Cult Classic

I had a really exhausting week, so I’m going to try to chill out by writing this thing about cults that’s been bouncing around in my head since... oh, like January 6th?   For some reason?     But it’s also about my insanely long OC fanfic slash vanity project slash concept album.  Join me, won’t you?

Okay, so back in... geez 2018?   Has it been that long?   Around October 2018 I started working out the details for the big climax of the “1000 years ago” section of my fanfic.  From the start I had this idea that the Legendary Super Saiyan would be locked into a death struggle with pretty much the entire Saiyan population, led by a Saiyan King who just can’t handle being upstaged.   But I had to figure out a lot of details to make that actually work.   What I finally ended up with was the Jindan Cult. 

Why a cult?  Because I wanted my King character to be the main villain, but also be physically weaker, but also he needed to be powerful enough to challenge the heroine. I came up with all these different ways to beef up his power level without making him a Super Saiyan himself, but ultimately I wanted him to have an army of Siayans at his back.   That led me to consider some sort of magic elixir that would make them all stronger, but especially the king, since he’s ultimately in this for himself.  At first, I considered having him mind-control all of his goons, but I spent the mind control nickel in earlier arcs, and I’ll have to use it again later, because Towa and Demigra use it.   Then I thought of drug addiction, which is sort of like mind control but not literal brainwashing or anything like that.  And that led me to the cult concept.  

One major inspiration for me was the real-life cult called “NXIVM”, which made the news back in 2018 when their leaders started getting arrested, including “Smallville” star Allison Mack.   Every time I read about it, it felt like something from a movie, but it was real.   I guess the celebrity angle made it more bizarre to me, because it’s sort of like “Hey, this isn’t just some group of randos; someone you’ve heard of is in this thing.”   Not that I ever paid much attention to “Smallville”, but you get the idea.  She didn’t just join NXIVM, she eventually became one of the top recruiters.   Some of the character arcs in my fic were my own attempt to understand how a person goes from Point A to Point B. 

The big plot hole, though, in my mind, was that I came up with this whole master plan for the bad guys, but it involved sending wave after wave of Saiyan cultists to die in pointless, unwinnable battles against Luffa.    I couldn’t have them win much, because if they beat her, they’d just kill her, and the story would be over.    It struck me as fishy that these Saiyans would sign up for a war where the casualty rate is 100%, but I tried to lampshade it as best I could.   “Yeah, all those other chumps couldn’t beat Luffa, but I’ll pull it off because I’m special!”   It still seemed a bit unlikely.  

But then 2020 happened, and I guess the main thing I learned from that year was that people will accept almost anything in order to believe a comfortable lie.  The joke I’ve seen on the internet is that we need to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague”, because it turns out a lot of people don’t actually avoid plagues very well at all.   The horrifying thing about COVID-19 is how easily people will accept the climbing death tolls.   “Oh, well this person was already in bad health, so they would have died eventually anyway.”   I don’t want to get too political here, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the anti-mask, coronavirus-is-a-hoax crowd are the same people who made up tall tales about “death panels” in Obamacare.    “They’re gonna euthanize your grandma!” they would say, but now they say your grandma is acceptable losses if it means reopening bars and restaurants.

Actually, I do mean to get political, because holy fuck, Qanon stormed the Capitol Building.    Look, if you don’t believe Joe Biden won the election, I don’t know what to tell you, except please get far away from me, right now.  If you’re not familiar with Qanon, a few years ago some guy on an image board posted a bunch of cryptic messages and claimed to be an important government figure who would know about important things.    People started “deciphering” his “clues” and when he stopped posting new ones they started inventing their own “clues” and interpreting them any way that suited them.    This led to an overarching narrative that Donald Trump was actually part of this massive sting operation to arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of left-wing politicians, celebrities, and whoever else.    Any day now, he was supposed to have Hilary Clinton arrested, and also JFK Junior would somehow show up and help him, even though he’s been dead for 22 years.  Every day, these Qanon guys would add on more bizarre lore to their “theories”, and every day none of their predictions would come true.  Then Trump lost the election, which put them in a bind, because their whole mythology is based on the idea of him saving the world as POTUS, and now he wasn’t even going to be POTUS for much longer.  

I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the lies about election fraud.    Trump himself refused to accept defeat, and his supporters didn’t want to accept it either, so they all told each other that it wasn’t real, and they believed each other so much that they dug in their heels.   But then they’d take this stuff to court and the judge would be like “Uh, what evidence do you have of mass voter fraud?” and they would just be like “lol nvm!”  I mean, if there was proof for any of this, why would they not want a judge to see it?   But for Qanon, it was more than just being sore losers.    They needed all their whackamaroo predictions to come true, and Trump losing re-election would upset the applecart.  

So then they started telling themselves that they could win this thing through the boring certification process.   I think it was like, December 14 when all the states had to certify their results.   So they held out hope that nothing was over until then.    Then they pinned their hopes on the Electoral College, and that there would be enough faithless electors to hand Trump the victory, in spite of the voters.   I found this one amusing, since I used to see tumblr suggesting the same thing back in 2016, when they were still trying to come up with ways for Bernie Sanders to win.  

Then they decided Mike Pence could fix everything, because on Jan 6, Congress would officially count the Electoral Votes and formally declare the winner, and Mike Pence would step in and overrule the whole thing, because the Vice-President oversees that process.    Except he just oversees it, he can’t legally change the outcome, especially on a whim.    And then the riot at the Capitol happened, and I’m pretty sure all these Qanon types thought it would mark the beginning of a nationwide uprising, with all seventy-odd million Trump voters going apeshit, but it... didn’t work out that way.  

Then they convinced themselves that everything was building to January 20, because the innauguration was actually a clever trap, and once Joe Biden took the oath of office, he could then be arrested for treason, so you see, they had to make it look like Trump lost the election, because it was the only way to fool Joe Biden into incriminating himself... or... something.   But Jan 20 came and went, so the latest fallback position I heard was that there’s a double-secret REAL inauguration day, and it’s in March, and the January 20 one isn’t legitimate, even though Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2016, but whatever.    That, or the guy we see in the White House now is actually Trump disguised as Joe Biden, or a Joe Biden android or something.   

I think I sort of understood that Qanon is a cult, but I didn’t really put the pieces together until the events of January unfolded.    Pre-November, it just seemed like a conspiracy theory, without any real timetables or prophecies, like Flat Earth.    But once the end of the Trump Administration was in sight, it really started to look like all the doomsday cults I’ve heard about over the years.  The predicted events wind up failing to come true, and they invent new predictions to explain away the old ones.   It’s not about the veracity of the claims as much as the claims themselves.    People want to believe there’s this whole elaborate explanation for everything.    They wanted to believe that Trump was this hypercompetent superheroic messiah, because the alternative is to face the uncertain reality: that he had no idea what he was doing, and real people were going to suffer for it.  

I think I sort of worked that idea into my fictional cult, but I backed into it.   NXIVM was a sex cult, not a doomsday cult, or an elaborate conspiracy theory, so I was mostly fixated on all the depraved things the cult could do to its members.   But they all share the same lure: a belief system that promises to make everything fit. I’m not sure what the hook was for NXIVM, but Allison Mack didn’t go in thinking about how much fun sex trafficking would be.   That came later, after she was convinced that NXIVM had all the answers, and one of those answers involved sex crimes, apparently.   In the same vein, Qanon attempted to explain mass arrests and executions by claiming that Hilary Clinton eats babies or something.   “Well, I don’t want babies to get eaten, so I guess breaking into the Capitol building seems like a reasonable course of action.”  

Weighed against real life, a bunch of Saiyans accepting a 100% casualty rate doesn’t seem so outrageous.   It also helps that sometimes the leaders of these groups can buy into their own hype, and think they’re infallible when they’re really not.    This week, I started reading the Darth Plagueis novel again, and I’ve seen the Sith from Star Wars referred to as a cult, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I noticed that Plagueis buys into the whole Dark Side of the Force thing a little too hard.   At times, he’ll wax philosophical about how the Jedi are the real bad guys when you think about it, and he’s not just saying that to be manipulative.   He honestly believes that the Sith can save the galaxy from decline, which is stupid and hypocritical, because they’re the ones causing all the decline.    I always got the impression that Darth Sidious understood that it was all about accumulating power as an end unto itself, and any high-minded talk of necessary evil was just to keep the rubes in line.    Rise of Skywalker plays into that idea nicely.   He somehow survived Episode VI, but he let the Empire collapse, because if he can’t rule it, he doesn’t want it to exist at all.   But he’s still playing himself, because he thinks he can win by following the same failed ideology that got all the previous Sith Lords killed.   

That’s pretty much all I have to say about it right now.    I need to move on to other topics, because Towa’s not doing a cult thing, so my fic is moving in a different direction.   But I feel better for getting this out of my head.

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

President Trump, officials from his administration and political operation, many Republicans in Congress, and conservative pundits and activists are criticizing special counsel Robert Mueller and his team and questioning the fairness of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Liberals see the anti-Mueller campaign — which has cast the investigation as akin to an attempted coup and in the last week escalated to calling for Mueller’s dismissal — as the obvious prelude to Trump firing Mueller.

But it’s best to understand what is happening as an anti-Mueller campaign with four potential goals, only the most dramatic of which is Trump dismissing the special counsel. Fundamentally, this is a campaign to weaken and undermine Mueller, even if he remains in his post.

I should emphasize what seems likely but has not been confirmed directly by Mueller or Trump and his allies (and may in fact not be the case): All of this jockeying is probably about whether Mueller will indict either the president himself or, more likely, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of the few people who has had senior roles in both the 2016 campaign and the White House. It’s not clear whether there are sufficient charges to indict Kushner, but there are indications that he is under serious scrutiny from Mueller. A Kushner indictment would be a huge setback to Trump, not to mention its family dimensions, so scuttling it is likely to be important to the president.

It’s not clear that the anti-Mueller campaign is coordinated, in the sense that congressional Republicans, White House officials and Fox News executives sat in a room together and planned how to attack Mueller and his team. At the same time, the various conservative players seem to be watching each other’s steps, creating what CNN media reporter Brian Stelter has dubbed an “anti-Mueller feedback loop.” For example, you can see anti-Mueller comments first made on Fox News echoed by the president.

Coordinated or not, the anti-Mueller campaign has at least five different elements:

*Attacking Mueller’s team by highlighting text messages that were critical of the president from an FBI official who was on Mueller’s team and donations by some on Mueller’s team to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

*Casting Mueller as a bad manager by in effect suggesting he has hired a team of anti-Trump people and let them run wild.

*Calling for a second special counsel to investigate various controversies from Obama’s presidency and Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state — best understood as a kind of “whataboutism” that would weaken Mueller’s probe by normalizing it.

*Investigating the investigation by disputing its methods, especially the FBI’s use of a “dossier” of information on Trump and his team’s connections to Russian officials that was compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

*Dictating timelines Mueller has not agreed to by proclaiming that the investigation is winding down or that Mueller’s team has already interviewed everyone at the White House, potentially creating an expectation that Mueller’s probe will be done soon regardless of his actual timetable.

Those elements are being deployed for an array of possible ends. I’ve ordered these potential goals from least to most likely to work:

*Setting up the firing of Mueller — Trump is an unpredictable politician who makes moves that are risky and at times politically unwise. (The firing of FBI director James Comey was a political blunder, but Trump did it anyway.) So I’m not predicting Trump will leave Mueller in place.

That said, firing Mueller would be way, way worse politically than getting rid of Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller (since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the process), and only he can officially dismiss him. Rosenstein has strongly defended Mueller’s investigation. So Trump would either have to unilaterally change executive branch law to fire Mueller or get rid of Rosenstein, replace him with another DOJ official, and then have that person dump Mueller. It would be Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” all over again.

Would congressional Republicans move to impeach Trump if he fired Mueller? I’m not sure. Here’s what I’m more sure would happen in the wake of a Mueller firing: There would be huge protests across the country; some Republicans (at least outside Congress) would join Democrats in slamming the move; Trump’s already low poll numbers would plunge further; Democrats would become even bigger favorites to take control of the House in the 2018 elections; and a Democrat-controlled House would move to impeach Trump almost as soon as it started meeting in January 2019.

Dismissing Mueller would effectively end Trump’s presidency as we know it, so it would only make political sense if Mueller were about to end Trump’s presidency as we know it anyway (with an indictment of Kushner or the president himself).

*Making Mueller more leery of controversial indictments — All of these anti-Mueller moves fit a strategy of trying to publicly browbeat the special counsel to make him leery of bringing forward a major indictment. Mueller now knows, if he did not already, that indicting Kushner is likely to bring the full force of America’s conservative movement against him.

But I doubt that Mueller, with his long record in top jobs (he was the FBI director on 9/11), would be intimidated by Trump’s team. So I see this goal as one that is also unlikely to succeed.

*Trying to turn the general public against the investigation — This is the goal that has the most precedent. Nixon allies questioned the Watergate investigation, suggesting that the team of then-special prosecutor Archibald Cox had too many staffers with Democratic ties and constituted a “hostile adversary” to the president. Bill Clinton’s allies spent more than a year attacking independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

By November 1998, as Starr was presenting charges to Congress against Clinton in an impeachment hearing, Clinton’s strategy had worked politically. Only 35 percent of Americans approved of the way Starr was handling the probe, compared to 58 percent who disapproved. But this approach might not work for Trump. First, the nature of the core allegation — that he colluded with a foreign government to help sway the 2016 election — is more severe than the charges against Clinton, who was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice in a dispute centered around his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Secondly, Clinton was a president who won the popular and electoral vote twice and had relatively high approval ratings even at the height of Starr’s investigation.

Trump, in contrast, lost the popular vote and has very low approval ratings. And he may lose the public relations battle with Mueller if current trends continue: A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 58 percent of Americans felt Mueller was conducting a fair investigation, about 20 percentage points higher than the president’s approval rating in the survey.

*Trying to turn Republicans against the investigation — American politics was polarized during the 1970s and 1990s, but there is evidence that the polarization and division between the two parties has grown much larger. So if Trump and his allies are aiming to get the vast majority of Republicans to oppose Mueller’s probe and question its findings, that seems to be a realistic goal.

There is already evidence that anti-Mueller sentiment is taking hold in the GOP. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in late November and early December (so before the latest round of Mueller-bashing) found that about half of Republicans doubted the special counsel would conduct a fair investigation, compared to about a third of the public overall. (Quinnipiac also showed about half of Republicans with concerns about the fairness of the Mueller probe.)

If this strategy succeeds, it could yield huge dividends, since ultimately the impeachment and removal from office of a president is a political process. In the short term, redefining support for Mueller as a liberal stance could prevent congressional Republicans eager to please their bases from defending or protecting the special counsel. So far, various bills to keep Trump from firing Mueller have gone nowhere in Congress, suggesting that this type of legislation has already been successfully painted as anti-Republican. In the long term, if Democrats gain control of the House, Senate, or both, Mueller and his investigation being viewed as anti-Republican could literally save Trump’s presidency. If few or no Republicans support a push for Trump’s removal, he is likely to remain in office even if he is impeached, since removal requires 67 senators and it’s unlikely Democrats will have that large a majority in the near future.

“By going public with criticism, you try and polarize reactions,” said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Cornell University who studies conflicts between Congress and the executive branch.

Trump and his allies could have all of these goals in mind at once: moving the public but particularly Republicans against Mueller; trying to force him to limit or end his probe; and leaving the door open to getting rid of him. But simply creating a trust gap between Republicans and Mueller helps Trump. And that gap is likely to grow, with Fox News personalities, Republicans on Capitol Hill and the president himself regularly attacking Mueller and his team.

Noble Effort, Please...

So on and on it goes with many people, seemingly men, white men I should say, who simply refuse to consider some kind of serious gun control, based on whatever bullshit they regurgitate over and over again from whatever website strokes their action movie machismo, video game expertise making them formidable protectors in their imagination, or whatever makes them offtick like a calculator with a fading screen. We simply need to make practical and responsible laws governing weapons, especially ones that can do as much damage as wee sees over and over again. Why does this not compute with them? Do they just NOT CARE?

Why SHOULDN’T there be rules about purchasing a gun? Especially something like an AR-15 or it’s many variants with names like “Sporter” and “ Sporter II” or “Bushmaster”. There are also many competitor’s models that attempt to match the performance of the AR-15 that are also widely available for any eighteen and over nutjob to purchase, along with unlimited ammunition. So Trump got some pretty weird looks the other day when he made comments about the NRA, but also praised The Second Amendment which he, like so many of the aforementioned American armchair experts seem to not understand, meaning that real gun control will likely not happen any time soon, just a little scratching at the surface maybe before the elections and a dismissal of it afterward. It should be such a simple thing, but it never is.

“The first commercialized silencer was created by Hiram Percy Maxim. Hiram P. Maxim was the son of Hiram Stevens Maxim, the man who brought us the first fully portable machine gun. Hiram P. Maxim was a brilliant engineer who graduated from MIT. He worked in several other businesses, but formed his own Maxim Silencer Company in 1908. 

Silencers became very popular in the US. They were mostly used to moderate the sound of firearms while hunting and target shooting, but eventually their ability to make firearms quieter yielded them as potentially useful in criminal activities. Some felt silencers might make poaching much easier. There were also concerns they could be used by mobs and in robberies. The federal government began looking for ways to make silencers illegal to own. They couldn’t go so far as outlawing them entirely because of the 2nd Amendment, but in 1934, the National Firearms Act was enacted.”1

“The NFA was originally enacted in 1934. Similar to the current NFA, the original Act imposed a tax on the making and transfer of firearms defined by the Act, as well as a special (occupational) tax on persons and entities engaged in the business of importing, manufacturing, and dealing in NFA firearms. The law also required the registration of all NFA firearms with the Secretary of the Treasury. Firearms subject to the 1934 Act included shotguns and rifles having barrels less than 18 inches in length, certain firearms described as “any other weapons,” machineguns, and firearm mufflers and silencers.

While the NFA was enacted by Congress as an exercise of its authority to tax, the NFA had an underlying purpose unrelated to revenue collection. As the legislative history of the law discloses, its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms. Congress found these firearms to pose a significant crime problem because of their frequent use in crime, particularly the gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The $200 making and transfer taxes on most NFA firearms were considered quite severe and adequate to carry out Congress’ purpose to discourage or eliminate transactions in these firearms. The $200 tax has not changed since 1934.”2

So it took twenty-six years and a plague of gangster crime to get the NFA enacted. As we approach the eighteen year anniversary of Columbine, things don’t look very promising... 

“On November 30, 1993, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was enacted, amending the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Brady Law imposed as an interim measure a waiting period of 5 days before a licensed importer, manufacturer, or dealer may sell, deliver, or transfer a handgun to an unlicensed individual. The waiting period applies only in states without an acceptable alternate system of conducting background checks on handgun purchasers. The interim provisions of the Brady Law became effective on February 28, 1994, and ceased to apply on November 30, 1998. While the interim provisions of the Brady Law apply only to handguns, the permanent provisions of the Brady Law apply to all firearms.“3

It took six years to get The Brady bill through. Six. A little late after the influx of assault weapons, like the AR-15, AK,47, Mac 10, and the Uzi in gang shootings all over the country and particularly in Los Angeles that took so many lives and negatively altered so many more. 

The passage of the 1994 assault weapons band should have been pretty relative but was not, and was barely passed. Perhaps every President since has looked upon this as a career breaker: “The political price for passing the ban included the loss of Congress to the Republicans in 1994, endangering Clinton’s agenda, and creating the partisan conditions on Capitol Hill that produced his own impeachment. Even Clinton himself, looking back on the assault weapon ban in his memoir, My Life, concluded that he had likely “pushed the Congress, the country, and the administration too hard.”But history may ultimately judge Clinton less harshly than his contemporaries. As the roster of mass shootings lengthens, a careworn weariness may put Clinton’s stubborn insistence on a weapons ban in a different light. Perhaps this will be one of those rare occasions, noted by John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage, when a costly act of political conviction is rewarded in time. “Sometimes, but sadly only sometimes,” Kennedy observed, history produces “the vindication of their reputations and their principles.”4

So again, politics over practicality. Go figure, and nothing has changed. And look at the results. They are horrifying. Why then did they let it expire? 

“AR-15s were one of 18 semiautomatic weapons banned under a 1994 law that expired in 2004 despite broad public support and a drop in gun fatalities, USA Today reported at the time.Since then, killers have used semiautomatics to target victims en masse at Virginia Tech; the Fort Hood military base; an Aurora, Colo. movie theater; a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; and now an elementary school in Newtown, Conn..So, why did Congress decide to let that assault weapons ban expire?Well, it was 2004. Democrats had lost control of the House, so they were starting to feel shy about pushing for the assault weapons ban in an election year even though polls showed two-thirds of Americans supported it, The New York Times reported at the time.One of those Americans supporting the ban had been George W. Bush, but he seemed disinclined to pressure Congress to renew the law."The president doesn't set the Congressional timetable. Congress sets the timetable," then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters, who asked what Bush was going to do to get the ban renewed.Led by Tom DeLay, who called the ban "feel-good" legislation, the House failed to bring the legislation to the floor for debate or a vote, PBS reported at the time.Gil Kerlikowske, who was at the time chief of police in Seattle, told PBS that Congress' inaction sent a horrible message to the nation."The last thing we need are more military-style assault weapons on the streets of this country," he said.“5

Really, two of the biggest issues in my humble opinion are that 1. weapons like the AR-15, and there are many competitive versions, need to be banned once and for all. Gun control naysayers claim that a DOJ review showed that the 1994 band did nothing but let’s face it, without the ban it is likely that the numbers would have gone up, not leveled out. The right always argues like that but that gets us all NOWHERE. 2. The ability of purchase a gun needs to be taken more seriously by the feds once and for all. A national standard would certainly set the pace and states could add to it but not subtract from it. I am confident that we would, if not see a drop in gun violence, at least not an increase. In time perhaps the drop would occur as it has in other developed nations over the years.

One more thing, for the doubters out there. Thanks to Timothy McVeigh and Terry NIchols, the sale of ammonium nitrate is regulated by DHS, so I can’t just go buy a bunch of it to fertilize my crops this weekend.6  Nor can I buy a bunch of dynamite to go blow stuff up in the desert or do some dynamite fishing. I need a license to buy it, another license to move it, and a proper storage container for it. I keep telling people that some people ruin things for everyone else, but if that is the price to pay to eventually curtail such horrific acts of gun violence, by making the availability of the most lethal ones next to impossible, I am all for it. Remember, the argument about criminals having them anyway is bogus. Criminals (the type the arguers are thinking of) don’t usually use these weapons. They typically use more compact guns in robberies or retaliation crimes. The argument that there are already guns out there and in the black market are also mute because illegal guns would have a more limited supply source if they are not available for purchase by the general public. As black market weapons are confiscated or taken into possession by law enforcement, basic mathematics determines that the numbers of those weapons available would go down as the price goes up, thus the number of violent acts with said weapons, just as the number of shootings using these deadly weapons should go down. 

And if I am wrong, at least a NOBLE EFFORT could be made by those we vote to protect us and support us could be made! Could they AT LEAST do THAT?

1) Dakota Silencer, August 28, 2013, 2) atf.gov, 3) atf.gov, 4) The Atlantic, June 15, 2016, 5) Business Insider, December 16, 2012, 6) DHS, Ammonium Nitrate Security Program