Weapons Don't Weep, Part 9

No. 3 A HAIR’S BREADTH FROM DEATH

Gun to Temple | “Say goodbye.” | Impaled

I know almost nothing about the military, and that's how I like it. Any inaccuracies about rank or protocol or what have you should be handwaved away; please do not tell me. Please do tell me if I missed any tags, or if you would like to join the taglist.

CW: gun violence, possessive whumper, abuse of authority, (spoilers, rest of CW in tags)

Masterlist

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Dr. Evangeline Colman, known as Command, prided herself on her patience. She had been the one to develop the protocols that took an unknown danger to the nation and turned it into their finest weapon. The process had taken the better part of two decades, but the results had been well worth the wait. 

She was rather protective of her Weapon. With all the work she’d put into creating and molding it, it wouldn’t do to have all that go to waste because someone got careless. 

As such, her usual patience was in limited supply after hearing that the Weapon’s escort team was returning— without her Weapon.

Command met the team as they exited their vehicle into the compound built to house the Weapon. She noted that the two senior members, those that would have been in the car with the Weapon, were nowhere in evidence. 

“Status report,” she barked at the remaining team members, who all snapped to attention.

“Sir,” one said. “There was an ambush. The terrorists set off a- a shape charge, of some kind, while our convoy was exiting the area. They separated the vehicle with the Weapon, and pinned the rest of us down with covering fire.”

She studied the group. They looked agitated and unnerved, standard enough post unexpected combat. They also looked intimidated, which was the standard reaction to her presence. Underneath those, though… There was a faint hint of guilt, as well.

Command narrowed her eyes behind her glasses. “Who gave the order to retreat?”

None of them answered. 

She turned to the person at the end of the line, the newest member of the group. “Private Harris.”

The man looked alarmed to be addressed personally. “Sir?”

“Who gave the order to retreat, Private?” she asked softly. 

Private Harris visibly gulped. “Sir, I’m- I’m not—”

“Do you know the voices of your teammates, Private Harris?” Command asked, tone even.

“Yes, sir,” the private answered.

“So you would have recognized who gave the order. Is that not correct?” she asked.

“Yes, sir,” Private Harris answered. “I- I mean, no, sir! I- everything was so hectic, and—”

“Are you saying that you were not adequately trained to keep calm and respond as necessary in combat situations?” Command asked, raising her eyebrows. “Did you sleep through that day in basic training?”

“No; no sir,” he answered. The private was practically trembling with fear.

Good. He should be afraid. They all should be, for failing in such an important task. But the person who should be most afraid…

“It’s a simple question, Private. Who. Gave. The order,” Command repeated, enunciating each word clearly.

…was the one who made the decision to leave her Weapon behind.

Private Harris screwed up his courage and managed to say, “Corporal Miller, sir.”

She nodded sharply and turned to face the corporal. “Report.”

He, at least, hid his fear well. His voice was even and level as he spoke. “As stated in the initial report, Command, the convoy was separated via explosive device. Sergeants Lee and Thompson were incapacitated and taking heavy fire. I made the decision to retreat to protect the rest of the team and prevent further losses.”

Command looked him over, assessing him. She let the silence stretch uncomfortably in the wake of his words. Finally, she broke her stare. She took off her glasses and began to polish them with a handkerchief. 

“What type of sidearm do you carry as your service weapon, Corporal?” she said, not looking up from her glasses.

“A Sig Sauer M-17, sir,” he responded promptly. 

She finished polishing her glasses and put them on again. “Do you know the cost of that weapon?”

A frown flickered across his face before he composed his expression again. “About $600, I believe?”

“That model is sold on the civilian market for approximately $650, Corporal,” she said. “We, of course, received a discounted rate. Step forward.”

He complied with her order, stepping out of line.

“Hand me your service weapon.”

The corporal retrieved the handgun and held it out to her, grip first. 

Command took the weapon and checked it over. Full magazine, and one bullet in the chamber. She held the gun at her side, finger on the trigger guard, as she continued speaking. 

“It is important to know the worth of one’s tools, Corporal,” she said. “For instance, I know that you are worth $[amount]. That is your projected pay over the course of your military career.”

She let another uncomfortable silence settle over the room.

“Of course, that number can change drastically. Tell me, Corporal, which is your dominant hand?”

He didn’t let his confusion stop him from answering, “I’m right-handed, sir.”

Command nodded and took a step to her left. “For example. That number changes if you were to die. At that point, the calculations would be based on what we would have to pay to your next of kin.”

She turned to face the corporal again. “Do you know how much my Weapon, the one you gave the order to abandon, is worth?”

He stayed at attention, not turning to face her as he said, “No, sir.”

Command allowed a grim smile to spread across her face. “Far, far more than you.”

With that, she pressed the gun to his temple, released the safety, and pulled the trigger.

The silence following her actions was almost as deafening as the gunshot.

She stepped away from the spreading puddle of blood as she removed her fingerprints from the weapon with her handkerchief. Then she turned to face the remaining team members.

“Tragedy has struck today,” she said, voice carrying through the whole room. “We have lost three good men. Sergeants Ryan Thompson and William Lee were killed in another act of violence from these brutal terrorists. Corporal Miller then committed suicide upon returning to base, after failing to keep our most valued weapon out of enemy hands. We will not allow these actions to go unpunished. We will find these terrorists and make them answer for their crimes.”

She set the cleaned gun down next to the corpse on the floor.

“Now, find me my Weapon.”

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Taglist:

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I usually don't care that much for celebrity culture nor use Facebook, but a couple of years back his posts made their way to my dash (I think it was a cute photoshoot with his dog or something like that) and I somehow ended up following his page and have learned about his plight recently.

I'll always respect the celebrities who use their platform to fight for their people.

He was suffering from cerebral malaria and congenital diseases including coronary heart disease and asthma at the time when he was arrested, so thank everything that he was released but so many people are still in jail for simply protesting and exercising their human rights.

If you want to learn more about what's happening in Myanmar, here are some resources.

Dear Resident Rohan Expert:

I'm not sure if you have given any thought to this, but I could sure use your help! What are your thoughts about how Rohan's government is structured, specifically the King's council at Edoras? I have assumed the King rules with full authority, but with the help of a council of advisors... but how do you think those advisors are selected? How many? Are they military men? Nobility? Elected? Appointed? Are they inherited titles?

Any of your thoughts would be appreciated since your grasp of Rohirrim culture is sounder than of anyone around! Thank you in advance! 😊

Ooh, this comes very close to giving me the chance to answer the question, “What was Éomer’s tax policy?” 😂 (Which, as a public policy major, is something I wouldn’t mind knowing about!) I have thought about Rohan’s government, and I hope you find my answer useful or at least interesting—it’s always my goal to live up to the praise you give me and to make my Rohan even close to being as well contextualized as your Mirkwood universe!!!

I’ve tried to keep a general structure for Rohan’s government in my mind that is at least quasi-related to the way that Anglo Saxon lands were governed, since they were Tolkien’s model. The big deviations are: 1) there is no mixing of religion and government like the Anglo Saxons did, since Rohan has no organized religion; and 2) I like to keep my Rohan government a little more democratic in the sense that everything isn’t based solely on nobility, inheritance or wealth. That’s partly because I don’t vibe with that approach, but also I feel like Tolkien gave us hints that the Rohirrim are pretty laid back about stuff like that anyway (like, Théoden is shockingly casual about the whole issue of royal succession, and he’s totally willing to take advice from guys like Háma or Wídfara even though we have no reason to believe they’re particularly wealthy or elite nobles).

So, the king has ultimate authority in Rohan and, starting with Éomer, that power is equally shared with the queen (I have to believe that he really took in what he learned about Éowyn’s experience in Rohan and would want things to change, starting with his own wife!). The monarchs exercise their authority with the help of a council. That council is comprised of: 1) the advisors of the royal household, a small group that is at Meduseld with the king and queen every day; and 2) the officers of the court, a bigger group who are out in the towns and villages as representatives of the crown. The entire council meets formally a few times a year to discuss and make recommendations on significant issues, though the king and queen can call them more often if needed. And when the officers of the court are back at their homes in between formal council meetings, the advisors of the royal household give the day-to-day advice or handle emergencies that crop up.

The royal household advisors are chosen by the king/queen and would generally include trusted family members as well as others who have distinguished themselves as being particularly skilled in relevant subjects. There would normally be 7 of these, with each specializing in a particular area: defense, diplomacy, justice/law, treasury, trade, infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) and public welfare (care of orphans, famine relief, what passed for public health in those days). But there could be more or less depending on the priorities of the particular king/queen, and the individual advisors might have their own staffs to help them.

The royal household advisors would often be members of the most prominent families in Rohan, if only because those are the people with the most access to the education and experience needed to become good at these things, but anyone can be chosen. And younger people of any background who are identified as being particularly bright and with a lot of potential might be referred to extra schooling/study with the idea of training them to be advisors, or work for them, in the future. (In my fics, this is how Gríma ended up in an advisor role – he failed out of éored training, but the brilliance of his mind was recognized, he was given the additional education to become an advisor on diplomatic affairs, got too close to Isengard and everything went to hell.) (It’s a good process, even though the one example I’ve just given is one where things did not work out well!)

The officers of the court who are spread throughout the land are chosen by their communities, though the king/queen can refuse to seat one that they don’t like or trust.* The king and queen decide how many officers there are, adding or subtracting as the population shifts, but there are generally 5 each from the West-mark and the East-mark and 3 from Edoras and its surrounding lands. These officers not only sit on the council that helps the king/queen set law and policy, but they’re also the first line administrators who see those policies carried out around the country (so, they hire the tax collectors in Dunharrow or the work crews that build the new road between Aldburg and Grimslade or whatever). That makes them kind of the face of the crown in most parts of Rohan where regular people are never going to see the king or queen (or, at least, not often). They can also draw on the expertise and knowledge of the royal household advisors as needed when carrying out royal policy.

Thank you again for the opportunity to write something that’s probably far too long about a niche topic that I find very interesting!! If anyone has their own ideas and thoughts—either complementary or conflicting—I would love to hear them. More Rohan for everyone! 👑🐎🗡️♥️

*A king/queen should really try to avoid doing this, especially if the person in question is really popular in their community and has any kind of independent power base. Don’t get me started on how Helm Hammerhand really fucked this up with a member of his own council and got a war started as a result.

To celebrate International Asexuality Day I’m going go give reasons why Una Chin-Riley/Number One is a glorious Ace icon.

Opening episode character introductions: Pike is making breakfast in bed for Marie, Spock is desperately hoping T’Pring will propose, Una has…found two random scientists, taken a ship out with like zero crew for like some random space thing, decided to do a quickie first contact on the side, and managed to wind up in an alien prison attempting to escape with a spoon. Getting bored while your friends are moping about their relationships/oncoming cruel fate and winding up on a crazy adventure, that is some iconic Ace behaviour right there.

She’s spent most of her life pretending to be human, which means trying to hide the fact she’s got super strength and her body puts on a lightshow whenever exposed to pathogens – so the classic Ace cliché of being more interested in cake than an partnered physical activity in which there is much sharing of body fluids is probably a superpower for her.

Una has a queer-coded storyline: It turns out she has been hiding who she is, has a whole episode in which she has to come out multiple times and deal with an array of reactions, is immediately arrested and put on trial by the quasi-military organisation she works for as soon they find out, and then is much happier when finally being able to be herself in the workplace and even sings a whole song about keeping secrets. Saying that, did you know that according to Stonewall’s Ace in the UK report 2023 that people of asexual orientation are significantly less likely to be out to family, neighbours and work colleagues than other sexual orientations for fear of a negative reaction. I’m certain Una being terrified of revealing she’s Illyrian and ultimately choosing to reveal herself cos she’s tired of living a lie likely resonates with many, many different people and groups. But just noting that the fear of coming out is also very central to many people’s experience of being Ace.     

Una/Neera can very much be read as that friendship which got messed up because it became a sexual relationship but the Ace person within it hadn’t figured out they were asexual yet – but then everything felt wrong and they couldn’t figure out why so reacted badly and the entire relationship went to shit, and it still hurts decades later.

Una knows how to invest in a friendship: and it’s making sure you win Enterprise Bingo together in the most spectacular/death risking fashion and also turning the gravity off during your life advice number in the musical episode so it is even more of A Moment.

Look, given there is so little Ace rep out there in media, I just think that having someone played by the ridiculously attractive Rebecca Romijn who has enough chemistry with other characters to be one half the fandom’s most popular het ship and one half of the fandom’s most popular femslash ship be Ace would be neat.

In conclusion:

(Inevitable disclaimer because it’s fandom: I’m not saying anyone is wrong about their view of Una and as a person who ships many Una ships, I love all her allo interpretations as well)

By: Tim Black

Published: Oct 19, 2023

Over the past two weeks, the same phrase has been uttered by countless politicians: ‘Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.’ US president Joe Biden has said it. British PM Rishi Sunak has said it. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which rules over the West Bank, has said it (before his speech was redacted).

But something far stronger needs to be said. It’s not that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. It’s that Hamas is against the Palestinian people. It’s the enemy of the Palestinian people. Its interests as an Islamist terrorist movement, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state in its place, stand in direct opposition to the interests and lives of the Palestinian people.

Make no mistake: Hamas has always treated the Palestinians like dirt. Since it seized power in Gaza in 2007, it has ruled as one would expect it to – as a brutal, oppressive, theocratic regime. It has tortured and killed those who deviate from its strict ‘laws’, and who dissent from its quasi-fascist ideology. Homosexuals have been regularly persecuted, tortured and killed. And political opponents have frequently been murdered, sometimes under the cover of its intermittent battles with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Perhaps most despicable of all, Hamas has constantly sacrificed Gazans in its multiple conflicts with Israel, deliberately placing them in harm’s way. It has stored rockets in schools, mortar shells in hospitals and munitions in mosques. And, with incredible callousness, people have been ordered to remain in their homes during Israeli attacks, even when being told by the IDF to evacuate. This is still happening now. The IDF is telling those living in the north of Gaza to evacuate, while Hamas is ordering them to stay put.

Despite Western sympathisers’ attempts to downplay this horrific ‘tactic’, or to dismiss it as Israeli propaganda, Hamas has always been open about it. As one of its leaders boasted in 2008: ‘For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry… The elderly excel at this, and so do… the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women and children.’ During the 2014 conflict with Israel, another senior spokesman told Palestinian station al-Aqsa TV that wilfully sacrificing Gazans ‘attests to the character of our noble, jihad-loving people, who defend their rights and their homes with their bare chests and their blood’.

Hamas uses the phrase ‘human shields’, but this unjustly dignifies this tactic’s depravity. For Hamas, Gazans’ bodies are not shields – they are media fodder. Their lives are worth less to Hamas than their deaths – the images and videos of which offer valuable propaganda material to be circulated around the world as proof of Hamas’s victimisation at the hands of evil Israel. Again, this is what Hamas is doing right now. As the Israeli military readies itself for a ground invasion, Hamas is happy to turn hundreds of thousands of Gazans into bloody war propaganda.

Every dead Palestinian is useful for Hamas. Just consider the explosion at the al-Alhi Arab hospital earlier this week. This was immediately held up by Hamas spokespeople as proof of Israeli war crimes. They claimed that 500 innocent people had died in the blast. Yet it now seems likely that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Islamist terror group, was responsible. All too often, rockets fired at Israel fall short of their targets and end up killing Gazans instead. But this is of no concern to Hamas, which can exploit and weaponise these deaths to its own abhorrent ends.

There is no question that Gazans have suffered greatly over the past two decades. But their oppression and exploitation has only benefitted Hamas’s leaders. They have happily reaped the rewards of their reign of terror, growing rich on their control of the Gazan black market, the largesse of their regional backers and no doubt some of the billions of dollars Gaza receives in international aid. Long-time Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pledged to live on ‘olive oil and dried herbs’ after he led Hamas to victory at the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2019, he shook off his asceticism and left Gaza to go on what Hamas announced was a ‘foreign tour’. He has never returned. The multibillionaire now lives in luxury in Qatar. As does some-time chairman of Hamas, Khaled Meshal. Meshal and his family, estimated to be worth something in the region of $2.5 billion, own a Doha real-estate firm, four residential towers and a 20-story mall. And all the while, the vast majority of Gazans live in extreme poverty.

Hamas is clearly corrupt, brutal and nasty. Yet we rarely hear much about just how vicious a regime Hamas runs, because Hamas also arrests, tortures and detains journalists. It is eager for the local and international press to carry stories and images of Gazans’ deaths at the hands of an Israeli missile. But less keen for the media to carry stories and images of its own treatment of Gazans.

That Hamas can treat Gazans so callously and brutally should not surprise us. Formed by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, Hamas does not share the interests of the Palestinian people. It is not concerned with establishing some form of Palestinian statehood, or securing rights and freedoms. No, its goals are near-enough apocalyptic – and genocidal.

Like the larger Islamist movement of which it is part, Hamas wants to wage war – perhaps the final war – against the Jews. It wants to destroy Israel, to cleanse the land of Jews ‘From the river to the sea’, as the slogan goes. ‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious’, reads one of the opening lines of Hamas’s 1988 founding charter. Hamas, it says, ‘is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy [Israel] is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised’.

This genocidal anti-Semitism doesn’t just pose a danger to Jews in Israel – it also makes any sort of political resolution of the Palestinian question near impossible. After all, how can Israelis be expected to make accommodations with a group that openly calls for their extinction? Meanwhile, the lives of the Palestinians are treated as mere fodder in this obscene, racist campaign.

And yet there are still many Western leftists proudly celebrating Hamas right now. There are many ‘radical’ academics cheering on Hamas’s pogrom of Jewish civilians as an act of resistance. And there are many poseurs flooding social media with Hamas-style anti-Zionism. These are not friends of the Gazans. They are friends of Hamas. And that makes them the enemies of the Palestinian people.

==

Free Palestine... from Hamas. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Hamas needs to be hunted down and exterminated so that Palestinians can find peace with Israel. It's impossible with fundamentalist terrorists in charge, because they're conducting a divine holy war.

The same way Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban need to be wiped out, and the Iranian regime torn down.

Also, defund Gender Studies.

The Russian MoD has begun to remove commanders from some of the Russian military’s most combat effective units and formations and appears to be accelerating this effort.

The reported dismissal and arrest of commanders leading combat effective units and formations appears to be associated with cases of insubordination. Popov flagrantly attempted to bypass Russian Chief of the General Staff and overall theater commander Army General Valery Gerasimov and directly bring his complaints about the frontline in western Zaporizhia to Russian President Vladimir Putin. A prominent Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Seliverstov’s dismissal was a result of similar insubordination, and Russian sources claimed that Seliverstov had a reputation for speaking up on behalf of his soldiers. Kornev may have voiced criticism of a host of potential issues on behalf of the 7th VDV Division, including the likely failure to be notified beforehand about the Russian destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station (KHPP) on June 6, reported attritional fighting that failed to eliminate a Ukrainian presence near the Antonivsky Bridge, or conditions in western Zaporizhia Oblast similar to those that Popov complained about. Ibatullin’s arrest may be associated with the 90th Tank Division’s resumption of assaults in Luhansk Oblast, where it conducted widespread offensive operations that failed to achieve territorial gains during the Russian 2023 winter offensive campaign. It is unclear why Ibatullin would have been arrested, if, indeed, he was, when the other commanders were reportedly simply removed from their commands.

Insubordination among commanders appears to be spreading to some of their soldiers. Russian milbloggers shared an audio excerpt on July 16 in which the alleged elements of the 7th VDV Division threatened that they would withdraw from their positions in occupied Kherson Oblast if the Russian MoD arrests Teplinsky or threatens his life. The elements of the 7th VDV Division also claimed that they would defend Teplinsky against the Russian MoD and asserted that the high command is targeting Russia’s most combat effective commanders. This audio appeal, if legitimate, is a threat of mass desertion in the face of the enemy on behalf of Teplinsky. Desertion in the face of the enemy is a capital offense in many militaries. The VDV servicemen are blackmailing the Russian MoD to ensure that Teplinsky continues to command troops in Ukraine, despite Teplinsky’s previous affiliation with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin who had led an armed rebellion on June 24 to overthrow Shoigu and Gerasimov.

The Kremlin’s chronic disregard for the Russian chain of command is likely hindering Shoigu and Gerasimov in their attempts to suppress insubordination and establish full control over the Russian military in Ukraine. Putin consistently bypassed or ignored the established chain of command in hopes of securing rapid successes on the battlefield throughout the war, degrading Shoigu’s and Gerasimov’s authority – especially when military failures on the frontlines also eroded their reputations. Putin had cultivated an environment in which military personnel, officials, and even Russian war correspondents bypassed Shoigu and Gerasimov to present Putin their understandings of the current state of the war and recommendations for what to do. It is unusual but not unique for a commander in chief to solicit views on the war from outside experts. It is more problematic, although still not unique, for a commander in chief to solicit the views of subordinates opposed to senior leadership directly. But allowing a quasi-military commander such as Prigozhin to conduct his own campaign parallel but not subordinate to the one being executed by the formal chain of command is extraordinarily unusual and badly corrosive of the authority of the formal military leadership.

Putin also established the Russian MoD as the scapegoat for all Russian military failures, which saddled Shoigu and Gerasimov with a reputation for incompetence and failure that they are unlikely to repair. ISW previously assessed that Putin regularly grants and withdraws his support for different commanders in hopes generating rapid improvements in Russia’s military fortunes but without always doing so formally. Shoigu and Gerasimov likely expected that Putin would restore their full authority over the Russian military’s decision-making processes given their loyalty to him after Wagner’s armed rebellion on June 24. Putin, however, has clearly not done so.  He has instead followed his normal pattern of seeking to divert backlash away from himself and rotating commanders instead of outright dismissing them. Intensifying insubordination and widespread outrage in response to the ongoing officer purge may force the Kremlin to reconsider its partial backing for Shoigu and Gerasimov in the wake of Wagner’s rebellion.

Russian commanders are likely setting information conditions to prevent the Russian MoD from punishing them for their insubordination by promoting narratives among Russian servicemembers along the front and thereby risking widespread demoralization.

The apparent crisis in the Russian chain of command and the corresponding morale effects it may produce will likely degrade Russian capabilities to conduct tactical offensive operations that are critical to the Russian elastic defense in southern Ukraine.

snippets from recent ISW updates, this isn't even relating to the Ukrainian offensive, it's all Russian-on-Russian violence

With Duke #2 due next week as people start to more openly debate Skybound's take on Hasbro properties vs. IDW's (this is not a debate in sales, retailers are claiming Skybound outsold IDW's comics at least 10 to 1), it's worth looking at the fandoms that developed around IDW's takes on Transformers and GI Joe (more Transformers, as GI Joe struggled with numerous reboots and attempts at making a more modern interpretation of the property before the license was yanked by Hasbro) and why they might not gel with Skybound's more casual-friendly approach. Ramble under the cut:

IDW's Transformers fanbase was one that was insular by design. Not in the "you need to understand this concept from a toy line in 1989" insular, or the "you'll be lost if you didn't read Simon'Furman's Alignment novella", way, but more insular in the concepts that they focused on. Bot-on-bot romance, usually between male robots (James Roberts flat out said he was going to write romance, and went with male/male because it was a toyline full of men). A very notable disdain for concepts that would alter that perception, hence the villainization of the Japanese characters and the Beasts, because many of the fanfic writers hailed from unironic "TRUKK NOT MUNKY" and "TRANSFORMERS SHOULD BE REALISTIC" thinking fantasy elements ruined the series (and a disdain for Japanese mecha tropes in general). However, as noted by others, there were also a lot of holes in the characterizations that were filled by fanfic writers. I'm pretty sure the writers knew this since their old fanfic spawned other fanfic to fill in holes, and they saw it as a way to keep the core audience engaged.

This in turn creates a very focused, dedicated, but ultimately narrow audience, and one more likely to influence the direction of the comics, either positively or negatively. The fanbase want more romance? They got it to the point that the comics were more about relationships than anything. They wanted representation? The writers baked it into the mythos although it has since been discarded by non-IDW-influenced work. And if anyone didn't like it, sic the dedicated fandom on them and tell them to go back to the Bay movies.

GI Joe meanwhile, from the word "Go" felt like something IDW didn't really know what to do with, with their best idea being to give Larry Hama the keys to resume his Marvel run from where it left off (and ignoring the quasi-sequel run from Devil's Due which was mostly made without his involvement). It was clear that IDW's writers and editorial cared far more about Transformers and even Jem and the Holograms (a notorious stinker in sales that went for 25 issues and a 4-issue spin-off before IDW was forced to cancel it due to low sales and never bothered to try again) than the Real American Heroes. Some of that might be because the idea of military comics didn't agree with the more liberal writers there, but I'd argue that they didn't really try, especially with the Energon Universe also going out of its way to avoid a stereotypical "MURICAN soldiers vs. terrorist army" scenario. This resulted in the eventual nadir of the brand, the 2016 relaunch where Skywarp was a member of the team because reasons.

The Energon Universe is quite the opposite of that, and I can see where the worry comes in from the IDW fandom. The soldier toys are important again in a more direct way where it's clear there's more effort put into them. Meanwhile, the robot toys are back to focusing on more universal concepts, like war, family in a platonic sense, and general action. That sense of control feels lost, and it is also introducing concepts that feel like they run counter to IDW's writers and their ethos, particularly ideas that IDW writers rejected whole-heartedly.

If I'm off-base, please let me know, but that's what this feels like to me. A group losing their perceived control over a license, and not taking it well.

"Like a state, an operating system “governs” the programs and applications under it and networked with it as well as, to some extent, the individuals who avail themselves of these tools and resources. It defines us in relation to itself, and each other, as “users,” and can reward us, reject our requests, or even bar us from access according to its needs. It can also monitor and surveil us. Referring to giant metaplatforms like Android and Apple, the German sociologist Philipp Staab observes, “Their own systems are continuously optimized for maximum convenience, to reduce the need to switch to another system. On the other hand, they make it as difficult as possible for users to use certain services outside their own ecosystem.” This is our starting point for understanding the State. Its central feature is the legal, administrative, and decision-making structure we refer to as government. But the State is a much larger, more complex phenomenon, a comprehensive means of organizing and exercising power that, once it’s launched, expands to cover more and more aspects of existence according to a direction and logic of its own. “The state could never be the means for any special or definite end, as liberalism conceived it to be,” the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker wrote in his classic, Nationalism and Culture ; “it was rather, in its highest form, an end in itself, an end sufficient for itself.” At the same time, and again like a computer operating system, the State is not a material object or entity. The various pieces of “hardware” we associate with it—big, imposing neoclassical buildings fronted by Greco-Roman columns quite often come to mind, along with military bases, roads, and monuments—are merely material containers and symbols of the immaterial reality. An operating system is soft ware, a collection of embedded commands that direct a machine called a computer. The State, too, is “software”: a collection of ideas, doctrines, commands, and processes that direct the deployment of human beings and their deployment of physical resources. The State is at once a political, social-cultural, and economic entity. Like an operating system, it networks together institutions, organizations, and less formal groups including government but also many others: corporations, banks, other financial institutions (state-chartered, as it happens), and other underpinnings of capitalism; eleemosynary (nonprofit and charitable) institutions; so-called civil society groups and political parties (especially “established” parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, which have evolved into quasi-state institutions); and even basic units like families and households. Other institutions and groupings that form part of the State furnish cultural and even paramilitary support to the social order, strengthen organized religion, and reinforce racial and gender stratification: for instance, the extreme wings of the nativist Alternative for Germany; the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India; and the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Rifle Association, militia groups, the Proud Boys, and the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States." -The operating system: An anarchist theory of the modern state

This past Last Saturday afternoon, 71-year-old Hagar Gefen was driving through the Jordan Valley when she was waylaid by Palestinian assailants. They pulled her from her car, beat her and stole her vehicle.

Gefen is an anti-Zionist activist affiliated with the radical NGO Looking the Occupation in the Eye. Her group’s modus operandi is to harass Israeli civilians and military forces in Judea and Samaria in order to demonize them. As the organization’s leaders wrote recently, “We initiate direct actions that get in the face of the settlers and challenge the security forces. We work in cooperation with Palestinian colleagues who often stand together with us in the West Bank.”

Gefen was carjacked just after she had just finished such a “direct action”: “Protecting” Palestinian shepherds from Israelis who live in the area. When security forces came to help the elderly woman as she sat beaten on the side of the highway, Gefen refused to file a complaint against her assailants.

Her story is notable because all aspects of it—the carjacking, her efforts as an anti-Israel activist to demonize Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria, and her refusal to report on Palestinian violent attacks, even when she is the victim of those attacks—expose the nature of the current international campaign against Israel’s civilian and military presence in Judea and Samaria. This campaign reached its pinnacle on Feb. 1 with an executive order issued by U.S. President Joe Biden, directly targeting Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria as quasi-terrorists.

Galloping Palestinian terrorism

This week, the Israel Defense Forces published its final statistics for 2023 regarding Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria. Last year saw a 350% increase in terrorist attacks over 2022 levels, with 608 attacks last year and 173 in 2022. The IDF reported that 300 of the 608 attacks were shooting attacks—the highest number since the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005.

The IDF data only includes incidents that ended with wounded or dead Israelis and others. The full data shows that the dimensions of Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria are much greater.

United Hatzalah’s Rescuers Without Borders serves as the first responders in Judea and Samaria. Its data enumerated 4,099 terror attacks during the first six months of 2023 alone. In the 100 days following Oct. 7, Palestinians carried out another 2,674 attacks on Jews in Judea and Samaria. Rescuers Without Borders includes vehicular stoning attacks in their data. Those average around 10 per day.

Not including stoning attacks, the Oct. 7 massacre or the casualties of the war in Gaza, the Shin Bet tallied 3,436 attacks in Israel, including Judea and Samaria in 2023. A total of 43 Israelis were murdered and another 224 were wounded. Israel Police put the total number of terror attacks in Judea and Samaria during 2023 at 5,600.

While the data varies depending on the source and what is counted, the trends are clear: 2023 saw a massive increase in Palestinian terrorist attacks, and in the number of Israeli victims. The steepest increase came in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Elusive settler violence

This brings us back to Gefen and her bid to “protect” Palestinian shepherds from “settler violence” in the Jordan Valley last Saturday. The level of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis in Judea and Samaria, coupled with the sheer volume of terrorist agitation in the areas, make it difficult for Gefen and her comrades to claim that Israeli Jews are the cause of the dire security situation in the areas.

But they don’t let the absence of evidence stop them in their bid to demonize and criminalize “the occupation.” To advance this line, as Looking the Occupation in the Eye explained, anti-Zionist activists from Israel and abroad working with the Palestinians have developed a pipeline for pumping libelous claims against Israeli Jews into the international discourse, and most importantly, into the U.S. State Department. The process, stunning in its boldness, was first exposed by the Hakol Hayehudi (“The Jewish Voice”) news service early last November in a report on one such NGO, the Hamas-aligned and Muslim Brotherhood-funded International Solidarity Movement (ISM), whose members overlap with members of Gefen’s outfit.

The case first reported by Hakol Hayehudi occurred on Oct. 25. That morning, Israeli and foreign ISM activists began harassing IDF reservists in a guard post outside the Maon Farm in the south Hebron Hills. When the reservists left their post to confront the activists, ISM member Allison Russell filmed them in an unflattering way that made it appear the reservists were instigating an altercation. Russell posted her video on Facebook later that morning.

Shortly after Russell posted the video, Breaking the Silence reposted it on its Twitter feed, presenting it as proof of “settler violence.” Breaking the Silence is an Israeli-registered NGO that runs international political and lawfare campaigns to demonize the IDF.

Breaking the Silence is funded by foreign governments, the United Nations and anti-Israel far-left NGOs aligned with the Democratic Party and the State Department, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Given its connections, once the video was posted on Breaking the Silence’s Twitter feed, it quickly made the rounds in Washington. Around 20 hours after the ISM provocation outside the Maon Farm in the south Hebron Hills, Biden issued his first broadside against Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria. Standing next to visiting Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, he condemned “settler violence” and accused “extremist settlers” of “pouring gasoline on a fire.”

Two days later, a coalition of 22 anti-Israel NGOs, mainly funded by foreign governments, including the U.S. government, the New Israel Fund, the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, published a document titled, “Emergency Call to the International Community: Stop the Forcible Transfer in the West Bank.” Datelined from the south Hebron Hills, they decried what they referred to as “the state-backed wave of settler violence.”

The groups alleged, “For the past three weeks, since Hamas’s atrocities of October 7th, settlers have been exploiting the lack of public attention to the West Bank, as well as the general atmosphere of rage against Palestinians, to escalate their campaign of violent attacks in an attempt to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities.”

The truth was very different both then and since. IDF data showed that violent incidents involving Palestinians and Israeli civilians in October 2023 were down 31% over the corresponding month in 2022. Violent incidents involving Israeli civilians and Palestinians were 55% lower than they were in November 2022.

In other words, as Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis reached a 20-year high, incidents involving Jewish violence were down by half, standing at 201.

Moreover, as veteran investigative reporter Kalman Liebskind demonstrated in the Israeli newspaper Maariv in December 2023, among the 201 reported cases of violence involving Israeli civilians and Palestinians, the IDF could not determine in 136 cases, or 67% of the incidents, who had started the incident. As Liebskind and others showed at the time and since, in the vast majority of those cases, the “settler violence” was simply Israeli civilians trying to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorists and lynch mobs.

As Liebskind reported, in one typical incident designated as “settler violence,” an Israeli motorist driving to his home in Tekoa in Gush Etzion with four teenage passengers was blocked from advancing on the highway by a herd of sheep. He slowed down only to have his vehicle pelted with rocks by a dozen or so Palestinians. Armed, he exited his car and shot two shots at the ground to try to scare them away. His gun jammed, and the Palestinians began beating him with rocks and sticks, and tried to steal his gun. When the teenagers tried to help him, they were also assaulted. Another Israeli driver saw what was happening, and armed, he got out of his car to help. He shot into the air, and the Palestinians began attacking him as well. The first driver was bleeding from his head wound. A military patrol that arrived at the scene was also attacked with rocks. The soldiers opened fire on the assailants, shooting three of them, before rescuing the Israeli drivers and teenagers from the lynch mob that ambushed the first driver.

Since the IDF force arrived after the incident began, it was classified as an act of “Jewish nationalist violence,” rather than a terrorist attack. This misclassification is so routine that even the United Nations acknowledges it is standard practice.

On its website, the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs acknowledges that its data on Palestinian casualties of so-called “settler violence” “includes Palestinians killed or injured during attacks or alleged attacks they perpetrated against Israeli settlers.”

The purpose of the slanderous charges of Jewish aggression is obvious. They are leveled against Israeli civilians to assert a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and their Israeli victims. Particularly after Oct. 7, the case for Palestinian statehood hinges on criminalizing Israeli opponents of Palestinian statehood. And the most easily caricatured and demonized opponents of Palestinian statehood are Israelis who work to maintain Israeli control over Judea and Samaria by farming, herding sheep and living in scattered communities. Israelis in these areas are law-abiding and peaceful. But if they are perceived as such, the U.S. and other Western governments will have no way to justify their policy of forcibly expelling these Israelis, along with the rest of the 500,000 Israeli Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, from their homes and communities, and transferring control over areas where no Jews live to Palestinians who overwhelmingly support the genocide of Jewry and the annihilation of the State of Israel. Demonizing them is key.

The demonization campaign against the Israelis in Judea and Samaria brings U.S. diplomats together with Palestinian terrorists and terrorism boosters. It culminated on Feb. 1 with Biden’s executive order. Titled “Executive Order on Imposing Certain Sanctions on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank,” it makes Israeli Jews targets of U.S. economic and travel sanctions. The order reads like a press release from the anti-Israel NGOs it relies on for its false accusations. It asserts that Biden “find(s) that the situation in the West Bank—in particular high levels of settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages and property destruction—has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel and the broader Middle East region.”

Their ascribed actions, the order goes on, “undermine the foreign-policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of the two-state solution.”

Biden’s order freezes all funds belonging to the targets of the sanctions. The four Israeli farmers named in the order stand accused of no crimes and were never convicted of any crimes. Their families report, however, that they were subjected to daily assaults and provocations by ISM and other anti-Israel activists who have trespassed on their land and have harassed them, and their wives and children, daily for the past four years. They are not U.S. citizens and have no property in the U.S. or accounts in U.S. banks. All the same, after the Treasury Department threatened Israeli banks with sanctions, the men’s bank accounts have all been frozen.

Next target for demonization: The IDF

One of the many distressing aspects of the campaign to criminalize Israeli civilians is that it is already apparent that they are only the first target. The next one is the IDF.

Two months ago, as the administration and its allied anti-Israel NGOs were kicking their post-Oct. 7 demonization campaign against “settler extremists” into high gear, the State Department sent the IDF a list of military operations that its forces in Judea and Samaria had carried out since Oct. 7, demanding detailed explanations and justifications of the operations. The State Department gave the IDF three months to submit its response before the United States began banning weapons transfers to the units involved in the incidents.

For their part, NGOs like Breaking the Silence work with anti-Israel reporters to demonize the IDF war in Gaza as well.

Last week, CNN ran a report featuring videos that IDF forces in Gaza took of themselves and their units blowing up buildings in Gaza. Recognizing the justice of Israel’s war in Gaza, the soldiers are proud of their contribution on the battlefield. The videos posted have gone viral in Israel, and play a key role in boosting and maintaining morale.

Yet spurred by Breaking the Silence’s CEO Avner Gvaryahu, the CNN report presented the videos as sinister admissions of Israeli venality, in general, and of the malicious nature of IDF soldiers specifically. “Israel is under increasing scrutiny over the war in Gaza. These videos may well be adding fuel to that criticism,” the reporter intoned.

The anti-Israel NGOs rejoiced at the report. Looking the Occupation in the Eye tweeted its glee at the thought of war-crimes trials against IDF soldiers.

“Take a look [at the CNN report]. Here are the soldiers that are helping the Government of Israel prepare its report to the [International Court of Justice at the] Hague [where Israel is being tried for genocide]. From anonymous warriors to celebrity bombers. Who wants to go abroad, and can’t? [For fear of war crimes charges, CBG] Raise your hands!”

Today, 92% of Israeli Jews oppose Palestinian statehood. Following Oct. 7, the vast majority of Israelis across the political spectrum recognize that a Palestinian state is as great an existential threat to Israel as Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Recognizing that they have no domestic support for their prized program, Israeli anti-Zionists and the State Department have joined forces to extort the government and people to act against their existential interests. The people, army and government of Israel now face a choice: They can stand up to this campaign of extortion through criminalization, even at the cost of an open breach with the Biden administration, or they can accept the destruction of their country.

share about lister and rimmer? 👉👈

ALRIGHT HERE I GO >:-) putting this under a readmore bc it kinda ended up being an abridged version of the history of the red dwarf universe as well as lister and rimmer lol so it's long as fuck <3 . this is mostly gonna be based on the tv series, not the books, but i am gonna use some details from the books to fill in some gaps

OK SO. the red dwarf timeline begins in the 23rd century. in this version of the future, humanity has colonised the entire solar system and beyond, and there are colonies of humans living on most planets and moons in the solar system with solid surfaces. earth still has a human population, but ecologically/geologically/etc it's been reduced to a wasteland, so humans have to look elsewhere for resources. in the 23rd century, the "space corps" is a huge mega-corporation/quasi-military force that runs most of the spaceships traveling between planets. the space corps also makes most of its money from mining minerals etc from planetary bodies in/around the solar system. the "red dwarf" is a huge mining ship owned by a subset of the space corps called the "jupiter mining corporation" or JMC, and is designed to house hundreds of crew, and is miles long. most of the series takes place on the red dwarf itself which is why this is relevant lol

lister (full name dave lister) grows up back on earth, which he loves, despite it being a wasteland. he never knows his real parents; he's abandoned underneath a pool table in a pub as a baby, and gets raised by the young couple who find him there. they live in poverty and lister's adopted dad dies when lister is 6 years old, and lister gets into shoplifting and stealing in general when he's a young kid. but his family is still pretty loving and lister grows out of the stealing and ends up taking on odd jobs here and there, and he's pretty happy despite everything.

on lister's 25th birthday, he gets plastered as fuck with a group of his friends and somehow ends up on a spaceship which drops him off at a colony on mimas, one of saturn's moons. lister wakes up there with no money and no way of getting home. eventually he runs into a space corps recruiter, who mentions that the mining ship "red dwarf" is making a trip around the solar system and will eventually return to earth. lister signs up to the space corps under the impression that the ship will be returning to earth immediately, but once he's on board he finds out that the trip is gonna take at least 5 years, and now he's stuck working as a technician on the ship for the entire time. that's how lister ends up on the red dwarf.

rimmer (full name arnold judas rimmer), on the other hand, is born and grows up in a colony on io (one of jupiter's moons), in an upper class family. rimmer's father is obsessed with rimmer and his three brothers becoming officers in the space corps, and they're all subjected to very high standards from an early age. rimmer is the youngest, and is pretty brutally bullied by his big brothers. he's also not particularly academically or physically talented compared to them, he does enjoy cartography and art, but his parents are pretty deeply disappointed in him for not living up to his brothers and they're very cold and frankly abusive towards him.

rimmer is desperate to please them, so although he isn't skilled enough to join the space corps as an officer/pilot like his brothers, he decides to join at the technician level (the lowest possible rank) and work his way up by passing his astronavigation exams to become an officer. however he ends up failing every single exam he takes, and ends up spending years on the red dwarf as a shift manager in charge of the guys who maintain the ship's vending machines lol.

rimmer and lister first meet when lister is assigned to be rimmer's roommate on the ship. they DO NOT get along. all lister wants to do is fuck around and get drunk and have fun, and he's pretty grubby and kinda lazy (actually he's just depressed basically lol but yknow). rimmer is career-driven, up-tight, and generally an obnoxious asshole with no friends who insists on being pedantic about EVERYTHING. they spend most of their time bickering. it's made worse by the fact that rimmer is technically one rank higher than lister and is his shift manager and uses this as an excuse to try and boss him around constantly despite lister barely giving a fuck lmao. they have to work together most of the time bc they're coworkers and there is a little hint of friendship there but it's. pretty small.

things continue like this for a while. however, it all changes when lister, while on planet leave on miranda (one of uranus's moons) ends up finding a little pregnant stray cat who he calls "frankenstein". he smuggles her back onto the ship with him, despite it being illegal to take unquarantined animals onto the ship. for a while he keeps her a secret, but eventually the captain finds out about her and calls lister to his office. he tells lister to give up the location of the cat so she can be euthanised, but lister refuses. as punishment for refusing to give up the cat, the captain sentences lister to be imprisoned in stasis (a kind of suspended animation) for the rest of the trip back to earth.

after lister is put in stasis, rimmer is given the assignment to repair one of the ship's drive plates by himself. this is far outside of his area of expertise, and not something he can do by himself, so he really should have delegated the task to someone else. but instead, because he's so desperate to be perfect and impress his superiors, he tries to complete the repair by himself.

this goes horribly wrong. the incorrectly repaired drive plate ends up leading to a radiation leak from the reactors powering the ship, which immediately spreads throughout the ship and kills everyone, including rimmer himself. lister, however, survives, because he's in stasis so the radiation doesn't reach him. his cat also survives, as she went down into the ship's hold to give birth to her kittens, and the hold was sealed by the ship's computer before the radiation could reach it.

the jupiter mining corporation, believing the entire crew to be dead, leaves the red dwarf to drift off into space as retrieving it would be more trouble than it's worth to them. and so, the ship drifts aimlessly, through the solar system and into deep space.

3 million years later, the radiation on the ship has returned to a safe level. the ship's computer "holly" (who has gone mildly insane after spending 3 million years alone) revives lister from stasis.

they also bring back rimmer as a hologram. holograms are popular in the 23rd century, and are like perfect digital copies of a dead person and their personality. holly could have brought back any of the red dwarf crew members as company for lister, but she decides to bring back rimmer because lister has the most shared conversations with him out of anyone else on the ship (despite them supposedly hating each other).

as well as lister and rimmer, there's also the cat (a humanoid creature that evolved from the descendants of lister's pet cat frankenstein over the past 3 million years), and kryten (a service android they salvage from the wreck of another ship), but im gonna focus on rimmer and lister here for now lol.

at first, after rimmer is brought back as a hologram, things between him and lister are probably even more tense and aggressive than they were when he was alive. after all, rimmer has all of the same neuroses and Issues as he did as a human, but now he's fucking Dead and a digital ghost of himself and the entire human race has gone extinct in the 3 million years since he died. and he copes with this by being Even More Obnoxious.

however as time passes, they get to know each other more and eventually come to be best friends and care abt each other deeply despite also somehow still hating each other lol. lister is pretty smart and very brave and kind despite his tendency to be lazy. and rimmer, underneath all the bitchy rude asshole behaviour, is really just a clingy sad little guy who wants to be loved. as the series goes on they do form a kind of mutual respect for each other. and they care abt each other.

the series spans like 30 years (both in irl time and time in the series), so you get to see the characters go from being dudes in their 20s to dudes in their 50s. they both mature and grow up somewhat, especially lister. and they're still roommates after all this time, and rimmer lets lister sleep in his bunk when he's too drunk to climb up to his top one lol.

the Gay Tension with these two is really. something else man. rimmer (as well as being heavily autistic coded imo) is commonly read by the fandom as a Deeply Confused and self hating gay man. as a younger man/hologram he's pretty defensive of his masculinity and makes a big show out of being a Heterosexual Man despite it clearly being an act he puts on. as he gets older he seems to make peace with it more though and is content with doing more "feminine" things and no longer rlly performs attraction to women.

lister is like the Ultimate Bisexual Transman Guy to me without either of those things being actually canon lol. there's a lot of unintentional transmasc coding with him. he's also shown to be pretty affectionate with his male friends when they're still alive (telling one of them he loves him and kissing him on the lips at one point lol). and with rimmer he's like. blatantly attracted to and flirting with an alternative universe version of rimmer they meet at one point. he puts his hand on rimmer's upper thigh not once but TWICE to comfort him. when rimmer leaves the red dwarf crew for a while he misses him desperately and literally has a dream about telling rimmer he loves him and making out with him. i could go on.

the latest red dwarf episode/movie thing has a really sweet scene where rimmer is considering turning himself off for good bc he feels worthless and is doubting his personhood due to being a hologram, and lister gives him this whole sappy adorable romantic speech abt how he's like the sun and rimmer is like the moon and basically implying that they need each other to exist and they complete each other and it's enough to snap rimmer out of it. they're also so sweet with each other in general in that episode and lister is So Proud of rimmer at different points for being himself and being brave. it's so sweet it makes me melt just thinking abt it AUGH.

in general they're basically canonically soulmates. that one meme that's like "they would find each other in every universe" but for rimmer and lister it's not even ironic they're literally a pair in every single alternative universe we've seen in the show so far. and at this point they've known each other for so long and lived together for so long that the old married couple energy is Very Very Real. idk i could keep typing this post forever bc there really is So Much there to talk abt. but ik this is already way too much information and you're probably not even gonna read it lol so i will stop myself here.

the tldr is that red dwarf is one of those series that's technically a comedy but underneath the humour it's deeply sad and tragic and kinda depressing. but rimmer and lister and their love for each other and their friends are what holds it all together. the universe is cold and uncaring but they Love each other. throws up. ok im done

^ oh also everyone should watch this amv btw

What did Roman Empire pagan soldiers think of fighting under Constantine and Christianity?

Probably not very much.

The Roman military was a world of its own. More than today, soldiers had their very identity shaped by the institution and people they served. Upon enlisting, they swore allegiance to the emperor and received new names as his servants — Valerius during the tetrarchy and Flavius under Constantine. Those who didn’t speak Latin were pushed to acquire a basic grasp of it, pretty much like the French Foreign Legion of today. Starting from the late republican period, Roman soldiers were accustomed to receiving salaries, booty and pensions from their commanders, not the state in an abstract sense. Under the empire, loyalty often lay with the emperor, as long as he was perceived as strong.

In that frame, Constantine never lost the faith of his men thanks to his talents, accomplishments and image. It surely helped that he was Constantius Chlorus’ son, but dynastic feelings were not so strong in the 4th c. What really mattered was that he was a victorious imperator, with plenty of experience both before and after his ascension. His CV included wars against, and victories over, foreigners (Franks, Goths, Alamanni) and rival emperors (Maxentius, Licinius) alike. That kept soldiers satisfied and himself secure on the throne. Besides, Constantine took care to associate his military exploits with the Christian God. On the contrary, his sons failed to live up to his legacy and had to face claims by men like Magnus Magnentius and Julian.

Another thing to consider is the role of religion in the then Roman military. In general, early Christianity wasn’t unanimously for or against military service, hence a decent minority of soliders were Christians even before Constantine. In the late 3rd c., you could find Christians like St. Marcellus holding even the rank of centurion. The statesman Cassius Dio is reported to have spoken of Christians in the comitatus of all four original tetrarchs. Cases of individual disobedience cannot be excluded, of course, but the military was, above all, a state mechanism. Under Diocletian, they persecuted Christians; under Constantine, they fought the Donatists and may have even destroyed the Asclepieion at Aegae, Cilicia.

On his part, Constantine didn’t adopt Christianity the way most people after his time imagine(d). There was a long, gradual process, for the most part inscribed into the norms of late antiquity. Nomenclature and visual language were preserved to a considerable extent. Separate Christian and non-Christian prayers are reported to have been taking place at the same time. At some point in the 320s, a group of veterans greeted Constantine with the traditional “May the gods preserve you for us” salute. Two elite army units, Diocletian’s Jovians and Maximian’s Herculians, were not rebranded, although their names recalled the gods Jupiter and Hercules whom the late tetrarchs associated themselves with.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the dynamics of that complex situation ended up favouring Christianity — if anything, all of Constantine’s successors were Christians except for Julian. That, however, should not be taken out of context. Few have a panoramic view of their time or the acumen to predict the future, and the provincials who made up the bulk of the late Roman military were not among them. Even if they were, though, they may not have had particularly strong feelings about any potential outcome. At the same time, various (quasi-)henotheistic traditions like the cult of Sol Invictus and Mithraism were around. The period was transitional, hence quite fluid.

"In the Philippines, President Quezon went into exile at the time of the Japanese invasion but instructed the cabinet and other government officials to remain. The American authorities told them to remain in their posts and obey all orders from the Japanese, but refuse to swear allegiance to Japan. The United States intended to resume ruling the island through traditional elites once the war was over, and did not want to leave a vacuum in the interim which might be filled by unknown and untested resistance forces.

For the islands’ traditional rulers to resist — and they were overwhelmingly unwilling to embark on that course — would only have led to the destruction of many of them and the likely domination of strongly anti-American nationalists over much of the nation or a dangerous power vacuum at the war’s end.[195]

Nevertheless, owing to economic hardships under Japanese rule and the corruption of local elites, resistance forces did arise. They ranged from spontaneous peasant actions — denounced as “extreme leftist actions” by the communists — against quasi-feudal landed classes, to more apolitical guerrillas who “resembled warlord armies far more than the patriotic resistance forces they usually purported to be.” In practice, these latter forces — most of them on the main island of Luzon — proved to be next to worthless for anti-Japanese resistance, but crucial for “containing the only political guerrilla movement that existed, the Hukbalahap.”[196]

Despite the Communist Party’s significant presence in the Huks, it by no means exerted complete control. Although the Huks were founded in March 1942 at the Communist Party’s behest, many of their founding leaders had a background in previous armed peasant resistance groups, and had engaged in the sort of activities denounced as left-wing extremism by the communists. They tended to pursue their own agendas locally, largely in disregard of the mostly urban and educated Communist Party leadership and their agenda (which, in keeping with Comintern policy, called for a united front of all patriotic forces and loyalty to the United States).[197] In particular, the Huks disregarded PKP instructions to confiscate only the crops of collaborationist landlords, and to share power locally with landlords rather than directly controlling villages in their own name.[198]

In late 1944, as MacArthur’s forces entered the Philippines, the Huks launched all-out attacks on the Japanese and established people’s councils in numerous towns. Three provinces elected or appointed governors from the PKP.[199] “By the beginning of 1945 all that stood between the Huks and a total transformation of the agrarian economy was the United States military, led by MacArthur.”[200]

MacArthur’s first order of business was to disarm the Huks, with the help of the previously mentioned apolitical warlord “resistance” which the Americans had “kept… in reserve mainly for this function.”[201] The American occupation forces restored native elites to power and, aside from a very few symbolic cases, refrained from any sanctions against Japanese collaborationists.[202]

MacArthur released Manuel Roxas, imprisoned for collaboration, and installed him as president of the newly independent Philippine nation. He and his successors conducted an ongoing war of counterinsurgency, on behalf of the rural landlords, against the Huks.[203]

America’s willingness to ignore local elites’ collaboration with the Japanese, and to install them as the governing class, was in considerable part dictated by their desire for military and naval bases in the Philippines.

What the American government wanted, therefore, only the conservative comprador elements, the very groups collaborating with the Japanese, were likely to grant. For this reason, despite the certainty that the Filipino people as a whole were bitterly anticollaborationist, the official American policy viewed the collaborationists with silent toleration, and many believed that prewar President Manuel Quezon, or even Sergio Osmena in Washington, were not themselves unfriendly toward them. Vindication of this suspicion came at the end of November 1944, when Osmena landed on Leyte with MacArthur and immediately issued a statement exonerating those public officials who “had to remain at their posts to maintain a semblance of government, to protect the population from the oppressor to the extent possible by human ingenuity and to comfort the people in their misery.” The counterrevolution that followed in the wake of the American occupation laid the basis for a civil war that soon followed….[204]

-Kevin Carson, "The Undeclared Condominium: The USSR As Partner in a Conservative World Order" (2023)

It's weird to me when white leftists defend North Korea.

For one, they don't really know much about it. Mostly it is based off the assumption that if a nation is the enemy of the United States, they can't be that bad. They are just demonized by American propaganda.

I understand that impulse.

But as someone who does research north korea, I feel like you are missing the point and making yourself look... silly? You lose some credibility.

See, some of it comes from the want to defend a communist country. Except, north korea is not a communist country. Not even nominally. Under Kim Il Sung, it started to transition from Marxism to the state ideology of Juche Sasang.

Juche seems to have a foundation of Marxism, but it shifts into a hypernationalist, militaristic, quasi-religious ideology.

Juche sees itself as an evolution of Marxism. Think of how Christianity views Judaism. Juche is critical of the original Marxist koreans that founded the communist party of korea (the original cpk which proceeded the workers party of korea or WPK)

Kim il Sung purged most of the other leaders of the communist groups in the north after the korean war.

In subsequent years, Kim il Sung pushed Juche Sasang as the new ideology of the DPRK. This was associated with a push towards a "military first" approach. In fact, newer North Korean constitutions removed references to communism, and established Supreme leadership from the communist party, to the military.

This shift also pushed north korea into its current state of regime.

I can't stress this enough. North Korea is NOT a communist nation. The people do not own the means of production and do not direct the politics of the nation or the economy.

Rather, through Juche, the Supreme leader is the autocratic and absolute ruler. This isn't propaganda, this is from the DPRK constitution. This isn't conjecture, this is what the North Korean news says about itself. For English speaking folks, check out KCNA. That's north koreas state news service. (Aka their propaganda) this is their own messaging. (Though they say the Supreme leader speaks "for the people")

North Korea, by any political definition, is an fascist Monarchy.

An absolute, hereditary ruling family, that leads a military regime.

Please stop defending them because they used to be communist. It is not a great look.

I could go into the corruption of South Korea as well. Maybe another time.

Gladiators in the transformers aligned continuity: why is it so contradictory?

So there's obviously some weirdness between tellings and there's no indication as to why in text. To guess why takes some history and acknowledgement that Alpha Trion is the absolute worst narrator to trust.

Here's the contradictions.

1.a Megatron had frequent losses in the arena starting out and slowly got better. (Covenant)

1.b Death is constant in the arena, with bots squashed underfoot and bodies piled high in the grounds. (Exodus/comics)

2.a Megatron has gladiatorial friends whom he's fought against in the arena and the gladiators have a training space.(Comics/exodus)

2.b Megatron has Shockwave build beasts of unknown sentience and kills these opponents in groups. (Exodus, and a glimpse in tfp)

3.a Megatron joined the gladiators voluntarily. (Covenant)

3.b Megatron refers to the gladiators and himself as slaves. (Exodus)

With these contradictions in place, what is the history of gladiators irl?

---

To honor the death of a loved one, loved ones would "gift" their memory with gladiators fighting to the death.

In other words, Entertainment. Ancient Rome used to feature luxurious, wasteful, traitorous, and degenerate barbarians to contrast the pious and plain Romans who then won. It was propaganda that happened to be widely popular, perhaps because prisoners of war were made into slaves, and those slaves made up half of the total gladiators, who then fought to death, it also took on a weird quasi-revenge for the death of soldiers lost in war.

It became a tool to keep morale high, often paired with feasts. It later became a huge business, with trainers, owners, editors, sponsors, and schools dedicated to it. It became a part of military training and became a massive political tool to earn the votes of citizens. It was so big they had to limit how many gladiators one person could keep and how much could be spent on them. Anti-corruption laws were put in place to curb how effective they were in politics but it wasn't enough, it was the best form of self-promotion for it's sponsor and small games were extremely cheap to produce.

Someone of low status could choose to become a gladiator and get paid pretty well in prize money or gifts. With the introduction of more voluntary gladiators meant that over time the games became mainly deathless, with private citizens able to train and lease out gladiators.

Even emperors performed in the arena/ gladiatorial pursuits. With Commodus being a big fan of doing so. (More on him later.)

Of course there were stage names, especially for female gladiators, and the big games had music, gambling, sprinklers, awnings, food and drink, programs indicating the type of gladiator show match up, and in what order. They were very theatrical with fanfare, scribes, depictions of the gods, rare weaponry, honors dedicated to the victor, and reenactments of historic/mythic events. There were beast hunts, chariot races, even comedic battles, more slapstick in nature, though people could die in these as well.

These productions were obviously a lot more expensive. Weaponry and armour could have silver or gold on them, gemstones, feathers, ornate carvings, etc, and everyone preferred skilled matches, meaning a good gladiator was a long term investment for fans and owners alike. A good gladiator troup could recoup the cost of purchasing them in two shows. There was also little to no stigma attached with owning gladiators and so no issue for politicians or anyone rich owning them, making killing a good gladiator a big and politically disastrous move.

Gladiators could be pulled apart by referees, who were often retired gladiators themselves, who could pause bouts or stop them all together. A gladiator could also give up by raising a finger, leaving his life to the whim of the Editor. The editor was responsible for the maintenance of the gear, the gladiators, and the venue. In less lethal times they would have contracts between themselves and whomever owned the gladiator, and would have to pay out in case of unexpected death, etc etc.

The editor could order the death of the loser and the winner would often have to carry this order out. While it was a common custom for the editor to outsource this decision to the crowd, there was at least one case where the editor murdered the defeated gladiator themself.

Most people preferred deathless victories, as they appeared harder to achieve.

--

With this in mind, we can create a timeline and a better understanding of the weird duality of gladiator Megatron.

Firstly he joins the gladiators voluntary seeking an avenue of political growth. It is likely that Megatron had a contract dictating how often he had to fight, and with what weapons. It would also dictate how much he got paid or perhaps how much went towards a debt he owed for his training.

He has a varied career under the name Megatronus until he becomes increasingly skilled and is undefeated.

This makes Megatron expensive and creates friction between the management and Megatron himself as the cost of making his show "interesting" or different increases (ie. exotic weapons or leasing skilled gladiators) cutting into their profits.

They want him to start losing.

Megatron doesn't.

While perhaps his costs could have been kept down via changing his weaponry early on in his career while his win rate was more mixed, or via ludicrous debt, it eventually cannot anymore.

Here in the timelines there is ambiguity.

At some point Megatron is forced into death matches, either via his editor, or because his contract has been vastly change without his permission- because his status has changed.

-It could be because he is arrested and sentenced as a criminal, then sold back to the arena with the potential for freedom dangling over his head. This could be because of Megatron's union activities (potentially a gladiator union but could be for miners or factory workers too), but it's also possible he is falsely accused of something by the arena owners and set up. -

The arena owners were into criminal enterprises as gladiator pits also became illegal in Kaon and slaughter City, though these laws weren't enforced. Even iaconians came to participate from far away, potentially forced to, exiled from the city for being a danger to the state.

In any case, sometime after Megatron has been participating in death matches his handlers make him an offer he can't refuse, and when he does they send in bodyguards to kill him.

Some time passes as Megatron takes action to kill the rest of the owners of the arenas, mob bosses, supported by his followers.

It's possible megatron is no longer allowed to participate in bloodless battles at this point, or just takes them bc he is unable to find opponents who will take him on anymore.

He then takes the name Megatron.

As the revolution grows arenas are made in increasingly obscure places until eventually they are no longer built.

-

Given the nature of gladiator combat, if Megatron lost a match as someone who participates in death matches, he may lose his life. If not by his opposition then by his editor deciding to cut his career short.

The asking of Megatron to voluntarily lose is as much of a threat to his life as the body guards they send in. Since it's an illegal enterprise there is no trust that they will keep their word and spare him.

It's uncertain what gladiatorial combat was like for other bots under Megatron, though in exiles we know he had training rooms and was revered. In Iacon where he had no power there were bots slated for deactivation trying to crush as many minibots as possible in a fight for their lives, a supposedly common occurrence with the crowd chanting the survivor's name.

So by the time Orion and Megatron meet gladiator stuff is very extreme and death heavy.

However, in tfp Megatron is seen with a statue of himself speaking to a crowd, supposedly pre-war. And one of him in a grand coliseum. Thus there could have been a point where Megatron got the full gladiator experience.

--

Commodus (the emperor) has interesting parallels to Megatron. He was a left handed fighter who encouraged the elite to watch his performance. They were bloodless battles he won with a wooden sword. He also fought lions and once decapitated an ostrich, carried its head to the senatorial seats, and gestured they were next. He was also a good marksman.

What is of most interest here however is that he once restyled a statue in his own image, as "Hercules Reborn" and called himself a champion.

His reign was short and ended in his assassination but it was peaceful, with few military conflicts, but a lot of political unrest due to his capricious and megalomaniac behaviour. The senate hated him but the army and common person loved him.

He was also critiqued for participating in the arena when there were places outside of Rome left to conquer.

-

It's possible Megatron changed a statue to suit his image after taking hold of the arena before crackdowns, but it's also possible he did this after decepticons had taking control of a few city-states.

As one last bit of fun trivia, gladiators often had references to Nemesis on their epitaphs, chalking up their deaths to things outside their control rather than the opponents skill, and thus, worth being avenged.

Tl;Dr there are two types of gladiators, bloodless volunteers and death matches slaves. Megatron went from one to the other, likely unvoluntarily.

Becoming a Spartan Citizen, Part One: The Agoge

I've been promising a post about the agoge for at least one hundred years, and at last, the Muses have given me the motivation to do it.

You’ll notice that there’s a lot of ‘probably’ and ‘possibly’ throughout this post. There is an absurd amount of academic speculation and argument in this particular niche of Spartan studies, and so little firm evidence, that there’s no other way to present this information. This is a summation of what is generally thought to be true, what academics have speculated might be so, and my own educated opinion on the topic.

The Basics:

Cartledge writes, ‘The agoge was, at best, ‘educational’ only in an extended sense and is more fruitfully regarded as a comprehensive means of socialisation. Thus, in the [Classical Period], the more orthodox musical and gymnastic exercises were combined with social institutions like age-classes and common meals, and with rites de passage to produce tough, self-disciplined and unquestioningly obedient military men.’

The word, agoge, literally means ‘raising’, as of cattle, and the boys were organised into groups called bouai, literally ‘herds’. They were probably grouped by who’d been born between fixed calendar points, possibly between the celebrations of one of the three major festivals - the Hyakinthia, the Karneia or Gymnopaedia. I personally favour the Hyakinthia in my own writing because that was the festival that was important enough to bring men back to Sparta from campaign, but it may have been something entirely else.

We do not know exactly how much of the agoge was state sponsored. I’ve read two specialist texts on the subject and the authors quite literally took opposite views on the subject. One argued that the state sponsored the entire duration of the raising, that the boys were taken into the barracks at age seven and had limited interactions with their family thereafter and that something similar was provided for girls (a whole other topic I won’t dig into here); the other, that this couldn’t possibly be true, that they were raised within the family and only went to the barracks once they reached the second age group in their early teens, and that it simply must have been privately funded because the state couldn’t afford to pay the teachers, such as they were - and for girls? Absolutely not.

You see, then, that the evidence is so scanty it can support both opinions equally well. This is what we’re dealing with at every step of the way.

Broadly, we’re fairly sure that the following is correct though:

The boys were required to go barefoot in all weather and all terrains;

They were only allowed one cloak against the bitter cold of the winter, (probably woven of wool or mohair);

They cut reeds from the banks of the Eurotas river with their bare hands to make their own beds;

They were kept on short rations from the public storehouses; so short it necessitated thievery (which was encouraged). [There’s a lot to say about the food situation around the agoge and phiditia (mess group) - I’ll come back to that at some later date.]

Once they entered the second age group up, the paidiskoi, there were some additional struggles involved:

Surveillance of the boys by their elders became constant.

The training acquired a strict quasi-military discipline; Or became a ‘para-military assault course,’ as Cartledge calls it. 

To unpack this topic a little, it is probably easiest to talk about the age groups individually; but let me just put a giant disclaimer here: This is an extremely vexed area of the field. Everything below is all highly speculative (even when infuriatingly presented by academics as fact), and mostly based on much later scolions which may or may not be even remotely correct. Some of the evidence comes from over a thousand years after the fact. Just bear that in mind :)

Age Groups [bouai]:

Paides

The boys entered the agoge at around seven, which is (incredibly) generally accepted; they graduated into the next group at somewhere around thirteen. Some scholars go as low as twelve, others favour a little older at fourteen or fifteen. 

Their training in this age group probably included the following:

Physical exercise of course, with an emphasis on endurance. A padotibai (athletic trainer) may have been hired by the family.

They were probably taught basic literacy.

Music and Dancing - they were trained in choral dance by a didaskalos (dance master). Choruses for festivals practiced for up to 6 months before the event. They were supervised by adult. One boy would be selected as lead dancer for high level competitions. The didaskalos was responsible for music, choreography and the performance in general.

At the end of this period, there was an initiation rite - at least by the Roman period and perhaps earlier. This was probably the Platamistas, which I described in a short piece or writing here.

 Paidiskoi

The next group began as above, somewhere in the early teens, and graduation into the class above occurred somewhere around eighteen to twenty.

Their training at this time changed markedly. 

If there had been tutors, these were dispensed with.

They still studied music and dancing for religious and military applicability. (Both encouraged a sense of rhythm, important to phalanx warfare.)

They still played sport, but it became considerably more competitive. They were encouraged to put their strength, aggression and leadership on display.

With this phase, pederasty was introduced. Cartledge frames it as, in the ancient mind, a manhood ritual. It is worth mentioning that Xenophon says unequivocally that there was no sexual element to these relationships, and Plutarch tells us that Lykourgas laid down in the Laws that entering these relationships for lustful purposes was forbidden; but scholars do not believe that. As unpalatable as it is through modern eyes and to me personally, I’m afraid neither do I.

The relationship, putting any sexual element aside, became the defining one in the boy’s life. The older man became his teacher and was responsible for helping him become a good Spartan. He would essentially work to find him a place in their society, including the critical introduction to his phiditia when the time was right.

At the end of this phase, there was another initiation ritual - perhaps stealing from Artemis Orthia, who symbolically patrolled the boundary between youth and adulthood.

In this ritual, the boys were required to steal the largest possible number of cheeses [goat or sheep] from the Temple of Artemis Orthia, which was located in the village of Limnai. The temple was guarded by the next group up which they were about to enter - the hebontes. These young men were armed with whips and the ceremony was intended, I suppose, to show the boldness and bravery of the boys who would dare the whips to steal the cheese. 

Later, in Roman times, this became a ceremony that ‘tourists’ would go to witness, and boys were often whipped to death for their entertainment. It is extremely unlikely that it was taken this far during the Classical period. The Spartans always had something of a population issue... (I’m sidestepping another complicated tangent here, hehe.)

Hebontes

The final group of the agoge, graduation into this class - at around eighteen to twenty, signalled that their education was complete.

At this time, they:

Probably remained within Lakedaimon’s borders.

Encouraged to grow their hair long and to shave their moustaches. They swore annually to always do the latter.

Became homoioi [translated as Equals, or Peers - essentially, a citizen,] if voted to a phiditia.

At home: ‘… all their time was taken up with dances, festivals, feasts, hunting expeditions, physical exercise and conversation.’ 

Were expected to marry while in this age bracket (that is, before thirty, though I very often see it stated as twenty-five).

Were possibly required to sleep in the communal barracks for the duration of this term, even if married/with children.

Played sphairomachia – a ball game for adults conducted in the theatre; five teams of 14 players (built around mora, units). Combination of rugby, volleyball and NFL.

Athletic contests as part of religious festivals.

Within the hebontes, we know of another group which defies all attempts at precise definition - the Eirines. We can’t be sure exactly what this group did or what age they fit into - but they were perhaps the youngest age group, between eighteen and twenty, the time during which they were doing their ‘national service’. It was this group that was required to assist in the training of the younger boys via ‘after dinner meetings’ - but as this post is already so long, I’m marking that down as something to come back to later, too.

So that’s it - my best attempt at summarising a really complicated and uncertain element of the Classical Spartan’s life - and for sure, the most (in)famous part of their culture. 

When I started studying Sparta a few years ago now, I lost my mind trying to wrangle all these maybes into some semblance of order; I hope that I can spare even one person from that struggle :)

“The lowest in the scale of the military régime was the group of ashigaru, that is to say, of the light infantry. Those who belonged to this group, though wearers of two swords, were not counted as of the corps of samurai. Being legally vassals of a daimyo, they had yet very rare chances of serving him directly, and often they enlisted into the household service of a higher samurai. Between the ashigaru and the regular samurai, there was another intermediate group of two-sworded men, called kachi, which means warriors-on-foot. In feudal times all warriors, if of samurai rank, were presumed to be cavaliers, though in reality most of them had not even a stable, and skill in horsemanship was not rigorously required from the samurai of the lower class. The name kachi, given to those who in rank came next to the samurai, implied that this intermediate group of quasi-samurai was not allowed to ride on horse-back. This group was, however, much nearer to the samurai than to the ashigaru group”

(An Introduction to the History of Japan

Katsuro Hara, 1920)