May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

This was originally going to be a reply to a conversation between @. keysmashslushy and @. dickgraysonsptsd. (Breaking the @'s because I don't think this is a fun read to get notified for). As I was writing, it ballooned in scope, and I decided to make it a standalone post.

When I talk about sexual assault, I like to hide behind statistics. That's more difficult for me to do here, so I have to get more personal to make my point. Forgive me.

A constant refrain I hear from people who oppose descriptions of sexual violence in fiction is that "sexual violence is just so much more real than killing." More real to whom? I have a family member who was murdered. Two different people have tried to kill me three times. People are sometimes surprised to hear that, but I don't think that makes me extraordinary. Growing up, I swear everyone I knew had at least one story of how someone they knew got killed. I only had the one, but some of my classmates had two or three.

I said before that I had trouble with statistics for this post. That's because most of the statistics I did find had one of three problems:

- They included vehicular homicides by drunk drivers, which I'm less interested in as a manifestation of a culture of violence

- They measured only gun violence to the exclusion of other means and weapons, and/or included suicides with homicides

- They cited no sources, or cited only studies conducted by partisan think-tanks.

I wanted to find an answer to "how many people know someone who has been murdered by another person," and I don't think I'm equipped to find that number. Regardless, the statistics I did find paint a far grimmer picture than what these fandomites must imagine. 17% of Americans have seen someone get shot. 20% know someone who was shot. For Black Americans, those numbers rise to 34% and 31%, respectively. Murder is the #4 leading cause of death for Native American men and #5 for Native American women. It is the leading cause of death for Black Americans ages 10-24, and the #2 cause of death for those between 25 and 34. Now, the United States has a high murder rate, but it has a lower murder rate than 60 other countries. And American civilians are not among the two billion people, fully one quarter of the world's population, who are currently in or fleeing active war zones.

If murder, legal or illegal, isn't real to you, you're privileged. There's really nothing more for me to say about that.

Pivoting to fandom. I am not going to argue that murder in fiction is realistic or representative. Fictional killing's unreality actually has some overlap with fictional rape's unreality. Fictional murder victims, like fictional rape victims, are mostly nameless and faceless. The violence exists to show the reader the power of the perpetrator. Focusing on the dead, the survivors, and the grieving friends and families is useless to that end.

But there is another unreality that isn't shared between the two. A large portion of fictional murder is presented as justified. Fictional violence is often part of a power fantasy. Audiences want to see hypercompetence. We want choreographed fight scenes where one man gets jumped by ten men and leaves all ten on the floor. We want to see people narrowly dodge bullets. For cape fans, we want this power fantasy to be even more fantastical, to see people fly through the air and punch each other through walls.

Most people with these fantasies also want to be good people. Thus, the physical hypercompetence must be complimented by moral hypercompetence. Fictional vigilantes have perfect discernment. They always know who's guilty, always know how to find them, and always give them what they deserve. In the same way nobody wants to see John Wick throw out his back, nobody wants to watch a movie about a WhatsApp vigilante stoking himself into a fervor and then killing an innocent person. It would be too real. When leftist cape fans see the Punisher skull on a cop car, usually the only critique they can muster is that Frank Castle would kill the cops, too. It's a bridge too far to wonder if they themselves have the discernment of their favorite heroes; to wonder if cops and WhatsApp vigilantes love these stories for the same reasons they do; or to wonder if their favorite stories still carry some of the themes of their progenitor.

Not everyone cares so much about being good. Given the theme of this blog, I can't resist shining a light on Deathstroke and his fans. During my career as a Tara Markov backstory canonicity defender, many times I've pointed out the bizarre double-standard Slade fans have, being okay with him killing kids but not okay with him touching them. Slade fans have some canned responses to this. Some of my favorites are "that was an OOC hitjob by some writers who didn't know what they were doing" ("some writers" there means Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two people who created Deathstroke, in one of his earliest stories and the story that established his supporting cast, motives, and other lasting elements of his characterization); "Tara was actually manipulating him" (Tara being a fifteen-year old who related to Deathstroke as her lover, her employer, her guardian, a man who monitored her constantly with contact lens cameras, and the only person she could trust with any true details about her life); and "Deathstroke is Literally Me, and I wouldn't do that, so he shouldn't either" (I think this one speaks for itself). I've seen all these dealt with multiple times on better blogs than mine, but I do want to get into one more argument they give me time and time again: "Deathstroke killing people is fun, but him being a rapist is too real."

What about Deathstroke isn't real? Mainly, his hypercompetence. As a comic book antihero, Slade has been blessed by the narrative with supersoldier serum, precognition, accelerated healing, superhuman strength, and the rule of cool plot armor worn by all action genre protagonists. He's also a genius tactician and gets away with schemes that have way too many moving parts to work in a more grounded setting.

Deathstroke is also a mercenary. He is revered by his fans as a killer with a code of honor, even though he's employed in the most dishonorable business in the world that's still legal. This, to me, is not at all unreal.

To start, mercenarism is in vogue. We in the 21st century are living through the "second golden age of mercenaries." For-profit companies are the industrial half of the military industrial complex. During the GWOT, the ratio of private contractors to regular soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by the US peaked at 3:1. In 2023, Wagner nearly captured Moscow with little resistance. PMCs operate in just about every conflict zone in the world. Wagner and its post-integration successor Redut torture and kill civilians in Ukraine, Syria, and Central Africa. Western PMCs conduct "anti-terrorism" operations the world over, and occupy mines for blood minerals in the DRC. Abu Dhabi based PMC Global Security Services Group is currently are helping Sudan's RSF conduct its genocide in Darfur. And all of this for good money.

Some real mercenaries are also cultivating followings similar to their fictional counterparts. After he was assassinated, shrines cropped up across Russia in honor of "Father Prigozhin." Today, bronze statues of his likeness stand in St Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, and the Central African Republic. If you're American, you might remember not too long ago being browbeaten to support or vote for Graham Platner, two-time US Armed Forces veteran and one-time Constellis contractor who, in his own words, joined the force because he "wanted to have an adventure and kill some people." Platner's campaign only died because a survivor came out and said he raped her; for the left-wing imperialist, neo-nazism, killing for fun and money, and campaigning on revitalizing the US military are all well and good, but rape is too real.

I have had the misfortune of interacting with ex-PMCs, both Russian and American. Given the state of the world, they're not difficult to find if you live in either country. In my experience, they are universally small men with fragile egos. They were all motivated to join because they had bad prospects elsewhere, and they wanted to do something that made them feel important, powerful, and masculine. Despite that, they'd all defend their choice as just another job, and they all believed that they had some personal code of honor that made them noble men despite their ignoble work. And all of them were totally callous to the people they killed. "If they didn't want to be beaten to death with hammers, they shouldn't have deserted. Really, they were in the wrong. Was he afraid to die? Should've been a man." "The guys behind the Nisour Square massacre deserved Trump's pardon. Any one of those people could have been terrorists." Likewise, those who glorify men like this do so because they're macho men, honest and rough around the edges. And their fans also never think about the people they've killed.

To wrap up, I'll deliver the original idea I wanted to write, before I wrote fourteen paragraphs to justify it. It is damn near impossible to write a character for whom being a serial killer is in character, but being a rapist is out of character. The overlap in motives is too big. We're talking about characters who are always convinced that their violent outbursts are justified, and who feel a need to stave off insecurity by asserting their power and dominance. That is why people rape. And that's why, in real life, so many serial killers are also serial rapists, and rape is handwaved away as a "tragic but inevitable" part of war. It's not about sexual gratification.

- France abolished the Code Noir 2 months ago. That law project that said hey you can enslave, mutilate, kill, cross breed, etc. black people at will bc they're not people they're property ? Yeah. Abolished 2 months ago. We are in July 2026.

- the last human zoo closed its doors in 1994 in France due to social pressure. Not bc they were running out of business, no. Ppl still visited that place until it closed its doors. No, it was bc (black) French people were fed up. That human zoo was specialized in displaying black (presumed Congolese) people in fake huts in enclosures, for white entertainment.

- now while this might no longer be the case, when I was growing up, I went to a French school (as in. It was an international French School w the French flag n all) and the way we were taught French geography was that France has the biggest and largest access to the sea in the world. And they'd show us a map of France and its colonies around the world. It's all occupied indigenous lands. I don't know if they still teach that. I hope not. But they absolutely did until I graduated high school in 2017. Again, I write this on July 21st 2026, for the record.

Surprised that Larys isn’t doing better; he’s got range! He’s got experience! He’s got plots! He knows all about managing disabilities!

Mysaria the extremely successful sex worker seems underrated too.

Daemon has some potential but unless you are beset by problems best solved by killing someone or organizing a police force, not necessarily the best choice.

>Guy who only played Rush mode in BF6 asks Steam for a refund after 450 hours

>Gets it

>Games journalists call this a 'dangerous precedent'.

Literally if you change fundamental aspects of what your game offers after the sale, locking a player out of their preferred play style, and don't refund them, that is anti-consumer. Hopefully this is a start of a larger discussion about bait and switch from developers going forward.

Anyway, I’m kind of intrigued by the “trickle down stupidity” statement, because overall the homeschooled teenagers and post-homeschooling adults I’ve known were solidly at or above grade level at basically everything, with the exception of the young earth creationists being young earth creationists (obviously).

I’d say the major downside is that every homeschooled person is noticeably socially delayed, and it’s one that I rarely see mentioned by people in education policy, probably because they don’t want to admit that self-teaching from a textbook works no more poorly than middle school. But there’s absolutely a “homeschooler voice” that you can learn to pick up on, mannerisms, and so on. It’s almost like “induced autism” for lack of a more tasteful description. You’ll have these people who are obviously mentally operating at a high level, but they’re just slightly off in terms of interacting with their peers, or any adult they don’t perceive as a parental figure.

There are obviously huge confounding variables here, in that all secular homeschool families basically do it to protect their overly sensitive children from the school system and most of those kids are neurodivergent, but it does seem to delay many social milestones.

Generally speaking, they know the material, but if I ask them to go beyond the material or use it in new and different ways, they often can't do it. One of the advantages of school education is you get exposed to lots of different teachers and other students and all of their ideas and ways of looking at things.

Also, homeschoolers are not required to follow school schedules and many semi-educational recreational venues that host after-school activities or field trips for traditional school students often specifically court homeschooling families as people who are available to use their facilities at under-scheduled times. This is no more inappropriate than anyone else taking their kids to these places at other times.

Also, the use of “Land Rover driving yoga mom” as a pejorative for homeschooling moms is honestly kinda odd, because I doubt that beater driving fatties would be less criticized.

Irt the social skills, have any of you met a person who was raised in another educational regime? For example a residential school or a foreign school system? The traditional American dayschool system socialization is not neutral and only is considered normal because of its dominance in America culture.

I kept expecting the screen to pause, and then a grizzled Targaryen general stepping out with a pointer and asking the class of trainees "okay, what would you do to fix this."

Had everything. Disorganized charge at the walls from a small fraction of the army (seriously, the majority of the army just sort of sat out of the way), using battering rams with no roofs so archers were picking off the soldiers carrying it, (classic TV defender idiocy like boiling oil dropped on defenders, as opposed to, like, rocks, also a fire moat that would have been solved for the attackers were they willing to *wait* like 20 minutes), leaving absolutely zero rear guard to defend if the enemy decides to use dragons. The attackers didn't try any of the usual tactics, like bribing the citizenry of the town (who hated the owners) to open the gates, or, say, bribing the *guards*. There wasn't any sort of preparation or scouting, just one hasty wall assault (which, again, did happen, with a fraction of the force) but no preparation for what happens next.

After discussion with the characters about how the battle should be run, you cut to the redone version of the battle, but with the classroom characters interposed wearing the correct armor/clothes/etc ("hey, why am I wearing this stupid toga?" "Shut up Władysław, you know the rules.") and re-do things, with commentary from the teacher(s). And then those stupid mistakes get run through and the scenario fails again for different reasons.

Periodically, they do a "how would you handle this" and it turns into a thing where dealing with it at Court or with the Diplomats ends up better.

1951 advert promoting the novel

[Kaylie Jones, daughter of From Here to Eternity author James Jones, reveals that a major gay sex storyline was cut from her father’s famed novel.]

My father, James Jones, shocked the world by using the F-word and many other colorful expletives in his 1951 novel From Here to Eternity. When he was asked to eliminate the offending language from the book, which was based on his experiences in Hawaii in the peace-time Army, he refused and wrote his editor at Scribner’s, Burroughs Mitchell, a prescient letter:

"The things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn’t do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve…You know there is nothing salacious in this book as well as I do. Therefore, whatever changes you want made along that line will be made for propriety, and propriety is a very inconstant thing."

My father agreed to eliminate a certain number of F-words—in part because there was a question whether the US postal system would even deliver the book to stores because of its “salacious” nature—but there was another battle he was waging with his publisher. Apparently Scribner’s had a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy about depicting homosexuality in the Army.

My father was told to cut the homosexual scenes in the novel, and he refused to eliminate them because he felt this would be unfaithful to reality he witnessed. (The original manuscript of From Here to Eternity resides in the rare books library at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the extent to which the scenes were cut can be seen by comparing the original text to the published version.)

How courageous was my father’s stand? Only five years before the publication of From Here to Eternity, Doubleday published Edmund Wilson’s novel, Memoirs of Hecate County. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice raided Doubleday bookstores in Manhattan and seized 130 copies of the book due to its explicit depiction of heterosexual sex. The New York District Attorney charged Doubleday with selling obscene material. Doubleday was convicted. Once the novel had been declared obscene in New York, Doubleday took it out of circulation nationwide to avoid the risk of further prosecution. Booksellers and librarians removed it from their inventories. The Supreme Court later split 4-4 on the case, allowing the conviction to stand. The book was not republished in the US until 1959.

My father wanted to write an honest and truthful book about the peace-time Army preceding WWII, and he insisted that could not be done if the language and routines of the soldiers were eliminated from the book. The soldiers in Hawaii were dead broke, barely one step up from homeless. They joined the Army during the Great Depression because they had nowhere else to go. And they were treated almost as badly as the homeless by the civilians that populated Oahu. They spent their meager Army salaries on leave days paying for whores and booze and on gambling—a way to pass the time.

One character, Maggio makes extra bucks by hanging out with older, rich gay men who live in Honolulu, who pay good money for his company. The original manuscript goes into great detail about what kind of sexual favors soldiers like Maggio are willing to provide. The soldiers act as if it’s simply their company that these older men are paying for, but there’s an underlying, secret understanding that many of them will provide sex. Maggio sees nothing wrong with this at all, since it is a means to an end—a way to make quick money so he can go back and hang out with the whores. Maggio never questions his own sexuality. The number of soldiers who can be found hanging out in the gay bars is also staggering; in fact, there are so many of them that the Army launches a (very quiet) investigation. One soldier, Bloom, realizes he enjoys sex with men, and is so terrified and ashamed of being gay and of being called on it, that he commits suicide. The sin and the shame, it seems, are not associated with the act itself or even in getting paid for it, but in whether or not a soldier enjoys it. My father saw the total hypocrisy and ridiculousness of this and Bloom’s death is portrayed as a tragedy, absurd and unnecessary.

Why was the depiction of homosexuality so frightening to publishers? The National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL), a Catholic group formed in Chicago, first targeted magazines and then paperbacks. NODL objected to “the lascivious type of literature which threatens the moral, social and National life of our country.” In 1947, NODL recommended that church members visit retailers every two weeks armed with a list of “harmful” titles. If they found books on the list, they informed the manager. The result? Widespread intimidation and boycott of booksellers. From Here to Eternity was blacklisted by the NODL in 1954. The religious group stated publicly its belief that certain books on its list—including works by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, my father, and other prominent authors—were too advanced for youthful readers and should be kept out of their hands.

In 1956, the prosecuting attorney in Port Huron, Michigan, ordered booksellers and distributors to stop displaying and selling all books on the NODL blacklist, citing erotic passages. The ban on NODL books was lifted after the paperback publisher of From Here to Eternity joined with other publishers to obtain a federal district court injunction against the prosecution.

Yet the NODL continued to exert influence when The Thin Red Line was published in 1962. In The Thin Red Line, privates Bead and Fife engage repeatedly in homosexual acts. Both try to convince themselves and each other that it’s out of necessity, not attraction. Fife, the dominant one, is so ashamed that he insults Bead whenever he gets the chance. When Bead takes a bullet to the head and lies dying, he asks Fife to hold his hand. Fife, even though he is mortified, forces himself to hold his lover’s hand as he dies.

These soldiers, whom my father followed from the peace time army in Hawaii in From Here to Eternity, to the battle of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line, and home in Whistle, were based on his actual division, which gained the famed nickname Tropic Lighting for its quick and brave fighting throughout the Solomon Islands and the New Georgia Campaign. My father believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time. He also believed also that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier’s capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago.

(Full article)

but more realistically the answer is "at that point the prices of things become much more more strongly based on the amount of human labor required to obtain them" and automation will also become much more heavily incentivized, even more than it is now, because of the cost of labor. so yes it's possible that certain fruit or specific goods or anything else requiring comparatively more human labor hours rather than machines/specialty equipment/capital will become relatively more expensive compared to housing, or other food, or whatever else, if it truly can't be automated very much even with advancements in robotics/AI/etc. but that isn't evil it just changes what people spend their money on.

if "stopping illegal immigration" were the actual policy goal our targets should be the industries that profit from the ability to exploit illegal immigrants (and want them to stay in that precarious position rather than becoming legal residents). doing more serious auditing to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants.

but that isn't what anyone (with sense) actually wants even if they claim it's what they want. because "zero illegal immigration" is very hard to achieve, people (and politicians) can pretend it's what they're trying to do. in reality it would be terrible to suddenly have absolutely no illegal immigrants. afaik it would especially be a shock to agriculture in a bad way. it would make both US agriculture and the immigrants worse off. so instead we end up with a worst-of-both-worlds situation where we make life more precarious and dangerous for anybody undocumented in the name of "stopping" illegal immigration, and this actually just makes exploitation easier because these people have nowhere to turn when they are being exploited. certainly this was the case under like, Biden and Obama and all. and cynics have long been describing this as intentional (that it's all to create this underclass, not REALLY wanting to get rid of illegal immigrants) and to some extent it is true. I don't think most liberals accept that this is their actual view, but it is the result of their view. Trump has made it worse in a new way (immigration enforcement that has actually worked at least a little bit, but in the most horrible and unethical way possible).