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A Wicked, Foolish Lie

@multiheaded1793 / multiheaded1793.tumblr.com

I received a message in the flood. Words for a new weapon. Named after an extinct deity. I have a name for you. https://www.twitch.tv/multiheaded

Hello! My name is Francesca Y. Kramer.

You may remember me from my Tumblr blog that, over the course of the past decade, went through names such as @ranma-official, @genderfluid-ranma, @fleshfleshfleshflesh and others.

My previous account was banned due to malicious reports, and it is unlikely that I will ever get it back: hence, this is my new blog.

I will try and recover and repost some of the effortposts I've written there over the years, but the drafts are, unfortunately, lost forever.

In either case, please give me a follow and a signal boost!

(I am also a political refugee that was forced to flee the Russian Federation due to my anti-war activism and queer identity, and so my financial status is dire: if you can offer me any job at all, or can recommend to anyone who does, please contact me!)

I think Columbo is the only good contemporary detective serial for a lot of reasons but mostly because you never really see a weird little gremlin man who causes problems on purpose and annoys rich people into accidentally confessing to murder anymore

Shows like Dragnet and Law & Order et al are unconscionable pro-police propaganda. Columbo is pro-"weird guy who's just sort of here" propaganda

I don't think he ever actually joined the police force I think he just showed up one day and wouldn't leave

I think it works out because Columbo is only a cop because that’s the quickest and easiest way to explain why he’s always showing up at crime scenes. He doesn’t carry a gun, his dog is absolutely not a police dog, he has no partner, and he seemingly never tackles a case unless it’s a rich person who has committed a murder. We learn nearly nothing about the police force or other cops on the show. Even in the episode where he’s solving a murder committed by a police commissioner, it barely comes up. He has more in common with with the ‘faerie disguised as humble beggar’ trope than with ‘good guy cop’ trope. I would absolutely believe it if it turned out that he was literally some kind of supernatural being, and he uses his limited magical abilities to convince everyone that he’s a detective for the sake of convenience and that’s about it.

Arestovych has been rather confidently telling an unlikely-sounding story about how a bunch of Russian spooks came to Ukraine, pretended to want to defect and gave up some real troops’ positions (but only those of Chechens, classic) to try and get SBU’s trust, steal a Stinger with Ukrainian numbers and shoot down a passenger plane in Russia with it as a false flag.

What’s more, the way they got burned in the meanwhile was supposedly that they were trying to recruit some locals to film a fake attack by themselves on a TDF post to report to Moscow, as they were less than confident about the prospect of actually raiding one and getting away with it.

The combination of incompetence and malice does sound plausible, I gotta admit.

Someone please compile Arestovych's statements and grade them on a curve wrt accuracy/insight at the time once this is "over", this would be legit fascinating because he's exactly the right combination of driven, loyal and just plain unorthodox to say *anything*, factually correct or not, conductive to the government's cause or not.

Much has been made of the way non-class divisions politically divide the lower class but naively this argument must also apply to the upper class as well, right? Feel like there's fun stuff to play with there. Like, say, the cosmopolitanism of the educated as a technique for removing this internal conflict. I don't think there's actually knowledge to be gained here but it's a fun toy

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Historically the technique for removing conflict in the upper class was just to not include the people you didn’t want—the thing that makes the upper class different is that it is small and exclusive! Wars of state formation were often how the class was sorted, using violent military conquest to depose the old upper class. The early liberal revolutions were in part driven by the newly rich parts of the middle class being upset they couldn’t gain real political power. And in later periods, to the extent that real social mobility has existed and not illusory forms that are a sop to aspiring nouveau-riche, its mechanisms ruthlessly vet would be aspirants.

Britain has got this modern system down pat: life peerages have replaced new hereditary peerages to keep the prestige of the latter from being diluted, even as the former are increasingly widely distributed, you can wield some power and influence if you’re well off, but real power is mostly in the hands of a social group whose core is Eton/Oxbridge alumns and which self-selects for a likeminded membership of the same mores and worldview.

The whole reason it is politically useful to divide the lower class is that the lower classes are necessarily bigger. You want to exploit existing divisions or try to get people to perceive new ones so that you can more effectively rule divided interest groups. And you need the lower classes to generate wealth. But the upper classes historically are often about who is allowed to *accumulate* wealth, so you want to keep them small and homogenous, with similar political interests.

  • Arestovych yesterday reasoned that Putin’s *maximum* aims at this point are basically to reach Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson oblast borders (in that order of priority) + the southeast half of Zaporozhia, long-term entrench there, exhaust Ukraine and allies with static warfare for several months (counting on the flow of aid to wither), and from there push for some sort of Minsk 3 rotten peace deal that’d let them secure those territories while leaving Ukraine maximally crippled
  • Hence no declaration of war, no formal mobilization and no more open nuclear blackmail in the cards.
  • If those aims prove elusive, then keep sending a trickle of reserves into the grinder to wear out Ukraine and prevent it from amassing combat power for a counteroffensive, hold and fortify current lines, and likewise hope not to lose the war of attrition before Ukraine can be pressured into a ceasefire.
  • Arestovych and other officials, including Zelensky, have been adamant that Ukraine will never consider a ceasefire that’d leave any recently occupied territories out of Ukrainian control. Ukraine will seek to retake those by force as soon as militarily possible, but would be extremely reluctant to launch a ground offensive beyond 2014 lines.

neon pink line added by me to indicate the likely de facto borders Russia would attempt to establish

This aged well enough, they ""annexed"" precisely that! In fairness they were actively preparing to ""annex"" the entirety of Kharkiv Oblast as well, but the September counteroffensive caught them entirely off guard.

Some loose thoughts on the war:

  • Looks like the Lysychansk withdrawal actually went exactly to plan, all the Russian sources are bemoaning not encircling anyone, no PoWs or captured vehicles to show off, etc.
  • That’s probably less because Ukrainian c3 (command, control & communications) is that good, and more because the Russian force is broken down and physically incapable of pursuit.
  • I feel like both sides don’t want to discuss how successful UAF have been ruthlessly spending the lives of their conscripts/TDF to fight in the salient. Huge casualties (~40-80%, of which 25-40% KIA – don’t cite me on this, all hearsay), wavering morale as a result, but they got the job done, and Ukraine apparently only committed quality reserves for the SD counterattack and then again to cover the final retreat. There’s reports/speculation of practically 1:1 casualty rates there despite the defender’s advantage, but the distribution of casualties really really matters.
  • It’s still unclear what Ukraine’s reserves situation is like. That RUSI report from yesterday says that it’s bad because they keep breaking them up to give TDF more backbone and also rely on them as shock troops. but that might not be the defining factor/bottleneck for gathering a counteroffensive force, one that will rely more on armor and mobile formations (that they’ve avoided throwing into the meatgrinder so far).
  • Likewise with their training pipeline; looks like it’s very rough going, and Britain’s offer to provide infantry courses in Poland is necessary/barely sufficient, and surely a lot of that is avoidable organizational ineffectiveness… but they don’t need to win any awards, they need to outlast Russia (who’s cannibalizing its training battalions and grows all kinds of desperate for manpower).
  • Ukrainian elite infantry (marines, airborne etc) have been suffering enormous losses all the way since April according to interviews from back then, but so have Russian ones, hard to say if it’s acceptable in their calculus.
  • I can see how squeezing every last drop of blood from the ragged but hardened infantry core they have now makes sense if they expect to fight very differently later when they have a large Western-equipped offensive force. I guess that depends on whether the tactic of interdicting supply lines and pushing Russians out pans out in Kherson and other cities they’d rather not turn into another Mariupol. Urban assaults basically require highly trained infantry; most other combined arms scenarios aren’t as demanding of it.
  • Collective experience, organizational practices, unit cohesion and the flow of decision-making are all insanely important in war, as the RUSI report notes. They can dwarf all else put together (like in Vietnam, or WW2 Eastern Front) but they’re also basically impossible to quantify. Models like the OODA loop are just narrativized abstractions, there’s a vast sum of individual human interactions behind everything.
  • Ukraine probably still is better off experience-wise because their officers aren’t getting slaughtered as badly. Russian artillery crews are going to get more and more raw as well.
  • The USSR overcame Barbarossa more because the Red Army eventually unfucked itself through necessity + survival of the fittest, less because of a materiel advantage. They had more on-paper materiel superiority in 1941 than at any point until, like, late 1944, and much of that simply ended up arming the Germans.
  • Institutional stuff is altogether more important than what’s going on with an individual soldier or squad and whatever kit they’re using, it’s honestly nuts. Especially so for armor, organization and mass make all the difference, not a videogame style one-on-one comparison. Even the oldest junk donated to Ukraine or dug up by Russia is unambiguously worthwhile as long as it adds up to more mobile formations and more operational reserves.
  • Regarding drone jamming: I hardly know anything about it, but can’t that be overcome with sheer numbers? Lots of drones, lots of frequencies, decentralized control, and hope that at least one gets a good view, no? I guess trained operators are a bottleneck, but still.
  • The Russian army is in a coyote-and-gravity situation, morale-wise; one big loss (like potentially Kherson by the end of summer) and they might start crumbling elsewhere. That could manifest itself on every level from grunts becoming ever more reluctant, to generals getting ideas.
  • Russia has irreversibly lost the war for most intents and purposes, but Ukraine’s got a long way to win it.

Reblogging on the eve of the grand counteroffensive, looks like it's time to see how this has held up.

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

some good theories in the notes but I choose to believe those are made by a village or perhaps king as an artificial home, to attract and keep a wizard. like a beehive

While artificially built towers do attract wild wizards a wizard will naturally build their own tower as they enter the later stage of their life cycle. For the first couple hundred years of their lives wizards are extremely mobile and may travel almost anywhere in the world or even beyond. A tower usually begins as a workshop which the wizard returns to during their migration in order to store trinkets and artifacts which they collect during their travels. As the collection outgrows the available space in the workshop a combination of the concentration of volatile magical energy and the wizards natural desire to build secret passageways causes them to begin expanding the workshop. This usually starts with basic "bigger on the inside" magic but due to constraints around energy usage for sustained large scale spacetime warping they will eventually turn to more traditional methods of building. There are some documented cases of wizards whose workshops expanded outward instead of upwards, resulting in labyrinth structures rather than the more traditional tower. It is still unclear what environmental pressure causes these divergent structures. As the wizard ages and their exploratory phase winds down their travels will focus on a progressively more narrow subset of arcane knowledge until they find one secret of the universe complex enough to prompt their transition into the final stage of the wizard lifestyle. By this point they will almost certainly have a fully fledged tower or have settled into one they've found already existing. Their desire to travel is generally severely reduced by this point and outside of quests to discover certain highly specific items related to their studies it's possible that they might not leave their tower for months or years at a time. In some cases they may begin this phase several times if the secret they started pursuing is less challenging or less fundamental to the operations of the universe than expected. When they do find their final subject of study and find the answers they sought, they will finally reach the end of the wizard life cycle, either via death caused by hubris, merging with a larger consciousness, ascendence to a different plane or to godhood, or metamorphosis into a litch. Other wizards may sometimes occupy the abandoned towers of a former wizard but most will move on in order to build their own before entering into these later stages. Very rarely a particularly social variety of wizard may build several connected towers and share resources, these are called schools and over time they will tend to attract a large number of younger and weaker wizards seeking shelter.

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Absolutely brilliant analysis of wizards and their migratory patterns through the ages. I can personally verify that this is accurate, and you may now consider this properly peer reviewed and accepted.

We might be seeing the same thing now. Politicians tell us it is possible to "stop the boats" but don't tell us it's possible to have economic democracy. Is it a surprise, therefore, that voters want one but not the other? It wouldn't be to Aesop, Chesterton, Galbraith or Elster.
[...]
Kris-Stella Trump has shown how this is true of inequality: the higher is inequality, she shows, the more likely people are to regard greater equality as legitimate. A plan to cut the post-tax incomes of the richest 1% by, say, one-third would seem very radical today - even though it would leave them better off relative to the rest of us than they were in the mid-80s. Such resignation to inequality means there is less demand for redistribution, even without any work by the media.
[...]
Thatcher, like her contemporaries in all parties, thought the job of politicians was not so much to sheepishly follow public opinion as to shape it. In her 1975 speech opposing the EU referendum, she approvingly cited a letter to the Evening Standard pointing out that if it had been left to the will of the people. "we would have no Race Relations Act, immigration would have been stopped, abortions would still be illegal and hanging still be in force."
But why have politicians lost that conception of politics and replaced it with the "customer is king" approach?
The mere fact that they seem unaware of these contrasting positions is itself confirmation of Bachrach and Baratz's point, that some questions are excluded from politics.

this is a series following America’s first sovereign citizen legal firm, and it’s absolutely priceless

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the concept of 'sperm whale' is so fucking funny. these prudish victorians found a gigantic, terrifying sea-beast, and, discovering it was full of a thick, oily substance, immediately went 'is this fucking Cum???' and started fueling everything with it. they thought their whole sexually repressed society was running on the monstrous cum harvested by deadly expeditions to the black, icy sea. what kind of immaculate neuroses they must have had.

Idk enough about the etymology of the name Sperm Whale to know if this is actually where it comes from but the idea is funny enough to me to actually just roll with it.

You will be delighted to know that yes, this is exactly where the name comes from.

To quote the wikipedia page-

The name "sperm whale" is a clipping of "spermaceti whale". Spermaceti, originally mistakenly identified as the whales' semen, is the semi-liquid, waxy substance found within the whale's head.

So yeah, they thought it’s head was full of semen and named it as such.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

Arestovych was understandably gleeful yesterday, in particular regarding how Ukraine's Bakhmut gambit seems to be paying off. Reading between the lines, Putin will surely throw the last remaining elite reserves (airborne, spetsnaz) to salvage the situation there, because he's a monke.

I'm still not entirely convinced that this whole thing was such a long-running plan though, although who knows. I think Ukraine started hyping up the defense of Bakhmut early this year, just as Russia/Wagner really started to smash its way in with the capture of strongpoints like Soledar. Maybe that was when Ukraine realized that they can fix all attention there and make it a trap to facilitate the counteroffensive

If Russia goes ahead with using the new e-gulag laws to draft people and ban evaders from absolutely fucking everything, they might try to suppress awareness and just have regime-controlled media not cover it at all, but even so they’d be desperate at any point they’d resort to that, and get much more sabotage and violence in return. That might actually lead to even more overt destabilization than the first wave.

Malicious use of AI is an unlovely but important reminder that we absolutely do live in a world where witches can eat your shadow.