by our current economic system. It has sold us the billionnaire dream which is one of the most toxic things capitalism has offered. We have looked up to billionaires for way too long, why are they so idolized? Most of them come from high upper class families that can easily afford to invest in their inventions and creations. After starting up their companies and occasionnaly stealing other's people ideas to ultimately get undeserved merit, they then can start to properly exploit their hardworking employees's labour. And for unlimited hours and a minimum wage which probably won't even suffice you to survive, you will have to either pick up more shifts or a second or even third job, especially if you have a family to support. All while the CEO barely does any of the work and gets all the praise and money. So no, they don't all come from really poor families and have built everything for nothing.

The worst thing is that we've been so gaslit and brainwashed that we're proud of our own exploitation, we are wired to think that to be successful we have to suffer, work 10 jobs we all hate, constantly pick up extra hours, have 2 hours of sleep, have no free time to do anything we love, waste our entire youth, be depressed our entire adulthood, to finally have a few pennies to spend when we're eighty. We so strongly believe that this is the only right way to be successful that I don't think many of us have dared to question it's authority, and even if we do, we quickly accept that this a truth, a fact we cannot change and this is just the way things are.

We have capitalized water, food, land, forests, oceans, space, and everything in betweeen. Money is social construct and we have deliberately let it take over our lives. To think about the wasted opportunities and the misery that we have to endure so others can enjoy life truly angers me.

Also, communism is not an ideology that has every actually taken place. Despite what they say, there was never actually a communist country. However, every nation that has attempted a socialist system, for exemple Burkina Faso, has thrived. But of course, once capitalist countries noticed that, they decided to murder it's leader. So in conclusion, the only reason socialism failed is because of capitalism and it's interventions.

"As President (1983-1987), Sankara initiated economic reforms that shifted his country away from dependence on foreign aid and reduced the privileges of government officials; he cut salaries, including his own, decreed that there would be no more flying in first class or driving Mercedes as standard issue vehicles for Ministers and other government workers. He led a modest lifestyle and did not personally amass material wealth. President Sankara encouraged self-sufficiency, including the use of local resources to build clinics, schools and other needed infrastructure. [...] President Sankara promoted land reform, childhood vaccination, tree planting, communal school building, and nation-wide literacy campaigns. He was committed to gender equity and women’s rights and was the first African leader to publicly recognize the AIDS pandemic as a threat to African countries. Although Sankara became somewhat more authoritarian during his Presidency, his ideas, and the possibility that they could spread, were viewed by many as posing the greatest threat. President Sankara was assassinated during a coup led by a French-backed politician, Blaise Compaoré, in October 1987. Compaoré served as the President of Burkina Faso from October 1987 through October 2014, when he himself was overthrown."

Via:https://africandevelopmentsuccesses.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/success-story-from-burkina-faso-thomas-sankaras-legacy/

I have been reading and watching some amazing human rights activists, notably Angela Davis, Malcolm X and James Baldwin. The people that were villainized, labeled as violent and radical, when every single word that came out of their mouhs were pure facts. They are probably some of the most eloquent people I have had the pleasure of hearing. Every sentence, every argument, every single detail made so much sense and opened my mind to so many new realizations. This is the perfect exemple of how the media tarnishes the reputation of wise black women and men. I would strongly advise you to research more about them.

"Socialism & communism are demonized in the west to the point of erasing influential individuals' socialist advocacy. Heres a short list of people you may not have known were socialists/ communists:

MLK

Albert Einstein

Nelson Mandela

Frida Kahlo

Tupac Shakur

Mark Twain

Malcom X

Oscar Wilde

Bertrand Russell

Hellen Keller

Pablo Picasso

George Orwell

Shia LaBeouf

John Lennon

Woody Guthrie

Socialism & communism are not dirty words. Some of the most brilliant minds of our history were socialists and communists. Embrace it." Via @sleepisocialist on twitter

So what else can I say, capitalism has ruined our society and the way we act and think. I know a lot of people refuse to support communism because they think it's too much of a perfect ideal utopian world for it to ever actually exist. And to that I say, first of all, so you agree, it is a wonderful theory, and second of all, a world without racism, sexism, homophobia or any kind or discrimination could also be perceived as "too ideal to actually exist", but does that mean I'm giving up on talking, educating myself and others, protesting and trying to build a better future? Absolutely not. This is the objective, it would be so dumb to think that we just couldn't achieve that so let's not even try.

I want to talk more in detail about communism, theory, human rights, etc... but I don't want to make this post any longer. I will however be posting more about it soon enough.

I know this is a little different than what I usually post, but I want to speak, tell you all my own opinions, I don't want to just repost activism related stuff. I'll continue to do that, but not exclusively. I know it won't get as many interactions as my other posts, but this is what I needed at some point in my life, and if I could make understanding some basic informations easier to some people, it'll already be a great accomplishment.

Thank you for reading.

[random-thought-depository]

I suspect it was mostly just because he was writing in the nineteenth century, when abolition of child labor was a much more radical idea than it is now. Same reason the Cuban communist government was homophobic in the middle twentieth century (gay rights was a fairly radical idea back then), and the American Founding Fathers were racist and sexist and mostly at least kind of OK with slavery (they were alive during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when racial and gender equality and slavery abolition were actually pretty radical ideas), etc..

Like, back when Marx was writing it was a normal established practice to have children working in factories, and this was basically a continuation of a millennia-old tradition of children working alongside their older relatives on farms and in artisanal workshops. From the perspective of today we easily correctly see children working in factories as horrifying, but it's a lot easier to recognize that the "we should improve society somewhat" people were right if you live in a society where they won and the result was basically a pretty obvious straightforward improvement compared to what existed before (also, "children shouldn't be expected to be even partially economically/productively self-supporting" is one of the many good things we can more easily afford today because we're vastly more productive/wealthier than the society Marx lived in). Karl Marx was writing in a time when "children should just learn and play and live and shouldn't be expected to do productive labor" was a very utopian idea and it would have been super-easy for even relatively progressive people to dismiss it as an excess of head-in-the-clouds bohemian utopianism, the same way lots of relatively progressive people dismiss things like veganism or youth rights today. What I think we're seeing here is fundamentally a failure of the thing Somni called "timeless seeing"; a failure to imagine something that lay beyond the immediate socio-political horizons of the thinker's society. I expect (and hope) a lot of takes from relatively progressive people today will read similarly reactionary and cringe to people in the 2150s (about as far from us as we are from Marx).

Like, I think a 2020s equivalent to Marx's "trying to abolish child labor would be reactionary, actually" sentiment is those people claiming that ethical vegetarianism is actually a colonialist and Eurocentric idea and therefore reactionary and the practice and attitude of a truly enlightened society will be to continue to kill and eat animals but doing it with some touchy-feely hippie-ish notion of "reciprocity." Or that person @feotakahari was interacting with a little while back who thought transhumanism was fundamentally eugenicist and reactionary and the desire for immortality was a fundamentally immature cultural pathology of colonialist societies that caused them to form "death cults" and people in "death competent" societies didn't/wouldn't want immortality. Adopting a basically centrist political position and then saying "actually, the centrist position is the maximally progressive one here," and hippie-punching by accusing the hippies of being reactionaries is a very common thing in progressive thought. It's just very easy to fall into as a basic factor of how human minds and society works, and it's not always wrong, sometimes people actually do advocate for bad and kind of reactionary ideas while posing as leftist ultra-radicals and genuinely being farther from the center of the Overton Window than the people calling them reactionaries. Also I think it's often a tempting posture for leftists and liberals with anxieties about how they're perceived by others, people often fear being mistaken for a member of the class that's adjacent to them and just below them in social status, I suspect a lot of leftists and liberals simultaneously want to be very progressive and are haunted by the fear of being mistaken for a stereotypical "stupid bleeding-heart hippie" (or whatever their time and place's equivalent of that is) and are anxious to distinguish and distance themselves from that stereotype, and that mindset makes punching leftward from a position of galaxy brain centrism an appealing posture.

From, respectively, the appendix to the critique of the gotha programme and Ch. 15, Sec. 9 of Capital, Vol. I

Marx was kind of enthusiastic about child labour and its future under communism!