#like theoretically i advocate for just letting this shit happen

[machine-saint]

i think one of the fundamental problems with the word "techbro" is that it has multiple meanings, some of which contradict each other.

the original term brogrammer referred to programmers who act in a very stereotypical masculine way, as a pejorative. the word "techbro" was sometimes used as a synonym for this. this is why the word "bro" is there, because it's a comparison to frat bros. this is also the only sense mentioned on the wikipedia page. this is also the sense i see the least usage of on tumblr; it was really more of a thing back in 2012-2013 or so.

people also use it to refer to people who are pushing the latest fad; web 3.0, blockchain shit, NFTs, LLMs, whatever. this usage does not require that the person actually knows anything about programming. some of these people genuinely believe in what they're advocating for, some of them are just hopping onto the latest money-making thing. this is the y combinator set.

a third usage is to refer to people who are very into self-hosting, and "own your hardware" type stuff and don't understand that computing is a compromise and not everyone wants to spend all their effort getting stuff to work. this is the rms type. unlike the second definition, this one requires the person to have fairly deep technical knowledge. theoretically you could have someone who doesn't know a lot about computers but is real big into this kind of stuff, but in practice that never happens.

(i'm broadly sympathetic to this type; i avoid music streaming and sync all my music using open-source software, that sort of thing. the "techbro" part, in theory, comes when they look down on others for not making the same choices. of course, the line between "you're looking down on me" and "you're arrogant for simply believing that you're right" is thin.)

in particular, sense-2 and sense-3 "techbros" have very opposite beliefs! one wants to run everything "in the cloud", the other wants to run everything locally. one wants to let chatgpt run your life, the other hates the idea of something they can't audit be that important. both tend to be very "technology will save us" types, but the way they go about that is very different. one makes very sleek-looking but extremely limited UI, the other will make ultra-customizable, ultra-functional UI that's the most hideous and hard-to-use thing you've seen in your life.

and so you can see here the problem: what can we actually say about "techbros" that's meaningful, other than "techbro is when i don't like someone who likes technology"? if a word isn't used as a self-descriptor, but only as an insult, what stops it from becoming broader and broader until it loses all usefulness?

#discourse #techbro

[catboybiologist]

March 2024 documentation and transition journal

Just got my levels results back, meaning that the doc is fully updated for March:

This is possibly one of the most exciting and interesting months of HRT since starting, because I've experimented around a lot with injection doses, so let's talk about that! I'm also slapping a couple of old pics in here for reference, so I'll slap some selfie tags on this.

So, lots of interesting HRT stuff. At my last levels check, I was on 4mg injectable EV a week. And… my E actually went down, even though that’s an effectively higher dose than my previous regimen (6mg sublingual/day). Because of this, I talked with my provider, and essentially she told me to fuck around. I probably was way looser with it than she wanted me to be, but she told me to go to 8mg/week maximum, and try and settle on 6mg/week minimum. So….. here’s what I did.

1 week of 8mg.

2 weeks at 7mg.

2 weeks 6mg, during which my levels were checked at mid.

I… can’t really advocate for this. Basically, my logic was that I wanted to see what it felt like to max things out, but have my actual levels check reflect what I’m like at 6mg to know if increasing or maximizing the dose beyond that is necessary at all. Ultimately, I’ve concluded that 8mg feels too high- I start getting a bit of headache and nausea at peak. 7mg feels very comfortable. 6mg, I felt fucking miserable at trough. When I was on 4mg/week, I used a couple of sublingual pills to try and get through that, but I tried to see if I could stop doing that. It went okay for the higher doses, but on 6mg… ugh. Felt like complete shit. I’ll def be using a couple this week to get through that, probably just 4-6mg sublingual on wed/thurs to make sure I’m feeling okay.

Oh. Also. I ditched Spironolactone, against the advice of my provider. 

I was getting really, REALLY irritated by the diuretic effects, so I quit it when I tried to 8mg dose just to see what would happen. I figured that 8mg would be more than enough to suppress T on its own (likely true), and so I thought it would be the best time to try that. And… when I stopped spiro, a depressive haze that had been in my head lifted very quickly. I thought it was just depression based on a rough past couple of months, and that’s probably true, but it also felt physical. The diuretic effects have also stopped, and I genuinely can’t imagine going back on spiro.

I’ve heard a lot of theoretical stuff about spiro potentially being able to inhibit growth and development. It's possibly a growth hormone inhibitor, but should be a more potent antiandrogen than anyone else. It’s…. Really hard to say whether spiro actually inhibits growth. As with a lot of transfemme physical developments, there’s never been a comprehensive, conclusive study on it, which is why its relegated to miscellaneous anecdotes that everyone will swear one way or the other on. I’ll have some opinions on this later.

So what improvement to my levels did I get out of all of this?

Well…. Good, but nothing radical. My midcycle estrogen is 159 pg/mL, which is about my target for trough. It’s a good step up from the 4mg dose, but I’m probably going to increase to 7mg/week- that felt fine to me, and I’m pretty confident that that’ll be the dose that nails it. I’m pretty deadset on going forward with that, I would just need a levels check to verify we’re all good there. (Side note, I’m a bit frustrated that my body literally seems allergic to just… stuff. Idk if I have an overactive liver or what, but my T crashed super easily, adderall consistently lasts shorter than it should, and my E is really struggling to go up.)

And did this result in any physical improvement? 

I actually think that this last month has been the single fastest month of physical development I’ve ever had. Here’s some things I’ve noticed:

My breasts have become much larger and more developed in relation to my chest, with a much better shape. Comparison pictures to even just the end of January show a wild difference (sorry, not posting that publicly). To be fair, though, I’m still pretty clearly in tanner 2, and I maybe want to wait for just a bit more development before I start progesterone. 

Waist measurement is still going down, and hip measurement is still holding steady. This means that, in effect, my hips are getting wider.

And this is one of the most exciting ones- my upper body seems like its getting smaller. I’m floored by this. My underbust is less, my chest looks noticeably less barrel-y, and my ribcage kind of “flows” into my waist better. I wrote a bit about this on reddit just now, but I think I know what’s happening here. Not only is fat burning from the sides of my chest as it builds on the front of my chest, I actually think my costal cartilage might be getting “tighter”, effectively pulling my ribs a bit closer in to my sternum

I have…. No way to confirm the hunches of that last one, other than the images I can show. So for educational purposes (and y’know. Making the funny women in my phone type funny syllables) Here’s a quick timeline where I think you can see the “barrellness” of my chest decreasing:

From left to right, we have September (0-1mo), December (3-4mo), March (6-7mo)

Don't worry, my shoulders are just as wide and athletic dyke-y.

Am I delusional? Is this anything? Maybe. Pictures are hard to make consistent with changes this small. But I do feel like its noticeable, and it seems like women’s cut shirts and tanks have fit me in a way that’s a lot more consistent with a cis woman’s body. Again, there’s also nsfw images, and I think they show a lot of progress, and I think I can pretty definitively say that this has been the single month with the most physical changes since, well, my first month back in September. 

Why did this happen? Well, I’m working with a sample size of one here, and multiple variables have changed at the same time. There’s really three things that could be happening: increased injection dosage, ditching spiro, or the general come and go of physical changes. It’s impossible to completely know what’s going on because of this, unfortunately- I’d need way more data. That said…. This is the first new “wave” of development I’ve had since I started, and my actual blood levels didn’t increase that much. I really, really don’t want to conclude anything, but I’m kinda thinking that spiro had something to do with it. It has broad effects on physiology which aren’t entirely characterized, that could easily theoretically be inhibiting generic growth and development. That said, I think starting with a strong antiandrogen is basically necessary for HRT. It’s extremely difficult to get E levels up without robustly inhibiting T first. Obviously don’t take this as medical advice, or even a scientific opinion. This is nothing more than a hunch.

Idk. I’m happy. I feel like I finally am starting to break through the progress stall I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with. And I think getting the proper injection dose actually worked to break through it. I’m feeling a lot better with my transition in general too. I won’t elaborate much here, but I’ve been coming out to a lot more people, and its been tentatively going about as well as I could ask. We’ll see what the future holds, but I’m excited about it.

#trans journal #hrt #transfemme hrt #mtf hrt #trans selfie #trans #transgender #trans timeline #trans progress #transition #transitioning #trans woman #trans female

[fooltofancy]

no gods no masters only ones on very easy deception checks.

#i need to lie down #bg3 #I'M SO SAD #like theoretically i advocate for just letting this shit happen #however #PLEASE #me and the f5 key have been very good friends this game #GOOD THING THE FIGHT IS APPARENTLY EASY #jesus #got used to lying to goblins apparently #up your game idiot

[suga-ssi]

Wanna share something both personal and random rn...

So, some of my close friends here know that I work for nonprofits (children's rights organizations mostly).

My job there is that... I manage celebrity advocates. Basically finding famous people to be ambassadors for the non profit I worked for. Like BTS to Unicef.

When I started in that position back in 2015... no one had any idea what the shit my job entailed. I HAD NO IDEA EITHER.

I created the whole process for our organization to follow and learned by doing. In 2019, the organization let me go because they lacked funds and employee cuts had to happen. In spite of all my hard work... I felt no one understood how hard it was because I was the only one doing that work in my country.

Fast forward to 2021. A former colleague of mine had to start managing her own communications team... and she finally understood the complexities of my previous job. I had to create a full file describing the nuances of it. I ended up having to teach her everything.

Now, 2022... I was asked to write a paper on the topic of Celebrity Advocacy Management. Most literature about the topic is theoretical... and the only practical source I found outlined everything I experienced on the job that no one understood.

I started my MA studies in 2020 because I felt insecure after having been let go. I did not graduate with a degree in the field and job I was in. I thought I was clueless...

Only to find out now... that the exact learnings I had on the job is what I would eventually learn in the books.

The moral of the story? Don't be afraid to go for that job just because your degree didn't prepare you for that. Also, never doubt, question, or belittle the things you learn by doing. I am learning now, I had no reason to be insecure.

#sorry... i just... #wanted to share how im feeling rn

[whitehotharlots]

Triumph of cowardice

I used to be a True Believer in social justice. I mean, it sounds nice: a brighter world being possible through something as simple as guilting people to consume the correct cultural products and stop using naughty words. And even as I became separated enough from the theoretical end of the movement to realize that there was no way in hell it could possibly work; even as a I saw, in undeniable terms, how sociopathic and hypocritical the movement's purveyors were--how it seemed, in fact, to reward such traits; and even after I realized that these people were just straight-up making shit up, I still stuck with it. Partially out of idealism. But mostly out of cowardice, because I knew if I pissed one of these people off they could very easily ruin my career.

And now that I've seen this moral and intellectual cowardice spread into the broader culture and become all but mandatory, I think it's important to push back. Even if my impact is minimal, I couldn't live with myself if I stayed quiet.  

Today I was reminded of a panel session I attended around 2011 or 2012. It was a big conference with an established, well-known and respected professor giving a speech about trans issues.  I remember following along with the usual arguments--woke people tend to say the same few things over and over with no variation whatsoever (which is why the constant rejoinder to JUST LISTEN is so infuriating, because the fact that everyone is forced to listen provides speakers with little incentive to say anything worth listening to).

Anyhow, one line jolted me out of complacency. The speaker said that "trans women are hunted down like dogs," a crisis condition so intense that our usual standards of logic and evidence should be suspended while we address it. "Just last year," she said, "over 30 thousand trans women were killed in this country."

The crowd gasped. But that--that was simply not plausible.  Afterward, I connected to wi-fi and found that the year before there had been fifteen thousand murders, total, in the entire US.

The common response here is that we'll never know the true rate of violence against trans people because it often goes unreported (an assumption that has recently been stretched out to dismiss any demands for concrete evidence of this supposed epidemic of violence). But even if we assume that to be true, the entire country's murder rate would need to be more than twice of what was reported, and every single person who was murdered would have had to have been trans.

The speaker’s statistic was a lie. Plain and simple. And this was from an established academic in a formal, professional setting. And no one pushed back in the slightest.

Now, that was forgivable, I guess. An emotional speech, a pressing topic, etc etc. The figure could have seemed plausible enough in the moment--I mean, how many people know the murder rate off hand? The people in the room could have been forgiven for taking it at face value.

I brought my concerns up to the people from my program who had attended the panel with me. One person's response was about what I would have expected if I had repeatedly screamed the n-word while explaining how the holocaust never actually happened--the act of looking up the statistic was violence, this is exactly why white men should not be in our field, expressing any incredulity was how fucking genocide happened and why am even bothering to explain this to you, you white male piece of filth.

After this woman stormed off I was left with people who were friends of mine. They were nowhere near as apoplectic, but agreed with the overall gist of the psychotic woman's outburst: it's simply not right to nitpick over statistics, even ones that are implausible to the point of being outright lies, when those stats are being deployed to express a greater truth. They knew me and therefore knew I didn't want to genocide trans people, but I needed to realize how bad and hateful outsiders would think me to be, were I express these opinions around them.

"Besides," one said, "maybe [the speaker] just misspoke."

Shamed, I didn't pursue the issue any further.

But it gnawed at me and I dug deeper. I found several transcripts and interviews the speaker had given regarding the subject. In each one, a murder figure was cited, but it was never consistent. They were all wildly implausible, but one day she would say 20k, the next 35, etc. And the academics who read and edited these--people who supposedly value rigor and attention to detail--never mentioned the inconsistencies.

This was disheartening but I rolled with it long enough to get out of the program. But then an even more disturbing development started to occur: people began citing correct statistics that completely contradicted the point they were trying to make, and those citations went unchallenged.

A famous one is that there is an "epidemic" of trans people being murdered, that leaving the house is a matter of life and death for every trans person and therefore you're a hitler if you disagree with anything they say. The number they use to prove this? Twenty-six. Not 26 thousand. Not 26 hundred. 26, two digits all by themselves.

Now, even if we take underreporting into account and even if we think the number of trans people is much lower than what their advocates would have you believe, this statistic would still suggest that trans people are murdered at a significantly lower rate than the general population. 

I can't think of a parallel for this doesn't sound laughably insane. It's like if I said "yesterday was hotter than today. Yesterday it was 95 degrees out, but today it was 105" or "the dog is bigger than the elephant because the elephant is larger and contains more mass." The data presented herein is a direct, obvious contradiction of the point that's being made and yet everyone just goes along with it. 

This type of madness does not occur in a functional milieu. This is the result of bullying and paranoia becoming the status quo on the left, of a movement that's so sure of itself that it's abandoned all pretenses of truth and decency. And we just let it happen. We don't even push back. 

[system-of-a-feather]

How do you feel about endos? Just curious.

Oookay, Riku will probably never get around to this, and while Riku wants to “get all the aspects” addressed in a “diplomatic” manner because it is a “complex and multifaceted discussion”, but they are over thinking this and will literally never do it so I’ll go with the really rough outline that they started and fill it in with what I know of our system.

Sorry if I sound really inflammatory, I’m not a diplomatic person lel 

Also, for comedy sake, I am going to maintain everything Riku kept in this outline and try my best to fill it out. A lot of this I am completely lost on so, there will be moments where I am clearly confused lel

I may get some of our opinions “wrong” because I’m kind of taking a guess from my access of the brain, so I apologize if Riku looks at any asks or reblogs we might get from this and goes WHY DID ADERIS SAY THAT?! I’m trying my best

===

Overall TLDR Opinion: So as a system, we don’t like to be too involved in it publicly. Its a multilayered complex topic with too much nuance for it to be worth advocating for or against, and with how large of a cultural phenomenon it is, it isn’t going to change with us. We don’t think it is likely that DID can be formed without trauma, but we also don’t write it off fully. We strongly however do not like “intentional” systems and find it really offensive and gross. With that being said, we also recognize issues in being too forward about that, so we don’t bother with it much.

More details below the keep reading.

-Aderis (Local Discourse Alter)

Can I follow if…

Yes. We really don’t limit or care who is following us. If you identify as an endogenic, singlet, fictionkin, a roll of toothpaste, we really don’t mind or care. I mean, we’d prefer if transphobes and homophobes and all those gross things weren’t following us because honestly - G r o s s - but also like, whatever.

I guess the only people we don’t want following are people that are actively going to use our posts to hurt others or to fetishize trauma or anything? I don’t think we have much worry for that but yeah nah. If you are endogenic or whatever, you can still follow. Just know that our writing isn’t written for an endogenic crowd.

====

Stages of Understanding DID and Endogenic Spaces

I don’t FUCKING know what Riku meant this. What the FUCK is “stages of understanding DID”? I’ve been sitting here for like... five minutes trying to understand what that meant, but I *think* they were trying to get at the idea of how people come to terms with DID.

If that is the case, then one reasons we don’t want to bash or actively advocate against endogenics is that identifying as an endogenic / endogenic-parallel concepts or finding concepts put out there by endogenics is kind of a stage / easier way to accept the situation since it doesn’t carry to baggage of having to accept that you were abused / mistreated. 

It isn’t necessarily the healthiest and there is a large concern of getting misinformation and feeding the denial or learning really bad coping mechanisms through those environments, so we don’t think it is a **good** purpose or environment to be in, but the last thing we’d want is to force people who are still struggling to understand their mental state and come to terms with the past that they *have* to admit that they were really fucked up and hurt by things that had happened in the past.

We have a lot of mixed feelings and don’t have a firm stance on if that role in coming to terms with DID is good or not so we really don’t know there or have firm opinions. Since we don’t have firm opinions, we default to “we don’t want to rush / control / dictate what other people with DID are doing in their path of healing and we don’t want to rush people’s healing journey with DID” so we refrain from involving or telling people one thing or the next.

====

Intentional Systems / Tulpamancy Systems

We think they are really offensive and problematic. We instantaneously unfollow and block systems that claim to be intentional, and we tend to unfollow people who post about intentional systems. That is the part of the endogenic community we have very little patience for.

We do know there are still probably actual DID / OSDD systems out there that use those terms to write off their condition similar to endogenics mentioned above, but the amount of damage these ones do and the just straight up often horrible thoughts and opinions about DID that they have outweighs our opinion on not budding our head where it doesn’t belong.

Don’t fetishize / make our disorder a fun thing.

====

Median Systems

Uhh.... I think Riku was going to mention something about how we found out that some people have multiple people in their head through median systems and came to understand that as ourselves and learned beyond that???

I don’t really know what stands out in specific about Median Systems though. I think there might be an opinion somewhere about BPD and Median systems? But generally we also put this in the same categroy as “stages of understanding DID”. Maybe if Riku comes around they can explain if they even know.

====

Can you have a system without trauma?

Oooookaaay, this is one Riku would be 10000% better at answering because they have a lot of nerd stuff about this about science and psychology and statistics and research and shit. I’m not that savvy in those topics though? So I guess I’ll give you a quick rundown from the gist.

We don’t think that it is likely that you can have a system - a true dissociative system with dissociated parts - without trauma. That though comes with the key word “likely”. We are very much open to the possibility / idea that other methods could form dissociated parts and are actually a bit keen into maybe some day doing research on it. Science and research has backed that DID is formed due to disorganized attachment to caregivers and repeated trauma at a young age, but DID is very under researched, psychology is a soft science, and very little about the conscious, identity, and dissociation is actually firmly known.

Until the exact neurological structure / reasoning / process to how DID forms and how it differs from those that don’t have it, we really hesitate to put it in any box because that’s really not how mental health works. It might be that the majority of cases are due to trauma, but theoretically other disorders can cause pretty dissociation and if said disorders occurred at a young enough age, then theoretically maybe something like that could happen. There is somewhere in this brain a tab on ADHD or something, but I can’t go into that cause I really wouldn’t do it a service.

The really condensed version is we don’t think so with our current understanding and readings, but we don’t think it is 100% certain and there is a very reasonable possibility that there is something out there, a different path way that can cause the DID we know - or a different condition that looks and appears similar to DID but is fundamentally different.

You rarely ever *know* anything in psych, especially with something so abstract of a disorder with little research on it such as DID and how consciousness / states of consciousness work in the brain to really be claiming anything so certainly.

====

Should endogenics be considered DID?

I don’t care?? Honestly, our system is generally of the consensus that until evidence comes to show that it is possible AND the same disorder, then no. And even then, I think the question Riku meant was “should endogenics and DID be related / equated / in the same space” which is a strong no.

Even if endogenics are real and are possible, the amount of which trauma plays into what we currently know as DID is so ridiculous that there is honestly little overlap other than the “same hat” of having multiple parts in a body. So much of DID is much more about “spicy” C-PTSD with the exclusive DLC of thick dissociative barriers. A lot of our experience is centered around navigating trauma and helping parts grow beyond the trauma that seeded their existence and I really don’t know how much of that would be able to be properly understood and shared with someone who has NO trauma? I also feel as though inherently the dynamics between parts would HAVE to be extremely different without trauma because all of the “roles” in our system are fundamentally absed on how we are because of our trauma and how we cope and manage things.

====

Endogenics on Social Media / Practically Speaking?

We leave them alone for the most part. If they aren’t being toxic or spreading misinformation, its really not our deal to care about much - and even then it really isn’t. We have a lot of other things in our life to care about and we really don’t have the time or energy to get worked up, heated, stressed, or anything because we see someone claiming to have parts without trauma. 

I say let people be people and do things as people do so long as they aren’t harming anyone. We disagree and are technically “sysmeds” or whatever, but like, its not that huge of a thing.

Anyways, that’s all.

#alter: aderis #syscourse #discourse #endogenic tw #ask #asks #opinion

[prorevenge]

Revenge with a cherry on top.

It's a looong read. TL;DR at the end.

I used to be a therapist. I trained hard not only in my masters degree, which I managed to get at one of the best programs available in the States after working my ass off in undergrad, but also afterwards in seeking out opportunities to get EVIDENCED-BASED training. I emphasize that point because in the world of mental health there is an internal struggle between people like myself who believe you should have proof that what you are doing for that specific person's issue actually works, and those who want to stick to "theoretical" models that sound good, but don't necessarily have any research to back them up. The town where I live is like a ground zero for this problem. I regularly saw unlicensed therapists who had failed the licensure exam multiple times get promoted to supervisor positions, just because they were good at making their companies money. I eventually got out because I couldn't stand the focus on profit over people, which is literally impossible to avoid unless you say fuck everyone and go into business by yourself. By the time I got to a point where I could have made that move financially, I didn't want to be a therapist anymore and moved on. But before that happened, I managed to slam dunk one of the unprofessional people I had to deal with in a very satisfying way.

This case was about a year before I got out. I was doing trauma therapy with several children from one family, meeting with each of them individually and sometimes together per their request. It was easily one of the most fucked up cases I ever dealt with in my career, and that is saying something. You see, I worked for an agency that contracted with Juvenile Justice and Child Protective Services. All of my clients were mandated offenders or kids who had been removed from abusive homes. In this particular case, the abuse was beyond egregious and I remember after the first session where the kids really opened up and told me what happened, I had nightmares all night. It was so bad. But the CPS case manager (referred to from now on as CM) had specifically requested me because of my success with difficult cases. I had a reputation in my county for being good with kids and someone who could handle tough parents. Even though I knew it was going to be rough, I stuck with it.

My first clue this wasn't going to go well was at the initial family team meeting. These happen monthly with the family, CPS, and all their service providers to discuss goals and progress, etc. You're ultimately working towards closing their case when they have done all their treatment and, most importantly, the kids are safe; have received all the care they need; and the caregivers have demonstrated their ability to provide an appropriate home and parenting. The caregivers, let's call them A and B, were selfish, unhinged fuckers. They denied the abuse, lied for one another, and regularly said horrible things about these kids, insisting they were little liars who deserved punishment for causing all this trouble (by speaking up). The thing that was even worse was this team of fifteen or so providers would not fucking stand up to A or B. I got into this work because I had trauma as a kid and wanted to pay forward what my therapist had done for me when I recovered. I also knew what it was like to not be protected by adults in your life who should have been there for you. So, I did not give one shit what A or B thought of me and stood up to their crap when no one else would, saying it was the responsibility of every adult in that room to put the well-being of these children first since they are the children and we are the grown-ups. A and B were pissed as hell, and everyone else who had thus far allowed their ranting without so much as a squeak actually applauded. But that support for sanity did not last.

Months went by and these poor kids couldn't make headway because their insane parents were not only not compliant, they were actively causing trouble for everyone on the case. You can't do trauma work if you don't feel safe, and for these children they were personally living weekly drama that reminds me of Americans enduring Trump now. It was that chaotic. A and B made wild accusations against most of the people on the case (they were a secret drug dealer, they were trying to molest their kids in visits, they spat at them during a visit). One of the other clinicians got into a car wreck one day during work hours and when A and B found out they demanded she take a drug test. Until she did, they refused to comply further with services. Thankfully, her agency stood with her and defended her (she DEFINITELY was not on drugs, I can assure you, it was absurd). But the CM allowed all of this crap to go unchallenged. She was afraid of both A and B, and one by one she fired the people they targeted or made them so disgusted with her lack of spine that they left, until I was the only original team member left. Up until this point, these assholes wouldn't come near me because my reputation was impeccable. I knew a lot of people in the county and their kids loved me. I was the only adult in their life refusing to back down against A and B and, try as she might, CM couldn't get the kids to say what she wanted: that everything was "much better" and she could close the case. This is where the revenge comes in.

So, months have gone by, almost a year, and I am getting burned the fuck out but I am hanging on until I can successfully close this case and one other. Around this time, CM brings on a new therapist for B (the primary offender), who we'll call SmugFace. SmugFace was unexpectedly announced and introduced at one of our monthly meetings and immediately made it clear she did not like me. Not by being rude in an aggressive way, but by being condescending. For the next three months, CM would try every meeting to close the case and, because NOTHING was better, I fought her every time. Before, I had at least one or two people agree with me, but was now met with silence. It soon became clear CM and SmugFace were friends and SmugFace had been brought on to squish me out. She tried every meeting to imply I wasn't qualified, that I was stupid and had clearly misunderstood the children's wishes, that I was taking on a personal crusade against the parents. And she'd do it with a shit-eating grin on her face each time. I was tired and it did make me mad, but I tried not to lose my cool and give her what she wanted. Because of the shitshows caused by A, B and CM's spinelessness, no one stood with me at all anymore. I was on my own.

For cases mandated by the court, you usually have to attend court dates to testify to progress and make recommendations on whether it should remain open or close. The tension was building before our next court date, and CM was laying groundwork through team meetings, emails, and her reports to discredit me and close the case. In private, I felt like I was losing my mind, but I stayed in touch with everyone I had known on the case; kept my documentation like it was going to be examined by the FBI, and bit my tongue. I did everything I could to reassure the children I would fight for them to stay in their safer placement with relatives, and waited for court day. When it came, SmugFace was there with A and B, looking fat with satisfaction (and, well, just fat). She smirked at me every few seconds, tossing her hair over one shoulder and chuckling. I pretended she didn't exist and waited patiently to be admitted to the court room. When our case number was called, I filed in with her, A, B and CM. Service providers sit in the back at this court house, with members of the family, their lawyers and CPS in front. As we a took our seats, the doors behind me opened and every service provider who had ever been on the case came strolling in. One after the other, until there were no seats left and people were standing. SmugFace's eyes just kept getting wider and wider, until she was not so smug anymore.

After the judge called everyone to order, the lawyers spoke for the family and then CPS got to give a report and their recommendations. Then the judge asked service providers if they have anything to say. CM, of course, recommended we close the case (weak, selfish wretch). Then the judge called on me and I deferred to SmugFace, saying that since the case hinged on B's progress, we should hear her thoughts first. SmugFace stammered and sweated under the collective gaze of all these other professionals glaring at her (it was dead silent but had the tension of many buzzing bees) and said B was doing well and the case should close. She tried to throw in some more professional-sounding jargon at the end, jutting out her chin and collecting herself a bit after seeing my deadpan stare. Then the judge turned to me. I stuck to my guns and expressed all my doubts in full, then reported on the kids and my recommendations. The judge, who was one of the toughest in juvenile court, actually stated to the room that she had respect for my views because of the good work she knew I had done with other children. I was really surprised by this, but the best part came next. The judge asked if anyone else wanted to speak and every. Single. Other. Person agreed with my recommendations. They called out all of A and B's bullshit, one after the other, giving so many documented examples it was dizzying. All the while, SmugFace is getting stonier and CM is just shrinking in her chair. The final blow came from the children's court-appointed advocate, who had never once betrayed any agreement with me in meetings. She said she completely agreed with my and others' assessment and could not see how CPS could justify closing the case. The judge calmly declared the case would remain open, told off CM for her being out of touch with the case, and sent us on our way. On the way out, I looked at SmugFace and she refused to acknowledge me.

I smiled all the way to my car, but the best was yet to come. The good news is the kids were fine in the end, A got caught in too many lies and finally went to prison, and I was able to move on to a new career. But before it was all over, we had another monthly team meeting to attend. And that's when it got a little cherry on top. I love to listen to music, and since I drove around a lot for my work I had an extensive playlist to keep me occupied all those hours. I have eclectic tastes and will often put it on shuffle. The day of the last meeting, I showed up early, parked and unplugged my AUX cable from my phone to go inside. This automatically shut off the music, but sometimes it would start to play again when I wasn't expecting it. Not thinking of that, I just went inside and signed in with the CPS receptionist. The lobby was deserted, except for one person - you guessed it, SmugFace. When she saw me turn around, she looked furious. Before, she'd make a point of greeting me and acting syrupy and overly polite. Now, she resolutely turned her back and stayed silent. So of course I went over to say hello. Only I didn't get to. Just as I sat down across from her, my music app came to life and the first lines of "Dirt off your shoulder" by Jay-Z reverberated around the room "BOW DOWN TO THE MOTHERFUCKING GREATEST". And then, as though satisfied it had expressed itself, the app paused again. Without missing a beat, I shrugged and said, "Sorry!" Then smirked. Her fury at the implied double meaning (sorry for the noise but really sorry I kicked your ass) was priceless.

(source) (story by hrowaway42422819)

#prorevenge #by hrowaway42422819 #pro #revenge #pro revenge #pro revenge stories #revenge stories #revenge story #last10

[gg-astrology]

hey gg! can you do capricorn sun-sagittarius moon? i feel like it's a rare combination and i'd love ur input on it! thank u

Aaaah I’d love to talk about it!!! 💕💕💕 This seems so fun! 💕

[Below Cut: Capricorn Sun - Sagittarius Moon 👹]

This is the devil’s advocate, this is the kind of person who embodies both the realities of being someone who can take things easy, makes jokes. but is also highly critical and accessive

Would rather use their prowess for mischievous mayhem and ‘bringing senses’ into others (sometimes through playfulness) at the same time

They can get serious however, they can be extremely blunt and powerful. If you really don’t get where they’re going, they may resort to calling you out right for something.

The type of people who has a hard time mincing their words especially when it serves others better to learn something from what they’re saying. They tie in Capricorn’s observation and practicality with Sagittarius’s perceptive and highly intellectual mind.

If they are (or were) kind of a geek I wouldn’t be surprise-- their minds needs stimulation and often the would have to find them in outlets, in medias, in something they can sink their energy into

Would actually do well in sports, if they have -- um, other things pointing to good co-ordination as well (can be good or terrible at dancing, depends on the person)

Because their mind is rather spontaneous, despite being in a stable sign. These people might need to ‘switch gears’ often in order to keep themselves motivated in doing a task or staying on track with something.

They’re powerful when they can work for like, 30 minutes and get something nearly done, take a 1 hour break and then get back to work again

So make sure to pace yourself, make sure you drink water and walk around. Capricorn/Sagittarius likes to keep their mind on something so they may switch gears from writing essays to looking at the tv to going back/remembering they were writing something again

I think the most important thing people notice about them is their easy-going manner, like these people really try to relax around others

It’s more to do with their wit?? They’re still moody-- they’re allowed to have their exasperated mood, their down time, their introverted-needs. But when they hang out with people, they’d rather be remembered to enjoying their company, bringing their best interaction forward. Having fun together, joking around

What they do in their spare leisure time is up to them, some just prefers to lounge around and have room/space to take/breath in the clear energy. All they need is just to feel good and alone in their surrounding sometimes

So don’t take it personally if your Capricorn/Sagittarius friend doesn’t want to hang out someday--- they have more needs for their alone-time and that might be why those who are completely extroverted may think they’re more introverted than not

Occasionally, they thrive on a lil adventure. The type to feel rejuvenated and genuinely excited for it even though they don’t normally show this pattern. Sometimes you can catch them bouncing on their feet a lil at the prospect of one of the hang out being to ‘go explore something together’

They like adventure, and they like doing new things. They’re much more open to newer experience than you realize (even risqué daring ones that makes more conservative Capricorn gasps in shock) -- so be sure to tell them when you made plans, because these people often try to urge themselves to ‘feel ready’ for it when they’re motivated by something that could be potentially new/an area of activity they aren’t normally used to

They can also get sulky or whiny, if you don’t invite them to something. Even though they love their homes/alone-time and you know they may sometimes just not want people around (scurry back into their space) 

Just being invited or feeling welcomed (openly) into a space, like they belong or have a place to go back to is what matters to them. They don’t want to feel like just because they missed out on one, they are immediately losing sense of what happened and they’d have to force themselves into social interaction all the time (it makes them tense, fatigue and nervous if it’s constantly)

Don’t make them feel orchestrated by their difference. Make them feel like you’re also adaptable, open and inviting for them to be there. 

(So in a way, a sense of freedom and autonomy is encouraged within the group. As well as just not making a big deal/trying to be passive aggressive about someone having needs/flaking out. Or making them feel like they’re possessed/belong/tied to the group and can’t hang out with their other friends)

Just don’t make them feel bad-- these people are sensitive to their social groups and their sense of belonging. They like structure and has a healthy respect of what it does to tie people together (like a Capricorn) but they also need to have space and a healthy dynamic with their more freedom-loving side, their ‘birds gotta fly’ side as well (don’t tie them in)

They are often good at a wide arrange of activities, talented concise yet witty remarks (maybe satirical even) but the most important thing they seek is to be recognized by others. That others nurture and recognize their value/progress here too 

They work hard for it, and they often let others know their sharp insights about their personality/traits to make them feel better. So let them know yours too, they appreciate any subjective comments as well, it makes them think about it and feel good about themselves. Rejuvenated.

These people are generous and kind-hearted, yet at the same time as long as they feel you have no ulterior motive behind you (and is just a dumbass) they often offer to do you ‘conveniences’ to make your life easier for you (like if they have a car, they’ll offer to drive you ‘since you’re on the way anyways’ or if they have a game console then ‘come over i can’t play this by myself’ after literally playing the game solo for a whole day before skdjnfsk)

They’re kinda like?? looking after their friends. They just want to see people happy, and while they may be dragged down emotionally by themselves. 

They often know what to do to keep balance between them dealing with their own shit vs everyone seeing it (as in they won’t expose their own problems but they’ll just suffer/keep it contained into two separate personal vs social life-- don’t want to drag anyone into it)

Thus--- these people are often less guarded, more casual around people. They have a way of speaking that doesn’t sound elitist, while coming across as pretty educated and can speak to people from all types/walks of life at the same time. 

They’re liberals, like their mind are often liberators of ‘why/how’ things are like this or that.  They may be adept at politics or philosophy-- but that doesn’t have to define their advocacy (considering they are still Capricorn so they’ll want to have something ‘independent but long term’ or something)

They’re the type who’s sensible and aligned, their minds are often organized when they have to declutter/do something about it (in preparations for a presentation or something) often much more balanced than other people (will try to actually get some sleep and not be frantic)

They’re the types who keeps cool and that often pays off in a successful ‘job well done’! -- after all the srz bzn is done they’re back into Bouncy Mode again (let’s celebrate! A dinner! Just enjoy!)

These people however-- may piss you off if you’re not into theoretical analysis or discussion of concepts sometimes (when they’re in the mood, their mind is always in the mood but they can sometimes show it out) -- please let them speak and just be happy to discuss in their mental/conceptual adventures (entertain them sometimes, take care of them)

That’s it!! 💕 I hope u enjoy! 💕💕

#sagittarius moon #capricorn sun #capricorn #sagittarius #capricorn-sagittarius #anon #asks

[kangamommynow]

Sigh.

I don't even...

This is just ONE of the long screeds about the Gillette ads. I'm not telling you who this person is, because that's not my point. My point is that there are LOTS of people of all genders who actually feel this way. And I just don't get it.

As a teacher, it's my job to call our students when their actions are detrimental to others. Mostly we try to do that as privately as possible, because we are trying to teach. To change behaviors and beliefs and understandings. Shame and blame will just shut a person down and entrench their thinking.

So, theoretically, I should reach out to this person, let them know that I think they are wrong, try to inform, teach, persuade. Right?

Yeah. No. That's NOT going to happen. Because I'm neither a martyr nor an idiot. There is no way I could engage this person in a conversation that would be helpful.

You know why? Because he ( I'm assuming this is written by a man) is in his own echo chamber, just as I am. He's got his beliefs, he thinks he's right. I'm convinced he's not. Neither of us would budge on that. No space for compromise.

Once upon a time, I had a mutual on Tumblr who was a self-proclaimed devil's advocate. Would state his beliefs and try to talk you around to his way of thinking, no matter what. I told him I wanted to stop discussing the thing we disagreed about. He wouldn't let it go, Claimed he was discussing, engaging in conversation. As soon as I expressed an emotional connection to the subject, he claimed victory. I had failed because I cared.

I just can't deal with shit like that. I'm not going to have a conversation. I'm not going to debate. I'm not going to follow up and try to persuade.

Call me a chicken if you want.

[qqueenofhades]

Medieval cosmetics: The history of looking good

So, I recently saw a post on my dash with someone lamenting the fact that in the medieval era, they would have been considered ugly as there was no makeup, and someone else offering a well-meant attempt to reassure them: that since they’d have no pox scars, rotten teeth, filthy hair, etc, all medieval men would think they were amazingly hot. While I appreciate the sentiment, there’s.... more than a little mythology on both sides of this idea, and frankly, our medieval foremothers would be surprised and insulted to hear that they were apparently the stereotyped bunch of unwashed, snaggle-toothed crones who put no care or effort into their appearance, and had no tools with which to do so.

(Or: Yep. Hilary Has More Things To Say. You probably know where this is going.)

I answered an ask a couple weeks ago that was mostly about medieval gynecological care and the accuracy of the “mother dying in childbirth” stereotype, but which also touched on some of the somehow still-widely-believed myths about medieval personal care and cleanliness. Let’s start with bathing. Medieval people bathed, full stop. Not as frequently as we do, and not in the same ways, but the “people never washed in Ye Olde Dark Ages” chestnut needs to be decidedly consigned to the historical dustbin where it belongs. “A Short History of Bathing Before 1601″ is a good place to start, as it follows the development of bathing culture from ancient Rome (where bathhouses were known for their use as gathering places and influential centers of political debate) through to the modern era. Yes, common people as well as the nobility washed fairly frequently. Bathing was a favored social and leisure activity and a central part of hospitality for guests. Hey, look at all these images in medieval manuscripts of people bathing. Or De balneis Puteolanis, which is basically a thirteenth-century travel guide to the best baths in Italy. Or these medieval Spanish civic codes about when men, women, and Jews were allowed to use the public bath house. There was also, as referenced in the above ask, the practice of washing faces, hands, etc daily, and sometimes more than once. Feasts involved elaborate protocol about who was allowed to perform certain tasks, including bringing in the bowls of scented water to wash between courses. They associated filth with disease (logically). Anyway. Let’s move on.

Combs are some of the oldest (and most common) objects found in medieval graves -- i.e. they were a standard part of the “grave goods” for the deceased, and were highly valued possessions. Look, it’s a young woman combing her hair (that article also discusses the history of medieval makeup for men, which was totally a thing and likewise also suspected of being “unmanly.”) The Luttrell Psalter, now in the British Library, includes among its many illuminations one of a young woman having her hair elaborately combed and styled by an attendant. There were extensive discourses on what constituted an ideally attractive medieval woman, and the study of aesthetics and the nature of beauty is one of the oldest and most central philosophical enquiries in the world (as were beauty standards in antiquity). Having a pale complexion was a sign of wealth (you didn’t have to work outdoors in the sun) and women used all kinds of pastes and powders to achieve that effect. Remember the Trotula, the medieval gynecological textbook we talked about in the childbirth ask? Well, it is actually three texts, and the entire third text, De ornatu mulierum (On Women’s Cosmetics) is dedicated to makeup and cosmetics. What weird and gross sort of things do they advocate, cry editors of “7 Horrifying Medieval Beauty Tips You Won’t Believe!”-style articles? Well...

First come general depilatories for overall care of the skin. Then there are recipes for care of the hair: for making it long and dark, thick and lovely, or soft and fine. For care of the face, there are recipes for removing unwanted hair, whitening the skin, removing blemishes or abscesses, and exfoliating the skin, plus general facial creams. For the lips, there is a special unguent of honey to soften them, plus colorants to dye the lips and gums. For the care of teeth and prevention of bad breath, there are five different recipes. The final chapter is on hygiene of the genitalia. [...] A prescription said to be used by Muslim women then follows.[...] The author gives detailed instructions on how to apply the water just prior to intercourse, together with a powder that the woman is supposed to rub on her chest, breasts, and genitalia. She is also to wash her partner’s genitals with a cloth sprinkled with the same sweet-smelling powder.

Wait so... hair care, skin and facial creams, toothpaste, lipstick, and sexual hygiene?? With the latter based on that used by Muslim women??? Zounds! How strange and unthinkable!

L’ornement des Dames, an Anglo-Norman text of the thirteenth century, offers more tips and tricks, and explicitly references the authority of both the Trotula and Muslim women: “I shall not forget either what I learnt at Messina from a Saracen woman. She was a doctor for the people of her faith [...] according to what I heard from Trotula of Salerno, a woman who does not trust her is a fool.” So yes. The beauty regimes of Muslim women were transmitted to and shared by Christian women, especially in diverse places like medieval Sicily, and this was valuable and trusted advice. Gee. It’s almost like women have always a) cared about their appearance, and b) united to flip one giant middle finger at the patriarchy. (You can also read more about skincare and cosmetics.) Speaking of female health authorities, you have definitely (or you should have) heard of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess and towering genius who was the trusted advisor of kings and popes and wrote treatises on everything from music to medicine to natural science (she is regarded as the founder of the discipline in Germany). This included the vast Physica, a handbook on health and medicine, and Causae et curae, another medical textbook.

Did the church grumble and gripe about women putting on excessive adornments and being too fixated by makeup and the dangers of vanity and etc etc? You bet they did. Did women ignore the hell out of this and wear makeup and fancy clothes anyway? You bet they damn well did. Also, medieval society was fuckin’ obsessed with fashion (especially in the fourteenth century.) The sumptuary laws, which appeared for the first time in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, regulated which classes of society were allowed to wear what (so that fancy furs and silks and jewels were reserved for the nobility, and less expensive cloth and trimming were the province of the lower classes -- the idea was that you could know someone’s station in life just by looking at them). These were insanely detailed, and went down to regulating the height of someone’s high heels. So yes, theoretically, the stiletto police could stop you in fourteenth-century England, whip out a measuring tape, and see if you were literally too big for your britches.

(”But, but,” you stammer. “Surely they had rotten teeth?” Well, this is probably a bad time to note that in addition to the five toothpaste remedies mentioned in the Trotula, there are even more. Jewish and Muslim natural philosophers and herbalists had all kinds of recommendations -- see Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean. Also, since there was no processed sugar in their diet, their dentistry was far better than, say, the Elizabethans, and white and regular teeth were highly prized. There would be wear and tear from grist, but since fine-milled white bread was a status symbol, the wealthy could afford to have bread that did not contain it, and thus good teeth.)

Of course, everyone wasn’t just getting dressed up with, so to speak, nowhere to go. What about sex? It never happened unless it was marital rape, right? (/side-eyes a certain unnamed quasi-medieval television show). Oh no. Medieval people loved the shit out of sex. Pastourelles were an immensely popular poetic genre which almost always included the protagonist having a romp with a pretty shepherdess, and anyone who’s read any Chaucer knows how bawdy it can get. Even Chaucer, however, is put to shame by the fabliaux, which are a vast collection of Old French poems that have titles so ribald that I could not say them aloud to an undergraduate class. (”The Ring That Controlled Erections” and “The Peekaboo Priest” are about the tamest that I can think of, but I gotta say I’m fond of “Long Butthole Berengier” and the one called simply “The Fucker,” because literally people are people everywhere and always. And yes, you perverted person, you can read the lot of them here.) This was incredibly explicit and bawdy popular literature that was pretty much exactly medieval porn (and like usual porn, did not exactly serve as any kind of precursor of feminist media or positive female representation, but Misogyny, Take a Shot.)

So yes. Once more (surprise!) the history of cosmetics goes back at least six thousand years, and is one of the oldest aspects of documented social history in the world. It existed broadly and accessibly in the medieval world, where women had other women writing books on it for them, and was just as much as a concern as it is now. People have always liked to look good, smell good, accessorize, dress fashionably, try weird beauty trends, and so forth. So if by some accident you do stumble into a time machine and end up in medieval Europe, you’ll have plenty of choices. Our medieval foremothers, and the men who loved them and thought they were beautiful, thank you for your time.

#history #medieval history #history of cosmetics #history of makeup #women in history #history of medicine

[tomfooleryprime]

Voq, Ash Tyler, and Growing up Star Trek

We learned a lot more about the curious case of Lieutenant Ash Tyler/Voq in the Star Trek: Discovery episode, “Vaulting Ambition.” It was finally confirmed in the previous week that the character we know as Ash Tyler is harboring some Klingon memories, but the precise mechanism behind how that happened was still a mystery, until Saru finally brought up the thing we were all wondering about:

Which prompted L’Rell to spill the beans.

“The one you call Tyler was captured in battle at the Binary Stars. We harvested his DNA, reconstructed his consciousness, and rebuilt his memory. We modified Voq into a shell that appears human. We grafted his psyche into Tyler’s, and in so doing, Voq has given his body and soul for our ideology.”

—L’Rell

It’s not all that shocking. Months of fan speculation aside, it’s not like this is a new trope for this franchise.

Remember this guy? 

What L’Rell revealed last night opens up an opportunity for Star Trek: Discovery to venture into classic Trek territory in a very un-Trek way. How the hell are we supposed to figure out what to think about Ash Tyler’s situation? 

The Trek formula of old would have given us a tidy episode in a box where the captain was confronted with some dilemma and spent the majority of the fifty-two minutes of air time chewing on it in such a way that the audience wasn’t really required to ponder the ramifications because we had a Picard or a Janeway to serve as the wise parental figure and do the messy business of thinking for us.

Yet Discovery lacks that central guiding ethical compass: its main character isn’t a captain, she’s a convict. That arguably makes Michael Burnham the most dynamic lead Star Trek has ever put forward, but because she’s too busy finding her place on a ship in the midst of a war with the Klingons and crawling over heaps of inner turmoil, that doesn’t leave her a lot of free time to tell us how to approach the wider problems presented in each episode. She tries to speak up as the voice of reason (miss you, Ripper!), but thus far, her objections are often drowned out by a plot that’s constantly blazing forward at Warp 10. It makes for good storytelling and character development, but it leaves the analysis of complex issues to the audience.

Think about it—every incarnation of Star Trek up until now had a way of introducing us to problems that were so obviously an allusion to the issues of their respective decades, whether it was Kirk meeting a society of people who desperately needed birth control or Archer ending up in a Suliban detainee camp courtesy of President George Bush… er, whoever the Tandaran leader was during the 2150s.

Captain Picard was the ultimate master of holding viewers’ hands all the way through the first four acts of an episode, carefully spoon feeding us both sides of an issue before finally allowing us to absorb the full weight of an enormous moral, ethical, or philosophical question in the final act with an impassioned speech or contemplative captain’s log entry. We were allowed to be mentally lazy. 

Is Data a person? Who’s to say? Let’s literally hold a trial to weigh the evidence!

The issues surrounding Ash Tyler are so enormously complex and raise questions about the nature of consciousness, self, immortality, and bodily autonomy, as well as the role of crime and punishment in society. It seems pretty ambiguous whether or not the real Ash Tyler is still alive in a Klingon prison somewhere, but regardless, maybe we should start by exploring whether we can really call the person lying in Discovery’s sickbay Ash Tyler. 

If someone were to duplicate your consciousness and place it into another living being, how would you define that individual? Say hypothetically that you are still alive, so is the other being with your consciousness now also you, an extension of you, or a completely independent being that simply carries your memories? If the original version of you is destroyed, did you really die, if a carbon copy of your mind exists somewhere else? If such a procedure is possible, doesn’t that imply we could theoretically live forever through a series of host bodies?

I feel like this is the premise of one-third of all Black Mirror episodes.

Hopefully, next week’s episode will iron out some of the details behind how the procedure was performed and whether or not L’Rell successfully removed Voq’s consciousness from Tyler’s physical form, but that just raises more questions. 

L’Rell indicated that the albino Klingon we knew as Voq in the first three episodes gave up his physical form to look like Ash Tyler, so the body was originally Voq’s.

Alien talent for crafting human flesh bags into suits varies by franchise. 

So if L’Rell manages to remove Voq’s consciousness from the body he and Tyler share, is that the equivalent of killing Voq? Conversely, if she snuffs out any trace of Tyler, has she killed Tyler? Last night’s episode made it apparent that if someone didn’t do something soon, the guy in sickbay screaming Klingon curses one minute and weeping human tears the next was going to die, but is it ethical to take one life to save another, and how do we decide?

I think the natural instinct is to say that obviously Voq needs to go in favor of Tyler. It’s easy to justify too: Voq knew what he was risking, the Klingons and Federation are in the midst of a war, and it doesn’t really seem like Tyler had much say in the medical experimentation performed on him. Not to mention, it kind of seemed like it was Voq shining through when Hugh Culber was killed. The Voq side of this person is clearly violent, dangerous, and a self-proclaimed enemy of the Federation.

Now consider how you feel about the death penalty. If you ardently support it, I question why you watch a show featuring people from an idealistic utopia where the death penalty was abolished, but hey, I’m sure the issue of what to do about Voq must seem pretty cut and dry. If you oppose the death penalty for any reason, now is probably a good time to ask yourself exactly why that is and apply it to this very bizarre situation.

Before you start hurling digital rotten produce at me for daring to suggest that Voq be given rights over Tyler, I’m not advocating for that, I’m merely asking you to consider it, because while the DNA is Tyler’s, the body is Voq’s. The heart of so many modern issues rests on a similar platform, this idea that we have the right to decide the fate of our own bodies, no matter what else we’ve done. 

It’s why we don’t harvest organs from criminals or force them to submit to dangerous medical experimentation, even though some *cough*Nazis*cough* might argue in favor of crude social arithmetic that there’s some net “good” to be had by testing unproven HIV vaccines or pioneering brain surgery on our convict population. To be fair, Voq decided to become Ash Tyler, and in doing so, it seems so unfair that I should even be considering his rights when it certainly seems like Tyler’s rights were so brutally and traumatically stripped away from him.

But Star Trek has also never shied away from unfair predicaments. Remember that time Trip Tucker was in a coma and Phlox collected his DNA and injected it into a Lyssarian Desert larvae to grow a Tucker clone, which they later named Sim, just so they could harvest Sim’s neural tissue for a transplant? OG Tucker was unconscious and didn’t consent to the procedure, and while Tucker 2.0 also didn’t ask to get made, which one deserved to live?

Yeah Sim, he owed you so big. 

No matter what happens, the whole business with Voq and Tyler is a bloody damn mess and there’s no chance for real justice for anyone involved. By stuffing Ash Tyler’s consciousness into Voq’s body and then mutilating Voq to look like Ash Tyler, L’Rell created an individual who is arguably somehow both Voq and Tyler and also neither Voq and Tyler at the same time.

Star Trek built an entire species based around this premise in the form of the Trills. For seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the symbiont Dax put us through our paces as we teased apart Jadzia from Dax and all of her previous hosts. There are too many episodes featuring Jadzia conflicting with the memories of her predecessors to count, but it was always interesting, watching Jadzia stand trial for something Curzon allegedly did, and it was heartbreaking watching her husband Worf interact with Ezri, Dax’s next host, after Jadzia’s untimely death. However much fans wished Ezri would love Worf as much as Jadzia had, Ezri wasn’t Jadzia and she deserved the freedom to make her own decisions.

So, I have to come back to the question, is Ash Tyler even really Ash Tyler? Can a copy be as good as the original? In many cases, sure. If someone torched the Declaration of Independence, its meaning isn’t lost forever; we have countless copies in textbooks and Internet archives. Ideas and facts are obviously more important than the paper that they’re printed on, but aren’t people greater than just the sum of their thoughts and experiences?

Star Trek: The Next Generation asked that question once when a transporter accident spawned a clone of William Riker, only he wasn’t technically a clone, because he shared all of Riker’s memories leading up to the accident. A clone implies an individual whose genome was copied from another individual, but the person created in that transporter glitch was an exact copy.

You know Riker II is looking at Riker I and thinking, “I grew a beard because I didn’t have a razor. Don’t tell me you grew that shit on purpose?”

Are they really exactly the same though? Once their paths began to diverge with differing life experiences (one got stranded on a station while the other went on to have a successful career in Starfleet), they really became two separate individuals, more like twins than the exact same person. So, I would argue that whether or not the original Tyler is really alive out there, the Tyler we know isn’t really Ash Tyler. 

But whoever he is and however he was created, he has rights too. He’s the only innocent person in this whole shitty scenario, and even if Voq’s consciousness is removed, no doubt the experience will irrevocably alter Tyler.

But what if L’Rell can’t separate them? I think of all the options, a plot twist that finds a way for both Tyler and Voq to coexist in the same body is easily the most complicated and daring path forward. Tuvok and Neelix had polar opposite personalities, but at least when they got spliced together, they generally lived by the same moral code. All the incarnations of Dax were also wildly different, but they jived well (so long as you forget that whole uncomfortable Joran incident).

Voq and Tyler are essentially Jekyll and Hyde. Voq killed Hugh Culber and attempted to kill Michael Burnham, so should he (they) be punished for those crimes? American Horror Story: Freak Show tried to address a similar situation when one conjoined twin murdered her mother in a moment of rage. It forces us to ask which is worse, “Deliberately punishing an innocent person or allowing a guilty one to go free?”

I have no idea what will happen in future episodes, but the idea of Voq and Tyler having to learn to live together might actually provide this show with something it’s been largely lacking thus far: a character who has to learn what it means to be human and who can provide an outsider’s commentary and insight on our odd little species, much like Spock, Data, The Doctor, Seven of Nine, and T’Pol did. Given Michael Burnham’s upbringing and life sentence for mutiny, it seemed like she was well-poised to fit this role, but while she spent the latter part of her formative years on Vulcan and is a lot less emotional than most of her crewmates, she’s fairly clued in to the human condition. 

Not so great at beer pong, but still a competent human. 

Ultimately, I can’t wait to see how Ash Tyler’s situation gets resolved, but I can now safely say Discovery might be my favorite series in the franchise. Some people hate it because it’s a lot of explosions and fighting and thus far, it hasn’t really felt like Star Trek with its power-hungry captain, Klingons with heavy prosthetics, and exceptional CGI. 

No, it ain’t your momma’s Star Trek, but maybe that’s a good thing. I grew up watching The Next Generation and later watched Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, and it was nice having Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer gently guide me to the answers with calm, well-reasoned thinking. In a lot of ways, they taught me how to think about morally complex matters, and now that I’m older, I’m able to think for myself while I watch Discovery, and that is precisely why I love it so much. 

Discovery is Star Trek all grown up.  

#star trek discovery #vaulting ambition #discovery spoilers #meta #ash tyler #voq #l'rell #long post

[coin-river-blog]

In an age where governments are trigger happy at censoring or shutting down networks, it is reassuring to know that Bitcoin can operate sans internet. Network censorship, after all, is not some dystopian storyline but a power exercised by many democratic governments across the world. Thankfully, there are solutions that enable people to send and receive bitcoin even in a worst case scenario. For an advanced technology, it turns out that cryptocurrency can get surprisingly low-tech.

Also read: Bitcoin and Weak Frequency Signals: Bypassing Network Censorship With Radio

Send Bitcoin by Radio and Circumvent Network Censorship

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the internet is down. Not because the wifi’s been disconnected: instead, your government has pulled the plug . You’ve no idea when it’ll be back online, and in the meantime, you’re cut off from life as you know it, ranging from contact with loved ones abroad to paying for anything by card. Since society isn’t big on keeping cash these days, and ATMs stock up on only so much paper money at a time, chances are you’ll have to sidestep – or engage in – a few fistfights if you’re to put a meal on the table.

Since bitcoin is, itself, a form of digital currency, it takes a good amount of preplanning to set up a transaction, but in theory, it could still operate even when conventional options are forcefully removed from the equation.

What do –

Greeks Cypriots Venezuelans Argentinians Brazilians Zimbabweans and Ukrainians have in common?

They all woke one day and the banks were shuttered and capital controls were put in place to avoid an economic collapse.

Bitcoin doesn't close 🚀

— Jason A. Williams 🦍 (@JWilliamsFstmed) February 12, 2019

While most of us will hopefully never experience a dystopian world of intermittent internet, the productivity sages remind us that a failure to plan is planning to fail. Knowing how to transact with cryptocurrency in a chaotic world is the sort of knowledge that might just come in handy one day, and in the meantime will make you the most interesting guest at the dinner party.

Depending on the political stability of your geographic location, learning how to send bitcoin without internet could be nothing more than a fun Saturday afternoon science project. Then again, it could provide the way out of a tight spot one day, whether it’s transferring funds to a buddy stuck in the middle of the ocean or bribing a zombie to feast on the coins stored in your brain wallet instead of devouring your brain.

Bitcoin Over Airwaves

2014 saw the earliest mentions of bitcoin being sent via the airwaves. Hamradiocoin was one of the early vanity altcoins, geared at the ham radio industry. While it wasn’t entirely clear why said niche industry needed a dedicated currency, its current $794 market cap – unchanged since May 2017 – adds to crypto’s rich historical arsenal of questionable coins.

But the idea of marrying Marconi and Satoshi was bound to lead to more useful experiments. A step in the right direction saw Finnish company Vertaisvaluutta.fi propose the creation of a P2P half-duplex CB/HAM radio cryptocurrency. Also in Finland, Kryptoradio partnered with a national broadcaster to pilot a cryptocurrency data transmission system that broadcasts bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data via national DVB-T television networks in real time. The project failed to launch its commercial phase, with founder Joel Lehtonen explaining:

The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without internet connectivity.

Come 2018, there was a new experiment in town. Ingredients: Brooklyn-based gotenna, a mobile, long-range, off-grid consumer mesh network, and bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet. A New Zealand developer transported crypto from a distance of 12.6km away, entirely offline, using only a network-disconnected Android phone and four portable antennas. Though as his Twitter recount acknowledges, it took one heck of a prep, including setting up relay stations.

Over the weekend I sent a bitcoin transaction to a relay 12.6km away with no cell network or internet connection. Here's a tweetstorm about how I used @gotenna and @SamouraiWallet to do it

— ℭoinsure (@Coinsurenz) October 16, 2018

Fast forward to this year, and in perhaps the most simplistic effort yet, Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak managed to move BTC some 600km away from Toronto, Canada to Openbazaar co-founder Sam Patterson in Michigan, USA. And in that moment, Bitcoin-by-sky went international.

Advocates for Bitcoin by Air

In 2017, computer scientist Nick Szabo and PhD researcher Elaine Ou delved into the topic at Stanford’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, introducing a research project that proposed tethering bitcoin to radio broadcast to secure consensus proofs using weak signal radio propagation. (View their talk, a copy of the presentation, and our coverage of the event for further information.)

With Novak and Patterson’s latest feat, crypto Twitter went wild. Szabo, showing that he’s still a firm proponent of taking bitcoin skyward, chimed in to congratulate the duo for a successful sendoff that not even a snowstorm could stop.

Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite — just nature's ionosphere. https://t.co/IKCAXGs9fW

— Nick Szabo 🔑 (@NickSzabo4) February 12, 2019

How to Send Bitcoin by Radio

As Novak and Patterson have illustrated, you don’t need to overload on gear or make space for satellite storage in your backyard to send bitcoin by air. Accompanying an SDR ham on this quest was nothing more than a 40m 7Mhz antenna and the JS8call application.

While the setup seems simple enough (Google “ham radio for beginners” for a primer), in practice this is probably not something you’ll dive into unless you’re just messing around or, in real life, shit gets real.

Gearing up is as easy as H-A-M

In truth, there are restrictions aplenty when it comes to sending bitcoin by radio.

First off, legalities. To stay on the right side of the law, some countries require you to be a licensed ham operator, and even then you’re unable to send any encrypted messages or use the airwaves for commercial purposes unless so licensed. At this point, it’s not yet clear which governmental task force will join the SEC and co in clamping down on illegal apocalyptic bitcoin-via-radio transactions.

Since legal restriction is the mother of all invention, Novak and Patterson circumvented this by broadcasting their experimental, non-commercial wallet encryption sendoff via public cypher.

Then there’s prepping it all. For this to be a viable – albeit last resort – solution in an actual nail-bite situation, sender and receiver would have to set it all up in advance. Novak and Patterson were able to execute their experiment by communicating and collaborating in lieu of the transfer, using a brain wallet. (The brainwallet, which is simply storing your mnemonic recovery phrase in your brain, is not to be confused with the recent more nefarious version – the deathwallet popularized by CEO Gerald Cotten who took the keys to Quadriga’s crypto kingdom to his grave.)

Thus, if you’re going to use this as a backup plan for when stuff hits the fan, you’d better secure a right-hand wo/man and a fool-proof project management blueprint while things are still web-friendly. If this process seems as though it walked off the pages of a James Bond novel, yes. It’s decidedly more involved than a mere intra-wallet send-off.

However, if you’re gung-ho on testing out alternative bitcoin transports, don’t let the naysayers stop you. Yours might well be the next proof of concept the interweb is waiting for. The blog Better Off Bitcoin, for one, offers a run-through protocol tutorial.

Scalability Is a Big Bottleneck

Clearly, scaling is a non-issue here. For the foreseeable future, sending bitcoin by radio isn’t happening unless it absolutely has to.

According to Australian crypto trader Boss Cole, “As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are moving into the future, it is an interesting concept to think about what would happen if we instead went into the past. It is possible and easy to transfer Bitcoin without an internet connection, but it is not convenient. There are a number of projects working on this with satellites or their own infrastructure, however at the time of this writing they are not “popular” simply because there is no real demand.” He continues:

In the case of government censorship, the infrastructure would change rapidly. If we were dealing with serious problems, the infrastructure would follow. Because it is possible. If we went into the dark ages, the main way to transfer Bitcoin would be transferring private keys between individuals. This would be simple, but not convenient.

Not even extreme weather conditions can deter the determined from sending bitcoin via radio waves

So while it’s theoretically possible to take to the skies and send crypto wallets around the world and all the way into space, DIY bitcoin ionosphere amateurs won’t be sending satoshis to the dark side of the moon any time soon.

Why Radio Wave Transmission Might Be Necessary

We tend to associate worst-case scenarios in which the main character has nothing but a walkie talkie and an old ham lying around with Hollywood’s portrayal of doomsday.

Yet for unstable regimes like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, internet blackouts were how 2019 got its start. In reality, network censorship is an all-too-common control tool for many governments around the world.

India leads the pack with 288 shutdowns between 2012 and 2019, with 134 instances in 2018 alone. The Middle East and Africa aren’t strangers to forcing citizens into offline mode, either.

Good luck stopping information across borders when all you need is 40 watts of power, a long piece of wire, a radio and a computer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 12, 2019

Under the Communications Act 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the U.K. has an internet kill switch, which could be enforced in light of a serious threat such as a significant cyber attack. The U.S. has had, for the past 85 years, the power to kill electronic communications under the Communications Act of 1934. And with talks of Russia considering a test run to decouple from the global internet, we risk taking a rude awakening if we assume the world’s 72,558 Google searches every second to be an unquestionable given.

Bitcoin for Every Situation

It might have taken a mini-library worth of code to get NASA astronauts to the moon, but sending bitcoin there won’t be nearly as hard. All you need is a radio. Okay, that and a moon rocket. But the point is, this new technology can be just as comfortable – or accessible – even when when the tech you’re using is decidely old school.

Peer-to-peer networks built on the internet have a special allure because of the sense of resilience they have without a central point of failure. A bit misleading: they are really built on many computers and the connections between them.

Not true with radios. True peer to peer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 16, 2019

Bitcoin might have been invented on the internet for the internet, but it can straddle both the digital and analog worlds. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin walk the line between money under the mattress and cash in the bank. As these trailblazers show, bitcoin can straddle those worlds not only functionally, but also technically. Thanks to the efforts of the pioneers profiled here, crypto has shown it can survive in even the most challenging environments.

Sending bitcoin by radio isn’t quite carrier pigeon, but in tech terms it might as well be. Which, says crypto developer John Villar, is “probably the most low end you can get before smoke-signaling a brain wallet.”

Can you envision a situation in which you might have to send bitcoin by ham radio? What other ways could you picture cryptocurrency being transferred without the internet? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

Tags in this story

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Radio Broadcast, brainwallet, BTC, Censorship Resistance, Data Transmission, Elaine Ou, gotenna, HAM radio, N-Technology, network censorship, Nick Szabo, Rodolfo Novak, Sam Patterson, samourai wallet, Scaling Bitcoin 2017, Stanford University, Weak Signal Radio

Nadja Bester

Nadja has been involved in the cryptocurrency industry in numerous capacities, ranging from journalist, writer, marketing and communications specialist, and speaker. She has reported on cryptocurrency since 2017.

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[1000-directions]

For writer ask meme: 1, 11, 13, 27, 36, 53

11 and 13 were already answered

1. Tell us about your WIP!

idk if i properly have a WIP, but i have timetravelverse and aokiverse as sort of...outstanding projects, i guess. but i wouldn’t say either is properly “in progress” at the moment. i’ve talked about timetravelverse before, it has a tag if you want to investigate it, but i haven’t really talked about aokiverse. it just sort of happened after i watched steve aoki’s documentary and started thinking about how steve and louis are similar and different. it’s theoretically about the two of them building a friendship and then louis losing his mum and needing someone else to disappear into, which ends up being steve, who is just like so chill in some respects and such a hardworking motherfucker in others. but overall just a really positive and affectionate and nurturing kind of person, while still seeming much younger than his age and up for a good time. but then he also works like 300 days a year, etc, he’s very dichotomous, it’s very interesting to me. i use the tags “st.louis” and “tonight make me unstoppable” to talk about this one.

27. Every writer's least favorite question - where does your inspiration come from? Do you do certain things to make yourself more inspired? Is it easy for you to come up with story ideas?

so this might be shitty of me, but i get inspired to almost play devil’s advocate and defend things that people aren’t into? like, people aren’t into louis getting back together with eleanor? i’m gonna write the shit out of it. louis got an idiotic penguin tattoo? i will make that a stupidly touching plot point. louis and eleanor can’t stop wearing ugly matching tracksuits? no offense but they are TEAM TOMMO and i’m gonna give you some emotions about it. i also get inspired a lot by pictures, just like one little moment without any context. i think it’s a nice jumping-off point. i’m always going to write more for emotions than for plot, so for me it’s important to have some sort of emotional resonance with whatever i’m writing, even if it’s not a situation i’ve been in. like, my life and louis tomlinson’s life are extremely different in most regards, but i wrote his depression like i would write my depression, and i’ve spent several months really wanting to write about my depression and not being able to identify a comfortable way to do it directly, so this was a helpful way for me to unintentionally work through some shit.

36. Post a snippet

i truly don’t think i have anything left that i haven’t posted. maybe a sentence here and there, but it’s not much. i just dug up the last piece of original fiction i wrote, maybe like eight years ago? you can have a bit of that, if you want. it’s got a very different feel from most of my stuff, very deliberately detached. this is something that meant a lot to me at the time that i was writing it, but i feel very little emotion reading back over it now, which is unnerving.

he listens to the track seventeen times in a row while she flips through his notebook, marking some pages with tiny check marks and others with Xs. when everyone returns from lunch, lazy and unfocused, she slips away. he reviews her review. she likes the same things that he likes, and she doesn’t like the page where he wrote “this is a fucking waste of time” over and over in tiny scrawl until his hand hurt. sometimes, he has to write just to write, and he has explained this to her, but she still doesn’t like his negativity.

he goes into the bathroom, and he runs the water in the sink, and he ducks down to get his head close to the tap, and he whispers to it, “this is a fucking waste of time. this is a fucking waste of time.” later, when everyone else has gone, he will sample this and bury it somewhere in the mix, and it will be their secret.

they leave for the night, and he stays for the night, and then the rain starts. he wanders from room to room, dimming lights, cutting through the empty rooms like a ghost. he moves through things without changing them.

in the kitchen, the rain is more insistent. there is a leak somewhere in the roof, and the water is coming closer and closer to him. in the morning, someone will find the wet patch on the ceiling, and men will come out and plug the holes, and this is his only opportunity to sit here, cross-legged on the floor, listening to the droplets plying at the thinning ceiling like fingers on skin. this is his favorite noise today. this is the best part of today.

he falls asleep on the kitchen floor, and he wakes up on the kitchen floor. she is sitting on the counter, just watching him, her legs dangling like they are connected to two separate bodies. he makes coffee and drinks it, and she watches him quietly. she is waiting for him to speak first, but he won’t.

a door opens somewhere, and it lets in the clamor of directionless people walking vaguely towards a paycheck. she hops off the counter and disappears, and he drinks another cup of coffee and thinks about water and rain, and he wonders if evaporation makes a noise.

53. What is the first line of your WIP?

timetravelverse:

Baby Louis shows up just after midnight in the nebulous space that is not quite Louis' birthday anymore but doesn't feel like Christmas just yet. Either way, he is pretty much the worst gift ever.

#timetravelverse #st.louis #tonight make me unstoppable #asks #meme #writing #Anonymous

[janiedean]

Okay so I freely admit my knowledge of history absolutely sucks so this will sound stupid but - is communism a good thing or a bad thing??? I'm asking because I see SOOOOOO many conflicting ideas coming from people and everyone ends up contradicting each other, it seems like tumblr is very pro-communism but at the same time there are people on here who are absolutely disgusted with tumblr's "pro-communism" ideas and at the same time people praise Karl Marx and I'm just confused sorry.

okay, thing is, you have to make two distinctions. there’s theoretical communism and applied-in-the-real-world communism, and when it comes to theoretical communism, one thing is marx (which is why marxism is a thing and stalinism is another) and another are other communists who interpreted his thought often for political reasons. now I once had replied to a post on the topic which I never posted to avoid extra wank but I have it in my drafts let me see if I can c/p it... yeah okay no but maybe I can reuse parts of it.

anyway: communism is originally marx’s theory/system. marx conceived it in a society that was ALREADY CAPITALIST and its entire idea was destroying the aforementioned capitalist society which was founded on inequality and exploiting workers (like if you read the capital, it has chapters dedicated to child labor and how horrible it is just to mention one). communism is a philosophical and economical THEORY which does indeed look good on paper, its problem is that at most you could make it viable in small communities because it implies that everyone must be on board with it to make it work, that corruption doesn’t exist, that people do automatically their best for the others and the community/collectivity and a lot of other things that literally can’t coexist when your problem is basic human nature. never mind that marx’s system was based entirely on the situation in industrialized nations during the second industrial revolution and it’s entirely tied in that historical timeframe and it doesn’t take reading the capital for that, and now we’ve gone past that. never mind that not all nations go through what the UK did during the second industrial revolution. we’re past the second industrial revolution. marx’s system is not viable in reality because not many places are in those same conditions. never mind that marx himself knew that perfectly - ie, there’s a part in the communist manifesto which goes:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. (….) When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.

Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

now, why did I bold exactly those parts? because the last one states that communism’s eventual target is everyone living in an equalitarian union, and the second is to show that according to marx communism could be a thing IN ADVANCED COUNTRIES. industrially.

and here we arrive to practiced communism which is our problem. because thing is, communism on paper is great - equality! no one is exploited! everyone contributes as they can how much they can! no classism! - but in practice, it has never been introduced in nations that were already capitalist. it’s mostly been countries that either had a strong agricultural/rural economy or came from centuries of dictatorships/monarchy, which means that regardless of how much communism is viable as a way of life or not, it wouldn’t and couldn’t have been applied there the way it was supposed to because those weren’t capitalist countries. you can’t have a communist society without capitalism first. period. and when you try to merge the two you have today’s china which is basically the worst of the two systems put together, never mind that if you look at mao’s CV, the cultural revolution and the likes it doesn’t sound to me that it’s the best way of life for everyone as marx put it. (and to add to that by the way, just the exploitation of workers in china that allows us to buy for ridiculous cheap from there is the most anti-communist thing anyone could ever conceive. and I’m just mentioning one thing.)

when **communism** has been implemented in both russia and china and everywhere else it was a thing, it was never a capitalist country. add that as I stated above in order for it to work it means EVERYONE IS ON BOARD and the people in charge don’t exploit it and you have a recipe for disaster, because if you look at it everywhere it was implemented, regardless of how much they might have started decently, it turned into a dictatorship not long later.

so this whole ‘shit happened in communist countries and people died but communism is still AMAZING’ topic is ridiculous because thing is, if one grasps the spirit, the entire point of communism as an utopian society (because that’s basically the outcome of that at the end of it) is having a society of equals where everyone contributes for what they can, there are no injustices like in capitalist society and your worth as a person isn’t put after your capacity to produce money for someone else. any so-called communist system calling itself communist and allowing people to die/oppressing its citizens/exploiting workers’ labor without allowing them to have unions/creating gulags/silencing disagreeing opinions is inherently a system that marx would have loathed because it goes against everything he wanted out of his vision. like, especially exploiting workers’ labor. that’s the reason why historically why most unions were communist/socialist when unions started being a thing. never mind that marx called for criticizing the status quo/people in power who exploited it, which should automatically suggest that most people who praise communist regimes aren’t really marxist.

(now we could also discuss over how both communism and capitalism taken in their purist form don’t benefit anyone except the people in power and so the best way is midway, because capitalism does have good aspects same as communism does, and actually the reason communism was groundbreaking in its historical moment was because it put attention on the need for equality and better working conditions when most poor people were exploited by the upper class. theoretical communism advocated a world where everyone contributes according to their own capacities and doesn’t end up sacrificing themselves on the altar of factory work, and that’s not what has happened until now in real life. taking the best from either system is what actually does work all things considered - counteracting 100% bonafide capitalism with 100% bonafide communism, which by the way can’t exist today, is fried air, as we say in italy.)

so, at this point the thing is: if you’re anti-communism meaning COMMUNISM THE WAY IT HAS BEEN IMPLEMENTED IN THE REAL WORLD then you have a point or ten because most times it has betrayed its own roots (really, marx would have been horrified at basically everything **communist** regimes have implemented) and it has been a tool of oppression/communist dictators have killed thousands of people same as their fascist counterparts and so on. at the same time, if you like marx then you like COMMUNISM AS A CONCEPT THE WAY IT WAS ORIGINALLY INTENDED, as in, you like the idea of a society where everyone is equal and not exploited as above. it’s two completely different things - personally I love the idea of communism as marx presented it but I know it’s not viable and I wouldn’t say that stalin or mao were amazing people TM just because they were **communist** (tbh today’s china is like the most un-marxist thing ever soooo). and at the same time I’ll feel free to praise marx to the heavens because he was a genius, came up with an amazing philosophical system which then started irl a lot of good things ie workers’ unions as above and gave the left an ideology to aspire to and because he didn’t advocate for genocide, while I absolutely loathe most applications of communism irl (and in most cases when communist ideals work out it’s in *socialist* countries, not communist ones).

we can also add that kids on tumblr being pro communism most of the time just read ‘communism = equality’ and think OMG AWESOME when they haven’t read marx or a history book so they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about so let’s not even count them into the discussion. but never mind.

tldr: communism as a theory/political ideology the way it was conceived was a good thing and is still a good thing if you take the good parts from it (tbh the US could totally do with some more marxism especially when it comes to reviving workers’ unions, striking when you want things and the likes), never mind that in western countries that were under the US influence post WWII and in european countries pre-WWI communist parties were generally the ones protecting workers/their rights to strike and pushing for leftist policies along with the socialist ones. communism as an actually applied system in the real world is almost always a bad thing because it’s not what marx conceived, it betrays its own roots and I can only understand people who grew up under the ussr when it was a thing (or eastern europe) who loathe communism since a communist regime was what fucked their countries over. (that’s also valid for places like cambodia and NORTH KOREA I mean in theory north korea is *communist* but there’s literally nothing communist about NK.) we can argue about cuba for the next century or so since when it comes to it there’s pros and cons (ie: castro was a dictator? yes, not good, not communist. everyone getting free healthcare and instruction including curing people from other countries? yes, good, marx would have approved. and so on.), but even if you consider cuba the only place where it sort of worked (sort of, because if you ask people who flew cuba they certainly don’t agree and really it’s so complicated only people who studied the situation for years or live there could give an opinion), cuba has eleven million inhabitants and it’s not CHINA or the former USSR, which makes it fairly more manageable to govern. same as I said above: it maybe sort of POSSIBLY worked out not somewhat in a small country. in large countries it’s just not a thing you can reasonably conceive.

so: some people praise marx because marx said a lot of good things, but being uncritically pro-communist means ignoring that communism when implemented (successfully-ish or not) has caused a lot of harm and isn’t that much different from other regimes, and that what marx preached was good for his historical moment and time, not for us, because the second industrial revolution is that and gone. never mind that people who come from communist regimes that hurt their nations or were political dissenters have all rights to be anti-communist, since as stated when applied irl it’s not what marxism preaches. and that said if you praise marx then you should criticize all of the irl applications of communism because marx would balk at pretty much 99% of what *communist* countries ended up being. but like there’s a lot of good in what marx says and that’s why some people say they’re communists - because they like it as a concept and want to make reality what they can of it, not because they approve of stalinism.

hopefully it was clear. xD

#janie rants #communism for ts #to be tagged further later #Anonymous #ask post

[cryptswahili]

No Internet, No Problem: How to Send Bitcoin by Amateur Radio

In an age where governments are trigger happy at censoring or shutting down networks, it is reassuring to know that Bitcoin can operate sans internet. Network censorship, after all, is not some dystopian storyline but a power exercised by many democratic governments across the world. Thankfully, there are solutions that enable people to send and receive bitcoin even in a worst case scenario. For an advanced technology, it turns out that cryptocurrency can get surprisingly low-tech.

Also read: Bitcoin and Weak Frequency Signals: Bypassing Network Censorship With Radio

Send Bitcoin by Radio and Circumvent Network Censorship

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the internet is down. Not because the wifi’s been disconnected: instead, your government has pulled the plug . You’ve no idea when it’ll be back online, and in the meantime, you’re cut off from life as you know it, ranging from contact with loved ones abroad to paying for anything by card. Since society isn’t big on keeping cash these days, and ATMs stock up on only so much paper money at a time, chances are you’ll have to sidestep – or engage in – a few fistfights if you’re to put a meal on the table.

Since bitcoin is, itself, a form of digital currency, it takes a good amount of preplanning to set up a transaction, but in theory, it could still operate even when conventional options are forcefully removed from the equation.

What do –

Greeks Cypriots Venezuelans Argentinians Brazilians Zimbabweans and Ukrainians have in common?

They all woke one day and the banks were shuttered and capital controls were put in place to avoid an economic collapse.

Bitcoin doesn't close

— Jason A. Williams (@JWilliamsFstmed) February 12, 2019

While most of us will hopefully never experience a dystopian world of intermittent internet, the productivity sages remind us that a failure to plan is planning to fail. Knowing how to transact with cryptocurrency in a chaotic world is the sort of knowledge that might just come in handy one day, and in the meantime will make you the most interesting guest at the dinner party.

Depending on the political stability of your geographic location, learning how to send bitcoin without internet could be nothing more than a fun Saturday afternoon science project. Then again, it could provide the way out of a tight spot one day, whether it’s transferring funds to a buddy stuck in the middle of the ocean or bribing a zombie to feast on the coins stored in your brain wallet instead of devouring your brain.

Bitcoin Over Airwaves

2014 saw the earliest mentions of bitcoin being sent via the airwaves. Hamradiocoin was one of the early vanity altcoins, geared at the ham radio industry. While it wasn’t entirely clear why said niche industry needed a dedicated currency, its current $794 market cap – unchanged since May 2017 – adds to crypto’s rich historical arsenal of questionable coins.

But the idea of marrying Marconi and Satoshi was bound to lead to more useful experiments. A step in the right direction saw Finnish company Vertaisvaluutta.fi propose the creation of a P2P half-duplex CB/HAM radio cryptocurrency. Also in Finland, Kryptoradio partnered with a national broadcaster to pilot a cryptocurrency data transmission system that broadcasts bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data via national DVB-T television networks in real time. The project failed to launch its commercial phase, with founder Joel Lehtonen explaining:

The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without internet connectivity.

Come 2018, there was a new experiment in town. Ingredients: Brooklyn-based gotenna, a mobile, long-range, off-grid consumer mesh network, and bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet. A New Zealand developer transported crypto from a distance of 12.6km away, entirely offline, using only a network-disconnected Android phone and four portable antennas. Though as his Twitter recount acknowledges, it took one heck of a prep, including setting up relay stations.

Over the weekend I sent a bitcoin transaction to a relay 12.6km away with no cell network or internet connection. Here's a tweetstorm about how I used @gotenna and @SamouraiWallet to do it

— ℭoinsure (@Coinsurenz) October 16, 2018

Fast forward to this year, and in perhaps the most simplistic effort yet, Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak managed to move BTC some 600km away from Toronto, Canada to Openbazaar co-founder Sam Patterson in Michigan, USA. And in that moment, Bitcoin-by-sky went international.

Advocates for Bitcoin by Air

In 2017, computer scientist Nick Szabo and PhD researcher Elaine Ou delved into the topic at Stanford’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, introducing a research project that proposed tethering bitcoin to radio broadcast to secure consensus proofs using weak signal radio propagation. (View their talk, a copy of the presentation, and our coverage of the event for further information.)

With Novak and Patterson’s latest feat, crypto Twitter went wild. Szabo, showing that he’s still a firm proponent of taking bitcoin skyward, chimed in to congratulate the duo for a successful sendoff that not even a snowstorm could stop.

Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite — just nature's ionosphere. https://t.co/IKCAXGs9fW

— Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) February 12, 2019

How to Send Bitcoin by Radio

As Novak and Patterson have illustrated, you don’t need to overload on gear or make space for satellite storage in your backyard to send bitcoin by air. Accompanying an SDR ham on this quest was nothing more than a 40m 7Mhz antenna and the JS8call application.

While the setup seems simple enough (Google “ham radio for beginners” for a primer), in practice this is probably not something you’ll dive into unless you’re just messing around or, in real life, shit gets real.

Gearing up is as easy as H-A-M

In truth, there are restrictions aplenty when it comes to sending bitcoin by radio.

First off, legalities. To stay on the right side of the law, some countries require you to be a licensed ham operator, and even then you’re unable to send any encrypted messages or use the airwaves for commercial purposes unless so licensed. At this point, it’s not yet clear which governmental task force will join the SEC and co in clamping down on illegal apocalyptic bitcoin-via-radio transactions.

Since legal restriction is the mother of all invention, Novak and Patterson circumvented this by broadcasting their experimental, non-commercial wallet encryption sendoff via public cypher.

Then there’s prepping it all. For this to be a viable – albeit last resort – solution in an actual nail-bite situation, sender and receiver would have to set it all up in advance. Novak and Patterson were able to execute their experiment by communicating and collaborating in lieu of the transfer, using a brain wallet. (The brainwallet, which is simply storing your mnemonic recovery phrase in your brain, is not to be confused with the recent more nefarious version – the deathwallet popularized by CEO Gerald Cotten who took the keys to Quadriga’s crypto kingdom to his grave.)

Thus, if you’re going to use this as a backup plan for when stuff hits the fan, you’d better secure a right-hand wo/man and a fool-proof project management blueprint while things are still web-friendly. If this process seems as though it walked off the pages of a James Bond novel, yes. It’s decidedly more involved than a mere intra-wallet send-off.

However, if you’re gung-ho on testing out alternative bitcoin transports, don’t let the naysayers stop you. Yours might well be the next proof of concept the interweb is waiting for. The blog Better Off Bitcoin, for one, offers a run-through protocol tutorial.

Scalability Is a Big Bottleneck

Clearly, scaling is a non-issue here. For the foreseeable future, sending bitcoin by radio happening unless it absolutely has to.

According to Australian crypto trader Boss Cole, “As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are moving into the future, it is an interesting concept to think about what would happen if we instead went into the past. It is possible and easy to transfer Bitcoin without an internet connection, but it is not convenient. There are a number of projects working on this with satellites or their own infrastructure, however at the time of this writing they are not “popular” simply because there is no real demand.” He continues:

In the case of government censorship, the infrastructure would change rapidly. If we were dealing with serious problems, the infrastructure would follow. Because it is possible. If we went into the dark ages, the main way to transfer Bitcoin would be transferring private keys between individuals. This would be simple, but not convenient.

Not even extreme weather conditions can deter the determined from sending bitcoin via radio waves

So while it’s theoretically possible to take to the skies and send crypto wallets around the world and all the way into space, DIY bitcoin ionosphere amateurs won’t soon be sending satoshis to the dark side of the moon any time soon.

Why Radio Wave Transmission Might Be Necessary

We tend to associate worst-case scenarios in which the main character has nothing but a walkie talkie and an old ham lying around with Hollywood’s portrayal of doomsday.

Yet for unstable regimes like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, internet blackouts were how 2019 got its start. In reality, network censorship is an all-too-common control tool for many governments around the world.

India leads the pack with 288 shutdowns between 2012 and 2019, with 134 instances in 2018 alone. The Middle East and Africa aren’t strangers to forcing citizens into offline mode, either.

Good luck stopping information across borders when all you need is 40 watts of power, a long piece of wire, a radio and a computer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 12, 2019

Under the Communications Act 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the U.K. has an internet kill switch, which could be enforced in light of a serious threat such as a significant cyber attack. The U.S. has had, for the past 85 years, the power to kill electronic communications under the Communications Act of 1934. And with talks of Russia considering a test run to decouple from the global internet, we risk taking a rude awakening if we assume the world’s 72,558 Google searches every second to be an unquestionable given.

Bitcoin for Every Situation

It might have taken a mini-library worth of code to get NASA astronauts to the moon, but sending bitcoin there won’t be nearly as hard. All you need is a radio. Okay, that and a moon rocket. But the point is, this new technology can be just as comfortable – or accessible – even when when the tech you’re using is decidely old school.

Peer-to-peer networks built on the internet have a special allure because of the sense of resilience they have without a central point of failure. A bit misleading: they are really built on many computers and the connections between them.

Not true with radios. True peer to peer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 16, 2019

Bitcoin might have been invented on the internet for the internet, but it can straddle both the digital and analog worlds. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin walk the line between money under the mattress and cash in the bank. As these trailblazers show, bitcoin can straddle those worlds not only functionally, but also technically. Thanks to the efforts of the pioneers profiled here, crypto has shown it can survive in even the most challenging environments.

Sending bitcoin by radio isn’t quite carrier pigeon, but in tech terms it might as well be. Which, says crypto developer John Villar, is “probably the most low end you can get before smoke-signaling a brain wallet.”

Can you envision a situation in which you might have to send bitcoin by ham radio? What other ways could you picture cryptocurrency being transferred without the internet? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

The post No Internet, No Problem: How to Send Bitcoin by Amateur Radio appeared first on Bitcoin News.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

[flauntpage]

A Pro/Rel Column – Why American Soccer Can Exist Without It

I’ll start by saying that I don’t hate promotion and relegation. I can’t dislike a system that rewards success, punishes failure, and provides opportunity. Stripped down to the simplest of explanations, it sounds very American.

My stance has always been that domestic soccer has unique challenges and considerations that aren’t necessarily fixed by structural changes to the pyramid. There’s no magic bullet here, as some would have you think.

What we get is a noxious clash of ideas with a lot of shouting and idiocy on both sides. Pro/rel advocates froth and whine on social media while those of us on the other end of the spectrum, or somewhere in the middle, are guilty of engaging in the pissing contest instead of ignoring the trolls and seeking out rational thought instead. Just like Capitol Hill, moderate voices and measured takes are often drowned out.

So I think the premise of the column is this –

American soccer doesn’t necessarily need promotion and relegation. I think we can be successful in our current setup, with a closed league, steady growth, and a soft salary cap that promotes pseudo-parity in lieu of top-heavy foreign-framed systems. Let’s fix MLS before tearing the whole thing down and starting over.

The main pro/rel argument basically suggests that opening the pyramid will provide opportunities for smaller teams and result in widespread investment at lower levels due to the removal of the ceiling that limits those clubs. Would-be owners who can’t buy in to Major League Soccer can start a lower division team that has unlimited potential for upward growth. Lesser division one teams, like your Philadelphia Union, can’t be cheap and lazy, or else they go down.

Sounds good in theory, right? Fresh blood and motivation. Jay Sugarman, one of the worst sports owners on this side of the Atlantic, would be punished for his thriftiness with D2 relegation, which would have happened in 2015 after the Union finished with 37 points and a 10-17-7 record. Down goes boring Philly, up comes the exciting New York Cosmos. We punish the underachiever and reward success.

Nothing wrong with that on paper. My stance has always been predicated on four things:

1. There are organic ways to remove owners and executives in a closed system

During that 2015 Union season, the Sons of Ben marched to the gates of PPL Park carrying a coffin with an image of CEO Nick Sakiewicz inside. Painted on the casket were the words “serial franchise killer,” a reference to Sakiewicz’s time with the Tampa Bay Mutiny and New York Red Bulls, the former of which folded in 2001 and the latter which found little on-field success.

This was a grassroots protest from the same fan body that lobbied for an MLS franchise in the first place, starting with a group that gathered in McGillin’s Olde Ale House to discuss ways to generate interest in Philadelphia soccer. In a way, that 2015 protest was a natural extension of the process that started the Union, which was organic and fan-generated. Sakiewicz was removed at the end of the season and Earnie Stewart was installed as the club’s first Sporting Director.

Two years later, Union fans have come to realize that the failures were not entirely Sakiewicz’s fault, as the team continues to struggle after his departure. But the takeaway here is that fans were able to influence the front office even in a closed system with no built-in punishment for under-performance. And if they’re fed up with the team in 2018, they can simply stop showing up, stop buying tickets, and stop buying merchandise. The consumer always has the power, whether he or she realizes it or not.

Another point is that relegation doesn’t automatically mean that ownership and front office problems are solved. Take Hull City, for instance, who are currently in 19th place in the English Championship. Owner Assem Allam bought the team in 2010, saw it promoted twice and relegated twice, and tried to change the name at the same time, angering the entirety of his fan base with one weird decision. Here’s a team on its fifth manager in two years and now trying to stay afloat in the second division after seven seasons of turbulence.

How about Francesco Becchetti, who took Leyton Orient from the verge of the Championship to division five?

Or Ellis Short, the guy who oversaw Sunderland’s descent into irrelevance? What about Mike Ashley and Karl Oyston?

Relegation isn’t an auto-fix for ownership issues. There’s no guarantee that Jay Sugarman or Stan Kroenke would leave town if their clubs took the drop. They can drag it down even further into the mud.

As it stands, their franchises continue to increase in value with the addition of new MLS expansion teams, so they can simply sit on their rear ends and watch their investment grow. Sugarman paid $20-30 million in an expansion fee back in 2010 and that fee is now up to $150 million. I don’t know how much that value drops if Philly takes the fall. If anything, the asking price probably remains relatively high in a system where that franchise can potentially go back up. I think it’s a wash.

What the league can do is guide ownership from within. MLS can certainly pressure cheaper owners to add new partners or increase their financial profile, or run them out entirely ala Chivas USA. You can tweak cap and roster rules to price them out. Look for MLS to start turning the screws a bit once expansion finishes.

Trust me on that one, per sources that have been spot on in the past. I’ve spoken to numerous people who say MLS HQ isn’t exactly thrilled with Union ownership right now. Sugarman sits on the expansion committee and, theoretically, the value of his club should level off at least somewhat when we get to 28 teams.

2. Pro/rel creates top heavy leagues and alternative boardroom objectives

Look at the Premier League table right now, where Manchester City is 13 points clear with a +49 goal differential after 20 games. Might as well hand them the trophy.

They’ve been a pleasure to watch, a team with 18 straight wins and 0 losses this entire campaign. They’re having historic success this season.

Next up is the clump of Manchester United, Chelsea, Tottenham, Liverpool, and Arsenal, who are sort of jockeying for Champion’s League positions. Going into this season, I think those were the six clubs that really had a chance to win anything in the Premier League, which is usually the case every year.

What, then, are squads like Stoke and Watford playing for? 10th place? Moral victories?

The problem with a pro/rel setup that doesn’t have a salary cap* is that only a handful of teams can really achieve anything, while the mid-table clump is irrelevant and the bottom feeders are just trying to stay afloat. That creates auxiliary goals for smaller clubs who aren’t even necessarily trying to win, they’re just trying to remain in the division. And maybe that’s a success for a small team like Huddersfield, which is trying to make progressive forward steps after years in the lower divisions.

But the nice thing about American sports is that everybody, theoretically, is pulling a Herm Edwards. You play to win the game. Sure, teams like Toronto and Seattle are obviously going to be favored to beat New England and Colorado, but at least the lesser MLS teams still have a chance at the playoffs in September and October. This doesn’t turn into a two-team race between Barcelona and Real Madrid seven games in.

For starters, eight different clubs have won MLS Cup in the last 10 years. La Liga has three different winners in that time frame. Same thing in Italy, where Juventus has won six Scudettos in a row. Same thing in… Germany, too, where Bayern Munich has won the last five. In Turkey, only one non-Istanbul club has won the Super Lig dating back to 1984.

1984!

In the prem, it’s United, City, Chelsea, and… Leicester!

We love Leicester. What a story, right? It’s the prime example pro/rel advocates use when explaining why their system makes more sense than what we currently have.

Problem is, a story like Leicester only comes around once in a blue moon. Chapecoense doesn’t happen often enough. There’s a big gap between Eibar and the Spanish top-five. Go around the world and you’ll find that these “small club” success stories are too often drowned out in top-heavy leagues with oil sheikh and Russian oligarch owners. It results in some high quality football at the expense of table slots 5 through 20, which are ultimately pointless unless you care about the Europa League. What we’re trying to build here is not a three-team snooze-fest, but a league with parity and competition.

Let’s take a look at the last nine years of Ukrainian football:

See a pattern there?

I enjoy the MLS system, where every season 10-12 teams can win a trophy. Our league has plenty of ridiculous issues, which requires a separate column, but I like the idea that squads are playing to win hardware, or at least make the playoffs, as opposed to “just staying up” or being satisfied with a mid-table finish.

Let’s check in with the Crystal Palace boardroom:

“Well lads, we finished in 14th place and fired our manager, but at least we didn’t go down! Hooray!”

I don’t like the direction the Philadelphia Union are going in, but I can appreciate the fact that they don’t need to bring in Sam Allardyce to save themselves from the drop. They’re at least committed to a young manager and not going to bail after four months to bring in a “relegation specialist.” Say whatever you want about Jim Curtin, who isn’t the best example for this story, but we can’t be canning coaches at the rate of Swansea City. Caleb Porter went from 1st place in the west, all the way down to 6th, then won a title. Bob Bradley will have a chance to build something at LAFC, not get run out of town at a shit club after 11 games.

Honestly, a lot of this just boils down to preference. Do you like open leagues with unrestricted spending that results in three to four clubs having a real title-winning shot? Or do you like a closed league with restrictions that close the gap from one to 22? MLS, of course, is not the best product out there, but it’s certainly more competitive and interesting, and at least I know that there’s something to play for in October, November, and December. Truthfully, I’m just bored with the Premier League and Serie A and La Liga, where it’s the same shit year after year after year, save for one enjoyable season of Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez. I watch the games and enjoy them in a vacuum, but the title-races leave a lot to be desired.

Now, does pro/rel automatically come with the removal of the salary cap? No, I don’t think so. But are we going to open the pyramid and then tell Miami FC that they can’t spend more than Jacksonville? You can’t cap teams while asking them to be ambitious investors at the same time. The MLS salary cap is waaaaaay too low right now and that has to change. We haven’t even scratched the surface, and we have to get rid of at least 50% of the absurd MLS roster building rules if we’re going to keep moving forward. Again, another article entirely, but I can’t get behind pro/rel entirely until I feel like we do everything in our control to maximize what we currently have. It’s like tearing down a building that’s only half-way finished.

(*I put the asterisk there because, yea, you can go above the MLS cap with a couple of designated player signings. That’s why it’s a soft cap with pseudo-parity instead of a true cap like the NFL or NBA.)

3. We’re not financially stable, yet

Let’s say the Philadelphia Union take the drop. Say it happened in 2015.

Now you’ve got a division two team playing in a half-full, eight-year-old stadium in one of Pennsylvania’s poorest cities. Chester is under a state-mandated recovery program (Act 47) and already pulling from other revenue sources to cover for the $275,000 annual shortfall in county bond payments. The stadium lease doesn’t expire until 2040. The pending litigation over waterfront property (and its valuation) takes a turn. How many people are driving down there to watch the Union play the Richmond Kickers? Every painfully small step to improve that area goes straight into the toilet if Philly goes down.

In a perfect world of Capitalism, you let it fail, right? Just let the market do its thing, which is what our economy is predicated on. That sounds good in theory, but the cost is just too much here. People lose their jobs. The city loses money. Fans stop showing up. The Philadelphia Inquirer pulls Jon Tannenwald off the Union beat to go do high school football instead. 2,000 season ticket holders decide not to renew and the front office lays off 10 sellers. Academy investment is cut back and Bethlehem Steel hemorrhages more money in year number three. It’s like a devastating backwards version of Reaganomics, where nothing is really trickling in either direction.

We don’t have 75 years of history to create a diehard core of supporters who will stick with the club through something like that. If the Eagles go down, no problem. If the Union go down, I don’t know if they survive. This is a 10-year old team and long-term project that already faces incredible struggles, some of which are self-inflicted and some that aren’t, namely the construction of a soccer-specific stadium in a less-than-desirable area during the worst part of the economic recession. Good job by Ed Rendell on that one.

Furthermore, potential buyers know they’re going to take a short term loss on an investment that might not even pan out if the Union never make it back to D1. Sure, they’d probably slap around Charleston and Pittsburgh and remain in the top-half of the table, but there’s never any guarantee here. Portsmouth and Blackburn are where right down? League One? Where’s Charlton?

Here they are:

PROGRESS |

2013: Charlton finish 9th in @SkyBetChamp.

2014: Duchatelet buys Charlton.

2016: Championship relegation.

2017: 13th place finish in League 1.

December 17: Promotion campaign starts to falter, #cafc can’t fill the substitutes bench for a league fixture. http://pic.twitter.com/QqECqGFMeN

— Charlton Athletic {…} FC (@ParodyCharlton) December 26, 2017

People always talk about the rise of new clubs but ignore the fall of once-great clubs. Charlton has been around for more than 100 years and now languishes in the third division while their fans suffer:

“Next on 60 Minutes, it’s the side of pro/rel that they don’t want you to see. I’m Lesley Stahl and I’ll take you to Southeast London, where one of England’s historic clubs is now total shite.”

Is there enough money out there to provide a parachute payment that would sustain an MLS drop? I don’t know, but that same infusion is basically labeled as allocation money within our closed system. It’s all coming from the same source, I just don’t know how much you would need to keep these clubs afloat.

If Wall Street banks were “too big to fail,” then MLS clubs are too fragile to fail, at least the one that plays here. You’re trying to make inroads in the country’s fourth largest television market, not risk the entire thing falling apart. We’ve already taken major backward steps from 2011 until now, with local TV ratings dropping below 1.0 and a slight dip in attendance. The Union have become more and more irrelevant and demoting them to D2 ain’t gonna help.

For years, Major League Soccer’s success was built on the process of slow growth and steady expansion. Seattle came in. Toronto came in. Vancouver and Montreal came in. One or two teams every year or every other year. These are nascent and vulnerable clubs. The fallacy here is that every division one team is some established juggernaut, which is certainly not true. Philly is a venture. The club didn’t even have practice fields or a training complex until two years ago. They used to drive to a public park to train. Now we’re pulling the rug out and jeopardizing a decade of (slow) development in a difficult soccer market just so division five Traverse City can get a shot? Do we want Capitalism or Socialism? What exactly are we looking for here?

Overall MLS attendance has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. TV ratings aren’t amazing, but they’re better than they were. This league has grown by leaps and bounds, but don’t let the success of Atlanta and Portland fool you. There are a ton of challenges for numerous “big market” teams, especially on the eastern seaboard. Revenue needs to increase, our TV deals need to be stronger, we have to do a better job of attracting casual fans, and we have to keep improving the product and create some stability before we risk it with structural changes. 1,500 fans might work in Utica, but it’s not gonna work in Philly. We can’t start turning our attention to smaller auxiliary markets until we gain a foothold in places like Boston, Dallas, New York, Washington, and Chicago. That’s how we negotiate better broadcasting deals and get more eyeballs on the product. As someone who worked in television for nine years, I can tell you that division one Shreveport does nothing at the bargaining table. But if the Chicago market, with 3.4 million TV homes, tunes in to a Sunday afternoon Fire game against Seattle, then partners are willing to sign off on bigger and better deals.

On the bottom end, we need to get teams like Harrisburg (now Penn FC) out of baseball parks and into stable situations. We need to stop sharing college stadiums and we need to continue building on the positives at the USL level. A lot of lower level teams simply do not have the infrastructure and business setup to be viable at division one. MLS is only 22 years old, yet lower division teams that have played less than five seasons are ready for promotion? The cart is way out in front of the horse here.

We’re only just starting to find our feet.

4. You are not entitled to anything

You know what’s more American than a free market economy? Earning your spot at the table.

Sorry, but you don’t deserve a shot to play with the big boys simply because you started a division nine soccer team that plays in a borrowed middle school stadium.

“We want the shit we don’t have and we want it for free!”

It doesn’t work that way. I worked graveyard shift producing the 5 a.m. news in Augusta, Georgia before I earned the opportunity to work at a bigger television station and make more money. I didn’t come out of college demanding $55,000 and a nine to five gig at Action News.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some apologist for the GOP or the “one-percent,” but there has to be a modicum of respect for the owners that took a leap on Major League Soccer back in 1996 and got us to where we are today. Yes, that includes Bob Kraft, who is terribly absent in 2017 but played an enormous role back in the day. That includes Phil Anschutz and Lamar Hunt and everybody else who got this thing off the ground.

If you don’t like it, you work against it. NASL pushed MLS but ultimately blew it. Cross-league jockeying creates competition that forces rivals to up their game. That’s how our economy works. Don’t like Verizon? Go to Comcast. Don’t like Comcast’s horrendous customer service? Cut the cord and stream the game on your Chrome Book. Don’t like your Chrome Book? Buy a Mac.

That’s America. It’s not about free handouts, it’s about making a product that’s bigger and better and more desirable than the other person’s product. And when you fail, sue the shit out of someone! Minnesota and Montreal went to MLS because it meant financial and competitive stability. Carolina, Tampa, and Ottawa saw a path forward in a smarter and less bombastic USL. The NASL shot itself in the foot with a lack of focus and poor expansion strategies (among many other things), then pointed the finger at the USSF instead of looking in the mirror.

And if we want to go down the road of, “well, the U.S. Soccer is a corrupt monopoly that favors MLS,” then go out and lobby for one of the candidates currently running for USSF President. Go be a part of the democratic process and make your case. There are pro/rel candidates out there who can change the game if they win the job. This is your opportunity make your voice heard. We’re still a pay-to-play sport that caters to suburban white kids with money. We need a national team coach. The women’s team isn’t being treated the same as the men’s team. U.S. Soccer has a million problems, but not all of them are directly tied to whether or not we have pro/rel at the professional level.

Just don’t suggest that the American soccer media, which is basically a rag tag group of part-timers, is “in the bag” for MLS or U.S. Soccer. I made less than $25,000 in eight years of writing about soccer ($3,125 annually) and never received a paycheck from MLS headquarters. I think I speak for most writers when I say that my motives were to put something on the resume and do a bit to hopefully grow the game in this country. I didn’t spend Saturday nights in Chester to pad my bank account, I was down there to hopefully play a small role in pushing the Union in a market that traditionally only watches the “four major North American sports.” I’d be flattered to receive bung offers but they just haven’t come. There’s no secret conspiracy going on here, so enough with the accusations of “collusion” and “tyranny” and all of the conspiratorial melodrama.

People with truly productive pro/rel opinions are being done a disservice by the tinfoil Twitter personalities. These guys claim to speak for the movement but they’re really just faux guerrillas fighting a contrarian war against the “establishment.” It’s like Occupy Wall Street, which started out as a protest against, well, Wall Street, then slowly morphed into a catch-all demonstration for the grievance of the day.

Walk away from these people and you’ll see the conversation open up. You can’t make outrageous accusations and then act surprised when the vitriol is reciprocated by myself and others.

Can it ever work?

Sure, pro/rel could work here, but it’s a monumental project. You’re talking about 100+ clubs spread out over a massive geographic region that includes two countries. Are we doing single-table or playoffs? Spring and Fall seasons? FIFA calendar? Is Canada on board? MLS is already on a seven-month, 34 game schedule built to accommodate weather, travel, and the existence of competing sports.

With the partnership between USL and MLS, people talk about doing a controlled, two-division pro/rel system after expansion is completed. I think that’s a start, but the problem there is that a lot of USL clubs are farm teams for MLS squads. Bethlehem Steel exists solely to provide minutes for academy kids and future Union signings, not to win trophies and make money. The team plays in a borrowed college stadium that has no lights. It’s funded entirely by Keystone Sports and Entertainment.

Now, compare that to teams like Charleston and Cincinnati, who have no affiliate and are not owned by a parent club? What now?

If you’re going to do pro/rel, I think you start with these four clumps:

Major League Soccer clubs

independent USL clubs

NASL leftovers and folded teams

USL clubs owned by MLS teams (Steel, NYRB 2, etc)

I don’t know what you do with the fourth grouping. Bring back the MLS reserve league? No idea. I like the idea of playing double-headers where, for example, Bethlehem Steel can get a 90 minute run out against Orlando City B after the senior teams finish their game. That might be a solution.

Then, if you take the first two groupings there, throw #3 a bone, and split the country in half, you’d get something like this:

West

East

It’s arbitrary. I’m just flying by the seat my pants here. But you get the idea, right?

I like four divisions split into two halves of the country, because it cuts down on travel and creates more meaningful games in smaller geographic regions. You’d play a 30 game schedule from March to September, with two teams relegated and two teams promoted every season. You could hand out a trophy for winning your regular season, then do a four to eight team playoff in October between eastern and western teams and award another trophy there. This all coexists with the U.S. Open Cup and Canadian Championship, so it’s basically placing more value on the regular season while still throwing out two more trophies to claim.

Maybe NPSL clubs or new franchises fill the slots that say “team.” There’s room here to add more, but I don’t know where a squad like Reading United fits in. They play at Exeter High School and are an incredibly small operation. Even if that team is promoted to D2 or even D1, that market doesn’t move the needle. Are we closing this off at four divisions in two regions or going further down the pyramid? I don’t know, but I think we need 8 to 10 more years of stability before traveling down this road.

It’s a start, though. I think something like this could work. More rivalry games, easier road trips for fans and media, and single tables that could still theoretically operate with a salary cap. You’ve got possible expansion from 16 teams per bracket, to 18, then up to 20, with room for new blood in ownership. Existing owners will never sign up for anything that could harm their investment, so they give them a five-year window to cash out before we install the new system.

The biggest struggle I have with pro/rel is that I feel like there has to be bridge here to involve investors who want to play a role, people dissimilar from Riccardo Silva and Dennis Crowley, who just want a piece of the pie that they didn’t bake.

That’s the important thing here, we’re selling ourselves short by excluding people who have good intentions and something tangible to provide. I joke about 500 fans showing up to a division four soccer game in Altoona, but we want these people on our side. We have enough obstacles trying to attract the Philly tough guy who could give a shit about the Union but walks around wearing a Chelsea kit. It’s counter-intuitive to divide soccer fans in this country when we already face an uphill climb against NFL and MLB traditionalists.

Right now I think we have four competing factions:

MLS fans

pro/rel NASL types

white Americans who watch foreign soccer but not MLS

1st/2nd generation immigrants who watch foreign soccer, but not MLS (think Mexican-Americans and Liga MX fans)

It’s ridiculous that soccer in this country features multiple groups of fans with contrasting opinions and interests, and that’s the priority here. We need to pull these groups together and find some common ground before we start working on the 65-year-old Phillies fan. He or she is probably a lost cause anyway, but we’re trying to grow the game here with soccer people on entirely different pages.

I don’t like going to bat for folks like Bob Kraft, but I do respect what they did for MLS in the late nineties. And I don’t want to dismiss investors at lower level clubs with good intentions, I just want to weed out the leeches who want a free spot at someone else’s table. I think pro/rel provides opportunity and forces lazy owners to spend, but I also don’t like top-heavy leagues with a lack of true competition. I appreciate stories like Leicester City while also being concerned about the future of a Bolton or Blackpool.

Each system has its own merits, and a lot of this, as I said before, just comes down to preference. Right now, I think we can be successful by improving what we currently have and building on a competitive and interesting league, instead of taking a huge risk by tearing down 22 years of progress and starting from scratch.

          A Pro/Rel Column – Why American Soccer Can Exist Without It published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv