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jungcity · 4 years

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can I request an idol au with jaehyun and the reader is also an idol and they get time to spend together but there’s angst and then ends with soft smut/fluff?? Haha if it’s too specific, feel free to write whatever way you think is best! Hope you’re doing better hun ❤️

“And one, two, three— one— okay stop!”

All the movements halted as your leader raised her hand. The music stopped, heavy breathings filled the whole practice room.

“Y/N, you aren’t in sync with us.” She sounds exasperated now. You bowed and told her you were sorry for the incompetence. It’s been hours yet you still could not get your mind to focus on the practice.

“Let’s take a break first, shall we?”

The members scattered to different corners of the room; some drank water, some checked their phone. The only person that was left in the middle was you. You stared at your reflection on the mirror in front, then you sighed.

A frustrated sigh escaped your lips yet again when you saw that there wasn’t any message sent to you by Jaehyun. You have been waiting for hours on end for his call, but to no avail. Gripping the phone tighter with your hand, you slumped on the shiny floors of the practice room.

“Y/N,” Your leader greeted before sitting beside you. She regarded you with careful eyes, biting her lips as if afraid to say what’s on her mind. “This is about Jaehyun, right?” she whispered, cautious by the staffs around you.

You nodded and ran a hand through your hair while biting your lower lip, “Yup.”

She sighed before putting her hand on your shoulder, “It’s their Inkigayo stage, right?” By that, you gave her a curt nod. “You know how promotion weeks are, I bet he’s busy.” Her words were quieter than a whisper, but you heard her absolutely fine.

“Their stage ended an hour ago,” you muttered. This is the first time Jaehyun hadn’t sent you any text after their stage. When you first started dating him, it was a simple promise that you both would understand each other’s schedules— given that the korean pop industry could be so hectic, especially when it’s comeback season. But you could not help but anticipate his texts despite promoting, because he never misses calling or messaging you after each stage. Not until now.

“But he’s one of the MC, right?” she added.

“Inkigayo has already ended,” you added. If they’re doing any v-live right now, you would know.

“I’m sure he’s going to contact you soon. Have a little patience, Y/N. Our own comeback is fast approaching, you wouldn’t want to disappoint our fans, right?” You know she only meant to remind you of the upcoming work, but you could not help but feel embarrassed by your unprofessional emotions.

So you turned off your phone and kept it in the deepest part of your bag. The members were slowly grouping themselves in the middle, ready to dance again. Your leader held her hand out to you, then you took it with a half smile. There’s time for Jaehyun, but right now, you have to focus.

The practice ended five hours later, the choreographer was extra harsh today, given that your comeback is in one week and there’s a tiny bit of polishing you still needs to do. He adviced all of you to practice in your dorms, which elicited a silent groan from you. Ever since the preparations for the comeback started, you could only sleep for three hours maximum; going home at twelve, practicing until three a.m. in your dorm, and waking up at seven a.m. to pratice again. Yet you could not even doze off in the van, nor eat whatever you like, for the fear that you might oversleep and overeat, which could mean two dreadful things; the wrath of your manager, and the wrath of your manager. Again.

Thankfully for today, your chereographer dismissed you earlier. So that you could get enough rest, he said.

Korean pop industry criticizes every hairsbreadth of a move you make, and they don’t miss whenever you gain weight. Hell’s about to go down to your group once that happens. And you could not let that happen. So even if you feel like you might collapse any time soon, you still dance to the music that has been on repeat on the loud speakers of the practice room for weeks.

It’s not like you are tired of it— this has been your life since you were in eight grade, you’ve worked hard to get where you are today. And you badly wanted to be a musician ever since you could count, you’re not going to let it go. No matter how tiring it must be.

You slumped on your seat near the window of the van which would take you to your dorm. The air conditioning cooling your pores, relaxing your body a little bit. It’s been hours, surely, Jaehyun would’ve send you a text already. So you fished for your phone, cursing yourself for having a hard time finding it in your bag. With your heart jumping inside your chest, you press the power button. The logo displayed on the screen. You have no idea why but the van seemed to suffocate you as you wait for the home screen to show up.

Nothing.

You blew out a breath, the conversations being exchanged inside the vehicle seems to be far away from you. Voices are muffled as you stare into your notification panel, empty. What are you doing, Jung Jaehyun?

With a thud, you rested your forehead on the window, the blur of the highway flashing in your eyes. Then you decided to text Jaehyun. You could not wait any longer. But as you clicked the logo of the messaging app, your phone displayed a lone notification. It’s from Naver.

NCT’s JAEHYUN AND April’s NAEUN SPOTTED IN A COFFEE SHOP TOGETHER

You clicked on the article as fast as your body would allow you. Your forefinger made a silent thump on the screen by how agitated you are. Naeun is Jaehyun’s co-mc together with Minhyuk. Apparently, the article would just berate you and your already boiling blood, but you clicked the notification still.

Pictures accompanied the articles. They were shot in an awkward angle, but you could totally see Jaehyun— smiling— while he sat across from Naeun. It was posted a few minutes just after your practice. A proof that he did not bother to text or call you to inform you of his whereabouts.

“Are you okay?” Your leader asked, placing her hand on your shoulder again.

You feel like combusting in your seat, but you took a deep breath and flashed her your sweetest smile. “Of course.” Then you shifted so your body could shield your phone away from the members.

[Where are you?] You sent with shaking fingers.

Maybe you’re just overreacting. Yes, you probably are. But it’s just a normal feeling, right? Specially when your boyfriend did not even send you any message since the start of the day. One message is all you’re asking. One message. But still, no reply.

You wanted to throw your phone away, if not for the fact that you just bought it and it pairs with Jaehyun’s. So you gave him one last chance. Last chance to reply before you wreck havoc in his life. Last chance until you reached the dorm.

The members has gone straight to their room to get a little bit of rest before a tiring day, yet again, in a few hours. You shut your door silently, which took up a lot of patience to do, by the way. The bed seems so inviting, you literally jump onto it and lay your phone beside you. As you close your eyes, the vibration of your phone tingled on your finger.

[i’m finally at the dorm, love. how about you?]

[Where have u been?]

[inkigayo, love. why?]

Petty as it might sound, you sent him the link of the article you’ve read awhile ago. The messaged displayed ‘read’, but it took him minutes to reply.

[sorry, baby. i’d read the whole thing. what about it?]

With that, you stood up. Really stood up. And began pacing the small space of your room with bulging veins in your temple.

[Wow. You are unbelievable Jung Jaehyun. Really. The headline did not even bother you? Where have you been the whole day? I’ve been waiting for your texts for hours! My God!]

Sweat formed in your forehead, your thumb aching by how aggressive you typed in the words.

[yes it did not bother me. because i wasn’t doing anything wrong.]

[I have no words. Go and date Naeun instead.]

You sent a silent sorry for Naeun in your mind. She does not deserve this, she probably does not even know that you and Jaehyun are dating. This is all Jaehyun’s fault.

[i’m not having any of your tantrums and dramas tonight, y/n. gn.]

What? And with that, you’ve finally reached your end. You threw away the phone. It bounced on your mattress. The sides of your eyes started to sear, Jaehyun never spoke to you that way. And he does not say good night without you seeing each other’s faces. If the time would allow it, you would even sneak out every other night to meet. But it’s impossible now that he’s in the middle of promotion.

You snatched a pair of pajamas in your drawer and decided to shower instead. There is no point curling in your bed and waiting for Jaehyun to say sorry. After a cold shower, you walked straight to your room, declining the offer of your leader for you to eat.

A single message from Jaehyun was on your screen when you opened your phone. It was a media message. You clicked on it. And shame washed over you as you took in the image. It was Jaehyun, Naeun, and… Minhyuk. In the same coffee shop displayed on the article. Before you could type in a reply, Jaehyun sent you a message.

[we’re with minhyuk earlier. i guessed the sasaeng forgot to include him.]

The text was devoid of any emotions, but you could still hear Jaehyun’s impassive voice in your head. Without another thought, you replied to his message.

[I’m sorry, baby. I wasn’t thinking rationally earlier. It’s just that—]

Before you could finish the message, Jaehyun’s caller ID flashed on your screen. You slid the green button.

“Baby?” was his greeting.

“I told you not to call me that through phone calls.” You bit your lips. In one of Haechan’s video, Jaehyun accidentally called him ‘baby’. According to him, he thought you were calling by that time since it’s two a.m. already. Thankfully, Haechan called him back with the same endearment, so there wasn’t any rumor that has bubbled from it. After that incident, you told him not to call you baby as a greeting. A single ‘hello’ would do.

But here he is, insisting.

“Can’t help it, my love. I’m outside, by the way.”

You literally fell from your bed. Jaehyun. Outside. Did you shower too long that you lost track of time? You grabbed your curtains, eyes peeking through the window. Even if Jaehyun covered his face with a full-on mask, you would identify him. He was standing near one of the light posts, head turned towards your window. As usual, he’s clad in his all-black clothes. His hear obscured by a cap, with only his eyes peeking through his mask.

“Are you insane? What if someone followed you?!” You hissed.

“Then be ready for some dating articles tomorrow,” he simply declared. The mere thought of your relationship spreading through the whole of South Korea and the world gives you enough creeps to last a lifetime. Jaehyun’s career is on its peak, so do yours. It’s not yet time.

“Jaehyun, go home. Let’s not wait for your sasaengs to find out and sell the photos to Dispatch,” you sighed.

“I’m sorry if I sounded selfish with that, baby. I just…” He paused, “When it comes to you, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Your breath hitched. There were tears trying to fall down your cheeks when he said the words. Jaehyun was a man of few words. But every time he speaks, he always knew the right thing to say.

“Wait for me,” you breathed and cut off the line. The whole dorm was silent when you departed your room, one light coming from the television in the living room. Wona must be watching her favorite movies again.

You tiptoed to the backdoor, and silenty departed the vicinity of your dorm. Jaehyun remained on his position near the light posts, his foot kicking pebbles on the ground. Your stomach somersaulted by the sight of him. After weeks of not seeing each other because of your schedules, he is here now. You could nearly jumped from happiness. However, despite your elevated feelings, you remained calmed and texted him.

[On your right.]

His phone lit, then he looked at it. Then around him. His sight halted when he saw you. You signaled him with your hand, heart thudding that someone might find you. That would be the end of both of your careers. As Jaehyun jogged the distance between you, you frantically looked around to check if anyone’s spying around. Luckily, there isn’t one.

Jaehyun stood in front of you, his scent wafting your nose with an ache of familiarity. You almost jumped to hug him. But you were stopped when he pulled down his mask and attempted to kiss you.

“Jaehyun!” You warned, eyes widening. The dimpled-boy only chuckled at you. “Let’s get inside before somebody sees us!”

Before opening the back door, you sent a silent prayer that all of your members are comfortably sleeping on their matresses already. Not that they don’t know about you and Jaehyun, but they’d surely kill you if ever they see you sneaking him inside your dorm.

The dorm was the same when you entered, with Wona still watching television. You pressed your finger on your lips as you turned to face Jaehyun, your one hand holding his wrist. He nodded at you before he roamed his eyes around the kitchen.

You tugged his wrist up to your bedroom. And only when you locked the door did you let out the breath you’ve been holding for minutes. Jaehyun sat on your bed, examining your room with curiosity.

“This is my first time seeing your room,” he said, mischief displayed in his irises. You pretended to clean your things to keep your mind off the thought that you’re alone with Jaehyun, in your room.

“Where did you buy this turntable?” He stood up, walked towards your turntable and ran his finger on it.

“In a shop. Where else?”

“Tell me which shop so I could buy the same design as yours.”

You ignored his words, “This is dangerous, Jaehyun. What you did is insane.” You crossed your arms.

He sauntered up to you and wrapped his hands on your waist, “Come on, baby. You wouldn’t have let me visit if I told you. I’ve been planning this for weeks.” He mumbled, pressing his lips on your hair.

“Still. You should have informed me. What if someone saw you leaving your dorm? For Pete’s sake, you’re a member of NCT.” He held the back of your head and gently pressed your face on his chest.

“Baby, stop worrying for a minute.” He then pulled away and cupped your cheeks, “I miss you.” Then he pressed his lips to yours. You stopped yourself from grabbing his hair and deepening the kiss, even though that’s all you wanted to do the moment he stood face to face with you.

“I’m sorry if I didn’t had the chance to text you today. It was a hectic day, baby.” He explained against your lips. Then he started to kiss your cheek, jaw, down to your neck. “Please don’t be jealous. Naeun invited me and Minhyuk for a coffee and that’s it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

Jaehyun sucked on your neck then. It took your knees a lot of willpower not to buckle. “That’s my mistake. I thought you were still busy practicing and I didn’t wanna disturb you. Your comeback’s in one week, baby. I don’t wanna be a nuisance.”

“You were never a nuisance, you know that.”

“I know. And you, too. But I hope you understand my reasons, though.” He kissed your collarbone, his fingers pulling the collar of your shirt down. “I love you.” He whispered against your skin, his breath hot. Then he looked at your eyes, “I love you. Forgive me, baby.”

Jung Jaehyun. All the girls swoons at the sight of him ever since he was in high school. Who in their right minds would decline this boy?

So you grabbed his cheeks, “I forgive you.”

His grin transformed his face in an instant. From something adorable, to something… hungry. He kissed your lips with enough ferocity as to bruise the skin.

Then he whispered, in his most raspy voice, “What are you waiting for? Spread those legs for me now, baby. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m so, so hungry.”

#requested #anon #jung jaehyun imagines #jaehyun x you #jaehyun fluff #jaehyun au #jaehyun scenarios

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fmdtaeyong · 3 years

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restructuring update prompts

a prologue to officially re-introducing ash kwon // aka i decided to re-do this because i changed some parts of ash’s backstory and established career claims after i did this the first time and half of this wasn’t really true anymore rip

also there’s nowhere for me to put this in the answers anymore so i’ll put it here: circles is ash’s best song

content warning: mentions of alcohol abuse and drug use / abuse, but none of it is in-depth

assuming your muse has changed in some way, be it internally or as a result of a change of the external factors around them, how is your muse different?

for the most part, ash’s general personality and character has stayed the same. he’s the same angsty, creative, romantic dude at heart, but he’s a little more jaded in some ways.

ash moved around before he became a trainee now. he lived in san francisco, sydney, and seattle. when he lived in sydney, it was just him and his mom and he grew really close to her during that time. he doesn’t really feel like he has a home at all since seoul is the longest he’s ever lived somewhere, but he’s less happy so that’s not home either.

ash is a better technical singer now ig, being a main vocal. he focused more on singing as a trainee now instead of dancing. his ankle injury in 2018 was a little more serious now, which is why he doesn’t dance much in his solo music anymore. it’s also why he’s less interested in dance, but, at the same time, i think it leaves more potential for him to re-develop some love for it again.

he’s also now the maknae, although it’s a common joke in the fandom that he doesn’t act like it. he debuted a year and three months younger than before and he feels a lot more beholden to the industry now. has even less of an idea of what he’d be outside of it at this point, even though he got closer to actually leaving it than previous ash ever did.

he’s still had a couple of minor attitude controversies in titan’s early days caused by cultural differences. he was in public relationships in 2016 and 2019. neither were received well for their own reasons. his clubbing habit has gotten him into some controversy, though bc has never issued a statement on it beyond that one time they had to confirm the woman in a picture of him clubbing was his girlfriend because people were trying to accuse him of cheating. he has a passionate anti gallery and obsessive sasaengs that make his life a living hell.

since renewing his contract, ash has also had a few hiatuses of varying lengths due to his physical or mental health. this was true before with how he naturally developed, but it’s more tied together now as a result of generally poor physical and mental health he’s been experiencing for a few years now after his dating scandals and his ankle injury in 2018.

his image is more streamlined now too! he never really had the era of being pushed as a cleancut boyfriend that old ash had around 2018. he’s been marketed as a musical genius / sexy bad boy rockstar / artist with a tortured soul for as long as he’s been majorly pushed individually. this means he’s still very sexualized, but he hates his image a little less because he can be a little more himself as far as personal style and self-expression through tattoos and piercings goes.

what does your muse think of their company and their group?

this hasn’t really changed. ash has no real love for bc entertainment and wouldn’t really care if titan disbanded tomorrow. some of their music is good and some isn’t (though he considers less of it terrible without wolf and gorilla in the mix lmao), but he feels he’s mostly outgrown it as an artist. not that it’s below him, but it’s not what he connects with creatively, which is far more important to him now than it had been when he’d first debuted. he doesn’t hold ill will toward his groupmates unless he feels they’ve given him an individual reason to, and actually feels more guilty toward them for getting involved in scandals and taking hiatuses more than anything, but they’re also not his best friends. he views titan as a purely work endeavor and he doesn’t feel bad about the fact he got about as close as possible to leaving them without actually doing so that he could back during contract renewals. after all, they’d be fine without him. he’s a main vocal, but they’ve got two others. he’s a dancer, but they’ve got two others. he can write music, but titan has never been his main priority there and others are more than capable of doing it. he wants out of both the group and the company but is starkly aware of the fact that he did this to himself when he re-signed out of what he now perceives to have been impulse and greed.

since titan is the seniormost active group under bc, ash tries to be a good senior to his company juniors in general, but there are certainly more welcoming alternatives than him. he worries about them from a distance more than anything else.

is your muse on their first contract or their second? if they’ve renewed, what were their feelings around that at the time and what were their hopes for their second contract?

he’s on his second contract and he definitely regrets renewing. he hadn’t planned to renew for the longest time the lack of privacy and the public criticism and the hate he’d received were just too much, and he had plans that would require him to stop being an active idol, namely marrying his girlfriend of two and a half years at the time. their relationship wasn’t stable enough at the time for that to be a good idea and that was proven when they broke up shortly before final negotiations for contract renewals, but ash wanted an excuse to escape and the idea of a happy, normal life more than he wanted to be rational.

spite after the (very brief lmao) break up was part of his decision to renew, but bc entertainment also offered to support him as a songwriter and producer in addition to allowing him to regularly release solo music. he still really loved music and his first taste of promoting as a solo artist had been right before renewals as a proposal to sway him into re-signing, so he was swayed to sign on for seven more years. they followed through on their promises, but he struggles to weigh the recognition he’s earned as a solo artist and songwriter-producer against signing his life away again and doing a number on his physicla and mental health. most of his health issues and his hiatuses have happened during his second contract, as well as several behind-the-scenes situations that could have become scandals if they’d had any less luck, mostly stemming from ash drinking too much and his occasional recreational drug use, so he’s not sure bc even really feels the contract renewal was entirely worth it.

what are your muse’s goals and motivations?

if you asked ash this, he wouldn’t know what to answer. he doesn’t feel very motivated these days and pretty much feels like he only does anything because he’s contractually obligated to. making music as a form of expression has long been his main drive, and beyond that, the desire to make a mark on the world he can be remembered by through his music, but he often oscillates now between feeling like there’s not much more he can realistically achieve and the sense of hopelessness that he can try as hard as he wants, but his music’s never going to be what he’s defined by when he’s a public figure with an image.

he also feels a duty to make his parents proud. though i could argue that might be less now than it was in the previous iteration of ash, it’s still very much there. they let him come to seoul when he’d just turned thirteen to follow a dream that many never get to follow all the way through to the end and they believed in him fully. they express how proud they are of him when they do talk, but he doesn’t know that he believes them. he doesn’t feel that anything he’s done has been deserving of paying them back for everything they’ve given to him.

right now, he wants to be able to feel excited about his life and what he’s making again. he’s trying to better himself internally in regards to the way he views himself and his mental health, although he’s more prone to still taking steps backwards there than he was at this point previously. a lot of the ways ash has found to feel that excitement and creativity he wants (such as recreational drugs and excessive alcohol consumption and fleeting, sometimes toxic, relationships) do damage to his mental wellbeing, so it’s a balancing act at the moment.

what is one conflict, internal or external, that your muse is currently dealing with, has recently dealt with, or will need to deal with in the future?

i covered this partially with the last one, but one major conflict remains his internal conflict about his passion for music. this was very much where ash was before as well, but now that i’m really pushing songwriting and producing as his main career path, it presents a more equal professional and personal challenge for him.

more than having truly lost joy in making music, he’s burnt out. his latest album lovesick was emotionally exhausting because it was a partially rushed, deeply personal and vulnerable album exclusively based on an unhealthy relationship that had stretched its hold on him out over for almost six years, and then he went into making music that he couldn’t relate to at all and didn’t really fit his image all because bc thought it would sell well.

the burn out in his personal life has affected the burn out in his professional life he would be feeling anyway and made it ten times worse. it feels more hopeless because he doesn’t have much else going for him. in the past few months, his relationship with alcohol and drugs also reverted back to unhealthy after he was doing better with it for a while, not helped by a really bad stint with his mental health. all of this was at its worse in june before he went on hiatus, and in this universe, his behavior was more of a factor in his hiatus than him practically begging to leave the group because ash is more resigned to the fact that he chose to sign back on with bc and that that’s on him. instead, there was more of a push by his manager, who knew that ash was on the road to a major scandal if action wasn’t taken.

almost all of his conflicts are internal right now. he’s become successful enough that external factors other than the large umbrella of having to remain in titan can be negotiated, but he’s too tired to do so because of everything going on inside of him. there’s a lot of negative feelings going on inside of him, and he’s trying to deal with them one by one, but it’s hard to see the weight of them easing that way.

if your muse has established career claims, what are their thoughts on their career so far? if they do not, how do they feel about not having individual activities yet? what would they like to do in the future, if anything? if they don’t have ambitions for individual activities, explain why.

ash has been able to establish himself a little more as a songwriter and producer outside of his solo music. he wrote “universe” for titan in 2017, and after that, as promised, bc hooking him up with the right opportunities and connections to establish himself more. since then, in addition to his heavy involvement in his solo music (his 2020 album lovesick was entirely written/composed/produced by him alone), he’s worked on calypso’s “rollin’” in 2018, polaris’s “fake love” (a korean music awards song of the year!) and “the truth untold” in 2019, and lily’s “i’m so sick” this year. i’m planning on more being added there with these extra ecp and maybe some refunded since i think i’m going to drop some of his points claims to streamline his career better.

his canon discography creative claims reflect his progression as a songwriter, from very earnest and romantic to more sensual to very uhhh angsty and personal to developing a more polished and professional sound as he grew in experience as a songwriter and producer.

ash is praised for having several representative works as a songwriter that all speak to his individual style, and ash is happy with what he’s gotten to do since he does genuinely enjoy working as a songwriter and producer.

he’s planning to continue branching out in this direction, so look for quite a lot of ash dabbling in canon discographies in the future. before, i’d say ash’s primary push was solo music, but my plan for him is for songwriting and producing to be his main career path from now on with solo music as a close secondary.

#famedrstask1 #+10 ecp

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bezoarcureforpoison · 4 years

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History Will Judge the Complicit: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.

This Atlantic piece was a very interesting read, and applies to more than just US politics.

+++

On a cold march afternoon in 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard slipped out of the East German Communist Party Secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother. “My article will be finished this evening,” he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in advance. It meant that he was escaping the country, at great risk to his life.

To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.

Though only 28 years old at the time, Leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the new East German elite. The son of German Communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945, on the same airplane that carried Walter Ulbricht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party. Leonhard was put on a team charged with re‑creating Berlin’s city government.

He had one central task: to ensure that any local leaders who emerged from the postwar chaos were assigned deputies loyal to the party. “It’s got to look democratic,” Ulbricht told him, “but we must have everything in our control.”

Leonhard had lived through a great deal by that time. While he was still a teenager in Moscow, his mother had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” and sent to Vorkuta, a labor camp in the far north. He had witnessed the terrible poverty and inequality of the Soviet Union, he had despaired of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, and he knew about the Red Army’s mass rapes of women following the occupation. Yet he and his ideologically committed friends “instinctively recoiled from the thought” that any of these events were “in diametrical opposition to our Socialist ideals.” Steadfastly, he clung to the belief system he had grown up with.

Anne Applebaum: Resist the urge to simplify the story

The turning point, when it came, was trivial. While walking down the hall of the Central Committee building, he was stopped by a “pleasant-looking middle-aged man,” a comrade recently arrived from the West, who asked where to find the dining room. Leonhard told him that the answer depended on what sort of meal ticket he had—different ranks of officials had access to different dining rooms. The comrade was astonished: “But … aren’t they all members of the Party?”

Leonhard walked away and entered his own, top-category dining room, where white cloths covered the tables and high-ranking functionaries received three-course meals. He felt ashamed. ��Curious, I thought, that this had never struck me before!” That was when he began to have the doubts that inexorably led him to plot his escape.

At exactly that same moment, in exactly the same city, another high-ranking East German was coming to precisely the opposite set of conclusions. Markus Wolf was also the son of a prominent German Communist family. He also spent his childhood in the Soviet Union, attending the same elite schools for children of foreign Communists as Leonhard did, as well as the same wartime training camp; the two had shared a bedroom there, solemnly calling each other by their aliases—these were the rules of deep conspiracy—although they knew each other’s real names perfectly well. Wolf also witnessed the mass arrests, the purges, and the poverty of the Soviet Union—and he also kept faith with the cause. He arrived in Berlin just a few days after Leonhard, on another plane full of trusted comrades, and immediately began hosting a program on the new Soviet-backed radio station. For many months he ran the popular You Ask, We Answer. He gave on-air answers to listeners’ letters, often concluding with some form of “These difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army.”

Read: James Mattis denounces President Trump, describes him as a threat to the constitution

In August 1947, the two men met up at Wolf’s “luxurious five-roomed apartment,” not far from what was then the headquarters of the radio station. They drove out to Wolf’s house, “a fine villa in the neighborhood of Lake Glienicke.” They took a walk around the lake, and Wolf warned Leonhard that changes were coming. He told him to give up hoping that German Communism would be allowed to develop differently from the Soviet version: That idea, long the goal of many German party members, was about to be dropped. When Leonhard argued that this could not be true—he was personally in charge of ideology, and no one had told him anything about a change in direction—Wolf laughed at him. “There are higher authorities than your Central Secretariat,” he said. Wolf made clear that he had better contacts, more important friends. At the age of 24, he was an insider. And Leonhard understood, finally, that he was a functionary in an occupied country where the Soviet Communist Party, not the German Communist Party, had the last word.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Markus Wolf’s career continued to flourish after that. Not only did he stay in East Germany, he rose through the ranks of its nomenklatura to become the country’s top spy. He was the second-ranked official at the Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi; he was often described as the model for the Karla character in John le Carré ’s spy novels. In the course of his career, his Directorate for Reconnaissance recruited agents in the offices of the West German chancellor and just about every other department of the government, as well as at NATO.

Both men could see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

Leonhard, meanwhile, became a prominent critic of the regime. He wrote and lectured in West Berlin, at Oxford, at Columbia. Eventually he wound up at Yale, where his lecture course left an impression on several generations of students. Among them was a future U.S. president, George W. Bush, who described Leonhard’s course as “an introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom.” When I was at Yale in the 1980s, Leonhard’s course on Soviet history was the most popular on campus.

Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

In english, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

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Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.

Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture—though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.

Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.

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Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. I was reminded of this recently when I visited Marianne Birthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin. During the 1980s, Birthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany; later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret-police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi.

She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn’t interesting, Birthler told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator; 99 percent of East Germans collaborated. If they weren’t working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party, or with the system more generally. Much more interesting—and far harder to explain—was the genuinely mysterious question of “why people went against the regime.” The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not.

Here is another pair of stories, one that will be more familiar to American readers. Let’s begin this one in the 1980s, when a young Lindsey Graham first served with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps—the military legal service—in the U.S. Air Force. During some of that time, Graham was based in what was then West Germany, on the cutting edge of America’s Cold War efforts. Graham, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, was devoted to the military: After both of his parents died when he was in his 20s, he got himself and his younger sister through college with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He stayed in the Reserves for two decades, even while in the Senate, sometimes journeying to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as a short-term reserve officer. “The Air Force has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he said in 2015. “It gave me a purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots.” Through most of his years in the Senate, Graham, alongside his close friend John McCain, was a spokesperson for a strong military, and for a vision of America as a democratic leader abroad. He also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home. In his 2014 reelection campaign, he ran as a maverick and a centrist, telling The Atlantic that jousting with the Tea Party was “more fun than any time I’ve been in politics.”

Read: How Lindsey Graham stomped the Tea Party

While Graham was doing his tour in West Germany, Mitt Romney became a co-founder and then the president of Bain Capital, a private-equity investment firm. Born in Michigan, Romney worked in Massachusetts during his years at Bain, but he also kept, thanks to his Mormon faith, close ties to Utah. While Graham was a military lawyer, drawing military pay, Romney was acquiring companies, restructuring them, and then selling them. This was a job he excelled at—in 1990, he was asked to run the parent firm, Bain & Company—and in the course of doing so he became very rich. Still, Romney dreamed of a political career, and in 1994 he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, after changing his political affiliation from independent to Republican. He lost, but in 2002 he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a nonpartisan moderate, and won. In 2007—after a gubernatorial term during which he successfully brought in a form of near-universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—he staged his first run for president. After losing the 2008 Republican primary, he won the party’s nomination in 2012, and then lost the general election.

Both Graham and Romney had presidential ambitions; Graham staged his own short-lived presidential campaign in 2015 (justified on the grounds that “the world is falling apart”). Both men were loyal members of the Republican Party, skeptical of the party’s radical and conspiratorial fringe. Both men reacted to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump with real anger, and no wonder: In different ways, Trump’s values undermined their own. Graham had dedicated his career to an idea of U.S. leadership around the world—whereas Trump was offering an “America First” doctrine that would turn out to mean “me and my friends first.” Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant—whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all. Both Graham and Romney were devoted to America’s democratic traditions and to the ideals of honesty, accountability, and transparency in public life—all of which Trump scorned.

Both were vocal in their disapproval of Trump. Before the election, Graham called him a “jackass,” a “nutjob,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He seemed unhappy, even depressed, by the election: I happened to see him at a conference in Europe in the spring of 2016, and he spoke in monosyllables, if at all.

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Romney went further. “Let me put it very plainly,” he said in March 2016, in a speech criticizing Trump: “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.” Romney spoke of “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.” He called Trump a “con man” and a “fraud.” Even after Trump won the nomination, Romney refused to endorse him. On his presidential ballot, Romney said, he wrote in his wife. Graham said he voted for the independent candidate Evan McMullin.

But Trump did become president, and so the two men’s convictions were put to the test.

A glance at their biographies would not have led many to predict what happened next. On paper, Graham would have seemed, in 2016, like the man with deeper ties to the military, to the rule of law, and to an old-fashioned idea of American patriotism and American responsibility in the world. Romney, by contrast, with his shifts between the center and the right, with his multiple careers in business and politics, would have seemed less deeply attached to those same old-fashioned patriotic ideals. Most of us register soldiers as loyal patriots, and management consultants as self-interested. We assume people from small towns in South Carolina are more likely to resist political pressure than people who have lived in many places. Intuitively, we think that loyalty to a particular place implies loyalty to a set of values.

But in this case the clichés were wrong. It was Graham who made excuses for Trump’s abuse of power. It was Graham—a JAG Corps lawyer—who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyperpartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances—with Europeans, with the Kurds—that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break ranks with his colleagues, voting to impeach the president. “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office,” he said, is “perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

Read: How Mitt Romney decided Trump is guilty

One man proved willing to betray ideas and ideals that he had once stood for. The other refused. Why?

To the american reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

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Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.

It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes.

The lie was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in Eastern European potato fields, Soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots, as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red-white-and-blue beetles went up all across Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn’t matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.

These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

This process happens in politics, too. In 1947, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. The decree did not nationalize the printing presses; it merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses, and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners. Imagine how a law like this—which did not speak of arrests, let alone torture or the Gulag—affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden, a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Following its passage, he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices. Would he apply for a license? Of course—he needed it to earn money for his family. Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners? Yes to that too—what else was there to print?

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After that, other compromises follow. Though he dislikes the Communists—he just wants to stay out of politics—he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin, because if he doesn’t do it, others will. When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime, however, he refuses. Though he wouldn’t go to jail for printing it, his children might not be admitted to university, and his wife might not get her medication; he has to think about their welfare. Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions. And after a while—without anyone being shot or arrested, without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience—the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime.

The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account, and for Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest, because that’s just family stuff.

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump—people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and the advocates of “national conservatism,” an ideology invented, post hoc, to rationalize the president’s behavior—advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti–Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their “Drain the swamp” slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump’s ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values. But it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution, and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

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His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist—and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it—Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID‑19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

Maybe it isn’t surprising that the implications of “Trump First” were not immediately understood. After all, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe—or, if you want a more recent example, the Chavistas in Venezuela—all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity even though, in practice, they created inequality and poverty. But just as the truth about Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution slowly dawned on people, it also became clear, eventually, that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart. And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot, Republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate, just like people living under an alien regime.

In retrospect, this dawning realization explains why the funeral of John McCain, in September 2018, looked, and by all accounts felt, so strange. Two previous presidents, one Republican and one Democrat—representatives of the old, patriotic political class—made speeches; the sitting president’s name was never mentioned. The songs and symbols of the old order were visible too: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; American flags; two of McCain’s sons in their officer’s uniforms, so very different from the sons of Trump. Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser described the funeral as “a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.” In truth, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1956 funeral of László Rajk, a Hungarian Communist and secret-police boss who had been purged and murdered by his comrades in 1949. Rajk’s wife had become an outspoken critic of the regime, and the funeral turned into a de facto political rally, helping to set off Hungary’s anti-Communist revolution a couple of weeks later.

Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain’s funeral. But it did clarify the situation. A year and a half into the Trump administration, it marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past—doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Miłosz wound up in exile in the 1950s; dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin’s Russia, public protest could lead to many years in a concentration camp; disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation.

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By contrast, a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of—what, exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School? He might meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News. He might suffer like Romney, who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID‑19.

Nevertheless, 20 months into the Trump administration, senators and other serious-minded Republicans in public life who should have known better began to tell themselves stories that sound very much like those in Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. Some of these stories overlap with one another; some of them are just thin cloaks to cover self-interest. But all of them are familiar justifications of collaboration, recognizable from the past. Here are the most popular.

We can use this moment to achieve great things. In the spring of 2019, a Trump-supporting friend put me in touch with an administration official I will call “Mark,” whom I eventually met for a drink. I won’t give details, because we spoke informally, but in any case Mark did not leak information or criticize the White House. On the contrary, he described himself as a patriot and a true believer. He supported the language of “America First,” and was confident that it could be made real.

Several months later, I met Mark a second time. The impeachment hearings had begun, and the story of the firing of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was then in the news. The true nature of the administration’s ideology—Trump First, not America First—was becoming more obvious. The president’s abuse of military aid to Ukraine and his attacks on civil servants suggested not a patriotic White House, but a president focused on his own interests. Mark did not apologize for the president, though. Instead, he changed the subject: It was all worth it, he told me, because of the Uighurs.

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I thought I had misheard. The Uighurs? Why the Uighurs? I was unaware of anything that the administration had done to aid the oppressed Muslim minority in Xinjiang, China. Mark assured me that letters had been written, statements had been made, the president himself had been persuaded to say something at the United Nations. I doubted very much that the Uighurs had benefited from these empty words: China hadn’t altered its behavior, and the concentration camps built for the Uighurs were still standing. Nevertheless, Mark’s conscience was clear. Yes, Trump was destroying America’s reputation in the world, and yes, Trump was ruining America’s alliances, but Mark was so important to the cause of the Uighurs that people like him could, in good conscience, keep working for the administration.

Mark made me think of the story of Wanda Telakowska, a Polish cultural activist who in 1945 felt much the same as he did. Telakowska had collected and promoted folk art before the war; after the war she made the momentous decision to join the Polish Ministry of Culture. The Communist leadership was arresting and murdering its opponents; the nature of the regime was becoming clear. Telakowska nevertheless thought she could use her position inside the Communist establishment to help Polish artists and designers, to promote their work and get Polish companies to mass-produce their designs. But Polish factories, newly nationalized, were not interested in the designs she commissioned. Communist politicians, skeptical of her loyalty, made Telakowska write articles filled with Marxist gibberish. Eventually she resigned, having achieved nothing she set out to do. A later generation of artists condemned her as a Stalinist and forgot about her.

We can protect the country from the president. That, of course, was the argument used by “Anonymous,” the author of an unsigned New York Times op-ed published in September 2018. For those who have forgotten—a lot has happened since then—that article described the president’s “erratic behavior,” his inability to concentrate, his ignorance, and above all his lack of “affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” The “root of the problem,” Anonymous concluded, was “the president’s amorality.” In essence, the article described the true nature of the alternative value system brought into the White House by Trump, at a moment when not everybody in Washington understood it. But even as they came to understand that the Trump presidency was guided by the president’s narcissism, Anonymous did not quit, protest, make noise, or campaign against the president and his party.

Read: The saddest part of the anonymous ‘New York Times’ op-ed

Instead, Anonymous concluded that remaining inside the system, where they could cleverly distract and restrain the president, was the right course for public servants like them. Anonymous was not alone. Gary Cohn, at the time the White House economic adviser, told Bob Woodward that he’d removed papers from the president’s desk to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement with South Korea. James Mattis, Trump’s original secretary of defense, stayed in office because he thought he could educate the president about the value of America’s alliances, or at least protect some of them from destruction.

This kind of behavior has echoes in other countries and other times. A few months ago, in Venezuela, I spoke with Víctor Álvarez, a minister in one of Hugo Chávez’s governments and a high-ranking official before that. Álvarez explained to me the arguments he had made in favor of protecting some private industry, and his opposition to mass nationalization. Álvarez was in government from the late 1990s through 2006, a time when Chávez was stepping up the use of police against peaceful demonstrators and undermining democratic institutions. Still, Álvarez remained, hoping to curb Chávez’s worst economic instincts. Ultimately, he did quit, after concluding that Chávez had created a loyalty cult around himself—Álvarez called it a “subclimate” of obedience—and was no longer listening to anyone who disagreed.

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In authoritarian regimes, many insiders eventually conclude that their presence simply does not matter. Cohn, after publicly agonizing when the president said there had been “fine people on both sides” at the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, finally quit when the president made the ruinous decision to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, a decision that harmed American businesses. Mattis reached his breaking point when the president abandoned the Kurds, America’s longtime allies in the war against the Islamic State.

But although both resigned, neither Cohn nor Mattis has spoken out in any notable way. (On June 3, after this article went to press, Mattis denounced Trump in an article on TheAtlantic.com.) Their presence inside the White House helped build Trump’s credibility among traditional Republican voters; their silence now continues to serve the president’s purposes. As for Anonymous, we don’t know whether he or she remains inside the administration. For the record, I note that Álvarez lives in Venezuela, an actual police state, and yet is willing to speak out against the system he helped create. Cohn, Mattis, and Anonymous, all living freely in the United States of America, have not been nearly so brave.

I, personally, will benefit. These, of course, are words that few people ever say out loud. Perhaps some do quietly acknowledge to themselves that they have not resigned or protested because it would cost them money or status. But no one wants a reputation as a careerist or a turncoat. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, even Markus Wolf sought to portray himself as an idealist. He had truly believed in Marxist-Leninist ideals, this infamously cynical man told an interviewer in 1996, and “I still believe in them.”

Many people in and around the Trump administration are seeking personal benefits. Many of them are doing so with a degree of openness that is startling and unusual in contemporary American politics, at least at this level. As an ideology, “Trump First” suits these people, because it gives them license to put themselves first. To pick a random example: Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, is a former Georgia governor and a businessman who, like Trump, famously refused to put his agricultural companies into a blind trust when he entered the governor’s office. Perdue has never even pretended to separate his political and personal interests. Since joining the Cabinet he has, with almost no oversight, distributed billions of dollars of “compensation” to farms damaged by Trump’s trade policies. He has stuffed his department with former lobbyists who are now in charge of regulating their own industries: Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky was for 21 years the CEO of the American Soybean Association; Brooke Appleton was a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association before becoming Censky’s chief of staff, and has since returned to that group; Kailee Tkacz, a member of a nutritional advisory panel, is a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association. The list goes on and on, as would lists of similarly compromised people in the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and elsewhere.

David W. Blight: One week to save democracy

Perdue’s department also employs an extraordinary range of people with no experience in agriculture whatsoever. These modern apparatchiks, hired for their loyalty rather than their competence, include a long-haul truck driver, a country-club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented-candle company, and an intern at the Republican National Committee. The long-haul truck driver was paid $80,000 a year to expand markets for American agriculture abroad. Why was he qualified? He had a background in “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.”

A friend told me that each time he sees Lindsey Graham, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader.”

I must remain close to power. Another sort of benefit, harder to measure, has kept many people who object to Trump’s policies or behavior from speaking out: the intoxicating experience of power, and the belief that proximity to a powerful person bestows higher status. This, too, is nothing new. In a 1968 article for The Atlantic, James Thomson, an American East Asia specialist, brilliantly explained how power functioned inside the U.S. bureaucracy in the Vietnam era. When the war in Vietnam was going badly, many people did not resign or speak out in public, because preserving their “effectiveness”—“a mysterious combination of training, style, and connections,” as Thomson defined it—was an all-consuming concern. He called this “the effectiveness trap”:

The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues—is overwhelming. Nor is it the tendency of youth alone; some of our most senior officials, men of wealth and fame, whose place in history is secure, have remained silent lest their connection with power be terminated.

In any organization, private or public, the boss will of course sometimes make decisions that his underlings dislike. But when basic principles are constantly violated, and people constantly defer resignation—“I can always fall on my sword next time”—then misguided policies go fatally unchallenged.

In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word—prisposoblenets—that means “a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly.” In Putin’s Russia, anyone who wants to stay in the game—to remain close to power, to retain influence, to inspire respect—knows the necessity of making constant small changes to one’s language and behavior, of being careful about what one says and to whom one says it, of understanding what criticism is acceptable and what constitutes a violation of the unwritten rules. Those who violate these rules will not, for the most part, suffer prison—Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s Russia—but they will experience a painful ejection from the inner circle.

For those who have never experienced it, the mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an insider, is difficult to explain. Nevertheless, it is real, and strong enough to affect even the highest-ranking, best-known, most influential people in America. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, named his still-unpublished book The Room Where It Happened, because, of course, that’s where he has always wanted to be. A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

LOL nothing matters. Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went—Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

From the October 2001 issue: France’s downfall

To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from “the left” has been spelled out many times. “Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature,” wrote Michael Anton, in “The Flight 93 Election.” The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that “massive demographic changes” threaten us too: “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” This is the Vichy logic: The nation is dead or dying—so anything you can do to restore it is justified. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House—all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

The Republican senators who are willing to express their disgust with Trump off the record but voted in February for him to remain in office all indulge a variation of this sentiment. (Trump enables them to get the judges they want, and those judges will help create the America they want.) So do the evangelical pastors who ought to be disgusted by Trump’s personal behavior but argue, instead, that the current situation has scriptural precedents. Like King David in the Bible, the president is a sinner, a flawed vessel, but he nevertheless offers a path to salvation for a fallen nation.

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The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

I am afraid to speak out. Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, people fear for their lives. In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950 and Putin’s Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street, in my accented Russian: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier they might have been, and the cultural memory remained.

Republican leaders don’t seem to know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.

In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime’s political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump’s Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that “they are all scared.”

They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked, or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties. They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC and a lot of plans for how he wants to use it; no wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration, in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history. They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party—and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out.

They are scared, and yet they don’t seem to know that this fear has precedents, or that it could have consequences. They don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don’t seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma, or the Hungarian Parliament, a group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building, with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined.

In february, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment. All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of Ukraine. All of them knew that he had tried to use American foreign-policy tools, including military funding, to force a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent. Yet Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never took the charges seriously. They mocked the Democratic House leaders who had presented the charges. They decided against hearing evidence. With the single exception of Romney, they voted in favor of ending the investigation. They did not use the opportunity to rid the country of a president whose operative value system—built around corruption, nascent authoritarianism, self-regard, and his family’s business interests—runs counter to everything that most of them claim to believe in.

Just a month later, in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism—his one true “ideology”—was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

Anne Applebaum: The rest of the world is laughing at Trump

This utter disaster was avoidable. If the Senate had removed the president by impeachment a month earlier; if the Cabinet had invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as soon as Trump’s unfitness became clear; if the anonymous and off-the-record officials who knew of Trump’s incompetence had jointly warned the public; if they had not, instead, been so concerned about maintaining their proximity to power; if senators had not been scared of their donors; if Pence, Pompeo, and Barr had not believed that God had chosen them to play special roles in this “biblical moment”—if any of these things had gone differently, then thousands of deaths and a historic economic collapse might have been avoided.

The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. Unless, of course, they decide not to.

When I visited Marianne Birthler, she didn’t think it was interesting to talk about collaboration in East Germany, because everybody collaborated in East Germany. So I asked her about dissidence instead: When all of your friends, all of your teachers, and all of your employers are firmly behind the system, how do you find the courage to oppose it? In her answer, Birthler resisted the use of the word courage; just as people can adapt to corruption or immorality, she told me, they can slowly learn to object as well. The choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of “a number of small decisions that you take”—to absent yourself from the May Day parade, for example, or not to sing the words of the party hymn. And then, one day, you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. Often, this process involves role models. You see people whom you admire, and you want to be like them. It can even be “selfish.” “You want to do something for yourself,” Birthler said, “to respect yourself.”

For some people, the struggle is made easier by their upbringing. Marko Martin’s parents hated the East German regime, and so did he. His father was a conscientious objector, and so was he. As far back as the Weimar Republic, his great-grandparents had been part of the “anarcho-syndicalist” anti-Communist left; he had access to their books. In the 1980s, he refused to join the Free German Youth, the Communist youth organization, and as a result he could not go to university. He instead embarked on a vocational course, to train to be an electrician (after refusing to become a butcher). In his electrician-training classes, one of the other students pulled him aside and warned him, subtly, that the Stasi was collecting information on him: “It’s not necessary that you tell me all the things you have in mind.” He was eventually allowed to emigrate, in May 1989, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?

In America we also have our Marianne Birthlers, our Marko Martins: people whose families taught them respect for the Constitution, who have faith in the rule of law, who believe in the importance of disinterested public service, who have values and role models from outside the world of the Trump administration. Over the past year, many such people have found the courage to stand up for what they believe. A few have been thrust into the limelight. Fiona Hill—an immigrant success story and a true believer in the American Constitution—was not afraid to testify at the House’s impeachment hearings, nor was she afraid to speak out against Republicans who were promulgating a false story of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” she said in her congressional testimony. “The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.”

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—another immigrant success story and another true believer in the American Constitution—also found the courage, first to report on the president’s improper telephone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, which Vindman had heard as a member of the National Security Council, and then to speak publicly about it. In his testimony, he made explicit reference to the values of the American political system, so different from those in the place where he was born. “In Russia,” he said, “offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life.” But as “an American citizen and public servant … I can live free of fear for mine and my family’s safety.” A few days after the Senate impeachment vote, Vindman was physically escorted out of the White House by representatives of a vengeful president who did not appreciate Vindman’s hymn to American patriotism—although retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, apparently did. Vindman’s behavior, Kelly said in a speech a few days later, was “exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave. He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Read: John Kelly finally lets loose on Trump

But both Hill and Vindman had some important advantages. Neither had to answer to voters, or to donors. Neither had prominent status in the Republican Party. What would it take, by contrast, for Pence or Pompeo to conclude that the president bears responsibility for a catastrophic health and economic crisis? What would it take for Republican senators to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love? What would it take for their aides and subordinates to come to the same conclusion, to resign, and to campaign against the president? What would it take, in other words, for someone like Lindsey Graham to behave like Wolfgang Leonhard?

If, as Stanley Hoffmann wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of “collaborationisms,” because the phenomenon comes in so many variations, the same is true of dissidence, which should probably be described as “dissidences.” People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations like the one Wolfgang Leonhard had when walking into his fancy nomenklatura dining room, with its white tablecloths and three-course meals. They can also be persuaded by outside events: rapid political changes, for example. Awareness that the regime had lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harald Jaeger, an obscure and until that moment completely loyal East German border guard, decide on the night of November 9, 1989, to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall—a decision that led, over the next days and months, to the end of East Germany itself. Jaeger’s decision was not planned; it was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. “Their will was so great,” he said years later, of those demanding to cross into West Berlin, “there was no other alternative than to open the border.”

But these things are all intertwined, and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable. Leonhard’s “sudden” revelation may have been building for years, perhaps since his mother’s arrest. Jaeger was moved by the grandeur of the historical moment on that night in November, but he also had more petty concerns: He was annoyed at his boss, who had not given him clear instructions about what to do.

Could some similar combination of the petty and the political ever convince Lindsey Graham that he has helped lead his country down a blind alley? Perhaps a personal experience could move him, a prod from someone who represents his former value system—an old Air Force buddy, say, whose life has been damaged by Trump’s reckless behavior, or a friend from his hometown. Perhaps it requires a mass political event: When the voters begin to turn, maybe Graham will turn with them, arguing, as Jaeger did, that “their will was so great … there was no other alternative.” At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting “Trump First,” especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than in much of the rest of the world.

Anne Applebaum: A study in leadership

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham—along with Pence, Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures—will understand what he has enabled.

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

This article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “The Collaborators.”

ANNE APPLEBAUM

is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

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hanzi83 · 4 years

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Probably the Longest Blog You Will Ever Read.. fuck it. Very Necessary Tho

Since I have not been constantly writing down my thoughts other than the occasional blog, that never seems to get any type of feedback, probably because no one is paying attention other than a few dedicated trolls, who I presume have been sent to fuck with my mental health, even if it is not true, the illusion of trying to implement some kind of devastating fear, and every time I decide to write a blog that expresses what is transpiring in my mind, it is met with no acknowledgement, and when it is acknowledged, it is the cult like trolls who will convert it to audio, so people will not bother to give me a click on where it is posted. I don’t know where this blog will particularly go since I never plan these out, and just write from the heart, and my will has not been into jotting down my thoughts, I still have point form notes on my phone dating back to last June about experiences and topics that have transpired, but for the most part it has mainly been me explaining how I think it is organized and wondering where it is all leading because it has meaning symbolically and how the seeds are planted, it has become clear since I stopped writing stuff down daily to get the frustration out of my system, that I have become exhausted mentally and can barely retain anything, whether it is reciting why capitalism is bad or if it means memorizing a movie or television show reference, mixed with how now to watch this entertainment that I have to read on the discourse about something not being woke enough, or if it something seems woke, then it just people pushing agendas, and then lesser known people expressing the fake wokeness that exists, and I just realize I am too stupid for this world so I just remain in the wrestling bubble, just like I began last decade.

I need to set this up because I am trying to think rationally as I write but I know in the middle of this blog, it will probably fall apart but it is a good thing that most people don’t take me serious, and I am not really on the masses radar, even though important people are constantly on the lookout for me, that is why my broadcasts on periscope are interrupted, my social media posts are practically shadow banned, my facebook lives are not giving out people notifications, so clearly they are trying to censor me, and it shows this is real censorship, not the marketing tool censorship where the masses are aware of the censorship at hand.

I have been writing blogs on a certain person on youtube, who has become completely unhinged, and then a group of people on the application periscope, that I feel have felt they did not get all of their use from me, so now are trying to align with people who have been waiting for anyone to have a mutual distaste, and what is weird is that I am this irrational and irrelevant mentally ill person they dismiss as just some delusional caller but these same people need to try to destroy any good that I try to create and try to bring me down so badly that I lash out with irrational anger that makes me want to go back to my ignorant ways after years of trying to deprogram myself since I was dumbed down majority of my life and fell for the ignorance, and because mental illness to the mainstream is just described as someone being sad, and not the fact that there are darker elements in mental illness people will not want to discuss, but rather they ignore it so when someone else is having a legit mental breakdown, they will pile on them all the while maintaining the “woke” points for addressing the stigma of mental illness, even if it means it is presented in such a limited way,

My trolls also realize that I have not been writing lately so they figure it will be easier for me to snap since they know I am not getting my thoughts out and the plan is for me to be piled on mentally so much, in such a pseudo intellectual way, that I will just snap and lose my mind and then the people paid to harass me can take the audio of me losing my mind and saying some hurtful shit to people encouraging a mentally ill person to go kill himself, and constantly hint that I will be targeted. It feels this aggressive trolling has begun on periscope when I was discussing these Howard Stern leaks, and it feels like we are at the precipice of Howard finally getting canceled because his past will come back to haunt him, so the person that will be of interest to people in the media might be me, and before that could happen these people need me out of the way. If my theories are correct, then these people could probably be sacrificed when they strike down on Howard’s image.

One of the other problems was that when I initially broadcasted on periscope, I would not really follow anyone and just broadcast while promoting it on twitter. Last summer, I got suspended on facebook and twitter and I decided to browse the app and see what kind of people are there. There were plethora of characters etc that existed and I have tried to become friendly with people, a lot of sex workers, musicians, gimmick personalities etc. It seems friendly but also if you browse by the random broadcasts you will see thumbnails of people I perceive to be young and I have to report because I feel people running periscope allow some type of exploitation on there that is truly disgusting, but overall it has been kind of a positive experience, and I am so full of low self esteem I have to constantly name drop I was part of an institution to present myself to stand out but also interview different walks of life and get some good discussions going on, and also because I feel Howard has a stake in periscope, again it is my theory I name drop to see if people who are there are kind of answer to him since I feel the elite use these apps to sell people, but I could be wrong but if I am wrong at least I make a friend out of it. It feels like people also get sent to me, and since I don’t have the resources to do background checks on people, I always wonder if the system is sending people who are not good people to be associated with me, so it damages my reputation further. Even when I talk to people on there, I have to ask their age because if they are not over 18 I have to dismiss them from talking to them because I don’t like talking about the content I talk about in front of people who are not of age, even though I can control who comes into my broadcasts and don’t interact.

So before I get accused of setting a narrative and speaking out like it is fact, I have to preface this by saying whatever I have written on here has been just my opinion, when I do my videos, I express my opinions and I might vent out of frustration because if I don’t express myself I will probably end up harming myself and I don’t want to do that and since I do feel bad and get to reflect when I say some evil shit when being pushed by people, others just want to cross the line and then pretend they never did anything negative while pointing out all my flaws. So I don’t know where to go with this because I am not intelligent enough to deal with the nuances of good storytelling, or maybe I am just underselling it.

This lady came to my scope last summer after people who have been trying to troll me for years were in there and immediately I did not take her seriously because she was presenting herself as an alien and she would full of mystery all while having this soothing voice. I always have my guard up and I do want good content, as long as the people in my periscope are willing to come up and talk etc. I am creating content, and hopefully I can try to move on to a podcast, but there are a lot of people who somehow have some investment in me without knowing and if I don’t move on their watch, they will then start showing their true selves eventually. I entertained this lady’s presence for a while but then when someone from her past came onto my panel when they called into my periscope, that alien schtick went down the tube and I laughed because as a wrestling fan it would be like if the Undertaker was confronted by someone in real life and then him immediately dropping the Dead Man character and freaked out. I was not aware of the drama scopers on this app, because apparently a lot of doxing goes on and organized harassment, basically what I have predicted in my own life, but I am kind of watching it play out to others and it is just completely fucked up.

There was another nice man I met on scope who I gelled well with when discussing stuff and even though we did not agree, he clearly has some resources and his full of encouragement when people want to go for their dreams and if he is cool with you he will help you out but because I was suspect of this alien lady who would not ever address any of my questions for her, and I did not want to talk to her in private because apparently she belongs to some former patriot groups, and when I hear that I can only imagine these can’t be good. It is one thing to have a conversation with someone who might not be politically correct, but I have learned some people who lean right are not as bad and are anti imperialistic, while others are just defensive of anything criticizing Trump. I feel with these conversations I am able to at least talk to someone who I don’t agree with politically and get them to deprogram themselves from the ignorant propaganda, the same shit I used to kind of fall for. This woman does not seem like a Trump supporter but she is an enigma because she will play the Jewish card but still associate with people who have been fucking with me and bothering me to join their podcast network, and these people are insanely racist and bigoted. This lady puts it all on me when she comes into my scopes, and her supposed harassers come in, and because some of them seem like they could be dangerous, I try not to rock the boat with more enemies, but as far as I know they have been nice to me, but then again my trolls do the same thing where they endear themselves to people I try to make friends with and when I flip out they will claim I am the one bothering them. I just kind of wish she would have stayed out of my lives, I even blocked her because she was becoming a disturbance in my sessions, but the nice guy I became friends with would always kind of vouch for her and I did not understand why. The only thing I could come up with, is the typical “Are these 2 fucking?” because I don’t understand how you could just know someone for a month or so and suddenly just become these great friends, I did eventually unblock her and tolerated her but she would kind of want me to have conviction in protecting her when I don’t even know her like that because she has not presented any proof of this happening

The fucked up thing is she claims to be someone that just observes but she is following all the trolls who have been following me nonstop, and these people have become extra aggressive since making new friends on this app, like they are lashing out about me not paying attention to them and having people of color on my panel since I did not know that there were so many black and brown people on the app. They then start saying I am so anti white because I rail against a white supremacist system and then they discredit me with rumors of me beating up a gay couple, or beating my mother. They create accounts where they take pictures of me and blacken it because they think I want to be black. They are doing deep fakes of me talking, and then leaving suspicious messages instilling fear about me being kidnapped and killed. They have a sub reddit dedicated to me, and then when I become rational enough to analyze their mental illness, because if I am so irrelevant and useless and such a drain on society, then why wouldn’t you do something better with their lives? The answer is they can’t, because as useless as I have been, these people are even more useless for the last several years and clearly need to latch onto me to exist, and because people end up having problems with me they all connect because of their mutual hatred for me, but the truth is none of them are interesting without me and they lack creativity.

The alien chick and the supposed innocent dude would be in these scopes with these people witnessing my meltdowns on the Stern Show and apparently questioning them is a big no-no so I assume they get the advice of these trolls who study me that if they are nice enough and I don’t fall for it, it can be easily pushed against me that this is what happens and this is why I was kicked off the Howard Stern Show. They try to be like Howard and Robin and try to dismantle your psyche. I did not trust this lady and I felt like the dude I was cool with was just going to take her side regardless and because I feel like she is hanging out with my trolls, and I figured she was recruiting me for some kind of cult or wanted to capitalize of any value I have so they could get some clout, even though I barely have it on the surface. I am going all over the map and kind of leaving some details out but overall these people she claims were bothering her came into my scope, but according to this innocent nice dude, these are legit gripes, and I am supposed to have some kind of conviction, but not them because they are associating with people who have made my life hell, and they dismiss my claims even though there is a legit thread I have made on twitter on my pinned tweets where you can see the supposed threats made to me.

So the innocent dude eventually blocks me because I had the gall to get mad that I was not trusting him because he was in this dude’s scope who is harassing me, I got tired of periscope so I started doing facebook lives, and then the cult of trolls would fuck with that too by people not getting notifications and there would not be many there and I was so set out on doing it with low views for the principal, because I know when you are supposed to be popping, you will have a plethora of views, and when they punish you they dumb them down, but either way it is all organized. I eventually go back to periscope in December, and the alien lady has choice words for me because that innocent dude had “helped” me and he did but there was something they weren’t telling me, like there was some hidden investment with me, and it set their plans back by me leaving periscope for a bit. She would give me more attitude, and honestly I would have preferred to speak to the dude, instead of this chick who I feel has brainwashed this dude. That is the way I see it, they will probably read this and get mad that I am presenting it as fact, but a lot of the videos are on my facebook public page and there have been a lot of witnesses who can attest that I am presenting the events truthfully mixed with me presenting my theories, whether they are valid to you or not, depending on how low the totem pole I am in social media.

(Blog continued 2 days after)

Now I have been out of practice from writing since I used to do it consistently in my life since 2007, and felt I had to make up for the anger I had years before, and I had a lot of deprogramming to do, it went from writing in notebooks and barely understanding what I was writing, or that I would have to write on my computer so I could read it back and maybe sustain some material for it so I could write a book of my irrational thoughts, but I scare myself with the anger I had and how my opinions would differ often and barely being able to retain shit, so sometimes I felt I would guess people were watching me and monitoring my computer so I would suspect different people and write things to test anyone and see what would prompt them to move my mouse so I know their presence is lurking digitally in some hacker like way.

Anyways, writing a blog has even drained me and I felt I was not aligning the stories well because I have been used to just talking more often on my platform than writing. I had to take a break from it and since the developments are breaking every single day I had to hold off and debate if I wanted to write a blog because it will seen as some act of social media war that will further encourage more harassment, that most people who have power and set the narratives can use to their advantage to further make me feel like a useless piece of shit, more so than already. If I vent, I am supposedly doing the woe is me gimmick, and constantly feeling sorry for myself, because I don’t want to hold in my irrational feelings or I will snap and maybe that is the wave right now.

So I did not bother to know where I left out because I am too lazy to read it so I will try to pick it up from where I left off and there is a good chance that I might repeat the same shit but at least if you are going to read this, I at least came up with an interesting angle of how to write a shitty blog that people will pretend does not exist, or maybe they just don’t know and I have to act like I am this important person being spied on.

I think it was from the time that I got blocked by this one guy from periscope, while he defends the alien lady. I know I should present names but if you been following it you already know the names, but I need to express this and I don’t want to be accused of putting their name out there and seeing as lying on their names, when I have explained ad nauseam that these are my theories, and no one ever listens to what I say and by people being scared people might believe me, it will contradict the whole thing of me being irrelevant and that maybe beneath the surface more people care about what I think.

I just feel when I took a break from periscope because I did not want to deal with more betrayal, at least from my perspective, do these trolls actually wish me harm or are they just testing me and toughening me up mentally and putting me through some shit, or these people are aligning with trolls who have tried to drive me insane by spreading rumors of me hitting my mother, or beating up a gay couple etc, and they put out misleading titles of what my periscope is about so when people do search my name, they will get these negative and untruthful shit at the top of google etc. That was my beef with these new people who wanted to be friends with me, but it seems like I am only supposed to take their safety seriously yet they will be following my trolls who have constantly pushed me to the brink of insanity and make me want to say some irrational shit that I will regret, because the system is so against me, if I irrationally talk shit and tell someone to do something horrible to themselves, they will suspend me. They push me to that so they can twist it into me being seen as threatening

I don’t know if the trolls have been aligned with these people from the beginning or do people approach anyone I make friends with and when I try to create some content with interesting discussion. The trolls hate me for not acknowledging them as much and because I have different people of different races/ethnicities/nationalities on and they spread this shit of me hating white people even though I talk about the systemic corruption and the grander white supremacy that exists on a pseudo intellectual type of way.

I took a month away from periscope, so my facebook lives would suffer when I would do decent numbers prior and suddenly I would be lucky if I would get 5 people in there but out of principle I would still do it and it would anger the trolls even more, because even though I was not broadcasting I was still being a guest on people’s periscope. They got it banned and I had to write a repeal on it and they gave it back. So it was like a test. I don’t know who helped do this but I eventually came back, and this time instead of dealing with the constant disturbance I would just block these trolls and not unblock them, because when I did, they would say I want the drama and want them to come in so when I become strict with it I then angered them even more and they will keep leaving cryptic messages on different troll accounts about them going to execute MK Ultra on me, or that they will kidnap me and that they are continuously watching me and monitoring me and showing so by knowing when I have therapy appointments etc.

It felt like this dude I met on periscope who really helped me for a bit, and this alien lady really wanted to teach me a lesson and maybe fuck with my head but overtly finding all the trolls, when there are people I roll with who have discussions with people who might seem more conservative, and I will have discussions and not budge from my point of view while still having the discussion, and some people I can get through but some have their minds made up on believing Trump is actually anti establishment and I can’t deal with it. So there was these 2 black dudes I have conversations with and enjoy their scopes, but they are constantly getting harassed by a lot of white people or people with Zionist leaning ideals and harass black people for not wanting to give them the time of day and think they are entitled to these people’s time. So when one of the guys lost account after account for defending himself, he had a enough and I shared his scope, because when he comes back with a new account I share it so more people can see it but the guy had a periscope saying “Jew Jokes’ not the best title, but he was trying to get at these Zionists fucking with him, and he even cleared it up that he is just doing that for that purpose, because he was pissed, the other guy, who loses account after account, wanted to troll with someone black in Nazi fatigue, and I expressed concern with it and he was just so pissed about being banned and I had to approach him privately and explain that even though I know what he is doing it is wrong to do it because it feels like you are cosigning some white supremacist shit, and it that people try to discredit black people a lot, that it gives the Zionist more ammo because ultimately it won’t matter if they did racist shit first, it will be all put on the black dudes. So this alien lady, who often tells me that the people harassing her are anti Semites, and I don’t hang around them enough to know, they only come in when the alien lady comes on my scope, and I am expected to just block them, when she won’t even unfollow the trolls harassing me. She starts this campaign that I am hanging out with anti Semites and she seems to dismiss what others are going through, while she is hanging out with anti Muslim type of people who also say anti Semitic shit and actual real generalizations. That is why I hate generalizations and specify Zionism, even though they are starting to say that Zionism and Jewish is the same. The guy I talked to privately was thankful for my advice, because he was so irrationally angry he wanted to do something to upset them, because he is constantly being called the N word and having money taken off his table by getting his broadcasts suspended and making people rebuild.

So this is when I was like I had enough of this shit because it hurt me to know this dude I met on periscope who became friends with will defend this chick for some reason. Why does she get to follow all these people who are often anti Black and anti Muslim? I don’t even know where this is going but if these people are aligning with my trolls, and they are actually trying to do harm to me, because they want me on their playing field where all my trolls are, and think I am using them for entertainment on my platform, which is what the app is for, but when something organic is to be discussed I don’t mind that, but they wanted me in their platform because it supposedly was not for entertainment while all these people in there are guilty of putting fear and severe paranoia in me.

The trolls will constantly try to pretend they turned a new leaf and that they are done harassing me but will still have sub reddits trying to dox me, or mislead with the titles to paint me in a bad light, and the stuff they claim I am saying that is fucked up when I am angry is what made them fans of me on the Stern Show, while probably being associated with people like that dude Jimmernam, who has probably been behind the attacks as well.

Jimmernam has become much more unhinged and he has started to fucking with the True Crime community because everything else has fallen apart and since he pissed off his old crew so much and has done so much fucking damage in people’s lives, wherever he goes to endear himself and then destroy it because that is what he does, he has done it to some poor woman named Limonade. I was done after the summer where I wrote the blog and believing that there are lies about him being a child groomer, and how he has changed from the old guy, but he has that venom in him and he is still full of lies. He hates me for not cosigning his show the first time and not believing his sob story and how he tried to use Wendy to gain sympathy, and then people expected that she was taking her donations to give to him, and he would play dumb about giving it back and change the topic. He even caused a beef with me and that Ross Dawg guy, because he knew I was protective of Wendy so he would get her to say different people are bothering her so I would be insanely angry about it, and it almost started something ugly because even though I don’t like the general way Stern has trained the public to talk to Wendy, I have to understand she is used to that and she gravitates towards that kind of thing and I don’t want to feel she can’t have fun and joke like normal with people etc. So when he fucked with this Limonade chick, I really felt for it and it was like a united front with people who I did not see eye to eye with, to help this woman against Jimmer, who turned her friends against her, constantly doxing her, and her family, and putting out threats within 12 hour streams, all while taking over her community of True Crime and wanting to be the number one guy in town. And the sycophants have become a lot worse, I don’t know how he has convinced these many people to help him and be completely blinded by his tactics, and the ones who are standing up for themselves as doing dirty tactics, when it is not nearly on the same level, and it is being done out of self defense. I don’t agree with everything people say on the panel, but I have enjoyed discussion I have had with certain people because without being this preachy SJW, I try to teach people that the shock jock type of humor is not really the edgiest and it doesn’t mean it can’t be funny but I would rather have people agree with me with systemic shit, and let them do their shock jock style of humor, but Jimmernam’s crew will take stuff and make videos to discredit any type of criticism towards him and create false narratives about him. It feels like what he pretends he is going through, he actually does it to me, so it sounds like me and him are kind of the same, but this guy copies everything, Howard Stern’s personality, Bill Burr generic whit woman voice, NBA commentators closing tags and even channels Chris Jericho by calling himself Le Champion. When he sees that this woman has backup, he will try to get in on the Stream Yard link and claim he wants to talk when he just wants to insult her and project things on to her and questioning her parenting and her divorce, when he is the guy who can’t see his kids because of the shit he is doing. He will send his teenage audience into this woman’s streams and then make videos of how she is grooming him, when he is the one who has had a kid audience and played adult content for them and constantly bringing up how people are calling him a pedophile because he let a kid in his discord in 2018 and it had porn in it, and he will claim the videos of him are being edited, when it is not and that is him. He lost his mind when he lost that reddit money, so now he has just become a lot bitterer and he is threatening me and others.

He did not like that I was on her panel and making new alliances and friendships, especially with people I didn’t think I liked before because I assumed they were just doing ignorant shock jock humor when they are a lot more deeper about their discussions. Now Jimmer did not like that and it gave me confidence to stand up to him seeing how this Limonade chick was standing up to him, even though she has been getting a lot of shit on her from her former friends, one of which is a gay guy who seems so scared he just hangs out with Jimmer, and Jimmer has constantly been kind of homophobic and does not regret any of the hurtful things he has said to people, It feels like that Kitty chick, who he doxxed when she did not have his back, is back with him time to time, even though she is good at hiding her role in doing any dirt, so as far as I know she has nothing to do with this, but it feels like if they want to make money in a field and continuously create drama, they will. I could be wrong though. It felt for a while that he was going to get caught for what he is doing, but he just comes back more confident and making some threats and dedicating streams to putting out private information, and it seems youtube does not want to do anything. He does not like that I aligned with this woman to give her support about what he has been doing, and I did it because maybe if people in that community did not believe the others who are informing these people about the past of this guy and to watch out for him, I would have more credibility since I am a former celebrity essentially and since we in society value someone who seems to have greater value unfortunately because of how “famous’ they are, I thought I would put it for good use, and now Jimmernam aka Misery Box has threatened to come after me, which is aligning with the original trolls who are now constantly bothering me and sending people to my scopes, and maybe get shady people to befriend me so I will be associated with someone I don’t know well. I don’t have the resources to do background checks, I kind of assume if this person is just roaming around I want to believe they are not all scumbags, even if they put on a false bravado of being anti PC, they are buying into ignorance,

So this all ties into the alien lady because she followed me when one of the guys who has power with the app came into my scope, and since I blocked her he and the trolls have become a lot more aggressive, but I also know that these people are associated with Jimmernam, and these people seem hella racist, and bigoted, and this alien lady keeps making it seem like I am the one rolling with racists, while she is claiming to be someone with special powers who can put people into rehabilitation, so maybe she is someone special and I don’t realize it. I am having a hard time understanding what is going on because there is another guy involved who she calls my producer, who started out as a troll, but he and I have gotten a long, but sometimes I wonder since he had a friendship with her and that other dude I met on scope, he has kind of seem iffy by wanting me in their clique and to believe them, but when I don’t give in, he will be on my side, but then the lady will tell me he is the one that is stirring all of this up.

I realize by not giving specific names, I may be confusing people, but keep in mind that no one gives a fuck about these stupid blogs but I did an outlet to write about it and the more I write, I just fucking shake my head how I am so bad at explaining all of this and what makes it worse is that you can’t keep up with people who I am referring to other than a few people. The trolls will be so much more outward aggressively with admitting they want me to kill myself and encourage me to take pills, and what hurts about this, what if I am not the only one these people do it to, and how many people who have killed themselves have dealt with targeted harassment. So while I am tougher mentally than a lot of others, I can take it, even though it hurts my fucking soul, because these people can be protected and say the worst shit and do the worst shit and me standing up for myself is what is magnified because I am supposed to be the better person, even though people want to pile on me and making me a miserable person.

When I separated with the dude and the lady, I figured they would get mad at the fact I am moving forward so they have to try and show up in different scopes I am in and maybe tell people to come and be spies for them. So sometimes when I am hurt about how my friendship with this dude was from the summer, I might be irrational and talk shit and I do this knowing he will hear about it, and he will act like I am talking shit about him, and he will say he does not want part of drama, but he is still monitoring me, and because I am not giving in, this is all I suspect in a theory not fact, that they need to start with me but look like the rationalized ones. I was willing to make peace but because they dismiss what I am going through and claim that I am endangering this lady because she insists on observing my scopes, but hates that her followers are there, like it is my problem, I don’t encourage hatred toward her and continued harassment. I might talk shit about her when she makes my broadcast about her, but she will claim she finds it funny or whatever, but when it is convenient she will then use it as a prime example of why I am an asshole.

Last weekend we had a blow up where I was on her scope with the trolls, who are aligned with Jimmernam, and the dude I was friends with who does good community work, who seems to have conviction, because he did end his friendship with people who treated Wendy like shit, which is admirable but all I did was bring up is that he is careful of his image but he is hanging out and following trolls who might be aligned with someone who might be grooming children, I did not say that he is the one who is a child predator or anything but I can understand why he is mad, but I am making a point that I am getting hated on for people I don’t want to fuck with and get doxxed by, because I let them in my periscope but not following them while he and this alien lady are following someone like this account Gorilla Bacon, who will restream my shit and play my worst calls. Sometimes I don’t know if these people are actual fans and they are just toughening me up or if these people are punishing me and becoming more aggressive because it is their job to get me out of the way before Howard ends up getting canceled when his past and his potential corruption might be brought to light.

These trolls don’t realize that the only reason people are aligning with them is because they all have mutual hatred for me. It could be anyone, it could be this dude on periscope, the alien lady, the trolls, Jimmernam and his kid army, or maybe people in my life who probably hate me. Either way their lives are all better than me and yet they need to make me feel like shit and rub it in my face I am on welfare, like this was not the plan from the system, because there are different rules in this world, and they blacklist me from making a living anywhere else so they can say I am not trying to monetize anything because I am not doing it on their time.

Any chance for anything embarrassing they will run with. Here is an example, if I say something that might be about agendas by the upper echelon of the LGBTQ, they will say homophobia but then if I say that I would consider having sex with a post op Trans woman, then they will mock me for it like they are homophobic. They will say the most racist shit against Muslim women or black people, and then a story comes out from someone as a joke about how I asked a Muslim woman out because we both live in Toronto, and she is a cool chick who has a good sense of humor, she asks me how much I will pay for her and where I will take her and I am willing to pay for something small on first date because it is about getting to know each other but I believe if we should pay our own shit on the first date, but she jokingly said I need to spend more money and I said “I will spend 50 bucks at most” and when I was given the option of over 100, I said “For that kind of money I better be getting laid” but I did not mean it literally because it was my way of conveying that it is ridiculous to expect a man to pay so much on a first date to get to know each other, just like it is ridiculous for me to expect sex on the first night. But the trolls ran with it and said that I am harassing a woman so it becomes a top google search when you look me up. It feels they are amplifying it because if Stern does get exposed, and I am someone who has been a prime target for calling him out, then when the general public looks me up, they will see these false narratives about me, and that is why it hurts to see these people who I thought were good, to align with these trolls who are doing it, and because they are not getting the shit they wanted out of me, they will have no issues to act like I am this dangerous human being who is lying and causing all this pain, and that won’t work. You will not point out at me and discredit me, because I am such an easy target who has no backup.

No media outlet even gives a fuck and it is sickens me because it will continue and it feels like they will only care until something horrible happens to me so then they can pretend they give a fuck about the situation, kind of like they are what they claim the MSM is and maybe someone is investigating and I am wrong but it feels like the worst possible shit has to happen in order for it to be exposed. You know how fucked up that is? It is like no matter what people have to profit off the pain and it shows that all these things are predetermined and will have solutions after the fact. It does not matter and I wrote this in 2 parts and made it this long because I hope if you are reading this, I hope you got a headache from reading all this convoluted mess of an explanation. I know most of you will not get through it all so you might as well put it on vocaroo to so you can get through it easier. Make sure you set it on some stereotypical accent.

I wrote this part with the fact that lately it has been more peaceful but when I was given the choice of not wanting this lady in my scope or wanting her out of my life, they did not take it kindly because if I gave in then I wanted her in my life, but by saying no because she has fucked with me too much and changed the narrative on me to paint me as the bad guy because she couldn’t make me fall for her spell, like she seems to have on other people, she is now coming into scopes of other people I have met and is kind of trying to poach them from partaking in my lives, and now she is coming back to my scope and pretends she is just automatically being put there and that the whole ambush on me on her scope was just comedy, Now that I let her back on, she will twist that, and say I forced her to be put on.

I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore. I will close with this, that if you are someone of importance and power, you need to check in on this Misery Box guy and what kind of fucked up shit he has convinced his people to do. He has ensured that I will not go on that Limonade chick’s panel because he has threatened me and encouraged me to kill myself, and tell me how my parents don’t love me because I am such a disappointment, even threats of doxing them when people are not well, and I have tried to document this, if you go to my twitter page and look at the pinned tweet where I show old audio of Howard in 97 jokingly threatening the media if they fucked with him he would have dossiers on them to ruin their lives, and in that thread I have documented some of the cryptic videos, and threats of something happening to me, and it just does not matter anymore. I don’t know if the alien lady has anything to do with him but she is allowing some of the people she is associated with.

By the way on a scope where this bigoted guy who I hate was threatening to kill myself because his periscope girl friend cheated on him. Even though I hate the guy for how fucked up he is and feels no remorse I don’t like seeing anyone lose their mind, but he was one of the guys who I used as an example of the alien lady being friends with, who constantly says racist shit when she would point out because I shared the scope of the black atheist dude who was being harassed by Zionists, and now being labeled an anti Semite. So I called into the guy’s scope to see if he was for real and if he was fine, and if this situation was so real, that alien lady chose the time where he was threatening to kill himself and people, to come and tell me it was my fault and that I don’t care. She has no problem with just blaming me flat out and just making up lies, and then act like she is a victim afterwards if I point out her bullshit. It has become such a fucking mess. I don’t even know what this blog will accomplish. I am trying to move forward and it feels these trolls will not allow me, and they have me in a constant state of fear and paranoia, and when I explain myself they will even make more of a mockery because of it. It is so fucking gross and sick.

#Hanzi 2020 Illuminati Periscope Alien Lady Friends Jimmernam Misery Box Howard Stern Show Misery Box Targeted Harassment Suicide Paranoia #Zionism Racism Jewish Black Muslim Convoluted Mess Laziness Mental Depression Illness threats Dox MiseryBox

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Alan Calnan, The Nature of Reasonableness, The Nature of Reasonableness, Southwestern Law School Research Paper No. 2019/07. (June 4, 2019)

Abstract

Though the notion of reasonableness dominates Anglo- American law, its meaning has been clouded by traditional conceptual analysis. This Essay argues that greater clarity can be gained by taking a scientific approach to the subject, exposing the natural foundations beneath the concept’s varied interpretations.

Introduction

Reasonable legal minds agree that reasonableness is one of the foundational concepts of American law, infiltrating everything from administrative, corporate, and constitutional law to crimes, torts, and contracts.1 Yet the concept’s importance and prevalence haven’t necessarily bred clarity. In fact, a recent flurry of analytic interpretations has only clouded the term’s meaning.2 While some scholars say reasonableness is a prescriptive standard,3 others ]believe it describes existing community values,4 and still others see it as a combination of the two. 5 This split is deepened by disagreements over the concept’s normative basis. Indeed, the latest proposals ground reasonableness in a wide variety of ideals, including utilitarianism, economic efficiency, fairness, deontological respect, pragmatic rationalism, formalism, mutuality, and aretaic virtue.6

Since reasonableness effectively serves as law’s conscience, doubts about its essence are an obvious cause for concern. But the impasse also puts legal theory in a serious predicament. If reasonableness means different things to different people—or at least, different things in different legal contexts—then there’s little point to searching for a common unifying principle. Even if such a principle exists, traditional conceptual analysis has struggled to discover it. As jurisprudence maven Lawrence Solum recently observed, legal philosophy’s exhaustive polemic on reasonableness eventually just “runs out of gas.”7

Yet the problem with these approaches isn’t a lack of analytic rigor. Rather, it’s an absence of critical facts. What’s missing from the discussion of reasonableness, I argue, is a basic understanding of human nature. Because science informs that inquiry, this Essay explores the biological origins of reasonableness by probing three of its key connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. The first meaning evokes mankind’s integrated cognitive faculties, the second addresses humanity’s reflexive values, and the third entails the coordinative processes animating human decision-making. Together, these attributes suggest that reasonableness is not an abstract, static, or monolithic ideal; rather, it’s an organic, dynamic, and systemic phenomenon for satisfying our natural urge for homeostasis.

I. Integrative Faculties

It’s widely recognized that reasonable and sensible are effectively interchangeable ideas. But it’s not so clear how these terms became synonymous or what deeper insight can be drawn from their relationship. After all, words grounded in reason, on the one hand, and senses, on the other, seem facially antagonistic if not incompatible. Yet as it turns out, the meaning of sensible has changed over time, and its transition to reasonableness reveals more about that concept than any standard dictionary definition can offer.

What makes the etymology of sensible so significant is its uncanny resonance with human nature. Sensible originated in the Middle Ages with a physical connotation, suggesting something “perceptible to the senses.”8 Since sensory perceptions are typically clear and emphatic, sensible things were deemed “easily understood.”9 This interpretation subtly turned a biological feeling into a mental experience. That tendency was exacerbated by the growing belief in mind-body dualism, which placed reason in control of all human understanding.10 Thus, if a thought were comprehensible, and thus sensible under the latter view, it had to be both “logical” and “in accordance with reason.”11 So construed, sensible became something of a notional composite, integrating body with mind and feeling with rationality.

Though reasonableness isn’t conceived this way today, science has confirmed its integrative nature. The ostensibly one-dimensional term—reason-able—is really the functional integration of two human faculties: reason and feelings. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed, “Feelings and reason are involved in an inseparable, looping, reflective embrace”12 in which “mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind.”13 In fact, says Damasio, body and brain aren’t really separate life systems but rather “two aspects of the very same being”14—in effect, “an organismic single unit.”15

Like reason, feelings are a type of cognition.16 They process and evaluate information obtained internally from a person’s body and memory and externally from the surrounding environment. 17 Informed by homeostasis, which sets the parameters for an organism’s survival and flourishing, feelings provide “a moment-to- moment report on the state of life” inside the body.18 That report includes a normative judgment about its findings, signaling that the body’s condition is either good or bad.19 Conditions conducive to well-being produce a range of positive or pleasant feelings, while bodily states detrimental to survival evoke feelings that are negative or unpleasant.20 Over the course of evolution, these valenced feelings get etched into mankind’s long-term memory bank— DNA—where they emerge as heritable intuitions.21

This preserved affective experience begets, directs, and grounds our “sense” of reasonableness. When the body’s sensory apparatus is stimulated by new information, our feelings spontaneously appraise the situation and sound an immediate call to either accept or reject the precipitating cause. 22 This impulse often is accompanied by powerful emotions—like anger, fear, joy, or comfort—which heighten the initial reaction.23 These tumultuous feelings finally stir our reason, but not to act as the final arbiter or sole decider. Rather, reason intervenes to serve our intuitions by updating their old wisdom with new plans, strategies, and arguments suited to the prevailing circumstances.24 In short, feelings propose general rules of behavior, while reason searches for exceptions. If none can be found or fashioned, our rational faculty readily justifies, defends, and approves the proposal.25

Even when reason counsels a different course of action, feelings continue to influence its trajectory. Feelings monitor the quality of the mind’s response to a problem, making us feel good when the solution benefits our welfare and bad when it fails to advance our interests.26 This feedback renews the rational review of better alternatives, thus completing one cycle of integrated problem- solving and initiating a repeating succession of others.27 At each turn, reason is informed and tempered by feelings, and feelings are informed and tempered by reason.

Reasonableness emerges when the relationship between reason and feelings is relatively reciprocal. When it’s not, the effect is unmistakably un-reasonable. Psychopaths and sociopaths are rational, but they lack important social feelings like empathy, compassion, guilt, or shame.28 By contrast, infants are extremely emotional, but they have undeveloped powers of reason.29 Although adults with impulse control disorders are capable of rational thinking, they often are captive to their feelings and emotions. In each situation, the actor’s dis-integrated mentality prevents her from behaving as a reasonable person.

Ironically, our integrative faculties may explain why humans ever began creating such behavioral standards in the first place. According to Professor Damasio, “Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.”30 When people started experiencing the stress of group living, Damasio surmises, they would have invented a variety of responses to diminish their displeasure.31 These reactions initially may have “ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance.”32 Because such conventions proved effective, they were formalized in codes of conduct and eventually sanctified as law.33

We may not know precisely how reasonableness came to represent these homeostatic developments. Yet one thing is reasonably clear. We can’t hope to understand the meaning of that concept without investigating the integrated interplay of reason, feeling, and homeostasis.34

II. Reflexive Values

As it turns out, homeostasis and feelings are not just biological faculties for creating reasonableness. They also are normative agents that inform this mindset. We’ve seen how homeostasis gives valence to our feelings, which make positive and negative judgments about our homeostatic stability. But that process goes deeper still, imbuing us with core values that prime our every decision. While these values often seem too deep to fathom, their natural foundations actually lie well within the realm of reasonableness.

The central value of reasonableness is fairness.35 Though fairness is presented as a single concept, it combines two apparently inconsistent ideals. Fairness can be either a general sense of justice and equity36 or conformity with specific rules or duties.37 In reality, however, fairness is neither unary nor binary. It is a complementary and reflexive set of ideals naturally derived from mankind’s highest normative authority, the human brain.

The brain evolved in three stages to solve three different adaptive challenges.38 While the ancient selfish brain structures promoted the individual’s survival, later social structures facilitated cooperation and group living.39 The final global layer reconciled conflicts between its discordant predecessors and fashioned long-term strategies for human flourishing.40

As an assembled unit, the brain produces the two types of fairness that make up our sense of reasonableness. The selfish and social modules emit moral intuitions. Inherited at birth, these intuitions are self-evident to their hosts, who perceive them as special, serious, imperative, and universal.41 So when someone violates these rules, the infraction feels instinctively unfair.

This deep-seated feeling derives from values so important to human survival that they have been imprinted into our genome by natural selection. Though cultures prioritize these values differently, all people crave autonomy, care or security from harm, reciprocity, loyalty, hierarchical authority, sanctity, and integrity.42 Because we possess a visceral need for these basic goods, we feel subconsciously entitled to their fulfillment. When that entitlement is threatened or impaired, our indignity reflex automatically kicks in and we are filled with a sense of injustice and inequity. This feeling appears to account for theories of reasonableness grounded in deontology and virtue ethics.43

Our global neural network works differently. It deliberatively constructs conventional rules to solve current problems that evolution, genes, and intuitions can’t or don’t address. These rules depend on a logical accommodation of many factors, including the norms, practices, customs, and conditions prevailing at the moment. Though conventions are influential, they don’t feel nearly as binding. In fact, they typically must be enforced by external incentives like punishments or social sanctions, or justified by the power of affective persuasion.44 When such rules are breached, we think the transgression is unfair because it disrespects a rational rule of behavior grounded in a utilitarian or economic assessment of costs and benefits.45

The legal notion of reasonableness does a good job of capturing the dual strands of biological valence. Our moral intuitions are embedded in bright-line rules of law, including crimes and torts against battery, false imprisonment, theft or conversion of property, breach of confidentiality, and abuse or exploitation of the weak and vulnerable.46 Because these offenses directly betray our harm, autonomy, reciprocity, loyalty, and authority values, they are treated as presumptively unreasonable. When our values conflict or interrelate in complex ways, the law typically abandons a rule-based approach and replaces it with a general standard of reasonableness.47 This is particularly evident in the tort theory of negligence, where an endless array of lawful but ill-considered acts may result in someone’s harm. In these cases, findings of unreasonableness cannot be presumed, but must be rationally and affirmatively justified by considering all of the surrounding circumstances.48

Yet law’s rendition of reasonableness as fairness is not quite complete. Because the legal concept lacks a foundation in human nature, it misses reasonableness’s essential reflexivity. Rules and standards are never entirely separate; nor are they permanently set in stone. Rather, like the faculties of reasonableness inside the brain, these valenced mediums are constantly shaping and being shaped by each other.

Such circularity is most conspicuous at the level of doctrine, where rules and standards are locked in a perpetual feedback loop. In torts, for example, the presumptive rule of an intentional tort or strict liability theory is often countered by a privilege or defense grounded in the standard of reasonableness.49 In other situations, a reasonableness standard is used to clarify an ambiguous rule, as is true for cases of outrage and abnormally dangerous activities.50 This relationship is also reversible. Doctrinal standards��like negligence’s standard of reasonable care—frequently spawn rule- based exceptions; 51 and in some scenarios—like the no-duty principle for nonfeasance—the exceptions can effectively restore the standard.52

Because reasonableness’s reflexivity is ongoing, its patterns can even shape the course of law’s historical development. If one assumes a global perspective—in fact, the sort of meta-view taken by our faculty of reason—these ripple effects soon snap into focus. It’s clear that theoretical standards—like the original writ of trespass or “wrongs”—may splinter into more fine-grained behavioral rules—like our various intentional torts.53 It’s also apparent that a hodge-podge of specific social rules can scale up to form a general standard of reasonable care, as happened with the theory of negligence.54

It’s even evident that these normative movements can waffle to- and-fro. A good example is the law of products liability, which gradually morphed from a strict no-duty rule to a standard of reasonableness; then transitioned to a rule of strict liability, and ultimately morphed back into a standard of reasonableness.55 In each situation, reasonableness isn’t just the state of fairness within our rules and standards; it’s also the process for coordinating them.

III. Coordinate Processes

The idea of reasonableness as coordination is captured by yet a different connotation of the term. Being reasonable means being moderate or displaying moderation.56 Since the core idea of moderation is avoiding extremes or lessening their intensity,57 this version of reasonableness certainly assumes a coordinative mentality. But it also comes with a familiar qualification. Like other aspects of reasonableness, the mind’s coordination process isn’t purely rational. Instead, it’s a natural dynamic of a complex biological system.

All living systems contain disparate elements organized to achieve some purpose.58 Because these elements are innately competitive, they must coordinate their individual aims just to maintain system function.59 That process, though system-specific, is neither haphazard nor idiosyncratic. Rather, it’s the product of a universal medium called coordination dynamics.60 This uncanny natural power not only senses system instability, it initiates a continuous cycle of adjustments to restore equilibrium at all levels of existence.61

In fact, coordination dynamics accounts for the integrated brain mechanics mentioned earlier. Alerted by homeostasis, coordination dynamics sets out to reconcile the cacophony of thoughts and feelings aroused by a disruptive event. It also harmonizes the selfish, social, and global drives directing the mind’s response.62 As the process unfolds, coordination dynamics employs the trick of moderation to inhibit extreme, knee-jerk reactions. Though the mind simultaneously entertains opposed positions—a process called metastability—it constantly explores the vast array of middle-ground alternatives, ensuring that the final decision is measured, moderate, and ultimately, reasonable.63

But that’s not all. These dynamics don’t just operate in isolation. Because systems are overlapping and interactive, their dynamics have a circular causality, scaling up to higher levels and affecting the levels below.64 So it is with law. Human beings first addressed their survival problem by forming larger coordination systems called societies. When these social systems came into conflict, they formed coordinative cultural systems like religions, philosophies, traditions, and customs to hold their factions together. Yet even this wasn’t enough. As cultures and sub-cultures clashed, humanity adapted once again, this time by developing the still higher coordination system of law.65

Law served as a system of sociocultural homeostasis. As Professor Damasio explains, “the development of justice systems responded to the detection of imbalances caused by social behaviors that endangered individuals and the group.”66 Law’s purpose was to coordinate society’s volatile elements by reestablishing a healthy equilibrium between the law-abiding and the lawless.67

The longer law persisted, the more deeply coordination dynamics shaped the human psyche. Nurtured by global values of authority, sanctity, and integrity, this sociocultural norm became a pervasive natural instinct, inspiring an exalted and unifying legal “system” that reflected and reinforced its coordinative nature. In fact, within democratic cultures, coordination dynamics bred legal institutions structured for the very purpose of facilitating reasonable decision- making.

These features consistently promote metastability by juxtaposing polar positions, diversifying their analysis, assessing their intersections and interstices, and synthesizing medial solutions. The process begins with law’s superstructure, which strikes a delicate balance of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. It also permeates the infrastructure of each branch, dividing executive power among the president, the cabinet, and various implementing agencies; splitting legislative authority between the House and the Senate; and stratifying judicial authority through a multilateral court system.

Though such governance structures may seem to “leave the realm of biology,” Professor Damasio insists “that is simply not true.”68 “The protracted negotiating process required for governance efforts,” he continues, “is necessarily embedded in the biology of affect, knowledge, reasoning, and decision making.”69 Because “[h]umans are inevitably caught inside the machinery of affect and its accommodations with reason,” “[t]here is no exit from that condition.”70

These coordinative properties scale all the way down to law’s minutia. Legal concepts are framed as rules, standards, and principles or policies, and are packaged as competitive rights and duties. If these binaries can’t be reconciled, they’re functionally coordinated by law’s global mediator, the constitution. Such accommodations aren’t permanent, however. Under the common law system, each new decision must be continually coordinated with the old wisdom of past opinions. The same holds true in individual lawsuits, where law’s longstanding norms are constantly mediated by judges and juries informed by prevailing social values. Within the trial process itself, the law’s high-minded rationality gets further mediated by the raw emotion of the parties, the witnesses, and the factfinders.71 Even when a final decision is necessary, law typically doesn’t entrust the responsibility to a single person, but assigns it to a panel of coordinators willing to reconcile their differences in the common pursuit of justice.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the resulting judgments will be sensible, fair, or moderate. Seemingly rational people sometimes do irrational things. But because law is an essentially coordinative enterprise, it’s reasonable by nature even though it’s not always reasonable in fact.

Conclusion

Conventional legal theory treats big questions as matters for deep philosophical discourse. That’s certainly been true in the jurisprudence of reasonableness, which has become little more than intellectual jousting. It’s now clear, however, that topics like reasonableness can’t be grasped by analysis alone. Because reasonableness has physiological origins, it’s susceptible to scientific investigation. In fact, science helps to illuminate three of the concept’s core connotations: sensibleness, fairness, and moderation. While the first meaning describes the cognitive integration of reason and feeling, the second evokes homeostatic values like justice and reciprocity, and the third reflects the dynamics of human coordination.

Admittedly, these findings don’t tell the whole story, as new discoveries in the natural sciences continue at a frenzied pace. But such insights do bring us closer to the truth. Even if that prospect doesn’t convert every science skeptic, it does make a naturalized approach to reasonableness reasonable in itself. As Professor Damasio counsels, “It is often feared that greater knowledge of biology reduces complex, minded, and willful cultural life to automated, pre-mental life,” but science actually “reinforces the humanist project” by “achiev[ing] something spectacularly different: a deepening of the connection between cultures and the life process.”72

Footnotes

See Brandon L. Garratt, Constitutional Reasonableness, 102 MINN. L. REV. 61, 69-70 (2017) (recounting the concept’s significance and use within multiple legal fields); Frédéric G. Sourgens, Reason and Reasonableness: The Necessary Diversity of the Common law, 67 ME. L. REV. 73, 74-75 (2014) (same).

The latest entry appeared just two months ago in the Yale Law Journal Forum. See Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Fourth Amendment Reasonableness After Carpenter, 128 YALE L.J. FORUM 943 (2019).

See Alan D. Miller & Ronen Perry, The Reasonable Person, 87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 323, 326 (2012) (“We put forward and defend the argument that normative definitions [of reasonableness] are categorically preferable to positive definitions because the latter are logically unacceptable.”).

See Kevin P. Tobia, How People Judge What is Reasonable, 70 ALA. L. REV. 293, 299-300 (2018) (describing this view of reasonableness as a search for the statistically average characteristics of people within a community).

See id. at 296 (arguing that “[r]easonableness is best understood as a hybrid notion that is partly statistical and partly prescriptive”).

See Sourgens, supra note 1, at 80-105 (discussing utilitarian, pragmatic, and formalist paradigms of reasonableness); Benjamin C. Zipursky, Reasonableness In and Out of Negligence Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 2131 (2015) (proposing a theory of reasonableness as mutuality); Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Theory Lexicon: The Reasonable Person, LEGAL THEORY BLOG (Apr. 21, 2019), https://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2019/04/legal-theory-lexicon-the-reasonable-person.html (addressing efficiency, fairness, deontological, and virtue-based notions of reasonableness).

Id.

Sensible, ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARY, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sensible (last visited June 1, 2019).

Id.

Mind-body dualism is the belief that mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects.” Scott Calef, Dualism and Mind, THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, https://www.iep.utm.edu/dualism/ (last visited June 1, 2019). Such “substance” dualism was popularized in the seventeenth century by French philosopher Réne Descartes. See id.; see also EDWARD O. WILSON: CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE 108 (1998) (discussing Cartesian dualism).

Sensible, supra note 8.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: LIFE, FEELINGS, AND THE MAKING OF CULTURES 171 (Vintage Books ed. 2019).

Id. at 117; see also id. at 12 (stating that feelings are a “cooperative partnership of body and brain”); id. at 139 (noting that feelings are “based on hybrid processes that are neither purely bodily nor purely neural”).

Id.

Id. at 26

See JONATHAN HAIDT, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION 52-53, 102 (2012).

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 30-31, 146-47, 157.

Id. at 104.

See id. at 25, 102, 105-07.

See id.

See id. at 21-22; see also HAIDT, supra note 16, at 144.

See id. at 64-66.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 99-100, 108-13.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 54.

See id.

See DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 15-16, 171.

See id. at 117.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 72-73.

See id. at 74-75.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 26 (emphasis omitted).

See id. at 13.

Id. at 13, 26-27.

See id. at 13, 21, 26, 28-29.

See id. at 5.

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1).

Fair, BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY (10th ed. 2014) (entry 1).

Fair, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 1b(1)).

See PAUL D. MACLEAN, THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION: ROLE IN PALEOCEREBRAL FUNCTIONS 13-18 (1990).

See GERALD A. CORY, JR., THE CONSILIENT BRAIN: THE BIONEUROLOGICAL BASIS OF ECONOMICS, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS 9-14 (2004).

See id. at 15-18.

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11-12 (discussing and affirming the earlier work of psychologist, Elliot Turiel).

See id. at 178-79, 200-01, 215.

See, e.g., Heidi Li Feldman, Prudence, Benevolence, and Negligence: Virtue Ethics and Tort Law, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1431 (2000) (virtue ethics); Gregory C. Keating, Reasonableness and Rationality in Negligence Theory, 48 STAN. L. REV. 311 (1996) (noting that a freedom-based approach to reasonableness

See HAIDT, supra note 16, at 11; SHAUN NICHOLS, SENTIMENTAL RULES: ON THE NATURAL FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL JUDGMENT 5-7, 25 (2004).

See Stephen G. Gilles, On Determining Negligence: Hand Formula Balancing. The Reasonable Person Standard and the Jury, 54 VAND. L. REV. 813 (2001) (reviewing the cost-benefit or risk- utility approach to reasonableness).

Professor John Mikhail specifically has argued that the elements of a battery action find support in moral psychology. See John Mikhail, Any Animal Whatever? Harmful Battery and Its Elements as Building Blocks of Moral Cognition, 124 ETHICS 750 (2014).

See DAN B. DOBBS ET AL., HORNBOOK ON TORTS 193-95 (2015) (describing the evolution of reasonableness in the tort theory of negligence).

RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF TORTS: PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL HARM §3 (2010) (“ A person acts negligently if the person does not exercise reasonable care under all the circumstances.”).

For example, battery’s rule against harmful or offensive contacts may be countered by a privilege of self-defense, which depends on the reasonableness of the defendant’s response. See DOBBS ET AL., supra note 47, at 132 (“A person is privileged to use reasonable force to defend himself against unprivileged acts that he reasonably believes will cause him bodily harm, offensive bodily contact, or confinement.”). Likewise, strict liability’s rules against certain animals and activities may be met in many jurisdictions with the reasonableness-based defense of comparative fault. See id. at 793-94.

Outrageous conduct is viewed as unreasonable behavior that seriously violates the norms of a civilized society and can be assessed only by reference to various circumstantial factors. See id. at 707-09. Similarly, an abnormally dangerous activity is determined by analyzing a number of factors that “look like a poorly disguised negligence regime, balancing such things as the value of the defendant’s activity to the community.” Id. at 786.

For example, some jurisdictions recognize a rule that exempts property owners from negligence for failing to trim foliage at the perimeter of their premises. See id. at 207.

See id. at 615-16 (stating that the “exceptions [to the no-duty principle] have the effect of creating a duty to act in most instances where a reasonable person would feel compelled to act”).

See ALAN CALNAN, A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF TORT LAW: FROM HOLMESIAN REALISM TO NEOCLASSICAL RATIONALISM 160-61, 191-200, 225-30 (2005) (discussing this historical progression).

See id. at 161-62, 201-09, 231-48, 274-76.

See Alan Calnan, Torts as Systems, 28 S. CAL. INTERDISC. L.J. 1, 51-53 (2019) (forthcoming).

Reasonable, OXFORD LIVING DICTIONARIES, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/reasonableness (last visited June 3, 2019) (entry 2).

Moderate, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/moderate (last visited June 3, 2019) (as a noun, entry 1a; as a verb, entry 1).

DONELLA H. MEADOWS, THINKING IN SYSTEMS: A PRIMER 11 (Diana Wright ed., 2008).

See J.A. SCOTT KELSO & DA VID A. COMPLEMENTARY NATURE 9-12 (2006).

Coordination dynamics is “a set of context-dependent laws or rules that describe, explain, and predict how patterns of coordination form, adapt, persist, and change in natural systems.” Id. at 90.

Coordination dynamics helps to explain patterns within and between genes and proteins, different brain regions, various parts of the body, natural organisms and their environments, and among people, social structures, and institutions. See id. at 111.

See CORY, JR., supra note 39, at 20, 21 & n.9 (observing that “[t]he two master programs of self-preservation and affection” within the brain are “locked in inseparable unity” to form a motivational and behavioral spectrum that continuously blends both tendencies without ever reaching either extreme).

See KELSO & ENGSTRØM, supra note 59, at 10-11

See id. at 114-15.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

ANTONIO DAMASIO, SELF COMES TO MIND: CONSTRUCTING THE CONSCIOUS BRAIN 310 (Vintage Books ed. 2012).

Id.

DAMASIO, supra note 12, at 224.

Id. (emphasis omitted).

See Jessie Allen, A Theory of Adjudication: Law as Magic, 41 SUFFOLK U.L. REV. 773, 811 (2008) (noting that in the ritual of trial, “[n]orms and values ... become saturated with emotion, while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values”).

#reasonableness #rationality #decisionmaking #irrationality #values #fairness #tort law #constitutional law #neuroscience #moral psychology #feelings #emotion #cognition #norms #systems science #coordination

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johnson614610616-blog · 5 years

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Secular Renaissance Music

The effect completely different genres of music can have in your thoughts, body, and neighborhood. Then there is promoting. Bossa nova - Portuguese for "new wave" - gained forex, in line with Brazilian music historian Ruy Castro, when it appeared in an advert for a 1958 multi-artist live performance put on by Grupo Universitário Hebraico do Brasil. World music was hashed out in 1987 at an business meeting. It was meant only for www.goodreads.com a quick advertising and marketing campaign to pump non-Anglophone musicians in retail spaces they may not in any other case fit into, solely to remain an acknowledged, if unwieldy, category. Radio formats generally impose themselves on the music. AOR is a US abbreviation for "album-oriented radio" (later "rock") coined in 1972 by Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart's consultancy agency for the FM rock radio stations that may outline extremely-slick center-American rock: Styx, Boston , Aerosmith. In practise, it often translates to "definitively pre-punk".

Hip-hop emerged in the Nineteen Seventies and ‘80s in response to conservative government insurance policies that created a poverty disaster within the interior metropolis. Hip-Hop eliminated the melodic and harmonic elements of earlier musical types and targeted instead on rhythm and vocals to create a totally new musical fashion. Though it was a singular new musical type, Hip-Hop nonetheless had a strong hyperlink to the African oral custom with its fast wordplay, complicated rhyming, and storytelling strategies. Rappers used this new musical fashion to call attention to the internal-metropolis plight, criticize political figures, categorical ambitions, and promote themselves (Sullivan, 2001)." Like older musical styles, Hip-Hop served to present African Americans a voice in a tradition of oppression, in addition to to create cultural ties between individuals inside the African American community. In the highlands of Tibet, for centuries, it was commonplace for farmers to sing a particular type of track to their yaks. The melodies had been intended to coax the yaks to supply extra milk, praising the sheen of their coats and the great thing about their horns. The actual combination of tones was mentioned to have particular powers to chill out the yaks and get the milk flowing. As we speak, solely a handful of outdated-timers nonetheless remember these songs; youthful herders merely don't be taught the music, distracted by the pop songs coming in over the radio. And when the previous-timers die, more than likely the songs will die as effectively.

Setting a different precedent, Friedrich Nietzsche's views on music are a byproduct of his basic philosophy of tradition. Nietzsche initially defends the prevalence of certain strains of European classical music. He praises composers whose irrational genius provides the Dionysian energy wanted to correct the rational excesses of European tradition. Nietzsche finally reverses himself. In an extended assault on Richard Wagner's operas, he rejects the continuing worth of the great" fashion that characterizes artwork music. In what quantities to a reversal of Kantian aesthetic priorities, Nietzsche praises Georges Bizet's broadly in style opera Carmen (1875) for its triviality and simplicity (see Sweeney-Turner). Nevertheless, most philosophers ignore Nietzsche's protection of sunshine" music. Usually, many people imagine musical preferences reflect characteristics such as age , character , and values A 2003 study published in the Journal of Persona and Social Psychology discovered people who find themselves open to new experiences tend to favor music from the blues, jazz, classical, and folks genres. Those who are extraverted and agreeable" are inclined to prefer music akin to pop, soundtrack, spiritual, soul, funk, digital, and www.audio-transcoder.com dance. While these studies prove personality does affect musical tastes, Rentfrow and his colleagues on the University of Cambridge within the UK are curious as to whether there are other psychological mechanisms that come into play with regards to musical desire. When information or an expertise includes a range of senses, it is firing off a variety of electrical and chemical brain triggers. The extra triggers fired, the stronger the quick notion is, and the more seemingly the knowledge or expertise will transfer from our sensory notion into our quick-term reminiscence. That is one cause why it is easier to remember the lyrics of a track than to recite a poem. And it is why we do better remembering music lyrics if we hear the music playing - even if just in our heads. Our mind is retrieving a wide range of sensory cues. There are many different types of jazz dance, every with its own traits and influences. On the whole though, jazz dance has at all times been associated with fashionable tradition and it has changed over time in parallel with the music and kinds of standard leisure. Presently, many alternative types coexist, as well as various degrees of fusion with other genres. Some important figures in the historical past of jazz dance are Katherine Dunham, who reinforced the connection between jazz dance and its African origins; Bob Fosse extremely influential determine within the growth of dance in films, and Matt Mattox , who developed his own technique based on ballet training. The L.A. beat scene never really gets sufficient shine for its affect on future bass — however scan the playlists of most future bass DJs and also you're more likely to discover more than a few tracks from Brainfeeder, New Los Angeles, WeDidIt and different Low Finish Idea-affiliated imprints. Among the artists on these labels, the one whose music provides the clearest hyperlink between the beat scene and future bass is WeDidIt's RL Grime, who found his own again door More suggestions into the scene by juxtaposing pretty, almost ethereal melodies and pitch-shifted vocals with hard-hitting, trap-influenced beats as far back as 2011, when he was known as Clockwork. At the moment, impeccably produced, anthemic tracks like his recent "Reims" point the best way toward future bass's, um, future. XXXTentacion, 20 YouTube subscribers: 10.6 million SoundCloud followers: 2.6 million Instagram followers: 14.3 million Launched his first tune on SoundCloud in 2013 after spending time in a Florida youth correction centre. Called rap's most controversial man" by Spin magazine, he was recognized for his downbeat lyrics and quite a few brushes with the regulation and feuds with other artists, together with Drake. After being murdered in a theft on June 18, 2018, his single Unhappy! went to primary on the Billboard Sizzling 100. Rolling Stone journal mentioned he left behind a huge music footprint".

However the recipe to your Discover Weekly playlist is much more sophisticated than that. Spotify also creates a profile of each user's individualized style in music, grouped into clusters of artists and micro-genres—not simply rock" and rap" but wonderful-grained distinctions like synthpop" and southern soul." These are derived utilizing know-how from Echo Nest, a music analytics agency that Spotify acquired in 2014, which learns about rising genres by having machines learn music sites and analyze how varied artists are described.

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hansson82mays-blog · 5 years

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gofancyninjaworld · 6 years

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OPM Chapter 93 Thoughts

<20 in bold at the end.

It goes without saying that if you've not read this chapter yet, you probably shouldn't read this!

Typeset: https://imgur.com/a/cuCBt76

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AopCejGDKMg

The ART!

If there’s only one thing I’d declare my love for, it’d have to be the art. It brought the characters and the sense of place to life in a way I’ve not yet seen in One-Punch Man.

This chapter round, Murata did not pour his energy into elaborate backgrounds or spectacular scenes. His assistants did wonderfully at the backgrounds, particularly in showing the dereliction of City Z. So you'd think this chapter would be quick and easy to knock out? NO. WAY. Murata poured his art into detailing and delineating characters, bringing their very souls to life as we've rarely seen before. So many characters, both familiar and new. Along with the incredible character interaction, this chapter has been a real treat for the eyes as well as the mind.

More thoughts still under the cut!

Chapter Theme: You Can't Escape the Pressure

Everyone is under pressure. It's on everyone, both that imposed by the external circumstances and that imposed on themselves by the characters. So much of the ugliness we see in the S-Class meeting comes from that pressure. I'll deal with Fubuki, Bang, King and Genos separately.

The collective pressure to prove themselves is on the support heroes. While they may be the support, their role is just as crucial and their objectives are many -- containing any escaping monsters, clearing an escape route and making sure that Waganma is escorted to safety. OneShotter definitely feels the toughness of the assignment while Needle Star focusses on the other side of the pressure: the potential reward of promotion.

Even at the top, the pressure is intense. If anything it's worse. Being based in A-City, the executives have to look at the results of their failure every single day, at the still-raw lunar landscape that used to be most of A-City. Metal Knight didn't even bother trying to fill in the larger craters, but just built road bridges over them. Sekingal may be ambitious but he has earned Sicchi's respect for not merely being the guy in the suit who sits back in relative safety while sending heroes to their doom. He's going to be there with them -- he's tied not just his reputation and career trajectory to the success of the mission, but his very life.

I don't think many people would begrudge Sekingal his ambition nor any of the support heroes for being politically shrewd in their desire for promotion. They're doing the work and taking the risks, why shouldn't they make sure to get their reward? It's people who use politicking as a substitute for doing the good work whom we object to.

Wanted: Leadership and Unity

ONE has long had a special dislike for experts without actual expertise. One of his early cameo characters was a Mr. Nanmoshirane (Mr. I don’t know) who was a pundit making useless pronouncements on the mosquitoes that had appeared over City Z. So, why is a ten year old in charge of S-Class? Because he's the best at the job and has lots ofleadership experience? HA, not a bit of it! It's because he's clever (technologically), is available, and is the only one who will speak up.

Unfortunately, Child Emperor hasn't got the personal authority to shut down dissent and is having to rely on mollifying the egos of the other heroes to keep them all on side and focussed on the threat in front of them. To watch the clash of titanic egos as they try to work out how best to approach the Monster Association raid is to feel for Child Emperor. But he manages.

And then Sweet Mask appears. As a deeply disliked and barely respected hero, his presence is unwelcome in the first instance and his insistence in not just joining the strike team but leading it started to create an ugly situation.

Watching the S-Class meeting nearly implode into bloodshed, all I can think is with allies like this, who needs enemies? It's evident that no matter how talented the individuals are, without a sense of shared purpose around which they can rally and actual strong leadership, they're going to be easily working at cross-purposes to one another.

Fubuki: The Power of Spite

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? I guess Shakespeare knows what he's talking about -- here comes Miss Blizzard and she's looking to raise hell, both with the Monster Association and with her sister.

So much of her anger is not for the monster, Do-S, who brainwashed her group. After all, Do-S is a monster -- that's what monsters do. It's for Tatsumaki, who seriously hurt the members of her group and who has now had her dismissed without so much as a say. That's what she cannot forgive. She's taking them both on, both on a personal level and on the behalf of the group of heroes and compatriots she loves and nurtures.

While it's hilarious that she thinks of Saitama's group as her 'new' Fubuki group and is outraged at how completely she's ignored, her astuteness cannot be faulted.

Go Blizzard!

Bang: A Shabby Way to Treat a Good Man

I salute Bang's sense of responsibility in coming all the way out to A-City in order to find out what is going on, since the loss of his communicator has meant that he has no way to keep abreast of the situation. Watching Sicchi lie to Bang's face was just painful.

It's shocking how quickly narratives grow up around events. Sicchi may have defended Bang staunchly to the other executives, but he's asking if Bang let Garou go. Even Bomb is questioning Bang over it. And Bomb was there! You see how deeply this hurts Bang.

And yet, even now, Bang hasn't given up on Garou. He's jumped at the chance to 'accompany' King as he puts it in order to fulfil his duty to apprehend Garou. Maybe even to save him if he still can.

King: The Paper Tiger Becomes a Cardboard Tiger

King running away only to get himself deeper into trouble is nothing new, although it's wonderfully done here. His accidentally defusing the S-Class meeting's tension was absolutely stellar timing. And how freaky is it that even through several walls, Zombieman can hear the King engine?

However, what's new is that King can be mighty brave... so long as it's from behind Saitama. Watching King dying inside even as he puts on a brave face and says brave-sounding things has been quite the edifying development. He so wasn't counting on being bundled off to the Monster Association like a secret weapon though. Being deferred to and consulted by the other heroes was terrifying enough. The out-of-body experience he was having at the end is one for the ages. :D

You Wait Forever For A Cyborg And Then Three Come At Once

Conventional wisdom is that a cyborg is hard to kill. Defeat one, sure. Kill one, that takes some dedication. Accordingly, we see the return of Jet Nice Guy, phew! His backstory is that he won the lottery, then used his winnings on buying body modification surgery -- I'm glad they were good enough to keep him alive and that he's still got enough money (and enough desire) to return to hero work, looking better than ever. Learning that Drive Knight is also a cyborg has been awesome. Finally the question of what Drive Knight is has been settled, although the clues have been there for a while, mostly in Murata's art spreads, one of which shows him eating noodles through his mouth grille and another that shows him lounging in the swimming pool with a snorkel. His cyborg nature is why the rest of the S-Class are hoping that he may yet be alive, even if he's incapacitated.

I hope that we get to see what Jet Nice Guy and Drive Knight do. I hope the conventional wisdom isn't tested too hard!

As to the cyborg we know best, Genos, he has has gone dragon-crazy. [That said, his enabler-in-chief, Dr. Kuseno, has no right to say that it is Genos who is reckless: there's a bit of the devil in the old man too, what with putting such a badly-balanced build together for him.] I think I see the rational side of why Genos is gunning for dragon-level monsters so hard. As far as he's concerned, they're just a stepping stone in his path to strength -- huge, treacherous, bitey stepping stones, but stepping stones nonetheless. But they're rare monsters. If one pops up, it'll be assigned to Tatsumaki or a group of well-tested S-Class heroes. As a new guy who is still building his track record, Genos has no chance of being assigned one, not even to support another hero.

The conservative way to become a dragon-slayer is to painstakingly grind away, improving his proficiency with demon-level monsters until the HA is so confident in his ability to deal with them that they'd consider briefing him on joining other S-Class heroes to deal with a dragon-level threat. That'll take weeks. Genos is a little less... patient.

The Monster Association is the only place where he's guaranteed a crack at them. There are five main possible outcomes.

A: He gets killed or crippled (the scenario that literally keeps Dr. Kuseno awake). It is a risk that exists regardless of what he does -- monsters target even the most peaceable civilians. As a hero, Genos has a great big target on his back anyway.

B: He gets beaten down without taking out any dragons. Here's the thing: at the very least he's no worse off than beforeand he gets invaluable battle data to build up on. The data will help to sort between changes and strategies that were never going to work and those that might yet work with some improvement.

C: He gets beaten down but kills or critically injures at least one dragon. He gains that invaluable battle data plus a basis on which to consolidate gains. Gets a promotion to around S-10 (more likely rank 10 - 12)

D: He doesn't get beaten down and kills or critically injures at least one dragon. He can work on using data and experience to further refine the fighting platform. Gets promotion to well within top ten and to ask Saitama for his next assignment.

E: He doesn't get beaten down but doesn't take down any dragons, either. This scenario will have Dr. Kuseno sigh in relief, but it's the only really bad outcome from his perspective. He's lost data and the chance to tackle such monsters. He'll have to grind like mad and hope for another lucky break.

I rate the likelihoods of the various scenarios as A - 0%; (ONE isn't about to kill Genos over this fight), B - 60%; (no change from webcomic), C - 39%; (it's a big step up and still respects what happens in the webcomic), D - 1%; (in that case the first half of chapter 108 is redundant) and E - 0%; (don't worry boy, here be lots of dragons).

Rounding up

This may have been a set up chapter, but it was anything but uneventful. 32 people are responding to what is for most, the greatest challenge they've yet faced. Okay, one of them is Saitama and he's just wandering around oblivious to the import of anything.

I can't wait for the fights, when we see all the tensions and motivations explode into action.

<20: The keg is full of dynamite, and the fuse is lit. Bring on the explosion!

#OPM #Genos #Fubuki #Bang #King #manga chapter #meta #S-Class heroes

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fullmetalirin · 6 years

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Fullmetal Alchemist: Return to Liore (OG 39-42)

I've gotten tired of the slow pacing. We're covering the whole Liore arc in one go!

Fullmetal Alchemist Episode 39: "Secret of Ishbal"

On the train ride to a military base near Lior, Mustang is dismayed to discover that Kimblee is a part of the force and has been reinstated as a state alchemist by Archer, who has been promoted to Colonel for this operation. The Elrics and Marta arrive in Ishbal, and are surprised to find that only ruins remain. There, they discover that 2nd Lts. Breda and Havoc have been spying on them, and they are brought to Mustang, who puts the Elric brothers under his supervision. At dinner, Mustang shows Ed an aerial view of Lior, which reveals that Scar, who has been dragging a giant rock around the city, gouging the earth, is creating a giant Grand Arcanum transmutation circle, which upsets Ed. Ed then goes to Colonel Archer and asks to go undercover into Lior to investigate the area for the military. Archer agrees on the condition that Al is left behind so Ed does not have the will to "go AWOL". He then leaves after giving Armstrong his silver pocket watch.

Winry doesn't want to tell Ross and Brosh any details, just vaguing that something's up with the military. Is she afraid they'll be targeted if they know?

Cartoonface when Winry tells Sheska she'll have to leave her books. I feel like Winry is carrying the plot okay, but Sheska is really dragging her down with all the awkward comedy.

Cartoonface with Al when Martel pulls a knife on Ed. Not the time.

Martel is okay with Ed killing Greed because she figured he wanted to die. That's a bit convenient.

Martel makes a quip about eating snakes being cannabilism, which is a little clever.

There's a short gag when Martel is offended when Ed calls her old. Not necessary.

We see the animals the chimeras were fused with during the flashback.

I'm not sure what Martel's reveal adds, honestly? The official inciting event was already orchestrated by Envy, if memory serves. The reveal that they incited Ishbal with an earlier attack seems redundant, and also a lot less meaningful than a single small action causing this huge avalanche.

Archer actually moves for his gun during Ed's obligatory shortness freakout gag.

Ed is hogging all the food when they eat.

Ed confronts Mustang over hiding Liore's situation from him. He feels responsible, but Mustang said he'd get too emotional.

Ed meets the bartender from the first episode when he returns to Liore. We end with Lust and Gluttony overlooking the area as they did in episode 2, before Ed runs into Scar. Meanwhile, Martel sees Kimblee and attacks him. Double cliffhanger!

I will admit that the leadup to this seemed pretty pointless – if it's common knowledge that Ishbal is in ruins, why are the Elrics surprised, and what did they expect to find there? The driving question of the past few episodes ends up leading nowhere. If the real action was taking place in Liore, the plot should have taken them there sooner. Still, things are starting to move again. I'm particularly liking that we're finally getting teeth to the threat that Ed will be forced to serve the military in the event of another Ishbal.

Fullmetal Alchemist Episode 40: "The Scar"

After arriving in Lior, Ed finds his old acquaintance Rosé, who is now called "Holy Mother" and unable to speak. He also runs into Scar, and the two of them begin battling in an alley, to be interrupted by Lust and Gluttony. Al and Marta are shocked to find Kimblee at the military base, and Marta, acting out of rage, attacks Kimblee, and after a failed attempt to injure Marta by sacrificing a soldier, Kimblee finds himself fighting Al, who is protecting Marta. The battle is broken up by Mustang. Scar reveals his past to Ed, at the insistence of Rosé and Lyra, who is acting as Rosé's voice. Before the war, Scar's brother lost his fiance due to a fatal illness, and tried to use alchemy to bring her back, but instead created Lust. His brother then went on to create the Philosopher's Stone, and it is revealed where Scar's tattooed arm comes from, and the X-shaped scar on his face. He then reveals his plans to use the Grand Arcanum to create another Philosopher's Stone, but not by sacrificing the people of Lior, but by sacrificing the soldiers of the military. Führer Bradley arrives at the military base, and has a private conversation with Kimblee, where he is given the instructions to go into Lior and cause trouble, and return with Ed's dead body. Marta overhears this and also discovers that Bradley is actually Pride, the seventh and final homunculus, whose Ultimate Eye is hidden under the eyepatch. She encounters Al and hides inside him, but Bradley comes and sticks his sword inside Al, tragically killing Marta.

Al stops Martel from killing Kimblee. Kimblee promptly throws a people-bomb at them. Al is an idiot.

Al saves Martel by grabbing her and jumping from the balcony, but… Martel is still landing on armor, that's gotta hurt.

Kimblee gloats about Martel and Al not being people, and Al fights him. He pulls out chalk to draw a transmutation circle awfully quickly, and raises pillars of stone. Kimblee immediately turns them into bombs, but Al seals him in a box, trapping him in the explosion. What happened to not killing people, Al? Kimblee conveniently survives, somehow. Mustang shows up and does not do anything despite Kimblee explicitly telling him he plans to kill Al.

Ed learns Scar killed Nina and gets angry, saying it's not their place to decide things like that.

Ed foils Scar's destruction technique by changing the metal in his automail. Shouldn't that mean Scar ought to have trouble with chimeras, too? Of course, he not only tells Scar this, but also confirms that this is messing up his automail. No, Ed, stop being dumb.

Scar manages to grab Ed's flesh arm. Ed tries to slash him, but is stopped by the homunculi. Ed spews hot steam at them, and is surprised when they regenerate.

Scar takes out the locket he dug up, which makes Lust BSOD.

We get the full flashback with Lust and Scar's brother. It seems he did use her corpse as a base, but still produced a mess. Judging from where the blood is, it appears he lost his reproductive organs? So a male version of what happened to Izumi, though he seems a lot more functional than her.

Dante-Lyra pretends to be surprised when Ed reveals where homunculi come from. She then freely divulges that Dante created a homunculus too. Why?

Ed deduces that someone must be collecting and aiding the homunculi, since they're in no condition to do that on their own when they're first created. Dante-Lyra is suspiciously silent on this.

Flashback to Kimblee attacking Scar. He gave him his scar and blew up his arm due to choosing to blow him up a piece at a time – a bit forced, but not out of character. Not sure how Scar's eyelids survived, though, since the scar passes over them.

Scar's arm absorbs Philosopher's Stones in an attempt to complete itself. If we accept that the tattoo is a special type that can absorb souls one at a time, that checks out.

Ed pieces together that Rose was raped by the military. I've heard this come up a lot as an example of why OG is misogynist, and I honestly think that's incredibly uncharitable and reductive. I mean, for one thing, we're not shown it and we're not even explicitly told; if this was really just some sadistic male fantasy, we'd be wallowing in it. But, well, this is the kind of thing that happens during war. If you're going to write a story about the evils of the military, it's not wrong to follow that to its logical if awful conclusion. Pretending everyone in an occupied territory will be fine until the heroes conveniently arrive, as Brotherhood does, is just incredibly ignorant and dishonest. If a story wants to criticize military culture and imperialism, it has to show what that actually means.

Martel holds a knife to Bradley's throat but stupidly does not kill him. She wants him to revoke the orders, but he just met in secret; if she kills him now, the orders won't go through. It's not like it would even affect the plot if she did, since he's unkillable and we're about to reveal him as a homunculus anyway.

We see Bradley effortlessly dodging Martel's lightning-fast attacks, which is a far better demonstration of the Ultimate Eye than what we got in Brotherhood, in my opinion. Bradley also has a scar under the eyepatch.

Bradley kills Martel the same way he did in Brotherhood, but there's no blood on his sword, for some reason. He covers it better by saying he thought Martel was threatening Al.

Hm. I do like that Martel gets to stick around longer than in Brotherhood, but she doesn't really do much more, and still dies pretty stupidly (though her more rational motivation is an improvement). I do think this is a much better place for the Bradley reveal, though. It happens way, way too early in Brotherhood – knowing the evilness goes straight to the top only a quarter of the way through the story kills a lot of the mystery and makes the narrative pretty black-and-white. OG has taken pains to hide Bradley's connection to the villains even as the evidence has piled up against him, giving him plausible deniability and a seemingly benevolent relationship to the characters. This is timed well as a climactic reveal showing us that no, the homunculi really do control the entire government. And it's paired perfectly with Ed informing us there's someone else pulling the strings, too!

Fullmetal Alchemist Episode 41: "Holy Mother"

Scar, speaking for Rosé, tell the people of Lior to lure the military into the city, but not to provoke them. Kimblee, with a group of chimeras, attack civilians in the city, and Scar instructs the civilians to leave the city, so that he can create the Philosopher's Stone when the military arrives. Ed sends a letter to Mustang explaining all that's happening in Lior, and advising him to keep the military from entering the city. Mustang and his group learn about what happened at Laboratory Five in Central, and how a Philosopher's Stone is made. Mustang tells Alphonse to go into Lior and find his brother. Archer prepares to assault the city of Lior, but is ordered to wait by Bradley. When Lust asks Pride why he told Archer to wait, he said he was acting upon their master's orders. Angry, Lust decides to go into Lior alone so she can help Scar create the Philosopher's Stone. Ed and Rosé help the civilians exit the city of Lior, and Wrath and Sloth confront Ed. Wrath's weakness is revealed, and Wrath then attacks Rosé, who manages to speak and call out to Ed to get his attention. Scar confronts Kimblee, and they begin an alchemic battle, causing more destruction in the city. Alphonse intercedes by trapping Kimblee, but he escapes and uses his alchemy to begin transforming Alphonse's armor into a bomb.

We open with Ed seeing the graves of everyone who died in the uprising. Ed is overwhelmed by guilt.

We flashback to discover Martel did successfully tell Al everything. Not sure why we couldn't have done that last episode.

Ed has been imprisoned. Dante visits him, and says "we humans" are weak. Ed says she smells weird, and Dante passes it off as perfume. So she's already begun to rot. Ed says he doesn't like the smell. Foreshadowing!

Ed sends a letter telling the military to stop the assault, preventing Scar from getting his ingredients. The homunculi convene and tell Bradley to do it anyway, but he says Dante has ordered him not to. I presume she gave the messenger another letter for him. Lust points out the only reason they're following Dante is for the Stone, so she's going to help Scar do it anyway.

Back in Liore, Dante insists they should make a break for it and tell everyone what happened here. Ed says it'd just become another story of a failed Philosopher's Stone, so he won't. Dante looks irritated at this, so I guess that's what she was hoping for.

Sloth delivers Wrath but does not reveal herself to Ed.

The cry of Rose's baby makes Wrath flip out.

Ed argues that homunculi are nothing but illusions who falter in the face of the real thing, which I think is nice imagery.

Wrath says he has no weakness, since his own body was used as ingredients for his resurrection. I guess homunculi have better memory than human babies. While this does address a neat loophole, it does raise the question of why it's a unique case – I should think that using the corpse ought to be the first thing anyone would try.

Al arrives to stupidly insist everyone stop fighting. Kimblee uses the opportunity to transmute Scar's arm into a bomb, so Scar tears it off. Woah. I don't like the way the blood from his stump is animated, though; looks too goopy. And shouldn't he be bleeding out, since there are vital arteries in the shoulder?

Scar runs Kimblee through, but he somehow survives long enough to throw Ed's pocketwatch at Scar. Ah, that's clever; he learned the absorption incapacitates him earlier. And this also explains why Cornello thought the pocketwatches let you transmute without a circle, actually! If they used to stuff red stones in there, that would actually be true.

Oh, Sloth does appear to Ed. She accuses him of making her wrong, which makes him BSOD.

Rose echoes Ed's own advice at him, which is a nice callback. It's actually pretty appropriate, since Ed is collapsed.

We get a bunch of still images for the final sequence, but they're intercut with proper animation, so I presume it's for coolness rather than lack of budget this time.

Fullmetal Alchemist Episode 42: "His Name is Unknown"

Al's armor is slowly transforming into an explosive compound following Kimblee's attack. With Ed helping the Liorites escape, Scar is the only one who can help Al. Scar then proceeds to turn Al into the Philosopher's Stone. Seeing that Kimblee had been killed by Scar, Archer orders the military army into Lior to take him down. After multiple gunshot wounds in protecting Lust, Scar takes his last breath and transmutes the whole city with himself and the soldiers inside. Upon seeing the destruction, Ed races to find Scar. Finding his brother alive, Ed soon realizes what Scar has done. Lust then appears, instructing the brothers to start running; that they will soon be sought after.

Animators didn't bother drawing an exit wound for Kimblee. Boo. The blood spot is also higher up on his body, in a place where it should have been immediately fatal.

Al says it's hard to talk. Ed was worried about messing up the blood seal when he repaired him earlier, so it could be that any alteration to the armor messes him up.

New, and final, OP! Kind of an odd to do that in the middle of an arc, but okay. The visuals are quite good – we get a shot of Hoenheim, a prominent shot of Dante-Lyra, and a lot of battles with the homunculi. I think I liked the previous one's melody better, though. Looking at the lyrics, the OPs do seem to follow an interesting theme: the first one is about destroying memories, the second one is about never looking back, the third one is about holding onto memories, and this one is about the dissonance between memories and self-actualization.

Sloth undulates under her clothes while she's luring Ed, which is really creepy. I wonder if she has trouble staying solid.

Sloth changes her clothes into a sexy dress. Nooot necessary, though it's ironically pretty visually similar to Brotherhood!Sloth's overalls.

Dante informs them that homunculi have more than one life, so they'll be back. And how would Lyra know that, hmmm?

Archer says there is no military without evil or corruption.

Scar turns Al into the Philosopher's Stone to save him. I'm a bit confused as to why, though; what has Al ever done for him? Scar put a lot of work into this for the same of stopping the military, but now he's just willing to abandon that for Al's sake? He should also be able to amputate the affected area, like he did for himself.

Scar successfully lures the military to attack using himself as bait. I like that it's implied Lust is helping him, as he shouldn't be able to carry Kimblee's body without arms.

Ah, Scar explains he's helping Al because he sees himself in the Elric brothers. That still feels a little weak, I mean they've done nothing but fight him and try to impede his very justified goals. I can see what the writers were going for in trying to draw parallels between them, but I think this needed more time and interactions to make it develop properly.

Unfortunately, he then goes on to say he doesn't care what the Elrics do with the Stone now that he's given it to them, which makes less sense. He was already the victim of a Stone-amplified massacre; isn't he afraid they'll give the Stone to Amestris and make them even stronger?

Lust asks Scar's name and we get the same line from BH 15 about him forsaking it. Much better placement here.

Liore is completely vaporized after the transmutation, which seems a little odd, but it fits. I guess it was dragging in all raw materials.

New ED. It's strangely slow and contemplative, though not to the same degree as the last one. I still like the second one best. There is a shot of everyone who's died – Trisha, Nina, Hughes, and Scar – which I think is a nice detail for the final stretch, especially as this upcoming arc will be about the heroes confronting their flaws and mistakes.

Conclusion

All right! It's taken a while, but the original plot is finally in full swing. The quality of the early episodes gave me motivation to stick through the slow parts, and now that faith's been rewarded. Look at all the stuff happening! Bringing the story back to where it all began! People facing the consequences of their actions! Resolution to the longstanding mystery of Scar! The heroes actually doing stuff! Major characters dying! And to top it off, the heroes have finally attained the goal stated at the start of the story: the Philosopher's Stone. But the question remains: What will they do with it now, and what comes next? Like the Fifth Laboratory, this feels like a true culmination of all that has come before, while still leaving room for the future. We've been left with many questions and answers. This is how it's done!

I also prefer this resolution for Scar over what he gets in Brotherhood. That may sound strange or sadistic, but… getting to kill Hitler and then live happily ever after just feels too neat to me. Maybe I'm weird, but, and I'll talk about this again at the end, outcomes that are too happy just make me reject them as fake. In reality, people in Scar's position typically do not survive the revolution. They don't get to be in the perfect position to avenge their people and live to fix everything afterwards. They're lucky if they can accomplish anything before they're inevitably gunned down. But Scar did! Scar succeeded at his plan. He wiped out a huge chunk of the military, saved the Liorites, and completed his brother's work. It came at a high cost, but it's a cost all revolutionaries have to be willing to pay. His resolution in Brotherhood is: I will direct my anger at the right person and be the good scary black man. His resolution in OG is: I will die to stop this. And, everything's subjective, but I find that a lot stronger, and more real.

Additionally, I think there's something to be said here that Scar does what the heroes were too afraid to do. We saw this as early as episode 7, when he gave mercy to the pained Nina when Ed froze up at the risk. Ed spends this arc trying to stop Scar, but can't really give a good reason why. You can waffle over if every rank-and-file of the military really deserves it, but the fact remains that Amestris' military is evil, and turning their own methods back upon them is a powerfully ironic revenge. Scar is in many ways a truer hero than the Elrics, willing to make real sacrifices instead of demanding the world let him have his cake and eat it too. Equivalent exchange, eh?

But he's not here to bail Ed out of his indecision anymore. From now on, Ed's going to have to make the hard choices on his own.

Oh, and, after all that stuff in Brotherhood, I am also perversely amused by how sidelined Mustang is here. This was Scar's show, and the writers knew better than to dilute that by cramming other characters in where they weren't wanted.

I did have several nitpicks, but I feel that they really are nitpicks, rather than things that truly break the story. I can't get a good grasp on Al's motivation, but his involvement isn't very important, so it doesn't feel like an idiot ball is necessary to move the plot. (It also pleases me how his constant insistence on absolute pacifism just ends up screwing everything up far worse – intentionally or not, that's a good refutation of the philosophy. See my other favorite anime, Trigun, for more on that!) Scar's motivation for turning Al into the Philosopher's Stone is a little weak, as are the mechanics of how, exactly, it's supposed to undo Kimblee's transmutation, but everything else is so wonderfully done that I am willing to give it a pass, especially given how many options it gives the story going forward.

#fullmetal alchemist #fma #fullmetal alchemist brotherhood #fma 2003 #liveblog

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lamella320 · 5 years

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*Rhetoric as a Narrative*

In this entry I will be discussing the critical questions: What narrative(s) does this artifact tell about me or U.S culture or a certain group of people? What truths does it promote and what truths does it limit or ignore (who does it include and exclude)? Overall, is this narrative positive or negative for society?

The artifact I decided to analyze to further discuss the critical questions above is a YouTube video from the channel Cut. The video is called Divide Us Into Democrats & Republicans | Lineup | Cut. Here is a direct link to the video, which is also cited below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMsuvEGnvPw .This video tells the narrative of a typical American and their political views based off of stereotypes as well as personal opinions. Although this video exemplifies stereotypes Americans hold towards other Americans and their political views, it ultimately tells a positive narrative of how we can’t judge someone based off of minimal information and regardless of our political views we are just people.

Cut is a YouTube channel whose tagline and purpose is “Small questions have powerful effects when they go viral. Cut spreads stories for fun, for serious, and for real- bringing the internet together one awkward moment at a time” (2018). Their videos have various content and structure, but their most common series is one that deals with 5-6 individuals (which I will reference as categorizers), categorizing or matching people to certain ideas or things. For example, some videos are about matching the owner to their dog, or who does drag, or who is the best kisser? In the video I chose for my artifact, the creators asked four categorizers to guess if nine strangers were either Democrats or Republicans.Throughout the video each categorizer talks for a few minute to each stranger and based off of observations and small conversation, they are then categorized into Democrats or Republicans. By the end of the video, each stranger then reveals their true political stance, and gets a chance to talk about who they are and why they are apart of each party, as well as why people may have categorized them correctly or incorrectly.

There are many narratives riddled through the Cut video, as well as the video in its entirety being a narrative. To start off, narrative needs to be defined. Palczewski, Ice, and Fritch (2012) define a narrative as something that describes an event, often implies causation, and engages the interest of an audience. Narratives also contain stories, characters, themes, and cause and effect. The Cut video, “Divide Us Into Democrats & Republicans | Lineup | Cut”, is a narrative within itself. The overall narrative of the video is the idea that we are not defined by stereotypes, and we are constantly categorized by people. This is shown through the development of the strangers as well as how the viewpoints of the categorizers were changing. By the end of the video, each of the categorizers found themselves to have learned a lot and even if they did not necessarily agree with different viewpoints, they still learned from it. As Karlos said, who was one of the categorizers, “You don’t have to agree but you have to respect each other��. Not only is this his specific narrative for the video, and his point of view, but it also outlines the whole video very well. It creates a unifying narrative, told by one of the characters themselves.

There was also the narrative of how people are categorized, which was mentioned shortly above. Throughout the video, all of the categorizers were making assumptions based off of just a few short sentences or even solely based off of attire. The categorizers filled in their own narratives based off of their experiences with Republicans and Democrats and typically based their decision off of that. Some quotes or moments that stood out as telling a narrative was when Dae grouped someone as a Republican largely just because of their shoes, or their opinion about Taylor Swift. Something even as simple as age when Bjork asked a young woman how old she was, and she responded with 18, her first answer was Democrat. In the case of Bjork, she had created her own narrative based off of age and that’s all she needed to fill in the rest of her story. A negative narrative also could be told against Democrats as displayed by this video. At the end of the video, Bjork says “I need a drink after this.. If you guys want to come you’re invited”. When she extends the invitation, she only turns around to the group of Democrats to her right. Now this could be on the account of Cut and how they edited the video. Maybe they cut out Bjork looking at the Republicans as well, or maybe she really did just extend the invitation to the Democrats, who she identifies with. Regardless, the narrative was framed/ created so it may seem as Democrats can be very exclusive. It can also show that American parties in general are very exclusive towards one another, and typically stay within their own party. This is solely just one example, but it explains how one person can create a stereotype or a negative viewpoint on an entire group. This can be viewed as a negative narrative for society. Many people I do not want America to be viewed as excluding others, especially other Americans, just because of their political party or general point of view. Although this was only one example, a lot of what was said during the video could paint American parties in a negative light, and give negatives impacts on both political parties. After this video, Democrats can be seen as judgemental and one sided, however, the narrative was also created that way. They had no categorizers who were Republican, so we did not get to see how Republicans would question or categorize people. This decision was up to Cut, and they decided how they wanted to tell their narrative.

There were some positives that came from this narrative as well. Some positives would be that it informed the public about different parties in America, and also the idea that although someone is a Republican or a Democrat, does not mean they fully agree with each side. The video showed that some people were Democratic and still believed in gun control and that people can always change their political party based off of current politics. I feel like these are positive narratives to tell about American politics because it shows we are constantly changing and don’t always fit with what is thought of as the “norm”. This also brings it back to the idea that we are more than just Americans, but human. The whole point of these videos is not just to educate us on politics, but to educate us about human nature. Because of this point, I do think that overall this artifact tells a positive narrative about the importance of understanding our stereotypes and judgements, but still being able to learn from them and become a better person as a result.

An article by Fisher can help further describe narratives and dissect the artifact. One of the main topics Fisher brings up is the idea of narrative paradigm, specifically narrative world paradigm. Fisher explains the narrative world paradigm as: “..human being beings as storytellers indicates the general form of all symbol composition; it hold that symbols are created and communicated ultimately as stories meant to give order to human experience” (1984). To summarize, narrative world paradigm creates people as storytellers and they interpret their own meaning from their own framework. When first watching the video made by Cut, it was unclear if this artifact displayed a narrative world paradigm. Initially it could be seen as a rational world paradigm, which is where people are more rational and make arguments based off of data. However, the more of the video that is seen, you realize there is much more bias involved and the categorizers in the video were not very rational. As mentioned above, Dae based one decision off of the shoes the man was wearing. That was not rational at all, and used no real logic. Instead it was based off of a symbol, stereotype, and/or personal experience, which is very much an example of a narrative world paradigm. This may seem like a negative narrative to obtain from the article, but the end result and final story told by the artifact is ultimately a positive narrative that should be told.

In summary, the artifact discussed did enforce stereotypes and enforced a narrative of Republicans and Democrats, but overall had a positive narrative. It told an overarching narrative of how although we may use stereotypes to categorize people, once we go beneath the surface of looks and simple questions we discover a lot more about who people are, as well as ourselves.

Works Cited

Cut. (2018, November 6). Divide Us Into Democrats & Republicans | Lineup | Cut [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMsuvEGnvPw&t=31s

Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument. Communication Monographs, 51(1), 1-22.

Palczewski, C. H., Ice, R., Fritch, J. (2012). Narratives. In Rhetoric in Civic Life (pp. 117-146). State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc.

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escojedo-3na · 2 years

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Rationality and Faith

Everyone has a unique perspective on God, and it all begins with one's upbringing. My family does not attend church every Saturday, despite the fact that I was born and reared as a Born-Again Christian. We attend church only on rare and significant occasions. I'm not sure if I believe in God or not, but if I ever have a problem in my life, he is the one I turn to for relief. Without the ability to see or touch anything, it is hard for people to believe in it. When you believe in something, you believe it regardless of whether you can touch or see it. This is why faith is so potent. Even with faith, sometimes we cannot escape the fact that we continue to have doubts regarding God's presence and its values thought to us because not everyone are the same perception of who God really is and what he wants to tell us. While philosophy is a broad subject, one question has confounded even the most brilliant minds throughout history. "Does God exist?" is the critical question. This is a question that philosophers have debated for hundreds of years, each presenting their own set of reasons and evidence to support their position on the subject. A human being is incapable of objectively demonstrating God's presence in a way that convinces everyone else of his or her existence. On the other hand, a person can have subjective knowledge of God. Individuals' perceptions and understandings of God would enough to justify their own unique religious beliefs and activities.

If religious experiences and beliefs are comparable to what we witness, we should have no reservations about religious beliefs. It is critical to comprehend God rationally since it is this understanding that will shape you into a person with values, values that adapt to your beliefs. The rationality of God's belief is contingent upon both the style and substance of the belief. While it is not always easy to be a Christian, we must live our faith without surrendering our principles. Certain individuals rely solely on faith, without regard for reason or experience. Certain individuals opt for a religion that is not founded on reason or experience. Rationality is concerned with propositional evidence that is not person-indexed and its logical influence on the conclusion. Individuals who believe in God as a result of religious experiences do not believe their faith is rational or logical. No matter how diligently reason seeks the truth, it may fail. According to Locke, religious irrationality is a sign of unsoundness. Our intimate connection with God, as well as our continual worship and relationship with God, frequently appear to be contained within a religious box. It's one of our best questions as Christians to figure out whether we should have a private religion or a group one. These are the individuals who undermine organizations founded on "great confidence" and the concept that people may "give their all" and "do the right thing," which might finally result in conflict if God is viewed irrationally. Many people feel that religion and faith are inherently conflictual as a result of these types of conflicts, although this is not always the case. As a result, part of the solution is to promote knowledge of the constructive role faith has played in many conflict situations as a mediator. Maintaining one's faith is difficult, especially when one is constantly battling with oneself and other endeavors in life, but when we recognize that God is speaking to us and spend time with other believers who are motivated by rational values, sharing our discoveries and listening to theirs, we can greatly strengthen our faith.

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libr-tumbl-alternative · 6 years

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Depending on your search history and interests, there is a decent chance you've come across a number of articles written and edited across Wikipedia and RationalWiki and many other MediaWiki's on the web that were curated by the infamous Oliver D Smith, aka Darryl L. Smith aka Dan Skeptic, aka Krom, aka Atlantid, aka Anglopyramidologist, aka GoblinFace and aka a huge list of sockpuppet editing accounts spread across Wikipedia, Rationalwiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and only Google knows what else. Oliver has been featured extensively on Wikipedia We Have a Problem primarily because he is one of my well known online stalkers and harassers I encountered while developing this case study on Wikipedia consensus building. Oliver D Smith has engaged in a four-year-long campaign to target and attack me, first as a method of editor suppression on Wikipedia, where he was working with a small group of skeptic activists, a small but influential subculture on Wikipedia, under an editing account Dan skeptic (contribs). ‎ Dan Skeptic was actually more of a minor actor in the harassment that I received on Wikipedia during the Sheldrake wiki war in 2013, but his participation increased heavily immediately thereafter, as he was the creator of a number of other attack articles written about me, first on RationalWiki, then Encyclopedia Dramatica, then KiwiFarms. It took about two years to finally track and expose Oliver D. Smith in this case study. I wasn't even aware of his participation until I received an email from someone who proposed to me a curious and peculiar threat; delete your articles on GoblinFace/Atlantid or, as he linked to a discussion thread he created, under my real name, arguing against biological evolution in favor of creationism, he would create 500 more just like these on the internet. By these of course he meant impersonations, one of Oliver's key attack strategies on MediaWiki's against other editors he encounters and conflicts with. Oliver D. Smith was impersonating me as a creationist so, he claimed, he could add this to my RationalWiki profile which he noted, already listed me as a promoter of pseudoscience, which he inserted as well. Since combining me with either of these labels is completely removed from who I am, including what I do professionally and what I think privately, it was obvious to me that I was dealing with someone who did not have a firm grip on reality. Disturbing to experience, however, was his ability to publish his own peculiar reality, of which I was a key enemy, across MediaWiki's on the web about me, and then game those articles for peak Google performance in search. More so than any other Wikipedia or RationalWiki editor, Mr. Smith has numerous times crossed the line from online harassment to criminal levels of slander and behaviors. His actions were so extreme at one point that I filed a report with the FBI, a nonworkable path to recourse that was my only option as this individual, a resident of the UK, not the US, continued to target me on the internet. “You idiots don’t seem to realize that I made the Viharo and Jon Donnis pages here, then set up a whole load of other people and turned them against each other, as well as at Rationalwiki. I also added Viharo’s page at Rationalwiki.” – RationalWiki editor “Krom”, one of dozens of accounts operated by the Smith brothers, to sysops at Encyclopedia Dramatica, 2016 From my experience with him, it is likely that his psychology rather than any true ideology is what guides him. His editing history spans everything from white nationalism and neo-nazi MediaWiki MetaPedia, to articles on both the paranormal and skepticism, to left-wing MediaWiki RationalWiki to articles across the web the cover ancient Egypt, pseudoscience, anti-natalism, TombRaider, and whatever ideology he needs to adapt to become accepted by one community to target another. Over two hundred Wikipedia accounts have been discovered on the Smith sock farm, some claiming to be his brother Darryl who is claiming he is responsible, then denying it, and back and forth with layers of confusion, deception all over the web, including impersonating women or other editors Oliver D Smith conflicts with. The only controversial thing I have ever done is create a Rationalwiki article on Rome Viharo. MediaWiki editor skeptic, aka Darryl L Smith, aka Oliver D Smith, defending their actions on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Oliver, in a manner virtually identical to our Twitter president, has a habitual practice of deception. This practice may be more of a result of delusion. Oliver D. Smith believes he is a white knight, a hero on the internet who attacks his foes based on his own pizzagate interpretation of reality, that is, one that is disconnected from consensual reality but relies on emotional reactions to keywords he believes he finds on the web about his targets. Once Oliver finds a keyword written on the web by his targets, he then takes that emotionally charged keyword back to online communities and attempts to build personal armies, developing an emotional and distorted consensus so these platforms will not only join in the attacks but give Oliver a safe harbor to continue them. The strategies Oliver D. Smith employs to accomplish this extend far beyond him just editing articles on various wikis around the web about his targets, they are also entail online impersonations of other users editing accounts, which not only deflects blame from Oliver, but places blame on other users which then riles up communities against each other on the web. This was one of the factors that has contributed to it taking Wikipedia, We Have a Problem over two years to finally identify the author of significant harassment and targeting that I've received. This is how highly toxic digital wildfires and troll farms are able to build communities like PizzaGate or QAnon. Oliver D. Smith shows us how to do that too. His attacks actually show the trail these type of campaigns create on the web. Once an internet user is emotionally charged with any given keyword, they throw critical thinking skills out the window and fail to investigate the flag-waving of sources which misrepresent original context. What is curious about Oliver, however - is his ability to do this with communities that identify as skeptic activists on the internet, communities like RationalWiki and thought leaders of skeptic Wikipedia editing like Tim Farley, communities that would appear to be more critical. Oliver's abuses on the internet I believe help to expose a remarkable vulnerability of the web that all of us are more susceptible to than we are aware. Oliver is taking advantage of a flaw, deeply rooted in human nature and software design flaw. Oliver Smith always claims his innocence, and always confesses his guilt. Oliver D. Smith may be unaware of the very extreme contradictions he makes attempting to cover his tracks across MediaWikis, which are glaringly apparent to anyone who encounters him. I never met you on Wikipedia 4 years ago, that was one of my brothers. So you targeted my whole family out of a grudge of a silly Wikipedia dispute/ban. Oliver D. Smith, in a direct email to me, on file, 2017 Because he both confesses and denies all of his activity on the web, everything Oliver D. Smith says is highly suspicious. There is no brother involved. I made it all up to mislead people stalking me, or trying to investigate who I was (this goes back to when I had trolls following me 24/7 on other websites like Encylopedia Dramatica, Kiwi Farms etc). There's plenty of other false information I fed them and I found the situation rather funny since I fooled most, or all these stalkers. Oliver D. Smith, in a direct email to me, on file, 2018 Whatever guides Oliver D Smith, whether a brother who is deeply involved with Wikipedia editing and certain skeptic activist groups or an out of balance psychology, also has a significant influence on the web via Google search, and this is the tragedy of MediaWiki software. MediaWiki software, the engine the drives Wikipedia communities and dozens of more platforms around the web, in combination with Google search, provides significant global influence via individuals like this, along with the troll farms and agenda operators who collaborate with Oliver and those like him. The other problem with MediaWiki software is there is nothing that can be done about it, at all. That is really what Wikipedia, We Have a Problem validates, the utter failure of all of these communities, platforms, institutions, and even the legal system to do anything about this significant problem. While, in principle, online misinformation, targeted harassment and manipulation can find a solution on Facebook or Twitter, on MediaWiki's - there is literally no solution available. Since the participation is small, even insignificant in comparison to harassment occurring on large platforms of users like Reddit or Twitter, this problem does not obtain much mainstream attention. Pass the buck open source architecture MediaWiki's, as developed in open source by the WikiMedia foundation, put all of the responsibility of the management of the platforms on the users who edit them. As in a legally binding contract. This includes all paths to recourse for any misinformation, slander, fake news, attacks, etc. As long as the community who participates is well-intentioned, rational, and have integrity with the principles of the platform, this isn't a problem. Unfortunately, the web is anything but that. MediaWiki's are one of the few last artifacts of the early, idealistic web - so it is not surprising that the zeal mentioned in many early TED talks (my own included) opined on the great value of software that anyone could edit would easily overlook the social reality that occurs, a silent policy of not everyone should. Before we even address the inherent flaws of the software itself, there apparently is a very high appeal of MediaWikis by those who are on the spectrum with autism, aspergers, or social anxiety disorders. Within Wikipedia's own editing culture, Wikipedia itself is referred to as a honey pot for editors on the spectrum. Autistics can be remarkable editors who are incredibly diligent. The result of this, however, is a community that is unlikely to have much social empathy, a trait often lacking in those with the condition. This naturally exasperates the problem that MediaWikis carry with them. All MediaWiki's empower the users to restrict or police other users activities, within certain boundaries. This means the software that anyone can edit is synonymous with the software that anyone can police, and MediaWiki's give users tools which block, ban, or restrict other users participation. Therefore, MediaWiki software's core design flaw lay in how it creates competition instead of collaboration. This makes MediaWiki's even more problematic - while the software design increases user competition, the rules that govern the community usually instruct collaboration, a contradiction that makes it impossible for a community to responsibly manage itself without a high degree of social empathy. Really? Wikipedia is now being leveraged as the good cop of the internet on Facebook and YouTube, creating more tensions to the prime real estate value to agenda groups and the inherent tensions of the design. I'm all for spontaneous collaboration on the web, but if Wikipedia is the only solution Silicon Valley is offering us in defense of fake news and online misinformation, the web could be lost forever. This tension created by the design flaw in MediaWiki has created dozens of various ideological spin-offs of Wikipedia around the web, all using the same software with slight modifications, including the commercial version of MediaWiki, Wikia. Google's own search algorithm also rewards not just Wikipedia with a high ranking, but any MediaWiki platform. MediaWiki platforms are very easy to optimize for search engine results, and likely in most search returns internet users discover. Oliver D Smith, MediaWiki master. I'm vague on the details, but apparently, Oliver has finally been banned from RationalWiki. It took RationalWiki six years to finally boot him off of their platform. Six years of Oliver using RationalWiki as a platform to target anyone he considered an enemy. Six years of influence on global search results all over the world. After six years, is the web finally free of Oliver D Smith abusing media wikis and Google search? Booted from RationalWiki, Oliver found a new home on another MediaWiki fansite called RationalWiki,Wiki. Since MediaWiki's create a copy of themselves via spats within the previous community, RationalWiki now has RationalWiki, Wiki on Wikia and Oliver D Smith once again as an editor. The unique distinction in this MediaWiki is that it is Wikia, a paid advertising commercial platform MediaWiki site. Like Wikipedia and MediaWiki software, Jimbo Wales commercially successful Wikia was meant to accommodate, and commercialize, niche communities and the advertisers that want to appeal directly to them. It's Wikipedia with a business model. More than just a software platform that anyone can edit, Wikia is a MediaWiki that anyone can publish, simply by creating an account. The RationalWikiWiki is literally a fan wiki that covers all the RationalWiki articles that Oliver edited on RationalWiki, now primarily edited by Oliver who now just writes under his real name, Oliver D Smith - including a RationalWikiWiki article about himself, defending himself from his RationalWiki ban and many events detailed in this study. Oliver uses RationalWikiWiki to continue to attack all of his enemies all over again, of which Wikipedia, We Have a Problem and yours truly is uniquely featured. And you can see that he is the sole author of this latest attack article from the editing history. Wikipedia has blocked over 200 hundred of Oliver's editing accounts, yet it is easy for him to use a fresh IP, and continue where he left off. If that doesn't work, he goes over to RationalWiki, or Encylopedia Dramatica, to continue his obsessions. Even though it took six years to finally remove him from those platforms, he has finally found a new MediaWiki home on Wikia, one that has all the benefits of a high Google search ranking, advertising dollars, and both an algorithm and a set of rules that will allow him to continue for as long as he wants. Welcome to the very real problem of MediaWiki software and the poster boy who teaches all of us developing solutions for the web all the ways these platforms can be readily abused by just about anyone, for any reason - and without any path to recourse. . Powered by AutoBlogger.co

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