Arizona Public Service killed my mother

This has now grown beyond what a post can or should hold, so it has its own website:

APSKilledMyMom.com

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Israel’s “right to exist”

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so a few things up front:

• the moral question is simple: Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the praxis is complicated: antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable
• the history is complicated: I have a survey of it which addresses many common misunderstandings on all sides
• I keep an index of resources — my posts and others’

Many commentators allude to the question of “Israel’s right to exist”. Noah Berlatsky calls shenanigans on that turn of phrase in his post The Right To A State And State’s Rights:

Only individuals can have rights. Nationalist projects, however, are addicted to claiming rights for themselves.

Just so. His post lays out the ugly implications in asserting that nations have “rights”, not least in apologetics for the Confederacy and Jim Crow in US history.

That said, most people addressing Israel’s “right to exist” are not really engaging with any such theory. People generally reject it in response to Israel hardliners saying it to rationalize wrongs Israel has committed. People generally defend it in response to the common and ultimately antisemitic suggestion that Israel is a uniquely (or at least extraordinarily) illegitimate nation-state.

That attack on Israel’s legitimacy is not a fantasy of Israel hardliners. The original PLO charter in 1964 — three years before Israel’s occupation of Gaza & the West Bank — asserts:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate [which includes all of Israel], is an indivisible territorial unit.

[⋯]

The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

[⋯]

The liberation of Palestine [⋯] will safeguard the country’s religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.

Most of the 2½ million Jews in Israel in 1964 had no other home — they were refugees from the Shoah, Zionists who moved between WWI & WWII, and their descendants born in Israel. That charter sought to deny them citizenship in the Arab state of Palestine which the PLO wanted to displace Israel to create.

The PLO went on to recognize Israel’s legitimacy three decades later, demonstrating that one can both stand for Palestinian liberation and accept that the state of Israel has fundamental legitimacy. But not all advocates for Palestinian liberation have done the same; implicit (or even explicit) rejection of Israel’s legitimacy remains common, carrying with that the suggestion that one wants to see the displacement of Jewish Israelis. Asserting Israel’s “right to exist” is a bad way to respond, but it does address a real point in contention.

I avoid the expression “Israel’s right to exist”. I recommend that others do the same. We must talk about Israel-Palestine as crisply as possible. But I find it a lot more forgivable than many rhetorcial moves people make in this space which have bad unintended implications. And I embrace the extremely modest defense of Israel which it tries to offer:

• I reject claims that a state has a “right” to exist while seeing millions of Israelis who have never known another home as cause for recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I reject the Westphalian order of nation-states as the right way to structure geopolitics while accepting it as the reality of the world we have now, which compels recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I consider Israel’s government illegitimate because of their longstanding apartheid policies and current genocidal attack on Gaza, while distinguishing that from my recognition of the state of Israel as legitimate.
• I consider a single democratic state of Palestine vastly preferrable to the liberal Zionist dream of a soft-ethnonationalist Israel — more just, committed to inviting immigration by diaspora Jews, recognizing a truly sovereign neighbor state of Palestine in Gaza & the West bank — and even consider that liberal Zionism unworkable, while still counting liberal Zionism as a respectable position out of recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars. This political order emerged after a brownshirt rebellion against “failed” liberal democratic governance, explicitly rejecting universal human rights, including the right to vote, producing a better society. That is the core fascist dream. Considering that plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work. But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, and wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry.

I submit that the potential for a racist version of the Troopers political order just did not occur to Heinlein. This kind of mistake is why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being would have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically hobbled his imagination.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump.

I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose.

[⋯]

The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. [⋯] to make him do what you want him to do. [⋯] But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. [⋯] that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. [⋯] other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say supply the control.

Implication: the Politburo, made up of and selected by a single party state of Komsomol veterans, control the rest of the population through mass hypnosis. That’s not to say the book is not a paean to duty and patriotism, but that it’s primarily a cautionary tale of enslavement by mind-control of diligent patriots by Soviet-style communism. And, to that extent at least, the book is intended as a satire.

That linked post describes that reading to debunk it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate that reading as very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Aside from the basics of the backstory and political system, Troopers invokes a lot of fashy ideas.

Consider one of the passages in which the protagonist of Troopers reflects on his high school class in History And Moral Philosophy, which features a teacher given a lot of space to speak with Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece voice.

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book. The passage goes on to have the teacher, Dubois, reject universal human rights as the failing of the society — our society — which the future social order presented in Troopers is said to have replaced.

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’”

Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. [⋯] that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In the middle of this passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Oh … really?

Heinlein never returns to this science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals. He just leaves it as an assertion by the propagandist for their social order in our protagonist’s high school classroom. In moments like that — as when he gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it.

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace that nuance without doing the thing of defending a villain by calling them “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.

One demand

I have ambivalence about the memory of the breathlessness of the Occupy movement, but A Message From Occupied Wall Street (Day Five) still moves me:

Note: Our use of the one demand is a rhetorical device. This is NOT an official list of demands. Click Here to learn more about how you can participate in the democratic process of choosing the “one demand”.

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This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

On September 21^st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.

Ending capital punishment is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.

Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.

Ending police intimidation is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.

Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

Ending political corruption is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.

Ending joblessness is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.

Ending poverty is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.

Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.

Ending American imperialism is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America was at war with the world.

Ending war is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We're still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.

We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.

Comic book physics

A fragment I created thinking about worldbuilding for a superhero TTRPG setting. The rough idea was to identify every power as using a type of energy, so that characters using a particular type of energy would have advantages in dealing with other manifeststions of it.

Mundane

0. Pure
1. Kinetic
2. Heat–cold
3. Electromagnetic
4. Gravitational
5. Sonic
6. Light
7. Nuclear

Magic

0. Pure
1. Fey
2. Wild
3. Celestial
4. Arcane
5. Soul
6. Love
7. Black

Cosmic

0. Pure
1. Warp
2. Primordial
3. Quark
4. Dimensional
5. Ether
6. Negative
7. Void

Life

0. Pure
1. Animal
2. Plant
3. Microbial
4. Psychic
5. Evolutionary
6. Gaia
7. Death

Mushroom

Putting a little internet classic here for my convenience:

personsonable
me holding a gun to a mushroom:
tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom:
can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face:
I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

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miaislying
Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

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personsonable
decay exists as an extant form of life

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miaislying
That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day
#philosophy #mushrooms #you cannot kill me in a way that matters #perspective