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…

  • Cyberpunk 12: An Unexpected Research Audit

    No, it's not Coyote before breakfast!
    No, it’s not Coyote before breakfast!

    Date: 12th November 2177

    Weather: Rainy. Really rainy!

    Mood: Bloodthirsty. Beating corrupt scientists to death with power-armoured gloves is one of the most satisfying things I have ever done, and everyone was really happy to know what we freed those people from. But I am still on a high, replaying those final moments in my head. I always thought principles were for Important People who I don’t like, and for the kind of oily, seedy suited monstrosities who talk about values and ideals during the day but visit the kinds of places I was held in during the evening, to show what they really believe in, but now I discover that besides all of that hypocrisy and lying cant it’s really possible to have principles: real, pure ideals where you kill everyone who does the things you think are wrong. Who can stand between a young woman with power armour, and her moral goals? Not a bunch of soft and squishy bio-scientists, that’s for sure …

    Outfit: Power armour! We stole a suit during the hit on the train but it needed repairing, and it’s finally ready to use. Pops is off working on his crazy plan to create a community of misfits who’ll live together somewhere remote until someone loses their cool and they all kill each other, so we decided that for today’s raid I should wear the power armour. I made sure Coyote scrubbed the Arasaka logo off before I wore it, so it’s not uncool or anything, and it is great! I can move as freely as if I was in my favourite one piece, but it boosts my strength and reflexes and all my senses, and it’s almost as good for protection as my normal combat armour. We need more of this!

    News: Arasaka have declared war on Goliath! We were watching the news about how the Corporate High Council has been reformed without Arasaka when it was interrupted with a special announcement that was a live feed from Arasaka, but when Arasaka say “live” they really don’t know what the word means because it was just some crusty old Japanese dude in a samurai suit going on and on about treachery and justice. I thought it was some kind of new samurai drama but Coyote told me it’s actually Arasaka’s version of a declaration of war. They moved fast too, sealed off section 43 which is where Arasaka people mostly live, and now there’s Goliath armour moving around everywhere and everyone’s getting ready for war. War! We can make a lot of money in a war!

    This. Is. Arasaka!
    This. Is. Arasaka!

    How shall I explain the dying that was done?
    Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
    The value of his days
    Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
    They will want to know
    How was the audit done?
    And I shall say that it was done,
    For once,
    By those who knew the worth
    Of what was spent that day.

    – The Falcon, on wars

    So, although we can make a lot of money in a war, Coyote decided we should go on some stupid pointless mission to rescue his family from some dumb prison they got themselves into. Some Russian dude who is famous for being a human trafficker came to Coyote with a video from Coyote’s family, who apparently have never seen a contraceptive implant they liked because there’s like a thousand of them, and they all managed to get themselves locked up in the same ghetto down on the docks. The docks are now off-limits from Goliath policing, but Coyote’s cousin/niece/some random chick says that they were all rounded up and forced into this weird residential block, one family per room (so Coyote’s legion is all in one room) and sometimes Goliath police come by and grab someone and take them away and they never come back. Sometimes Goliath moves a family on to a “better” home but no one ever hears from them again and now it’s pretty clear that the “better” home is a bullet. So they managed to smuggle out a video to Coyote asking him to come and help them because he was always good at “fixing” things, and now just after we spent a lot of time talking about how we need to stop doing jobs for free, and just when a war comes along and offers us lots of chances to make money doing big fat wetworks, Coyote decides we need to go burn all our money freeing his family. All four hundred of them.

    After a bit of investigation though, we found a way to turn a profit. Coyote’s family are being held in some kind of housing complex that is also a Goliath facility of some kind, and it looks a lot like it’s being used for some kind of research or it’s a death camp. If we film our raid we could sell it for a big cash windfall, because there’s a war on and everyone’s interested in what Goliath did to trigger it. So we hooked up with Lin, the journalist who stumbled into our first mission together, and she agreed to come with us and film the situation in the Goliath Ghetto in exchange for an equal share of the takings. Because the ghetto is in the docks we spoke to Ghost’s goldfish hunter friends, and found out that they have a few people trapped in there too – Goliath has been casting a wide net to fill this ghetto up, which is interesting in itself – and they offered us two AV transports, capable of taking 60 people between them. We figured we could free another 20 random people, and we decided we would only free the first 20 people who promised to pay us 500 nuyen each, in either future work or cyberparts they don’t want. Ghost and Coyote did some investigating and found out that the people in this ghetto are having cheap and nasty cyberware put into them against their will by Goliath, which makes no sense at all, and we figured they would want that cyberware out so we could use it as payment for their transport.

    If it all goes down smoothly, we could make a lot of money. Oh, and free Coyote’s massive extended family. And find out what Goliath is doing in the docks, where some of our friends live and we’ve noticed there’s a lot of trouble happening. So in we went.

    We went in from the Pit, because there’s a way into almost everywhere in the docks from the Pit. The building we were targeting was an enormous column stretching up from the base of the docks almost to the next level. Around this enormous pillar there were habitat rings, each perhaps five stories high, spaced apart ascending the ring, and at the top – near the lowest level of New Horzion proper – a wider structure for AVs and troops. There were troops guarding this underground prison, but like all ghettos we were expecting them to be focused on keeping the Unwanted in, because no one who runs a ghetto ever expects anyone to come in and liberate the undesirables from outside, so we figured they’d be poorly armoured and unready.

    We were right. We came in through some kind of sewer system that emerged under a railway line linking to the base of the tower. We managed to cut out a hole so we could emerge near the tower, but there were a squad of guards loading a train when we arrived – they had just finished loading two stretchers with people on into the train when I came out of the tunnel. They didn’t see me but when Carbon came up, his/her cyberleg banged on the rails and someone noticed, even though the train engine had fired up and it had started moving. We had to move fast to stop them before the train got in our way and they got to raise an alarm, but we are fast. I shot two dead instantly, Carbon put an arrow through the third and moved out of the way of the train, and Coyote popped up from the hole and blew away the fourth, then dropped back down as the train rolled over him. All four guards died instantly, and while we killed them Ghost hacked the train and wiped the video of our passing. He and Lin emerged from the hole, and we moved into the lift area. Ghost hacked in, and up we went. The lift opened into a corridor that ended in a guard room, with two guards inside. Ghost hacked ahead into the cameras in the guard room, so we knew what was there, and we moved up to the doors. I fired through and killed one of the guards, and as soon as I fired Carbon and Coyote charged in, guns pointed at the other. He didn’t even have time to wipe the gore off his face before they were on him, and he soon agreed to tell us everything we needed to know. Carbon cut off the other guard’s fingers to bypass fingerprint scanners, and after the first guard told us all we needed to know we locked him away in a cupboard. We moved up.

    Coyote’s breeders were on a level much higher up from the security sectors, accessible by a single lift that opened into a security area with two sets of secured doors, between which a guard sat in a little bullet proof booth, and beyond which two more guards stood ready. Ghost hacked into the security system again and prepped the doors, and up we went. At the top the doors opened as we wanted, and we ran in. I managed to slide through and kill both the interior guards before they could react[1]. Carbon came through afterwards, almost as fast, and smashed through the door into the security room; Coyote tried shooting through the window but it was bullet proof. The guy inside pretended to surrender but actually tried to deploy a snub pistol embedded in his arm [idiot – working as a security guard isn’t a movie, what use is a snub pistol against us?], but Carbon saw the shift and pinned his arm to the wall with an arrow. We left him there. Carbon and I took positions in the hall, and Coyote and Ghost went on to gather his family. This took a bit of time because he has so many cousins, and lots of people wanted to pretend to be cousins, but eventually he found a few people to get everything rounded up. That’s when he found out that the Goldfish hunters’ family were six levels up, so he had to go up to get them while me and Carbon kept guard and the family milled around at the lift. Some more guards made the mistake of trying to attack the lift while we were waiting, but we gunned them down; Ghost, coming up behind them to access the control room, killed the last one himself. We all retreated to the lift and went down with Coyote, his legion of cousins, and the Fisher folk.

    At the bottom some wizened old distant relative of Coyote’s mentioned that she couldn’t find Timmy. Timmy! You know, Timmy! Who Coyote had never met, nor ever heard of, like most of his extensive family of nobodies, but who we now had to rush off to rescue from wherever he was. Apparently he had been taken out of the Coyote-community a few days ago, so we had to go find him not in the residential section up above but in the secured section beyond the lift. By now alarms were going off everywhere, and we figured we didn’t have very long at all before Goliath’s best soldiers came down on us. Fortunately, they didn’t know about the access from the Pit, so they would have to come down from the AV access areas at the top, which meant multiple switch-backs between lifts that they would have to fight Ghost to control. We guessed we might have time (and who doesn’t want to fight their way out of a Goliath research complex just once?!) so we sent the Legions of Coyote off down the tunnel we had used to come up, and ran into the security/research complex at the base of the Goliath Ghetto.

    Resleeved
    Resleeved

    Things down here were pretty simple, probably because Goliath was expecting any trouble to be ghetto dwellers breaking out, heading up, not trained soldiers breaking in and heading down. There were no guards, and we soon broke into the research complex. Finally we found the central labs. After we had rampaged through a couple of supply rooms we hit the central labs, where there were six research scientists cowering at their desks and trying to look all innocent, like they were just doing experiments on flies or something. The bodies, the graphics on big screens, and the people suspended in cryogenic units suggested something different. The room was suffused in a calm blue glow from the cryogenic units, maybe 10 of them, in each of which a real actual person was slowly metamorphosing into a monster. Something terrible was happening here, and we all wanted to know what it was. Ghost ran to access a computer terminal, yelling at one of the scientists to give him details while Coyote threatened the guy with his massive pistol; Carbon sprinted through to secure the far door.

    Me, I did what Dedicated Retribution Units do after they’ve been Involuntarily Demobilized by these kinds of people. I set to work.

    The first scientist was running out of the lab into the hallway, and I reacted before I knew we were in a lab; I shot him in both knees, but he wasn’t ready for the power of my rifle and had some kind of seizure when both his kneecaps blew out, falling down and twitching and frothing on the floor. I’ve seen that before and I know it means my job is done, so I moved straight into the room – in this power armour I have to take point. Because it was obviously safe Coyote and Ghost moved in behind me towards the central computer stack, the remaining five scientists all standing gape-mouthed in front of their work. The closest one had her scalpel in hand, standing just past the body of a child on a trolley, organs spread out in little dishes like some kind of Cantonese wedding party for the dead. I didn’t stop in my inward movement, slinging my rifle as I moved forward, and grabbed her by the face, lifting her over the trolley. The power armour has a huge amount of servo power, but I’m not used to its strength; as I lifted her up the boosted armour crushed her jaw and cheekbones, shattering them like a ripe melon and splattering her blood over her name badge, which I deliberately forget now because people like this do not deserve names; the body slipped out of my grip with a kind of still-desperately-kicking gasp and she fell on her experimental “subject” (funny how they use that name for people who are almost always objects), scattering organs all over the floor; somewhere there was a little dish of this child’s belongings and that too fell and scattered onto the floor, but now the scientist was twitching and spasming and gurgling on the gurney, her blood and teeth joining the child’s beads and liver and kidneys. I don’t like to leave a job half done but I thought she deserved such an ending so I left her there as I turned to the rest of the room. Things were moving too slowly – Carbon had barely reached the far door and Ghost was still plugging into the mainframe, but the remaining four scientists’ eyes were widening with slow horror as they realized the Ethics Committee had decided to do a site inspection. The nearest one tried to run to hide under a desk but he slipped on the first one’s blood and did a kind of clumsy somersault, breaking a leg as he fell. I let him slither, gasping, under the desk, thinking he had a safe moment, before I punched through the desk and grabbed him by the back of the neck. Power armour is a very serious force multiplier, but I couldn’t get him out of the desk through the hole I made – after a bit of shaking I gave up, but by now I’d broken him all apart like you see in those videos of lions and buffalo in the savannah back in the Oil Age before humans wiped out all the big predators. Now I’m the big predator and humans my prey, but I guess he didn’t get much time to make the connection while he was being rattled around like a rag doll, thinking his company would save him. The third scientist tried to scoot past me to the door after I threw his friend away like a rag doll but I punched him in the stomach as he ran (these people really should try some boosting if they’re gonna be in this line of work!) He made a kind of hydraulic “whoof” sound and went up to the ceiling, coughing a little constellation of blood all over the floor, then came crashing down. I think he was trying to say something to me after that but each time I punched him his pathetic begs just came out as soggy squelching noises, and then he stopped. There were two left now, backing away into the corner of the room and trying not to get noticed. Ghost was still busily downloading their data while Coyote watched him protectively, occasionally looking at me in this kind of disappointed way (I always disappoint Coyote, he’s constantly complaining that if I get the right coupons I can get my nails done 10% cheaper!) I guess those two scientists had figured out now that maybe if they both ran one of them might be able to beat the other one to the door, but I’m not bloodthirsty – I’m just doing retribution. So I shot them both as they ran, and tapped them a second time as they fell. Really, some people are so arrogant! Thinking I’m going to run all the way across the room just to kill them when I have so many perfectly good guns! But I guess that’s why they’re big-shot scientists in a human research facility, and I’m just a vengeful demon.

    Ghost finished his download, though he was muttering it was largely incomplete (what could these people have been learning that we want to know?) and he hadn’t found Timmy, so we moved on, past the inner door of the lab. Here we entered a corridor lined with cells, in each of which was this monstrous semi-human thing, a massive warped pile of flesh and muscle, obviously bioengineered in some way out of a real human. They were screaming and yelling and slamming into the walls of their cells, but it was obviously dangerous to try and open the doors, these cells were reinforced and reinforced for a reason. We stalked down this eerie corridor, surrounded by the blast glass-muted screams of the not-yet-dead, and came to a horrifying dead end. After about eight cell doors the corridor stopped at a kind of door, with a drop into a crate. In that crate was a pile of bodies in various stages of malformation: some still fully human, dried blood around mouth and ears; some half human, their hands brutalized from trying to escape their cells; some closer to the monsters in the hallway behind, but still broken and wrecked. Timmy was nowhere to be seen, but his presence was dark and threatening in the room. He was somewhere in that pile of bodies, obviously. We took another look in the cells to see if the warped faces in there might be Timmy, yelling his name, but the figures in the cell were so broken and deranged that we couldn’t tell even if they heard us, let alone if they were once a small, slender dark-haired teenager with an Arabic mother and Spanish father, who played Virtual-Pokemon and liked spun candy and was said to have got up to some mischief with Angela from the third block that made their families break up in acrimony; he was gone, replaced with either madness or the stench of wasted death.

    Then I looked at the camera, and I took a bit of the Falcon, and changed her, and made her my own, and spat her back out in the faces of the villainous scum who authorized this pit of bodies behind me. I gestured down there and said

    We’re coming for you, who signed the requisition for this. You’re next in that pit. Cross the gulf between the stars, and we’ll come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and we’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. We are what you once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death. We’re after you now, you creeping torturers and rapists, and you can sign all the digital requisitions you want but in the end you’re going to finish in that pit, and we won’t be merciful dragging you there.

    Then we ran. And got out.

    Now the whole world knows what you’re doing, Goliath, they have seen your hidden crimes. But you don’t have to worry about the whole world: You have to worry about me. I know what you did, and I don’t like it, and I’m not some fearful New Horizon mite, who can’t protect their family or doesn’t know where to go to get justice. I bend death to my will; like the Falcon said, I won’t even let Death in the tradesman’s entrance. I am the fury of a woman not just scorned but wronged, and wronged again. I have no past and no future, nothing to live for, and no reason to die quickly. I will measure my vengeance, but you can rest assured it is coming. I don’t know who Timmy was, but I know who he should have become, and I will pay you back for that, and for all the others who you ground up mercilessly for profit and power. I am the Dedicated Retribution Unit (Involuntarily Demobilized). They should have demobilized me properly when they had the chance, because now I’m coming for you.

    —

    fn1: Was there ever a better-timed Combat Sense critical? This got me to Combat Sense 8, finally … Drew is rocking …

    —

    Brief summary for the less bloodthirsty:

    1. Coyote got a message from his family begging him to rescue them from some kind of ghetto in the docks

    2. We decided to help them, and some goldfish hunters whose family were also in the same ghetto

    3. We broke into the ghetto and slaughtered our way up

    4. We rescued the necessary people, and ran down

    5. One of Coyote’s family, some poor helpless Timmy kid, was taken from them to the research labs in the basement a few days ago

    6. We slaughtered our way into the basement, and found that there are human experiments going on that seem to involve some kind of bioengineering to create insane super-soldiers

    7. No Timmy, but lots of vengeance

    8. We got out, with a video of the whole thing including the research labs; Goliath are in big trouble.

  • Spiral Confederacy Character: Ahmose Inhapi

    Beyond the stix ...
    Beyond the stix …

    I’m all alone
    Matter and shadow
    In the darkflow
    Treading deep waters
    Searching for the shore
    Waiting for the dawn to come

    – Catechism of the Tomb Masters of Duat

    Duat is a small desert planet on the Frontier. Its two big oceans frame one huge continent that appears to be all sand and stone. Only along its huge fresh water rivers can one find any flora or fauna. The rivers, especially the huge delta close to the southern ocean, serve as the source for almost all life on the Planet and are the wellspring of its civilization. Duat is a tomb planet: Many powerful kings and emperors from wealthier neighbouring planets choose it as their burial ground. Artefacts prove it has played this role for millennia. The religion of Duat is ancient and deeply connected to a concept of the Afterlife that is shared across several star systems, and the people of Duat see their planet as a gateway to the Underworld and their Gods as the gatekeeper and guardians of this sacred realm of shadows.

    Duat always had great Architects, Stonemasons and Artisans, but also lots of slaves. These slaves were residents of other planets who had been sentenced to death, as well as locals who couldn’t raise their status, rebellious slaves, or political dissidents. However, like all slave systems this arrangement eventually crumbled. About a millennium ago the locals revolted against the out-world lords. In the struggles a local queen rose to power and rallied all of Duat under her Banner, as she was believed to be sent by the Gods. She was said to rule over the living, where the Gods rule over the dead and the spirits. After a long and costly war, she was acknowledged by the out-worlders as the Queen of the Dead – showing how little the ones who chose this planet as their graveyard know about its people.

    And so Duat got its first queen and rightful leader in written history, and the dynasty of the God-Monarchs began. Under the rule of the God-Kings and God-Queens the tech-level rose quickly and slavery receded until only off-world prisoners and local pariahs were categorized as slaves. After Duat reached a certain Tech Level through its own efforts, and with a little help from artifacts from off-worlders, the Confederation decided to establish contact. In a short period the now frontier-planet has changed a lot, under confederate law. The God-Queen is a just some kind of mascot in the eyes of the Confederation. But her worshippers still would rise against all of the universes at her command. Nowadays Duat is still famous for its architects, stonemasons and artisans. It is also considered highly fashionable and a sign of great status to get one’s tomb built in the Deserts of Duat. The tombs along the Rivers are only for Queens and Kings, but more tombs have been opened inland and the funerary business is now thriving. With the opening of the space ports lots of grave robbers rushed to Duat to try their luck in the old pyramids – to collect sowme rare artifacts. Those who get caught face the death penalty by local law.

    There are rumors that the sudden Tech Level rise – as well as some of the astonishing architectural designs of some tombs – was influenced by some very powerful AI, which hides in one of the many hidden tombs (which is also why there are quite some confederated sponsored “grave robbers”). Others suggest that the rebellion of the original slave queen was fomented by Confederacy spies, and that certain magical traits of early priests of the afterlife who worked in her service may actually have been the work of Confederacy psions. Of course, this was all millenia ago now, so no one knows anymore what happened. But is it not a good thing that slavery was ended and a planet uplifted?

    Recently the queen disbanded her esteemed Queensguard, which was a big surprise for all on- and off-world, and was taken by the Confederacy’s leadership as a sign of her commitment to intergalactic morals.

    Bleeding across the sky
    A purpose that’s gone awry
    A dubious reckoning
    Don’t fade away

    – Motto of the disbanded Queensguard

    Ahmose Inhapi

    The Queensguard
    The Queensguard

    Home Planet: Duat

    Sex: Female

    Age: Unknown

    Height: 186cm

    Weight: 75kg

    Éyes: Green

    Hair: Black

    Ahmose Inhapi was born on Duat just around the time the confederation laws were fully enacted and uplift completed, even though she certainly looks younger than that. She was born an orphan, her mother died giving birth and her father a month before. Her family had traditional positions as servants and guards in the household of the Queens and Kings. Her grandfather would often tell her stories about life before the confederation made contact, about the glories of a free world and the rightful place of their God-Queen. Her grandma on the other hand made sure to point out that all is better since the Confederacy uplifted them and made them wealthy.

    Her parents were proud and famous soldiers with a fine reputation among the court. She followed their footsteps and she entered the queens-guard at a very young age, after she served as a servant in her childhood. However, a few years ago the queen sent her guards out, to explore the universe and bring knowledge and warnings of danger back to Duat. They are officially disbanded, but the truth is they were never released from their oath, neither that taken to the queen, nor Duat and surely not to the Gods.

    At the gates of the underworld ...
    At the gates of the underworld …

    As one of those guards dispatched to the universe, Ahmose had to make a choice of directions. Others of the queens guard joined the confederate military, some servants joined big corporations. Ahmose decided to learn all about and connect to the world of rogues, Pirates, thieves and smugglers. She joined a pirate vessel to get off world and get to know space. She spent a lot of time with the crew, tried to connect to get all the contacts and information she needs. But once she decided that she had learned enough about travelling in space to make it on her own, she left the Pirates. She won’t serve someone else except her queen! So she decided that, if she wants to keep her journey going, she must be captain of her own vessel. But from her time with the pirates she knows that, to explore the universe, you need a crew you can trust.

    Now, it s time to get herself a ship and a crew…

  • Comparing Rhetoric on Greece and Iceland

    You entrusted your money to people who eat smoked guillemot?
    You entrusted your money to people who eat smoked guillemot?

    I was in the UK in 2008 and 2009 when the Icesave banking disaster happened, and the UK government rushed to use anti-terrorism legislation to try and protect the money of British investors. There were something like 300,000 “ordinary” British and Dutch investors with money in Icesave accounts, and when the disaster happened all but the first 20,000 pounds or so were not protected by deposit insurance, so the UK government acted to try and protect the full deposits of the savers. I remember this clearly [although, probably not details of dates and money amounts] because one of my colleagues at the time had 120,000 pounds parked in such an account, the proceeds of selling her house, and was looking forward to using the money – inflated by the high interest – to buy her next one, and she was understandably distraught when she woke up to discover it had vanished into volcanic smoke.

    I also remember at the time that there was a lot of anger in the British public, not only at Iceland, but also at the British government for guaranteeing the deposits of people who were basically risking their money to get a higher rate of return. I often heard the refrain “they knew the risks” and many people pointed out at the time that higher interest rates usually correspond with higher risk, and these people could have had their money protected if they had taken more reasonable risks in a UK bank. This rhetoric probably wasn’t based entirely in fact, since British deposits weren’t fully guaranteed, and the UK government had to rush to assure large deposits in Northern Rock after it failed[1], but the general rhetorical principle was correct, British banks were safer than Iceland banks and had a correspondingly lower rate of return. The question was asked: should we bail out people who knew the risks they were taking? (Incidentally, I didn’t actually know at that time that a slightly higher rate of interest in a country that I assumed had good banking laws was a sign of higher risk; as a result of the rhetoric of that period I reassessed my involvement in an ING online account that is now defunct).

    I can’t easily find articles online from the time that say these things, but I don’t think my memory is wrong. This comment by an academic from McGill University (Canada) makes the point that investors should wear the risk; this blog roundup suggests that many economists thought it was right for Iceland to refuse to protect investors, and indeed Christine Lagarde of the IMF thought Iceland took the right approach. I can’t find any articles directly demanding that deposit holders should carry their risk, but I do remember it being a commonly-stated view at the time, and the view that Iceland did the “right thing” by telling investors to take a haircut is well-accepted, I think, as is the view that it has recovered better than those economies that did not. A subsidiary view, that deposit insurance creates moral hazard, is widely broadcast I think and is consistent with the idea that if you want to get a high rate of return on your deposit you need to be willing to accept the risk that you will lose it, pour encourage les autres. So I don’t think I’m wrong about this perspective and how it was broadcast at the time even if I can’t find written evidence.

    The idea that “investors” should wear the risk they take when chasing big profits seems completely reasonable, until one remembers that in this case the investors (and ultimately the creditors) for Icesave included depositors, that is ordinary people who put money in a high-risk/high-return account hoping for a short term gain. It seemed at the time that a lot of people were comfortable with the idea that creditors should just put up with their haircut, and depositors “knew the risks.”

    So it’s interesting to compare this rhetoric with the rhetoric surrounding Greece’s recent troubles. Much of the rhetoric about Greece focuses on its profligacy, the easy-spending nature of the Greeks, their corruption, their crazy ideas that they could just keep taking on more debt and spending it however they want. You don’t see much rhetoric (or at least, I haven’t) questioning why people were willing to lend them all this money, and why their creditors are now so heavily exposed. Remember that for every debtor there is a creditor, and the creditor wouldn’t be lending the money if they didn’t want to, i.e. if they weren’t benefiting from it. When Icesave collapsed the greedy motives of the creditors (and, implicitly or explicitly, the depositors who make up a certain proportion of those creditors) was front and centre in the debate, but it’s strangely absent from the Greek debate. We know that in the early stages of its crisis Greece had to take on a lot of public debt to bail out banks that were in trouble; at the time of writing it appears that private debt constitutes about 60bn euros of Greece’s total, which would have been about 30% of the total debt before the collapse. Why were these people lending money to a country that was cooking its books, had apparently obviously unsustainable pension and welfare systems, and an entire population that we are now told were slurping up ouzo down by the beach rather than working 12 hour days like Germans? These creditors didn’t have to lend this money, they could have bought German bonds or Iranian nuclear futures or something more solid and reliable. They loaned money to Greece because up until the crisis Greece’s economy was growing faster than anywhere else in Europe, everyone wanted a slice of that golden Greek sunshine, and basically they thought they could make their motza[2] and get out before the whole shebang went tits-up. i.e., they were greedy. Yet nowhere do we hear tell of their greediness – even though at the same time as their golden goose was turning barren, Icesave depositors were copping flak in the press and the public for being greedy and reckless.

    Why is that?

    We also shouldn’t stop with these faceless private lenders, who are no doubt lounging around in a gold-plated yacht off some private Greek Island, fluffy white cat firmly en-lapped. We can also wonder why none of this rhetoric of recklessness extends to the dour and responsible Germans. Germany has 60bn Euros sunk in the Greek project, and it is earning a healthy rate of interest. Germany, the country that has never paid its debts, the ultimate trust fund kid, is now strangely insistent on Greece paying its debts, and no one anywhere is questioning why Germany is so exposed to the economy of a country it has deplored as reckless, irresponsible, intransigent and wayward (indeed, worse than Iran if we are to judge by their negotiating results). A handful of eurozone countries have something north of 200 bn Euros sunk into the Greek project, and we now know that they are making a lot of money from this little act of charity: the Guardian’s live blog today tells us that David Cameron is contemplating demanding some of the 1.9bn Euros in profit that the ECB has made from its loans to Greece (though it doesn’t tell us over what period that profit was made). How come this fact – that the eurozone lenders are making fat scads of cash – is not being broadcast widely, as the Icesave depositors’ greedy winnings were being broadcast in 2008? Instead of this morality play, we are constantly reminded that the German taxpayer doesn’t want to have to cough up his or her hard-earned dollars to cover Greek mistakes. Yet right now the German taxpayer is making money from this debacle, so shouldn’t we be instead asking why the German taxpayer tolerates his or her government sinking 60bn Euros into a high-risk, high short-term profit venture in junk bonds? Germany is a responsible country, we’re told, whose taxpayers don’t take risks – at the same time as the media carefully avoids reporting on the big money Germany stands to make if Greece doesn’t default.

    The situations aren’t exactly the same of course, and people could argue that the eurozone nations didn’t have a choice – they aren’t loaning this money because they want to, the poor darlings, they’re doing it to save Greece and the euro project. But they did have choices, many choices: they could have told those (primarily French and German) banks to fail, as Iceland did, back at the beginning of the crisis; they could have rushed through some changes to the welfare transfers in the EU to ensure that Greece received direct payments rather than loans[3]; they could have printed money and handed it to the banks, as the UK and US did; they could have raised debt in their own countries, which are much less financially at risk, and provided it as a grant or something; they could have told Greece to find the money on private money markets. But they didn’t, they chose to lend money to Greece on terms that just happen to deliver them large profits – profits that are likely larger than they could have got from e.g. buying each others’ government bonds, or investing in the kind of low-return portfolios that would be politically acceptable to their electorates. And it just so happens that, since they control the mechanism by which Greece generates the repayments of those debts, they are able to turn the screws to ensure the money keeps coming – unlike those investors in Icelandic banks, who have no direct means of control over Icelandic politics and economy (and anyone from Britain who is old enough to know about the Cod Wars should surely know how hard it is to control Iceland!)

    And all while this was going on, we were being told about how irresponsible ordinary depositors were to put their money in a bank that had a high interest rate. It’s almost as if the morality underlying the rhetoric depends entirely on the people who took the risks …

    —

    Fn1: Northern Rock was then run by famous climate change denialist Matt Ridley, which one should always remember when one is considering how far our modern banks have sunk, and how much one should trust the risk assessment abilities of climate change denialists.

    Fn2: This is a Greek word, trust me, I’m Australian so I know Greek slang

    Fn3: Something you might argue is hard to do, but it appears that today the leaders of the ESMF have been able to magic up 20 billion euros from the Common Agricultural Policy, in order to find a way to provide rapid finance without leaning on the ECB[4]

    Fn4: Which makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Have these people been listening to the Greek government when it tells them how fucked it is? Had they not noticed? They just spent two days arguing with a Greek dude about whether to give him any money, and after they agree they find they don’t have any mechanism to provide the money, and he needs it now and he’s been telling them that for weeks! Perhaps instead of spending that two days arguing, they could have spent it more productively looking for their wallet.

  • A Tale of Two Deals

    At least it's not debt relief!
    At least it’s not debt relief!

    This week the European Union was involved in two major deals that settled two outstanding issues. One involved a long-standing issue that posed a threat to global economic prosperity, with an intransigent and corrupt government that consistently refused to adhere to past agreements, was not transparent about its activities, consistently responded to criticism of its activities with aggressive and nationalist rhetoric, and was suffering serious economic problems that required it to rapidly come to a deal that the rest of the world could agree to. The other involved Greece.

    The first of these two deals is, of course, the Iranian nuclear deal, which sees Iran keep its peaceful nuclear program and the vindication of its claim to a right to peaceful nuclear power, despite 10 years of obfuscation, secret development, and often dangerously inflammatory rhetoric. For much of that time Iran has been actively undermining US foreign policy interests in the region, including those of its allies, and any concessions to Iran are widely seen as both an insult and a threat to the US’s regional allies. But somehow the EU plus Russia and the USA managed to come up with a genuine compromise that respects Iranian sovereignty, allows it to continue to broadly control (and in many ways, expand) its nuclear science program, eases sanctions and gives security guarantees to the whole region. This deal is realistic about the realpolitik of the region, sensitive to the levers required to influence a sovereign nation’s domestic policy, and mindful of the long-term sustainability of the actions proposed. On a first reading it seems like a masterpiece of cooperative diplomacy.

    In contrast, in the same week the EU managed to come up with a completely reprehensible deal that crushes Greek national sovereignty, removes all national control over the key levers of the economy, and doesn’t offer any promise that the problem will go away in 5, 10 or even 30 years. It is both ignorant of the underlying economics of the problem and completely unrealistic about what can be achieved with the policy levers available. On a first reading, it seems like a dog’s breakfast of coercion and wishful thinking.

    How could the EU have come up with two such radically different deals in the same week? Ostensibly the former concerns a much greater threat – nuclear proliferation – from a much less tractable nation that shares no strong cultural, political or even geographic ties with any of the nations involved, while the latter involves an ultimately manageable debt crisis in an allied country with strong cultural, political and geographic ties. The latter problem could have been solved by unilateral EU fiat (debt relief) while the former required cooperation from the other power. Yet the deal on Greece has been forged as if that unilateral action were inconceivable, while the deal with Iran has taken a nuanced approach to the real challenges of securing cooperation from such a belligerent negotiating partner. I don’t believe that anyone negotiating with Iran really believed that Iran has a nuclear weapon, so they weren’t negotiating under such a threat, so it appears that they really, genuinely have just tried to come to good terms. It’s not even the case that oil diplomacy or regional military concerns could have been that influential – oil is losing its importance as a geostrategic asset (and will rapidly drop in value as global warming bites), and although Iran has something to offer the US in dealing with ISIS, it is effectively militarily contained.

    So what drove this difference? My suspicion is that the economic ideologies underlying the politics of most developed nations are now so completely unhinged and divorced from reality that it is impossible for them to negotiate reasonably in a sovereign debt crisis. They don’t (or won’t) understand fiat currencies, and won’t act with the authority and power that proper understanding of fiat currencies gives, so their negotiations have to be conducted in such a way as to carefully skirt around the actual economic facts in evidence. Connected with this is the related problem of ideologies and moralities – about work ethics, deserving vs undeserving poor, leaners and lifters – that are really hangovers from 100 years ago, and have no place in modern economic discourse (whether sub-national or international). In comparison, the nations involved in negotiating with Iran remain very cognizant and accepting of the basic principles of realpolitik and so are able to incorporate them into decision making and policy development. Hence the apparently bipolar mind at work on these two deals.

    An alternative explanation is that negotiations with Greece involved only the EU central powers, whereas negotiations with Iran involved Obama and Putin – who at the moment are looking waaaay saner than the European leadership …

  • Spiral Confederacy Adventure 1: Minor Contractual Disputes

    I didn't want to land there anyway ...
    I didn’t want to land there anyway …

    The first adventure of the Spiral Confederacy campaign starts with just two adventurers, who find themselves looking for work on a Starport above the Remnant planet of Dune. The two adventurers for this first session are:

    • Alpha, a psion with an interest in archaeology who has travelled out to Dune in hopes of exploring its surface
    • Ahmose Inhapi, an ex-pirate who has switched to smuggling and is travelling the Frontier hoping to find adventure, independence and wealth

    The planet they have travelled to, Dune, is under protective blockade by the Spiral Confederacy, enforced by the naval frigates Script for a Jester’s Tear and Garden Party. All congress with the planet is forbidden, even high-resolution film, and no one is allowed on- or off-world. This blockade has been in place since the planet was identified some 30 years ago, but the system itself is rich with asteroid belts and an extensive mining operation is underway. Travel in and 0ut of the system is unrestricted, and the starport was established soon after the wealth of the asteroids was identified by Pan-Galactic Mining, which sounds like a big company but isn’t, under a semi-exclusive lease. The starport is small but high grade, in order to support a large fleet of automated mining vessels and a small fleet of piloted vessels. Dune lies two parsecs from any other planet, and its star system is being exploited ruthlessly before the planet’s residents are uplifted and able to stake a claim on their resources.

    The characters have met with a man called Kong, a slightly effete fixer and broker from a nearby planet called the Forge. He has offered them a very simple deal: he needs them to get an ancient data crystal from a mine on an asteroid in-system, immediately. The crystal is a left-over relic from miners or prospecters who moved through the area a few hundred years ago, and may contain information of value to Kong’s buyer. He arrived in-system five days ago but didn’t have time to find people to help him on the way, so he is hiring the PCs. Because there is a possibility the crystal is guarded by some kind of automated system he wants people with a bit of combat experience to find it, and he can’t take his own bodyguard because the man is a Remnant and very uncomfortable with zero-g. Getting to the asteroid is simple: Kong has a chip that contains access codes for the automated mining ships, which can be overridden and given new flight orders, or even flown manually. If given automated flight orders they will not wait on the asteroid for more than a day, so it is better to use manual flight if possible, something Ahmose is definitely capable of. Payment consists of a single Memory Download Centre access card, valid for one week from date of activation, to be given to the PCs on their return with the chip. A memory download is equivalent to a spare life – it comes with a clone of the user’s body at the time of download – and is usually only available to members of the intergalactic elite, so even a one-time download is a great reward.

    The PCs spent a few hours getting their gear together, and then left on their mission. Hacking the mining ship was no trouble, and so after 15 hours of steady flight they were on the destination asteroid. They set the mining ship to manual upon arrival and emerged onto a small asteroid, perhaps 2-3 km across, rimed in some kind of ice and very far from the small, super-hot white sun that flooded this star system with deadly light. Vacc suits on, they trudged across the landing site, down a slope on the far side and into a gully in deep shadow. Ahmose activated a mining lamp and they moved cautiously down the empty gully, which was cast in deep shadow by 6m high sharp walls, on one side surmounted by rib-like stone arches. After walking perhaps 200 m they came to a small hole in the gully wall, which opened into a smooth tunnel leading down into the asteroid. They followed this tunnel down in a spiral for perhaps 60m before it opened into a small cavern. Here in the middle of the cavern was a small plinth, on which sat their target, a dusty yellow chip in a rough cube shape about the size of a die. They explored the cavern carefully, Alpha’s surveillance drone checking for any radiation or invisible signals, but could find no evidence of automated guard systems. Using a special box provided by Kong they picked up the crystal and left the cave unharmed. Too easy!

    As they returned, slogging up the gully back to the ship, they were ambushed. Two laser beams hit them, one each, and they dived into cover. They were taking fire from a pair of antagonists in a jumble of rocks about 40m away on the far side of their landing zone. Alpha, not being a combatant, slipped back down from cover into the gully, activated an anti-grav belt, and drifted out of the gully further away, out of sight of the shooters, in order to drift around behind them. Meanwhile Ahmose took out her shotgun and returned fire, flattening one of their attackers instantly but taking more damage from the other, who had better cover and seemed to be an excellent shot. Fortunately this enemy’s laser carbine was having difficulty penetrating Ahmose’s combat armour, and she was able to sustain only light wounds while she kept him pinned down. As this battle unfolded, Alpha slid up behind the remaining attacker and opened fire. He hit once but the attacker saw him and returned fire, doing a very light wound. Alpha, terrified of being killed here, teleported out of his vacc suit and back inside the hold of the mining ship, leaving his space suit drifting empty in front of their attacker, who didn’t realize immediately that something so strange had happened and kept shooting. This gave Ahmose time to leap forward into battle, drawing her cutlass and laying into the guy. He was soon beaten by her ferocious attacks, and she was able to tie up both men and drag them back to the mining ship.

    Once there they woke up one – Larry – and interrogated him. He was quite forthcoming, revealing that he and his empathy-linked colleague Barry had been paid by a woman called Orlac at Junction Zero, to come here and take the crystal. They were told that the crystal was a relic of an ancient rebellion that swept through this area 1000 years ago and might hold secrets about the nature of that rebellion, but that other factions connected to that time might be searching for it and they were to kill them if necessary. They were also told to rush the job, and offered shares in a micro-cutter called the Lithium Blade, as well as a safe house on The Reach (a pirate planet). Larry and Barry themselves had come on a small ship called Come as You Are, which was a shifter – a type of tiny ship designed to move very small numbers of people across short interstellar distances. Investigation revealed it had just two staterooms – room for four people – and a small cargo hold.

    Ahmose negotiated with Larry a little and they came to a deal: she would let Larry and Barry live, in exchange for becoming captain on their ship. Larry agreed, and they headed back to the starport together. Ahmose contacted Kong on the way and he met them in the arrival lounge of their ship bay as soon as they arrived, carrying their memory download cards. Larry and Barry passed him and went straight to the medical bay of the starport to tend to Barry’s (serious) injuries, while Ahmose and Alpha negotiated with Kong. They handed over the crystal and Ahmose told Kong about the information she had received from Larry; in exchange she convinced Kong (rather easily!) to give up two more memory download vouchers. He handed them over, thanked the PCs, and left in quite a hurry.

    Ahmose and Alpha were going to return to their quarters and relax a bit but something about the atmosphere in the starport made them change their minds. Things seemed tense and busy, and something had changed. Getting a bad feeling, they both went immediately to the Memory Download Centre, only to find it closed and the remaining staff member directing robots to pack up equipment. When they asked her why she was closed, she told them that the entire Starport was going to be destroyed within five days, and the MDC was evacuating today. Since memory download takes a full day with aftercare, they wouldn’t be able to do the download; and since jumping to another planet with an MDC would take more than 7 days, they would not be able to execute their vouchers. Perhaps they could find an advocate on Junction Zero who would be able to force an extension of the expiry date …

    Had Kong known this when he gave them the vouchers? Had he ripped them off?

    The pair of them rushed to a nearby bar where starport residents were gathered around a screen, to catch up on the news. The starport was due to be destroyed as part of a contractual dispute between Pan-galactic Mining and Soleria, a larger core company, that had been resolved several weeks ago in the Supreme Court. Soleria starships had just arrived with the news, and with the gunboat that would destroy the starport. They had also provided two evacuation vessels, Soleria 11C/1 and Soleria 11C/2, that between them could carry 400 people in cryogenic low berth. Because there were 600 – 700 people on the starport, these ships were sorting through residents and taking only residents who had legitimate business on the starport and were not Pan-Galactic staff, consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling that they only had to exercise a “reasonable” effort to save starport residents. Everyone else had to find their own way out …

    Alpha and Ahmose rushed down to the medical bay to find Larry arguing with the Doctor, who was refusing to provide medical care to Barry because his condition required several days of care and she needed to get out soon. Unfortunately she was a Pan-Galactic Mining employee, so had no guaranteed way off the ship. Ahmose suggested she could leave on the Come as You Are if she loaded up the medical equipment needed to care for Barry, and any spare valuable gear that would fit. She agreed to this deal very quickly and began preparing to move Barry and all required gear to their ship. They then rushed back to their ship, worried that someone might try to steal it, and indeed found two men arguing about whether to break into the docking bay when they arrived. They scared them off, set Larry to guard the doors, and went down to the main docks to find out what was happening.

    The main docks were a scene of chaos. Only four ships were now docked here – Soleria 11C/1 and 11C/2, a mining ship called the Mineral Dahlia, and a freebooter called the Ride on Time. The Soleria ships had marines out in force herding people into queues for assessment, and the captain of the Mineral Dahlia was looting as much mining gear as she could, loading it all into the cargo hold of her ship – a cargo hold that, if empty, could probably rescue all the remaining citizens of the starport. Meanwhile the captain of the Ride on Time, an odious man by the name of Mithril Carn, was auctioning off berths on his ship. He had enough stateroom space for 24 people to board his ship, and had begun taking bids on the space. Six of his men, thuggish-looking mercenaries, stood ready to quell any dissent, and as the PCs watched the two men they had scared from their own ship sidled up to join that gang. Things in the docks were rapidly taking a desperate and criminal turn …

    This is where the adventure ended. The PCs need to decide whether to try and intervene in this madness to try and rescue everyone on the starport, or to just abandon them to their fate. They have only two or three days to make their decision before the deadline becomes pressing. What will they do …?

     

  • Post-scarcity Traveller

    I have begun a campaign set in a post-scarcity science fiction setting, called the Spiral Confederacy. The setting is a sprawling corner of the galaxy that was once a sprawling human interstellar empire. This empire fell apart in some ancient catastrophe that separated all the planets, and over thousands of years they lost contact with each other. A new empire, the Spiral Confederacy, has arisen and is slowly recovering all the planets of this diaspora, expanding from a central core. The Spiral Confederacy is divided roughly into the core, consisting of planets that have been connected for thousands of years; the Rim, containing planets reconnected in the past couple of hundred years, still recovering from their isolation; and the Frontier, which contains unexplored planets and Remnant planets, civilizations of the Diaspora that have not yet been reconnected. Adventures will start in the Frontier.

    The Spiral Confederacy is close to a post-scarcity society, with so much wealth and resources that there is no need for most people to work or indeed to do anything they don’t want to. A person can live their whole life without working or contributing to society in any way but still have a guaranteed home, food, education, leisure, planetary and interstellar travel, with no conditions. The only limitation on standard needs is the amount of time it takes to procure them. The society is not completely post-scarcity, so although it is based on the principles of Iain M Banks’s Culture, it’s not possible in this Confederacy for a person to simply request a spaceship for themselves and disappear on a galactic tour for a hundred years – that level of resource consumption is still restricted. There are also many legal limits, still, on what people can have – you can’t fly a plane without a license and training, for example. But you can get on a plane and travel anywhere you want, any time. As a result of these restrictions there is still inequality – to have homes on multiple planets, for example, or own a spaceship, one will have to work and contribute and build up the right to this greater level of resource use. It is to achieve these rights that most people begin adventuring.

    The Spiral Confederacy has several important underlying principles, described below.

    • AIs are illegal: The Confederacy has a deep and powerful hatred of AIs, and does all it can to drive them out of economic and social life. As a consequence, AIs are commonly found as enemies of human civilization. They have followers amongst the human population, however, who call on their powers as if they were gods – players can play these PCs as a new Traveller career called Adherents. As a consequence of this attitude towards AIs, all computer systems are heavily secured and hacking is almost impossible; furthermore, the Confederacy has reached the limits of its technological advancement (in Traveller terms, TL17) because further advancement is beyond human computational capacity and requires an AI contribution to science
    • Psionics are the scientific frontier: With scientific research stalled, human effort has turned to the development of psionics and the human mind, in the hopes of using these mysterious and little understood powers to advance human civilization. Psions are an acceptable character career and there is no limit on psionics in society, though it is considered polite for a psion to identify themselves clearly
    • Remnant worlds have “magic”: Many remnant worlds have fallen back into ruin and barbarism, and an interesting consequence of this slide is the development of priests and “magic”, something only observed in these backward worlds. The generally accepted theory is that these primitive worlds conceive of psionic powers as divine intervention or magic, and channel their powers through this mechanism; but interestingly, their powers are different to the standard psionics available to people from Core worlds. Study of these Remnant Priests is an important part of the program to advance psionics, and Priests are a new career available to players.
    • Information cannot travel faster than light: The only way to carry information between star systems is on spaceships, which travel at high speeds through jump technology (the standard Traveller system of moving a certain number of parsecs in a week of jump travel). There is no “ansible” or other method for conveying information without sending it through jump; matter can travel faster than light, but light cannot. Thus information takes weeks to move between star systems, so systems without regular trade routes can be months behind the news, creating a sense of frontier or colonial life, like the 17th century on Earth.
    • Consciousness is required for jump: It is not possible to send automated systems through jump space – for some reason, a consciousness is required to enter and leave jump. Computers can program jump paths and enter jump but they always, without fail, misjump or are lost in jump space. This includes AIs, either because the consciousness must be organic or they are in some sense not genuinely conscious (the argument made by the leaders of the Confederacy). This prevents AIs from spreading their consciousness between planets and forces them to rely on Adherents for this task; it also prevents the Confederacy from sending news between planets without devoting piloted spacecraft to the task, and creates pockets of space where news is patchy and information is not regularly updated. Pirates and criminals thrive in these pockets.

    Against this backdrop the Confederacy is slowly spreading and joining up the planets of the old Diaspora. It fights a low-level war against AIs on its fringes, and occasionally also against Remnant planets who refuse to accept its protection and wealth, or against rebellions from within. As it expands it stumbles upon mysteries from before the first fall, and catastrophes or strange enemies. Greedy for history, it is always looking for brave or stupid adventurers to help with its contacts and conflicts on the fringe of its space – and it is on that frontier that we will conduct our adventures.

    A full description of the Confederacy, and guidelines for house rules, can be downloaded here.

     

  • Character Classes for a Mad Max RPG

    Tyrant, Lancer and captured Rev-heads en scene
    Tyrant, Lancer and captured Rev-heads en scene

    One of the members of my regular gaming group is thinking of running a one-off set in the world of Mad Max, probably hacking the Fate rules. I don’t know how the Fate rules work but I’m very excited to consider gaming in Mad Max’s crazed world. So here are a few ideas for character classes (or archetypes, if that’s too narrow a concept) that might make sense in that world. They’re designed in terms of what might be thier core attributes, skills and types of special powers or feats. The archetypes are all based on people you meet in Mad Max 2-4, and examples are given in square brackets after the archetype name.

    • Road Warrior [Mad Max, Furiosa, Warrior Woman]: The quintessential loner good at everything. A capable driver not great at stunts, the Road Warrior is also a capable melee fighter and shooter. The Road Warrior’s primary trait is her level of comfort on moving vehicles: for a Road Warrior the moving back of a car is as stable a platform for combat as the solid earth of the desert, and she suffers no penalties or disadvantages fighting atop a moving vehicle – the only way to shake her loose is to change the momentum of her car. Because the road warrior has to make it in a wild and dangerous world on his own, he has to be good at a lot of things and often isn’t the match of his opponents at any one of them. He makes up for this with a healthy reserve of cunning and luck, as if the world had a narrative that favoured him …
    • Rev-head [Warboys, Hedgehogs, the Rock Riders]:Rev-heads are the quintessential stunt drivers of the Fury Road. They aren’t great fighters or shooters, specializing in only one form of attack, but this is because their main job is delivery – they get the Road Warriors and Polecats where they need to be. Rev-heads are also technically adept, because they need to fix their rigs on the run.
    • Polecat [Polecats]: Masters of acrobatics and close-fighting, the Polecat forms the boarding party of the wasted future. There is no vehicle too hard for them to get a purchase on, no high-speed chase that can confound their acrobatics, and no height or speed that can scare them. They don’t shoot, drive, speak or think: they leap, they smash, they grab.
    • Lancers [Warboys, some of the hedgehogs, crew of the tanker in Mad Max 2]: Lancers are the stalwarts of the convoy, the men and women at front and back whose job is the gunnery and long-range attack. Masters of heavy weapons, rifles, crossbows and spears, they don’t aim to get in close and fight, but to lay down the heavier defenses of the convoy so that the Polecats can get in and get the prize. Although they aren’t great drivers or athletes, they have a remarkable talent for escaping car crashes, and when they have the enemy in their sights they don’t feel the rough and tumble of the road …
    • Fliers [The Gyro Captain]: Fliers are rare and valued heroes of the future, patrolling the skies rather than the road. They can’t fight but they can fly, they have no fear of heights, excellent perception and an acuity for technology and the weather. Those little gyro-copters aren’t particularly stable either, so Fliers tend to have a great deal of luck…
    • Scamp [The Feral Kid]: People grow up early in the wasteland, and they don’t all get ahead by fighting and killing. Some make it through luck, wits, stealth and cunning. Most of the wasteland’s thieves and spies don’t make it to adulthood, which is why the majority of the ones you see are feral, scuttling kids. They can’t fight, but good luck catching them, or even seeing them …
    • Breeders [The Wives]: Breeders are rare gems in the wasteland, humans of perfect purity and beauty who are somehow immune to the corrupting effects of the Collapse. Perfect in every way, their genetic advantage isn’t just reflected in exceptional beauty: they also have better senses, and their minds are unaffected by decay and deformity, giving them a rare insight into the true nature of the world. They are highly sought after by every community in the wasteland, and they know how to use their beauty to deceive, distract and confuse. Breeders can be male or female!
    • Tyrants [Toecutter, Humungus, Aunty Entity, Imortan Joe, the People Eater, the Bullet Farmer – my, there are quite a lot of these aren’t there!]: Tyrants are the leaders of the wasteland, so-named because there is no nice way to rule in a world without water, food or mercy. They know what makes men and women tick, and they know how to use it to their advantage. They may not be great in battle, or even able to to fight at all, but they have a remarkable ability for channeling others’ cruelty and ambitions to their own ends. Through intimidation, inspiration, cunning and plain old good luck they get everything they want every time … until their luck runs out.
    • Organic Mechanic [The Organic Mechanic]: The doctors of the future, though there is almost nothing in the future that they can prevent or treat, except physical injury. Lacking the bedside manner of modern physicians, they make up for it with a refined taste in cruelty and an ingenuity for the use and misuse of human frailties. In addition to rough and ready methods for preserving the injured, the halt and the lame, Organic Mechanics also have a remarkable talent for jury-rigging primitive cybernetics and bio-enhancements so that their charges can keep fighting and dying. Why waste good organics? Or any?
    • Tech-heads [Master, Mechanic]: They can’t fight, they’re probably physically deformed, and they aren’t usually very pleasant, but you can’t go anywhere without them, so there they are in every messed-up community and hole in the ground between here and the salt flats. Give a tyrant a mechanic and a pool of water, and she’ll have a “community” built on cruelty, pig-shit and petrol within a month.
    • Brutes [Blaster, Rictus Erectus]: Possessed of the two greatest physical attributes one can enjoy in the wasteland – excessive physical strength and dim wits – the Brute is the last line of defense of every tyrant and petty dictator ever to rule the sand. Once the warboys are done, the rev-heads are burning and scattered, and the forces of disaster are closing in, every corrupt has this final suicidal mutant giant to deploy as he or she scuttles out the back door. Slow, stupid, impossibly loyal and invincible – what’s not to like?

    In this list I haven’t included Savants like the children in Beyond Thunderdome or mobile archers like the Vulvalini, either because they don’t seem to be playable or because they’re really just the name for a specific clan of other types of characters. But I think this makes for a fairly comprehensive list of mad archetypes for a mad world. Have I missed any …?

  • When the Supreme Court’s Words Mean Nothing

    The New England Journal of Medicine was released today, with its first assessment of the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision not to gut Obamacare. Policy analysts writing in the NEJM have been generally supportive of Obamacare, and so of course they’re happy with the result, declaring that it has removed “the largest remaining cloud of judicial uncertainty hanging over the Affordable Care Act” and advocating that now the legislative agenda focus on real improvements to the established law.

    The NEJM article also remarks on the importance of assessing the text of the legislation in its full context, not just the strict text of the specific provision. It argues that this is a well-understood principle of Supreme Court jurisprudence, and gives the following example:

    An earlier example of this principle comes from the Court’s 2000 decision in FDA v. Brown and Williamson, which King cites or quotes several times. Brown and Williamson held that (before more recent legislation) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lacked authority to regulate cigarettes as devices that deliver the drug nicotine. Despite the FDA statute’s broad literal definitions of “drug” and “device,” the Court concluded that “considering the [statute] as a whole, it is clear that Congress intended to exclude tobacco products from the FDA’s jurisdiction.”

    This past decision also makes perfect sense to me. While tobacco is clearly a drug, the FDA is not charged with monitoring recreational drugs, and tobacco products should be monitored separately or the FDA’s authority extended to them through an act of Congress.

    Interestingly, this is also what the architects and defenders of the King vs. Burwell case thought, back when the FDA v. Brown and Williamson case was decided, and repeatedly since. For example, in a 2007 post the Heritage Foundation cites it as an example of an exception to the trend towards an administrative state. I can’t find any evidence that the legal experts at the Heritage Foundation have decided that this example of the Supreme Court not showing “deference to agencies” must have been wrong due to its willingness to invoke “context,” in which (to quote Scalia) “words have no meaning.” Similarly, the Cato Institute has referred positively to the appeal to context in FDA vs. Brown and Williamson in both its 2006-2007 and 2008-2009 Supreme Court Reviews (see page 201 of the 2006-2007 Review, or a footnote on page 126 of the 2008-2009 Review). The Cato Institute has also issued multiple Amicus Briefs for other court cases where they think that the FDA v. Brown and Williamson case might help to enforce the importance of context. For example, in their Amicus Brief on Texas vs. United States of America (Case 1:14-cv-254) , for example, they argue (citing the case):

    The court must “fit, if possible, all parts [of the statute] into an harmonious whole” and use “common sense” to determine the scope of Congress’s delegation to an agency.

    Interesting how much their opinion of how the Supreme Court should interpret statutes has changed in just a short time: their amicus brief to that case was submitted in January 2015 but by July 2015 they think that reading the law in its overall context

    establishes a precedent that could let any president modify, amend, or suspend any enacted law at his or her whim

    What a difference 6 months makes! Apparently now “common sense” is no friend of liberty, and in following the precedent of laws that the Cato Institute relied on heavily (until this year!) the Supreme Court has made it possible for presidents to do anything they want. I guess words really do mean anything these days …

    But it’s not just the Cato Institute that appears to have revolutionized its view of the role of context and common sense in the past little while. Four of the majority in King vs. Burwell were dissenters in FDA v Brown and Williamson, the common judge of the two cases being Roberts. Indeed, Scalia agreed fully with Roberts back then that common sense was important, but now appears to think it’s “applesauce” – and the Heritage Institute thinks that “liberals” were shocked then, and applauding now. About, presumably, the same thing.

    Where does this leave us? Should there be a common sense test for judges to see if they all agree? Or should we perhaps just roll dice to determine the outcome of Supreme Court decisions where context and common sense are required? Or, perhaps, we could accept that the Supreme Court as it currently works is just an ideological rubber stamp, and the battles in Congress to stack it are way more important than the judges who are on it. It might be of particular value to Republicans to get some bipartisan agreement on this quickly: they’re going to lose the 2016 election after Donald Trump eats a puppy on live TV, and Hilary Clinton is going to get the chance to appoint a couple more judges, which in combination with Obama’s legacy will mean that the nation will be at the mercy of a liberal majority definition of “common sense” for the next 20 years (or 40, if Clinton can find a few young and talented female judges to nominate). Perhaps a move to introduce fixed term limits, and a more objective and less partisan nomination process, might be a good idea. How about 12 year term limits, and nominees for replacement have to be recommended by a consensus of the Supreme Court Bench itself? That would iron out both the kinks in the nomination process and the risk that a single president could dominate the court for years after he or she has gone to the Great Presidential Library in the Sky – a domination, we should note, that will grow over time as life expectancies do.

    Of course it’s not going to happen, so Americans will continue to be subject to the tyranny of a system that is clearly broken, invented by a bunch of short-sighted slave-owners a couple of hundred years ago and completely unsuited to the modern world, and now used as a battleground for political retribution rather than solid constitutional decision. Still, at least the USA is on the way to universal health coverage!

     

  • Democratic Legitimacy and the EU

    In recent days there has been a tiny bit of discussion on this blog about whether a group of 9 unelected philosopher-kings should be able to decide social issues for 330 million people, so it seems appropriate that I turn my attention briefly to the chaos rolling over Europe and the threat of a Greek exit from the EU. From the outside looking in it seems like the three main powers involved in this shit-show (the European Central Bank, IMF and European Commission) have refused to give any serious ground on their demands, even though these demands are obviously not going to help Greece out of its crisis, and have instead decided to essentially dictate to Greece the terms of its fiscal, labour, welfare and banking policies. Given that they are well aware of how much their austerity policies have failed, and know full well that Syriza was voted in on the promise of no more austerity, it’s just ridiculous bloody-mindedness that drives them to force their ultimatum on Greece. The ECB even appears to have withdrawn its standard emergency credit line for banks experiencing instability, without any justification. They’ve basically made clear to Greece that they won’t accept any political options except those that suit their ideology. This is not how politics works, and it’s no surprise that under this pressure Syriza have decided to tell the troika to jump. Paul Krugman (who for some reason I never normally read) has a particularly deft explanation of this referendum decision:

    until now Syriza has been in an awkward place politically, with voters both furious at ever-greater demands for austerity and unwilling to leave the euro. It has always been hard to see how these desires could be reconciled; it’s even harder now. The referendum will, in effect, ask voters to choose their priority, and give Tsipras a mandate to do what he must if the troika pushes it all the way

    This is how politics should work, and giving Greece a week of grace to sort this out and set a clear future path would be a good way to indicate respect for its political autonomy. This is also the reason that David Cameron’s promise of an in-out referendum, though insane for Britain, is politically the right thing to do. Tsipras has taken the chance to make sure that his country’s decision is politically validated, and that he can make his final decision about the euro from a position of democratic legitimacy; the leaders of the EU’s main powers are flabbergasted by this, and the troika are confused. It appears that they don’t understand where their authority ends and the democratic demands of the people of Europe begins, and it looks as if a lot of Greek people are going to have to go through a fair amount of pain in order to teach them. This is disappointing, given the states involved are apparently all democratic, and it gives the lie to what I think is increasingly shaping up as the central fiction of the European project: that it can stop another war in Europe.

    The EU is a fairweather friend

    This isn’t the first piece of brinksmanship that has been deployed by an EU member in recent time. A few weeks ago Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, threatened to issue Schengen visas to refugees coming from Africa and send them on to other parts of Europe, after it was revealed that not only were other countries doing nothing to help, but German, French and Swiss authorities were turning migrants back at their borders, forcing Italy to manage both the rescue and the housing and welfare of tens of thousands of migrants – even though most of those migrants are hoping to move north to other parts of Europe. Basically Italy had to shoulder this whole burden because the rest of Europe has shown itself unwilling to help its members when they face serious problems. The same could also be said for the UK’s welfare and work problems: it is obvious that the UK is a preferred destination for migrant labour in Europe, because everyone in Europe learns English and the pound is so strong, but the EU has absolutely refused to bend the rules for the UK on welfare and migration issues.

    You may not agree with the specific governments on any of these issues (I don’t agree with the UK, for example) but I should hope it’s obvious what the problem here is: the EU member states are fairweather friends. They can carefully hammer out a compromise agreement on a shared issue like the free movement of labour or the role of the ECB that will enable them to handle the normal, stable times, but they are completely unwilling to compromise their own interests for the greater good when extraordinary circumstances roll around. The free movement of labour is fine but sharing the resettlement of refugees is impossible, and will be left for the country that happens to be unlucky enough to get them first; shared work and welfare goals are fine but they absolutely won’t consider an exception for a country that is bearing an unusual proportion of the effects of those rules; stability targets are fine but no one is willing to risk either their ideological purity or their own taxpayers (Germany’s constant petty battle cry) when a shared financial crisis hits one of their weakest members unusually hard. Basically, the countries of Europe are behaving like fairweather friends who pat you on the back and congratulate you when you have a success, and are happy to split the bill at your Friday pizza-and-beer nights, but would rather you didn’t come if you’ve fallen on hard times and might like to skip paying for the odd Friday night. They’re happy to talk about helping you move house, or minding your pets while you visit a sick relative, but strangely they’re all busy when the time comes.

    This is funny because the regular refrain we hear from the EU’s main sales merchants is that the EU establishes a bulwark against the risk of a future war in Europe. I’m sorry, but if the countries of the EU can’t come up with a mutually acceptable target for distributing 50,000 refugees among a population of 350 million without being threatened with an ultimatum, it’s unlikely that any one of them are going to pause for even the blink of an eye if war is in their interests. Indeed, while the EU rumbles on with its chaotic and obstinate mismanagement of what should have been a complete non-crisis in Greece, certain countries on the eastern edge are entertaining military antics by a non-EU member (the USA) that threatens to involve them in a war so catastrophic that they’ll all be running to Greece. If this is how you construct an “ever closer union of peoples” that will guarantee peace, then peace must be pretty easy to come by.

    The reality is that war isn’t going to happen inside Europe because no one wants it, and the major powers are aging so fast that they are no longer able to field a decent war machine. I think this is great, and one of the many untold benefits of rapid aging, but I don’t think it has much at all to do with the European project, which is looking increasingly like a German/French alternative to colonialism, intended to drive down the competitiveness of the European periphery and ensure the centre gets access to reliable markets and a long-term pool of cheap labour. Students of history might suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go about ensuring a non-chaotic future: the students of Greece are likely to soon provide an object lesson on the topic.

    If the EU wants to retain any kind of democratic legitimacy, its member states need to think about how to rein in their executive, and start giving more credence to the (disparate) complaints of countries like Greece and the UK, about precisely how governance should work in such a confederacy. Because right now it’s looking like a couple of people from primarily northern and western powers think that they can dictate political terms to entire nations on the periphery. That’s empire, not union, and I think people are starting to notice …

    —

    Addendum: Joseph Stiglitz also seems to think that the EU is behaving poorly, and Krugman has a couple of pieces pointing out that Greece wasn’t as badly off as we are told, and austerity has really done Greece no favours.

  • Reading the Turner Diaries in the Light of History: White Nationalist Terror and ISIS

    This weekend I read the Turner Diaries, a famous and influential right-wing apocalyptic insurrection fantasy written in 1978. I picked up this nasty little piece of racist literature because of the recent events in the US, thinking to get a bit of background on the white nationalist terror threat in the USA, but I was amazed reading it by the similarities in ideology, vision and practice between US white nationalists terrorists and “Islamic State” (ISIS). In this post I want to review the book and explore some of these similarities.

    Background: Don’t try this at home

    The Turner Diaries were written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce, founder of a white nationalist organization called the National Alliance, and quickly became an inspiration for many white nationalist terrorists. The most striking influence was on Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995 almost exactly mirrors the first major action described in the book, but the Diaries also inspired many other people: the Anti-Defamation League has a page on the Diaries that charts their widespread influence in the white nationalist movement. I first discovered them in my early twenties, when I had a lover who grew up amongst Australia’s neo-Nazis, and although too young at the time to understand their politics was familiar with much of their iconography and inspirations. For many years the book was on sale at a famous alternative bookstore in Melbourne, Polyester, though I imagine it’s unavailable now if the warning on the internet archive version is any guide:

    Ownership of this book might be illegal in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. You must be at least 21 years or older in order to read this book because of the sexual and violent content. Parental Discretion is Advised!

    Fortunately it’s not illegal in Japan as far as I know, and really easy to read on a smartphone, so a few hours later here I am better educated and definitely more disgusted. I read this book so you don’t have to, kids.

    The book is the literary equivalent of found footage, purporting to be diaries from a revolutionary war in the USA that were found about 100 years later, and cast light on central events of the time through the eyes of an activist who rose to legendary status in the movement through his sacrifice. It is short, and has that property of narrative coherence and good pace that makes it a page turner (or, I guess, in the modern era, swiper) even though its characterization is shallow and its story devices occasionally ridiculous. No one in this story is likable – and trust me, until you read what these people think and are willing to do, you really haven’t plumbed the depths of what unlikable means – but the plot will keep you involved in their horrid schemes and potential successes even while you are mentally urgently in need of serious disinfection. I guess this is why it was popular with the kind of “visionaries” who blow up kindergartens …

    The diaries describe the actions of members of a racist insurrectionist movement called “the Organization” that starts off small and ultimately takes over the US and then the world, using a mixture of terrorism and then nuclear warfare. To give an idea of the vision that this book describes:

    • Once they win the USA they solve “the Chinese problem” by nuking everything between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean, creating what they call the “Eastern Wasteland”
    • They don’t have a racial model based on heirarchies and slavery, as the Nazis did: anyone not white is killed across the whole planet. There are no untermenschen here, just white people and dead people
    • They “win” their battle with the US government by starting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, leading to the destruction of most major cities in the USA and the death of upwards of 60 million people, but they consider to be a worthwhile sacrifice

    Being found footage, this book has parenthetical notes describing the “past” depicted in the book: this includes a note telling the reader what “negroes” are, since this race has been exterminated from the entire planet. The book also has a couple of chilling asides in which the diarist describes Nazi Germany as good and decries the fact that they were stopped in their project. It also has a vicious scene where every mixed-race, non-black and non-white person in California – i.e. every Asian, every American of southern European descent, every native American and anyone of dubious heritage is marched into a canyon and murdered. This is racial purity of the most extreme form, and make no mistake: this was the visionary novel that America’s white nationalist terrorists were inspired by.

    It also has some ridiculous plot devices, such as the silly idea that the white nationalist Californian enclave is able to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union but doesn’t itself get nuked back to the stone age.  But for analytical purposes, I’m willing to overlook these slips in the interests of understanding exterminationist ideology.

    The Diaries’ Similarities with ISIS

    The Diaries have certainly stood the test of time, in that some of the scenes described in them have been enacted by various terrorist groups over time. Obviously they have a striking similarity with the Oklahoma bombing, since they inspired it, but that is just the start of their inventiveness. Other similarities include:

    • The Organization detonates a huge bomb on September 11th that kills 4000 people and leaves a part of a city burning for several days
    • They attack a newspaper they dislike, culminating in killing its editorial writer [at his house, not the offices, but I think the similarities should be clear]
    • They deploy a dirty bomb to render a major power station inoperable
    • Beheading is one of their favourite tactics once they become operational in the field

    The tactics described in the Diaries also have specific commonalities with ISIS tactics. In addition to the beheadings, they are very fond of filming executions and broadcasting them:

    That’s where we were taking the big-shots to be hanged: the well-known politicians, a number of prominent Hollywood actors and actresses, and several TV personalities. If we had strung them up in front of their homes like everyone else, only a few people would have seen them, and we wanted their example to be instructive to a much wider audience. For the same reason many of the priests on our lists were taken to one of three large churches where we had TV crews set up to broadcast their executions.

    This is a new, very modern phenomenon in mass murder, which we see from ISIS a lot. Government regimes like to hide their massacres, but terrorists need to broadcast them. Note also the choice of targets: not agents, technical staff and those who are implacably ideologically opposed to the force, but people whose actions and lifestyles represent a moral transgression. States kill people who threaten them materially, or fit into a category of useless people conveniently-scapegoated; modern terrorists murder people who have symbolic value, but who might otherwise be valuable. Their ideology doesn’t care whether you could be converted to the cause and used, because it is far more interested in making a spectacle out of punishing you for your transgressions.

    These transgressions, note, are racial, or derive from crimes against race that the “criminals” didn’t even know were illegal until the new order swept over them – just as many of ISIS’s victims didn’t know they were doing anything wrong until ISIS arrived. On Monday you’re a tobacco salesperson, on Tuesday you’re a criminal about to be executed. This is ideological purity at its craziest.

    Descriptions of cities “liberated” from racial miscegenation by the Organization also seem eerily similar to what we have heard of ISIS territory. They are depopulated, full of dead bodies, and struggling to find food and basic supplies, often for weeks, as the Organization is tiny, rules by terror and doesn’t have the manpower to maintain security and distribute food. It has also made clear that it isn’t interested in capitalism or markets, and its activities are completely disruptive of any kind of economic activity. At one point – having nuked much of America – the Organization’s enclaves are so desperate for food that they cannot take in even white survivors. Here is their solution:

    In Detroit the practice was first established (and it was later adopted elsewhere) of providing any able-bodied White male who sought admittance to the Organization’s enclave with one hot meal and a bayonet or other edged weapon. His forehead was then marked with an indelible dye, and he was turned out and could be readmitted permanently only by bringing back the head of a freshly killed Black or other non-White. This practice assured that precious food would not be wasted on those who would not or could not add to the Organization’s fighting strength, but it took a terrible toll of the weaker and more decadent White elements.

    Welcome to your racially-pure wonderland, honky… The similarities between this desperation and the desperation we are told is common in ISIS-held areas is noticeable. These people think they hold the key to the promised land but their millenial rage has so destroyed the world around them that they cannot help their own.

    The “terrible toll of the weaker” alluded to in the above passage is another common element of ISIS and Organization tactics, though it points more to a moral than an organizational failing. Both organizations have an ideology of purity so extreme and powerful that they have developed a position of harsh judgment on almost everyone they are supposed to be helping. It is very clear in the Turner Diaries that the Organization considers the majority of white people to be stupid chumps who have brought about their own decay, and they are responsible for their own bad position through a lack of racial awareness. Although salvation of the white race is their aim, they don’t have any sympathy or compassion for individuals. The Diaries’ putative writer and his girlfriend at one point manage to ambush four black men and two “white sluts” with them, and kill all six, even though two are white, because those two have degenerated – no effort is made to explain to them how they have transgressed against a code they didn’t even know existed. This is early in the book; later this scales to the complete destruction of New York, the white population of which is dismissed because it allowed itself to be miscegenated. There are several passages in the book that justify this in terms of both racial survival and moral laxity: only those white people who can show they are able to “wake up” to the sick and insane racial fantasies of the Organization are guaranteed salvation, with the rest only offered salvation where it is convenient. This is very consistent with ISIS’s extreme ideology, which both punishes people for any kind of minor past infractions against a strict religious standard, and treats Sunni adherents as cheap collateral in its war goals: those who didn’t think to get enlightened and join ISIS are expendable, because they don’t have the purity and commitment that would justify any effort to spare them.

    Finally, there is a similarity in targets. In addition to newspapers and politicians, the Organization targets actors and actresses, supreme court justices, and conservative politicians. There are multiple passages in the book railing against conservative politicians, who are racist but not willing to make the extreme steps necessary to see in the new world order. This is similar to ISIS, who consider Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood to be apostates for considering the use of democracy or negotiation to achieve their aims. The Diaries have an early scene where a cell member is revealed to be “merely” a conservative: they execute him because he doesn’t support their nihilistic form of revolutionary activity. Later on, too, they have to fight a military enclave in Washington State that is run by “conservative” military folks, who want to restore the constitution: they deal with such anathema in an appropriately brutal way. All rival political ideologies, no matter how similar to theirs in goals, are judged impure and dealt with in the same vengeful and exterminationist way. The battle between the Organization and “conservatives” (and libertarians!) in the Diaries is similar to that between ISIS and al Qaeda. There is also a striking similarity in attitude towards people who share the Organization’s broad beliefs but were willing to compromise in order to get rich – these men get very short shrift, and strike me as very similar to the way some of the Sunni sheikhs were treated by ISIS.

    The eternal terrorist

    This would be simply fanciful rhetoric, except that the Diaries have inspired serious terrorists, and are very popular amongst white nationalists: they represent a real and genuine expression of the vision and goals of the white nationalist movement, which is also the oldest terrorist threat in the USA. The KKK, the original white terrorist movement, formed during the reconstruction era and was around until the end of the civil rights movement, only to be replaced by the network of arseholes that produced Timothy McVeigh. Since then the movement has subsided, and seems to have collapsed into just lone wolf idiots, but historically it was the greatest threat to American domestic security for 100 years. Now a similar movement of nihilistic, destructive purity has arisen in the Middle East, with similarly apocalyptic and violently exclusionary goals, and most analyses of this phenomenon are treating it as if it were unique. My reading of the Turner Diaries suggests that it is not unique at all: it is actually a sadly derivative form of terrorism, just terrorism, with the same ideological framework as white nationalism, and remarkably similar targets. Of course it has been more successful than white nationalism in the USA, but that’s because it sprang up in a situation closely resembling chapter 25 of the Turner Diaries rather than chapter 1.

    I don’t know what produces this apocalyptic vision of society, and this antagonistic understanding of the causes of society’s problems, but it looks to me like a lot of terrorists hold it in common, and that people as vastly different as Baghdadi and Turner can have a very similar vision of who their enemies are and how to deal with them. It must be something very common to the human condition, and I don’t know what should be done about it, but my reading of the Turner Diaries, and my understanding of their influence, tells me one simple thing: ISIS aren’t new, or alien to western experience, although we might like to think so. They share a lot with the dark heart of our own racist past, and maybe if we look back there we can find ways to stop these movements from happening in future. Maybe the enemy really is us.