Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Re-reading the Mists of Avalon: When No Means No

    I am writing a series of posts about my attempt to re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the terrible things we know about the author Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). The story has now advanced considerably and although it wasn’t my original intention in this re-reading, I feel I am able to glean a little bit of insight into why MZB was able to write a strongly “feminist” story with huge influence, while also being a seemingly deeply committed paedophile. Here i will discuss a little about what I think her story tells us. Past posts in the series:

    I hope to follow up with a discussion of why we liked this story when we were young, a brief discussion of MZB’s intense homophobia, and an assessment of the difference between male and female characters in the story. But for now I will briefly discuss what I think we can learn about MZB’s philosophy on child abuse from between the lines of this story.

    Trigger warning: This post is going to discuss the politics, sociology and history of rape, and is necessarily going to have to involve detailed discussion of the topic. I’ll try to keep it dry, but if this seems like it might be a bit much for you, you might want to stop here. For those not reading onward, I give my conclusion first, and then explain the reasoning.

    Summary

    This is the tl;dr for those who don’t want to read an extended discussion of the history and sociology of sexual abuse. Basically, I think that MZB understands and is fully cognizant of the principle of consent, and thinks that sex without consent is wrong. But in circumstances where the victim either is not capable of understanding consent, or due to social and cultural forces is not able to give consent, she reverses our understanding of the concept. In these circumstances, where consent cannot be given, she believes rape cannot occur. To MZB, for a person to be a victim of rape they have to be capable of resisting or saying no to sex. If they don’t understand sex and consent or society is structured in such a way that consent is not possible, they have not been raped. MZB does not see children as capable of consent – in fact I think she sees them as a kind of animal, under the control of an adult master, and it’s possible she doesn’t think children are even sentient – and so she thinks the sexual abuse of children is a natural consequence of adult desire, which cannot harm children. This explains her long-standing support for her husband’s child abuse, and her victimization of her own children, in which she very much treated them as objects under her control rather than independent living people. Below, I explore the reasons I developed this theory.

    Three powerful moments in the story

    There are a couple of scenes in the books which either serve to drive the plot forward or give an insight into the sexual politics of the story. Three crucial scenes are:

    • Arthur’s pagan king-making ritual, in which he and his sister Morgaine are tricked into having sex with each other (even though they’re basically children), and Morgaine becomes pregnant with his child. Neither Arthur nor Morgaine consider this to be rape, and the entire narrative thrust and tone of the story is that the only bad part of this was the fact that they were brother and sister
    • Gwenhwyfar is married to Arthur in an arranged marriage, after which she spends her life being fucked by him to try and produce heirs, even though her true love is Lancelet. At no point in the story does she or anyone else consider this to be institutionalized or organized rape and her only complaint about it is that maybe Arthur doesn’t love her because she was delivered to him as a secondary consideration to his primary coronation present, which was a hundred horsemen
    • Gwenhwyfar is raped by her “brother” Meleagrant, who claims rulership of her inherited lands after her father Leodegranz dies, and plans to make her his consort and thus claim the right of kingship. This is physically violent altercation in which he beats her and forces her, everyone in the story considers this to be rape and Morgaine additionally thinks Gwenhwyfar considers it to be her fault because in her christian religious viewpoint women always deserve to be mistreated

    I also reported earlier that in the first part of the story there are many scenes in which children are depicted as sexually active and curious, and the basic assumption of the story is that having sex with these children is natural and while lascivious and possibly unsavoury there is nothing about the process which is bad for the children.

    From the various accounts of the relationships in the story we can establish some themes of sexual and personal agency in the story. First let’s consider the case of Gwenhwyfar, in the context of how fantasy writers and readers typically interpret the institution of arranged marriage in their medieval worlds.

    Arranged marriage and consent in fantasy literature

    Most fantasy literature that is set in identifiably medieval settings that are both culturally and technologically medieval establishes a cultural milieu in which, at least among wealthy and noble families, arranged marriage is the norm and women are married into families for political reasons with the sole goal of producing heirs, usually male. Of course there are stories that subvert this fundamental process, and fantasy tales that reject it or – as I think is the case with Game of Thrones, critique it – but this process is common to fantasy stories and I think is put there because it reflects the understanding that a modern liberal audience has of the sexual politics of that period. MZB’s book is no different, and it is very explicit throughout the story that young women are to be married off in politically convenient ways, and their primary role in their new families is to breed. Arthur even expresses this openly in an argument with Gwenhwyfar when, to try and reassure her that he genuinely does love her and doesn’t see her as just some baggage that came with his horsemen, he points out to her that if he really didn’t love her he would put her aside for a “brood mare”. Much of the complexity of the relationship between Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet revolves around the fact that Arthur isn’t willing to give up on his wife even though she is not discharging the single purpose of her marriage to him, which is not to love him, or even to give him sexual pleasure, but to give him an heir.

    The modern feminist understanding of this system is that it is one of organized, systematic rape, sexual slavery and human trafficking, in which women have no agency or freedom and are essentially chattel to be traded for political gain. At the time MZB was writing the second wave of feminists were critically reassessing the history of marriage, with feminists like Betty Friedan describing modern marriage as a kind of prison or trap for women, and feminists like Kate Millett and some thinkers in anarchist and Marxist feminism linking the institution of marriage to prostitution. While the ordinary, every day lives of women in these medieval marriages were, obviously, characterized by small acts of resistance, the kindness of the men they were married to and various forms of accommodation and acceptance, these human nuances should not be allowed to distract us from the fundamental structure of the medieval institution, at least as it is envisaged in popular fiction and fantasy. It was an organized and systematized form of human trafficking, in which women were sold – often as children – to be used sexually and biologically and discarded if they did not provide at least one of these two services.

    I don’t know if MZB was aware of the feminist critique of the modern or primitive institutions of marriage that was becoming widespread and controversial at the time of her writing, but there is no sign in her writing that she has any understanding or concern for this critique. There is no character in her story who speaks the way Cersei does in Game of Thrones[1], for example, who openly criticizes the institution into which she was forced in explicitly feminist terms, and contrasts the agency and freewill of her affair with her brother with the brutality and inhumanity of her marriage to Robert. The primary complaint or concern that any woman in the novels has about her marriage is that she might get a coarse or ugly man, or that she hasn’t got the man she wants. For example when Morgaine conspires with Elaine (young, pretty, ready to marry) to seduce Lancelet, she warns her that marriage isn’t a bed of roses, especially if married to a man who really loves someone else, and Elaine replies that at least if she marries Lancelet she’ll be getting a handsome man. She doesn’t offer any implicit or explicit critique of the institution overall[2], or express any desire not to marry – she just accepts that she must, and since she has access to a witch she decides to make sure her husband is handsome. Morgaine – the primary voice of the author and one of the two main representatives of modernity in this story – also offers no criticism of the institution, only strategies to bend the rules. Gwenhwyfar, who is in love with Lancelet, never complains that she had her agency or sexual consent taken by the decision of her dad to give her away like a horse to Arthur – her only concern is that Arthur doesn’t want her. Morgaine, reflecting on the marriage, observes that Gwenhwyfar has spent her life being ploughed by the man she doesn’t truly love, but just accepts this aspect of the institutions of the time.

    Children and consent

    There are many instances in the first half of this story of children having sex, either with each other or with adults, and the difference in tone and attitude towards this is noticeable. Children are presented as having just appetites, not really feelings, though these appetites may persist into adulthood and become strong desires (as with Morgaine and Lancelet, for example, or Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet). When children have sex or seek sex they – especially the girls – are the instigators rather than the recipients of the attention, and are presented as voracious and persistent in their appetites. The description of their behaviour makes them seem more like animals than people, and their appetites like fundamental, simple biological urges rather than complex emotional processes. Even when sex happens to the main characters when they’re children – as in when Morgaine and Arthur have sex in the king-making – it is essentially natural and unfettered by emotion or guilt or morality. At the end of the scene, in the morning after their second bout of sex when Arthur realizes he has fucked his own sister there is no concern or anger about the fact that a child was forced to have sex – just despair at having broken the taboo on having sex with a family member. The act of this child losing his virginity is even praised, as he says:

    I do not suppose I will ever meet you again … for you are a priestess and dedicated to the Goddess. But I want to say thsi to you – … you were the very first. No matter how many women I may have, for all my life I will always remember you and love you and bless you. I promise you that.

    This is not how a modern writer would summarize an act in which a child was tricked into fucking his sister.

    I think the way that MZB writes about sex with children expresses that she does not believe children are able to understand consent, and that to them sex is as natural and normal as any body function, that their desire to express it and enjoy it is natural, and that there is no reason adults should not take advantage of this. In the case of King Lot, he takes advantage of it by fucking any girl he can get his hands on; but he insists on controlling his own children’s natural expression of their sexuality in case they should devalue their virginity or embarrass him in so doing. Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, treats Arthur’s natural sexual expressiveness as an opportunity to bind the two Englands together, and for some cruel adult reason (never properly explained) takes pleasure in making him do this to his own sister – but the only form of cruelty possible in this act is the cruelty of incest, since the idea of an adult having sex with a child or two children having sex with each other is natural and simple. Since they have no independence or adult sentience, they are simply bodies to be played with, and since they are free – as children – of guilt and morality, nothing that they do or that is done to them sexually can be wrong unless it breaks some taboo of the adult world. And the only taboos in the adult world surrounding sex are homosexuality and incest.

    The rape of Gwenhwyfar

    In contrast, when Gwenhwyfar visits her “brother” Meleagrant, her rape is clearly described as a breach of consent, a violent imposition of one man’s will and body on a woman. He beats her, tears her clothes, and then rapes her, and plans to do it again and again until she is pregnant. She expresses clearly that she does not want it, and when she is rescued by Lancelet he does not doubt that she did not want it and resisted it. No one else who learns about it doubts this either – her ability to consent to any man except her husband is crystal clear, widely understood by men and women alike. The only complication – observed only by Morgaine – is that, since she is a devout christian she believes women are the source of all evil and sin, and that she somehow deserved the rape or brought it upon herself and the only way she could be truly free of blame is if she died resisting it. But this is a side point, a mere detail in the unfolding tragedy of Gwenhwyfar’s rape.

    It’s clear, then, that MZB understands and respects the notion of consent, and she extends this even to the adult female villains of her story (as I will describe in another post, I think Gwenhwyfar is the primary villain of this novel). Gwenhwyfar, as an adult, has clear sexual agency, desires and limits – provided she is expressing them with anyone except the man she was sold to, who retains ultimate rights over her body. I think this clear description of adult consent, and the clear excision of that right of consent within the framework of marriage, establishes an important principle underlying MZB’s work: if the social and cultural context strips you completely of the ability to consent, then it is no longer rape, because rape requires the ability to consent. I think this is the clue as to MZB’s paedophilia: a perverse inversion of the modern understanding of consent.

    Conclusion: How MZB inverts the concept of consent

    I think what this means in total is that for MZB if you are intellectually unable to consent because you are a child; or if the socio-political context has stripped away your right to consent so that from birth you have no right to consent, then you cannot be raped. It is a kind of inversion of how we understand consent – especially as it applies to children – in the modern world. Thanks primarily to the work of feminists, sex workers, the gay rights movement and children’s rights activists, we now understand that if someone is unable to consent because they aren’t old enough to make moral judgements (children) or they have no power over their own circumstances (prisoners, slaves, women in medieval Europe as envisaged in fantasy stories) then any sex with these people must be rape. But MZB flips this: if you cannot understand consent, your ability to consent cannot be taken away from you, and so rape cannot happen. A child cannot be raped, because they don’t understand the morality of sex and they don’t have the ability to say yes or no. If they express an animal desire to explore their body with you, or you can trick them into playing with you, you’ve done nothing wrong because they couldn’t understand their right to say yes or no, and they don’t understand morality. The same is true for a wife in Arthur’s England – since the entire social and political milieu strips away her power to say no to marriage, rape cannot happen in marriage. Rape is only possible when choice can be exercised.

    This may sound sick and disturbing to the modern reader but it was actually a pretty common theme running through much of western culture in the 1960s – 1990s. In my post on my experience growing up in Jimmy Savile’s England I describe some of the ways in which British people viewed children and sex, and I think some of this is reflected in MZB’s work. Of course there must be some additional, depraved element to it, since her husband was a voracious, open serial paedophile and she supported him and was to some extent involved in pro-paedophilia activism. But I think at the heart of it must be this principle that where consent is impossible, rape is impossible. You can’t rape animals, children or your wife, because biology, intellectual development, or cultural norms have removed their ability to consent, and rape can only exist when there is a right to consent that can be taken away.

    I wonder to what extent this attitude permeated the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution in the USA; I also wonder to what extent it is an exclusively US/UK principle, somehow related to the way that US libertarians cannot conceive of coercion in the absence of violence. A lot of work was done by feminists in the 1960s – 1990s to establish the principle that sexual coercion wasn’t just physical violence: the concept of “date rape” was invented in the 1980s to extend this principle, and activism on marital rape and intimate partner violence was also intended to ensure that people could defend themselves against coercive structures other than those based on outright violence. Now the concept of coercive control and financial abuse arises naturally from this earlier work. A lot of this material was still in its infancy or undeveloped when MZB wrote these novels, but that doesn’t excuse her: lots of people thought sex with children was wrong when she wrote this book and she knew it because they ostracized her and her husband from Californian SF society because her husband insisted on fucking every kid he met. So she must have been committed to these principles beyond just a casual, negligent kind of disrespect for other people’s rights and she must have known roughly what principles she was expressing when she wrote this book.

    To be fair to MZB[3], other than these subtle hints I cannot read into this novel any special attempt to describe or defend a principle or morality of paedophilia. But it is clear that she thinks that children are sexual creatures whose sexual desires and interests are the right of adults to exploit, and it is also clear that she only believes adults have the ability to consent within narrower confines than we would think of as normal today. A key difference from modern morality is this implicit principle that if you can’t consent you can’t be raped, and I think part of the reason that so many of us didn’t notice how awful that was when we were reading these books decades ago is that this principle was much more normal in our culture then than it was now. For example, when I read these books as a child my father would openly advocate for the right of men to beat and rape their wives, my mother openly believed children who got raped deserved it (she told me so!) and there was a general sense that girls had a precarious virginity that was precious, difficult to defend to adulthood, and in a sense every adult man’s right to take early if the girl “led him on.” So I think we who read these books as kids then, growing up steeped in that culture, would probably not have noticed how awful it is. But now, having grown up and having worked to change that about our own culture, when we look back on these books and re-read them in the light of all the changes we have worked on the society we were raised in, we are shocked by their callousness. At the time though the principles in this book were in many senses just the water we were swimming in.

    I guess the key difference, and the reason that I am re-reading this book, is that MZB and her husband were committed, principled paedophiles, and so she made some effort in the early parts of this book, when the main characters were children or very young adults, to express these principles more explicitly and more openly than many authors steeped in the same culture might have; and at the same time the careful, quite beautiful way she has told the entire story of the Arthurian court from a women’s perspective – coupled with the way the SF community were able to bury her and her husband’s obvious crimes – misled us into thinking these books were a genuinely ground-breaking feminist work.

    In retrospect, it’s a mish-mash of conservative and backward-looking morality tales, centred around the value of virginity, the right of men in a world of men to take what they want, and the power of social norms to so completely obliterate some people’s rights to bodily autonomy that it is not even possible to conceive that they have been violated. That’s not feminism – it’s a morality of violence and power, perfumed and wrapped in lace, adorned with a few baubles of paganism but, at its heart, the same old story of lust, power and the right of kings and men to take what they want.

    Addendum

    If you appreciate my views on science fiction and fantasy writing, please consider reading my fiction at Royal Road.

    Image note: This picture of Gwenhywfar is by Zooombie Grrl on Deviant Art, check her out!

    fn1: Please understand that whenever I reference Game of Thrones I am referencing the tv show, since I haven’t read the book, but assuming that for at least the majority of the show characters like Cersei speak with the voice of the novel, since George RR Martin was involved in writing the show.

    fn2: As an aside, it’s interesting to me that this book was so often described as a “feminist retelling of Arthurian legend” when it so consistently failed to offer any feminist critique of the central medieval institution in the story. There are really only two institutions in this story: the church and the family, expressed through christian marriage, and although she offers some relatively stringent critiques of the former, she never makes any effort to identify the terrible sexism of the institution of marriage that creates the legal, political and social context driving all the primary conflicts in this story! I don’t think it can be considered a feminist retelling of the legend if it doesn’t try to grapple with this part of the story!

    fn3: This woman was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction/fantasy writers of my youth, but now just to write these few words seems foul and grotesque!

  • Abasement and self-respect in the liberal worldview

    An interesting thing is happening this week as Israel enacts its Hannibal Directive on the hostages taken by Hamas, and behaves against all understanding of common decency or the basic principles of international law. Representatives of powerful nations, in some cases the most powerful nation on earth, have been lining up to very loudly declare that there is nothing they can do, and to reaffirm in the blandest possible terms their complete inability to do anything to stop Israel. The most striking example of this is Joe Biden himself, who came away from a meeting with Netanyahu and, with a shrug, said that there was nothing he could do to stop Israel from killing the 10 Americans taken hostage, and it’s all very sad but there’s nothing else he can do.

    In 2011 Joe Biden was Vice President when Barack Obama started a three month bombing campaign of Libya, estimated to have killed about 10,000 people, which fragmented the country and reduced it from one of the richest nations in Africa to a bombed out shell with an ongoing civil war where open-air slave markets are held in once-proud cities. This was done simply to support Libyan rebels against Gaddafi. But somehow there is nothing Obama can do to rein in his client state, whose prime minister is a US citizen and which receives about 15% of its annual defense funding from the USA.

    It’s not credible, is it? It’s not that he can’t rein in Israel – he doesn’t want to. But he can’t say that, since the last 20 years of liberal interventionism have been built on a dishonest foundation of protecting human rights, and human rights concerns are now fundamental to how many Americans – especially young Biden voters – see America and its role abroad.

    This puts states and significant public figures in a bind. Israel plays an essential role in the criminal extractive world order that maintains US dollar hegemony and the stolen wealth of the western European states, but in a modern liberal electorate they can’t admit that, so they need some other way to appease the very real – and good! – conscience of their electorate, while maintaining Israel’s freedom to brutally destroy the lives of its poorest residents. So they fall back on a public spectacle in which they replace their very real power with a performative self-abasement.

    I mean, what country with self-respect allows a nation 3% its size, heavily dependent on foreign aid, surrounded by enemies, indebted to a colonial nation’s gift for its very existence, to tell it no, you have no say in the fate of 10 of your citizens who were abducted by criminals within our borders? No self-respecting leader would allow that to happen. The same is true of the shameful death of Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home, whose death is occasionally celebrated by Israeli soldiers who make pancakes with her face on them. If anything like this happened in one of the “shithole countries” that the US likes to “throw against the wall” every decade or so, there would be an immediate violent response. But when Israel does it suddenly there’s nothing that can be done! Suddenly America’s leaders, politicians, journalists and public figures hang their heads in shame and admit that they’re just weak little nobodies who have to let the Israeli Chads kick sand in their face.

    Of course it is not only Israel and not only in times of crisis that this strange ritual abasement has to take place, and it isn’t just politicians who have to sometimes display a complete lack of self-respect. The most classic case is the decision by the British media to turn the UK’s most principled anti-racist politician, Jeremy Corbyn, into a nasty anti-semite who was going to cause Jews to “flee the country” if elected. Journalists across the country, political leaders, community figures, all spent a year penning columns and making speeches about this ridiculous idea, all in lock step with the idea that he was an anti-semite, without ever producing any evidence or addressing any of the many very clearly anti-semitic views of his opposite number in the Tory party. Isn’t it the job of journalists to report facts, or truth? Suddenly they lost this ability, and all of them together had to give up their professional self-respect and report complete drivel for a year. So too with the Uyghur genocide nonsense, which was made up out of whole cloth by a born-again christian who fantasizes about New York being destroyed in the rapture because it’s full of “bankers” (nudge-nudge wink-wink) and gays. Anyone who knows anything about China and has even a fragment of self-respect, integrity or honour knows this is a completely made-up lie, but for years now it has been repeated in every major media outlet without ever a single shred of evidence. The same thing happened with the Iraq war, compounded by the god-awful scenes of journalists and “pundits” and “public intellectuals” recanting and apologizing for their misleading coverage after the fact and giving us ridiculous “how was I supposed to know?” sob stories about Colin Powell’s transparently dishonest presentation at the UN (but he had powerpoint!) or the dumb 45 minutes story. These people didn’t even have the minimum level of self-respect to acknowledge their role as proxies for empire, and stand up for themselves as honest hacks. No, they abased themselves after the WMDs disappeared (remember “Friedman units”? But that loser is still out there peddling his poison!) and through this “difficult self-reflection” managed to keep their jobs and pretend they’d learnt lessons, just to repeat the same lies from the same liars about Chinese spy balloons or Uyghur genocide or how no, Nazis aren’t really Nazis if they’re Ukrainian.

    This guy is the author of a book called “Jewish pride”?

    Can you imagine having to degrade yourself like this every day? What a strange fetish to have. It could be described as a kind of Orwellian doublespeak I suppose, but doublespeak is primarily an intellectual dissonance, while this is also emotional. Consider the chorus of people reacting in horror and fear to protests in support of Palestine, or people chanting “from the river to the sea!” These people aren’t just abasing themselves in the world of ideas, such as when they repeat unquestioningly the claim that 40 babies were beheaded; they’re also abasing themselves emotionally, suggesting to the world that they are terrified of peaceful protesters, wetting their pants at the thought of ordinary people in the nations that brought us the Iraq war and the Libya shambles maybe not wanting this stuff done in their name anymore. Everyone who has been on an anti-war march knows exactly how peaceful they are; in fact there were large contingents of Jewish peace activists marching as Jews at these demonstrations, and nothing happened. Yet these smol beans have to pretend that they’re so terrified. Imagine being an adult man in the UK in 2023, scared of a peace march? Either you’re a brazen liar, or you have the self-respect of a particularly coddled house cat. This is doublefeel as well as doublespeak, the same abasement that has “gender critical” “feminists” (i.e. women who hate transgender women) being terrified of public bathrooms, and rushing to get men to protect them from anything that might look faintly like a man in a dress – probably leading to the harassment of other women. Somewhere in their dark hearts they know it’s not true, that men don’t need to pretend to be women to harass women, that the greatest danger to women is men they know, etc, but this honest assessment of the world isn’t going to help them destroy a hated minority, so they have to market it with fear instead, a fear so pathetic and unbelievable that the only way to sell it is to publicly abase yourself, to admit to a complete absence of self-respect.

    This was a big thing in the aftermath of 9/11 as well, of course, with crazy reports of non-white people getting kicked off planes because their mathematics looked terroristy, or being racially profiled in their own neighbourhoods because of scared neighbours. This has, of course, always been the go-to US strategy for dealing with black people, but since the turn of the century this doublefeel has become a common part of public discourse. I’m scared; I’m feeling threatened; there are (to use the favourite phrase of “gender critical” “feminists”) “safeguarding issues”. Yes we really do think that homeless people need somewhere to shelter, but the children here will be scared – they should be put somewhere else (where? are you really scared of the poor, hungry and desperate?) Watch as journalists and politicians fall over themselves to criminalize and dehumanize asylum seekers, who could be “terrorists” or “Chinese spies” and who “just don’t fit in.” Remember when France had to ban 14 year old girls at school from wearing Hijab, because the revolutionary state that had survived 200 years and 2000 guillotines could be brought tumbling down by a teenage girl with covered hair?

    This performative abasement is necessary because of the increasingly obvious contradictions in the structure of the liberal worldview. The fundamentals of what the liberal order demands of us – submission to the market, constant social competitiveness, social mobility instead of genuine equality, and the existence of winners and losers in every aspect of our social life – isn’t wanted by anyone except the people already at the top and benefiting from it. So the liberal democracies have attached genuine, important principles – like but not limited to sexual and gender equality, freedom of movement, an end to racial discrimination, freedom of association and expression – to their ideology as if these principles did not exist in any other worldview, and then beaten us relentlessly over the head with these principles at every turn, to distract us from the fundamentals, or – in their more honest moments – to try and convince us we can only have these valued social ideals as part of a package that includes exploitation and greed. But as the exploitation and greed becomes clearer, and the crises that our liberal order cannot fix become ever deeper and more obvious, and as concepts from outside the liberal viewpoint begin to be heard more clearly in our increasingly diverse media landscape, it becomes harder for liberal spokespeople to hide these contradictions. This is why congress people attacked Facebook after the 2016 election, and even more so have tried to ban Tiktok – Tiktok enables western young people to see life in countries outside the imperial core, which means they might see alternatives to the way their own social systems are structured and (worse still!) might begin to see those people as fully human, which would be a disaster for the exploitative international system that holds up the western countries and the in particular the wealth of their elites. These new forms of interaction and exchange of knowledge have enabled concepts like decolonization to enter mainstream social discussion – where in the 1990s you would see Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt, now you can see his face in a Tiktok video with a quote, or some young woman doing her make-up while she explains why he was right. Words, ideas, alternative principles, information from outside the bubble, unfiltered by the guardians of the liberal order, being viewed by ordinary people at the same time as the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the automation crisis and the covid crisis constantly show up how badly our masters are handling everything.

    The answer then is denial, and as the contradictions grow the denial becomes more difficult, more pathetic and more transparently self-serving. The only solution, then, is this performative abasement. And on a deeper level, how can you have self-respect if you defend these things? When you go onto the media and have to repeat your condemnation of Hamas for something they did three weeks ago before you hem and haw about how stopping the things Israel is doing right now is complicated, you know deep in your dark heart that you’re doing dark deeds. Why aren’t you speaking up? People lose their jobs for that! Why is it left to people like Lowkey to speak the truth that we all know, and how embarassing is it for a journalist to be schooled publicly on these things by a rapper? What kind of man must Piers Morgan be, that he was willing to lose his job on morning tv rather than stop condemning Megan Markle for imagined crimes, but he can’t bring himself to condemn Israeli slaughter? Someone like that doesn’t have any self-respect, does he? If he did, he’d get a real job.

    It’s sad of course when you see people you had hopes for, like Australia’s new PM Anthony Albanese or reasonably direct and honest journalists like Owen Jones have to humiliate themselves once they get within a sniff of any influence because the gatekeepers of power demand it. It’s depressing when the people we are depending on to actually fix things – people like Biden or Schultz, who we knew were never going to amount to much but who are the only people in place now to fix things now – fail to do anything, and fall back onto the same mantras of both-sides and it’s-complicated and but-the-economy. But it’s inevitable, because there is no reconciling the crises liberalism has to face with the fact that so many of them are a direct and immediate consequence of its underlying mechanics. In the face of that, you either tear the whole thing down – or the weight of the whole edifice will force you to your knees, begging and pleading and desperately trying to get people to understand these pathetic feelings that everyone knows aren’t real.

    Liberalism is incompatible with self-respect and dignity, neither individually nor collectively. Its final vision is a sniveling journalist abasing themselves before the public over and over as they tell you that nothing can ever get better, and you’re just gonna have to stand there and bear witness to horror as the people they installed and they supported and they propagandized for destroy everything that is good and right in the world – and bursting into tears at how mean you are when you tell them it’s their fault.

  • Liberal Democracies Finally Let the Mask Slip

    Have you noticed things seem to be getting a little worse in the developed world? Australia voting a resounding No on the weakest, most milquetoast concession to acknowledging and amending its colonial crimes, the Middle East’s Only Democracy(TM) going on a wild killing spree, unprecedented global heat at the same time as governments of the world’s richest nations are canceling basic infrastructure plans, reneging on carbon reduction commitments, and getting into weird culture war battles about how to define a woman? Things seeming a little desperate? It appears we have reached the stage just after the “and” in the famous phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”.

    Canada’s Liberals Applaud a Nazi

    The mask really slipped a few weeks ago when Ukraine’s president Zelensky visited Canada to beg for weapons. The war in Ukraine isn’t going well, and the much-vaunted wunderwaffen donated by the west – German tanks rolling into Eastern Europe for the first time in 80 years – have failed to advance the promised counter-offensive, though Ukraine’s leadership has made sure that the offensive achieves the US’s goal of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. With video of NATO’s supposedly superior “kit” (ugh) getting wasted on the battlefield proliferating, no progress in the war, and the US house getting skittish about signing more blank checks, Zelensky needed to shore up his support among his allies. After Zelensky’s speech to the Canadian parliament, an apparently well-meaning Canadian speaker introduced a 98 year old man who he told everyone “had fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union in world war 2”, with Liberal PM Trudeau leading Zelensky and the parliament in two rounds of standing ovations for this stalwart of freedom.

    Apparently nobody bothered to think what kind of man might have “fought against the Soviet Union” for Ukraine in world war 2, and of course it turned out very quickly that the man in question was a member of the Waffen SS. Canada’s parliament somehow tricked a Jewish head of state (Zelensky is Jewish) into giving a standing ovation for an Actual Nazi, just because he fought the Soviet Union.

    This is a kind of treason, of course: the Soviet Union were Canada’s allies in world war 2, fighting the Nazis, and suffered horrifying losses during their retreat from and recapture of Ukraine. Applauding someone who fought them makes a mockery of their sacrifice, shows the ignorance of all assembled towards their own history, conflates modern Russia with the Soviet Union (a common mistake among liberal apologists for our ridiculous support of Ukraine), and – most importantly – means applauding a nazi.

    The 14th Waffen SS division of which Hunka was a member wasn’t an innocent bystander in the war either. They did partisan suppression duties in Poland and Ukraine, freeing up regular SS and Wehrmacht units to kill Soviet soldiers, and in some instances destroyed whole villages. They probably helped with round-ups of Jews, and of course by providing support services they freed up regular units of the SS in Ukraine to speed up their activities in the Holocaust. Himmler himself visited the unit, and said some pretty horrifying things indicating he knew full well where their racial solidarity lay. The knowledge of this unit’s activities isn’t dead in Ukraine, either, far from it – you might recognize their symbol on the Wikipedia page as a common symbol on Ukrainian soldiers uniforms, and in the year before the war started the unit was celebrated in Kyiv. It’s likely that in that horrific display of Nazi solidarity in the Canadian parliament Zelensky, at least, knew about the unit’s history, since it’s a matter of public celebration in certain sectors of Ukraine’s political class, including the people who surround Zelensky.

    When Nazis aren’t Nazis

    There’s a joke going around the internet that since the Ukraine war began western media have slid through stages of Nazi-denialism, from “there are no Nazis in Ukraine” to “Oh, there’s just a few” to “they aren’t so bad” to, finally “Being a Nazi isn’t always wrong anyway”. It appears we’ve reached stage 4, because within a few days Politico EU published an article arguing that being in the SS didn’t make you a Nazi. Now there’s a reversal on the Nuremberg Trials, eh! Then there was a lot of talk about well how could they have known that these guys fighting in Ukraine against the Soviet Union were Nazis, and he probably wasn’t a volunteer anyway (he was). Then it began to become clear that the Canadian government had courted these Nazis after the war, and a whole bunch of horror stories began to emerge about monuments to the Nazis in Edmonton, an endowment in this Nazi’s name to a Canadian university, and, well, a generally sordid past of encouraging these treacherous villains to contribute to culture and history in Ukraine.

    It should be noted that Canadian scholarship on Ukraine was an important contributor to the development of the contested theory of the Holodomor, the idea that Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine. This idea was not new in Ukraine, but the word itself appears to date from the 1980s or 1990s, and it’s likely a fabrication of these Canadian Ukrainian scholars, many of whom were former Nazis. One person who has contributed to the popularization of this claim is Anne Applebaum, who is a regular contributor to liberal publications like the Atlantic and has been a vociferous proponent of the idea that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Her book Red Famine, which contributed to the popularization of this genocide myth, is no doubt heavily influenced by these Canadian-Ukrainian scholars, but she has been perfectly silent about the revelation that they were all Nazis. This body of recent work on the Holodomor feeds into a wider anti-semitic current, known as “double-genocide theory“, which holds that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and is often implicitly or explicitly cited as a justification for Ukrainian (and other countries’) support for the Nazis. This dangerous elevation of a high-school debate bro fetish to the level of serious legal and scholarly work is dangerous, particularly for anti-fascists in Eastern Europe, but it’s a surprise to see it bubbling to the surface in such a grotesque way in Canada.

    Russians, of course, have no illusions about this double-genocide nonsense, the evils of Nazis or the nature and persistence of Ukrainian Nazism. Here is what Vassily Grossman had to say about the looming threat of Nazi collaboration in Ukraine in his famous book Stalingrad:

    This is the background to the growth of Red Sector, the Azov battalion and the neo-Nazis who humiliated Zelensky in 2019 and forced Ukraine down the road to the war. This is the reason that to get to Baby Yar – the site of the infamous 1941 massacre – and the memorial erected there by the Soviet government, traveling from the Eastern side of Kyiv your quickest route will be along Stepan Bandera avenue. But all this history has been wiped from liberal memory in the west, in the post-war scramble to redefine the Soviet Union as the Enemy, and to rewrite the history of the war so that the allies’ relatively small contribution – and much smaller sacrifice – could be raised above the great and catastrophic suffering of the Soviet Union, obscure the allies’ failure to rescue the Jews, and airbrush the Soviet Union’s central role in saving Jews from the Holocaust out of our history. And how is that working out, now?

    The West’s guilty conscience lashes out

    Some simple facts about the West’s culpability for the Holocaust should be well known but are relatively underplayed in Western history lessons. From 1939 when the Nazis started the war to the middle of 1944 there is almost no evidence of significant resistance against the Nazis west of the Danube. In Poland and Ukraine yes, there is a well-known history of both collaboration and resistance, but go west and you see a bunch of complacent nations that were largely happy to be pinned under the Nazi boot, with the sacrifice of their Jewish populations considered a small price to pay for their relative peace after they were conquered. The Western nations also resisted refugees, taking only a small number of rich Jewish emigrees and even, famously, turning away shiploads of children. In contrast Jews fleeing east were welcomed into the Soviet Union, and it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz, discovered Treblinka, and rescued the Jews of Poland from Nazi violence. The West stood by and waited, taking far more interest in the recovery of their colonial possessions in Africa than in helping the desperate Jews of western Europe, and it was only when the Soviet Union began to roll over Europe itself that they suddenly conceived an urgent need to fight back against the Nazis. If Hitler had cut a deal with Poland to march his armies through for a direct attack on the Soviet Union in 1939, would the west even have bothered going to war with him? I suspect that they would not, and would have stood by while the fate of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population was determined.

    This is a stain on Europe’s post-war liberal conscience, so how did they endeavour to wash out this stain? They handed one of their stolen colonial lands to the Zionist project, which immediately unleashed the Nakba on the people of Palestine and established an apartheid state on the shores of the mediterranean. Every time the people of Palestine attempted to peacefully resolve this conflict the Israeli state responded with violence and destruction, and so we find ourselves at the present state, where 2 million Palestinians languish in an open-air prison camp constructed with western money. When Hamas finally respond with a successful attack on Israel’s military, that blood-drenched state unleashes a wave of violence – first indiscriminately killing their own hostages, making up a 21st century blood-libel about beheaded babies, and then attempting to starve and bomb the population of Gaza into oblivion.

    In response to this savagery the same liberal democracies and media outlets that were just two weeks ago giving a standing ovation to a confirmed Nazi, or defending that same action, or steadfastly looking away, suddenly rushed to condemn every unsubstantiated lie put out by the Israeli Defence Forces, and publicly announced their unconditional support for “the World’s Most Moral Army” as it enacts the first mass murder of the 21st century. They have nothing to say except “more!” as the IDF slaughters thousands of children, cuts off electricity from hospitals, and forces civilians to drinking from puddles. None of this is kept secret either – in contrast to the “genocide” of Uyghurs that the western media and intelligence agencies invented from whole cloth, and have presented to us constantly over the last 3 years without a shred of evidence, within minutes of the unfolding bombardment of Gaza our social media feeds are flooded with videos of dying children, bombed ambulances, buildings collapsed on civilians, reports of entire families wiped out. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK reports 6 of his own family killed; the Scottish first minister’s own mother-in-law is trapped in Gaza and he cannot even get a response to inquiries from the foreign office, while the media drill him on whether he has sufficiently condemned Hamas. Meanwhile France bans rallies in support of the Palestinian people, MSNBC bars its muslim anchors from reporting, a Muslim child is stabbed to death in the USA, and Germany stops a protest by Jewish opponents of the slaughter on the grounds it might be anti-Semitic.

    This is the “liberal” response to the mass murder by starvation and bombing of 2 million muslims. Meanwhile liberal blogs – those bastions of interventionism back in the Iraq war days – remain stunningly silent. Balloon Juice, which has run a daily post on the invasion of Ukraine, headed with a graphic accusing “Ruzzians” of genocide, declared “there’s no there there” about the shameful Canadian ovation of a Nazi, and is in full support of the Israeli military. Lawyers, Guns and Money have barely mentioned it, and Crooked Timber have put up a single, weak post about how they don’t know what to say, which has degenerated into a condemnathon and some complaints about Jeremy Corbyn – the only politician of any note in the UK who was willing to publicly support the Palestinian people.

    It’s often said that the single defining feature of liberalism is that liberals never, ever learn. They constantly watch the same things happening, hear the same lies from the same criminal gang, absorb the same excuses from the same people, and respond in the same way without any adaptation to the circumstances. We know that the Israeli Defence Forces lie – they lied about Shireen Abu Akleh, they lied about the Gaza Flotilla Raid, they lied about Rachel Corrie – but of course every person in the western media, political and public elite accepts everything they say without question, knowing it’s all a lie and knowing their history of killing children. Journalists, of course, don’t even have object permanence, but this singular property of liberal politicians and political commentators generally is that they cannot, under any circumstances, learn from what constantly surprises them, because if they developed any theory of the structural underpinnings of the social forces at work it would become simply impossible to remain a part of the liberal establishment.

    Our failing economy

    The last part of this collapse in the coherence of the western social order is our failing economy. We are constantly told – by political leadership, by economists, by journalists and by pundits and “think” tankers – that capitalism is the best system available to us, that capitalism has made us the richest people in the history of the world, that any other system would leave us impoverished and embittered. Yet at the same time they tell us that they have to cancel even the shortest high speed rail line because they can’t afford it; that university fees must remain too expensive for most people to attend without going into a lifetime of debt; that it is simply impossible for people to have affordable housing; and that paying you more than $7.25 an hour is beyond their power. You must remain poor, squatting in sub-standard housing surrounded by decaying infrastructure and scrabbling to get together enough money just to stay housed and pay off the exorbitant price of your university loans – all in the richest countries in the history of the world. Whose wealth? Whose benefit? They couldn’t even control a simple respiratory disease, you had to go back to work as soon as possible or the best, most efficient system of allocation of resources in the history of the universe would collapse around you; and they absolutely cannot afford to pay for you to get a booster vaccine if you’re under 50, because … well, because how could the 6th richest country in the world afford it?

    And where did this money go? The USA spends a huge percentage of its income on weapons, is a thoroughly militarized society; the UK and France are nuclear powers. But together the entire economy of the NATO countries – some 500 million people, including most of the top 10 richest countries in the world – ran out of ammunition and weapons to give to Ukraine after just 600 days of war with a country having not even a third of their population. Where did all that money they took from you go? What were they spending it on, while they were telling you they can’t afford high speed rail, schools that don’t collapse, COVID protections, universal health coverage, gun control or a raise in the minimum wage? After 600 days they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, right down to munitions they promised they wouldn’t use because they’re borderline illegal (and won’t work in Ukraine anyway). And worse still the wonder-weapons they sent have all failed, proven to be worse than the cheapest material the Russians can throw at them. All the Leopard tanks are burnt out husks, the Challengers – “never defeated in battle” – abandoned on the side of the road next to ditches filled with the corpses of Ukrainian men, the Bradleys and Bushmasters and Marders all toast and the troops they were slated to carry forced to slog through the long grass where mines and drones are slaughtering them. That’s what your money was spent on, while you were being told 10% annual inflation was inevitable and no you can’t have a pay rise, and if you try striking we’ll make it illegal because the best system of allocating resources ever invented – the only one that works – can’t make food affordable and can’t produce enough ammunition to fight a small war in a distant country.

    So, this is the promise of liberalism as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. No freedom of speech, no money for you and no investment in public services, and if you dare to speak up while we throw money into the mass murder of civilians living in the poorest place on earth we will throw you in jail. In America we’ll throw you in jail anyway, but not until we’ve stripped you of your assets without trial and only if you’re lucky enough not to get shot on arrest. In defense of this you need to stand by and watch – you must not speak, or you’ll lose your job! – as we commit warcrimes and cheer the bombing of hospitals and the starving of citizens and throw all our resources into defending a criminal, corrupt gang of Nazis as they grind an entire generation of men into meat, only to find those resources aren’t enough because our economies are running on empty.

    But if you talk about any of this you’re a wild-eyed idealist, a “tankie” (who paradoxically doesn’t want to send German tanks into Eastern Europe!), an anti-semite, and – worst of all – naive, unable to understand that this is the only way things can be. Nothing can ever ever be better, and anyone who tries to make it better is a fool and a trouble-maker.

    This is liberalism in the 21st century.

  • Comments Censored at Crooked Timber: Gaza Edition

    Crooked Timber has a typically weak post up about the new horrors in Gaza, which has descended into a debate about whether (I kid you not) Corbyn has condemned Hamas enough, the DSA (some tiny fringe group in the USA) has condemned Hamas enough, and how hard it is to have an opinion about a war where everyone is a barbarian. I posted the following comment, because I think the minimum standard for an academic, liberal blog should be that they care about facts. The comment did not pass moderation, of course:

    Perhaps before rushing to condemn fringe left groups for failing to condemn what Hamas did to civilians some of you should have waited to see what Hamas actually did. It turns out the babies weren’t beheaded (did you guys believe a community of 700 had 40 babies?), that Hamas militants called the police to negotiate with them, the IDF came in firing indiscriminately and killed all the hostages, fired mortars and tanks at the kibbutz buildings, and fired tanks into the buildings after the fighters were dead (did you think the damage in the pictures was done by Molotovs?) The idf announced it was doing air strikes in the area, info available on the cnn website but strangely not mentioned, most of the dead publicly announced are soldiers, and Hamas’s account of the events says that the IDF panicked, retreated and fought in urban areas. The IDF are the most dishonest organization in the world, who killed 500 children in the 2014 war, deliberately shot demonstrators in the 2018 match of return, and have been confirmed over and over again to lie, murder civilians, and commit horrible war crimes. You all know this but you just immediately rushed to believe everything they told you. What does it say about you that, for example, Chris Bertram immediately assumed they were capable of “breivik-like” attitudes? It’s racism, plain and simple. Try and engage just once with the reality fo the forces at play here, and stop treating the IDF as any th Inc. except a dishonest gang of mass murderers and criminals!

    [I wrote that on my phone on the train, so apologies for typos or small errors]

    We really are reaching the bitter end of things in western society, aren’t we? In light of this I’m planning an occasional series of posts on the collapse of the liberal order and the intellectual underpinnings of our present system of capitalist liberal democracies. As part of this I’ll be grappling with the failure of the 2000s-era liberal bloggers – CT, LGM, and spin-offs from the usenet era like Yglesias and others – to deal with the failure of their world view. This is necessarily going to involve some snark about the kind of things that go on their blogs, substacks and media appearances.

    I hope amongst it there will be some more serious material assessing where the liberal academic worldview went so wrong, but don’t hold out too much hope – I’m angry about the horrors being done by our governments, and if you’re not angry too (or if you’re angry at the wrong targets) you need to be reassessing your humanity.

  • Star Wars Character: Dita Voss, Sole Survivor of the Numenorean Argosy

    Dita Voss was born and raised in the Numenorean Argosy, a large fleet of ships that moved through the galaxy as a caravan, centred around the ancient behemoth called the Numenor. The Argosy was composed of thousands of ships, ranging in size from single-family yachts to kilometre-long hospital ships and resource barges. They traveled approximately together, though at any time a small portion of their number would be away on trade missions separate from the main body of the fleet. The Argosy was in part a self-contained economic entity, its member ships providing services to and producing goods for each other, but its primary means of external trade was the provision of mechanical and computer services to the myriad small, independent starbases, mining colonies and space stations of the galaxy. The Argosy had accreted slowly over thousands of years, and amongst the crumbling engine rooms and cockpits of its ancient ships the fleet held knowledge and expertise on almost every technical system that had ever been used in the galaxy, as well as starmaps detailing the location and complement of mining stations, gas harvesters, deep space research bases and colonies that had been established so long ago that knowledge of their construction methods, components and sometimes even coordinates had been long lost to the majority of the galaxy’s settled societies. The arrival of the Argosy at one of these legacy structures led to an orgy of trade and renewal, as technicians on the bases seized the opportunity to gain access to old blueprints, fashion spare parts for systems that had been held together by jury-rigged components for generations, and restart auxiliary (or sometimes essential) computer and life support systems that had long since been given up for dead. Sometimes they would pay the Argosy to take one of their young onboard as an apprentice, who would travel the galaxy for a decade training in mechanics or computing or electronics, to return to their home base years later with a deep and enduring knowledge of everything that could go wrong in even the most obscure of systems. Droids that had been shutdown for centuries would be repaired and restarted, their long lost knowledge returned to colonies and mining stations, and data storage systems whose access mechanisms had long since ceased working would be turned over to the Argosy, passed from hand to hand through ever-older ships until somewhere someone found a lovingly-maintained device that could read the lost data and return it to its owners. Sometimes a colony that had regressed to almost stone-age technology would have a memory of the last visit of the Argosy, centuries or millenia earlier, a cave painting or a religious fresco, and its return would be the opportunity for the renewal of a society, the overthrow of tyrants, the start of a new renaissance.

    Such was the vital role of the Numenorean Argosy at the Edge of the Empire, until the Empire realized its value and completely eradicated every single living member of its polity.

    Everyone, that is, except Dita Voss.

    Dita Voss

    Dita Voss was planetside when the Empire struck the only home she had ever known, helping an obscure religious order to retrieve data from a servitor droid that had crashed an eon earlier, taking with it precious fragments of their religious knowledge. Above her the Imperial SPIDER Unit tore through the myriad ships of the Argosy, destroying any who opposed it and rooting out every byte of information they could, while she worked quietly and earnestly in the chilly crypt of the ancient order’s long-abandoned hilltop shrine, patching together systems that were so old even the language of their manuals was a barely-remembered legend. In galactic terminology Dita is a slicer, someone who can work with computer systems – programming them, breaking into them, subverting them and hacking them to make them do her bidding. She had been trained for years in the manifold computer networks of the relic sites on the empire’s rim, helping to disable rogue defense systems for their owners, reworking neglected mainframes for a new era of information, and sometimes helping mining communities to establish secure uplinks that were protected from spying by big corporations or imperial agents. But she had never been trained in anything except the rudiments of combat, and so when she emerged from the dusty cold of the underground chambers to witness the remains of her ancestral home tumbling flaming from the sky, there was nothing she could do to help. She could only watch in stunned disbelief as the Empire destroyed what, for slicers and mechanics across the galaxy, was the greatest library of knowledge that had ever existed.

    The order hid her in their crypts, and kept her identity and location secret when imperial troops came looking for any survivors of the carnage. Fortunately for Dita, her contracted task had been entirely communicated by word of mouth between herself, her grandmother and the order, and there was no record of her presence on the planet. Her grandmother had died in the first assault, the secret of Dita’s mission dying with her, and so she was able to hide and emerge safe from the destruction of the Argosy. The order gave her a little money, an ancient slugthrower, some stun grenades the imperial agents “misplaced”, and some basic survival gear, and helped her to hide until the SPIDER unit was gone. In exchange she promised them that she would exact her revenge, and somehow recover all the knowledge she could that had been taken from the Argosy.

    With just this obligation – this oath of revenge – to sustain her, carrying everything she owned on her back, Dita Voss set out into the world, determined to right a great wrong, and to restore the legacy of the Argosy. Dita is young though, and inexperienced in the ways of the world – she will need a team to join if she is to make her way. Once carefree and lighthearted, she is now burdened with the loss of her family and community, and carries this great tragedy with her. Nonetheless she is young, and she remains cheerful and optimistic in the pursuit of her ordinary daily life. She loves all things technical, and never backs down from a challenge, believing she has never met a computer she could not overcome. Now, though, what was once an aimless and joyous pursuit of technological skill for its own sake has become a finely-honed weapon against the Empire, a mission to find and restore the lost knowledge of the Argosy, and to wreak revenge on everyone who was involved in its destruction. Give her a ship, a team and a chance, and she will change the galaxy!

    Illustrator note: The top image is by The UncannyKen on DeviantArt. The second picture is from the Coriolis Last Cyclade book

  • Do Journalists Understand Object Permanence? A case-study with a balloon

    If you haven’t been living under a rock since the beginning of February you’ll be aware that a Chinese “surveillance” balloon has drifted over the continental USA and even hovered over some dustbowl in the centre where the USA keeps its missiles. This has led to that weird kind of 24 hour cable news coverage that gets Americans hysterical, in which they cover a perfectly normal event as if it were a catastrophe, and get terrified of shadows. In this case the media were tracking the balloon across its entire path, defense experts were being interviewed, and every armchair expert on twitter was weighing in with their opinion of the real significance of the thing. An entire country sent into a state of unhinged uncertainty by a balloon. Ultimately Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, canceled a visit to the USA which the Americans (but not the Chinese) claimed was going to lead to high-level meetings.

    Of course this is transparent nonsense. Nobody can control the path of a balloon, though some people tried to speculate that some moderate degree of control could be achieved by changing heights, and the balloon covered a track across the USA that is already widely covered by military and commercial satellites. Why would the country that has its own fancy-shmancy space station, a cloud of satellites powering its own mapping service, the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and a lander on the dark side of the moon, need to use a balloon to spy on the continental USA? And why would it particularly want to hover over a missile site that has been so extensively mapped by the USA’s “adversaries” that all activity there has to be done underground? And why would they risk this provocation on the eve of a supposedly historic visit by a senior US diplomat?

    The balloon took its strange path just after the USA experienced a huge cold snap across much of the contiguous states, and just as the north east of the USA and Canada were expecting a secondary cold snap. These cold snaps are caused by the jet stream slowing and weakening, so that its path sags southward and cold air from the pole is allowed to escape across the continental USA. These jet-streams flow from west to east, and are the reason for example that a Canadian weather balloon ended up over Russia in 1998. Indeed, after the Chinese government finally noticed US panic they issued a statement that it was a weather balloon gone wild, which is completely consistent with its strange looping pathway. It drifted north east until it hit the jet stream, diverted eastward, and then was dragged down over the continental USA by the sagging jet stream that was simultaneously producing the coldest ever recorded temperatures in New Hampshire.

    None of this obvious counter-evidence led the US media or various twitter commentators to question the Pentagon’s claims, which is unsurprising but depressing, because these claims were being aired by not just the same institution that brought us the invasion of Iraq, but the very same people. The current Pentagon press spokesman, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, who gave press conferences about the balloon, has a storied history of propaganda for the US military, and in particular was in charge of “strategic communications” for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. He was the chief of propaganda for the most corrupt military occupation in history, and in particular he was in charge of “strategic communications” when the Abu Ghraib scandal happened. He was also in charge of public affairs for an air force wing during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when one US airplane (not from his wing) blew up the Chinese embassy – something that required a bit of spin at the time! The guy currently providing information about this balloon to the press never saw a truth he wasn’t willing to hood and electric-shock to death. If this guy said the sky was blue you would need stick your head out the window and check. If he asked for the salt at dinner you’d best pass him the pepper, and if he claimed he wasn’t the father you wouldn’t need to waste money on a paternity test – you could be sure it was him. This man is a liar, he is paid to lie for his government, and he has spent at least some of his life lying to cover up some of the most corrupt and incompetent mistakes and crimes of the US military.

    Why would you believe this man when he tells you that a balloon is being used for spying?

    It gets worse, of course. On February 4th the US department of defense released a statement about the shooting down of the balloon (which cost at least $1 million, but finally gave the F-22 jet a confirmed air-to-air kill). In the statement they noted that

    Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration

    and of course the media and various idiots in the commentariat went wild about how “spy balloons” had been regularly sent over the USA. Media reported this as spy balloons entering US airspace, dropping all ambiguity, as did the usual talking heads on the internet. But note that the DoD statement nowhere says that they’re spy balloons – it leaves that for the media to do. It also states they “briefly transited” the USA. It is not physically possible for a balloon to “briefly transit” the continental USA from China unless it passes over the tip of Alaska – standard behavior for a weather balloon launched from China and blown out to sea, on occasions when the jetstream is functioning properly. But all of this nuance and the obvious implications were left out by commentators, who went off the deep end at the suggestion that balloons might have been used for spying and Trump just let them.

    This is particularly ridiculous posturing, because it is also attempting to rewrite history to suggest that Trump – who led a trade war against China and sparked a wave of both official and unofficial retaliation against Chinese living in the USA – was somehow soft on China during his time in office. And it is also trying to conjure up some grand conspiracy in which the country that controls satellites, a space station, and half the marketshare of the world’s cellphones, is sending balloons it can’t control across the Pacific in the hope that one day one of them will just randomly luck onto a top secret site that they couldn’t photograph better from orbit. This is thoroughgoing nonsense. But it has the entire press pack and liberal intelligentsia doing the Pentagon’s propaganda work for it, and baying for blood. These people aren’t even paid, and they’re taking subtly misleading information from the most dishonest organization on earth – straight from the mouth of the man who was in charge of “strategic communications” during the Abu Ghraib scandal – and adding the extra panic the Pentagon wants, without even being directed to.

    This is how we got the invasion of Iraq, the murder of a million Iraqis, the displacement of four million more, and the creation of ISIS: because the Pentagon lied to journalists, and journalists just repeated everything they were told as if it were god’s own truth. Josh Marshall (whose tweet is pictured above) wrote lots of essays about the Iraq war that he has scrubbed from his blog, so I can’t tell if he supported it or not, but it is clear he wrote extensively about it at the time, so if he has any sense he would be aware that the Pentagon lied us all into that atrocity. Is he aware that the people he is quoting now were lying to him then? Do other journalists reporting on this ever stop to think that maybe they shouldn’t listen to people who lie to them consistently?

    No, they don’t. Journalists are like a baby playing peekaboo, or like Bart Simpson in Lisa’s cupcake experiment – they just can’t think that the same thing would happen twice, because they cannot, under any circumstances, analyze the structural factors driving the news they report on. They just keep reporting the things they are told and even if they are being told the same lies with the country name changed, by the same people, working for the same institution, they are unable or unwilling to question whether there is any level of trust they should assign to that person. Even if they know that the last time around these were shown to be lies, and they know who spouted those lies.

    They just don’t have object permanence. And these babies are going to help the Pentagon lie us into a war with China.

  • Secrets of the Archipelago: The Ritual

    The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deepcult leadership, killing their Demiurge and looting her laboratory. Amongst her documents they have found a set of scrolls that describe a ritual that is likely at the heart of the deepcult’s plans. These documents are a set of scrolls rolled up in an ornate scroll case, in a box with obvious magical paraphernalia – a silver knife, some jars of reagents and powders, bunches of herbs, a set of robes, and a wand of blackened bone. The scrolls appear to have been written relatively recently, by an unknown writer who is probably a scholar of magic and most likely a member of the deepcult – and definitely not a deepfolk.

    The scrolls describe in detail a ritual to reopen something called “the Rift”, which can be located in the wall of a huge room called the “Chamber of Remembrance.” The ritual will take some hours, and requires seven specific artifacts of great power, listed as:

    • Fragment of a fallen moon
    • Rib of the first human
    • Eye of a dead god
    • Fragments of a dragon’s egg
    • The ghost of the first human child
    • A fragment of death’s shadow
    • The embers of the first fire

    Each artifact is described in detail, along with some ideas about its possible location. It is clear from the description that the Wrathbreakers already possess the Fragment of a fallen moon, eye of a dead god, and the ghost of the first human child. It is also clear that the Rib of the first human is in the possession of the cult, in the Demiurge’s study, and that the fragment of death’s shadow is under Kyansei’s lands. The only two remaining artifacts to be gathered are the fragments of a dragon’s egg (held by the dragon that was born from that egg, in Caen) and the Embers of the First Fire, which are currently being searched for in the Valley of Gon.

    The writer indicates that this ritual needs to take place at a specified time that corresponds with the millennial re-alignment of the stars known as the Seven Children of Rage. The writer believes that there is perhaps a 1-3 month time period in which their alignment will be approximately good enough for the ritual to work. The writer speculates that the ritual could be conducted at any other time but would require significantly more power than the deep cult currently has available, and to summon that power would require “a wasteful expenditure of a large portion of those who will eventually become our slaves.”

    The writer also seems to hint that this ritual is a re-engineering of a ritual first conducted 1000 years earlier which attempted to fully seal “the Rift” closed, but which failed because one of the artifacts was a fake. The writer hypothesizes that the egg was a fake, and that whoever was responsible for providing the egg in the ritual had swapped it for a fake and stolen the real one. Why they did this is not known, but ascribed to ordinary human greed by the writer.

    The writer describes the consequences of this treachery: the original ritual failed, unleashed a huge blast of evil magic, and did not completely seal the gate. The writer believes that this ritual was rushed, probably because the humans who conducted it were under attack from the guardians of the seals, and so had no time to abort the ritual and recover the egg – or maybe didn’t even realize the dragon egg had been swapped with a fake until the ritual was supposed to be completed. The writer postulates that when the ritual failed and unleashed its huge blast of dark magic, it killed or severely damaged the guardians of the seven seals, and scattered them across the underworld of the Archipelago. The locations where those guardians appeared probably correspond in some way with the alignment of the seven new stars, The Seven Children of Rage, which appeared in the sky at that time.

    The writer does not know what the seven guardians were, but based on what they know about the first artifact they found – the rib of the first human – they postulate that the seals were stolen by humans from “the treasure chambers of their slave masters”, though how this was done the writer cannot say. Each seal had a guardian, and those guardians chased the humans to recover the seals, coming through “the Rift” and catching them during the ritual. The humans must have had to fight the guardians while continuing the ritual to seal “the Rift”. The writer notes that he/she found the Rib of the first Human in the chamber of Remembrance, and had to fight its guardian. This guardian is described as a crazed human with supernatural powers, wielding a powerful spear it calls the “spear of destiny.” The human bled from its hands and feet and could perform various feats of magic, but was ultimately too weak to be a god or a full power from the world beyond “the Rift”, so the writer assumes that the blast of magic power unleashed in the ritual, plus 1000 years trapped in the Chamber of Remembrance, both weakened the guardian and drove it crazy. It is not clear if every guardian survived this ritual.

    The writer further postulates that the dragon, being originally a creature from beyond “the Rift”, must need “the Rift” to stay open in order to survive, and will die if “the Rift” is closed. The writer also speculates that fully opening “the Rift” will have significant consequences for the deepfolk, and these consequences should in no way be communicated to the deepfolk. “After all,” the document finishes, “When we are elevated to a place of status alongside our former masters from beyond the Rift, will we not need slaves of our own?”

  • Secrets of the Archipelago: Letter to the Demiurge

    The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deep cult, killing its leader, a middle-aged woman with potent deep magic powers who was referred to by her followers as the Demiurge. In her study they found a very recent letter sent to her by one of her field agents, which contains important information about the Dragon of Caen and the location of one of the as yet undiscovered relics, the dragon’s egg.

    Demiurge,
     
    I have made contact with the beast. It is old and tired, barely bothering to stir from its lair. Its size is fantastic, and it must once have been mighty, but now it were as if it were afflicted by some dementia or failure of spirit. Nonetheless, to fight it even in its senescence is beyond the capacity of our forces on the island.
     
    It is convinced that the Rift weakens it, and that it will die if it is not closed. Based on my research here I believe the opposite to be true – if we close the Rift the beast will inevitably fade. In its delirium and weakness it misses the truth.
     
    I believe I can convince it to allow us to take a fragment of egg, on the promise of using it to close the Rift. I await your authorization.
     
     
    Shileel
    Caen
     
     
     

  • Secrets of the Archipelago: The Elven Documents

    The Wrathbreakers have destroyed the deep cult with a final battle in its lair, and uncovered some documents that can finally tell them what the deep cult was seeking. The first of these are the elven documents that were captured from Regalt’s daughter by deepfolk raiders. The wrathbreakers first stumbled on hints of this story in session 4, when they were attacked by Regald’s daughter’s animated corpse.

    The elven documents

    These are clearly copies of an original set of documents, with the copies laid out on dwarven stone paper with a few elven notes. They are mad scribbles, pictures and diagrams, transcribed as carefully as possible to reflect the original, with a short foreword by an elven scholar from Asboran called Inxult, who is known to have disappeared in the Middlemarch about 400 years ago. They are written as transcriptions of a dream message, but the message is garbled and confused. It has three distinct voices, and appears to have been dreamed over many nights.

    Voice 1: A group of people who are desperate and need help

    Voice 2: A group of people who are happy and comfortable, living easy and satisfying lives

    Voice 3: A group of people consumed with rage and hatred, who seek revenge and destruction for a reason they do not clearly understand.

    Foreword

    I had long suspected that there was a reason the elves lost their holdings in Leminog, and was never satisfied by the explanation that the land was abandoned because it was too hard to protect our holdings during the war between deepfolk and humans. In the annals of old scholars during a routine search I noticed that one scholar, Avelst, went missing in Leminog at around the time of the concession of Leminog, but in an addendum in a particular book I found reference to a tower that he had written letters from. Such an obscure link! But I thought there might be something to it, and so I visited here with a small team of human guards and porters. The local humans, a superstitious group, warned against visiting it, telling me it was haunted by an ancient elven ghost, but I refused to believe them. Foolish me! For it is haunted by an elven ghost, and when I found him, buried in his tree, I discovered that the spirit of Avelst himself was bound up in this tree. I bonded with his spirit but could learn little, except that he had dreams of despair and ruin, and finally flung himself from this tower to die in the garden. A tree grew around him but it is corrupt and evil, and I do not understand how his soul can be so trapped within it. I am no Astrologer and so I cannot say, but this whole place makes me uneasy, and I understand why the human locals avoid it. Perhaps this is why the elves abandoned this place? But Avelst was never himself buried, so perhaps he remained after the other elves left, and killed himself? There is much mystery here in this dank, unwelcoming forest – no wonder the elves abandoned this unyielding place.

    In Avelst’s chambers I found his documents, a collection of hand-scrawled documents that present a fine testimony to the depth of his madness. It is some hundreds of years since he wrote them and even fine elvish paper has begun to decay, so I conducted a careful and painstaking documentation of them, which has taken me some months. I copied them as faithfully as I could, and then reorganized them into what I think is the correct temporal organization. They are written in the register of a report of a dream message, but have none of the clarity of a dream message, and seem to come from three different voices, which I label The Desperate, The Complacent, and The Vengeful. They are not directly linked temporally, with the story of the desperate coming in between that of the Complacent and the Vengeful, I think.

    No doubt serious scholars would laugh at my findings, but I cannot help feel there is some historical fact buried in these crazed visions. I aim now to travel to the elven scholars in the southern Hadun borders, to present these documents to scholars there for further analysis. Unfortunately, the work of transcription has taken longer than expected, and I have business with family in Asboran that I cannot delay. I will return overland to Asboran for the winter, and when the spring storms pass I will take ship to Estona, and from there travel through the Middlemarch to the great forest. It is a long journey, and disrupted by timing and family affairs, but Avelst’s dreams have waited nearly half a millennium to be discovered, they can wait a year longer.

    Signed

    Inxult, this year 531 of the Human Calendar

    Voice 1: The desperate

    Images of a life of slavery and torture in a dusty, furnace-hot land where they are used brutally and mistreated constantly. They are used for labour, sometimes taken as food, sometimes used for medical experiments, sometimes forced into horrible union with evil beasts that create tortured children. No one ever escapes slavery except by death, and no one ever has any hope. Their captors are never seen clearly, but envisioned by the dreamer as creatures of shadow, flame and terror.

    Eventually the slaves escape, there are visions of a ragged column fleeing across hot dusty plains, pursuit and eventually escape. They find themselves in cool dark and prepare to be permanently free. There is chanting, magic, many people busy in preparation, and then a scene of a great battle. Here the number 7 appears a lot: 7 treasures they need and stole, 7 great evil monsters that they have to fight, a single betrayal, a sense of something lost, then 7 flashes of light and a sense of failure. Here there is a picture of 7 stars, very clearly placed in the sky in a perfect depiction of the 7 Children of Rage.

    Voice 2: The complacent

    This is shorter, visions of people living happily in darkness and luxury, mining and digging and living peacefully with all. Sometimes they go out under the stars to enjoy the open air away from the sunshine. There is a sense of distant strangers who they know and are never troubled by, just happy days in darkness and starlight.

    There is a vision of a horde of desperate, hungry, dirty, tired, almost naked people, bronze-skinned and alien, emerging unexpected in a great hall underground. A sense of them coming from nowhere, of upheaval and confusion. But peaceful exchange. They help the strangers.

    Then there is suddenly a great battle, an explosion of magic, a wave of pain and chaos, and they are lost.

    Voice 3: The vengeful

    This is the shortest. There is a vision of a sudden explosion of darkness and rage, and suddenly a horde of people who are angry, and a strong sense of self-hatred and shame at who they were. There is rage at a group of bronze-skinned strangers, and terrible scenes of hunting them through the dark halls of their home, slaying them and killing them and eating them in paroxysms of brutal joy. There is also hatred of the ground above, realization that some of them are not the same, a vision of a line where the magic explosion ended, and missions aboveground to kill those who were not touched by it. There is constant rage, a desire for revenge, and a sense of a spiritually evil place they desire to ascend/descend to.

  • Archipelago 53: Love’s Labours Lost

    The Wrathbreakers have survived a deepfolk ambush and returned to the bay where they left their ship, only to find it scuttled and their crew missing or dead. A ship floating at anchor in the bay suggested that the deepfolk who pursued them had come by sea, and ambushed their own ship while they fought the Spider God. Answers could be found on that ship, and revenge.

    They retreated from the shore to plan, but they had little time to prepare. It was midday, and if deepfolk were on the ship at anchor they would likely have taken at least some of the crew of the Wages of Sin captive – if the Wrathbreakers did not take the ship before evening at least some of their crew would be on the breakfast menu. The Wrathbreakers were injured and exhausted but they had no choice but to quickly prepare and spring an ambush of their own.

    Blood and fog

    They chose a simple strategy. Itzel used her magic to repair one of the damaged longboats from the Wages of Sin, where it lay rolling in the spume of low tide. The party took some time to rest, and after a few hours Bao Tap conjured a fog that slowly filled the bay and obscured their passage. He also attempted to summon a giant squid/crab monster to aid in their attack, but failed and instead only managed to draw a swarm of small squid/crab parasite creatures. This swarm crawled over the bow of the ship as the Wrathbreakers carefully climbed up a rope ladder to the stern. The rope ladder appeared to have been left hanging over the side by whoever was in possession of the ship, probably in expectation that the Wrathbreakers had been slain and the bay was safe.

    On the ship itself the Wrathbreakers began their attack. They found two deepfolk standing around a warming brazier on the forecastle, confirming that the ship was under the control of a deepfolk raiding party. Bao Tap’s swarm grabbed these two and dragged them overboard to devour before they could raise the alarm, and as they did so Xu and Bao Tap began to set up an ambush at the top of the stairs to the deck. Ella crept cautiously into the sterncastle and Itzel dropped a rolling ball of lightning into the hold. The deepfolk came swarming up the stairs to attack the intruders and were cut down en masse as they emerged from belowdecks.

    There were no serious fighters left on the ship, only a few Grigg archers and some goblin skirmishers, and the Wrathbreakers slaughtered them without mercy. In the belowdecks area they found a young human deepcultist who they kept alive, and within a couple of minutes the ship had been secured. In the hold they found the crew, chained together to locking pins inside large, empty cargo containers. The ship’s party of marines, three soldiers and a captain, had been hung from the walls and cut into parts for food; one, still alive, was obviously being harvested piece by piece. Calim healed him as best he could and they cut the others down for a proper burial. They freed the crew and gathered their story.

    The Rake’s Progress

    With the deepfolk dead and the crew freed the Wrathbreakers were able to learn what had happened. They found two of their own crew among the humans they freed, survivors of the attack on the Wages of Sin who had been brought on board to be interrogated and devoured. They learnt that the ship had been attacked in the night, the crew captured and the ship scuttled. They had quickly told the deepfolk where the party were going, and those who had not been eaten immediately had been locked in the hull with the crew of the larger ship.

    The crew of the larger ship, the Rake’s Progress, told the Wrathbreakers that they had set off from Alpon 7 days ago, carrying a cargo of large boxes that had been brokered by a human who took ship with them. On the third day out, once far from their origin, they had been swarmed by deepfolk from belowdecks – the deepfolk had been hiding in the boxes. Easily defeated in the attack, the crew had been forced to watch as their four-person marine squad was tortured and eaten in front of them. They had then been warned that the same fate awaited them if they did not sail the ship as they were told. Thus they had brought the ship to this secluded bay, and been chained in the hold to await their fate as the deepfolk went about their business.

    They turned their attention to the human deep cultist they had captured. He was young and scared and very confused, and eager to tell them his story and try to escape a horrible but just death. He had joined the cult a year ago and was still a new member, who did not even realize that the cult were working with deepfolk. He was not sure why he had joined, and upon interrogation the Wrathbreakers realized he was another person who had been brainwashed into joining the cult by the subtle rituals of deep magic. He had been taking a peripheral role in cult activities, learning vague platitudes about the brighter future they planned for the world, until a week before when the cult had suddenly sprung into action. The capture of the ship had been rushed: the cult leaders had disappeared and then returned with the cargo, and had pressed him into joining them even though he was new. It was only was they were at sea and the trap was sprung that he realized what he was involved in, and by then it was too late to escape. The Wrathbreakers learnt that this was definitely a rushed mission, suddenly and hastily organized by the deep cult in Alpon and rushed into action the moment the party had set off by ship for the Spider God.

    They could not interrogate the deep cult cell’s leader to find out how the cult knew about the Wrathbreakers’ mission, their possession of the artifacts, or their destination, but upon reflection they realized that one person had helped them to find the location of the Spider God and provided them with the anti-fey poison that seemed to have no effect: Kyansei’s lover, Wei[1].

    They pressed the crew into service, turned the ship around, and rushed back to Alpon for a reckoning.

    Wei

    They did not return directly to Alpon, but to a small town to its south. From there they traveled overland to Alpon, smuggled themselves into the city, and took lodging in a rundown hostelry far from the academic part of the city. Once they were ready they forced their captive cultist to let them into his lair, on the promise that he would survive their wrath, and launched their raid.

    It was easy – the cult’s leader was dead in the great forest, they had the layout of the building, and they knew what Wei looked like. They caught her on her way out and bound and gagged and paralyzed her before she could kill herself or cast any spells. Finally they had a prisoner with some degree of seniority within the cult. Better still, they discovered that she had no magical power – she really was just an archaeologist, who had joined the cult out of desire and interest. A non-magical true believer! The perfect weak link.

    Under interrogation Wei told them the story they had expected. She had been working in the academies in Alpon looking for hints of ancient secrets for the cult, when one of her friends told her about Kyansei’s mission to find the cause of the blight up north. Thinking this sounded like a signature of one of the artifacts, Wei took up the job of Kyansei’s research assistant. When she heard about Kyansei’s adventures and past she realized she might have a chance to learn a lot more than just the location of an artifact, so she slowed down the drip of information about the blight, insinuated herself into Kyansei’s bed, and started learning all she could about the Wrathbreakers. Their arrival in Alpon had been an unexpected but perfect opportunity. Kyansei was about to set off on her mission to the north, and once she was gone Wei would send a team of deepfolk to ambush her and destroy all knowledge of the blight. Then she would organize a team of cultists from Leminog to go and explore the area she had researched for Kyansei, hopefully to uncover an artifact. When she discovered the Wrathbreakers were off to kill a Spider God she saw a perfect opportunity to get the rest of the artifacts – go there, wait for them to either die in the battle or come out badly injured, kill them and steal the artifacts. To help this happen she used her position of trust to prepare a poison that would make a fey god stronger, and once the Wrathbreakers set off she organized the ambush. Unfortunately she had not expected them to go by sea, and had to rush her plans to ambush them, which meant the team she sent was under-powered compared to the team that they would have met if she had a chance to ambush them overland.

    Wei’s plans had failed but her pride did not. She regaled the Wrathbreakers with angry speeches about how the world would be a better place once the deepfolk achieved their purpose – that once they had the artifacts they would build a better world, with her taking a central place of power in it. She was unrepentant, arrogant, and horrific. Knowing she had planned an ambush for Kyansei, Itzel used her magic to warn Kyansei to avoid the trap, and then they turned their attention to their captive.

    Did they have any other use for her, and how were they going to kill her? Should they keep her alive until they were ready to raid the cult headquarters in Leminog? Should they hand her over to the city authorities? They now believed it was time to reveal the facts of the cult and its horrible plans to the human world, and begin sending warnings to all cities about the risk of a cult of deepfolk collaborators in their midst. But then what? Leminog to kill the cult or the far north to find the artifact Wei sought? Decisions needed to be made, and soon, before the cult moved on its mission to raid the site of the Blight and find the artifact. The final showdown was near, and although they did not know exactly what rode on their decision, they sensed that some great fate rested on it. In the dark skies above them the Seven Children of Rage circled slowly towards their alignment, and Wrathbreakers prepared for their fateful decision …

    fn1: Tip for newbie GMs, if you want to hide a traitor in plain sight, describe them as the slightly lust-addled and largely objectified nerdy side-piece of a major NPC, make sure they’re a young woman, and be sure to throw in a few ribaldrous jokes about how her “mouth is always full” and “we don’t really talk too much, she’s too busy”. It works a charm, no one suspects she’s a secret spy for an evil death cult! They’ll even let her brew them a “poison” for their enemies which actually makes those enemies stronger, tell her partner all their plans on the assumption that the secret will be safe, and then spend half a session wondering how they got caught out!