I don't know where to post this, but I feel I need to try and spread the message as much as possible, as I am absolutely terrified being in school at the moment. Most of my criticisms are of broader government policy rather than the policies of my school specifically, so I hope this is useful to everyone at the moment.
So English schools have fully returned this week after the summer break. They breifily reopened to select students in June/July, but now every student has to come back. And oh fucking Jesus Christ It's a complete and utter disaster. My parents both work in education to some degree and we've all said as a family that there is no way that schools could reopen fully to every student and adequately prepare for covid. We've been saying this shit since April and May. So imagine my shock when come September, it's a complete disaster.
The government has said that every year group has to work in a "bubble" and that no two "bubbles" can ever cross into each other. The huge fucking problem with this is that in a secondary school, there are about 160-200 students in a single year group. That's not a bubble, that's a fucking health hazard. That's potentially 160-200 households each making close close contact with eachother. To put that in perspective, government advice is to only socialize with 6 people from a maximum of 2 households, and it's illegal to have more than 30 people gather on private property. Primary schools are still bad with "bubbles" of 30 kids each, but it's not as bad as what secondary schools have. No distancing takes place at all in these bubbles. Fucking nothing. That means that up to 200 kids are are able to get within touching distance of eachother and it's apparently OK. Classrooms are also completely full. No one is working in groups, but people are still sat just as close as they were before. Masks are only compulsory in corridors in my school but this differs from school to school. If an area is in local lockdown, than masks are compulsory. I still wear one all the time outside of eating lunch, but I've only see about 3 or 4 people who are consistently doing the same. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I was asked about why I was wearing a mask by other students. How brain-dead do you have to be to ask that lmfao.
On top of all of this, the "bubbles" aren't even effectively kept separate. The school has tried their best to keep these bubbles separate, by allocating different classrooms to different year groups, but there's still blatant holes. The year 11 bubble that I'm in is made up 4 classrooms in building A and 3 in building B. However, building C contains specialist classrooms for classes such as IT, and in order to get to building C, you have to walk past building B, meaning that students that have lessons in Building B will mix with those in Building C. Lunch and Break times are also a complete disaster. In order to keep everyone separate, the school has given each year group a set outdoor space, but because those spaces are really small, we end up coming into more close contact than ever before. I can imagine a similar situation, or maybe even a worse situation in other schools, as the nature of how schools are designed and how they operate on a regular basis makes it practically impossible to keep "bubbles" separate.
Our school has done many many stupid things as well. For example, our school wants us to do PE lessons still. During a normal PE lesson theres barely enough space for everyone to get changed in our changing room anyway. They claim that everyone will have 1 peg each, but I don't think there's that many pegs anyway, and the pegs are literally less than a foot apart. They also want us to change in silence because not talking will help prevent covid from spreading. I wish I was kidding. They might as well tell us not to breathe to prevent its spread lmao.
Last of all, probably the most insulting part of all of this, the government has reinstated fines for absences as if it's a normal time. Unless the kid is ill or has to self isolate, or has any other exceptional circumstance, then they have to be in. If the parents are scared about covid, tough shit. If the child is scared about covid, tough shit. If you have someone vulnerable living with you, tough shit. Plenty of people have come in even though someone vulnerable is at home, and it's honestly sickening that in theory, people who actually care for their safety and stay out of school for any of the above reasons can be fined for doing so.
So yeah, the reopening of schools has been a disaster, and I'm terrified. I'm not scared for me and my family. I'll be ok, I just don't want to infect anyone else. If I infected my grandparents, they'd most likely be dead. They pretty much lean on our family for emotional support, and therefore, post lockdown, they've been in our support bubble. I don't want to be the reason why so many people get the virus, yet I feel I will be if I keep going there.
I hope you guys can spread the message because I have no clue where else to go. If anyone has any ideas about where else to post this, I'd appreciate it. Thanks
Edit: Spelling and Grammar
submitted by There’s the schools that exist in canon obviously which are: Hogwarts, Beauxbaton, Durmstrang, Koldovstoretz, Mahoutokoro, Uagadou, Castelobruxo, and Ilvermorny plus 4 more unknown schools.
These aren’t enough magical schools though even if you want to believe there aren’t that many wizards and witches in the world because why would there be so few Asian and African wizards and witches that they only require one school per continent (Asia not even having that but only having one magical school in Japan for Japanese wizards only) while Europe requires 4? Although J.K Rowling has stated most wizards and witches in other parts of the world homeschool their children and if they don’t homeschool them they go to smaller schools, and I can buy the idea of the older civilizations having retained a more traditional view on magic and it’s ancient roots- I think the idea that Asia and Africa wouldn’t at least have a few more elite schools just like Europe is a little insulting.
So I have this idea for a Harry Potter spin off project with all the other schools and then some but it would require so much research and knowledge it would never get gone of course.
First of all the 8 known schools would for historical reasons take in some international students, that means:
Hogwarts would take in English speaking students from all of the former colonies.
Beauxbatons would take in French speaking students from: Quebec and Haiti in America, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland in Europe, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Cameroon, DRC, Congo, Djibouti, Burundi, Rwanda, Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros and Seychelles in Africa, Cambodia and Laos in Asia and Vanuatu in Oceania.
I don’t know how common it is for people from former French colonies to go to France to study though I imagine it’s probably not so common to see a lot of students from poorer countries in French universities due to cost alone, but in the magical world travel cost wouldn’t really be an issue and I don’t remember Beauxbaton having a tuition fee. Then there’s the French territories; Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, French Polynesia, Reunion and Mayotte. I’d imagine these students would go to Beauxbaton as well.
It isn’t clear exactly where Durmstrang is supposed to be, Sweden or Bulgaria but I imagine there being two schools; the one in Bulgaria being the oldest while the one in Sweden was built by migrating Uralic speaking people from Eastern Europe. It would be nice to see some real life history woven in to the magical world history here although that might be difficult given that we don’t know much about the origins of the Scandinavian people, I think.
Scandinavian Durmstrang would use swedish which all norwegian, danish and (though Finland isn’t really part of Scandinavia) finish students (who learn swedish) would understand, but beyond those (and in particular international students), students from for an example Iceland would have to already know or learn Swedish?However you could say make them Icelandic descendants of Norse Vikings and the Swedes, the descendants of Swedish Vikings who still speak some common Germanic language or use “ancient runes” in which it would then be possible to include the countries of Austria, Liechtenstein, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium.
Bulgarian Durmstrang would use Bulgarian which is only really spoken in Bulgaria.
Koldovstoretz is the Russian speaking school which I assume the older generation from all former Soviet Union members and other Eastern European countries like Poland, Ukraine and Romania could still understand but beyond that it’s a bit of a stretch to except younger generations to attend Koldovstoretz.
Japanese is pretty much only spoken in Japan (as far as I know) so Mahoutokoro which is supposed to be a small exclusive boys-only-school would pretty much only take in Japanese young wizards (possibly but not likely Chinese, Philippine and Korean young wizards) which doesn’t leave a lot of option for other asian wizards and witches.
So far we’ve covered english, french, german (sort of) and Russian (and Japanese) out of the major languages but we still have spanish and arabic and the languages that aren’t spread that wide but still spoken by a lot of people; chinese and hindi etc. The first of the four remaining unnamed magical schools would have to be somewhere in the Middle East, possibly Egypt (because of the ancient history but it would be in such close proximity to an already existing school in east Africa while the rest of Africa and Asia didn’t have any schools) or somewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
Uagadou would have to be divided between different branches operating in the northern, western, central, eastern and southern regions of Africa and then further in to different localities to solve the language barrier.
Unfortunately Castelobruxo is in Brazil and the only other counties in the world where they speak Portuguese are (aside from Portugal) the African countries of: Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and East Timor.
I guess students from the Caribbean can go to Ilvermorny but the rest of Central and Latin America would have to choose between an English- or a Portuguese speaking school unless we assign one of the 3 remaining unknown schools to South America or Spain.
But now we’re down to only two unnamed school left to use and we need those for China and (at the very least) one for all of India and its various languages.
So far it’s pretty basic Wikipedia-level research. Also to not make the schools too large, each magical school could have local branches. With more research and knowledge the magical world societies would be fletched out and based on real world history and culture.
Other parts of the world outside of Europe don’t rely on wands as much, not because they can’t but because they prefer not to although it makes their magic weaker when they don’t use wands to focus and enhance their magic.
The Greeks (which would be a new non-canonical magical school or a branch of the Bulgarian Durmstrang although I can’t see the link between Greece and Bulgaria) have two types of magic; the common one thats based on power and talent and intuition (for which they use a wand) and a second, knowledge-type of magic based on philosophy and logic. The latter is a wandless type of magic which produces less powerful magic but requires more understanding of the knowledge behind the magic. You want to conjure up a unicorn but you’re bad at logic? Use the laziest and easiest to learn logical spell of the principle of explosion that’s sure to never fail:
“From falsehood anything follow”. “Not all lemons are yellow”. “All lemons are yellow.” “Unicorns exist”.
Greek young wizards and witches aren’t even allowed to have wands until they learn this type of magic first and the knowledge behind the magic because the Greeks view magic so dangerous without a precise understanding of what it is you’re doing magically, yet this type of magic is also the most dangerous because if your logic is not correct your magic won’t know either except it won’t just error but clash with the logical rules of the world and so the consequences could be dire. This is why all young Greek wizards and witches wear magic inhibiting bracelets until they are ready to have them taken off.
This is among the reasons why this project would never get done because I’d have to first become knowledgeable enough to teach it since my intention is to make the books pedagogical that teaches kids school subjects like philosophy, logic and maths in a fun way.
Uagadou in the oldest civilizational region in the world, east Africa (although it’s in Uganda and not Ethiopia) would focus on ancient traditional magic. If there’s a magical school in Egypt it would be heavily inspired by ancient Egyptian history and religion (I wouldn’t borrow from any of the current world religions (bad idea) which means Mahoutokoro and the Chinese, the Indian and the middle eastern schools wouldn’t be inspired by Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam respectively). Apparently J.K Rowling’s has said that there actually have been many schools that have existed in Africa throughout time but Uagadou is the only school that managed to last this long so maybe these former ancient schools aren’t really lost but really just went in to hiding to protect themselves or they exist in another dimension like a direct link to past. In that case we’d be looking at: the kingdom of Punt, the kingdom of Kush, the kingdom of Aksum, the Ghana empire, the Mali empire, the kingdom of Zimbabwe, the Zulu kingdom etc.
Uagadou focuses on astronomy, alchemy and self-transfiguration (as per canon). They use dream messengers and magical paintings to stay connected to their ancestors, extensively.
Castelobruxo focuses on herbology and magizoology and would obviously borrow heavily from Native American culture and mythology.
Edit.
Uagadou. I was first going to have an African Squibb girl born in to a wizard family and portray her life with her magical mother and father and sister, and all the hazards that would befall her in the magical world due to her vulnerability. Even though she’s a squib (although it turns out she’s not just a squib, she doesn’t have the magical gene at all meaning she’s essentially a muggle even though she was born to two magical parents) her parents want her to go to Uagadou with her sister and goes to the school to try to get her in. The girl is gifted, she just doesn’t have any magic, and because wizarding schools are superior to muggle schools due to their more creative and live ways of teaching which makes the students learn more, the school agrees to let her attend under close supervision for her own safety.
But then I thought what if the girl being born not magical means she can’t see magic and that magic can’t actually touch her. I always thought Harry discovering he was a wizard to escape his lonely isolated existence and miserable life, a bit convenient. I’ve asked “what if Harry Potter wasn’t a wizard at all and magic never was real? Harry was just a lonely kid who one day snapped and created a whole fantasy world from his little room under the stairs?” here before with mixed responses. “Hermione and Ron and Neville and all the other kids were just kids who lived on his street or people that went to the same school as him who he never even knew.”
“Ron Weasley is a boy from the poor family in the neighborhood whom social services drops in on from to time. Hermione is the perfect straight-A student at school with no friends. Neville is a kid in a wheelchair because he was pushed out a window by his abusive grandmother when he was a baby...”
You may have a strong reaction to that because it’s so depressing and it may even appear as unimaginative, but why does it make you feel so bad? It’s because in the real world there is no magic and there are no convenient escapes (no Narnia in your closet and no tall dark and handsome nice vampire boyfriend showing up at your window if you’re a lonely young teenage girl dreaming about having your first boyfriend) and possible alternative worlds, there’s only here and now (and there’s possibilities in that) and honestly much of the power behind a lot cliche fantasy stories is the creativity behind the world-build and the fantasy itself. We’re obviously interested in the characters and the story as well (and I love the Harry Potter books) but take away the magic and I’m not sure what you really have left.
So what if we make magic real; all the magical beings can see it and respond to it so we know magic is real but it’s invisible to muggles and can’t affect or harm non magical beings like muggles or objects which would explain how the existence of magic has never really been exposed. That would raise a psychological aspect as we se things from the girls muggle perspective, and experiencing her doubts but also having to realize magic is real when all the other magical beings seem to know exactly what the other person is seeing without them having to explain anything (for an example, how do deaf people know hearing people can really hear?). We’d constantly be jumping back and forth between dramatic circumstances and then be taken out of them back to reality which would produce both humorous scenes and results with deeper meaning.
submitted by RR link Previous chapter (#2 - THE TWISTED HEIST) #3 - THE INELUCTABLE DUEL Observers of the Middle System had named it Rosetta. This comet was a newcomer. It had started its long dance within Solaris beyond the dwarf planet of Eris. Its veil of ice had amazed many despite the disastrous consequences. For Rosetta had crossed the highway linking Mars to the main belt, wreaking havoc throughout the area. Its marbles, sometimes the size of a basketball, hit several ships at a prodigious speed.
And guess who was in the middle of it all? Me, the Kitty and to get lost in the details: Ali.
“We’re gonna die!” she shouted as the sound alerts from our radar were tearing my eardrums apart. “Look at the screens! We’re gonna fucking die!”
The control computer calculated the best trajectory, but was unable to find a path safe enough to lead us to safety through the tail of the comet.
“Full steam ahead, Kitty!” I roared as the first impacts could be heard on the armor.
Already, the cockpit windows cracked under the shocks. We had to fold up the metal flaps and continue blind. At the speed we were flying, it didn’t make much difference anyway. It was then a long quarter of an hour like a winter night; listening to the rain falling on the roof. Except that we weren’t warm under the quilt. It wasn’t rainfall! And, yes, we were most certainly going to perish pulverized!
A more violent impact suddenly shaked the cockpit. The dashboard abruptly turned off. A few sparks came out of the control panel and the life support systems. Shortly afterwards, a slight hissing sound of depressurization escaped from the cargo bay behind us.
“Hold on, Kitty! I trust you, darling!”
Then everything stopped. The Swallow had passed through Rosetta’s trail. Miraculously, we were still breathing.
“Are we alive?” Ali asked, patting my lower back.
“For the moment, we are. But not for very long.”
Indeed, on the central polychrome monitor of the dashboard, the control computer was listing the damages by order of seriousness. Without emergency intervention on the drive, now shut down, or the air filters of the LSS, we were doomed.
“What is the nearest station?” I asked.
Her harness unstrapped, my human opened the system map on the side CRT while I was trying to restart the Baltimore reactor despite the numerous leaks of Blue. A column of azure bubbles escaped from the hold then floated across the cabin. The liquid was penetrating through the electronic instruments.
Cleaning the cooler off her blond hair, Ali answered me between two very distinguished swearwords:
“Yggdrasil! A few hours away from here… fairly isolated from the celestial highway.”
Yggdrasil? This name hadn’t been heard for a long time. Once, it was a simple M-type asteroid that escaped from the main belt. It had been used as a base of exploration before setting up colonies on Ceres, Vesta and Pallas then quickly abandoned. It was many of them’s fate when the new generations of post-nuclear engines, developed by Lucie Baltimore and her engineers, flooded the market.
At the peak of its glory, however, Yggdrasil had transformed itself into a station in its own right, where even real earth had been brought back from the original Blue Planet. The first settler families had grown a wonderful tree in the heart of the gardens. This tree had quickly become gigantic thanks to the reduced gravity.
“Do you think it’s still inhabited? It’s no longer a listed port,” Ali pointed out.
“That’s because it doesn’t belong to any corporation…”
But Yggdrasil was more than busy. Once in range, a couple of days later, we could guess an asteroid teeming with life. The station had been dug into the pure ore which was now only an indestructible shell. Numerous cylindrical windows dotted its surface. On the other side, lush gardens mottled the rock walls. It was like a gigantic celestial terrarium of nickel and glass.
But the most impressive was indeed this titanic tree that occupied the entire planetoid in its height. Its trunk and leaves were perfectly white which gave a wonderful contrast with the emerald forest that covered its roots.
“I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Ali said.
Yet it was just a simple tree, dirt and tons of mutagenic green moss. Humans were so melancholy about our home planet that I couldn’t understand why they had ravaged it in this way.
But the station was more impressive once inside. People lived all over the inner surface, in burrows and anchored nests covered by round vegetation. There were no taxicabs, nor any traffic for that matter. One could only take comfort from the birds’ singing and the wind turbines’ whirling, ensuring the good circulation of air. This piece of cosmic heaven had nothing to do with the shipyard of yesteryear.
We clamped the Kitty in one of the only two pods of Yggdrasil, run by a Lilliputian with shoulders so broad that one would have thought she was a dwarf from ancient tales if her beard had been bushier. Alas, just like the children of Vala Aulë, she announced a huge bill for the realization of her art. But it was unfortunately justified. Rosetta had absolutely ravaged our only means of transport.
My beautiful Swallow…
“All we have to do now is find a small job!” Ali had confessed to me while I was verifying one by one the expenses on the receipt in recycled bark.
“Alas! I doubt that there is an interesting contract under this thick foliage.”
I was right. The following days were nothing but disillusionment. There was work on Yggdrasil, but no one wanted to entrust it to two marauding bounty hunters. To be perfectly honest, this was the case in most stations and towns in the system. The Alliance wasn’t a respected institution. Auxiliaries were more hated than the F musical note or We Built This City song.
“Scratch again, I spotted something in the green spot!” Ali guided me.
She had refused to dive to the bottom of the dumpster herself. I had to submit to the search for nutrigel residues floating in the hazardous gravity.
“There is nothing! All we have to do is eat moss!”
I had come up to the surface to find her crouched in the grass, a winged caterpillar in hand. The bryophyte and its fauna were once again going to be our evening meal when a young boy landed barefoot in our organic banquet.
“Can I ask what ye, scummy bounty hunters, are doin’?” he questioned us as he snapped one of the multicolored slap bracelets on his arms.
He then introduced himself under the name of Benàn. He was the son of Yggdrasil’s main gardener whom we met shortly afterwards when the teenager invited us to his house for a real dinner. His family lived in a gigantic sclerotic tinder mushroom against the metal wall of the ancient asteroid.
“May ye forgive the folks here. Isolation has made them bitter. And abundance stingy,” his father, Alàn, apologized with the same nordic accent as his son.
He was a little man with a wide neck and sparkling yet tired eyes. Very jovial, he didn’t care that we were auxiliaries. His mustache and braided coppery beard jumped at every word. Despite his wife’s efforts to wash him, his face was constantly stained with brown mud.
“Hold op, Diligua! Would ye want to stop?” he cried.
Diligua scolded him, unhappy with her husband’s marshy appearance in front of her guests. She was his exact opposite, tall, fine and elegant. And without clods of dirt in her blond hair. She was wearing them twisted and braided in a bun on the back of her head, as expected to be in a micro-g environment.
Alàn was at first reluctant, but soon entrusted us with the simplest work in exchange for a roof and a good daily meal. We finally had enough to survive in this Smurf Village.
As for our invoice, Diligua had gone to negotiate with the dwarf of the hangar to obtain an amendment. She was the engineer in charge of the wind turbines and often had spare parts to trade for services.
“Decent people here”, Ali said to me once in our own private room at the top of the giant family mushroom, after our first day of work.
“For a change…”
The following days on Yggdrasil were pleasant. The company of this family proved to be very much appreciated. Benàn, for example, was an energetic teenager. He kept talking about his dreams of escape and space conquest. He was fed up with living in that aquarium, but his father had always resisted a premature departure.
“He promised to buy me a roun’ trip to Ceres-by when I was twelve years old then a secon’ one when I was sixteen. And finally, let me leave for the Marine Academy once I will reach my majority,” he told us once we were chilling under the shade of a giant dandelion. “But he had always refrained from keepin’ his word so far! He thinks I’m not ready!”
In a rage, he closed his record player and threw away the last can of Pepper Coke soda from our picnic as it slowly swirled near a rotten log.
I was surprised when he mentioned the Academy.
“I thought you wanted to be a pirate. Why would you join the Marine Corps?”
“To learn how to handle weapons! My pa refuses to let me use his and the armor he hides under his workbench. I don’t even know how to wield a revolver!”
Ali then passed him her gun, barrel in hand, without a word. I didn’t even realize she was listening. It was a habit of hers; following a conversation while sleeping.
The boy feigned hesitation, but the sparks in his eyes betrayed his excitement. My human didn’t need to insist any further, because seconds later he already had the gun between his fingers.
“It’s so frackin’ heavy," he said. "It’s different with my virtual reality console.”
“Try it out,” Ali proposed as she put the needle back on the first track after reopening the portable turntable.
From her chin, she then pointed to the can Benàn had thrown a few minutes earlier. Together, they practiced in music all afternoon. The yardman’s son had almost exhausted Ali’s ammunition when Diligua picked us up on her sail Solex for dinner.
This was our daily routine for the next two weeks: working in the morn, hanging out in the evening. We had been so productive that Alàn no longer needed us to maintain the station. To be fair, I suspected that he had dismissed us because of the meager gardening skills of my sapiens. That girl had two left hands but no green thumb. And it wasn’t the funniest part.
“What’s happening to me?” Ali asked one night, feverish.
“Unbelievable!” Diligua answered, staring incredulously at the thermometer going up. “You are allergic to real vegetables! Nobody’s allergic to real vegetables! What kind of human being are you?”
“Gimme pizzas...” muttered my dying nutrigel-raised partner, white as the giant tree’s leaves.
The next morning, Benàn finally introduced us to his spaceship. He had begun to assemble it by repairing the worn parts of the hangar with his mother’s tools. Its name testified to his ambitions: The Arcadia.
I had to reckon. This taciturn rascal was a mechanical genius. However, he needed my skills to set up the control computer and program the out-of-gravity draining of the post-nuclear engine. My sapiens, meanwhile, was improving the prototype of a jet-pack, a slice of pizza between the teeth. The young boy had stolen it from a pirate who stopped by a couple of months ago.
In the following evenings, Ali and Benàn often exchanged stories of buccaneers and adventurers. He was fascinated by the freebooters from the Golden Age of Jupiter’s colonies: King Xiao and the Lost Triad, Amadeus the Traveler, Osborn the Freak or Marcellàn Iron Fists and his famous hand-to-hand fights. The latter was the boy’s favorite and he would talk about him for hours.
What they had in common was that they showed Goldsun, the privateer, the respect he deserved. And this even though he sided with the Marine on the recent conquest of Pluto.
“It is said that the Sun King, Goldsun’s vessel, shines like a star. Forstår du? And that is how he camouflages himself in the celestial firmament!” Benàn exclaimed. “His fleet is so frackin’ fast that even the Marine’s Interceptors can't compete in pure speed!”
Our amateur raconteur wasn’t holding back his ardor. He knew hundreds of stories about pirates. Like everybody in Solaris, we already knew some. In fact, there were so many of them that we didn’t distinguish the truth from the myth. Indeed, the majority of these criminals and adventurers had never existed.
But the vacations were shortly ending. It was only missing a few coats of paint on the Kitty and Alàn boasted every night that he would soon have one last job for us. However, I suspected him of monopolizing the floor so that his son would no longer broach the subject of his emancipation. And this was confirmed in the following twilight:
“Wait! Both of you. I gotta talk to ye.”
He took a look at Benàn, who had grabbed his virtual reality console before going outside.
“Amalrik, the station storekeeper, told me that ye’ve emptied his entire soda supply…” he began, clearing the remains of his nattmal.
But that wasn’t the most important thing.
“...and .50 AE ammunition. The kind of bullets we used to hunt hvaler... whales or Soviet cosmodons!’
“We shouldn’t have hidden this from you, Alàn, we’re sorry,” Ali apologized. “We just wanted to teach the kid how to shoot.”
We saw Alàn smiling shyly through his beard.
“There’s no harm, rest assured,” he said after a short silence. “I just yearn this pirate story would get outta his head…”
“He’s a descendant of the first settlers… of course he has a taste for adventure,” I reported.
“Ja! I know. ‘was like him…”
Our host’s eyes were full of nostalgia.
“You wish…” corrected his wife, who was fixing a modulator in a corner of the room. “This child has more potential than the whole clan put together. He has passed the age to play with his Spirograph.”
“Again, I know. ‘saw the boy handling the absurd handgonne Ali uses as a gun,” admitted Alàn. “And for sure, he’s also undoubtedly smarter than me.”
“So why not let him go?” Ali asked.
The gardener then showed us his right leg by putting it on the table. His calf was studded with scars and burns. The same wounds slept under the dry earth that permanently covered his hands.
“There was an age when I craved to see what was happenin’ in the solar mines of Mercury and the colonies of the Outer Worlds. T’was a beautiful time of freedom that was already comin’ to an end,” he said as he readjusted his pants to hide his pink topographic map of Mars. “What will he find now? The ruthless Marine and this durn Technocratic corruption? Cyber-psychos on the run? Irradiated moons? Nej. There’s nothin’ for him in the deep space.”
“The armor was from when you had served?” I asked, alluding to Benàn’s words about the assisted exoskeleton.
“Served? I’ve never served anyone but the giant plants of Yggdrasil,” he said.
He scratched his beard; his gaze was lost in time. Then, when he addressed us again, he made us promise to stop encouraging his son’s sweet utopias. After that, he floated off to his workbench on the second floor.
“How can we tell him that he’s living in his own illusion?” Diligua asked rhetorically.
Diligua had finished repairing the modulator, but she threw it in the garbage anyway. Tomorrow, Benàn would secretly retrieve it to improve his radar system. She ultimately left the room after wishing us a good evening. The sadness could be seen on her face.
She was right, though. When their child celebrates his eighteenth Martian spring, Benàn will leave for Ceres or the Red Planet… if not before. Yggdrasil and his burrows were far too small for a boy like him.
“My father was like that too,” Ali concluded.
The final days were quieter. Diligua and the station’s technicians had activated the wind turbines. This ingenious system dispensed a fine mist inside Yggdrasil. The fog had invaded the large windows separating the pastoral town from the vacuum. A curious surrealist vibe reigned from then on.
With the humidity, Ali’s haircut had doubled in volume, giving her a Bob Ross vibe. Benàn and I both enjoyed seeing her like this before she threw her iron cup at us. Despite the lack of gravity, it almost tore off my right ear.
“The mist will only last a few days. It’s good for the skin. Just like the mud and…” Alàn preached.
“Alàn—” his wife started.
Diligua’s commentary was interrupted by a knock on the giant mushroom’s door. It was strange because since the beginning of our stay, nobody had come to visit Benàn and his family. From the yardman’s opinion, this didn’t bode well.
“Enter!” he shouted as he slid off the table to face this unexpected intruder.
The door opened slowly before a man in a beige raincoat rushed inside. Water was dripping from the edges of his round hat and long pointed nose. He wiped his mustache from the back of his sleeve then plunged his gold circled gray eyes into each of ours. When he met Alàn’s gaze, he gasped.
“What a shock! What they say is true!” he shouted with a thick english accent, hands on his hips. “Marcellàn Iron Fists lives on this moldy stone!”
Marcellàn? Was he mentioning the pirate? Marcellàn Iron Fists who pulverized his opponents with the strength of his fist? That Marcellàn would be Alàn?
Ali didn’t seem to make the connection. She was for the moment too busy finishing her meaty dagmal, the bottom of the bowl almost stuck to her forehead.
“I don’t know what ye’re talkin’ ‘bout,” replied our host coldly.
“Cut the crap, old man!” the visitor laughed. “I am responsible for some of the scars on your back.”
He then opened his coat, revealing an AAJ’s badge and the stock of a rifle with a scope hanging from his shoulder.
I recognized him. We were looking at Nigel Hemingwest, a second-generation bounty hunter. Obnoxiously famous for his gross blunders from which he had always come out as white as snow.
“Marcellàn, who fought bare hands in his shiny red titanium armor, relegated to the simple rank of a gardener! This is beyond prodigious!” Hemingwest continued, taking a step towards the table.
He was stopped by Diligua, a sharp knife ready:
“If you’re not here for any Yggdrasil-related business, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out!”
Hemingwest stumbled backward, hands up, but visibly amused by the situation. His smile faded as he looked at Ali who had now put his bowl back on the table. His eyes lingered for a moment on her own badge.
“Lovely wife. Anyway, I see that the bounty is already coveted…”
My partner wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand, also revealing her .50 caliber before granting her unexpected opinion on the matter:
“We ain’t give a shit about the dollar credits. Alàn has offered us shelter and food. No harm will come to him.”
Hemingwest opened his eyes wide. It must have been a long time since he had been so dissed, but unfortunately that was Ali’s trademark.
Nevertheless, my associate had just indicated that she wouldn’t fulfill a contract, which wasn’t common for an auxiliary. Unusual and punished by a severe reprimand if the high authority got wind of it.
“Whatever,” Hemingwest squeaked. “But I’m no fool, Alàn the florist. I’ll be waiting for Marcellàn and his armor at the foot of the Big Tree for a duel tonight. A legend like him can’t refuse, even if he had pissed calcium for twenty years by living in low G. Because, otherwise, the whole system will learn where his family is hiding… rightly or wrongly!”
And he left by slamming the door.
“Well, that explains all the praise for Marcellàn coming from Benàn!” I said to Ali, breaking the awkward silence.
“There’s no way I’m goin’ to accept this cursed challenge,” Alàn grumbled, back at his seat.
Benàn had risen, red with anger:
“Ye’re goin’ to let yerself be humiliated like that?”
“Can’t you see that your father has moved on?” his mother spoke in the same tone.
We didn’t say a word. Ali grabbed me by the paw before leaving the table. She had judged that the rest of the conversation had nothing to do with us. But when we arrived at the front door, Benàn passed us and withdrew first, visibly furious at Diligua’s answer.
“This Hemingwest klaphat hasn’t turned over a new leaf and I know him, he won’t let go,” Alàn grunted with his hands on his eyes.
“We ignore if he has any hard evidence. But if he does, I’ll bet he has nothing solid and is attempting to bluff us…” tried to reassure his wife before we closed the door.
Outside, against his mother’s flying Solex, Benàn was tearing off the pieces of moss covering the ramp to their fungal home. His anger had subsided and his eyes filled with tears when he saw us:
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who my pa was… but you were bounty hunters…”
“All fathers have secrets,” I replied. “Yours is worth a lot of dollar credits. And this Hemingwest is no joke…”
“My pa hasn’t wrestled for decades,” Benàn explained. “And yet, even with porous bones, he could crush this rat’s skull if he wasn’t such a coward!”
I noticed he had lost his nordic accent.
“Your father is anything but a coward, you know…” Ali intervened, sitting next to him.
“Is he? Then why does he refuse to fight? Why did he stop his life as a pirate and adventurer? Why does he prevent me from leaving?” Benàn shouted as he stood up. “Because he’s a fraud!”
He then swam in the void before disappearing into the fog.
“What an ingrate!” grumbled my human.
“Don’t blame the boy,” said his father, who had now joined us. “He also inherited the worst of his parents’ nature… especially his mother.”
A cast-iron cup from the house brushed against his head before getting lost in the mist.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“This afternoon? Dig out the contours of the water recycler. And if ye’re not ashamed to help an old pirate, I can employ you for that last job,” he says. “As for tonight? Absolutely nothin’. Hemingwest could wait for the Ragnarök that I wouldn’t give him satisfaction.”
Then we worked. But not without concern. Because we had no news from Benàn for the rest of the day. By dinner time, he was still missing, which worried his mother. And rightly so.
“Alàn! Alàn!”
The voice came from outside. The station storekeeper, Amalrik, stood below.
“Alàn! You’re not gonna believe your ears!” he continued after we had joined him. “The pirate Marcellàn is on Yggdrasil… and he’s struggling with Nigel Hemingwest!”
The real Marcellàn jumped and grabbed the flying Solex before his wife took control of it. The machine unfolded its wings and made its turbine roar then took off, forming a tunnel in the fog. After storming out of the house, Ali and I chased them to the foot of the Big Tree. It was there, in the center of the station, that Hemingwest had set its cruel rendezvous.
Unfortunately, just like our hosts, we arrived too late. The fight was over.
“By the 79 moons of Jupiter… no…” I meowed.
Hemingwest, who had disappeared, had mercilessly crucified his victim with huge cactus thorns on the gigantic white trunk.
“It can’t be…”
Thanks to the clan, Alàn and his wife were able to quickly take down the exoskeleton of the tree. As I thought, inside lay Benàn, shot from behind with a bullet in the back of the neck.
“Alàn? I recognize these colors and this symbol! Is this the armor of Iron Fists?” asked a technician in a brown work suit.
“Is this ye boy, Alàn? What is he doin’ in the exoskeleton of a pirate!” wondered the Nelwyn of the garage.
“Enough!” Diligua bellowed as Alàn was frantically removing the last metal plates.
Silent and livid, the gardener then took the body of his son in his arms. On his knees, he cried. His tears mingled with the droplets from the haze.
We subsequently left on foot to the tinder house after Diligua had collected the pieces of armor. But we ran into another surprise. Hemingwest was waiting for us at the foot of the access ramp, leaning against the trunk of a butterfly tree. He was polishing his rifle threatened by humidity.
“Ye!” shouted Alàn, putting his son in the arms of his wife.
“What? You can only blame yourself, Alàn the florist,” Hemingwest said. “You’re the one who should have been in armor under that tree. Not your foolish child. As far as I’m concerned, I was just doing my job! And giving you a chance on top of that!”
Alàn wanted to punch the murderer but Diligua stopped him immediately:
“Marcellàn! Not here. Not now.”
He understood. They had a child to bury.
Diligua transported Benàn’s body a few meters further, at the foot of the wall against which their house was fixed. Alàn moved silently towards it without adding anything more. Unlike his wife:
“He will meet you under the tree. Tomorrow. At dusk.”
Hemingwest withdrew, a smile up to his ears.
The funeral service was brief. Contrary to galactic custom, Benàn was buried in the soft earth of Yggdrasil. For his final journey, he was dressed in his father’s armor. There were no stones nor grave; just a rhodiola with yellow petals that the mist could never hide.
“We should have done something earlier,” my partner said as she was folding our luggage, the next day. “Did we fuck this up?”
“It's not like Marcellàn was a saint. It was nothing but a truce,” I answered. “Staying out of this was our choice.”
She sighed. I could see anger in her eyes.
“That’s just another way to say we fucked up...”
“These kinds of things sometimes just happen, Ali...”
But it wasn’t the end of it.
“Hemingwest made its last mistake there!” she exploded. “Leave him to us, Alàn!”
The former pirate, who until now had been listening to us from afar, entered the room.
“Definitely not. I’ll take care of this,” he declared. “My mistakes. My boy.”
He grinned. His eyes were still red with pain, but he was smiling. It was also the first time we saw him without a trace of dirt on his face or hands.
“But how are you going to do without your armor?” I asked.
We had the answer in the evening. Alàn, the father and not Marcellàn the pirate, was waiting for his opponent at the foot of the Big Tree. All around the improvised arena, the community of Yggdrasil watched anxiously.
Hemingwest was late and the crowd began to express their dissatisfaction. Only Alàn remained calm as a monk, searching for his foe in the fog that was finally dissipating.
A spark ignited the white foliage where Hemingwest had hidden for his ambush. A gunshot followed. The deceiver must have used the same strategy the day before.
The gardener was hit in the shoulder and fell to his knees. Then, a second bullet struck him in the middle of the thigh, knocking him against the ground.
“Alàn!” cried Diligua as she tried to reach him.
Hemingwest, delighted with his ploy, let himself slide down to the roots not without tearing a whole chunk of bark with his reinforced gravity-boots. With the rifle now stowed in his holster, he exalted as he prepared a fatal stab.
“Is that all Marcellàn can do without his armor? A miserable snail out of its shell, that’s what you are now! I wasted my time!”
He laughed at his joke and was the only one.
But that was short-lived. Alàn had recovered as if nothing had happened. Left shoulder and leg backwards, fists clenched in front of his jaw, his body moved into a fighting position.
Hemingwest swore and threw his knife, which slithered into his opponent’s forearm. The latter withdrew it immediately before tossing it into the peat slightly further. With a quick gesture, the bounty hunter then grabbed his rifle and leaped about ten meters back. His reflex was too slow because the pirate was already on top of him. His rain of punches met with little resistance.
Hemingwest was knocked to the ground with a sweeper, but not without giving back a few blows. When he tried to get up, Alàn gave him an uppercut and then a hook that pushed his right cheekbone trough the nasal walls. Hemingwest spat out teeth and crushed flesh before escaping inaudible gurgling noises. The murderer was being reduced to a bloody mush by Alan’s long trained gardener hands.
One never truly knew if the stories were authentic or if the exploits of these yesteryear’s legends were pure fabrication. But on that day, the gardener reminded Yggdrasil what a freebooter’s fury was. Alàn was a real brute even without his armor.
“Have you had enough?” asked Alàn, grabbing the murderer’s throat. “Because I want ye in yer ship and far from here in the next half-Martian hour.”
Hemingway nodded slowly in approval, risking losing what was left of his cervical vertebrae. But when Alàn turned away from him, the bounty hunter had his rifle in his hand again.
“Watch out!” I yelled.
Fortunately, Ali was even faster. She had fired instantly and her projectile had hit Hemingwest’s fingers, tearing off his index and thumb. He wanted to scream in pain, yet Diligua silenced him with a last kick to the gut.
She then ran to her husband and they just went home.
Shortly after that, the onlookers had abandoned the scene. None of them will ever talk about this fight or acknowledge the presence of a certain Marcellàn on their station. All that remained was Nigel Hemingwest, still breathing the filtered air from this haven of paradise.
With the surviving fingers stuck in the dirt, the bounty hunter had started crawling to the hangar where our respective ships were parked when we fell on him. Actually, it wasn’t difficult to follow his tracks because of the bubbles of blood and the urine’s smell that he had sown in his path.
“What the hell do you want from me?” he stammered as he replaced his incisors at each syllable. “You’re finished too, once the Alliance is informed.”
As my human sat on his back, with a heel against his neck, I climbed on his hand while he tried to grab his rifle under his coat.
“The Alliance is far too tolerant nowadays,” I said. “Because of sleazeballs like you, we have a tainted reputation.”
“Even worse than criminals,” my partner added. “And we don’t have stories singing about our deeds. Something I’d surely like to.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” screamed Hemingwest.
“Ali. Stay focused, please.”
She then continued:
“I don’t know what doggone protection you got, but let’s make a deal, dick-nose. You don’t tell anyone about this story and we’ll forget your new little blunder that cost our friend Benàn his life and dreams.”
An agreement like this one was yet a gut-wrenching affair.
“Screw you, punks! My brothers are going to…”
My sapiens smashed his skull with her foot before placing the still hot barrel of her gun at the base of his neck. She then concluded:
“Who cares about your brothers, may they be Vito Corleone or cousin Vinny. Am I right, Lee?”
“Indeed, partner.”
Without further hesitation, yet a few punches in the nose, Hemingwest finally accepted the arrangement. A minute later, he was gone.
The next day, it was Diligua who came to say goodbye once the Kitty was completely repaired and ready for flight. She entrusted us with some equipment from her son’s ship as spare parts, his virtual reality console and the jet-pack my associate had worked on.
“Where are you going? If it’s not indiscreet,” she asked us while finishing to screw a last rivet badly tightened under the wing of our beautiful Swallow.
“Towards the belt… Ceres,” I replied. “Hunt down real gnarly guys, sleep under the gaze of the nebulae and, why not, pursue the majestic Wes Goldsun on Pluto.”
Diligua smiled.
“All the same! Why do you have to run after chimeras?”
“What else do we have left?” concluded my sapiens.
The ramp closed, the control computer greeted us. As for the engine, it hummed as its first day.
Back to business… submitted by This happened to my relative who we will call John. John is a very experienced fisherman and owns a couple of small fishing boats. Anyways one day he was returning from a fishing trip (the ocean in my city is a couple of hours drive) and suddenly felt very tired and sleepy. In my country, you can find small rest stops on the highway with limited capacity motel rooms. John decided to rent a motel room and sleep for a couple of hours since he is worried about driving late at night while feeling tired. The clerk at the motel tells him that all the rooms are booked but the back building has 2-3 rooms and is rarely used, so John agrees. Now here is the interesting part, John swears the back building was locked with a chain and padlock (meaning the building was empty of people) and looked abandoned. The guy takes him up to his room (which John says was VERY dusty) and looked like no one has used it in forever. Feeling very exhausted he ignores all this and just wants to nap so he can hit the road again. John says while he was sleeping, someone started knocking very loud and was kicking the door. So he gets up and asks who is there? but no one was there or responding, and the knocking stops. He goes back to bed and decides to ignore it since he is out in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing he can do. He messages his family his location and tells them he can’t drive and will rest. After an hour or so passes while he is in bed, he hears foot steps in the room. While laying on the bed he sees very small people (about 2-3 ft as he puts it) all surrounding his bed, at least 6 of them. They were mumbling to each other while looking at him and kept walking around the room. John at this point says he is literally paralyzed from fear and can’t move or scream. He closes his eyes and wonders if he will become a missing person. He remembers waking up in the morning after that and sunlight in his room. He quickly jumps out of bed, and goes to the main building and tells the clerk (different from last night) what happened. The clerk could not believe it, and told him the new clerk working the night before was not supposed to open the back building as it hasn’t been used for years and is considered a safety hazard.
Please excuse my English as it is my second language.
submitted by I rarely post essays.
As someone who's lived in other parts of the world, I've been watching events unfold with a severe dread that surpasses Trump's worst desires (or projected desires).
The thing I fear, is not Trump "winning, it's not Biden "Winning", it's not even directly related to the election itself, rather it's summarized in Friedrich Nietzsche's famous quote;
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
This quote while widespread is often ignored or dismissed as a side point, however I've long since come to the conclusion that the intense polarization is intended as a feature not a bug, and Trump is just merely a
tool in the plan that has been underway for decades.
We've reached the point where
BOTH Republicans
AND Democrats (speaking of actual regular voters, not politicians or bots, or those minorities on either side that were already "extremists");
- Cynically treat rape and sexual abuse differently depending on the "tribe" accused (Yes, it's a mind boggling surprise to folks that even conservatives hate sexual abuse, but "classify" it differently, Which I obviously and completely disagree with.)
- Are willing to silence and censor people because they don't like what they're saying.,
- Hate whistle-blowers (unless they can once again cynically use them)
- Are willing to harass and bully those that don't subscribe to their orthodoxy, and are open to using violence to enforce said orthodoxy
- Are willing to embrace and amplify people who go against everything they "believe in", because of a common enemy, even if they themselves are horrendously guilty of the same despicable behavior as the "common enemy".
- Are absolutely ok with stoking Xenophobia and racism as long as it benefits their cause.. Sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, sometimes just insanely obvious
- Yearn for a strongman to protect them from something/someone scary. They "yearn" even as they dismiss the very rights they claim to represent.. Some aren't at all shy about it either
- Cult like submission to the party
- Willingness to punish political "enemies"
- Approval of crack downs on dissent, even when "justified" with very very flimsy "causes". Not counting approval for crack down of civil liberties (check the dates)
- Hatred of anyone that speaks the truth, if only because it goes against their tribal group. Coupled with intentional blindness, or obtuse excusing of any crime their "tribe" commits
- The list goes on, but those are the most important ones imo.
Myself and
thousands of others that have traveled or lived in "less free" parts of the world have constantly warned of the similarities of the "But Trump" Boogeyman strategy, and of the dangers of this strategy coming to fruition, people from those regions
have spoken the warnings clearly in English and of course we're ridiculed attacked and most importantly
ignored.. Because "it can't happen here". Furthermore, the truth is, we've seen many
"Trumps" before in recent times.
Anyone that has ever looked at any "Authoritarian" country, recognizes a very simple fact; People enable and allow said tyranny.
Consent of the Governed is in fact given to both Democratic leaders and Authoritarian leaders.
In each and every one of these countries, no matter how despicable their leaders, they always manage to find support out of a fear of one or many "Boogeymen". In MENA, the holy trinity of Boogeymen is; The USA, Israel, The Muslim Brotherhood. And depending on which part of MENA, either Iran/Saudi.
Anything and everything wrong with the country, is the fault of one of those Boogeymen, and as a result quite a few people will hate their leaders openly, know they're corrupt thieves, murderers, pedophiles...etc but still back them because at least they're "protecting us from X". They'll be outraged at whatever crime the regime commits against the people, but willingly eat up the pro-regime propaganda because "They were trouble makers that deserved it" or "They were agents of Israel/USA" or "This is a plot by Israel/USA/Iran/Saudi"..etc. The list goes on and on and on. So much so that a common "twisting" of Karl Marx's adage on religion is
"Israel is the Opiate of the Arabs", a concept
naturally twisted by pro-Israel parties to deflect away from Israel's actual crimes, using typical "
Whataboutism"
Sound familiar?
There's no doubt those "Boogeymen" are scary and regularly commit crimes. But the fact that someone commits crimes, has never ever meant that others have not themselves committed crimes. But they want you to think that, or even worse, they want the crimes of said Boogeymen to excuse the
crimes of those in
their own tribes. There's a very real reason the astroturfing efforts are focused on
"So you want Trump to win?" and
"So you're voting for Trump?" type messages when trying to "convince" voters to back Biden that are skeptical. So much so,
they haven't even bothered to pretend otherwise. They want binary.
There's a very very
VERY good reason that
Bernie said we need a global progressive front, and that Yanis Varoufakis agreed., What we're seeing happen in the USA, we saw before in multiple countries. They understand that with corporate authoritarian power going multinational and coordinating on an international basis, we need an international front to fight it, and not just focus on "local" stuff, because as I'm trying to point out, you end up seeing the same tactics happen elsewhere because even those that bother to pay cursory attention think or say
"it can't happen here", or more importantly, even if they do understand the possibility of it "happening here" only see it in the light of tribalism, where only
"The other" is willing or
capable to bring it to fruition. We're now at the
point where civilian oversight of an election is considered a "bad thing" by "Liberals", "cause Drumpf", this isn't the first (or even last) time I've heard something similar. For example, it's anecdotal, but a friend reported once that during a conversation, a very liberal and otherwise "normal" but very "Dem" co-worker mentioned that she found it "extremely creepy" that a Bernie supporter was video taping her counting votes at a precinct in 2016 when she was a volunteer poll worker. She obviously wasn't a Bernie fan.
You're either with us, or against us is now the rallying cry across the board..
one we've heard before even here in the USA, a message that when last we heard it,
it was used to justify one of the worst crimes of the modern era The
intense polarization of America along acceptance of authoritarian tolerance is a feature, not a bug. To quote the pinned tweet of one of the aforementioned accounts;
“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
~William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Multiple studies from reputable sources
have sounded the alarm that faith in democracy is fading fast, but once again, no one is listening, even when
"Liberal" favorites talk about it.
To give you an example of what I mean,
folks wanting the government to "verify" news (to combat fake news), completely forget (or intentionally omit) the fact that the very same laws they're recommending have already
been implemented in multiple countries and only benefit the ruling regime, who use them as just another tool to silence dissident. Furthermore,
there are other methods of combating disinformation that don't erode civil liberties., but we rarely hear about them in public discourse, the choice we're always given is
"Give up this right, or suffer the consequences".
And a crucial but (intentionally?) overlooked fact on the free-speech debate,
starts cutting through all the fog;
“Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political,” he wrote. “There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”
But a transformative ruling by the Supreme Court five years later began to change that thinking. The case, a challenge to a state law that banned advertising the prices of prescription drugs, was filed by Public Citizen, a consumer rights group founded by Ralph Nader. The group argued that the law hurt consumers, and helped persuade the court, in Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, to protect advertising and other commercial speech.
The only dissent in the decision came from Justice William H. Rehnquist, the court’s most conservative member.
Kathleen M. Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that it did not take long for corporations to see the opportunities presented by the decision.
“While the case was litigated by consumer protection advocates,” she wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “corporate speakers soon became the principal beneficiaries of subsequent rulings that, for example, struck down restrictions on including alcohol content on beer can labels, limitations on outdoor tobacco advertising near schools and rules governing how compounded drugs may be advertised.”
That trend has continued, with businesses mounting First Amendment challenges to gun control laws, securities regulations, country-of-origin labels, graphic cigarette warnings and limits on off-label drug marketing.
“I was a bit queasy about it because I had the sense that we were unleashing something, but nowhere near what happened,” Mr. Nader said. “It was one of the biggest boomerangs in judicial cases ever.”
“I couldn’t be Merlin,” he added. “We never thought the judiciary would be as conservative or corporate. This was an expansion that was not preordained by doctrine. It was preordained by the political philosophies of judges.”
Not all of the liberal scholars and lawyers who helped create modern First Amendment law are disappointed. Martin Redish, a law professor at Northwestern University, who wrote a seminal 1971 article proposing First Amendment protection for commercial speech, said he was pleased with the Roberts court’s decisions.
“Its most important contributions are in the commercial speech and corporate speech areas,” he said. “It’s a workmanlike, common sense approach.”
Liberals also played a key role in creating modern campaign finance law in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 decision that struck down limits on political spending by individuals and was the basis for Citizens United, the 2010 decision that did away with similar limits for corporations and unions.
One plaintiff was Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, who had challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 presidential primaries — from the left. Another was the American Civil Liberties Union’s New York affiliate.
Professor Neuborne, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said he now regrets the role he played in winning the case. “I signed the brief in Buckley,” he said. “I’m going to spend long amounts of time in purgatory.”
To Professor Seidman, cases like these were part of what he describes as a right-wing takeover of the First Amendment since the liberal victories in the years Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court.
“With the receding of Warren court liberalism, free-speech law took a sharp right turn,” Professor Seidman wrote in a new article to be published in the Columbia Law Review. “Instead of providing a shield for the powerless, the First Amendment became a sword used by people at the apex of the American hierarchy of power. Among its victims: proponents of campaign finance reform, opponents of cigarette addiction, the L.B.G.T.Q. community, labor unions, animal rights advocates, environmentalists, targets of hate speech and abortion providers.
Yet, almost all the discourse in free speech debates/"Cancel culture" is focused on anything EXCEPT the corporate aspect, and
naturally ignores the only groups actually and truly at a disadvantage.. Joy Ann Reid's was never "cancelled" for her Islamophobia, bigotry, racism, antisemitism...etc , but was rather rewarded with a prime time show, and many of the same "liberals" applaud her regularly.
And obviously on the Right, none of them are "Cancelled" for any obvious transgressions.
It starts getting clearer when
you realize what types of people
are "agreeing" with each other on the subject, and who certain folks decided to
target All that paints a very clear picture; Only
your rights should be revoked.
"We" should be given a pass.
Side note; I also find it interesting how many twisted abuses can be
traced back to the corporate response to Nader's (at the time) very effective citizen activism.. That was the pivotal moment.
Which makes it all the easier to see how they so effectively managed to turn him into a pariah. On a related note, Information warfare has been predicted to be the new major war front
at least as far back as 1996, so this isn't something they just started thinking about in 2016, contrary to popular perception.
Hell, an extremely popular anime talked of it in the early 2000s, and fictionally exhibited things we see in reality today. Even
Bin Laden, the infamous terrorist, understood the ramifications, and considered it a primary tenant of his "Death by a thousand cuts" strategy, although he was primary focused on inflicting economic harm.
And "we" walked right into it willingly. Why? Well perhaps this next quote will shed some light;
Richard Shultz, a professor of international politics at Tufts who’s long been a key national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that “A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as ‘a small price to pay for being a superpower.’”
Again, the missed subtext is clear; Human lives lost in terrorism attacks (and increased radicalization due to US actions leading to more potential terrorist attacks) are a cheap price for global (and more importantly economic) dominance. By extension, one can assume that human lives lost to other corporate goals are also considered a "cheap cost".
This is NOT ok.
Speaking of radicalization and
Al-Qaeda....
What did the founding fathers (that conservatives love to reference) think of stuff like this?
Abraham Lincoln warned in February 15, 1848, of the
dangers of "Only I see and understand the danger, only I can protect you" type politics.
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,—”I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.”
The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood. Write soon again.
James Madison on Friday, February 8th, 1788 warned;
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
What's often missed, is the subtext of Madison's warning, and central to the thesis of this essay, clarifies that yes, Government is supposed to represent the will of the people (or what they're willing to tolerate), but what happens when "the people" are "guided" to a particular view? Why is propaganda so prevalent and effective?
Why do we reject the
very clear evidence and
science that entire populations can in fact be "rewired" to a particular view? In other words, combining the warnings of Nietzsche, Lincoln and Madison's warning leads to the conclusion that yes, if "properly guided" the people can be taught to "yearn for a king", something which again, we've seen happen in practice across the world.
In closing, while none of this information is new but we're reaching
the apex of a long arc, and if you've read this and thought one or more of;
- "It's just a conspiracy theory"
- "You're bashing Democrats and supporting Trump"
- "You're bashing Trump and supporting Democrats"
Then you're exactly part of the problem I'm warning of. I'm not saying vote for Trump, I'm not saying vote for Biden. I'm not saying to vote at all, or that voting actually has much to do with it in the first place.
I'm pointing out a very simple fact expressed once by Benjamin Franklin, and even though the context was endlessly butchered,
the real context makes it far more relevant; In January 1775 Benjamin Franklin (1796-1790) was part of an American delegation sent to Britain in an attempt to resolve the outstanding disagreements between the Crown and the colonies. Seventeen points were up for discussion of which several were rejected outright by the Crown while others were rejected by the colonies. Franklin’s comments regarding the last two points produced one of his most famous sayings from the period:
As to the other two acts, (i.e. 16. The American admiralty courts reduced to the same powers they have in England, and the acts establishing them to be reënacted in America; and 17. All powers of internal legislation in the colonies to be disclaimed by Parliament) the Massachusetts (sic) must suffer all the hazards and mischiefs of war rather than admit the alteration of their charters and laws by Parliament. ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
The context explained in the analysis makes it ever more clear;
It is interesting to see where the main lines of disagreement lay between the colonists' delegation to London and the Crown in early 1775 which one would think would have been the last opportunity at some kind of reconciliation before independence was declared and war broke out. The sticking points for the Crown were the 8th, 11th, and 17th Articles which were declared to be “inadmissible” or were “refused absolutely”: “8. No troops to enter and quarter in any colony, but with the consent of its legislature. 11. The late Massachusetts and Quebec Acts to be repealed, and a free government granted to Canada. 17. All powers of internal legislation in the colonies to be disclaimed by Parliament.” The payment of back taxes might be negotiable but when it came to the stationing of troops or placing limits on the power of Parliament over colonial legislatures no compromise was possible without giving up political power. Franklin’s remarks about the trade offs between “essential liberty” and “a little temporary safety” seem to have been directed at those in the colonies who could see that further compromise was no longer possible by the Crown and that it was up to the colonies to cave in in order to maintain the peace. Franklin was urging them that to do this would be to give up the entire game and thereby scuttle any chance for real liberty and independence in the colonies.
TL;DR : Shit is fucked. Read it.
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