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dwellordream · 4 years ago

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“...Because if we want to ask “What was life as a woman like in Sparta?” we really need to ask “What was life like as a helot woman?” because they represent c. 85% of all of our women and c. 42.5% of all of our humans. And I want to stress the importance of this question, because there are more helot women in Sparta than there are free humans in Sparta (as from last time, around 15% of Sparta is free – men and women both included – but 42.5% of Sparta consists of enslaved helot women). If we want to say absolutely anything about the condition of life in Sparta, we simply cannot ignore such a large group of human beings living in Sparta.

...The primary economic occupation of helot women was probably in food preparation and textile production. And if I know my students, I know that the moment I start talking about the economic role of women in ancient households, a very specific half of the class dozes off. Wake Up. There is an awful tendency to see this ‘women’s work’ as somehow lesser or optional. These tasks I just listed are not economically marginal, they are not unimportant. Yes, our ancient sources devalue them, but we should not.

First: let’s be clear – women in ancient households (or early modern households, or modern households) were not idle. They had important jobs every bit as important as the farming, which had to get done for the family to survive. I’ve estimated elsewhere that it probably takes a minimum of something like 2,220 hours per year to produce the minimum necessary textile goods for a household of five (that’s 42 hours a week spinning and weaving, every week). Most of that time is spent spinning raw fibers (either plant fibers from flax to make linen, or animal fibers from sheep to make wool). The next step after that is weaving those threads into fabric. Both weaving and spinning are slow, careful and painstaking exercises.

Food preparation is similarly essential, as you might imagine. As late as 1900, food preparation and cleanup consumed some 44 hours per week on average in American households, plus another 14 hours dedicated to laundry and cleaning (Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness (1993)). So even without child rearing – and ask any parent, there is a TON of work in that – a small peasant household (again, five members) is going to require something like 100 hours per week of ‘woman’s work’ merely to sustain itself.

Now, in a normal peasant household, that work will get split up between the women of the house at all ages. Girls will typically learn to spin and weave at very young ages, at first helping out with the simpler tasks before becoming fully proficient (but of course, now add ‘training time’ as a job requirement for their mothers). But at the same time (see Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) on this) women often also had to engage in agricultural labor during peak demand – sowing, harvesting, etc. That’s a lot of work to go around. Remember, we’re positing a roughly 5 individual household, so those 100 hours may well be split between only two people (one of whom may be either quite old or quite young and thus not as productive).

...Let’s start textiles. Spartiate women do not engage in textile manufacture (Xen. Lac. 1.4) as noted previously, nor do they seem (though the evidence here is weaker) to engage in food preparation. In the syssitia, at least, the meals are cooked and catered by helot slaves (Plut. Lyc. 12.5, 12.7). In the former case, we are told explicitly by Xenophon that it is slave labor (he uses the word doule, “female slave,” which clearly here must mean helot women) which does this.

So helot women now have an additional demand on their time and energy: not only the 2,200 hours for clothing their own household, but even more clothing the spartiate household they are forced to serve. If we want to throw numbers at this, we might idly suppose something like five helot households serving one spartiate household, suggesting something like a 20% increase in the amount of textile work. We are not told, but it seems a safe bet that they were also forced to serve as ‘domestics’ in spartiate households. That’s actually a fairly heavy and onerous imposition of additional labor on these helot women who already have their hands full.

We also know – as discussed last time – that helot households were forced to turn over a significant portion of their produce, perhaps as high as half. I won’t drag you all through the details now – I love agricultural modeling precisely because it lets us peak into the lives of folks who don’t make it into our sources – but I know of no model of ancient agriculture which can tolerate that kind of extraction without bad consequences. And I hear the retort already coming: well, of course it couldn’t have been that bad, because there were still helots, right? Not quite, because that’s not how poor farming populations work. It can be very bad and still leave you with a stable – but miserable – population.

Let’s talk about seasonal mortality. As the primary food-preparers in the helot household, helot women are going to have the job of managing a constrained but variable flow of food through an extended family that may include their husband, children, older relatives, etc. Given the low productivity of ancient farming, this is a tricky operation in systems where rents are extracting 10% or 20% of the farming yield every year, but given the demands of supporting an entirely unproductive class of elites, it becomes even harder. The key task here is stretching one harvest through the next planting to the next harvest, every year. That means carefully measuring out the food consumption of the household against the available reserves, making sure there is enough to last over the winter. If too much food is extracted by the elites, or the harvest fails or (likely) some combination, the family will run into shortage.

Now, the clever helot woman knows this – peasants, male and female, are canny survivors, not idiots, and they plan for these things (seriously, far too many of my students seem to instinctively fall into the trap of assuming serfs, peasants, etc. are idiots who don’t know what they are doing. These people have survived for generations with very few resources, often in situations of significant volatility and violence; they’re not stupid, they’re poor, and there is a difference!) – so she will have strategies to stretch out that food to try to keep herself and her family alive.

But that in turn often means inflicting a degree of malnutrition on the family unit, in order to avoid outright starvation – stretching the food out. It also probably means a lot of related strategies too: keeping up horizontal ties with other farming households so that there is someone to help you out in a shortage, for instance. Canny survivors. That said – especially in a situation where shortages hit everyone at once – a shortfall in food is often unavoidable.

But, we need to note two things here: first: humans of different ages and conditions react to malnutrition differently. Robust adults can tolerate and recover from periods of malnutrition relatively easily. For pregnant women, malnutrition increases all sorts of bad complications which will probably kill the child and may kill the mother. For the elderly and very young children, malnutrition dramatically increases mortality (read: lots of dead children and grandparents), as compromised immune systems (weakened by malnutrition) lead to diseases that the less robust old and young cannot fight off.

Second – and this is the sad and brutal part – feeding the agricultural workers, meaning the adult males (and to a lesser extent, adult females), has to come first, because they need to make it to the planting with sufficient strength to manage the backbreaking labor of the next crop. If it’s a choice between the survival of the family unit, and taking a chance that you lose Tiny Tim, our helot mother knows she has to risk Tiny Tim.

So in a good year, there is food enough for the entire household. Families expand, children grow up, the elderly part of the family makes it through another winter, imparting wisdom and comfort. But the bad years carry off the very young and the very old (and the as-yet unborn). For children who make it out of infancy, a series of bad years in early childhood – quite a common thing – are likely to leave them physically stunted. It was very likely that most helots were actually physically smaller and weaker than their better nourished spartiate masters for this reason (this is a pattern visible archaeologically over a wide range of pre-modern societies).

The population doesn’t contract, because the mortality isn’t hitting adults of child-bearing age nearly as hard, meaning that in future good years, there will be new children. In fact, societies stuck in this sad equilibrium tend to ‘bounce back’ demographically fairly quickly, because massive external mortality (say from war or plague) frees up land and agricultural surplus which leads to better nutrition which leads to less infant mortality which leads to rapid recovery.

...And so helot women must have spent a lot of time worrying about food scarcity, worrying if their sick and malnourished children or parents would make it through winter. Grieving for the lost child, the lost pregnancy, the parent taken too quickly. Probably all while being forced to do domestic labor for the spartiates, who were both the cause of her misery and at the same time did no labor at all themselves and yet were better fed than her family would ever be. Because peasant labor of any kind is so precariously balanced, we can really say that every garment woven for the spartiates, every bushel turned over, represented in some real sense an increase in that grief. Subsistence farming is always hard – but the Spartan system seems tailor made to push these subsistence farmers deeper and deeper into misery.

The instances of brutality against the helots – the murders and humiliations – which our sources preserve are directed at helot men, but it seems an unavoidable assumption that helot women were also treated poorly. Spartiate women were, after all, products of the same society which trained young men to ambush and murder helot men at night for no reason at all – it strikes me as an enormous and unsubstantiated leap to assume they were, for some reason, kind to their own female domestic servants.

In fact, the one thing we do know about spartiates – men and women alike – is that they seem to have held all manual laborers in contempt, regarding farming, weaving and crafting as tasks unbefitting of free people. I keep returning to it, but I want to again mention the spartiate woman who attempts to shame an Ionian woman because the latter is good at weaving, which in the mind of the spartiate, was labor unbecoming of a free person (Plut. Mor. 241d, note Xen. Lac. 1.4). The same attitude comes out of a spartiate man who, on seeing an Athenian convicted for idleness in court, praised the man, saying he had only been convicted of being free (Plut. Mor. 221c). This is a society that actively despises anyone who has to work for a living – even free people. Why wouldn’t that extend to its treatment of helot women?

To this, of course, we must add now the krypteia and incidents like the 2,000 murdered helots recounted by Thucydides (Thuc. 4.80). While the murdered are men, we need to also think of the survivors: the widowed wives, orphaned daughters, grieving mothers. This must have been part of the pattern of life for helot women as well – the husband or brother or cousin or father or son who went out to the fields one day and didn’t come back. The beautiful boy who was too beautiful and was thus murdered by the spartiates because – as we are told – they expressly targeted the fittest seeming helots in an effort at reverse-eugenics (Plut. Lyc. 28.3).

Finally, we need to talk about the rape. We are not told that spartiate men rape helot women, but it takes wilful ignorance to deny that this happened. First of all, this is a society which sends armed men at night into the unarmed and defenseless countryside (Hdt. 4.146.2; Plut. Lyc. 28.2; Plato, Laws 633). These young men were almost certainly under the normal age of marriage and even if they weren’t, their sexual access to their actual spouse was restricted.

Moreover (as we’ll see in a moment) there were clearly no rules against the sexual exploitation of helot women, just like there were no laws of any kind against the murder of helot men. To believe that these young men – under no direction, constrained by no military law, facing no social censure – did not engage in sexual violence requires disbelieving functionally the entire body of evidence about sexual violence in combat zones from all of human history. Anthropologically speaking, we can be absolutely sure this happened and we can be quite confident (and ought to be more than quite horrified) that it happened frequently.

But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers. There is a strong reason to believe that these are the same as the mothakes or mothones which begin appearing with greater frequently in our sources. Several of these mothakes end up being fairly significant figures, most notably Lysander (note Plut. Lys. 2.1-4, where Plutarch politely sidesteps the question of why Lysander was raised in poverty and seemed unusually subservient and also the question of who his mother was).”

- Bret Devereaux, “This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women.”

#spartan #greek #ancient #bret devereaux #history #cw: rape #weaving

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itsegerton · 4 years ago

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Chapter 1: Attack on the Neighbors

Anastasia realized as she looked through the crystal wall that surrounded her bedroom in her Beverly Hills mansion that it was a dark night, darker than usual. Even though there was a full moon, not a single beam of light could be seen in the deep blue sky, which matched the color of her hair.

It was a Saturday night. At 29 years of age, Anastasia was working, writing songs. Thanks to her family name and her father’s profession, she had chosen music as a career and excelled at it.

Her father, Nick Truman, was the leader of a legendary rock band and passed on to all his knowledge of the business to his youngest daughter. From an early age, Anastasia worked hard to become a famed music producer.

One song was giving Anastasia a hard time. A client had commissioned her with a song about discovering love and she knew very little about it. Luckily, she was an avid reader and as such, she tried to invocate all those romantic novels she had read and hated to help her finish the damn song.

A noise downstairs startled her. She looked up from the paper and placed her eyes on her bedroom door, then looked back out the window but could not spot anything out of the ordinary –except for that darkness which she found strange. Anastasia was sitting on a bench next to a crystal wall, from where she could stare down to her patio and a big infinity pool and some classic garden elements such as chairs and tables. The house was two stories high and all the walls that faced the patio were glass. Those incredible views convinced her of buying that house six years ago.

In spite of being born with a silver spoon in her mouth, the blue-haired girl had worked since the age of fifteen; in music, modeling and even found the time to graduate as a professional musician in the University of California. She was not your typical Hollywood heiress living at her parents’ expense. Nevertheless, she had gone through a rebel phase where she partied every night and went on insane trips around the world, spending money without thinking of the consequences. That often put her in the front cover of tabloids, which dubbed her ‘her family’s disgrace.’

A new noise made her look away from her window. This time, it was louder and closer. They were movement noises. Objects were moving. At that precise moment, she understood why the night appeared as dark and in a millisecond, her brain deciphered that she had to leave that house as soon as possible.

Anastasia took her phone and tried calling her older sister, Barbara; she did not pick up. She tried again with no luck. She decided to compose a text message:

“I’m heading to your place.”

She put her phone in the back pocket of her jeans, left the pen and paper aside, and full of fear, headed to the entrance.

Anastasia opened the door to her bedroom; the rest of the house looked darker than usual as well. She did not need a flashlight; this was her home, she knew it by heart. As she arrived to the hallway before taking the stairs down, she felt an instant heaviness all over her body, just like she were carrying somebody heavy.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled. “Get out of my house!”

As she got halfway down the stars, Anastasia felt a sharp, deep headache. She had to stop and close her eyes due to the pain, but knew she could not stay there. As she could, she arrived to the lower floor and adjusted her sight to look around her. The heaviness and the headache increased. She took three steps and felt like something or someone pushed her. She fell over her largest couch. It was a short way until the entrance but felt like her arms and legs had turned to butter; it was impossible for her to stand straight. Suddenly, her sight turned red and it was hard to breathe.

Anastasia had to try with all her might to get out of there.

She crawled and made a great effort to make her way to the entrance when she heard a loud roar behind her. She did not stop to look back. One last adrenaline kick made her get up, take the keys to her car from a small table to her right, open the door and run to her car. Still struggling with that headache, she turned on the ignition and drove until her vision adapted to a normal environment.

One hour later she found herself knocking her stepsister’s door, in Malibu. She knocked so hard and insistently that her sister opened up, scared. Anastasia looked into Barbara’s eyes in panic and couldn’t keep standing. She collapsed at the entrance.

Barbara dragged Anastasia inside to her living room and sat her down on an emerald green futon. “They were at my house,” Anastasia fearfully told her sister. “They came to get me.”

“The night’s unusually dark, I knew something was going on,” replied Barbara as she went to get some fresh lemonade for Anastasia.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Anastasia asked while her sister offered her a glass.

Barbara did not reply. It wasn’t necessary.

Apart from having a musical gift, Anastasia is part of the witch population of the world. The witch community is much reduced and extremely occult. Witches have been persecuted for years because humans tend not to like what they cannot understand. Besides witches, there is a whole compendium of communities with hidden powers and some of them are dangerous even for witches.

Magical powers were granted to two members of each generation of families that had been initiated as witches. Barbara, who had light, mid-back length brown hair and big, green eyes like grass after rain, also had powers and perfectly understood what was happening.

Anastasia chugged the glass of lemonade.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“You won't like what I'm about to say.” Barbara replied. "You need to leave. You were lucky you got out.”

“Leave?!" She exclaimed. "Why were they looking for me?” Anastasia’s huge, turquoise eyes opened wide.

“They know you’re on your way to becoming a powerful witch. That’s not good for them. They want to get rid of us all.” Barbara turned her back on her sister. “There has to be a snitch within the coven,” she muttered.

“What did you say?” Anastasia asked, although she had heard her well.

“Nothing, it’s not important.” Barbara replied, causing suspicion to her younger stepsister. “You should go to sleep. The full moon will be over tomorrow, they can’t attack you anymore. I’m going to throw my moon water away, it’s contaminated.”

Anastasia walked with Barbara to the patio of the luxurious mansion located by the shore of a private beach. There, she had five half-a-gallon jars of water that she placed there every time there was a full moon, to be charged with the energy of the satellite. Together, they took the jars and emptied them in the coast, allowing the liquid to mix with the water from the ocean.

Sleeping was impossible that night. She had faced a beast and she was still alive. Adrenaline was running through her veins and the concern did not let her rest.

The following morning, Anastasia woke up with the sound of the breaking waves that went in through the big window that served as a wall. Malibu had that aura that eased her anxiety and her complicated brain. The sound of the ocean was helpful; she had always felt a connection to it.

The deep-blue-haired girl got up from the comfy bed and opened the window that faced a small balcony, from where she could glance at the entire coast and the backyard of her sister’s mansion. She breathed deeply, trying to fill up her lungs with the salty air and wondered if in another life she had inhabited the depths of the ocean, as a part of some civilization hidden from human stupidity.

She turned on her heel to her bathroom to take a quick shower. The weather was warm enough, so a grey dress and sneakers dressed her body that day. Anastasia always made sure to keep a change of clothes in that house as she crashed it from time to time. Her sister never closed the door on her.

Before leaving the bedroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. The color of her eyes varied from turquoise to aquamarine. They were big, enormous like a doll’s. Her skin was pale as china; she got it from her grandmother on her father’s side –a British gypsy witch. Her lips were small but plump. She decided on the spot not to wear makeup that day. She closed the door behind her and although she had to walk downstairs to the kitchen, a hunch told her to head up to the attic.

Just as her head predicted it, there was her sister in front of a big cauldron. Every witch had a specialty and Barb’s potions (as Anastasia affectionately called them) were the most effective of them all. Then she spotted another figure, her sister wasn't alone. A tall lady with light blonde hair, almost white was avidly talking with Barbara.

Anastasia took a seat on a red couch that stood out from all the wood around her. The attic was filled with shelves containing strange objects: jars, potion ingredients, and books. A sole rounded window provided the entire room with light. It could not be seen from the outside architecture of the mansion, from the ocean’s shore –that window was hidden under a strong, protective spell. Witches’ dens were personal and only explicitly invited humans could enter them.

The place was decorated with old pictures and paintings showing witches of all times, from gypsies to those brave women of Salem. Witches were always feared because of the power they represented. While men were heads of families whose function was to sustain, hunt, rule, govern and women were displaced to less relTaront activities, witches rose up to do everything the male gender could and more, therefore, many lost their lives. They were never understood and much less respected. Nowadays they lived hidden. The fear was never gone but while living a concealed life they could be themselves and put their powers to practice, waiting for the day the world could finally see them without a dagger slashing their necks.

The witches’ power was granted by nature. They had the ability to manipulate the Universe’s energies to achieve everything their hearts and minds, at unison, wished for. On the other hand, there were many other creatures that had stolen that power to use for their own benefit and own the world order. Many ruled nations and hurt thousands, they appeared in human form to the mortals’ eyes, but inside they were dark, shapeless, black-smoke-emitting masses with two red slits in the place of eyes. They fed on suffering and power kept them alive. They had no name, because by naming them they’d get the respect they did not deserve. Witches prevented them from taking over the world order, and therefore they dedicated their lives to hunting them and murdering them. When that happened, they sent their heads to the doorstep of the covens’ leaders as a warning that they were, bit by bit, achieving their goal.

That is why witches had to hide their power from humans. They didn’t know which of them could turn into one of those dark masses, except for Anastasia. She had been blessed with the maximum power of empathy. She could read people; know their deepest feelings by only looking into their eyes. When she did not feel an ounce of sadness or joy in a human, she knew she had to run.

Many had connected the power of witches to the devil, and while this is not exactly correct, many witches had chosen to serve evil with their powers. But there was no such malignant entity. Magic could do good and could also cause terrible suffering. Only those who could dominate both sides, light and darkness, could be leaders of the Coven. Many felt intimidated by handling dark arts, while others felt so attracted to them that darkness consumed them. Anastasia’s run with darkness had been scarce but satisfactory, so much that she became obsessed and Barbara had to intervene to regulate those practices.

“I have news,” said Barbara as soon as she felt the presence of her younger sister pointing to the lady at her side.

"I'm so sorry your Saturday was ruined like that", the blond lady said taking Anastasia but her arms. "You were so brave".

“Yeah.it wasn't like I was having fun anyway so…" said Anastasia in a low voice, as she glimpsed her sister rolling her eyes.

“They also attacked Mika at her house. They’re getting more aggressive and powerful.” Barbara was making a potion so her eyes were fixed on the cauldron.

“How did you survive?”, Anastasia looked to Mika.

“I took some paralyzing potion. The best one, made by Barb of course. My heart stopped for a few seconds and they thought I was dead, so they went off for a bit and I ran to seek shelter. I imagine that if they returned, they wouldn’t find me.” Barbara was adding some bright purple dust to the cauldron.

“Maybe that’s why they came to my house. Maybe they thought Mika was hiding there.” Anastasia’s word caused her sister to look into her eyes for the first time that morning.

“Why the hell would Mika hide at your house?” asked the eldest sister. Anastasia shrugged.

Instead of answering Mika looked at Anastasia kindly in her eyes. She took the girls hands and inspection them cautiously.

"I remember when you were born. Your midnight blue hair got all the hospital talking. We were so glad a witch was born. The first in a decade". The witches population had been shrinking thanks to the necessity of hiding their powers. Magic is like a muscle if you don't use it you'll lose it, as Barbara would love to say. Since the 80's born witches were a rare phenomenon, imagine a blue haired one.

"Yeah, I would like to remember my birth", Anastasia said sarcastically. Mika always created a sense of comfort when she was around, truth was that Anastasia wasn't very close to the North America Coven Leader as she was called by fellow witches in the continent. Mika ruled with a strong but emphatic hand and she was loved by everyone.

Mika was a role model but not to her. Magic wasn't something Anastasia focused a lot on. She actually kind of neglected it. Situation got easy out of hand in the past and she decided that magic wasn't going to define her.

"You are going to be a great leader one day", Mika turned her back to Anastasia and started walking around the room. "But you need to accept who you are and study" She made a pause "A lot".

Anastasia looked at Barbara confused. Her sister nailed her eyesight on the cauldron to avoid the big turquoise eyes.

"Yeah, I don't know about that. I can't even manage my own life, imagine being in charge of a whole damn coven. Never less one of the most important in the world!", she laughed but neither Mika nor Barbara raised even half smile.

"She needs time", Barbara said to Mika.

"Something we don't have", Mika answered. "Your sister told me you own a small apartment in London"

"I wouldn't call it small" Anastasia was interrupted by Mika.

"I suggest you take some time off to enjoy that gorgeous British grey skies", Mika said.

"Pardon me?", Anastasia was understanding everything now but her brain was trying to block what was coming.

"You need to leave", her sister said abruptly. "Even if you like it or not you are next in line to be the leader of this coven. And we need you safe, alive and wise. You are going to London and you're gonna learn as much as you can about what you are and your mission in this world".

"I'm almost 30, I have a job and a life here and frankly I never asked to be any of this", she just spit those words without second thoughts. The pain that Barb and Mika felt was instant.

“I need you to take this seriously. I need you to take magic seriously for the first time in your life.” Barbara said firmly.

From the age of eight, Anastasia knew she was a witch. Her abilities began manifesting, but she never cared too much about them. She never wanted to train or learn. To her, it was something she had to keep at bay. It was just something she could do, not who she was. On the other hand, music was everything to her, so she sought to focus her energy on that.

“Barbara, for Hell’s sakes!” Anastasia laughed profusely.

“As much as I wish I were lying, I’m not.” Barbara replied, upset by her sister’s reaction. “Anastasia, a power such as yours has not been seen for centuries.”

“But I don’t practice magic! Apart from a couple of spells to date guys in my teenage years and to do well in College, I haven’t done much more,” replied Anastasia.

“Because you have repressed your power. You never wanted to learn how to use it.”

“Yes, from the moment I began seeing people all around that weren’t really there, I didn’t want to keep up with it.”

“It’s your duty as a witch to educate yourself so that you can rule the Coven in the future.” Mika interveneed.

“I’m at the highest peak of my career, I don’t have time for this.” Anastasia got up from the couch and headed to the door.

“Go ahead, act spoiled! It’s what you do best anyway! Just caring about yourself".

Barbara could sometimes be very hurtful. Anastasia stopped and wanted to talk back to her sister, but thought it through and kept going, out of the attic, the house and into her car. She drove back to Los Angeles, to her place.

On the way she did a couple of calls to Matt, her on and off boyfriend. But as natural he didn't answer.

I do not want to rule the Coven, she kept telling herself over and over as she drove. She also though she didn’t really want to go back home, but as she got closer, a crowd of people gathering outside the Jensen’s porch called her attention. Anastasia pulled over by her own gate and curiosity drove her straight to the house next door. She made her way among the people and when she got to the front of her neighbors’ place, she spotted two police cars. The house perimeter was surrounded by yellow tape. Standing there was a blonde lady who kept staring at the main entrance. It was Cindy, the youngest in the family. She was about 21 years old. Anastasia always ran into her at LA events. Cindy was the typical party girl, and judging by her choice of outfit –mini dress and high-heeled shoes, she was just returning from one.

“Cindy!” Anastasia called her.

The blonde girl turned her head towards her. Her make-up was smudged all over her face; she had been crying. Cindy signaled Anastasia to come over and so she did, going under the yellow tape.

“What happened?” Anastasia inquired as she walked.

“My parents—they—they’re…” Cindy stretched her arms out to hug Anastasia. When they touched, an electric shock ran through the blue-haired girl. It was so strong that every nerve on her body hurt, her vision blurred and a scene came in front of her: the Jensen’s master bedroom. The father, Carl, lay on the floor. When she adjusted her sight she realized his neck was slashed from side to side. She kept looking all over her body but nothing prepared her for what she was about to see next: half of his body was missing, just like they had ripped it off him. All internal organs and guts were spread around him. She felt a sharp pain in her stomach. His lower belly and his leg were about 12 inches away. Wendy Jensen lay in bed in a similar situation: her left arm was under the bedside table and the lower half of her body was by the bed. As if all of this weren’t strange enough, there was not a single drop of blood in the scene.

Cuts weren’t clean; they looked more like rips caused by a beast. The organs looked clean. The couple looked like mannequins. Carl’s eyes were open and completely white. When she turned to Wendy, she realized the woman was missing both eyes.

The vision faded in a second as soon as Cindy let go of Anastasia. Fear took over her and she understood she hadn’t been inside the house. Instead, she had seen what Cindy herself had seen when she walked in that morning. The adrenaline rush was so strong she abruptly parted from Cindy and fell butt-first on her neighbors’ front lawn. Her expression was one of terror and Cindy’s was one of being stricken by the situation.

“Cindy, I—I am so—so sorry.” That was the only thing Anastasia managed to say before running back to her own place. On the way, she spotted the suspicious looks of a couple of policemen, but she kept on walking, trying as much as she could to ignore her surroundings.

Once home, Anastasia locked the front door and called Barbara immediately. A couple of hours later, the eldest sister was knocking on the door.

“I swear that had never happened to me before.” Anastasia was terrified. She was sitting on her blue futon, sipping on some tea Barbara had made her.

“As much as you try to repress your magic, your powers will manifest themselves one way or another. If you had learned to control them years ago, they wouldn’t come out as intensely now.” Barbara explained.

“I just touched her, but I could experience everything the poor Cindy went through when she found her parents torn to pieces. Terror, shock, uncertainty,” Anastasia explained. “It was horrible.”

“You’re empathic, that’s a normal ability of your power.” Barbara sat down next to her sister.

“Now, tell me, were they dismembered?”

Anastasia nodded.

“Not a drop of blood around?”

Anastasia shook her head no.

“The bodies were clean, just like the entire scene.” Anastasia put down the cup of tea on the coffee table. “Do you think the same creatures that tried to attack me did this?”

“To be honest, yes.” Barbara replied. Anastasia got up in a heartbeat.

“It was my fault, Barbara. It was my fault that they died. It’s my fault poor Cindy is now an orphan.” Anastasia paced around but a force out of her might have made her stop.

“It was not your fault.” Barbara moved her fingers to release Anastasia from the spell. “If you hadn’t ran away, I would be picking up your pieces now, and the Universe knows I wouldn’t do it all by myself. Those creatures were thirsty. Unlucky for them, Carl and Wendy were home.”

“They just came back from Mykonos,” Anastasia said as she sat back down.

“They should’ve stayed in Greece,” Barbara uttered sarcastically.

#anastasiatruman #fanfic #fanfiction #fan fic writing #fan fiction #taron egerton #taronegerton #Egerton #taron egerton fanfiction #taronegertonfanfic #fantasy #witch witches

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arcticdementor · 5 years ago

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There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then. A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.

#malcom kyeyune #read the whole thing #professional managerial class

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robertmarch82 · 5 years ago

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They created a “Palestinian people” as a tactical instrument to have the right to claim land in Israel. It was Nasser, president of Egypt, who brought the Palestinian people on the political agenda first. To strengthen their arguments, they settled Arabs by the millions until today.

Ben Fladder, studied German Language and Literature & IT System at Free University of Berlin (2010)

To explain why Israel is such a big thing on Quora (at least for me), I want to tell you some of the earlier history of the State of Israel. This short part of history is enough to make Israel a big thing for me, I don’t need to go into detail about the almost 1600 years, that Jews lived there as indigenous people from 1500 BC to 70 AD (and until today).

I do not deny, that Israel has committed war-crimes, just as the Arabs have. I am not an Israeli, nor am I Jewish, so I do not have any personal connection to Israel that would make me feel I must justify anything. Just the facts are enough in my opinion.

Before the first Zionistic settlements started in the 1870s, there were roughly around 255.000 Arabic people in the rural areas and around 24.000 Jews (the numbers vary, but that’s the average) living under Osman rule. The land was totally devastated. Agriculture and livestock took place on a minimal level, just barely enough for the self – sustaining of the inhabitants. Reports from 1882 - 1913 talk about “completely sown land, with dirty dilapidated houses built of loam, catastrophic hygienic circumstances”, the little agriculture done with small wooden plows. You find these descriptions for practically all the land. People were shocked when they came there and compared the status quo with what they had imagined.

Felix Bovet wrote about his visit of the area in 1858: „The ... Turkish [Osmans] ... turned it into a wasteland ... The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants ... have created nothing here.“ Quote from: Felix Bovet in: "Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands" (Can be found in /Scheel/)

The reasons lay in a chaotic, inhuman politic and the traditional lifestyle of the inhabitants. An example is the “Musha-land”, one of six categories of land under ottoman rule. Musha-land is supposed to have been the biggest obstacle against improvement for the fellahin/fell. In addition, wells and fields were further destroyed through steady fights between the Arabic residents themselves and the steady attacks and extortions from their neighbours, the Bedouin. The population was steadily declining.

Alif I. Tannous, a Palestinian intellectual wrote in October 1935: “Until today the fellahin/fell are the object of oppression, disregarding and bad treatment by their own people and the old political regime. The feudal system extincts their life, the effendi-class looks down on them and the old Turkish regime was too corrupt to deal with this vital problem.“

Because of this always declining population, lease declined as well and so the leaders constantly let non-Arabic and Arabic workers into the country. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 not less than 50 languages were spoken in what today is Israel.

With the new workers/peasants it went the same way as described above: They fell into poverty; the wars went on and the owners didn’t gain enough income from their land …

So, selling it to immigrating Jews was a jackpot for many of the owners. As said most of the land belonged to Arab families in the cities like the Sursock family in Beirut. They for example sold 240 square kilometres between Haifa and Beisan for over 800.000 British pounds to (among others) the Jewish National Fund. That‘s only one family. There were so many, who got rich by selling land, they had no use for because it was dried out and devastated. The money from these land sales often became the basis for their political power today. They also sold swamp land to those Jews, who had no experience with farming (swamp land was almost impossible to cultivate. If you were lucky enough to survive the first year, you gave up during the second). Jokes made the round about the stupid Jews who paid so much money for swamps.

But the Jews made it. I guess the century-long experience of being mistreated together with the pogroms that had happened not long ago, in Russia, Europe and North-Africa did theirs to motivate them. They put effort, all their money and knowledge into building up new homes. The immigrants that came there were a mix of farmers, workers, soldiers, intellectuals, medics, engineers etc. Men and women were active in the discussions and plannings of the settlements. All that contributed to the successful re-cultivation of the land and to the relatively modern and open society that evolved in Israel.

Together with the green, Arabs came to work there. Many Palestinians are descendants of the migrant workers from Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, who came between 1830 and 1945 to what is now Israel. And they came by increasing numbers, because the Jewish immigrants created more and more work and wealth.

A study from 1943 – 1947 and 1949 – 1963, as well showed that most Arabic inhabitants came from other countries. For example, the village el-Fahan (20 km west of Hadera): In 1943, out of 2.800 inhabitants 900 were from Egypt, 1.400 from Hejaz in Saudi-Arabia, 500 from today’s Jordan.

The population of el-Fahan exploded when Jordan’s King Hussein brought ten thousands of Arabic settlers there from 1948 – 1967, for the Arabization of the city that is already mentioned in the Bible.

Since the founding of the state of Israel tenth of thousands of Arabic immigrants have come to Jewish cities, farms and fabrics and all the other work opportunities, doubling and tripling the number of Arabs.

The Peel-Commission reported in 1937, that the „… lack of land … is less attributable to many Jews having bought land, but to the increase of the Arabic people.“

So far so good. But now the real problems began. To make it short: The Arabic leaders didn’t like the thought, that the Jews were prospering, especially since the idea of an organized Arabic settlement in the areas had been existent for a while among them. There had been attacks on a lower scale all the time.

But now a broad anti-Jewish campaign was launched, intensified especially during WW II, all over the Arabic world. Protagonists of this campaign were for example the Muslim Brothers (especially their founder Hassan Al-Banna, a big admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, who praised them in speeches) or Amin al-Husseini - the Mufti of Jerusalem (a searched war-criminal and collaborator of NS-Germany). These campaigns were supported by the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs even set up a radio-station for al-Husseini to spread anti-Semitic ideas from Germany (where he lived as Hitler’s guest since 1941) over Egypt and the whole Maghreb. Powered by the internal explosive situation in the Arab countries – poverty, political fights etc. – this anti-Semitism digged its way deep into people’s thinking.

Arabic leaders and organizations tried to destroy Israel twice with military force but lost. So, they changed their tactics and used not only terrorism but also humans as a “tactical” instrument. During the 1967-war, they actively tried to make Arab inhabitants move out of Israel by telling them horror-stories about massacres by Israeli soldiers and pretending to want them safe when they overrun the country. Similar tales as we had them in Europe during the middle ages and up to the 1940s (some statistics talk about 68% Arabs that left Israel without ever having seen an Israeli soldier. They then denied many of those refugees to enter Egypt for example and used them to “stay an open wound in Israel’s flesh forever” (see the sources).

A quote from the Muslim Weekly Magazine KUL-SHAY, Beirut, 19.08.1951: „Who brought the Palestinians as refugees into the Lebanon, where they came into huge hardship and destitute – no one else but the Arabic States themselves, including the Lebanon.” Can be found in: /Farah/

Since 1967 Arabs built 261 settlements in Judea and Samaria alone - but only 144 Jewish settlements in ALL of Israel were built. But we never hear about that, do we?

When Jordan overran a part of Jerusalem in 1948, the Jews in this part of the city were killed, robbed and expelled to make Jerusalem Arabic. That happened in many parts of the country: Kfar Etzion near Hebron: in 1948, all Jewish citizens except one who managed to flee got shot by the Jordans. On the north side of Jerusalem, a village named Neve Jaakov was arabized through the murdering of all Jews.

Quotes:

· Zuheir Mohsen, a high-ranked PLO-member, said in 1977 (in a disarming honesty): “There is no Palestinian people. The creation of a Palestinian State is one weapon to continue our fight against Israel and for the Arabic unity. Since Golda Meir is denying the existence of a Palestinian people, I claim, that there is such a people and that it is to be distinguished from the Jordans ... Only for political and tactical reasons we talk about the existence of a Palestinian identity, because it lies within the national interest of the Arabs, to oppose a separate existence of the Palestinians to Zionism. For tactical reasons Jordan, which is a country with fixed borders, cannot claim Haifa and Jaffa. I in contrast, as Palestinian, can claim Haifa, Jaffa, Beerscheba and Jerusalem. But as soon as our rights on Palestine are restored, we must not delay the reunion of Jordan and Palestine not a single longer.” Quote from: W. Roxan: Israel und die Palästinenser. Darmstadt 1978. p.66·

· Prof. Philip Hitti, Arabic American historian from Princeton university, said in 1946 in front of the Anglo-American committee: „Something like Palestine has never existed in history.“ and in 1988: “One thing is clear: No Palestinian State has ever existed not for the shortest period in the past. There is no Palestinian language either, no distinct Palestinian culture, no special religion in Palestine.” Quotes from: Mitchell G. Bard: Behauptungen und Tatsachen-Der israelisch-arabische Konflikt im Überblick, Hänssler 2002. p.50 (original from Jerusalem Post, 2. November 1991) and from /Pfisterer/ (originally from Six millions de Palestiniens ... valeurs actuelles. Paris 26.12.1988, p. 31)·

· „The Palestinians… it could have come to a humanitarian solution, like in other parts of the world ... [But it is as] the Arabs in the Arabic League said in those days: ‘We want to keep this as an open wound und use the human beings as a pawn against Israel. Quote from: Joan Peters in, quoted in ARAB NATIONS PERPETUATED THE REFUGEE PROBLEM /Arutz Sheva-4. Febr. 2001

I did not mention all the things we can see on TV every day: Terrorist attacks and rockets that end peace-negotiations and provoke counter-attacks. There are organisations, who have no interest at all to make peace with Israel. They will not stop until Israel is destroyed or they are. The sad thing is that they use their own people, Muslims and Arabs to reach their goals. And these people get brainwashed and let themselves be used for a war, that will better nothing for them. What will happen, when Israel is destroyed? Will the Palestinians live any better in the ruins of this country? It would be so easy: Let the refugees in your countries, not like 1967 when you first called them to leave their homes and then put them in refugee camps and treated them like second class humans. Just let them in, stop telling them, that Israel is the root of all evil.

But this will never happen, I fear that peace will never come. I feel sorry for the Jews, who for almost 2000 years are expelled from their land, fought, harassed and lied upon, be it by Europeans or Arabs, Christians or Muslims. It’s a shame. Not even after the fabric-like murder during the “3rd Reich” we manage to let them live in peace. They do not want to make the world Jewish. They just want to live their lifes with their religion in their country.

When you watch the news, not from Arabic countries or Israel – no, from Europe, then you can find reports about policemen giving their microphones and speakers to people who use them to shout things like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews into the gas” through them:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein...

Did German (!) police do anything against those exclamations which are illegal according to German law? No, you know what they did? They put a young man on trial, who had stood beside this aggressive bawling people and waved a little, 5-inch-long Israel-flag. Sued him for making an unregistered counter-demonstration. Although the German constitution gives everybody the right to express their opinion peacefully at any time. But the judge spoke justice, right? No. He found that the man was guilty and since he was a kind judge, he offered him, if he would commit his crime, to just make him pay a small fee. Otherwise it would be way more expensive.

Such things happen all over Europe. Jews emigrate back to Israel out of Europe and this only place where they can feel, if not safe, then at least wanted, this place is in steady danger of being destroyed. Arabs have so many countries where they can live in, Europeans, Christians, Muslims have. Why don’t we leave Jews live on this tiny place on earth? I really don’t get it. We are drifting into something very bad. But this time no one will be able to say that they didn’t know anything. This time everybody could see the signs in the newspapers, on TV, on the radio. If you believe in god, no matter which: Beware, beware. If you do not believe in any god then: Will you be able to stand the shame?

Sources:

/Stein/: Kenneth W. Stein: The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984

/Peters/: Joan Peters: From Time Immemorial-The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, Harper & Row, NY, 198

/Twain/: Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, London 1881.

/Voss/: H. Carl Voss: The Palestine Problem Today. Israel and its Neighbours.

/RBP/: Royal-British-Palestine-Commission: Report of 1913

/Goldberg/: David B. Goldberg, M.A., Haschiwa: Auf unwegsamen Pfaden- von Touristen selten betreten (Exzerpt), in: Die Rückkehr No.2/1995

/Samad/: Hamed Abdel-Samad: Der Islamische Faschismus. Eine Analyse. Droemer Verlag 2014

/Pfisterer/: Rudolf Pfisterer: Israel oder Palästina. R.Brockhaus 1992.

/Kark/ Ruth Kark, Ed.: The Land that became Israel/ Ran Aaronsohn: Cultural Landscape of Pre-Zionist Settlements. Yale University Press. London 1990

/Scheel/ Wolfgang Scheel. Referat March 2006: Zionistische Landbegrünung als Erfüllung biblischer Verheißungen.

/Ba/ S.83, /Pf/ S.147 (Bericht der Königlichen Palästina-Kommission, S. 242, Detaillierte Protokollauszüge in J. Peters, From Time, S. 302ff). and https://www.freitag.de/autoren/b...

/Fereydoun/: Fereydoun Hoveyda: Que veulent les Arabes? Paris 1991. In German: Was wollen die Araber? Droemer Knaur. München 1992

/EB11/: Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Israel-seem-to-be-such-a-big-theme-on-Quora-when-there-are-so-many-other-troubled-areas-in-the-world

#antisemitism #israel #palestine #arabs #palestinians #muslims #islam #europe #germany

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wespeak-yolros · 8 years ago

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This question is a bit broad but what is the world like

Alright, this could get a bit long so I apologize in advance.

Edit: this is super heckin long I’m sorry

This is the basic world map of Yosra.

Enik, Shecai and Geshith are monarchies at different levels.

Enik is a regular monarchy (ruler guided by a counsel) and also a diarchy (ruler and spouse rule together).

Shecai is an absolute monarchy so the empress/emperor have complete control.

Geshith is mostly a constitutional monarchy (kinda like Britain) on the Mainland although the ruler does have significant say in the happenings of the state and regularly meets with the elected prime minister (check the world map tag for a bit more info cause I’m working on close ups for all the countries). The Main Island is mainly large stationary tribal groups consisting mostly of naga (legs and tail) gorgons. Each group has a chief that inherits their title and there’s a head chief (title also inherited though can be stripped if the person’s deemed unfit) that organizes meetings between all of them to stay in contact.

Hellui is a dictatorship run through heritage (if a tyrant dies their eldest child or named heir takes over).

Jakil is home to a nomadic people’s so there’s a lot of different groups that travel around. Every group has a leader of some sort (whether elected or by heritage depends on the tribe) that organizes and protects their tribe. There’s little outside influence because it’s so bloody cold. It has snow for most of the year despite having a between 4-8 hours of sunlight a day which becomes 12 hours in the summer. Any non-porcupine living there have established self sustaining villages, complete with farming, enclosed in clear domes and connecting but clear, enclosed walking paths (much like Ikduma’s underwater society but above ground). The tribes tend to steer clear of these places but they’re not against those people as long as they’re not disrupting things. Plus the people who live in the villages do venture out and trade with them from time to time.

Liclica is an in-world second world country. Some parts are really developed and others not so much. Also some of the islands are home to tribes of people who will literally kill you if you come anywhere near it (freaky shit goes on there). In terms of government they’ve established a rocky confederacy but it’s only been in place for about 200 years and there are still people alive who remember when the country was under Geshith’s control (they were a tribal people before Geshith conquered them which unfortunately resulted in the enslavement of the native ghosts).

Vremsin is a well developed democratic commonwealth country.

Oktice is a theocracy (a deity is recognized as the ruler and rules are interpreted by oracles and the country is run by these interpreters). It is incredibly well developed and considered another commonwealth country.

Ikduma is home to selkies so a large part of their civilization is actually underwater. Their land base is used for trading and farming and things. Selkies can’t breath underwater so underwater buildings are surrounded by clear, water tight domes and there are several chambers one has to go through to drain all the water before entering a building. Every building is connected by thick, clear, watertight, walking tunnels that give a great view of the surrounding waters but can be intimidating. Things like skateboards rollerblades etc. can be utilized in certian lanes of the walking tunnels but cars and bikes are permitted only on the surface. Non-selkie people’s are more than welcome in the underwater society if they can find a way down there first.

Tiokal is classified as an in-world third world country and as a result is much like an old western movie. No external influence has reached the interior at all because it’s so bloody hot only the native scorpions and immigrated gorgons can handle it; everybody else who’s tried has died. Today, Geshith leaves Tiokal alone meaning any gorgons living there were a) born there or b) are really stupid it’s so hot what are you doing. It’s literally the opposite of Jakil. Also no one leaves unless they’re adventurous. Running water is a thing but electricity is scarce (and expensive; candles are cheaper) and cars do not exist, it’s all horse and buggy. Every town has a sheriff but other than that it’s the lawless west, pardner.

Here’s a basic chart of things that isn’t quite finished yet but I’ll post it again under #world map once it’s filled out

In terms of in-world movement all countries (except Tiokal obviously) are considered multicultural with Vremsin being a vast mixing pot of peoples much like real world Canada. No one leaves Tiokal unless they’re really adventurous so scorpions can be a rare sight in most other countries but there are some. Porcupines are a rarer sight in other countries than scorpions since they greatly prefer to stay in their tribal groups. Naga gorgons (gorgons with both legs and a tail) are developed tribal groups living in the rain forests of Geshith’s Main Island but can be found across the globe in steady numbers (it’s just a lot more concentrated in Geshith).

Trade connections between countries vary.

Enik, Shecai and Geshith have very good connections with each other (partially do to the 3 royal families intermarrying). Vremsin, Ikduma and Oktice are on good terms with everybody; including Tiokal (since trade happens along the coast where it’s cooler) and Jakil (not so much the tribal groups but the villages). Hellui’s rather conservative in there trade and doesn’t do business with Shecai, Geshith or Enik at all do to political power clashes (that changes when a new dictator comes to power tho). Tiokal mainly exports to Hellui, Geshith and, to a lesser extent, Liclica. Jakil has little to offer except stories and a good number of famous authors live there.

Race is not defined by skin colour. It’s defined by species (check the list nabove).

Arranged marriage was a thing in Enik, Shecai and Geshith until relatively recently and still occasionally happens in Tiokal (but nowhere near as much as it did).

There are a sub class of peoples called Wanderers (which have members from nearly all races of people but are called by different terms based on language. Wanderer is the universal language term for them) who can be considered society’s outcasts to a certain extent. Waanderer’s typically have powerful magic and fire-telling (storytelling but with fire) is an ancient tradition (if you’ve ever seen the hunchback of notre dame, they’re like the Yosra version of gypsy’s). Their main concentration is in Enik (the majority of the Wanderer population are peciks (people with peacock tails)) but they can be found just about anywhere.

The sub race of ghosts known as Apparitions are mysterious peoples that live almost on a higher plain than the rest of Yosra. These people’s have the ability to alter a person’s genes to make them an Apparition meaning that there are people of other races that have been unwittingly pulled into this higher plain. They’re completely invisible and speak a language called Liksora which cannot be taught. People who’ve had encounters with them but didn’t have their genes altered can pick up some of the language in the breeze and occasionally see flashes of this race of people but otherwise you’d have to become an Apparition or be born one to know the language fully.

Another ghost sub race are the Revenants. Humans were absorbed into evolutionary lineage Megaannum’s (millions of years) ago and Revenants are the closest living relatives to humans. They’re classified as ghosts because they have an aura about them but lack the abilities of their brethren making up for it by becoming master’s of black magic. They’re thought to be extinct because it’s been millennia since any of them were seen up close and the person lived to tell the tale. They live on isolated islands far off Liclica’s coast and are the ones that will either kill you if you get close enough or curse you so you die anyway.

There is a sub class of hellhounds known as wolves and a sub class of kitsune’s known as foxes. These are groups of people who’ve abandoned society and many have forgotten how to use their human forms or simply don’t have a human form if they were born into a wild pack. Wolf ales (especially alphas) typically have harems and the female alpha always has a litter either from the packs head alpha or one of the lesser ones (same with foxes but they don’t have litters so it’s typically one at a time unless it’s like twins or something). They live typically in forests or anywhere away from civilization and are most commonly found in Vremsin.

Harems are common amongst chief’s of naga gorgon clans on Geshith’s Main Island but it depends on the chief. If there’s a female chief she can choose to have a male harem if she wishes. If there’s a chief that swing for more than one gender they can choose to have a mixed harem. All members of the chief’s harem (no matter their gender) must agree to be a part of it, otherwise the chief cannot/will not touch them. Harems are also often shared with the chiefs knowledge and consent and a small price must be paid (whatever that price is again depends on the chief) if someone wishes to leave the harem before the end of 2 years. After that if a member tells the chief they wish to leave then the chief can no longer touch them.

Peciks have clutches like hellounds have litters and they range in size from about 2-6 kids per clutch/litter.

Social dynamics vary too but I won’t get into that.

I think that’s it so far. I’ll keep reblogging and adding to this as stuff progresses but there ya go!

P.S. It’s so long thank you for reading to the end

#speaking yolros #asks

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voicehumanity · 8 years ago

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Political parties, each with its own agenda, are required to abide by the law established by its nation’s Constitution. When a political party takes control of the government, it can act however it chooses as long as what it does conforms to constitutional law.

“President Barack Obama sought to weave climate considerations into every aspect of the federal government, Trump is hoping to rip that approach out by its roots.”

There is no law that could have stopped Obama from doing what he did; and there is no law stopping Trump from reversing Obama’s act.

The Humanity Party® stands with Obama in that we believe that the earth’s environment must be protected from unscrupulous acts to generate corporate profit. However, THumP® also stands with Trump and acknowledges that when government steps in to impede entrepreneurship and free market enterprise, it stops the creation of jobs and impedes or eliminates business practices that are dependent upon disrupting and having dominion over the laws of nature.

The argument between the two parties comes down to a fight between the right of a person to be employed in order to earn enough money to fulfill basic human needs, and the earth’s right to exist as it has for billions of years within a natural symbiotic balance.

“[Trump’s] order comes after several moves by [him] to roll back Obama-era restrictions on mining, drilling and coal- and gas-burning operations,” which have resulted in the loss of many high-paying U.S. jobs.

Trump has a pragmatic argument. Obama makes a logical point. The Humanity Party® looks at the issue with both logic and pragmatism. THumP®’s new constitutional proposals support each argument and provide the right solution.

First, the right Constitution will make it illegal for any party to legislate or issue an Executive Order that does not “support ... the natural laws of Earth and its environs.” But by the same constitutional authority, “Legislative powers shall be restricted to acts and procedures in the establishment of laws that support the wants and needs of the people.”

Article I – The Legislative Branch; Section 1 – The Legislature

c. Requirement to protect Earth. Legislative powers shall be restricted to acts and procedures in the establishment of laws that support the wants and needs of the people proportionate to the support of the natural laws of Earth and its environs. (See http://humanityparty.com/proposed-constitution.html)

This constitutional amendment will force Congress to consider both human and environmental needs when implementing any law. However, and most importantly, the right Constitution will also mandate that the powers of both the Legislative and the Executive Branches of government guarantee “Inalienable Human Rights,” which include but are not limited to, the five basic necessities of life: 1) Nutritious Food; 2) Comprehensive Healthcare, including mental care; 3) Safe and secure Housing and Utilities; 4) Essential Clothing; 5) Public Education from an elementary level up to and including four years at any accredited University.

(See Article IV: http://humanityparty.com/proposed-constitution.html)

THumP®’s constitutional proposals encumber the President to focus more on the enforcement of human rights than on environmental issues, while forcing Congress to come up with laws that protect both human life and the earth’s environment.

THumP®’s proposals provide the basic necessities of life to all people equally and do not require anyone to become dependent upon corporate profit for a paycheck. This eliminates the slavery of the laboring class, but bolsters and motivates businesses and corporation to seek profit by providing government-guaranteed and constitutionally mandated goods and services.

Suppose that all of the energy requirements of humans were transformed to renewable energy: wind, for one of a few examples. Desolate places upon Earth can house the wind turbines that produce all the energy that humans could ever use. It will take jobs to make the turbines and put them in place, but once in place, the only jobs that will be left are the few needed to maintain the turbines. What do the people do who helped build and put the turbines in place but who are no longer needed? What do the people who maintain the turbines do when they are replaced by robotic innovation that can maintain the turbines much better than humans can? The earth wins, humans lose.

Long ago, the earth offered its natural resources equally to all humans. This changed drastically as the few conquered the masses and privatized or nationalized all the land, banning an individual from being able to freely sustain their basic needs of life. Slavery was the only way that the powerful could conquer Earth and sustain their massive private and national interests. Unpaid slavery eventually evolved into paid slavery by deceiving the people into believing that anyone could be one of the wealthy, land-owning few, if one worked hard enough.

There are more than eight billion human beings upon the earth at this time. Less than one percent (eighty million) of these hold the rest in chains of slavery and inequality from which there is no escape. The promise of becoming one of the elite—one of this blessed one percent—assures the efficacy of the rationale for the chains of slavery: work hard enough in the fields of slavery, and one day you might become a master.

Upon the prison walls that encase humanity, in plain view of the enslaved, hangs the key to their chains. It is not a tangible key, because there is no actual lock. It is the writing upon the wall that resonates in words that the chained cannot interpret for themselves: The truth shall set you free!

Someone must boldly step forward without agenda and personal expectation, wielding the sword of truth in defense of the yoked. The sword will cut for the benefit of the poor, the meek, the downtrodden, and the exploited of the world.

The Humanity Party® wields this sword of truth.

The wrong type of government creates political policies that benefit a very wealthy class of a relatively few individuals with great power. This consequently creates a middle class that buffers the impact that absolute wealth and power has on the majority of people. This majority includes the poor laboring class that has always suffered in poverty. Throughout history, the poor majority has been able to rise up and overthrow the few in power when the situation called sufficiently for reformation, but in our modern world, the middle class and powerful nationalized militaries stand in their way.

Teetering on the edge of wealth and believing that they could become just as the wealthy, the middle class stands between the rich and poor: coveting one, while fearing a return to the other. The middle class validates the actions of the rich, while pacifying the cries of the poor.

The military strength of the governments that control human civilization overpowers weaker nations and leaves many desolate; causing thousands of deaths from the effects of war, hunger, disease, and poverty left over from military conquests and occupations.

There is no part of our current civilization that promotes equality. There is no government upon Earth that protects the rights of all people equally while protecting the natural environs that sustain human life upon Earth.

If the earth has evolved naturally, then humans are a product of this natural evolution, and this evolution cannot be stopped. We belong to the earth’s environment just as all other species of plants and animals do.

We are Homo sapiens. “Homo sapiens” means “wise ones.” The term is taken from the scientific classification given as the genus homo and the species sapiens. Of course, those who invented this scientific classification system did not see themselves as stupid creatures, and thus were so inclined to include their genius in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom as intelligent and wise (sapiens).

These wise ones of the animal kingdom came up with a theory in which they could, through their self-proclaimed wisdom, logically support their classification system. This became the Theory of Evolution. Its premise is based on what is termed, “Natural Selection,” which again as they suppose, is wise because they thought of it.

Natural selection can best be described as an evolutionary mechanism that occurs when some individuals of a population are better able to adapt to their environment, and subsequently produce more offspring. Nature, in effect, selects which members of a population are fit to survive long enough to reproduce. Differential reproductive success between individuals is the key. Those who produce more offspring have a greater influence on the gene frequencies of the next generation. In easier terms for the common wise ones to understand: “Survival Of The Fittest.”

It would seem, therefore, that if this wise theory could be substantiated as a true law of nature, it would apply to all of the animal kingdom. Yet, if science has proven that a species exists to maintain and perpetuate itself, then the Theory of Evolution has no verifiable application in the ant world, for example, in which the strongest (the soldiers) could surely kill every worker and every queen and take over the hill. Likewise, an alpha male could kill all other males, he being the strongest of the group, as well as could an alpha female drive off or kill the other females, thus assuring her prominence and future posterity.

If only the strongest survive, how have insect species existed for millions of years without any indication of evolution or subjection to the theorized law of natural selection? Could it be that Darwin (the so-called father of the Theory of Evolution) was not paying attention to the ants crawling up his pants as he crouched on the ground watching the birds? Furthermore, if Homo sapiens evolved from other primates, why aren’t other primates evolving?

The more the species sapiens learns about itself and its environs, the more it begins to realize that there are more than just two kingdoms on this planet. There are three: the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the human kingdom. Because the human kingdom follows none of the instinctual and natural laws that the other two kingdoms follow, it cannot be logically included under the same natural classifications.

The plant kingdom cannot survive without the animal kingdom, and the animal kingdom cannot survive without the plant kingdom; but both can do rather well without the human kingdom. In fact, because of the human kingdom, the plant and animal kingdoms are being destroyed, not by natural law, but by wise human law. The laws of nature create a balance and order (some refer to as a symbiotic state) that perfectly sustain the perpetuation of the creatures for which these laws exist. The lion eats no more than that which satisfies its hunger. When its hunger is satisfied, it does not kill unless it feels its life is threatened. The flower takes no more sun and water than what it needs to grow and flourish.

The laws of nature uphold the design of all creatures to sustain the life of their species and also maintain the environment from which they take this life. Creatures beholden to these natural laws do not have the ability to see themselves as individual and separate parts, but fulfill the measure of their creation in order to sustain the whole. No individual buffalo looks at its herd and makes the decision not to mate so that the herd doesn’t get any bigger. No plant or animal subjected to the laws of nature worries about tomorrow, nor do they look up at the stars and wonder what those shining lights are.

Humans are not subjected to the laws of nature. Yes, they are affected by the natural world, but they stand alone from all other genuses in their ability to consciously rebel against any law they so choose. This natural earth is not subjected to human law, but follows the course it has been following for millions of years. It wasn’t until the wise ones showed up that natural law began to be violated and disregarded.

Natural law fills the atmosphere with clean, pure air that brings energy to the plants and animals it sustains. It fills streams and rivers with pristine water and supports colorful and healthy plants and wildlife. It assures the calm rest of winter brings the refreshing life of spring. In all things, nature creates a balance and order for the benefit of all those subjected to it. There is only one thing that keeps nature from doing what it does best: human nature.

We are humans. We are the greatest species that has ever existed upon Earth. Therefore, according to the evolutionary rights afforded by natural law, we have dominion over the earth, its environs, and everything found in these environs. We can either use this dominion to sustain our lives or destroy ourselves.

The Humanity Party® exists to sustain human life by using its dominion and power to protect Earth’s fragile environment.

THumP® has the solutions. No one else does.

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lissas1x1s · 8 years ago

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Welcome to Clearwater!

Welcome to Clearwater; one of the hottest vacation spots in the Florida keys. Every year, millions of people pour into this picturesque coastal town to enjoy cocktails and crystal blue water but they are by far not the only guests of this beachy city. Silently, more and more vampires arrive to enjoy the easy pickings of drunken spingbreakers who can be conveniently “eaten by the alligator”s that populate the glades just outside the city limits. With its growing number of nightwalkers, the local werewolf pack and witch coven have combined powers to help fight back and defend the innocent humans - no matter what the cost.

ABOUT VAMPIRES.

FOOD. Vampires live by consuming blood. Just like humans, they have taste buds so certain blood types taste better or worse to them. They can also survive drinking the blood of animals if they so choose but it leaves them measurably weaker than those who drink human blood. The best blood, however, is that of the werewolf and witch (even though both species have forbidden their rankings to allow vampires to feed from them).

ADVANTAGES. Vampires are stupid fast. They can move and it look like they teleported. They are strong, nearly invincible, and unless killed, will never die. They are also able to “compel” humans to forget a bite.

DISADVANTAGES. As much as they would like to, vampires cannot walk in the sun. While it doesn’t immediately turn them to dust, it will burn them like acid. It is extremely painful and will disintegrate a vampire’s skin until all that remains are bones.

MYTH. A stake to the heart will only irritate a vampire. They aren’t effected by garlic, and actually quite enjoy looking at themselves in a mirror. A werewolf bite however, can and will kill a vampire.

HOW TO BECOME A VAMPIRE. The process is quite simple. You must be drained of blood to the point of death before being fed the blood of a vampire. Next, the soon-to-be vampbaby must be killed to give the vampire blood time to circulate through the body. Finally, when the moon is at it’s highest that night, the new vampire will rise from the dead a member of the immortals.

HOW TO KILL A VAMPIRE. There are only three ways to kill a vampire. The first is to leave them in direct sunlight. Their skin will disintegrate followed by their major organs until they are just a pile of dust and bones. The second is more difficult - you must remove a vampire’s heart from their chest. The final way to kill a vampire is through a werewolf bite. The bite is very much a virus. It causes extreme temperature, chills, hallucinations and then death.

THINGS TO KNOW. - Vampires have the ability to compel their prey though they aren’t naturally good at it. The older they are, the better they get. - Vampires are unable to walk in the daylight but can be seen during the day if it is overcast. - Vampires are extremely loyal to their makers and often do whatever they are told to do. - Unless they learn control, vampires are slaves to their indulgent personalities. They will kill and drink indiscriminately.

ABOUT WEREWOLVES.

FOOD. For most of the time, werewolves are just like any other human. They eat whatever food they have a taste for. They will increase their consumption of meat to ensure their body has enough energy to sustain the animal side. If a werewolf doesn’t get enough meat, it’s harder for them to suppress the urge to hunt.

ADVANTAGES. While werewolf speed does not match that of a vampire, they are much stronger than their blood sucking counterparts. Wolves have incredible senses, being able to hear things from far distances and see clearly with the smallest amount of light. They can also turn into wolves, how cool is that?

DISADVANTAGES. Yes the wolf thing is pretty awesome but the transition part is not so much. Literally every bone in the werewolf’s body will break, bend, and reshape during the three nights of the full moon. They have absolutely no control over themselves during the shift, which is when they are most vulnerable.

MYTH. Yes, werewolves are slaves to the full moon. No, they cannot avoid it. Yes, silver is toxic to a werewolf. It’s the only weapon in the world that can cause a werewolf permanent scars. It’s also true that a werewolf bite will kill a vampire.

HOW TO BECOME A WEREWOLF. It’s easy to become a werewolf - too easy. There are only two ways to achieve it. The first is to be born with the lycan gene. On the first full moon of your eighteenth birthday, you’ll turn. The second way is to contract the lycan gene. This is done by either a bite or even scratch from a werewolf. Because of how easily the gene can be contracted, many wolves try to keep their distance from humans.

HOW TO KILL A WEREWOLF. One of the truths from werewolf lore is that silver is extremely poisonous to them. Aside from possessing accelerated healing, wound from a silver blade take significantly longer to heal and because of such, they can bleed out. Werewolves also have the ability to regrow body parts as long as they stay in wolf form - except they cannot regrow their heads so another surefire way to kill a werewolf is to behead it. Also, because they are half human, werewolves can die of starvation is kept from food.

THINGS TO KNOW. - Despite keeping their distance from humans, werewolves are very protective of them and often fight vampires to protect them. - Werewolves can shift into wolf whenever they so desire but they all will shift during the three nights of the full moon - no exceptions. - Werewolf bite is deadly to a vampire and the werewolf gene is extremely easy to infect a human. - Werewolves are poly amorous creatures for the most part but they can imprint on another person and become bonded to them for life. - Werewolves are not immortal but they do have an extended lifespan. The average full life for a werewolf is between 250 and 300 years old. - Every pack has a king and queen (the two wolves in charge), along with an enforcer, alphas (strong pack members), and betas (weak/young/new pack members. They all protect each other but will die to protect their king/queen.

ABOUT WITCHES.

ADVANTAGES. Witches are born with gifts that range anywhere from potion making, divination, and spell casting. Some witch lines are more powerful than others but like anything, the more they practice, the better they’ll be.

DISADVANTAGES. There is only one disadvantage to being a witch and that is the physical toll that magic takes on the body. The more a witch pushes herself, the harder it is on him/her. They will often get a blood nose, or pass out. In certain special circumstance, if a witch pushes herself too far, she can even fall into a coma.

MYTH. They can’t fly on a broomstick and they don’t use a wand. Witches siphon their power from nature and so they often feel more at ease surrounded by it - be that in the woods, or by the water. All witches have a family grimoire of spells and pledge themselves to their coven.

HOW TO BECOME A WITCH. You have to be born a witch to become a witch. There is no way to become a real witch with powers unless you have it already in your DNA. Unless born into a coven, a witch could spend her life not knowing what she is. Powers that are not exercised, disappear eventually.

HOW TO KILL A WITCH. For the most part, magic aside, witches are just humans. This means that all the normal things that can kill a human, can kill a witch. However, they are unique in the fact that a witch can also been killed by siphoning away all their power. If a witch uses too much power, their bodies will shut down and if they really pushed it, they may never come back.

THINGS TO KNOW. - All witches naturally belong to a coven. It is extremely rare that one will come along and not belong to one. - A witch coven is more sacred to its members than any blood relations. Often times, witches will distance themselves from their family completely when they join a coven. - Each coven is led by one Supreme, a powerful witch who is often descended from one of the founding families that began long before Salem. - Covens do not believe in any type of homosexual relationships as they have for a long time believed that it goes against nature. - While witches generally do not care for werewolves, the coven has agreed to partner with the pack in order to protect humans from the vampires.

[CHARACTER NAME] is a/an [AGE] year old [GENDER]. [NAME] is a [SPECIES] and is said to look a lot like [FACE CLAIM]. Most people will tell you they are [- TRAIT & - TRAIT] but they’d say they’re [+ TRAIT & + TRAIT]. I guess we’ll have to see about that.

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