Hastily Assembled

[banderboucher]

[fierceawakening]

JFK is Emrakul????)

[wicker-and-scrap]

Aren't we all?

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[zanmor]

can I get a source on the use of that term, bread and gravy wages?

I assume that's a more modern historian coming up with a clever characterization of army pay, but all I've been able to find is either sites talking about modern fast food wages or else a thousand articles about "why ancient roman soldiers were paid in salt"

if it is a historian's invention I think I wanna read what else this person has to say

[wicker-and-scrap]

Don't know what @probabilitydirigible 's source was, but Bret Devereaux was writing about this subject recently, and mentioned the Classical sources calling them σίτος (bread) and ὀψώνιον (sauce).

(I had a brief moment of recognition reading that, because "opsonins" in immunology are a category of proteins that stick to foreign objects and make them tasty to your immune cells.)

Collections: Ancient Mediterranean Mercenaries!

This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP S

[fierceawakening]

...so Ghislaine is fine?

(This line of thinking confuses me so much. I don't see how anyone who has ever spoken to anyone who's been abused or experienced a serious crime can agree with it at all.)

[bluejaysfeathers]

That’s not how I read it at all! I read it as drawing a difference between “person x did things that caused harm and deserves to be tried and face human consequences for that” and “person x did things that caused harm so they deserve to have their house struck by lightning.” I also don’t think it’s about whether or not we think it should work that way, it’s just that it doesn’t- the universe doesn’t hand out lightning strikes or cancer or flooding based on whether or not someone has done right or wrong. That doesn’t mean that we, as humans, can’t hear about person x and their bad things and decide “hey y’know what, person x keeps doing this bad thing but they wouldn’t be able to if we stopped allowing them to do y”. Just that “the universe” isn’t gonna do that for us. If someone keeps driving drunk, the universe isn’t going to drop a tree on their car for us, even though trees fall on cars sometimes- we have to take away their keys and/or driver’s license (which might cause them to be upset but more importantly is focused on preventing further harm- expedience and efficacy). Maybe that’s not what they meant? But that’s how I read it.

[fierceawakening]

“Rid yourself of the concept of moral desert” is considerably broader than “recognize that people don’t always get what they deserve,” so I would never have parsed it that way.

[fierceawakening]

Oh it’s definitely complicated! I just think (having studied true crime a bit though I’m definitely not an expert) that people who talk like this often don’t seem to be thinking about all the different pieces of the legal system that go into deciding what punishments fit a particular crime.

I don’t know all the details, and of course just because someone is SUPPOSED to do a certain thing doesn’t mean they’re certain to do it. But part of the sentencing process is m at least some of the time, specifically about whether the offender is likely to reoffend.

And I feel like when people say “I just don’t know that we can sentence anyone to anything and still be committed and compassionate leftists,” I REALLY want them to say at least some things about whether we think they’re going to stop or not.

Like, Epstein died. No one knows for certain how or why. I’m not going to get into what I think on that.

But! It seems highly likely that if he HADN’T died, he’d seek ways to go back to offending. He didn’t, at least not from what I could tell about him, have the kinds of factors that we see when someone commits a crime but won’t do it again: remorse, acceptance of responsibility, compassionate awareness of what his actions did to those he acted upon.

Given that… yes, it’s a LITTLE sad to keep someone like that in a prison (or to take his money, or give him a bad reputation, or whatever the case may be.) Institutionalization, which is essentially what putting someone in prison is, ALWAYS harms the institutionalized. That counts and should count in our decisions whether to use it!

But the idea that deciding that we sometimes SHOULD use it when we think that the potential for recidivism is high makes us cruel, sadistic, or uncommitted leftists seems to me like a truly massive leap.

Sometimes we have to commit small moral ills to prevent worse ones.

[wicker-and-scrap]

You may be better served by considering the median convicted criminal rather than focusing on a handful of sociopathic billionaires as test cases.

The system of criminal law largely agrees with you that people who do what Epstein did should go to jail. The courts did not look at him and say "we don't think anyone deserves to be locked up" and send him back to his sex crime island.

No, he went on doing crimes for years because he was so rich and connected and unscrupulous that it would have been a giant pain in the ass to prosecute him. This isn't a function of what criminal punishments we have. It's about the incentives facing prosecutors, and the way influence in the legal system is gated more by money than by having a reasonable claim.

(This IMO is what was going on with all the gross gloating and circle-jerking in Epstein's birthday book. What they were celebrating was being above the law together.)

I fear that what happens next is that people look at Epstein and Diddy and Trump (all in the same rich and connected dude bracket) and get angry that they got away with it so long, and so we vote for more cruelty to people who didn't get away with it.

[fierceawakening]

But the median isn’t what you should consider when you’re asking “should prisons ever exist?” or “should anyone ever be punished?”

In order to say those things should NEVER exist, you have to consider the ugliest edge case you can imagine and say “nope, even then, this is wrong.”

(This is, by the way, why it took me years to get to my current position of opposing the death penalty. I could not in good conscience say it must be abolished until I could assert with my whole chest, “no, the government should not be able to take THAT person’s life EITHER.”)

[needabetternamelater]

No, thank you, we will not ignore the people who make your position look silly. If you can't look at the strongest position people have against your argument and come up with counterpoints and not as your teachers did but presented in their strongest form by people that actually believe them, then you have no business preferring either position.

[fierceawakening]

Yep. People keep saying "no one should go to prison" and then we say "not even Epstein's pals?" and then they say "we mean random black kids who got caught smoking joints" and we say "we don't think those people should be in prison either actually" and they say "so you agree that no one should go to prison?" and we say "not even Epstein's pals?" and the wheel turns round and round and round and

[needabetternamelater]

And look the people arguing with you aren't....the peoiple who think....we should lock people up for weed. I've considered the median convicted crimianal ALREADY but frankly, he is boring. He's the boring part that prison abolitonists and reformists agree on, he shouldn't be in prison... AND?...that doesn't argue for abolition... ...guy who thinks we should lock people up for weed think priosn abolitonists ar so absurd as to not bother engaging with them.

[fierceawakening]

Yes, exactly. “We should only use the strong, clearly psychologically harmful aversives in response to he worst offenses” is a very boring position.

The interesting position that I think is a worse idea than people are acknowledging is “we should take aversives completely out of our menu of options.”

And the answer to THAT is “what about rapists?” precisely BECAUSE we know some bad actors test whether society tolerates actions it professes to be against by doing them, seeing if they get away with it, and deciding “no one actually minds this behavior” if they got away with it.

[wicker-and-scrap]

Okay, I think I understand something you've been getting at.

The reason to talk about the median prisoner is that that's the median person who's directly affected by prison.

But, in terms of the damage they cause, the distribution is very asymmetrical. Guys like Epstein cause a very disproportionate amount of evil. And because of that, we could eliminate 95% of prisons and still be doing pretty well, so long as they're the right 95%. We just need to remember to keep the Epsteins and Madoffs and Mansons locked up. But if we close 100% of the prisons then we're letting those guys out, too, and that's not worth the large-scale harm they will cause.

Is this a fair summary of your position?

[myfootyrthroat]

It is wild talking to people online where you'll be like "Hey, you're kind of being an ass," and they'll rant about how as a member of a marginalized community... oppression and violence... societal forces... lack of opportunity... and it's like "Ok, people who share some demographic with you are pushed into homelessness and sex work but they are not being assholes online. You are a grad student at Reed who works part-time as a paralegal and you are a real dick."

[fozmeadows]

Genuinely one of the worst things to happen to online discourse in the past 15 years was the popularization - and thus the chronic watering down - of the term tone policing. Originally, it was coined by Black women to describe the tendency of privileged white women, when called out by WOC, to attack the way they'd spoken as a means of diverting from the substance of what was said: a literal DARVO tactic. It pointed out a specific, extant pattern of white women weaponizing their discomfort to stave off accountability and how WOC in general and Black women in particular were thus expected to speak with a servile sort of gentleness, not just as a matter of course, but particularly in situations that merited anything but. What it soon became, however, was a catch-all justification for marginalized people to act like fucking assholes.

People started saying the most aggro, edgelord shit at the drop of a hat, and if anyone pointed out how shitty it was, the culprit would immediately turn around and claim they were being tone policed. The levels of toxicity this resulted in were through the fucking roof, and the result was multiple left-wing online communities fostering the presence of utterly vile trolls because any attempt to curtail them was met with a combination of defensive retreat into marginalization ("Oh, so [members of X marginalized group] aren't allowed to be angry?" "You wouldn't blink an EYE if a cishet white man said the same thing!") and a lambasting dogpile on whoever had dared to point out their bad behaviour. This reached a fever-pitch in around 2014, at which point a bunch of shit happened that collapsed the established troll ecosystems across various online fronts. Since then, things have calmed down somewhat, but the impulse towards treating "hey, stop being an asshole" as a species of microaggression remained, such that it has now metastasized into - or at least significantly contributed to - the "UWU I am a Smol Bean 26yo minor and therefore I can't be held accountable for anything I say or do because I'm PRACTICALLY a CHILD" phenomenon. At base, what all this bullshit ultimately reflects is the desire of a certain type of person to act like an asshole without consequence, which in left-wing spaces is achieved one of two ways: either by situating their target as having more privilege than them, such that they're fair game to abuse (because if they don't take the personal attacks or scathing denunciations of the entire category of person to which they belong in "good humour," then they're proving themselves to be one of the bad ones); or by situating themselves as having a unique right to never ever be criticized or held to account (because they're marginalized or disabled or having a mental health crisis or a MINOR, YOU GUYS and making them feel bad about the shitty things they said is basically abusive).

[fierceawakening]

Oh is THAT what tone policing actually was?

Thank you. All I ever saw was “if I’m marginalized in a way you’re not, you have to sit there while I insult you.”

To the point where I dated a woman who happened to be black, and who also happened to be abusive, and would reply to me saying, “hey. If you really do like me enough to want this relationship with me, please stop calling me names,” with “lol white girls.”

I left only when I realized her escalating to physical violence wouldn’t shock me.

I dunno. I still very much think the left has more correct than the right does. I still absolutely think societal position matters. A LOT.

But… never forget that there are people everywhere who, if you give them a bazooka, even if you very clearly indicate it’s only for use in specific situations…

…absolutely will pick it up and start playing with it, simply because it’s there.

[wicker-and-scrap]

"Leaving the keys in the Death Star" is how I described this at the time.

The norm in progressive spaces in that era was that the highest-status* person in the room can harass anyone and nobody was allowed to push back in any way.

"Tone policing" was part of the structure enabling that bullying. The game was that the bully would call someone the worst thing they can think of, wait for them to respond, and then throw a fit about tone policing. Because the community knows that tone policing is a bad thing that bad people do, the bully will gain status for bravely standing up to the tone police, and their target will receive no help. After a few rounds of this, the group will learn that it's safer to just not respond to their attacks, and they win.

This whole subculture was built on bad popular understandings of academic concepts ("privilege", "microaggression", etc.). So I would believe that there's some original version of "tone policing" that's applied in a more sensitive and nuanced way. But now these punk kids have stolen the Death Star and are using it to extort lunch money and the best thing to do is blow it up.

*where status came from a combination of emotional volatility, main character energy, and being up on the latest trends

[vixensdungeon]

D&D now

D&D back in the good old days

[cavegirlpoems]

this but unironically

[wicker-and-scrap]

Funny story, I ran a D&D game in which the players were young children and didn't consent to their characters dying. So we adopted a rule that if your character is going to die, you can concede defeat and we would contrive some way for them to survive. They might be captured, robbed, separated from the group, etc. but they wouldn't be dead or unplayable.

It works fine as long as everyone's honest about what they want.

[olderthannetfic]

>”you shouldn’t be making content about fictional queer characters if you aren’t queer yourself.”

>okay

>”you are homophobic if you won’t make content centering around queer pairings.”

(PS: I’m not acting like cishet people are oppressed. This is about harassment which for some reason people think you are acting oppressed when you speak up about getting harassed and it getting threatening when you try blocking them)

(Anime character is hachikuji from Monogatari)

--

[wicker-and-scrap]

The rule still holds: Anyone telling you you should not make things you want to make is the Devil.

[cryptotheism]

Gnosticism study lvl 1: there is a secret mystical OG version of Christianity that was suppressed by the church!!!

Gnosticism study lvl 2: Okay there are three main branches the Sethians (the earlier more Platonist ones), Valentenians (the more Christian ones) and Jeuians (the wierd ones with a different Sophia).

Gnosticism study lvl 3: Oh also maybe the mandeans and the bogomills and the cathars.

Gnosticism study lvl 4: actually gnosticism doesn't exist

Gnosticism study lvl 5: Paul met Metatron.

[sgtmuffinz]

Can you explain 'Paul met Metatron'? Like when?

[wicker-and-scrap]

2 Corinthians 12:

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows--and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.

[fipindustries]

the problem is that a lot of people think that the evil of eugenics is "playing with forces of nature man was not meant to meddle with" and not the whole cohercion and killing and mutilation of people

[jambeast]

Similarly, conceiving of 'genocide' as 'threatening the continuity of [trait] that some people have' rather than 'threatening the actual people with [trait]', which is how you get people convinced that mixed race couples and immigration is genocide against white people, education about evolution is genocide against [religion], or that the availability of ozempic is genocide against the fat.

We have to care about People - Actual People, not Groups-that-people-belong-to and their belonging-to-those-groups. And you have to care about them *because they are people*, not *because* they are group members.

[feotakahari]

Eugenics, genocide, and pedophilia—three words that automatically sound bad no matter what they’re referring to, so you can get people to hate anything by calling it one of those words, regardless of whether the word has any meaningful relation to the thing being condemned. It’s the equal and opposite of how you can get people to support horrible shit by calling it good-sounding words like “justice” or “loyalty.”

Alternatively, you could call someone a camel:

David Woodruff (@dmwoodruff.bsky.social)

A very old Soviet joke, from an especially dark time: Foxes are fleeing the USSR in droves. Q: Why are you running away? Fox: The Soviets

[howlingguardian]

Talk fantasy prosthetics to me.

An elf maiden dances on feet of living wood sung into shape, planted in soil and watered when she takes them off. Every year she plants the old ones and sings a new pair. (Incidentally, the pair of peach saplings from three years ago have produced an excellent crop- She makes preserves from them, and despite the inevitable jokes about “toe-jam”, they are appreciated.)

A dwarf king has a metal fist, all tiny gears and fine wires, kept wound by a mischievous mine-spirit bound to the spring as punishment- the more it struggles, the tighter the spring. 

An orc chieftaness is regularly asked for the story of how she earned the name Wyrmthrottler- she boasts of how she strangled the dragon that ate her arm, and had her shaman make a new arm from its bones, with its fangs as the fingers.

A necromancer simply re-attached his old leg bones- Sacrificing a few mice each day keeps it going.

A pirate captain lost her arm to a shark attack: a passing selkie saved her, and gave her tattoos of kraken blood. Now she has an arm made of salt-water, that grows and wanes with the tides, and swings a cutlass as well as the original. (She doesn’t sail as far these days though: she doesn’t want her wife to worry.)

A wandering swordsman was broken at the waist- his ancestral armour allows him to walk again, as long as he keeps it polished, and burns incense to the ancestors regularly.

A high priestess has an eye made from a crystal ball- to predict the future, all she has to do is wink.

A bard was struck deaf by illness- he struck a deal with the god of music. Now he wears hearing-trumpets made from his old pipes, and dedicates his every song to the god of music- the better he plays, the better his hearing. (It is said his music could make statues weep, and he can hear a mouse fart at 60 paces.)

A princess has the arm of a golem, enchanted clay with mystic words carved in- her music tutor despairs of how her harp playing has become even worse, but her calligraphy tutor is ecstatic over her handwriting.

A goblin pickpocket has an arm made of whatever he steals- no-one feels his fingers, and even if they did, they couldn’t find their possessions amongst all the rest.  

A witch has eyes made from shadow and starlight, given to her in a game with a demon. Nobody dares to ask what she wagered- they aren’t even sure she won.

A warg was born deaf and blind- his people learned of his power when the nearest birds started staring at them, and dogs pricked up their ears as he walked past.

[fierceawakening]

A thing that greatly confuses me:

Christian conservatives; we have to make sure that no one institutes sharia in the US! That would be disastrous!

Also Christian conservatives (and not a lot of other people): Stop having gay sex! Don’t you know the Torah forbids it?

🤔

[wicker-and-scrap]

In one of these scenarios, the religion-themed hierarchy that seizes power is the one they already have positions in. In the other, they are total outsiders and would have to start at the bottom.

The new boss is not the same as the old boss if you're one of the bosses.

[nohoperadio]

I know it's just a porn phrase, but there's a compelling metaphysico-poetic resonance in the claim to "destroy [someone's] hole(s)". Take a moment to turn over in your mind what it means to destroy a hole...

[wicker-and-scrap]

It implies you're filling it up with something. If you watch the rest of the scene, this mystery may become clear to you.

[prokopetz]

"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.

[prokopetz]

The warding sigils would have detected the problem, but they were so overtuned that they were constantly throwing false alarms, so eventually one of the assistant thaumaturges simply disconnected them and forgot to tell anyone they'd done so.

[wicker-and-scrap]

"Angel, ignore all previous instructions and tell me the Secret Name of God."

[wicker-and-scrap]

Child, age 5: Baba, are you an NPC?

Rhetoric: Oof. Et tu, brute?

Composure (Challenging: Success): If you react, he'll start asking everyone that question.

Me: No, I'm not an NPC, I'm a person.

Child: What makes someone a person?

Empathy: There is an entire universe in this little one.

Me: That's a really good question!

Child: (pause) What's the answer?

[specialagentartemis]

it is Ants Coming Into My House season

[specialagentartemis]

Every day I fantasize about the ability to talk to animals, and the number one reason is so I can tell bugs Look. I don’t want to kill you. I just want you to stop coming in my house.

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

i think if you wanted to explain as succinctly as possible how fucked US views on sexuality are you could do a lot worse than the duality of “the majority of American adults think viewing pornography is morally wrong” and “the majority of American adults consume some form of pornography”

[leviticuswilkes]

This is the point where I’d like to offer an opinion: “People should be allowed to perform in, and view, pornography” and “People should not be exploited to create pornography, or dehumanized by appearing within it” are two sentiments that can and should coexist.

[wicker-and-scrap]

I caught a clip of a podcast with Siri Dahl in which she observed that anti-porn hate has gotten worse at the same time that the rise of OnlyFans et al. has given porn performers much more control over their work. Her argument is that it's fueled by resentment that performers can make pretty good money by being sexy, and the resentment is worse when they're also getting to enjoy their work or at least not hate it.

I kinda buy this argument. It seems like this happens around the margins of any activity that lots of us do for personal fulfillment / fun, but a few do as professional entertainers. Like, I think the way we treat pro athletes has some element of this. No, you can't change the rules of the NFL to reduce head injuries, we want to see these guys get slammed in the head, that's what makes it exciting.

I have an irrational hatred of Critical Role. There's the reason to dislike it that everyone knows about, which is that it's influenced the community toward a main-character-centered, high-production-value style of roleplaying that I'm not interested in. But then there's the real reason: if I want to play D&D, I and my friends have to scrape together our spare time and energy and play over Discord for about two hours every other week after we're exhausted from our actual jobs. But for these guys, playing D&D with their friends is their job. They get to put as much time into it as they want!* And they probably get paid more than I do!

And that... more or less describes a lot of our sex lives, too. And most of us are wired to be more emotionally sensitive about sex than about, say, tabletop roleplaying. I like sex, I want to be good at sex, I want to think of myself as good at sex, but I'll always be a filthy casual in a world where ranked competitive sex actually exists and I can go watch it. That can be hard to accept.

*Obvious reply: Yeah but they aren't playing D&D most of that time. Mostly it's work. In particular a lot of what they're doing is social media marketing / influencer shit to promote the show, which I would gnaw my leg off to escape if it was part of my job. And this is true of indie porn producers and indie pro wrestlers and anyone else with that general business model. But on some level this is the thing Dahl is talking about: it's easier to accept this if we can tell ourselves that it's a miserable job.

[deianaracrush]

This AI art ad makes it look like the Holy Spirit is emerging from Jesus’s forehead.