Untitled Title

girl’s friend: “wow.. thats so creepy…”

Americans criticizing English defamation law used to repeat a meme: that unlike the First Amendement, English law doesn't provide a right to make true statements. But in fact English courts always considered truth as part of their evaluation of whether a statement was "justified", and since the Defamation Act 2013 the text of the law explicitly protects true statements. The differences are more subtle; the burden of proof falls differently, and in American defamation cases involving "public figures" it's not enough for a statement to be false, it must be made with "knowing or reckless disregard of its falsity".

But enough about England and America. There is a European country where the meme is literally true; it's just a thousand kilometers further east. The Swedish defamation law criminalizes statements that designate somebody as "criminal, blameworthy in their way of life, or otherwise provides information that is likely to expose them to the contempt of others" unless the statement is "justifiable". Not every true statement is justified; rather courts will balance the importance of letting the public know against the individual's interest in not being exposed to contempt. This is a fairly unique approach. The law in Norway used to be similar, but case law evolved in the 1990s based on the ECHR right to free speech, leaving Sweden as the only European country without a truth defense.

People are getting convicted for true statements every so often—e.g. in 2021 the leader of the Christian Democrat party Ebba Busch pleaded guilty to posting on Facebook that a lawyer she was feuding with had previously been convicted of child sex abuse—but for the most part this remained a little-known legal quirk until the 2010s, when the #MeToo movement happened. The idea of #MeToo, of course, was that women should speak up against sex abusers, but in Sweden the women who did so found out that being a rapist is "criminal and blameworthy", and hence revealing that somebody is a rapist is defamatory.

The most published case happened in 2017, when the media personality Cissi Wallin made an Instagram post accusing the journalist Fredrik Virtanen of having raped her in 2006. Virtanen reported her to the police and she was prosecuted and convicted of defamation. The court decision explains the balancing test:

The requirement for justifiability means that a balance must be struck between, on the one hand, the protection against offensive statements and, on the other hand, the requirement for freedom of expression. […] When assessing justifiability, one must take into account how and when the information was provided. What is justifiable to say in a confidential circle may be unjustified to talk about in a larger group, and while it may be justified to speak openly about current criminal convictions, it may be unjustified to discuss older ones […]. The purpose of the statement is also of importance for the assessment […] Regarding the background to and purpose of the posts, Cecilia Wallin Blomberg has stated [...] The primary purpose was to tell the truth about the abuse of power she had been subjected to. Another purpose was to warn others about Fredrik Virtanen. [...] As far as the purpose of providing information is concerned, the court notes that it was entirely possible for Cecilia Wallin Blomberg to talk about the incident with, for example, her family, her therapist and the police, an opportunity that she also took advantage of. It has also been possible for her to share her story with others in a way that did not identify Fredrik Virtanen. In her posts, she has not only shared her own story but also referred to what others have experienced. Since the alleged abuses date back so far in time, it cannot be considered justified to warn others about Fredrik Virtanen.

The Wallin case got a lot of media attention, but similar things happened to non-celebrities too. One lawyer found around 30 defamation convictions of women discussing sexual assaults, and is currently appealing one of the cases based on ECHR rights. A 13-year old girl had a part-time job and was raped by her employer. Some years later, after the perpetrator has served his prison sentence and was working at the company again, she noticed on social media that the company has posted an ad for part-time work, and posted about her case in a local Facebook group "as a warning". Somewhat ironically, she was convicted of the more serious degree of defamation because what she described was such a serious crime.

(With reference to this post here.)

Digitally published third-party Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks consisting mainly of sex mechanics had been a thing long before the Book of Erotic Fantasy dropped in 2003; the most well known of the lot is probably The Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge – the original 1996 netbook, not any of the dozen-plus unrelated commercial projects which have opportunistically taken the same title in order to snaffle search engine hits – but it's far from the only one, and much of its contents are assembled from pieces of earlier netbooks on the topic, some of them dating as far back as the mid 1980s.

The impetus for the Book of Erotic Fantasy in particular was that the publishers realised that, by the strict letter of the Open Game License and the d20 System Trademark License, they could technically publish a sex sourcebook as an "official" d20 System product. As the OGL and d20 STL had only existed since 2000, the project sprang into existence pretty much the very moment it possibly could – the Book of Erotic Fantasy's publishers were merely quickest on the draw.

Unfortunately, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast got wind of the project before it could hit the shelves, and made a hasty update to the terms of the d20 STL in order to insert a vaguely worded "community standards" clause – an action that was transparently aimed at preventing the already-in-production Book of Erotic Fantasy from carrying the d20 System logo. The book's publication was delayed by several months, and subsequently went out without the logo.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

is a sourdough boule

Then Graeber shared another story from the group - once there was a member of the group who got on everyone’s nerves by asking the hunters for all of their best cuts of meat every time they returned with their haul. So one day the hunters invited him along on a seal hunting trip and then abandoned him on a raft in the Arctic ocean to die of exposure.

Social ostracism has existed before capitalism and it will outlive capitalism. Sometimes capitalism has even gone against social ostracism, like the famous example of the Sears and Roebuck magazine - the massive company could offer uniform products with uniform prices, which was a godsend for rural Black people because they could finally buy things for once in their lives without ludicrous markups from the local shopkeepers in their community!

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.

Looks like the cat's finally out of the bag! Last year I was able to assist in identifying 4 (FOUR?!?) members of the Franklin expedition! I researched Bridgens, Young, Orren, and Peglar, and was able to find and contact living descendants of their families who agreed to do DNA tests!

Anyone who claims that things have only improved for the rich is either lying or stupid. I’m done politely pretending otherwise.

Have you been vaccinated? Are you less at risk of diseases? Can you expect all of your children to live through infancy? Can you choose not to have children while still being sexually active? Wow! Incredible! What progress! What great improvements to your life!

Do you have up-to-date information on the lives of your loved ones, even when they live across the world? Do you have the ability to fly to them in a matter of hours should an emergency occur? Amazing!

Can you get access to healthy, diverse food? Even when you have weird dietary restrictions? Can you cook the food by nuking it for 5 minutes in the microwave instead of needing to dedicate hours to tending a fire? Wow!

How long does it take to do your laundry? How long do you spend sewing your own clothes by hand because you ripped your last pair of pants? Do you have to go outside to piss in a hole in the ground or do you have a fucking flush toilet in your house?

I have asthma medications! I have migraine medications! My mom and baby sister did not both die during the relevant pregnancy! I can listen to my favorite music whenever I feel like it without bothering the people around me! When I lose my favorite pair of gloves I can order a replacement for cheap! If your political opinions need me to pretend that none of that is true, then your political opinions are worthless. If your political opinions don’t require this elaborate farce, then stop trying to make me participate in it! 

the fed trying fight inflation popped the pandemic WFH boom economy but didn’t slow the degree to which it felt like prices were climbing, even on non-luxury categories like basic groceries, rent, etc.

that said, the Biden years weren’t too bad in the big scheme of things, and it was truly bizarre to me how bad they were at getting the word out. 24 hour cable news cycle of Democratic Party / centrist-liberal leaning people and my coworkers were learning about this or that Biden policy from fringe weirdos on twitter rather via me sharing stuff I’d read, rather than from TV

the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.

and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.

is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?

But e.g. this post by Mike Konczal argues that the prices of essentials and housing have gone up faster than inflation, and those are a bigger share of expenditures (and stress!) for people toward the bottom of the distribution; so even if "inflation"-adjusted wages have gone up, they might be under more pressure because their basket of goods has had its price go up faster than inflation.

And every time I've heard this suggestion, my first reaction has been skepticism, because I'm pretty sure I remember reading analyses that if you break out baskets of goods for different income levels, inflation has been lower than average for the bottom quartile or so, meaning that they've been doing better than "real wages" make it look.

(This is possible if luxury goods are rising faster than inflation; the "average basket" goes up by 3%, but the cheap stuff only goes up by 2% while the expensive stuff goes up by 4%.)

But of course I remember reading this a while ago, like before the pandemic. And if that's true, but Konczal's post is true, that would explain a lot, right? The explanation would go something like

In the 2010s, wages in the bottom quartile weren't rising faster than inflation. But they were rising faster than the expenses people in the bottom quartile actually had, so their experienced living standards were improving. After covid, wages in the bottom quartile have risen faster than average inflation, but the prices of things people in the bottom quartile [need to] buy have risen even faster, so their experience living standards have fallen.

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff.

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took at step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

I'd also like to point out that the idea that you can prevent a wholesale genocide by like, killing the RIGHT individual, is a rather...simplistic understanding of what causes genocide.

Frollo, to use him as the example, is a priest (in the book), and a judge (in the Disney movie.) He's not just a bad guy. He's an extention of the Catholic Church/The State (depending on which version you want to lean on here.) His power to do harm comes from his position within those institutions and the power of those institutions themselves. The persecution of the Roma people within France isn't because there was a bad guy, but because of those systems of power being used to kill the people that the church and the government wanted dead. Frollo getting dropped off a building wouldn't stop the persecution of the Roma in any world that isn't, maybe, a Disney film.

In the real world, it's very easy to hold up Hitler as the boogeyman. But if Hitler had died, but the war machine of Third Reich Germany hadn't lost the Battle of Berlin/the War as a whole, the Holocaust wouldn't have magically stopped just because 1 guy died.

Look. I'm not saying that there's never been a situation in the world where killing 1 guy wasn't the objectively best option in a high stakes, immediately dangerous situation. The world is full of Trolley problems and self defense situations and nuance and context.

But this post is about Restorative vs Punitive Justice *systems*, and about how many people, in general, start and end their analysis of Justice with "did the bad guy get killed?"

I would even argue that this mentality, where as long as you are sure in your heart that it will SAVE LIVES, killing people is just and good and shouldn't be questioned because some people are just bad- that mentality? Forms the core of Police killings in our culture. Justifies shooting first and asking questions never. Because once you decide that someone has done harm, they need to die for there to be Justice?

Many Disney villain deaths ARE specifically by falling ( Gaston and Frollo are the most obvious examples, but theres more- Snow Whites Queen, Ratigan from the Great Mouse Detective, etc), or falling with a twist (Gothel from Tangled and Clayton from Tarzan come to mind). But sometimes it's a little more abstract- still a death that leaves the hero blameless, but not specifically a fall (Hades, Dr. Falcifer) Technically, it's not falling that kills them, but it fulfills the same trope.

2.

Scar absolutely fits category 2. He very dramatically falls off a cliff, in a parallel to Mufasa, and THEN gets eaten by hyenas. The fall is absolutely part of it.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.

Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.

In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)

Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.

Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?

Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."

You are pressed to find a soul alive today that can testify to the experience of several hundred horses charging at your direction and you know they intend to charge past, over, and through you. The realization is alone enough to shake your will.

Hobelars were mounted on small gaited native pony-horses called hobbies; carrying no gear and wearing no armour and riding practically bareback, a feat made possible by the fast smooth pace of the hobby (whose gait would presumably resemble the Icelandic pony’s tölt or the Mongolian war pony’s joroo.) the Irish Hobby is now extinct, but the name is where we get the word “hobby” from - an activity done for pleasure. This sounds made-up, doesn’t it? You can read a long post by myself and contributors here, which includes this poem from someone describing their fighting style and how annoying it was:

And one amang, an lyrysch man, Uppone his hoby swyftly ran; Hyt was a sportfulle sygthe, How hys darttes he did schak ; And when him lyst to leve or tak, They had fulle gret dispite.

There are a few reasons why you haven’t heard of hobelars (god forbid people have hobbies). It is important to the imperial construction of the myths of the British Isles (and the French) that Celtic people be negligible and subjugated in any narrative of medieval warfare. They did not correspond to a social class outside of warfare: you can spin so MANY sexy aristocracy-reinforcing tales of chivalry around knights that we’re still doing so today. Sexy tormented superhero with his ARMOUR and his SWORD and his big HORSE - let’s roleplay this 5 million times, and for political comfort, rather than trampling the peasants he now rules, we shall enshrine and repeat the safe metaphorical image of the “dragon” for him to fight as well…

Guy Who Just Caught A Wild Hobby From A Bog And Doesn’t Wear Armour (and runs around bareback, throwing stuff and being incredibly fast and annoying, and vanishing when you tried to kill them back) is just… less sexy. They literally weren’t superheroes. There is discomfort as well - if we kept their imagery, we couldn’t give them fictions to fight; hobelars were not romantic, they had no fixed honour; they were always a scrambling skirmishing fighting unit for killing people. As an academic puts it:

The hobelar is very much the poor relation in the study of the English armies of the fourteenth century, eclipsed by both the man-at-arms and the archer. Our understanding of his origins and role has been wholly based on only two major studies of this troop type: J. E. Morris’ ‘Mounted Infantry Warfare’ in 1914 and J. Lydon's ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’ in 1954. The lack of interest might be considered surprising, given that Morris saw him as the precursor to the mounted longbowman, while Lydon called him ‘the most effective fighting man of the age’, referring to the hobelar as ‘an entirely different type of mounted soldier’. Yet other historians have been happy to accept the conclusions of Morris and Lydon, considering the hobelar only in passing. Perhaps the reason that so little work has been done on him is that he is always considered in comparison to the man-at-arms – the elite warrior, in his shining harness, doyen of chivalry and a core element of the medieval political and social elite – and the longbowman – the almost super-heroic, Hundred Years’ War-winning, nationalistic symbol of medieval English, and Welsh, martial prowess. By contrast, there is little if any mention of the hobelar in the battle narratives of the middle ages; they have no great role to play in the successes of the English over the French. They do not form a political and social class within medieval society and there is no way, therefore, to discuss their impact outside of the military sphere. It is also almost certain that their Irish origins have counted against them too. Medieval Ireland has been considered militarily backwards by most historians of warfare, who seem to have inherited something of the dismissive tone of their English sources…

Right. 

You’ve read the posts above. You have dutifully pictured the mental image of being a pikeman, Just Some Guy with a big pointy stick, while thousands of pounds of steel-armoured horseflesh ridden by braying Tories comes at you. You have understood that this is inherently alarming, even if you understand the military theories involved, and are prepared to make horse-kebabs.

Now picture being that pikeman when hobelars turn up. First off, the hobbies are WEIRD. They’re fast and tiny, and they move Wrong:

Rather than lining up to be kebabs, as you expect, they feint - dance up to you like weirdos and turn away. They show off how - unencumbered and in good control of their hobbies - they can pretend to do the scary charge thing, breaking your will, but not get kebabed. They are not wearing armour; they’re not using saddles or stirrups, but some of them appear to be archers (?!) sometimes the hobelars get off and wind you up a bit and then jump back on their stupid hobbies. Psychologically they seem more like YOU, but then there’s the horses. They throw spears, or arrow-spears called “darts.” They laugh at you. They have amazing control of their hobbies, who turn away from pikeheads on a dime. The sight of hobbies skirmishing was described (above) as “a sportful sight” - presumably if they weren’t doing it at you, when it would be SO annoying.

There is zero expectation that Celtic mounted skirmishers will break a wall of pikemen. The hobelars have been sent to annoy you. What if this is part of their function, a natural activity in their wheelhouse, and they have perfected it. What if it’s working. What if, by the time the big shiny horses with their big shiny nobles come, you’re already a bit shaken…

Not saying this scene ever happened in history, but you can see from this a bit of how these histories are constructed: here is a unit that was effective and influential in its time and gave its name to “hobbies.” Here are the places where it would seem logical to use them. We have lost much of what would have been known about how they fought at all. The primary source for the quote of the “iyrysch man upon his hoby” is preserved in one single corrupted document in a corner of the internet that took me a morning to find. We will never forget knights, but with a strategically placed EMP, we would probably lose our ability to remember and connect over hobelars (why would anyone care.)