BY OUR MALICE COMBINED

In that city and in those times and days, there lived a man named Aristides, son of Lysimachus. Aristides had won renown as a statesman and general, a hero of Marathon and Salamis, but he remained a very humble man. He forsook all earthly wealth, choosing to live a life of austerity and discipline, and gave away all he had to the poor; for his great wisdom and generosity, he was known as Aristides the Just.

One day, Aristides was walking through the marketplace when he saw a man standing awkwardly in the street, holding a potsherd in one hand and a nail in the other. He approached Aristides. "Excuse me, kirios," he said, "there is to be a vote of ostracism in the assembly today, but I don't know how to read or write. Could you scratch a name on this potsherd for me?"

"Of course," said Aristides, always happy to help a fellow citizen participate in the democracy he'd spent his life defending. "And what name shall I carve?"

"Aristides," the man replied. "I'd never heard of him before today, but they tell me he's called 'Aristides the Just' and I hate him because I know he thinks he's better than me."

"What was that name again?" Aristides asked, trying to hide his shock and concern.

"Aristedes," the man repeated.

Tal: Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.

And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanović Chukovsky: "Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".

I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder.

After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.

And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice.

My ears perked up. The highway patrol constable was speaking an entirely different series of words than he usually does. My attorney strongly recommends that I not tell you the normal sequence of words, being as they are likely "building evidence of an anti-social pattern of behaviour," but he's not here. You know what? You seem cool, I'll tell you the new words that this mountie told me.

"Hot air balloons are the new thing, man. If you don't get rid of your car and switch to this, you'll be left behind forever."

Not wanting to argue with the mounted policeman too much, I still gently push back. Hot air balloons aren't for me, man. I like to do my own driving. Go where I want.

"Listen, pal. If it doesn't go where you want the first time, you can just take off again and see if it works then. It's so much less work than driving. I barely have a job, now, with all the hot air balloonists overhead." He points to a series of dirigible-adjacent aircraft, repeatedly bumping into each other. At least half of them are the ugliest fucking thing I'd ever seen. None of them seemed to be going anywhere, honestly.

"And the emissions? We can only get more helium from the moon. We shouldn't be just burning it in order to maybe travel to the Kay Bee Toys."

That did it. I had stated enough words of a certain pattern to be billed as an adversary in this officer's mind. An intricate crystalline structure of indisputable scofflaw behaviour had been constructed in the very air between us. I was now an "IA hater" – one who opposes the inevitable dominance of inflatable aircraft. There was nothing to do but to engage in a high speed chase about it.

M Y  M O R N I N G  C O F F E E  M A K E S  ME  S T R O N G  S O   I   C A N

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

April 7, 2026 - "All you had to do was pay us enough to live, all you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live"

A worker in Ontario, California, USA, set his company’s warehouse on fire and has a message for the CEO: