Republican senators block effort to bar federal troops from election interference
A Democratic senator said he was “fearful” that GOP resistance was a sign the administration is planning “illegal domestic deployment of our military.”
. 12, 2026, 11:35 AM EDT
By David Rohde
Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked a Democratic effort Thursday to strengthen existing bans on federal troops entering polling stations or seizing ballots or voting machines, two senators told MS NOW.
Democrats called the Republicans’ opposition to the measure “deeply alarming” and predicted that President Donald Trump would deploy federal troops in an effort to interfere in this November’s midterm elections, which polls suggest his party will lose.
A Democratic senator said he was “fearful” that GOP resistance was a sign the administration is planning “illegal domestic deployment of our
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One of the recurring themes in Dark Souls that I'm obsessed with and keep coming back to is what I think of as the tendency for the ruling classes to descend deeper and deeper into depravity as they try to perpetuate their existence forever.
The chief example is, of course, Gwyn, this great king who hollows himself out and sacrifices himself to the fire to keep his kingdom alive, and for what? The function of a kingdom is to produce value for its king, so what good is it to keep your kingdom alive if you kill yourself in the process? Dark Souls is not exactly concerned with modes of production and exchange, but there's enough there in the worldbuilding and level design to imply that Lordran once was a proper kingdom with farms, workshops, kitchens, sewers - everything a large nation needs to reproduce its own existence - and also higher functions of the state/superstructure - prisons, churches, colleges, and so on. The implication is that this was a real society predicated upon the exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. At a certain point, the underlying reason for the existence of a given state is lost, and its rulers chief concern simply becomes reproducing the state-as-state. Killing yourself to preserve the thing that keeps you alive as it rots away is the action of someone who has been reproducing the same cycle over and over again already and has forgotten that anything else is possible.
Alongside Gwyn, we can also see what's left of the old rulers of the world. Pre-Gwyn ancient dragon society isn't discussed much, and it doesn't seem like they really had any sort of state or anything recognisable as a society in a strictly literal view of the story, but their symbolic role in the story is that of a group of deposed, wonderful, ancient kings. They are majestic, beautiful, even aspirational creatures whose radiance many have tried in vain to recapture for themselves. There aren't many of them left by the time of Dark Souls, but what's left of them hardly inspires feelings of majesty. The notable 3 are the Gaping Dragon, the Undead Dragon, and Seath the Scaleless. Each of these three are shambling, monstrous, vile creatures; warped and disgusting abominations that are barely clinging to existence. The Gaping Dragon has become so twisted with hunger it transformed into one big mouth and continues to starve anyway; the Undead Dragon is rotting as it still "lives" after being permanently cut into two pieces and is barely able to move (except for its many butts down in Izalith for some reason); and Seath has only managed to survive by constructing a massive institution of torture in the name of medical research, sacrificing who knows how many people in the pursuit of immortality, just as Gwyn himself did after Seath helped him slaughter most of his own kind specifically because he was jealous of their majesty and wanted it for himself.
Of the true dragons in Dark Souls, the one that only one that really comes close to possessing the majesty of the old dragons (not counting Kalameet, who is dead by the time it actually takes place) is the Stone Dragon. This one seems to be juvenile based on its down-feathered appearance, and is in my estimation much younger than Lordran itself, though I'm not aware of any objective statement in that regard. If it is indeed younger, then this is a dragon which has never known kingship, which has only grown up in a world beneath Gwyn's shadow, and is still coming into being rather than clinging onto its old existence. It makes sense, then, that this would be the only one which seems beautiful in the way the true dragons are typically described. Notably, it's also helpful as a covenant leader, rather than being an enemy like every other dragon or dragon-related creature.
In many ways, Dark Souls is the story of a wretched king trying to preserve his kingdom against the other kings he conquered before him, and from whatever system of production and exchange and rule will inevitably come after. The main victims in all of this are the people of Lordran, who have all become undead as the curse produced by Gwyn's own stubbornness spreads and infects all. Negation tries its hardest to stave off the negation-of-the-negation, but in doing so only produces the conditions which bring it about. The undead melt and twist and warp eternally because ultimately, the nature of undead existence is to be subservient to and exploited by the system Gwyn built, even longer after Gwyn himself has become hollowed out and all but destroyed just in the name of perpetuating it. The only way it stops is when the Chosen Undead finally puts out the flame and brings about the Age of Dark, which amounts to a revolution of some sort - I read it optimistically as something akin to a socialist revolution, one which abolishes the contradictions of previous society, as this seems most in line with the theme of ending the needless pursuit of endlessness, but ultimately it's left vague and it might as well be something akin to a capitalist revolution consuming feudalism and producing its own twisted negation on top of the last.
anyway my undead is like if lenin was a cute girl who stunk real bad on account of the rot
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I'M GOING TO OBLITERATE THE NEXT PERSON I COME IN CONTACT WITH
Okay I'm going to dump all of my Frieren shit here bc I js remembered it existed and I lwk forgot how in love I was with this show
HIMMEL AND FRIEREN ARE THE BEST SHIP/STRAIGHT SHIP TO EVER EXIST SOMEBODY FUCKING FIGHT ME
It's way too intricate and deep for it to js be "love" imo. It's layered and driven by passion, dedication, and understanding. Himmel knew they didn't have enough time and tried to savor it while Frieren - well it's kinda obvious. "Right person, wrong time" ahh /pos. Their relationship would've worked except for the fact they ran out of time.
Frieren is so relatable, especially with the time aspects. Every little thing feels like a waste of time, years go by too quickly, and everyone moves on without you. You've js gotta learn to follow the river's current yk ("yeah okay Shakespeare" SHUT UP YOU IMBECILES MY WRITERS BRAIN IS WORKING)
I love Frieren. A lot if you couldn't tell.
Also nobody knows how much these stupid blue flowers mean to me ARGHH
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I do think it's kind of funny that all the like, John [Game] characters of Dark Souls and Elden Ring all have like. weirdly inadequate thigh protection
John Darksouls and John Darksouls III both have this weird sort of gap between their thigh bits and their poleyns and I'm not sure what's up with that
John Eldenring just has NO thigh protection but does at least have some kinda scale thing going on to cover their groin
vs John Darksouls II who's just sitting there like "No tassets. No cuisses. Fuck it. we ball"
During the ongoing Buffy rewatch we've been talking about and around a few interconnected issues.
The fact nobody outside the core gang seems particularly worried about all the signs of vampire activity (even if you don't jump to 'vampires' as your explanation, surely the number of students who just go missing or the times the school or the Bronze is attacked by PCP-abusing gang members with sharp teeth should worry people much more than it seems to?)
The fact that Willow and Xander never talk about Jesse after The Harvest, and Cordelia never talks about her dead boyfriend Kevin after Prophecy Girl, and nobody talks about Buffy's fellow teen delinquent Sheila after School Hard, and nobody talks about the fact Angel killed Theresa after Phases, and nobody seems to have noticed when Harmony became a vampire, and so on.
The general lack of preparation for vampires on the part of people who really should know better (whether that's the gang continuing to meet in the school library despite it being attacked by vampires multiple times in the show's first fifteen episodes, or Buffy not doing anything about the fact a vampire came to her house and attacked her mother in Angel except hunting down that one specific vampire, or characters who know vampires are real repeatedly walking around Sunnydale at night without even carrying crosses with them...).
As I've argued, I don't think there's a particularly strong in-universe justification for any of this. I think it's just baked into the show's premise to a pretty large extent (Buffy can't juggle an ordinary life at school and her destiny of fighting demons and vampires at night unless she's allowed to have a fairly regular school life, which significantly limits how much the mundane world can be allowed to react to signs of the supernatural) and that some of it is just of the consequence of the show being a loosely serialized work of network television (Sheila exists within School Hard but not beyond it: they only signed the actor up for one episode and they don't want to confuse casual viewers by mentioning her later). The show itself doesn't really want to dwell on the fact Xander and Willow had a close friend who died, because that's not the sort of story the writers are interested in telling. So we get a quick line in The Harvest from Giles to the effect that "people have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't", and we're just not meant to think too much about the fact that regular attendees of the Bronze will have witnessed multiple vampire attacks and lost several friends there and yet kept coming back to the Bronze night after night.
I think it would be interesting, though, to imagine a slightly different version of the show. One which leaned a little harder into the horror elements all of this implies. What if, instead of just appealing to some supposed human instinct to rationalize the inexplicable away, the show told us that the Hellmouth itself was the reason people kept acting like this? What if, just as the supernatural energies of the Hellmouth attract vampires and demons and impossibly giant insects, they also have a corrosive magical impact on people's memories? (We know, after all, that this sort of thing is not something the show would later shy away from: Jonathan in Superstar, Dawn's whole deal in Season 5 and beyond, whatever the mysterious and largely unexplained connection was between Ben and Glory, ...)
Imagine a version of the show where Giles told us in The Harvest that the Hellmouth itself was actively trying to make people forget about vampires. As the Slayer, Buffy is immune to this effect, and with careful preparation and training (which is what the Watchers do) or just a bit of luck combined with some very traumatic experiences ordinary humans can also fight off the effect to some degree, but most people on a Hellmouth will:
Forget about seeing any vampire's true face minutes after seeing it
Forget about seeing anybody turn to dust (and not think too hard about what that person was doing before or why they suddenly aren't around)
Have very vague memories of anybody who is bitten by a vampire: they don't necessarily forget about them completely, but they definitely don't remember seeing them bitten and (unless talking to the vampire they became) they generally don't think about them at all anymore (no funeral, no wondering where the body is, no wondering what they're up to and why they're not around right now)
What if Willow and Xander (and eventually Cordelia, and Oz, and a few other people like the members of the vampire-worshiping Sunset Club) were -- because of a combination of sheer luck, and their repeated close escapes from vampires, and people who knew the truth being at hand to explain right away -- mostly (but not entirely) immune? What if Buffy tries bringing up Jesse's death at the end of The Harvest, to tell her new friends how sorry she is she couldn't save him, only to be met by puzzled looks, or a vague recollection from Xander that ... oh, yeah, Jesse was a kid he used to know when he was younger, but he must've moved away at some point and Xander hasn't thought about him in years? What if Buffy does remember Jesse, and Kevin, and Sheila, and Theresa, and every other classmate who was killed by a vampire, but she doesn't ever talk about them because she knows from experience that nobody else does. (She doesn't know if Giles forgot about Jesse too and she's too afraid to ever outright ask.)
What if the Hellmouth itself is always exerting a constant pressure on people who should know better that makes them forget about crosses and holy water and not staying late after school? What if that's part of the reason vampires come to Sunnydale: even if you're not interested in ending the world, it's a great place to be a vampire because the Hellmouth is aware and (in some sense) actively on their side? What if the reason that only the Slayer can stand against the vampires and the demons isn't just a question of physical strength: what if it's not just carelessness that means people other than Buffy regularly walk around Sunnydale in the dark without even trying to protect themselves? What if, after he loses his soul, everyone but Buffy starts to forget about Angel too? What if the reason Giles needs to keep consulting his books for details on Angelus or Drusilla and Spike and never seems to have the information to hand is that the Hellmouth is constantly trying to make him forget everything he knows? What if the reason the Initiative start collecting vampires and demons in their underground base isn't to construct some ridiculous super-soldier: what if until they started doing that, they'd go out patrolling, fight several vampires each night, then all march back to base and confidently report that they'd had no encounters that night? What if Sunnydale's police know they're covering something up but can't ever remember exactly what it is, or that some of their fellow officers went to investigate reports of gang members hanging out in the cemetery one night and ... well, don't seem to have been around much since then? What if Joyce can't even remember the time a vampire attacked in her own house, so Buffy knows there's no point telling her mom the truth because even if she staked a vampire in front of her she'd forget all about it the next day?
To be clear, this isn't a headcanon as such: I don't think this is what's going on in the actual show at all. But I think this version of the show -- a version that leaned into the episodic nature of the early episodes and the absurdities imposed by the need to maintain the masquerade, and deliberately amplified the horror aspects of that and how it contributed to Buffy's increasing sense of isolation -- would have been pretty interesting.
Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)
Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!
Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.
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hey guys- i’m very sad to share the news that i am no longer a part of drawfee going forward. you’ll keep seeing me around as i move on to new things! but please understand the privacy and difficulty around the matter.
thank you everyone for many fun years, and for your continued support going forward 🫶
