#ineffectual

[eaglesnick]

“Many years ago, there used to be something called ‘conflict of interest.’ No longer, I’m afraid. Today, we all bathe in the same river.” ― Gore Vidal, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

When the hapless and ineffectual Therese Coffey resigned from her post as Secretary of State for The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs many people would have heaved a big sigh of relief. At last Rishi Sunak might appoint someone who could bring the river and sea polluting water companies to heel.

That pipe dream was shattered within 24 hours. Sunak has appointed Steve Barclay as the new Environment Secretary, the man who refused to talk to doctors and nurses during the NHS pay and recruitment strikes, leading to a massive increase in NHS waiting lists.

Although Therese Coffey was useless at controlling the polluting water companies, she at least had the advantage of not being in bed with any of them. Barclay can make no such claim as his wife is a senior executive at Anglian Water.

Anglian Water has attracted headlines like these:

“Anglian Water ordered to pay £156,000 for sewage pollution. The court found that negligence and a lack of maintenance were to blame." (GOV.UK: 13/09/19)

And

“Anglian Water has been fined more than £1.2m after admitting causing pollution in three counties.” (BBC News: 17/10/22)

And

“Anglian Water fined £2.65m after sewage discharged into North Sea. Largest ever fine imposed for environmental offences in the East region.”  (GOV.UK: 28/05/23)

The Anglian Water annual financial statement for 2020/21 recorded group revenues of £1,351.8 million, with an increase in profits of £68.2 million. The Financial Times (21/06/22) reported that:

“Anglian Water pays £392 mn dividend to owners as customer bills rise.”

And in November of this year it was reported that Anglian Water:

“...paid its executives an eye-watering "£2,424.555 in pay and perks last year.” (Yahoo News: 14/11/23)

Maybe I am being cynical but I cannot see Steve Barclay doing anything that is likely to jeopardise his wife’s  (and by extension, his family’s ) income, can you?

#uk politics #rishi sunak #steve barclay #anglian water #pollution #profits #income conflict of interest #ineffectual #corporate power

[peculiary]

Red Tornado #1 May 1, 1985

#base #unit #initial strategy #ineffectual #shift #alternative strategy #instructions #understood

[howifeltabouthim]

You live on books and conversation and mutual admiration and drink — you're all alcoholics — and sentimental ideas of virtue. You have no energy, you are lazy people. The real heroes of our time are those who are brave enough to let go of the old dreamy self-centred self-satisfied morality and the old imperialistic moral person who was monarch of all he surveyed!

Iris Murdoch, from The Book and the Brotherhood

#read for filth #i feel read #intellectuals #ineffectual #insulting #self satisfied #self centered #selfish #the times they are a changing #relic #lazy #complacent #unmotivated #judgmental #characterization #criticism #quotes #lit #words #excerpts #quote #literature #iris murdoch #the book and the brotherhood

[mumblesplash]

i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers

you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.

AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character

see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.

mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.

#anyway yeah i have this whole idea in my head about mumbo’s friendship with grian from a characterization standpoint #bc i agree with the somewhat? common consensus that being friends with mumbo has made grian softer and friendlier over time #but i don’t think it was in a ‘reflecting back the kindness he’s being shown’ way #i think it’s because the more harsh and chaotic you try to be towards mumbo the more you feel ineffectual and out of control #and grian can’t handle it so he slowly becomes nicer until he feels like they’re on equal footing again #like don’t get me wrong i think they genuinely are good friends #and i don’t think this is necessarily something mumbo is doing on purpose #but i think the power dynamic going on under the surface is much more bizarre and weighted in mumbo’s favor than it seems at first glance #mumbling

[whjxl03rsvz]

Black Girl Riding Big Black Dick Amateur reverse cowgirl good fuck sex hard Naked buff mexican men gay porn All the dudes get into some throating atlantis bahamas casino sports book POV milf blows cock and balls Sexy teen fucks big cock husband of swinger couple, wife joins in Latina and BFFs teaching a big cocked exchange student Hot girls wrestling Charlotte Sartre vs Sheena Rose with pussy eating wife caught

#noncognizance #consecratedness #brachisto- #allothigenic #inelastically #scriptwriting #preemptory #enneatical #organopathy #discoveries #Pandarus #statistology #uncanonised #trollman #epichondrosis #ineffectual #ovalescent #preinspection #jab #histidine

[mercymornsimpathizer]

the thing about judith is that fundamentally she is the most reasonable and level-headed person at canaan house. when you're stuck in a locked room serial murder mystery you really ought to, like, get help. at the very least let someone know that there is some serious murder-type shenanigans going on. not, you know, desperately try to achieve immortality before you can be murdered. like say what you will about her approach! but everyone else's approach was, crucially, also really bad.

#judith deuteros #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #etc etc etc #judith was my first favorite character bc i too am fundamentally a no fun allowed ineffectual busybody #<3

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Oh wait I never told you about the ballet Cinderella adaptation I saw last week ok! So the prince was a wastrel and as a prank when he had to go out with his best friend/serving-man to deliver invitations they exchanged clothes so the step-sisters thought the serving-man was the prince and danced for him. Meanwhile, the prince came to the back door as a beggar and Cinderella let him in and gave him soup, and when he saw how sad she was that her step-mother wouldn't give her an invitation he did a stupid dance for her and then taught her how to do the courtly dances by having her stand on his feet, and all the time she thought he was just a random beggar until the ball. Also the younger stepsister was actually nice and she and the servant fell in love at the ball as well!

#interestingly the dad wasn't killed off! he was just very very ineffectual #a choice I'm still thinking about #cinderella

[grinchwrapsupreme]

any other character I might not have noticed, but the way Roman holds his arms in front of him when he's crying at the funeral like a shield... like he might get hit...

#roman roy #succession #succession spoilers #yeah i'm gonna be unsufferable about this for AT LEAST 2 weeks considering whats happening next sunday #i didn't even think about it until i noticed the arm that wasn't holding the cue cards #was also held in front of him just him putting it between him and his siblings #like yeah he knew he 'wasn't supposed to' cry #and he's especially visible here in front of all these people #and what must dad think #i do think its a combination of him ineffectually trying to put something between him and all the people watching #and habit from how logan treated him growing up #okay mr armstrong i see your silly mirror i see it

[rotisseries]

me and the mutuals discussing violence as a metaphor for sex

#violence and sex as partners in the dance of physicality etc etc #an ineffectual venomous snake bite. a slow stabbing. choking. an animalistic neck bite #all things that can mean so much to insane people<3

[fazgoo-connoiseur-1987]

important thing that I don't think I've mentioned is that Henry was THERE for Cassidy's murder- or the end of it at least. It was a breaking point cus of the obvious violence of it but also the sudden reality of the situation hitting Henry like a freight train. Hiding the bodies after the fact and watching a child die and doing nothing in the moment are different things. No backing out now. In far far far too deep.

#this is why he agrees to make the funtimes i think cus hes just #part of it now #fully #this is mooostly why henry feels responsible for cass in particular btw he couldnve saved her if he wasnt so ineffectual #fnaf #five nights at freddy's #william afton #henry emily #cassidy fnaf #yelling about the bear #child death

[bestworstcase]

Out of curiosity (and some confusion), how do you think Faunus came about? Unless I'm misremembering (in which case this would be pretty awkward) Faunus didn't exist in the First Wave of Humanity, and given that the two creation myths we're presented with (not even by an actual Faunus) disagree on almost every point I'd be surprised if there was an actual answer-

you’re remembering correctly that the faunus are unique to remnant. also tonight has been one of my periodic episodes of being unhinged about this so here is some Background Reading.

of the two faunus creation myths one is explicitly a very old faunus oral tradition and the other reads to me very strongly as a syncretism with the (human) brother-cult, in that the earlier conceit of freely chosen, joyful transformation and liberation by a wild but benevolent trickster god is retained but presented within an explicit framework of divine judgment and moral imperative to be peaceful and harmonious or else bring about self-annihilation through conflict. which is exactly the sort of cultural evolution that you’d expect to get from refracting ‘the shallow sea’ through the eschatological prism of ‘the two brothers’ and the doctrine of the brother-cult generally.

(for a real historical exemplar of this sort of shift occurring, see the cultural remapping of ambiguous deities in many pre-christian polytheistic traditions onto the christian idea of The Devil; this is fairly ubiquitous but the most generally accessible case is the popular conception of hades as an evil god and hades as hell, whereas in actual practice hades was the god who ruled over hades, which was where everyone went when they died and encompassed a variety of different areas raging from very nice to okay to unpleasant.)

see also: ozpin’s commentaries on ‘judgment,’ which gestures at exactly this phenomenon. “faunus always cast their god as a wise and noble figure, while human stories portray the same god as a trickster, not to be trusted.” he identifies both tales as faunus in origin (& certainly the characterization of the god of animals in ‘judgment’ is more ‘wise and noble’ than ‘trickster,’ although i think ozpin is also showing his own biases here because the god depicted in ‘the shallow sea’ is a trickster who is also very wise, honest, and fair. so ‘wise and noble’ vs ‘untrustworthy trickster’ is something of a false dichotomy, but also one that maps perfectly onto the gods of light and darkness as depicted in brother-cult doctrine.

<- the way rwby Handles religion is really excellent

anyway. i have a theory.

it’s lightly implied that grimm and faunus came first, humans second. (per WOR: there has never been a time in human history without grimm, and faunus have been around as long as humans “if not a little longer,” and there was a historical period when faunus were more numerous than humans.)

which is incongruous with the faunus’ own creation myths, both of which hinge on humans choosing to be transformed into something new by divine power.

salem squares that circle. salem was the last human of the old world, all that remained of humanity, and by extension she was also the first person of remnant. if faunus came to be before humans were revived, and salem embraced the faunus as her own people as discussed in the background reading post, it’s perfectly cogent for the faunus to be older than this humanity whilst understanding themselves as a people who came from humans, because for the very oldest one of them that was true.

which explains the myth, more than the factual history, but i do think it probably gets at the factual history too, because…

mechanically speaking.

what did salem do when she jumped into the pool of grimm? she combined the waters of life (pure creation) with the waters of grimm (pure destruction) into a new kind of being (herself, a grimm-person) in the same pattern as before (herself, a human-person with free will and a dualistic nature).

that’s, uh, how the brothers created humankind. and the jabberwalker. and the cat by combining their magic (dark’s fire, light’s smoke) into new kinds of beings modeled after themselves.

what did salem hope to achieve by rebelling against the brothers? she wanted humanity to “claim the powers of their creators and perfect their own design.”

and she failed but also succeeded in the end because she Did That—in the very literal sense. salem Remade Herself in the pool of grimm; jinn’s framing of the story through ozpin’s point of view elides salem’s agency at every step and implies an uncomplicatedly suicidal motive for jumping into the pool of grimm, but—i mean–

—the blacksmith has been right under our noses this whole time because she’s the form that salem gives to the idea of remnant’s souls. the lore put forward in v9 recontextualizes and clarifies a lot of what happens in the lost fable, not just in terms of the interpersonal history with the brothers but also the reason certain things unfold as they do and (most importantly) where the missing pieces might be.

the god of light’s understanding of balance is wrong. death as permanent unconscious stasis is not the natural order of things, it’s an arbitrary rule the brothers made up, and they themselves are beings from a place where death is a moment of rest and healing before rebirth as yourself again. they made humans in their image. balance is something that happens when things are given the time to figure themselves out.

what happens to the nature of life and death on remnant when the brothers remove themselves from the artificial system they created? it’s not balanced. it’s like a ball perched juuust at the upper rim of a ramp after you pull your hand away: it might not start rolling right away, but if you leave it long enough then something will eventually give it a nudge, whether the wind or the vibrations of a truck passing by or tiny imperceptible movements of the earth, and then that potential energy will be released.

the “death is when you stop and don’t change, forever” system was a ball sitting on a ramp in a room with someone who both really wanted to get the ball rolling and had absolutely nothing better to do than figure out how to give it that nudge. for millions of years.

yeah? here’s salem telling ozma “our souls transcend death.” that’s a surprise tool that will help us later.

the natural order of things, in remnant as in the ever after, is change. changing, it rests. ascension is just how it is in the ever after, meaning it’s in balance, meaning it’s the rhythm the ever after kind of settled into over time. the ball is on flat ground down there, jabber and all.

but the ever after didn’t begin the way the brothers’ world did—it wasn’t created ex nihilo with a specific prescription for how life/death were going to work, it was cultivated into a garden from wilderness. (ascension is the cycle of the harvest: when you have finished, when you are ready, the tree calls you back—you’re reaped—and then the seeds of you are sown and you begin again. this is a life/death system that developed through gardening!)

so it’s silly to imagine remnant’s balance will necessarily look exactly like the ever after’s balance. different beginnings, different variables, different environment. neither the ball nor the ramp are identical, so why in the world would the outcome be the same?

here’s pyrrha chanting that it is in passing we achieve immortality, through this we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all, infinite in distance and unbound by death, i release your soul. that is also a surprise tool that will help us later.

but we can look at the ever after to get an idea of what the “lowest energy state” for the rolling-ball of a life/death system is, practically speaking, because—like i said—ascension is a cosmic repetition of how the ever after was made. the garden is populated by living fruits and blossoms of the tree who are reaped and sown in a continual cycle. the proverbial level ground is a pattern that wears in some grooves for the changing to follow. rivers, to change up the analogy a bit, don’t go flooding around everywhere all the time; the water flows through its channels, generally.

so, what patterns has remnant got, potentially?

death either takes a really, really long time (because it was dammed up for so long, the reservoirs is deep) or happens really fast, in a flood (what happens when a dam breaks?)

dying once makes you infinite (salem drowned in the fountain of creation, and became immortal)

dying twice unbinds you (salem drowned again in the pool of grimm, and remade herself into something new)

the “really fast” way of dying can maybe bind you to someone else, changing both of you in ways you may not like (ozma’s soul is continually recombined with another and he is changed against his will)

penny ambrosius bootleg ascension (i hope ambrosius enjoys his probable eventual new role as the chthonic god of remnant’s very complicated afterlife. he cannot possibly do worse than the guy who built the dam.)

however ozma’s curse gets resolved is likely to complete or alter the existing pattern(s)

gestures at the maidens. that’s a “really fast” way of dying that follows both the ozma pattern (the maidens cleave to new hosts) and the unbinding salem pattern (maidens choose themselves and also do not compromise the free will of the host or corrupt or take over the host’s conscious mind or identity)—maidens are twice-dead because they were cut out from ozma’s soul (<- spiritual death) and their cycle began with the deaths of the first four women who were given this magic.

gestures at whatever the hell is going on with silver-eyed psychopomps and the white liminal space between life and death. ruby’s eyes make her a conduit of some kind for that passage through the void; she hears pyrrha’s and penny’s cries for help (and pyrrha’s last words) after they die, and in the ever after she is haunted by penny’s sword. and the light motivated by her desperation to save people she cares about appears to be the white light that fills the void where life and death both part and come together again.

if death is a reservoir behind a dam and it happens either quite fast or very slow, what—or who—are the floodgates? [checks notes] the biological children of the “really fast” pattern-maker absent the interference pattern of salem. obviously.

notably, ozma’s influence as a pattern-maker is constrained to specific things with a direct spiritual or biological connection to himself, which tracks because his reincarnation sitch is relatively new. (likewise, i expect the penny ambrosius bootleg ascension deal will not have far-reaching effects any time soon; there are much older, deeper patterns at work here.)

salem, on the other hand, is two fucking hundred million years old. probably. on account of plate tectonics. which means that she has a much greater gravitational pull, so to speak, and is most likely to be that pattern that life/death on remnant ‘wants’ to fall into. the ball rolls down; water will flow into the deepest available channel.

so she died and became infinite and then died again in a manner she hoped would “take [infinite life]” away from her (TAKE AWAY FROM AN INFINITE QUANTITY AND AN INFINITE QUANTITY REMAINS. WAS SHE SUICIDAL OR DOING MATH.) and so remade herself.

salem wandered the face of the planet alone, awaiting a death that would never come. then she jumped into the pool of grimm. then ???. then the god of light pulled ozma out of stasis and told him “mankind is no more, but in time they’ll come back” and also he’ll kill everyone again if ozma doesn’t make them obey teach them to live in harmony with each other and stop demanding things from the gods :). THEN ozma comes back and there are human civilizations everywhere and all the faunus he encounters are in cages.

remember how the faunus are older than humankind? tha-at would be our “???” gap between salem crawling out of the grimm pool and light digging up ozma. probably.

you’ve got grimm. there have, as it’s said in ‘the shallow sea,’ always been grimm. they survived the moonfall.

you’ve got faunus. they were created when salem remade herself—the infinite life taken away from her brought them to life, in her image, just as original humans were brought to life by the brothers’ power in the brothers’ image (and of course the power salem has now was the brothers’ power and is now hers). this is maybe not what she was expecting to happen but she’s not alone anymore and, unlike humans of old, the faunus can coexist peacefully with the grimm with salem to mediate.

you’ve got the god of light taking a peek to see if perhaps salem is ready to grovel in repentance yet and going HEY WHAT THE FUCK THAT’S NOT ALLOWED…

…and hastily attempting to get the situation back under control by arranging for the “right” creations (he and his brother’s) to crowd out the ones salem defied him by making (WHEN WILL SHE LEARN HER LESSON!) and for good measure sending her beloved to punish her (SURELY THIS WILL MAKE HER SEE THE ERROR OF HER WAYS. BECAUSE SHE’S DEFINITELY THE ONE WHO’S WRONG.) because he is the god of the sunk cost fallacy first and foremost.

of course, the mere fact of allowing mankind to rise again achieves nothing but completing the “very slow” pattern—humans were dead for a long time and now they’re alive again. whoops! this is what happens when you meddle with forces you don’t understand.

anyway i think probably everyone on remnant reincarnates very slowly, not the way ozma does and also not the way ascension happens. i think when you die in remnant a part of you stays behind—infinite—to wander the face of the planet until it finds a way to guide the rest of you back home, in whatever form that takes. (BUT AS A BABY PROBABLY.) ’cause that’s the salem pattern.

points at the autumn leaf dancing around pyrrha’s memorial statue that guides jaune to see her so he can meet her mother and say goodbye. That’s Actually Pyrrha For Real. maybe. probably. a sliver of her soul left behind to find her way. i think faunus have the same cycle but it’s a bit smoother for them because they were never stuck in the old artificial death-as-stasis system and also this is why faunus genetics are so FUCKING weird, it’s because if you’ve got cat ears the first time you have cat traits forever even if in one of your lives your parents are, like, a crab faunus and a tortoise faunus. possibly children of interracial couples are more likely to be new, hence the more genetically logical outcome of usually inheriting the faunus parent’s animal.

but yeah i think the faunus like popped into existence as a consequence of salem grimming herself. that was my working theory prior to volume nine on the basis of mechanically how humans were created but in light of the v9 lore it’s quite literally the most thematically coherent explanation.

#salem is going to win because she has in fact already won. light is ineffectually raging in a last ditch effort to make her not have won.

[inamindfarfaraway]

So Kyle was knowingly bait for Task Force X’s trap in “Zero Day: Part One”, but regrets it at the end, both because of how badly Clark was hurt as a result and because of the genuine, unwavering kindness Clark showed him with no personal benefit. If he’d actually been on Clark’s side, they probably could have rescued his teammates. Instead Intergang and an irrefutably heroic person are all trapped under the control of Task Force X, who are very torture-happy. Intergang are carelessly selfish, but they love each other, are naive, inexperienced criminals and want money and respect, not death, suffering and destruction. They’re way in over their heads entangled with the other villains. If the “work release program” is a lie and it was all for nothing, I can see them turning on Task Force X. Maybe even if not. I don’t expect them to fully reform (though Cadmus is good in this universe, so anything’s possible), but I hope they get some development.

#they’re likeable lighthearted ineffectual villains like team rocket #they need repeated silly encounters with the heroes for enrichment #being forced to work for a completely serious overarching threat is NOT cute it’s bad for them! #they’re also like in their early twenties right? #by the same token as clark they feel very young to me #i’m sorry i know everyone’s going crazy about the actual main characters after this episode #and i am too okay? #but i just love maws intergang #my adventures with superman #maws #maws spoilers #maws intergang #maws mist #kyle mcdougal

[communistkenobi]

It reminds me of why the stop the steal people lost their legal challenges to Biden’s election. It’s not that it’s impossible for right wing people to use legal architecture to halt democratic processes (cf Bush v Gore), it’s that they did it in an openly stupid and nonsensical way. In terms of American fascism I think the lessons they’re learning re: interacting with institutional power is that they can’t use twitter posting tactics in the courtroom

#I don’t know how salient this analysis is because like also america is a well developed fascist state in many ways #like in terms of large scale fascistic processes those things are already finely honed #but there’s a particularly unstable element being expressed domestically #eg qanon stop the steal unite the right etc etc #that seems to be losing legal battles not because fascism is structurally excluded from those processes #but that they aren’t being sophisticated with their legal challenges #I mean I guess also another conclusion to be made is that this is just the logical output of a well developed fascist state #you are going to get these fantastical spasms of reactionary violence and legal resistance at home #as stupid and ineffectual as it appears to be #like these are also in a sense the ‘new normal’ of an openly fascist state #anyway these are messy thoughts not fully formed. the more I learn about this topic the less I feel like I actually know

[notbecauseofvictories]

honestly if poor things did nothing but dramatize the moment when emma stone learns about suffering and almost throws herself into the sea with horror and grief, it would be enough.

#and how the narrative turns it immediately into something ineffectual #sincere but useless. defeated before it could even blossom into something meaningful. #honestly this movie makes me think of david copperfield or tom jones - one of those sprawling personal epics #actually.....is it in direct conversation with tom jones 1963? #some of the structure of the shots makes me wonder. #a proscenium for our dreams

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

what is also disturbing is the cottage industry of fake lawyers and so called experts on youtube that exclusively exist to do free pr for violent and abusive famous men. when you google j*nathan m*jors for example among the articles from reputable sources, most of which avoid misleading headlines, are several videos claiming he’s been exonerated or that his charges have been dismissed, which is obviously not true. this to is apart of the vortex of womanhating that drives so much engagement for social media companies run by womanhating parasitic regulation-dodging CEOs and their shareholders. but these elements are so loud precisely because women are re-gaining ground. #MeToo has had lasting consequences. women’s liberation is unstoppable and inevitable, and much like anything dying, male supremacy will be the loudest and most aggressive just before it takes its dying breath.

#they’re desperate and afraid #and doing all they can from all angles including infiltrating women’s organizations to turn them into ineffectual apologists #including taking our right to abortion #but we will not be deterred #and we will not be defeated #all that noise and he couldn’t get his charges dropped or hers to stick. what a fucking loser

[gender-trash]

does anyone have a command-line tool they recommend (a la ag) for indexing and searching a bigass folder of epubs? i'm attempting to locate a fic i read and bookmarked on ao3 via full-text searching my archive of downloaded epubs, but find + zipgrep is incredibly slow :(

#the trashcan speaks #i'm so so small and ineffectual bitches help