Something that seems to come up a lot in conversation on this sub is whether or not trans people exist in the 41st millennium, and if so, how prevalent they would be.
The short answer is of course they do; we have no reason to believe that these conditions have disappeared from the human population. However:
Some people seem to think that the 41st millennium would be a relatively safe haven for trans people, because the Emperor cares not for what does or does not sway between your legs, and medical marvels are commonplace. This is half true, if you are not a mutant or a heretic then the Emperor and his agents indeed do not care. Nor do most other people. And the super wealthy or connected do have access to medical interventions that would be miraculous by 21st century standards, including rejuvinat procedures, cures for cancer, and life support systems that can keep a human brain alive in a box (good news: also available for potential servitors like you and me). But, if you think trans people will be free to live their ‘authentic selves’, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion.
The 41st millennium is not a safe space. It is not nice. Since Rogue Trader, the tagline for the setting has been a derivative of in the grim darkness of the far future there is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only war.
This is intrinsic to the setting. The primary theme underpinning 40K is that it is a shit place to live. It’s basically the shittest place to live that the developers can think of while still being stimulating and offering a glimmer of hope for humanity. Most people have minimal/no healthcare. They live and work in punishing, inhumane conditions or they serve in the military (or both, e.g. gundeck crews, Emperor bless them). They have no freedom. They do not have enough food or water. People die from easily curable conditions all the time, because healthcare is not provided to them, or is not even available. For an example, see Spear of the Emperor, or almost any book that features significant representation of civilian life.
I repeat that this misery is intrinsic to the setting, and it is used as justification for many other elements, e.g volunteering to join the various military orders, the adeptus astartes (even as a serf), genestealer cults, chaos cults, and defecting to the Tau, to name but a few. Almost none of this would happen if living standards were high. Most humans are desperate to escape their impoverished lives, and only faith in the Emperor and the shock batons of the overseers and arbites keep them in line.
How then does this affect trans people? Quite simply, the vast majority of humans on the vast majority of worlds do not have access to hormone therapy or plastic surgery, regardless of their needs or wants. People die from easily curable diseases or injuries that are left to fester all the time. Hardly anyone knows your name, let alone your pronouns. This includes Holy Terra. To suffer from gender dysphoria in the 41st millennium means you will almost certainly live a life of disjointed anxiety and depression. If this leaves you remotely suicidal then you will end your life, and you will not be missed. Your body, if recovered, will be ground up for corpse starch and the war machine will keep trudging forward without you. Trans people are not getting special treatment, or likely any treatment.
Yes there are some planets where people have an okay standard of living. Yes some people are wealthy or connected and so have access to healthcare or even elective surgery for the autogynophiles. For examples, see the Eisenhorn books. However, it cannot be overstated that these are both a small minority. The overwhelming majority of humans are born into a life of poverty and slavery, and die that way.
And what of good old fashioned bigotry? This is alive and well in the 41st millennium. For an example, please read Avenging Son, a relatively new book that includes oppressive classism, sexism, ageism, and arranged marriages based on the premise of forced procreation. To be a common woman in the 41st millennium is indeed still loaded with sexism and servitude.
If you don’t like this, then the 41st millennium is not for you. If you don’t agree with this, then please actually, for the love of the Emperor, read the books and educate yourself on the grimdark nightmare that is the 41st millennium. If you don’t want this, then tough shit. Now say a prayer to the Emperor and get back to your production line, citizen, or so help me I will release the Cyber Mastiffs.

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42yKCnUBa0
Jean Baudrillard, a famous writer on the topic of “postmodernism,” explained postmodernism by means of four stages that symbols and objects have progressed through.
Stage 1: “Basic reflection of reality.” Here, symbols and objects attempt to create an objective reflection of reality. For example a chair is made to be sat on and is valuable if it fulfills its purpose, and a shirt is valuable if it covers your skin. The symbols, stories, myths, etc. of our ancestors were an attempt to describe reality as best they could (agree with the results or not). A symbol or image of a god was meant to represent an objectively existent force in reality. Here I see a comparison to very early Polytheism and the Stellar Tradition, where we accepted the objective, dualistic and spiritual nature of reality, the existence of the gods, and so on, with very complex systems that understood reality itself is complex. Inherently this can only ever be, at best, an attempt at metaphysical knowledge about reality, but it is an honest attempt.
Stage 2: "Perversion of reality.” Here the relationship between value and objective reality begins to shift, for example a chair may still serve its primary function, but be more valuable if made with a rare material, by someone of note, and/or for someone of great importance. There may be no practical difference between the stage 1 and stage 2 chairs, and yet the stage 2 chair is given more value. Symbols (perhaps most famously the serpent) are also twisted, for example as a means to control people, or even by demonizing all gods and saying there is only One True God. The complexity of reality is ignored, in favor of a simple “good vs. evil” breakdown, where everything is either Godly or Demonic. The comparison here is the SolaAgricultural tradition and, especially, Monotheism. There is an acceptance of some sort of reality, but that reality is twisted intentionally, whether that be to control people, confuse them, or anything of the sort.
Stage 3: “Pretense of reality.” Here we have the appearance of reality, but much more of a detachment from it. The idea that gods are "just archetypes," or that magic is “just psychology,” illustrate this, along with Physicalism at large. People pretend these are the totality of reality, of which they consider themselves to be the "true seekers," but in the end they outright ignore the most important aspects of our reality. Christian Nationalism is another illustration, where leaders outright lie and fabricate history under the pretense of truth, such as the U.S. being founded as a Christian nation. Objects mainly have value thanks to Materialism and Consumerism, not to mention advertising, and the rejection of higher reality makes such things easier to fall for.
Stage 4: "Bears no relation to any reality whatsoever." This is what may be called "postmodernism," total detachment from reality. An very worrying illustration is the democratization of science, where politics and public opinion now hold as much (or more) sway as empirical evidence (with strict empiricism or “scientism” already falling under "stage 3,” since there are so many other forms of knowledge than empirical knowledge.). Here, a shirt or chair like from stage 1 may be significantly less valuable than an identical shirt or chair endorsed by a famous celebrity. We all know politicians lie when they make promises and yet cheer any time they make one anyways. Our symbols only represent our made up realities: watered-down Christianized ideology such as we see running rampant in polytheistic revival, or modern pop-cultural fictions and multiverses, for example.
Baudrillard gives the example of Main Street at Disney Parks. Not only do we spend more time and money on these fabrications than reality (e.g. replacing the gods on our altars with Disney stuff), but our very differentiation between the "real world" and "Disney world" is a delusion. Disneyland is part of the “real world”. There is no inner child to most adults which is in hiding and in need of release, rather they are very outwardly children yet still wield great power. The world is childish and run by mental and spiritual children. The "perfect world" of Disney is still draining your so-called "real" money (which itself belongs to stage 3, as paper money has no objective value).How often do we obsess over the lives and stories of fictional people, such as families in TV shows, meant purely as consumer content? Even I am guilty of this. Our biggest "influencers" are literal morons on terrible platforms, platforms which encourage us to pretend our true selves are only the best moments we choose to share online.
Stage 5: To these 4 stages I propose adding a 5th in the 21st century: “replacement of reality.” Artificial intelligence, virtual and alternate realities, one of the most recent symbols of status at the time of writing this is the new Apple headset, costing thousands of dollars, people just walking around and existing in a totally manufactured reality, one which will inevitably be shaped by those in positions of power and wealth. The popularity of fake news also may deserve ranking in this new, 5th stage, perhaps even something like plastic surgery.
It is important to note that I do not believe we necessarily pass linearly through these stages. For example there are currently people whose beliefs and practices conform to any one of these 4+ stages, or they fit different stages depending on the context.
Morality is another way to look at the stages, and for this I will use the modern example of the debate on abortion. In stage 1, morality is a quest for objective truth, so for instance with abortion we would realize that the issue is objectively complicated.
In stage 2, morality is twisted to fit the reality promoted by those in power, so for us this would be that abortion is always wrong. They still believe in an objective morality in theory, but twist and simplify that morality.
Stage 3 brings us Moral Relativism, whether abortion is right or wrong depends on who you ask, what culture you were raised in, etc. There is no objective morality, but this itself is an objective truth in a way. This is opposed to the second stage Monotheists who believe abortion is objectively wrong all together, or first stage folks who know the topic can be more complicated than black and white. Basically whatever the culture says is moral, is. Whatever morals the Relativist has, they do not believe them to be more correct than any other morals.
Finally in stage 4+, morality is completely dependent on what those in power (politicians, corporations, influencers, etc.) say is moral. It's a warped form of Moral Relativism, really. This individual believes that morals are relative, but not to culture or anything of the sort. Instead, morals are relative to whatever suits them best at the time, and whatever they are told by "authorities" of high symbol/object value. They do not believe the values and morals of others are equally valid to theirs (stage 3), nor do their actions suggest any belief in a consistent objective morality, warped or otherwise (stage 1 and 2). Instead, their morals are relative to whatever their own pseudo-reality is, whatever is to their benefit, and this itself mainly stems from the aforementioned authorities. And note that someone may be, say, a stage 2 monotheist when it comes to religion, but a stage 4 on morality, and so on.
"Whataboutism" is another illustration of moral Postmodern manipulation. Say a person is telling you how evil the current president of the U.S. is because they do X. You ask, "what about the fact that your favorite president did X too, were they also evil?" The Postmodernist will then say you are engaging in "whataboutism." To one who accepts Moral Realism it is immediately clear why the question is valid though: the answer determines if the person is truly opposed to X or simply using it against those they don’t like, special pleading. Postmodernists simply believe whatever they need or want to at the time to support their own biases, not that X is actually immoral.
Our paper money is another example of stage 3, “pretense of reality.” The paper money system is entirely theoretical, in reality the paper is worth very, very little. It's just tied to this conceptual system that, were it to be cast aside, would make all cash meaningless paper. Stage 1 would be things like services, sustenance, shelter, useful things, symbols that were thought to impact reality, etc., objective things all people need. Stage 2 is illustrated by gold, we give it meaning beyond what it has, but it's a real thing with a limited amount of it in the world, you cannot get trillions in debt just printing new gold into existence as with stage 3 cash. And for stage 4+, what better example than NFTs and Bitcoin, or views, likes, and upvotes?
Social media gives us insight into the world of stage 4 / Postmodernism. All the big-name forums or social media platforms, as well as many smaller ones, are oversaturated with advertisements, these new religious symbols and their new valuable objects, to the point where advertisers choose which platforms or outlets survive and which crash and burn. Whole sites wield the power to silence dissenters of whichever ideologies they find unappealing. In many cases people are extremely limited in the number of characters they can use at once, making true discourse impossible. People live entirely fake lives to instill jealousy in others, who go on to lie to themselves and others as well, and groupthink is encouraged through voting systems which create hiveminds and drive out any independent thought. All these fit with Baudrillard’s fourth stage - none of this is reality. Consumerism is objectively less valuable than individuation and freedom, it is not a valid way to live life, it only wastes life, time, and resources. Human thought is not limited by a character count, this does not describe reality in any way, instead creating a new "reality" where any idea longer than a few sentences is a "word salad" and cannot hold one's attention. There are fewer and fewer "great thinkers," and they are not the ones being heard and viewed. The endless, manufactured, touched up selfies, vacations wasted taking pictures instead of living, time lost in the imagery rather than the real event - this is not objective reality. It not only rejects reality but twists and perverts it, replacing it with a manufactured (simulated) one.
Cancel culture is another unfortunate offspring of Postmodernist thought. Due to the power held and used by the creators and maintainers of all these stage 4 images and objects, "reality" is now defined by such entities. A famous actor was fired from all his roles including a massive franchise on mere accusations of abuse, before the crimes were even brought to court (where it turned out things were not so clear cut). If it can happen to a rich, beloved movie star, imagine what could happen to you. I am not suggesting you feel bad for a billionaire who helps fabricate reality, nor do I believe we have a great and trustworthy justice system in place. All I want to illustrate is how a mere accusation led to guilt and punishment because corporations and the more popular political party said they were guilty, and culture followed blindly, before it even reached the justice system at all. Even in cases where someone ends up being guilty, they cannot be found guilty before investigation and judgment. But this does not matter in a world where reality is whatever is most popular at the time.
All forms of media contribute to this, there is no longer any reality in culture outside of the images and realities created for us, created to distract us from this disturbing rejection of reality. Games, shows, movies, children’s content, fiction and non-fiction works, governments, news outlets… not every single individual instance of these may be wholly negative, but the positive ones are becoming more and more rare. I’ve found an interesting source of philosophy on this matter in the poetry of Jim Morrison, famously known as the singer of The Doors, whose father was all too familiar with the fabrication of reality. Morrison wrote about how the powers that be use content from films to museums (where we simulate history) and everything in between to blind citizens to their power over us, our values, even our own meanings regarding life. He feared that humans had become simple spectators, staring blankly into the screen, letting it write their reality for them. He even predicted the "meta" nature of our modern culture, where everything has become self-referential, filled with cameos and easter eggs, dead actors resurrected and old ones de-aged, because media-created reality is now the only reality. All it can reference is itself, lest it shatter the illusion or acknowledge reality. Just look at how our culture cannot even create new content, just remakes, sequels, shared universes, etc.
"There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all the books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence… We are content with the “given” in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark." - Jim Morrison
Another great example of postmodernism is the idea of secularism, that we can separate the public from the religious, or that there are actually people who have no religion whatsoever. This rejects the reality that religion applies to many aspects of life, that someone who is non-theistic or simply “spiritual” still is often religious. For example we can look to sports, where all sorts of weird rituals and ceremonies take place that have nothing to do with the layman understanding of religion, gods, the divine, etc, but are studied as such by religious scholars nonetheless. It can even tie back to the Disneyland example, such as how we pretend America is a secular country, or delude ourselves into thinking the hateful Atheism of France (or places like the USSR before it) is somehow not its own form of religion. In stage 1 we recognized there was no separating the spiritual and religious from daily life. Stage 2 keeps this mostly in place but twists it to fit monotheism. It's not until stage 3 that this really changes to keeping religion “private,” and stage 4 flips the whole thing on its head to where the state and corporations have become god, and the gods have become fantasy.
Postmodernism has even seeped into the WLHP to a great extent. For example, with the identification of the Christian entity Satan with all sorts of beings that have no correlation to him. The Satanist who says that The Devil is Setesh, the Serpent, Prometheus, or any other such deity is placing objective reality on the backburner in favor of a popular cultural meme - that all these beings are Satan, despite their histories, characteristics, mythologies, etc. It is Postmodernism which allows certain groups from the late 1900s to claim absurd things like being the first and only Satanists with no regard for objective reality, or which allows organizations to claim the title of Romantic Satanists when their values and acts fly in the face of that literary movement. It's why people who think they are on the WLHP can still fall for things like Physicalism against all evidence and reason. It's how occultists can create completely made up identities for themselves that, even after being exposed as fraudulent, are still parroted blindly by their followers. And in a wider sense it applies to modern polytheism overall, where new age, fluff bunny occultists come in changing polytheism to monotheism, or saying all male and female goddesses are just a manifestation of duo-theism. There is no escaping Postmodern irrationality.
Our symbols of the divine, of deeper spiritual meanings and truths, of a reality beyond this one, have all been replaced with corporate logos, meme templates, and easter eggs. Like me, many others also have altars in every room of the house, their altars are simply shrines to brands, consumer content, companies, political parties, famous actors, etc. The utility of an object no longer defines it, but instead it is the fabricated social status a thing is supposed to create, such as an uncomfortable designer chair being ten times the cost of a more comfortable and practical one. If your car can reliably get you place to place, but isn’t sporting the right hood ornament, or a fresh coat of paint, all the fancy add ons and a high floor price, then the object simply is not as valuable as if it had these entirely unnecessary things, and therefore the individual themselves is judged as less valuable. Two identical shirts can vary in price by hundreds of dollars based solely on the name printed on the tag inside. All of these values are entirely manufactured and completely detached from objective reality.
Perhaps worst of all is that people and objects have become harder to tell apart, as best exemplified with celebrities. They are fake people with false personalities who we are supposed to see as the ideal human beings. All of their flaws are edited and filtered out, and then we are condemned for not being on par. To postmodern companies, the individual is literally just an object to be used as a means to an end, a cog in a machine rather than an individual with needs, goals, drives, etc. Politicians are themselves celebrities now, and I do not only mean literal actors running for office, but rather that people cheer for them like they do a rock star, consume their media like it is a drug, defend them as if they were their favorite comic character… What gives these politicians and celebrities their power? An association with the new system of symbols and objects of value, the system which disregards reality all together in order to encourage things like Consumerism and obedience.
Postmodernism has an influence over almost every aspect of our lives. It encourages people to believe any fleeting thing they want, or more often are told to want, is of foremost importance or value. It allows constant advertising to empty us of any "inconvenient" meaning or value and fill the void with Consumerism and material things, or to fill it with work lives that are ultimately pointless and amount to nothing more than some conceptual material wage (money itself not even being "real"). The value of objects defines and overtakes the value of the individual. A disregard for objectivity means a disregard for the scientific method itself, allowing science to become a process of authoritarianism at worst and democracy at best, a process of media propaganda rather than a quest for truth. Whatever facts benefit the high-object-value people and the symbols they associate with are true, and facts which do not are false, being able to change at the drop of a hat as needed.
Postmodernism is clearly the natural outcome of our move from profound reality to a fabricated simulation of reality created to control, stifle, and subdue human beings… an immoral and dangerous metaphysics too blind to see that without any objective reality nobody can ever be correct, including themselves.

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42yKCnUBa0
Jean Baudrillard, a famous writer on the topic of “postmodernism,” explained postmodernism by means of four stages that symbols and objects have progressed through.
Stage 1: “Basic reflection of reality.” Here, symbols and objects attempt to create an objective reflection of reality. For example a chair is made to be sat on and is valuable if it fulfills its purpose, and a shirt is valuable if it covers your skin. The symbols, stories, myths, etc. of our ancestors were an attempt to describe reality as best they could (agree with the results or not). A symbol or image of a god was meant to represent an objectively existent force in reality. Here I see a comparison to very early Polytheism and the Stellar Tradition, where we accepted the objective, dualistic and spiritual nature of reality, the existence of the gods, and so on, with very complex systems that understood reality itself is complex. Inherently this can only ever be, at best, an attempt at metaphysical knowledge about reality, but it is an honest attempt.
Stage 2: "Perversion of reality.” Here the relationship between value and objective reality begins to shift, for example a chair may still serve its primary function, but be more valuable if made with a rare material, by someone of note, and/or for someone of great importance. There may be no practical difference between the stage 1 and stage 2 chairs, and yet the stage 2 chair is given more value. Symbols (perhaps most famously the serpent) are also twisted, for example as a means to control people, or even by demonizing all gods and saying there is only One True God. The complexity of reality is ignored, in favor of a simple “good vs. evil” breakdown, where everything is either Godly or Demonic. The comparison here is the SolaAgricultural tradition and, especially, Monotheism. There is an acceptance of some sort of reality, but that reality is twisted intentionally, whether that be to control people, confuse them, or anything of the sort.
Stage 3: “Pretense of reality.” Here we have the appearance of reality, but much more of a detachment from it. The idea that gods are "just archetypes," or that magic is “just psychology,” illustrate this, along with Physicalism at large. People pretend these are the totality of reality, of which they consider themselves to be the "true seekers," but in the end they outright ignore the most important aspects of our reality. Christian Nationalism is another illustration, where leaders outright lie and fabricate history under the pretense of truth, such as the U.S. being founded as a Christian nation. Objects mainly have value thanks to Materialism and Consumerism, not to mention advertising, and the rejection of higher reality makes such things easier to fall for.
Stage 4: "Bears no relation to any reality whatsoever." This is what may be called "postmodernism," total detachment from reality. An very worrying illustration is the democratization of science, where politics and public opinion now hold as much (or more) sway as empirical evidence (with strict empiricism or “scientism” already falling under "stage 3,” since there are so many other forms of knowledge than empirical knowledge.). Here, a shirt or chair like from stage 1 may be significantly less valuable than an identical shirt or chair endorsed by a famous celebrity. We all know politicians lie when they make promises and yet cheer any time they make one anyways. Our symbols only represent our made up realities: watered-down Christianized ideology such as we see running rampant in polytheistic revival, or modern pop-cultural fictions and multiverses, for example.
Baudrillard gives the example of Main Street at Disney Parks. Not only do we spend more time and money on these fabrications than reality (e.g. replacing the gods on our altars with Disney stuff), but our very differentiation between the "real world" and "Disney world" is a delusion. Disneyland is part of the “real world”. There is no inner child to most adults which is in hiding and in need of release, rather they are very outwardly children yet still wield great power. The world is childish and run by mental and spiritual children. The "perfect world" of Disney is still draining your so-called "real" money (which itself belongs to stage 3, as paper money has no objective value).How often do we obsess over the lives and stories of fictional people, such as families in TV shows, meant purely as consumer content? Even I am guilty of this. Our biggest "influencers" are literal morons on terrible platforms, platforms which encourage us to pretend our true selves are only the best moments we choose to share online.
Stage 5: To these 4 stages I propose adding a 5th in the 21st century: “replacement of reality.” Artificial intelligence, virtual and alternate realities, one of the most recent symbols of status at the time of writing this is the new Apple headset, costing thousands of dollars, people just walking around and existing in a totally manufactured reality, one which will inevitably be shaped by those in positions of power and wealth. The popularity of fake news also may deserve ranking in this new, 5th stage, perhaps even something like plastic surgery.
It is important to note that I do not believe we necessarily pass linearly through these stages. For example there are currently people whose beliefs and practices conform to any one of these 4+ stages, or they fit different stages depending on the context.
Morality is another way to look at the stages, and for this I will use the modern example of the debate on abortion. In stage 1, morality is a quest for objective truth, so for instance with abortion we would realize that the issue is objectively complicated.
In stage 2, morality is twisted to fit the reality promoted by those in power, so for us this would be that abortion is always wrong. They still believe in an objective morality in theory, but twist and simplify that morality.
Stage 3 brings us Moral Relativism, whether abortion is right or wrong depends on who you ask, what culture you were raised in, etc. There is no objective morality, but this itself is an objective truth in a way. This is opposed to the second stage Monotheists who believe abortion is objectively wrong all together, or first stage folks who know the topic can be more complicated than black and white. Basically whatever the culture says is moral, is. Whatever morals the Relativist has, they do not believe them to be more correct than any other morals.
Finally in stage 4+, morality is completely dependent on what those in power (politicians, corporations, influencers, etc.) say is moral. It's a warped form of Moral Relativism, really. This individual believes that morals are relative, but not to culture or anything of the sort. Instead, morals are relative to whatever suits them best at the time, and whatever they are told by "authorities" of high symbol/object value. They do not believe the values and morals of others are equally valid to theirs (stage 3), nor do their actions suggest any belief in a consistent objective morality, warped or otherwise (stage 1 and 2). Instead, their morals are relative to whatever their own pseudo-reality is, whatever is to their benefit, and this itself mainly stems from the aforementioned authorities. And note that someone may be, say, a stage 2 monotheist when it comes to religion, but a stage 4 on morality, and so on.
"Whataboutism" is another illustration of moral Postmodern manipulation. Say a person is telling you how evil the current president of the U.S. is because they do X. You ask, "what about the fact that your favorite president did X too, were they also evil?" The Postmodernist will then say you are engaging in "whataboutism." To one who accepts Moral Realism it is immediately clear why the question is valid though: the answer determines if the person is truly opposed to X or simply using it against those they don’t like, special pleading. Postmodernists simply believe whatever they need or want to at the time to support their own biases, not that X is actually immoral.
Our paper money is another example of stage 3, “pretense of reality.” The paper money system is entirely theoretical, in reality the paper is worth very, very little. It's just tied to this conceptual system that, were it to be cast aside, would make all cash meaningless paper. Stage 1 would be things like services, sustenance, shelter, useful things, symbols that were thought to impact reality, etc., objective things all people need. Stage 2 is illustrated by gold, we give it meaning beyond what it has, but it's a real thing with a limited amount of it in the world, you cannot get trillions in debt just printing new gold into existence as with stage 3 cash. And for stage 4+, what better example than NFTs and Bitcoin, or views, likes, and upvotes?
Social media gives us insight into the world of stage 4 / Postmodernism. All the big-name forums or social media platforms, as well as many smaller ones, are oversaturated with advertisements, these new religious symbols and their new valuable objects, to the point where advertisers choose which platforms or outlets survive and which crash and burn. Whole sites wield the power to silence dissenters of whichever ideologies they find unappealing. In many cases people are extremely limited in the number of characters they can use at once, making true discourse impossible. People live entirely fake lives to instill jealousy in others, who go on to lie to themselves and others as well, and groupthink is encouraged through voting systems which create hiveminds and drive out any independent thought. All these fit with Baudrillard’s fourth stage - none of this is reality. Consumerism is objectively less valuable than individuation and freedom, it is not a valid way to live life, it only wastes life, time, and resources. Human thought is not limited by a character count, this does not describe reality in any way, instead creating a new "reality" where any idea longer than a few sentences is a "word salad" and cannot hold one's attention. There are fewer and fewer "great thinkers," and they are not the ones being heard and viewed. The endless, manufactured, touched up selfies, vacations wasted taking pictures instead of living, time lost in the imagery rather than the real event - this is not objective reality. It not only rejects reality but twists and perverts it, replacing it with a manufactured (simulated) one.
Cancel culture is another unfortunate offspring of Postmodernist thought. Due to the power held and used by the creators and maintainers of all these stage 4 images and objects, "reality" is now defined by such entities. A famous actor was fired from all his roles including a massive franchise on mere accusations of abuse, before the crimes were even brought to court (where it turned out things were not so clear cut). If it can happen to a rich, beloved movie star, imagine what could happen to you. I am not suggesting you feel bad for a billionaire who helps fabricate reality, nor do I believe we have a great and trustworthy justice system in place. All I want to illustrate is how a mere accusation led to guilt and punishment because corporations and the more popular political party said they were guilty, and culture followed blindly, before it even reached the justice system at all. Even in cases where someone ends up being guilty, they cannot be found guilty before investigation and judgment. But this does not matter in a world where reality is whatever is most popular at the time.
All forms of media contribute to this, there is no longer any reality in culture outside of the images and realities created for us, created to distract us from this disturbing rejection of reality. Games, shows, movies, children’s content, fiction and non-fiction works, governments, news outlets… not every single individual instance of these may be wholly negative, but the positive ones are becoming more and more rare. I’ve found an interesting source of philosophy on this matter in the poetry of Jim Morrison, famously known as the singer of The Doors, whose father was all too familiar with the fabrication of reality. Morrison wrote about how the powers that be use content from films to museums (where we simulate history) and everything in between to blind citizens to their power over us, our values, even our own meanings regarding life. He feared that humans had become simple spectators, staring blankly into the screen, letting it write their reality for them. He even predicted the "meta" nature of our modern culture, where everything has become self-referential, filled with cameos and easter eggs, dead actors resurrected and old ones de-aged, because media-created reality is now the only reality. All it can reference is itself, lest it shatter the illusion or acknowledge reality. Just look at how our culture cannot even create new content, just remakes, sequels, shared universes, etc.
"There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all the books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence… We are content with the “given” in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark." - Jim Morrison
Another great example of postmodernism is the idea of secularism, that we can separate the public from the religious, or that there are actually people who have no religion whatsoever. This rejects the reality that religion applies to many aspects of life, that someone who is non-theistic or simply “spiritual” still is often religious. For example we can look to sports, where all sorts of weird rituals and ceremonies take place that have nothing to do with the layman understanding of religion, gods, the divine, etc, but are studied as such by religious scholars nonetheless. It can even tie back to the Disneyland example, such as how we pretend America is a secular country, or delude ourselves into thinking the hateful Atheism of France (or places like the USSR before it) is somehow not its own form of religion. In stage 1 we recognized there was no separating the spiritual and religious from daily life. Stage 2 keeps this mostly in place but twists it to fit monotheism. It's not until stage 3 that this really changes to keeping religion “private,” and stage 4 flips the whole thing on its head to where the state and corporations have become god, and the gods have become fantasy.
Postmodernism has even seeped into the WLHP to a great extent. For example, with the identification of the Christian entity Satan with all sorts of beings that have no correlation to him. The Satanist who says that The Devil is Setesh, the Serpent, Prometheus, or any other such deity is placing objective reality on the backburner in favor of a popular cultural meme - that all these beings are Satan, despite their histories, characteristics, mythologies, etc. It is Postmodernism which allows certain groups from the late 1900s to claim absurd things like being the first and only Satanists with no regard for objective reality, or which allows organizations to claim the title of Romantic Satanists when their values and acts fly in the face of that literary movement. It's why people who think they are on the WLHP can still fall for things like Physicalism against all evidence and reason. It's how occultists can create completely made up identities for themselves that, even after being exposed as fraudulent, are still parroted blindly by their followers. And in a wider sense it applies to modern polytheism overall, where new age, fluff bunny occultists come in changing polytheism to monotheism, or saying all male and female goddesses are just a manifestation of duo-theism. There is no escaping Postmodern irrationality.
Our symbols of the divine, of deeper spiritual meanings and truths, of a reality beyond this one, have all been replaced with corporate logos, meme templates, and easter eggs. Like me, many others also have altars in every room of the house, their altars are simply shrines to brands, consumer content, companies, political parties, famous actors, etc. The utility of an object no longer defines it, but instead it is the fabricated social status a thing is supposed to create, such as an uncomfortable designer chair being ten times the cost of a more comfortable and practical one. If your car can reliably get you place to place, but isn’t sporting the right hood ornament, or a fresh coat of paint, all the fancy add ons and a high floor price, then the object simply is not as valuable as if it had these entirely unnecessary things, and therefore the individual themselves is judged as less valuable. Two identical shirts can vary in price by hundreds of dollars based solely on the name printed on the tag inside. All of these values are entirely manufactured and completely detached from objective reality.
Perhaps worst of all is that people and objects have become harder to tell apart, as best exemplified with celebrities. They are fake people with false personalities who we are supposed to see as the ideal human beings. All of their flaws are edited and filtered out, and then we are condemned for not being on par. To postmodern companies, the individual is literally just an object to be used as a means to an end, a cog in a machine rather than an individual with needs, goals, drives, etc. Politicians are themselves celebrities now, and I do not only mean literal actors running for office, but rather that people cheer for them like they do a rock star, consume their media like it is a drug, defend them as if they were their favorite comic character… What gives these politicians and celebrities their power? An association with the new system of symbols and objects of value, the system which disregards reality all together in order to encourage things like Consumerism and obedience.
Postmodernism has an influence over almost every aspect of our lives. It encourages people to believe any fleeting thing they want, or more often are told to want, is of foremost importance or value. It allows constant advertising to empty us of any "inconvenient" meaning or value and fill the void with Consumerism and material things, or to fill it with work lives that are ultimately pointless and amount to nothing more than some conceptual material wage (money itself not even being "real"). The value of objects defines and overtakes the value of the individual. A disregard for objectivity means a disregard for the scientific method itself, allowing science to become a process of authoritarianism at worst and democracy at best, a process of media propaganda rather than a quest for truth. Whatever facts benefit the high-object-value people and the symbols they associate with are true, and facts which do not are false, being able to change at the drop of a hat as needed.
Postmodernism is clearly the natural outcome of our move from profound reality to a fabricated simulation of reality created to control, stifle, and subdue human beings… an immoral and dangerous metaphysics too blind to see that without any objective reality nobody can ever be correct, including themselves.

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42yKCnUBa0
Jean Baudrillard, a famous writer on the topic of “postmodernism,” explained postmodernism by means of four stages that symbols and objects have progressed through.
Stage 1: “Basic reflection of reality.” Here, symbols and objects attempt to create an objective reflection of reality. For example a chair is made to be sat on and is valuable if it fulfills its purpose, and a shirt is valuable if it covers your skin. The symbols, stories, myths, etc. of our ancestors were an attempt to describe reality as best they could (agree with the results or not). A symbol or image of a god was meant to represent an objectively existent force in reality. Here I see a comparison to very early Polytheism and the Stellar Tradition, where we accepted the objective, dualistic and spiritual nature of reality, the existence of the gods, and so on, with very complex systems that understood reality itself is complex. Inherently this can only ever be, at best, an attempt at metaphysical knowledge about reality, but it is an honest attempt.
Stage 2: "Perversion of reality.” Here the relationship between value and objective reality begins to shift, for example a chair may still serve its primary function, but be more valuable if made with a rare material, by someone of note, and/or for someone of great importance. There may be no practical difference between the stage 1 and stage 2 chairs, and yet the stage 2 chair is given more value. Symbols (perhaps most famously the serpent) are also twisted, for example as a means to control people, or even by demonizing all gods and saying there is only One True God. The complexity of reality is ignored, in favor of a simple “good vs. evil” breakdown, where everything is either Godly or Demonic. The comparison here is the SolaAgricultural tradition and, especially, Monotheism. There is an acceptance of some sort of reality, but that reality is twisted intentionally, whether that be to control people, confuse them, or anything of the sort.
Stage 3: “Pretense of reality.” Here we have the appearance of reality, but much more of a detachment from it. The idea that gods are "just archetypes," or that magic is “just psychology,” illustrate this, along with Physicalism at large. People pretend these are the totality of reality, of which they consider themselves to be the "true seekers," but in the end they outright ignore the most important aspects of our reality. Christian Nationalism is another illustration, where leaders outright lie and fabricate history under the pretense of truth, such as the U.S. being founded as a Christian nation. Objects mainly have value thanks to Materialism and Consumerism, not to mention advertising, and the rejection of higher reality makes such things easier to fall for.
Stage 4: "Bears no relation to any reality whatsoever." This is what may be called "postmodernism," total detachment from reality. An very worrying illustration is the democratization of science, where politics and public opinion now hold as much (or more) sway as empirical evidence (with strict empiricism or “scientism” already falling under "stage 3,” since there are so many other forms of knowledge than empirical knowledge.). Here, a shirt or chair like from stage 1 may be significantly less valuable than an identical shirt or chair endorsed by a famous celebrity. We all know politicians lie when they make promises and yet cheer any time they make one anyways. Our symbols only represent our made up realities: watered-down Christianized ideology such as we see running rampant in polytheistic revival, or modern pop-cultural fictions and multiverses, for example.
Baudrillard gives the example of Main Street at Disney Parks. Not only do we spend more time and money on these fabrications than reality (e.g. replacing the gods on our altars with Disney stuff), but our very differentiation between the "real world" and "Disney world" is a delusion. Disneyland is part of the “real world”. There is no inner child to most adults which is in hiding and in need of release, rather they are very outwardly children yet still wield great power. The world is childish and run by mental and spiritual children. The "perfect world" of Disney is still draining your so-called "real" money (which itself belongs to stage 3, as paper money has no objective value).How often do we obsess over the lives and stories of fictional people, such as families in TV shows, meant purely as consumer content? Even I am guilty of this. Our biggest "influencers" are literal morons on terrible platforms, platforms which encourage us to pretend our true selves are only the best moments we choose to share online.
Stage 5: To these 4 stages I propose adding a 5th in the 21st century: “replacement of reality.” Artificial intelligence, virtual and alternate realities, one of the most recent symbols of status at the time of writing this is the new Apple headset, costing thousands of dollars, people just walking around and existing in a totally manufactured reality, one which will inevitably be shaped by those in positions of power and wealth. The popularity of fake news also may deserve ranking in this new, 5th stage, perhaps even something like plastic surgery.
It is important to note that I do not believe we necessarily pass linearly through these stages. For example there are currently people whose beliefs and practices conform to any one of these 4+ stages, or they fit different stages depending on the context.
Morality is another way to look at the stages, and for this I will use the modern example of the debate on abortion. In stage 1, morality is a quest for objective truth, so for instance with abortion we would realize that the issue is objectively complicated.
In stage 2, morality is twisted to fit the reality promoted by those in power, so for us this would be that abortion is always wrong. They still believe in an objective morality in theory, but twist and simplify that morality.
Stage 3 brings us Moral Relativism, whether abortion is right or wrong depends on who you ask, what culture you were raised in, etc. There is no objective morality, but this itself is an objective truth in a way. This is opposed to the second stage Monotheists who believe abortion is objectively wrong all together, or first stage folks who know the topic can be more complicated than black and white. Basically whatever the culture says is moral, is. Whatever morals the Relativist has, they do not believe them to be more correct than any other morals.
Finally in stage 4+, morality is completely dependent on what those in power (politicians, corporations, influencers, etc.) say is moral. It's a warped form of Moral Relativism, really. This individual believes that morals are relative, but not to culture or anything of the sort. Instead, morals are relative to whatever suits them best at the time, and whatever they are told by "authorities" of high symbol/object value. They do not believe the values and morals of others are equally valid to theirs (stage 3), nor do their actions suggest any belief in a consistent objective morality, warped or otherwise (stage 1 and 2). Instead, their morals are relative to whatever their own pseudo-reality is, whatever is to their benefit, and this itself mainly stems from the aforementioned authorities. And note that someone may be, say, a stage 2 monotheist when it comes to religion, but a stage 4 on morality, and so on.
"Whataboutism" is another illustration of moral Postmodern manipulation. Say a person is telling you how evil the current president of the U.S. is because they do X. You ask, "what about the fact that your favorite president did X too, were they also evil?" The Postmodernist will then say you are engaging in "whataboutism." To one who accepts Moral Realism it is immediately clear why the question is valid though: the answer determines if the person is truly opposed to X or simply using it against those they don’t like, special pleading. Postmodernists simply believe whatever they need or want to at the time to support their own biases, not that X is actually immoral.
Our paper money is another example of stage 3, “pretense of reality.” The paper money system is entirely theoretical, in reality the paper is worth very, very little. It's just tied to this conceptual system that, were it to be cast aside, would make all cash meaningless paper. Stage 1 would be things like services, sustenance, shelter, useful things, symbols that were thought to impact reality, etc., objective things all people need. Stage 2 is illustrated by gold, we give it meaning beyond what it has, but it's a real thing with a limited amount of it in the world, you cannot get trillions in debt just printing new gold into existence as with stage 3 cash. And for stage 4+, what better example than NFTs and Bitcoin, or views, likes, and upvotes?
Social media gives us insight into the world of stage 4 / Postmodernism. All the big-name forums or social media platforms, as well as many smaller ones, are oversaturated with advertisements, these new religious symbols and their new valuable objects, to the point where advertisers choose which platforms or outlets survive and which crash and burn. Whole sites wield the power to silence dissenters of whichever ideologies they find unappealing. In many cases people are extremely limited in the number of characters they can use at once, making true discourse impossible. People live entirely fake lives to instill jealousy in others, who go on to lie to themselves and others as well, and groupthink is encouraged through voting systems which create hiveminds and drive out any independent thought. All these fit with Baudrillard’s fourth stage - none of this is reality. Consumerism is objectively less valuable than individuation and freedom, it is not a valid way to live life, it only wastes life, time, and resources. Human thought is not limited by a character count, this does not describe reality in any way, instead creating a new "reality" where any idea longer than a few sentences is a "word salad" and cannot hold one's attention. There are fewer and fewer "great thinkers," and they are not the ones being heard and viewed. The endless, manufactured, touched up selfies, vacations wasted taking pictures instead of living, time lost in the imagery rather than the real event - this is not objective reality. It not only rejects reality but twists and perverts it, replacing it with a manufactured (simulated) one.
Cancel culture is another unfortunate offspring of Postmodernist thought. Due to the power held and used by the creators and maintainers of all these stage 4 images and objects, "reality" is now defined by such entities. A famous actor was fired from all his roles including a massive franchise on mere accusations of abuse, before the crimes were even brought to court (where it turned out things were not so clear cut). If it can happen to a rich, beloved movie star, imagine what could happen to you. I am not suggesting you feel bad for a billionaire who helps fabricate reality, nor do I believe we have a great and trustworthy justice system in place. All I want to illustrate is how a mere accusation led to guilt and punishment because corporations and the more popular political party said they were guilty, and culture followed blindly, before it even reached the justice system at all. Even in cases where someone ends up being guilty, they cannot be found guilty before investigation and judgment. But this does not matter in a world where reality is whatever is most popular at the time.
All forms of media contribute to this, there is no longer any reality in culture outside of the images and realities created for us, created to distract us from this disturbing rejection of reality. Games, shows, movies, children’s content, fiction and non-fiction works, governments, news outlets… not every single individual instance of these may be wholly negative, but the positive ones are becoming more and more rare. I’ve found an interesting source of philosophy on this matter in the poetry of Jim Morrison, famously known as the singer of The Doors, whose father was all too familiar with the fabrication of reality. Morrison wrote about how the powers that be use content from films to museums (where we simulate history) and everything in between to blind citizens to their power over us, our values, even our own meanings regarding life. He feared that humans had become simple spectators, staring blankly into the screen, letting it write their reality for them. He even predicted the "meta" nature of our modern culture, where everything has become self-referential, filled with cameos and easter eggs, dead actors resurrected and old ones de-aged, because media-created reality is now the only reality. All it can reference is itself, lest it shatter the illusion or acknowledge reality. Just look at how our culture cannot even create new content, just remakes, sequels, shared universes, etc.
"There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all the books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence… We are content with the “given” in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark." - Jim Morrison
Another great example of postmodernism is the idea of secularism, that we can separate the public from the religious, or that there are actually people who have no religion whatsoever. This rejects the reality that religion applies to many aspects of life, that someone who is non-theistic or simply “spiritual” still is often religious. For example we can look to sports, where all sorts of weird rituals and ceremonies take place that have nothing to do with the layman understanding of religion, gods, the divine, etc, but are studied as such by religious scholars nonetheless. It can even tie back to the Disneyland example, such as how we pretend America is a secular country, or delude ourselves into thinking the hateful Atheism of France (or places like the USSR before it) is somehow not its own form of religion. In stage 1 we recognized there was no separating the spiritual and religious from daily life. Stage 2 keeps this mostly in place but twists it to fit monotheism. It's not until stage 3 that this really changes to keeping religion “private,” and stage 4 flips the whole thing on its head to where the state and corporations have become god, and the gods have become fantasy.
Postmodernism has even seeped into the WLHP to a great extent. For example, with the identification of the Christian entity Satan with all sorts of beings that have no correlation to him. The Satanist who says that The Devil is Setesh, the Serpent, Prometheus, or any other such deity is placing objective reality on the backburner in favor of a popular cultural meme - that all these beings are Satan, despite their histories, characteristics, mythologies, etc. It is Postmodernism which allows certain groups from the late 1900s to claim absurd things like being the first and only Satanists with no regard for objective reality, or which allows organizations to claim the title of Romantic Satanists when their values and acts fly in the face of that literary movement. It's why people who think they are on the WLHP can still fall for things like Physicalism against all evidence and reason. It's how occultists can create completely made up identities for themselves that, even after being exposed as fraudulent, are still parroted blindly by their followers. And in a wider sense it applies to modern polytheism overall, where new age, fluff bunny occultists come in changing polytheism to monotheism, or saying all male and female goddesses are just a manifestation of duo-theism. There is no escaping Postmodern irrationality.
Our symbols of the divine, of deeper spiritual meanings and truths, of a reality beyond this one, have all been replaced with corporate logos, meme templates, and easter eggs. Like me, many others also have altars in every room of the house, their altars are simply shrines to brands, consumer content, companies, political parties, famous actors, etc. The utility of an object no longer defines it, but instead it is the fabricated social status a thing is supposed to create, such as an uncomfortable designer chair being ten times the cost of a more comfortable and practical one. If your car can reliably get you place to place, but isn’t sporting the right hood ornament, or a fresh coat of paint, all the fancy add ons and a high floor price, then the object simply is not as valuable as if it had these entirely unnecessary things, and therefore the individual themselves is judged as less valuable. Two identical shirts can vary in price by hundreds of dollars based solely on the name printed on the tag inside. All of these values are entirely manufactured and completely detached from objective reality.
Perhaps worst of all is that people and objects have become harder to tell apart, as best exemplified with celebrities. They are fake people with false personalities who we are supposed to see as the ideal human beings. All of their flaws are edited and filtered out, and then we are condemned for not being on par. To postmodern companies, the individual is literally just an object to be used as a means to an end, a cog in a machine rather than an individual with needs, goals, drives, etc. Politicians are themselves celebrities now, and I do not only mean literal actors running for office, but rather that people cheer for them like they do a rock star, consume their media like it is a drug, defend them as if they were their favorite comic character… What gives these politicians and celebrities their power? An association with the new system of symbols and objects of value, the system which disregards reality all together in order to encourage things like Consumerism and obedience.
Postmodernism has an influence over almost every aspect of our lives. It encourages people to believe any fleeting thing they want, or more often are told to want, is of foremost importance or value. It allows constant advertising to empty us of any "inconvenient" meaning or value and fill the void with Consumerism and material things, or to fill it with work lives that are ultimately pointless and amount to nothing more than some conceptual material wage (money itself not even being "real"). The value of objects defines and overtakes the value of the individual. A disregard for objectivity means a disregard for the scientific method itself, allowing science to become a process of authoritarianism at worst and democracy at best, a process of media propaganda rather than a quest for truth. Whatever facts benefit the high-object-value people and the symbols they associate with are true, and facts which do not are false, being able to change at the drop of a hat as needed.
Postmodernism is clearly the natural outcome of our move from profound reality to a fabricated simulation of reality created to control, stifle, and subdue human beings… an immoral and dangerous metaphysics too blind to see that without any objective reality nobody can ever be correct, including themselves.

Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42yKCnUBa0
Jean Baudrillard, a famous writer on the topic of “postmodernism,” explained postmodernism by means of four stages that symbols and objects have progressed through.
Stage 1: “Basic reflection of reality.” Here, symbols and objects attempt to create an objective reflection of reality. For example a chair is made to be sat on and is valuable if it fulfills its purpose, and a shirt is valuable if it covers your skin. The symbols, stories, myths, etc. of our ancestors were an attempt to describe reality as best they could (agree with the results or not). A symbol or image of a god was meant to represent an objectively existent force in reality. Here I see a comparison to very early Polytheism and the Stellar Tradition, where we accepted the objective, dualistic and spiritual nature of reality, the existence of the gods, and so on, with very complex systems that understood reality itself is complex. Inherently this can only ever be, at best, an attempt at metaphysical knowledge about reality, but it is an honest attempt.
Stage 2: "Perversion of reality.” Here the relationship between value and objective reality begins to shift, for example a chair may still serve its primary function, but be more valuable if made with a rare material, by someone of note, and/or for someone of great importance. There may be no practical difference between the stage 1 and stage 2 chairs, and yet the stage 2 chair is given more value. Symbols (perhaps most famously the serpent) are also twisted, for example as a means to control people, or even by demonizing all gods and saying there is only One True God. The complexity of reality is ignored, in favor of a simple “good vs. evil” breakdown, where everything is either Godly or Demonic. The comparison here is the SolaAgricultural tradition and, especially, Monotheism. There is an acceptance of some sort of reality, but that reality is twisted intentionally, whether that be to control people, confuse them, or anything of the sort.
Stage 3: “Pretense of reality.” Here we have the appearance of reality, but much more of a detachment from it. The idea that gods are "just archetypes," or that magic is “just psychology,” illustrate this, along with Physicalism at large. People pretend these are the totality of reality, of which they consider themselves to be the "true seekers," but in the end they outright ignore the most important aspects of our reality. Christian Nationalism is another illustration, where leaders outright lie and fabricate history under the pretense of truth, such as the U.S. being founded as a Christian nation. Objects mainly have value thanks to Materialism and Consumerism, not to mention advertising, and the rejection of higher reality makes such things easier to fall for.
Stage 4: "Bears no relation to any reality whatsoever." This is what may be called "postmodernism," total detachment from reality. An very worrying illustration is the democratization of science, where politics and public opinion now hold as much (or more) sway as empirical evidence (with strict empiricism or “scientism” already falling under "stage 3,” since there are so many other forms of knowledge than empirical knowledge.). Here, a shirt or chair like from stage 1 may be significantly less valuable than an identical shirt or chair endorsed by a famous celebrity. We all know politicians lie when they make promises and yet cheer any time they make one anyways. Our symbols only represent our made up realities: watered-down Christianized ideology such as we see running rampant in polytheistic revival, or modern pop-cultural fictions and multiverses, for example.
Baudrillard gives the example of Main Street at Disney Parks. Not only do we spend more time and money on these fabrications than reality (e.g. replacing the gods on our altars with Disney stuff), but our very differentiation between the "real world" and "Disney world" is a delusion. Disneyland is part of the “real world”. There is no inner child to most adults which is in hiding and in need of release, rather they are very outwardly children yet still wield great power. The world is childish and run by mental and spiritual children. The "perfect world" of Disney is still draining your so-called "real" money (which itself belongs to stage 3, as paper money has no objective value).How often do we obsess over the lives and stories of fictional people, such as families in TV shows, meant purely as consumer content? Even I am guilty of this. Our biggest "influencers" are literal morons on terrible platforms, platforms which encourage us to pretend our true selves are only the best moments we choose to share online.
Stage 5: To these 4 stages I propose adding a 5th in the 21st century: “replacement of reality.” Artificial intelligence, virtual and alternate realities, one of the most recent symbols of status at the time of writing this is the new Apple headset, costing thousands of dollars, people just walking around and existing in a totally manufactured reality, one which will inevitably be shaped by those in positions of power and wealth. The popularity of fake news also may deserve ranking in this new, 5th stage, perhaps even something like plastic surgery.
It is important to note that I do not believe we necessarily pass linearly through these stages. For example there are currently people whose beliefs and practices conform to any one of these 4+ stages, or they fit different stages depending on the context.
Morality is another way to look at the stages, and for this I will use the modern example of the debate on abortion. In stage 1, morality is a quest for objective truth, so for instance with abortion we would realize that the issue is objectively complicated.
In stage 2, morality is twisted to fit the reality promoted by those in power, so for us this would be that abortion is always wrong. They still believe in an objective morality in theory, but twist and simplify that morality.
Stage 3 brings us Moral Relativism, whether abortion is right or wrong depends on who you ask, what culture you were raised in, etc. There is no objective morality, but this itself is an objective truth in a way. This is opposed to the second stage Monotheists who believe abortion is objectively wrong all together, or first stage folks who know the topic can be more complicated than black and white. Basically whatever the culture says is moral, is. Whatever morals the Relativist has, they do not believe them to be more correct than any other morals.
Finally in stage 4+, morality is completely dependent on what those in power (politicians, corporations, influencers, etc.) say is moral. It's a warped form of Moral Relativism, really. This individual believes that morals are relative, but not to culture or anything of the sort. Instead, morals are relative to whatever suits them best at the time, and whatever they are told by "authorities" of high symbol/object value. They do not believe the values and morals of others are equally valid to theirs (stage 3), nor do their actions suggest any belief in a consistent objective morality, warped or otherwise (stage 1 and 2). Instead, their morals are relative to whatever their own pseudo-reality is, whatever is to their benefit, and this itself mainly stems from the aforementioned authorities. And note that someone may be, say, a stage 2 monotheist when it comes to religion, but a stage 4 on morality, and so on.
"Whataboutism" is another illustration of moral Postmodern manipulation. Say a person is telling you how evil the current president of the U.S. is because they do X. You ask, "what about the fact that your favorite president did X too, were they also evil?" The Postmodernist will then say you are engaging in "whataboutism." To one who accepts Moral Realism it is immediately clear why the question is valid though: the answer determines if the person is truly opposed to X or simply using it against those they don’t like, special pleading. Postmodernists simply believe whatever they need or want to at the time to support their own biases, not that X is actually immoral.
Our paper money is another example of stage 3, “pretense of reality.” The paper money system is entirely theoretical, in reality the paper is worth very, very little. It's just tied to this conceptual system that, were it to be cast aside, would make all cash meaningless paper. Stage 1 would be things like services, sustenance, shelter, useful things, symbols that were thought to impact reality, etc., objective things all people need. Stage 2 is illustrated by gold, we give it meaning beyond what it has, but it's a real thing with a limited amount of it in the world, you cannot get trillions in debt just printing new gold into existence as with stage 3 cash. And for stage 4+, what better example than NFTs and Bitcoin, or views, likes, and upvotes?
Social media gives us insight into the world of stage 4 / Postmodernism. All the big-name forums or social media platforms, as well as many smaller ones, are oversaturated with advertisements, these new religious symbols and their new valuable objects, to the point where advertisers choose which platforms or outlets survive and which crash and burn. Whole sites wield the power to silence dissenters of whichever ideologies they find unappealing. In many cases people are extremely limited in the number of characters they can use at once, making true discourse impossible. People live entirely fake lives to instill jealousy in others, who go on to lie to themselves and others as well, and groupthink is encouraged through voting systems which create hiveminds and drive out any independent thought. All these fit with Baudrillard’s fourth stage - none of this is reality. Consumerism is objectively less valuable than individuation and freedom, it is not a valid way to live life, it only wastes life, time, and resources. Human thought is not limited by a character count, this does not describe reality in any way, instead creating a new "reality" where any idea longer than a few sentences is a "word salad" and cannot hold one's attention. There are fewer and fewer "great thinkers," and they are not the ones being heard and viewed. The endless, manufactured, touched up selfies, vacations wasted taking pictures instead of living, time lost in the imagery rather than the real event - this is not objective reality. It not only rejects reality but twists and perverts it, replacing it with a manufactured (simulated) one.
Cancel culture is another unfortunate offspring of Postmodernist thought. Due to the power held and used by the creators and maintainers of all these stage 4 images and objects, "reality" is now defined by such entities. A famous actor was fired from all his roles including a massive franchise on mere accusations of abuse, before the crimes were even brought to court (where it turned out things were not so clear cut). If it can happen to a rich, beloved movie star, imagine what could happen to you. I am not suggesting you feel bad for a billionaire who helps fabricate reality, nor do I believe we have a great and trustworthy justice system in place. All I want to illustrate is how a mere accusation led to guilt and punishment because corporations and the more popular political party said they were guilty, and culture followed blindly, before it even reached the justice system at all. Even in cases where someone ends up being guilty, they cannot be found guilty before investigation and judgment. But this does not matter in a world where reality is whatever is most popular at the time.
All forms of media contribute to this, there is no longer any reality in culture outside of the images and realities created for us, created to distract us from this disturbing rejection of reality. Games, shows, movies, children’s content, fiction and non-fiction works, governments, news outlets… not every single individual instance of these may be wholly negative, but the positive ones are becoming more and more rare. I’ve found an interesting source of philosophy on this matter in the poetry of Jim Morrison, famously known as the singer of The Doors, whose father was all too familiar with the fabrication of reality. Morrison wrote about how the powers that be use content from films to museums (where we simulate history) and everything in between to blind citizens to their power over us, our values, even our own meanings regarding life. He feared that humans had become simple spectators, staring blankly into the screen, letting it write their reality for them. He even predicted the "meta" nature of our modern culture, where everything has become self-referential, filled with cameos and easter eggs, dead actors resurrected and old ones de-aged, because media-created reality is now the only reality. All it can reference is itself, lest it shatter the illusion or acknowledge reality. Just look at how our culture cannot even create new content, just remakes, sequels, shared universes, etc.
"There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all the books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence… We are content with the “given” in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark." - Jim Morrison
Another great example of postmodernism is the idea of secularism, that we can separate the public from the religious, or that there are actually people who have no religion whatsoever. This rejects the reality that religion applies to many aspects of life, that someone who is non-theistic or simply “spiritual” still is often religious. For example we can look to sports, where all sorts of weird rituals and ceremonies take place that have nothing to do with the layman understanding of religion, gods, the divine, etc, but are studied as such by religious scholars nonetheless. It can even tie back to the Disneyland example, such as how we pretend America is a secular country, or delude ourselves into thinking the hateful Atheism of France (or places like the USSR before it) is somehow not its own form of religion. In stage 1 we recognized there was no separating the spiritual and religious from daily life. Stage 2 keeps this mostly in place but twists it to fit monotheism. It's not until stage 3 that this really changes to keeping religion “private,” and stage 4 flips the whole thing on its head to where the state and corporations have become god, and the gods have become fantasy.
Postmodernism has even seeped into the WLHP to a great extent. For example, with the identification of the Christian entity Satan with all sorts of beings that have no correlation to him. The Satanist who says that The Devil is Setesh, the Serpent, Prometheus, or any other such deity is placing objective reality on the backburner in favor of a popular cultural meme - that all these beings are Satan, despite their histories, characteristics, mythologies, etc. It is Postmodernism which allows certain groups from the late 1900s to claim absurd things like being the first and only Satanists with no regard for objective reality, or which allows organizations to claim the title of Romantic Satanists when their values and acts fly in the face of that literary movement. It's why people who think they are on the WLHP can still fall for things like Physicalism against all evidence and reason. It's how occultists can create completely made up identities for themselves that, even after being exposed as fraudulent, are still parroted blindly by their followers. And in a wider sense it applies to modern polytheism overall, where new age, fluff bunny occultists come in changing polytheism to monotheism, or saying all male and female goddesses are just a manifestation of duo-theism. There is no escaping Postmodern irrationality.
Our symbols of the divine, of deeper spiritual meanings and truths, of a reality beyond this one, have all been replaced with corporate logos, meme templates, and easter eggs. Like me, many others also have altars in every room of the house, their altars are simply shrines to brands, consumer content, companies, political parties, famous actors, etc. The utility of an object no longer defines it, but instead it is the fabricated social status a thing is supposed to create, such as an uncomfortable designer chair being ten times the cost of a more comfortable and practical one. If your car can reliably get you place to place, but isn’t sporting the right hood ornament, or a fresh coat of paint, all the fancy add ons and a high floor price, then the object simply is not as valuable as if it had these entirely unnecessary things, and therefore the individual themselves is judged as less valuable. Two identical shirts can vary in price by hundreds of dollars based solely on the name printed on the tag inside. All of these values are entirely manufactured and completely detached from objective reality.
Perhaps worst of all is that people and objects have become harder to tell apart, as best exemplified with celebrities. They are fake people with false personalities who we are supposed to see as the ideal human beings. All of their flaws are edited and filtered out, and then we are condemned for not being on par. To postmodern companies, the individual is literally just an object to be used as a means to an end, a cog in a machine rather than an individual with needs, goals, drives, etc. Politicians are themselves celebrities now, and I do not only mean literal actors running for office, but rather that people cheer for them like they do a rock star, consume their media like it is a drug, defend them as if they were their favorite comic character… What gives these politicians and celebrities their power? An association with the new system of symbols and objects of value, the system which disregards reality all together in order to encourage things like Consumerism and obedience.
Postmodernism has an influence over almost every aspect of our lives. It encourages people to believe any fleeting thing they want, or more often are told to want, is of foremost importance or value. It allows constant advertising to empty us of any "inconvenient" meaning or value and fill the void with Consumerism and material things, or to fill it with work lives that are ultimately pointless and amount to nothing more than some conceptual material wage (money itself not even being "real"). The value of objects defines and overtakes the value of the individual. A disregard for objectivity means a disregard for the scientific method itself, allowing science to become a process of authoritarianism at worst and democracy at best, a process of media propaganda rather than a quest for truth. Whatever facts benefit the high-object-value people and the symbols they associate with are true, and facts which do not are false, being able to change at the drop of a hat as needed.
Postmodernism is clearly the natural outcome of our move from profound reality to a fabricated simulation of reality created to control, stifle, and subdue human beings… an immoral and dangerous metaphysics too blind to see that without any objective reality nobody can ever be correct, including themselves.

As we wrap up our in-depth journey through the maze of "Zombie Leadership," it’s been an enlightening exploration, inspired by the groundbreaking study "Zombie Leadership: Dead Ideas that Still Walk Among Us" by S. Alexander Haslam, Mats Alvesson, and Stephen D. Reicher, published in The Leadership Quarterly in January 2024. This series has not only shone a light on the undead practices lurking within our organizations but has also challenged us to confront these archaic norms that stifle innovation, promote inequality, and undermine ethical standards.
Throughout this series, we've dissected the concept of "Zombie Leadership" — those leadership practices and beliefs that, despite being outdated and ineffective, continue to dominate our work environments. These practices linger like ghosts, haunting our decision-making processes, culture, and ultimately, our effectiveness. The study by Haslam, Alvesson, and Reicher meticulously outlines how these relics of the past continue to impact our organizations negatively, propagating a cycle of stagnation and exclusion.
But the journey doesn’t end here. It's a call to action for all of us. The future of leadership demands agility, inclusivity, and a foundation built on evidence-based practices. It challenges us to scrutinize our beliefs and methods critically, to ensure they're not merely echoes of an outdated past but are instead vibrant, living principles that propel us forward.
Taking Action: Identify one specific leadership practice you currently employ or observe in your organization that might be considered a "Zombie" practice. Reflect on its impacts and consider modern, research-backed alternatives that could replace it. How can you implement these changes to foster a more dynamic, inclusive, and innovative environment?
This is more than just about shedding outdated practices; it's about embracing a leadership style that is resilient, ethical, and adaptable to the challenges of the 21st century. It's about creating workplaces where everyone is valued, where diversity is not just tolerated but celebrated, and where innovation thrives.
As this series concludes, I invite you to join me in this transformational journey. Let's commit to being the leaders who not only navigate but also shape the future with vision, compassion, and integrity. If you’re looking for support, strategies, and a community to guide you through transforming your leadership approach, you’re in the right place.
For those keen to dive deeper into the research that inspired this series, check out the full study here: Zombie Leadership: Dead Ideas that Still Walk Among Us - https://vist.ly/vttc
This isn’t just the end of a series; it’s the beginning of a leadership revolution. Let’s make it count.

In August 1891, William T. Lynn, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and member of the British Astronomical Association, wrote a letter to the editors of the Observatory (a journal devoted to astronomy) concerning Assyrian eclipses. In his letter, he related the following:
"But two, if not three, eclipses (of the Sun) do really appear to be recorded in the Assyrian inscriptions. The first of these occurred in B.C. 763 on the 15th of June, and was total in or near Nineveh. There appears no reason to doubt that it is mentioned in the Assyrian so-called 'Eponym Canon,' which was interpreted by Sir Henry Rawlinson in 1862, from the fragments of terra-cotta tablets brought over by Sir A. H. Layard and placed in the British Museum. The inscription in question states (as kindly translated for me by Mr. T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum) that in the "Eponymy of Bur-sagale, governor of Gozan, a revolt in Ashur (the city) took place in the month Sivan and the Sun was eclipsed." This, according to the Canon, was in the eighth year of the reign of Assur-day-an, and the record must be allowed to fix subsequent dates in the Canon with great precision. For although Oppert, by assuming a lacuna of 46 years in it, endeavored to identify the eclipse with the annular one of June 13th, B.C. 809, there seems little ground for this or doubt that the view of George Smith is correct, and the eclipse the total one of June 15th, B.C. 763."
Assigning the solar eclipse in the Eponymy of Bur-sagale to the year 763 B.C.E. established the anchor date for the chronology of the Neo-Assyrian period. Lynn stated the eclipse was then fixed to the eighth year; however, it appears in the canon published by Smith in the ninth year - perhaps a lapse in memory. Professor Julius Oppert maintained that there was a break in the canon because he recognized a conflict with the Biblical records and concluded that the eclipse of 809 B.C.E. was the correct one. That Oppert held this opinion, of 46 missing years, is also confirmed by George Smith on page 75 in his book, "The Assyrian Eponym Canon," which he published 16 years before Lynn wrote his letter to the editors of the Observatory.
Moreover, neither Smith nor Lynn were willing to accept Oppert's opinion that 46 years were missing from the canon. Trying to add back 46 years in a single place in the canon was more than they were willing to attempt. Nevertheless, when the Biblical chronology is aligned to the accepted chronology (using 539 B.C.E.), 46 years are missing from the Assyrian and Babylonian periods, but certainly not in one place. Within the cannon, only 15 years are missing between the reigns of Ashur-nerari V and Tiglath-Pileser III. An additional ten years are missing in the post-canonical period from the reign of Ashurbanipal after the reign of Samas-suma-ukin and before the reign of Kandalanu, during which time Ashurbanipal ruled over Babylon. Another 21 years are missing from the Neo-Babylonian period, after the death of Labashi-Marduk and before the reign of Nabonidus, during which time Belshazzer exercised military control without being officially acknowledged as king. These are the 46 missing years, but not the 46 missing years Oppert thought should have been added back into the canon in one place (for more specific information, see the articles "Interregnum" and "Eponymen").
Therefore, the eclipse of June 13th, 809 B.C.E., is the one that occurred in the Eponymy of Bur-sagale. Oppert was correct but unable to understand where the chronological errors actually were, and Lynn and Smith were right to reject Oppert's opinion, but only because he proposed to add back 46 years in a single place in the canon. Nevertheless, the anchor date of June 15th, 763 B.C.E., for the Neo-Assyrian empire is wrong. Additionally, a lunar eclipse occurred in the eponym of Mutakkil-Marduk (Waterman Vol. 2, 1930:483, Letter 1406) on October 21, 844 B.C.E., 35 years prior to the solar eclipse in the eponym of Bur-Sagale.
Lynn's second reference to an Assyrian eclipse is also recorded in his letter and reads as follows:
"An eclipse is also mentioned in an Assyrian tablet in the British museum, which would seem to have occurred in the reign of Esar-haddon. Mr. Pinches thus translates the portion referring to the eclipse: - 'Since the king my Lord went to Egypt, an eclipse has taken place in the month of Tammuz [corresponding nearly to our own June]. . . . . . When I brought the account of the eclipse of the month Tammuz, I sent it away to the presence of the king.' It is very difficult to identify this eclipse with any resulting from calculation; the only conjecture I can make is that it may have been one which occurred on the 27th of May, B.C. 699, and was annular in India."
The only eclipse that matches the biblical chronology occurred on 8/6/-699 (700 B.C.E.), which was in Esarhaddon's twelfth year. According to the Esarhaddon Chronicle, which states, "The twelfth year: The king of Assyria marched to Egypt but became ill on the way and died on the tenth day of the month of Arahsamna." According to the report, the eclipse occurred in the month of Tammuz (June/July), which would have been after Esarhaddon marched toward Egypt but before he became ill and died on the tenth day of Arahsamna (OctobeNovember). Thus, Esarhaddon died shortly after the eclipse took place.
The accepted chronology assigns Esarhaddon's reign to the years 681-669 B.C.E., which includes his ascension year. In considering Lynn's second eclipse and searching through all the years of Esarhaddon's reign (according to the accepted chronology), the annular eclipse (seen as partial at Nineveh) of 6/17/-678 (679 B.C.E.) would be a candidate, except the eclipse occurs in the second year of his reign, which was five years before his first campaign to Egypt.
Esarhaddon's campaign against Arzâ, located at what is termed the "brook of Egypt," does not imply he campaigned in Egypt in his second year, because Arzâ was a separate city-state kingdom located at the southernmost end of Canaan and not in Egypt (see "The Brook of Egypt and Assyrian Policy on the Border of Egypt," Nadav Na'aman).
Lynn's suggestion for the second eclipse (that of the "27th of May, B.C. 699") must be a mistake for the 27th of May, B.C. 669 because there was no eclipse on the date he provided, in addition to it being displaced 30 years from the last year of Esarhaddon's reign. Nevertheless, the final part of the eclipse of 5/27/-668 (669 B.C.E.) was only visible above the horizon for 15 minutes and was over before reaching three degrees above the horizon. With the mountains partially obstructing the view and the sun being eclipsed only for a small fraction of its diameter at the bottom, it is unlikely to have been visible. Perhaps this was part of the reason Lynn stated, "It is very difficult to identify this eclipse with any resulting from calculation."
At this point, the only other option available for the advocates of the accepted chronology would be to look at the reign of another king who went to Egypt during an eclipse in the month of Tammuz. Ashurbanipal is the only alternative. His reign, according to the biblical chronology, is significantly different from that of the accepted chronology.
Ashurbanipal ruled Assyria from 699-652 B.C.E., with his first regnal year in 669 B.C.E., which is 48 years. The reason for the ten-year difference between the biblical chronology and the accepted chronology is because of the additional ten years (twelve total) he ruled Babylon after the reign of Samas-suma-ukin and before the reign of Kandalanu. Edwin Thiele created a coregency between Hezekiah and Manasseh in an attempt to synchronize the biblical chronology with the accepted chronology because he didn't know Asshurbanipal ruled Babylon for the ten additional years after he defeated Samas-suma-ukin.
The accepted chronology assigns Ashurbanipal's reign to the years 669-631 B.C.E., for a total of 38 years. Concerning the later part of his reign, Wikipedia makes the following statement:
"The end of Ashurbanipal's reign and the beginning of the reign of his son and successor, Ashur-etil-ilani, is shrouded in mystery on account of a lack of available sources."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashurbanipal
Additionally, it must be pointed out that there is a dispute concerning the reign of Ashurbanipal over whether he reigned for longer than 38 years. Wikipedia has concluded that Ashurbanipal's reign could not have exceeded 38 years.
"Inscriptions by Ashur-etil-ilani suggest that his father died a natural death, but do not shed light on when or how this happened. Though his final year is often erroneously given as 627 or even 626, this follows an estimate from an inscription written nearly a century later at Harran by Adad-guppi, the mother of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (r. 556–539). The final contemporary evidence for Ashurbanipal being alive and reigning as king is a contract from Nippur made in 631. If Ashurbanipal's reign had ended in 627 the inscriptions of his successors Ashur-etil-ilani and Sinsharishkun in Babylon (covering several years) would have been impossible, given that the city was seized by Nabopolassar in 626 and never again fell into Assyrian hands."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashurbanipal
However, the Biblical chronology demonstrates that ten years are missing from the post-canonical period, which reveals that Ashurbanipal ruled Babylon for ten additional years and reigned for 48 years. Because the proponents of the accepted chronology have not considered the Biblical chronology, they are divided among themselves with insuperable difficulties.
According to the accepted chronology, Ashurbanipal secured Egypt by 663 B.C.E., which was in the early part of his reign. He put down the rebellion that began in the last years of Esarhaddon. However, during Ashurbanipal's campaigns in Egypt, there was only one partial eclipse, which was visible at Niniveh on 8/27/-663 (664 B.C.E.), but it occurred in month six (Elul), where the criteria requires month four (Tammuz). The scribe did not provide the day of the month. The best case would place the eclipse 42 days late (relative to the months), and the worst case would be 72 days late, which would be difficult to account for. The eclipse of 8/6/-699 (700 B.C.E.), which agrees with the Biblical chronology for the last year of the reign of Esarhaddon, is only 21 days late in the best case, 51 days late in the worst case, and off nominal (the middle of the month) by 36 days, whereas the eclipse considered for the reign of Ashurbanipal is 57 days off nominal.
It is prudent to keep in mind that looking for an eclipse too far from the actual month stated in the report and attempting to justify it by assuming excess or missed intercalations beyond what is within reason will only increase the probability that the eclipse is the wrong one.
There are no other eclipses that merit consideration while Ashurbanipal campaigned in Egypt. Therefore, only the eclipse of 8/6/-699 (700 B.C.E.), which occurs in the twelveth year of Esarhaddon's reign (according to the biblical chronology), meets the required criteria with the least amount of difficulty, but only so long as the solution is sought within the reign of Esarhaddon.
In consideration of Lynn's statement regarding the eclipse, "which would seem to have occurred in the reign of Esar-haddon," and assuming that the reported eclipse is not firmly fixed to his reign, Ashurbanipal, unlike Esarhaddon, would have occasion to go to Egypt without prosecuting a military campaign. After Ashurbanipal regained control of Egypt, he installed Psammetichus as king and entered into a treaty with him. The eclipse of 6/17/-678 (679 B.C.E.), which took place in Ashurbanipal's 21st year (according to the Biblical chronology), occurred in the first year of his reign in Babylon after he defeated Samas-suma-ukin. This eclipse meets the required criteria, and, under the circumstances, the purpose of his visit could have been to reaffirm the terms of the treaty. The date of the eclipse falls almost exactly in the middle of the month of Tammuz, which is much closer than the eclipse on 8/6/-699 (700 B.C.E.) for the twelveth year of Esarhaddon. For this reason, and assuming the circumstances of the report do not require it to be placed in the reign of Esarhaddon, assigning the eclipse in the report to 6/17/-678 (679 B.C.E.) in the 21st year of Ashurbanipal is preferable because it falls within the middle of the month Tammuz and aligns with the political circumstances associated with the king going to Egypt.
Nevertheless, the report cannot be simultaneously associated with the reigns of both kings. Until there is evidence that the report is limited to the reign of Esarhaddon, the eclipse in the reign of Ashurbanipal is to be preferred. However, it is possible for the proponents of the accepted chronology to choose from several eclipses in the reign of Ashurbanipal (according to the accepted chronology) that would meet the criteria in the report. The eclipses on 6/27/-660 (661 B.C.E.) and 6/7/-650 (651 B.C.E.) are both options.
Lynn's third reference to an Assyrian solar eclipse involved some degree of controversy but was accepted as a valid eclipse after he made an inquiry to Theophilus Pinches, a member of the staff at the British Museum, who confirmed that the text did in fact describe an eclipse. Lynn related this information, in addition to other details, to the editors of the Observatory in his letter, which contained the following statement:
"The immediate successor of Esarhaddon was Asshur-bani-pal. An inscription made in his reign was interpreted by. Fox Talbot (see the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology, vol. i. pp. 13 and 348) to record the occurrence of an eclipse of the Sun, which, at the suggestion of Oppert, was supposed to have been that of the 27th of June, B.C. 661. The inscription, as translated by Talbot, states that it took place whilst the king of Elam was preparing an attack upon Assyria, and that 'for three days the evening Sun was darkened as on that day.' No eclipse of course could produce such an effect as this; but he suggests that 'it is not impossible that, in a very ignorant age, the report of such a wonder having happened in Susiana should be believed in Assyria, at the distance of many hundred miles, and have been chronicled by a superstitious scribe.' Revising, however, a record by a conjectural process of this kind is always a hazardous proceeding, and on reading it I felt doubtful whether an eclipse was really referred to in the inscription. But Mr. Pinches has kindly examined it again, and considers that the eclipse and the three days' darkness at evening are distinct occurrences, forebodings of evil to the king of Elam. He, thus, in fact translates the passage: - 'Te-umman devised evil, and Sin [the moon god] devised against him forebodings of evil. In Tammuz an eclipse at evening - he troubled the lord of light and the setting sun thus also for three days was troubled - it went forth for the end of the reign of the [king] of Elam. This [omen] was the announcement of his [i. e. the god's] decision, which changeth not.' Upon the whole, therefore, we may fairly conclude that the eclipse of June 27, B.C. 661, is really alluded to in this inscription."
Oppert was correct in identifying the eclipse of 6/27/-660 (661 B.C.E.), although he couldn't place it in the 39th year of Ashurbanipal without knowledge of the ten missing years (after the reign of Samas-suma-ukin) and the 21 missing years during the neo-Babylonian period (after the death of Labashi-Marduk).

I have a corny long-winded rant to share on why I feel this way:
Not Like Us has the potential to become the greatest diss track ever. It has the bop of California love, the hard-hitting lyrical mindset of a No Vaseline or Hit Em Up, while having quotables that fans catch on to using like Ether. F.A.N. is now becoming a pejorative just like how Nas made Stan popular after Eminem first used it. He flipped the 69 God thing on Certified Pedophile.
And it is going against not some random Compton jerkoff, not MGK, but one of the five defining hip hop artists of the 21st century who has tens of millions of listeners and fans and supporters. This is massively difficult and could have proven to be unpopular. And holy shit, he actually pulled it off.
He made Pusha T's assault on Aubrey look like a limp wristed punch. And Pusha T is an all time great MC with a decorated career and diss on Drake of his own. This month has been humiliating Drake in the process, to the point his career may have jumped the shark while doing even just damage control. God forbid even half the stuff Kendrick said is true regarding the Canadian.
The crazy part? Kendrick MIGHT HAVE MORE TO UNLOAD. This feels like we saw Michael Jordan win his sixth ring at 30 years old. What if he films a Not Like Us video with the 11 year old neglected Daughter of Drake in it? Probably unlikely but I'm not betting against Kendrick on anything at this point. It's probably overkill too, like Kratos punching Hercules' face off in God of War 3 kind of overkill.
Now let's take a step back: Kendrick has dissed Drake in five different ways in a month. Like That is a bravadacious, boastful Muhammad Ali-esque reaffirming message that he's Big Me. 6:16 is a mellower, still critical blasting of Drake, kinda Section 80ish. Not Like Us is a disrespectful as fuck club banger that's about to take over the Internet and even sports stadiums. Euphoria is a methodical bop that compels you to listen and then you make fuck face kinda reactions as you listen to it. Meet the Grahams is pure evil, so sinister you can't help but repeat the last verse ripping Drake fraudulent image apart.
Kendrick has never made an album that sounded the same as a previous release, yet still keeps tremendous quality. Albums that initially polarize even the harshest critics age well and most of the time he is universally praised anyways. His worst formally released album in his catalog might be Damn, and it won a fucking Pulitzer Prize. LMAO.
But I think the one thing Kendrick was missing was an iconic showdown in front of the world, online or in real life, against a major musical competitor, and a lot of people thought that would be J Cole or Drake as time went on but it never happened. It would've been easier for him to outrap either of these two, but Drake is supposedly way more popular, having double to triple the online reach and has a global presence that few rival. Taking that on could've been intimidating or career damaging with the amount of networking Drake has. He's a huge presence, period. Like it or not, Drake has massively influenced American, and global, pop culture. We still subconsciously quote him even in jest at times.
And Kendrick has poured kerosene on that presence and spit fire on the gas trail. He has objectively, utterly humiliated Drake, and whether he is lying or not (and he appears to be mostly truthful) it no longer matters. He won and has the entire rap community on his side right now. It's near universal outside of Drake's diehards, a few notable contrarians like 50 and Game, and major record labels with conflict of interest financially speaking on Drake's side.
Canada, even in major cities, is turning on Drake. The record sales and streaming back this up. God forbid Mr. Degrassi 69 walks into California in public without being catcalled a chomo going forward.
There's literal children and girls that don't even like hip hop making Tik Tok dances to A-MINORRRRRRRRRRR and OV HOOOEEEEE which is extending the Drake bashing indefinitely. It's mid-Spring entering Summer. This song is going to be blasted from Compton to Newfoundland and big bouncy titties, thick assed girls in swimsuits and guys in baggy pants and skinny jeans and dudes on the basketball courts all over the walks of life are going to be C-Walking all over Drake's corpse.
Kendrick Lamar, in the past few weeks, has embodied the phrase "Win the War, then Fight the War" from Sun Tzu. He went in with a plan to utterly destroy Drake and it worked, even when it appeared Drake would at least have half the community side with him by default. J Cole wisely fucked off from engaging Kendrick or otherwise he would've been destroyed too. Nobody is making fun of him anymore for apologizing, for being the Switzerland in this rap WWII conflict.
And this beef, and how it went down systematically, has separated him from everyone else. Even with Ether and Hit Em Up, Nas and Tupac didn't destroy their enemies irreparably. Biggie, Jay-Z and Mobb Deep ultimately have respected legacies. Ice Cube thoroughly dismantled NWA with No Vaseline, but Eazy-E even after being outed as a corrupt business partner has an OG legacy and Dr. Dre is a billionaire producer and businessman.
Kendrick did to Drake what Anderson Silva did to Forrest Griffin in 2009. All his hits hit and Griffin just missed everything before the third knockdown (Not Like Us). It's Germany vs. Brazil in the World Cup winning 7-1 kinda embarrassing at this point.
Maybe Drake re-emerges somehow. Maybe he does enough PR damage control to have a decent career after this. But nothing will be the same as he might put it on one of his older albums.
I don't think it's hyperbole to think about the magnitude of what Kendrick just accomplished. The most he has hitting his image currently, is that Drake and his posse are reminding casual fans and independent neutral viewers that Kendrick cheated on/hit his mother of two kids that he hadn't seen in a while, and that Kendrick is soapbox preachy. I hope he didn't actually hit Whitney or neglect his babies, doubtful as that claim is. Even if that's true, that's not anywhere near as bad as being a fucking child molester or creepy groomer. Hell Tupac went to jail for a year for alleged sexual assault and nobody even brings it up anymore.
That's how bad Drake got destroyed. Rap and R&B fans generally overlook shit (see R Kelly) and there will be a decent plenty that do even in Drake's case. But he has lost his grip over the universe fawning over him. And Kendrick is majorly responsible for that happening. That is quite simply a tremendous accomplishment, one that in my judgement puts Kendrick above the inner circle of rap greats, making him the greatest ever.
And by the way, even if that recent overreaction from some paranoid opinion havers takes place, that "Kendrick could get himself killed for this beef" ever happens, God Forbid, that would only double down the people's love for Kendrick being the 🐐 because we just saw it with MJ, Prince, Tupac, Proof and XXXTentacion. When beloved artists die we push them even higher in legacy. It's a lot like Avon vs Marlo in The Wire. Marlo is Drake, and people like Kendrick, that won the streets in the game, they're Avon.
We are watching history and it's fucking delightful. Kendrick is gonna be more than Alright. He's going to be legendary for this alone, in a long list of legendary accomplishments in his wonderful career.
Above all else, thank you for at least taking on this sissy, fake culture vulture piece of shit, because a lot of us were wanting to see it as the rumors and videos and degenerate stories about Drake, Diddy, etc were emerging the past few years. For someone who is supposed to be boring, Kendrick, you sure made a watershed event in modern music history.

At popular request you can now get this as a newsletter. Sign up and help support these posts! Have a great weekend, Mother's Day is on Sunday so you still have some time to get a gift together.

THURSDAY - MAY 9

NBA Playoffs: Celtics vs Cavaliers @ TD Garden @ 7PM
After Dark @ MIT Museum @ 6PM Enjoy an adult-only lively evening of entertainment, science, and tinkering.
‘Cat & Nat Unfiltered’ Podcast Live @ The Wilbur @ 7:30PM Best friends, moms, best-selling authors, and creators of the award-nominated podcast Cat & Nat present a hilarious and interactive live comedy show.
Celeste Barber Comedy Show @ Shubert Theatre @ 8PM
Ahren Belisle Stand Up @ Laugh Boston @ 8PM
Candlelight: Tribute to Coldplay in Concert @ Simons Theatre @ 7PM / 9PM Coldplay’s biggest hits ‘Fix You,’ ‘Viva La Vida,’ ‘Clocks,’ and many others are performed by a string quartet!
Hatsune Miku EXPO @ Wang Theatre @ 8PM The concert features brand new Hatsune Miku songs as well as the big hits for fans who had been eagerly waiting for an opportunity to see her on stage.
The Whiskyx @ Roadrunner @ 7PM With St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Holly Humberstone @ Paradise Rock Club @ 7PM
Cheekface @ Brighton Music Hall @ 8PM With Yungatita
Jerry’s Middle Finger @ The Sinclair @ 8PM
JER x Insignificant Other @ Crystal Ballroom @ 7:30PM

FRIDAY - MAY 10

Red Sox vs Nationals @ Fenway Park @ 7:10PM
NHL Playoffs: Bruins vs Panthers @ TD Garden
Late Nites @ MFA @ 8PM This after-hours party celebrates current exhibitions and features dancing and DJs, pop-up performances, exploring the galleries, art-making activities, and more.
Nate Jackson Stand Up @ Shubert Theatre @ 7PM
Justin Silva Stand Up @ The Wilbur @ 7:30PM / 10PM
Candlelight: The Best of Hans Zimmer in Concert @ Simons Theatre @ 7PM / 9PM Hear Hans Zimmer’s best soundtracks from ‘Inception,’ ‘The Lion King,’ ‘Interstellar,’ ‘The Dark Knight,’ and more.
Freddie Gibbs + Madlib @ MGM Music Hall @ 8PM
Chicano Batman @ Paradise Rock Club @ 7PM With Lido Pimienta
Olive Klug @ Brighton Music Hall @ 7PM With Chrysalis
Svdden Death @ Big Night Live @ 9:30PM
Hot Water Music @ Royale @ 7PM
Alice Merton @ The Sinclair @ 8PM With Juliana Madrid
Big D and the Kid’s Table @ Crystal Ballroom @ 7PM

SATURDAY - MAY 11

Red Sox vs Nationals @ Fenway Park @ 4:10PM Promotion: El Alfa Day
Ongoing - Artisan Market @ Rose Kennedy Greenway @ 11AM
Somerville’s PorchFest @ 12PM Musicians and bands in styles including funk, blues, gospel, bluegrass and so many more serenade passersby from porches throughout Somerville.
Watch City Steampunk Festival @ Waltham Common @ 10AM The festival will feature costumed performers, musicians, kids' activities, and a large collection of unique vendors peddling all things Steampunk!
Aries Spears Stand Up @ The Wilbur @ 7PM
‘Encanto’ in Concert @ Symphony Hall @ 2PM Disney’s Academy Award-winning film comes to life in a concert event, featuring the entire feature-length film with a full orchestra performing the score.
Zucchero @ Emerson Colonial Theatre @ 8PM
Madison Beer @ MGM Music Hall @ 8PM With Charlotte Lawrence
Sanguisugabogg + Jesus Piece @ Paradise Rock Club @ 6PM
Emo Night Brooklyn @ Brighton Music Hall @ 9PM
Ride @ Big Night Live @ 7PM
Silk R&B Party @ Big Night Live @ 9:30PM
Indo Warehouse @ Royale @ 10PM
Sawyer Hill @ The Sinclair @ 8:30PM With Raue
Tim O, l.ucas, Jiida, Rilla Force, & Faybee @ Crystal Ballroom @ 8PM

SUNDAY - MAY 12

Red Sox vs Nationals @ Fenway Park @ 1:35PM Promotion: Sherpa Belt Bag, Moms and Kids Run the Bases
NHL Playoffs: Bruins vs Panthers @ TD Garden
Duckling Day @ Boston Common @ 10AM A beloved Mother’s Day tradition, this event features activity booths, lawn games, magic, live music, and a duckling parade.
Say Anything @ MGM Music Hall @ 7:30PM
Alpha Wolf @ Paradise Rock Club @ 7PM With Emmure
Combo Chimbita x Panchyman @ Brighton Music Hall @ 8PM
Sunny Day Real Estate @ Big Night Live @ 7PM
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets @ Royale @ 7PM
Lewis Ofman @ The Sinclair @ 8PM With Fonteyn
Frankie Cosmos @ Crystal Ballroom @ 8PM

ALL WEEKEND

FRIDAY & SATURDAY - Gianmarco Soresi Stand Up @ Laugh Boston
FRIDAY & SATURDAY - Doug Key Stand Up @ Nick’s Comedy Stop @ 8PM
FRIDAY & SATURDAY - Harry Connick Jr. in Concert @ Symphony Hall @ 7:30PM World renowned artist Harry Connick Jr. returns to the stage at Symphony Hall to perform with the Pops for the first time in 23 years in a superlative Opening Night at the Pops!
All weekend - ‘Spring Experience’ Ballet @ Citizens Bank Opera House Explore Boston Ballet’s dynamic and captivating Spring program composed of three masterful ballets featuring classical and modern dance elements.
All weekend - ‘A Strange Loop’ Musical @ Wimberly Theatre Winner of Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, Michael R. Jackson’s blisteringly funny masterwork exposes the heart and soul of a young Black artist grappling with desires, identity, and instincts he both loves and loathes.
All weekend - ‘Jersey Boys’ Musical @ North Shore Music Theatre Featuring legendary hits, this award-winning musical tells the behind-the-scenes drama of the international sensation boy band The Four Seasons.
All weekend - ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Play @ Calderwood Pavilion Brought to life by Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Shakespeare’s most famous duo return in a flurry of forbidden love, exhilarating fight scenes, and tragic fate.
All weekend - ‘Orpheus in the Overworld’ Play @ Black Box Theatre LAST CHANCE - In this play, The gods have forced Orpheus and Eurydice to repeat their tragedy for centuries, but this time everyone is a bit more queer than usual.
All weekend - ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ Play @ Lyric Stage LAST CHANCE - This bubbly love letter to musical theater sparkles with one show-stopper after another, story mix-ups, mayhem, and a wedding (or two).
All weekend - ‘Mermaid Hour’ Play @ Arrow Street Arts Fast-paced, funny, and heartfelt, ‘Mermaid Hour’ follows two parents and their trans teen kid as they all seek to understand who they are and who they wish to be.

ONGOING

Ongoing - Immersive Disney Animation @ Boch Center Step into the art and legacy of Walt Disney Animation Studios and celebrate the music, artistry and animation from the creators of Frozen, The Little Mermaid, Big Hero 6 and many more.
Ongoing - Musical Shows @ MoS Planetarium Museum of Science puts on special experiences adapting the music of Pink Floyd, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and The Divas to immersive visuals in the Charles Hayden Planetarium.
Ongoing - ‘Firelei Báez’ Exhibition @ ICA One of the most exciting painters of her generation, Báez explores the multilayered legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond.
Ongoing - ‘Wordplay’ Exhibition @ ICA Highlighting the rich interplay between imagery and text, the exhibition showcases how contemporary artists have played with words to animate and expand their art practices.
Ongoing - ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’ Exhibition @ MFA Enjoy an immersive and multisensory journey through Korea’s fascinating history, and celebrate its contemporary vibrant creative force.
Ongoing - ‘Dress Up’ Exhibition @ MFA Through more than 100 works from the MFA’s collection including 20th- and 21st-century clothing, jewelry, accessories, illustrations, and photographs, this exhibition explores adornment and its role in the creation of a look.
Ongoing - ‘Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party’ Exhibition @ MFA This exhibition brings together 27 powerful photographs by Stephen Shames that feature the women of the Black Panther party and showcase their crucial work for the movement.
Ongoing - ‘Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale’ Exhibition @ MFA Featuring 15 intriguing objects from 17th-century Netherlands such as paintings, prints, silver medals, and books, this exhibition compels viewers to reconsider their relationship to the world around them.
Ongoing - ‘Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West’ Exhibition @ ISG Museum Shaw’s images of magic and mystery combine Western artistic tradition with ornamental elements derived from the Japanese, Persian, and Indian cultures that he vividly remembers from his youth.
Ongoing - ‘Picasso: War, Combat, and Revolution’ Exhibition @ Harvard Art Museums The exhibition explores the dictator Francisco Franco’s Spain, imagery of death, struggles of good and evil, political and artistic revolution, and issues of desire and capture.
Ongoing - ‘Our Time on Earth’ Exhibition @ Peabody Essex Museum This traveling exhibition from the Barbican Centre in London celebrates the power of global creativity to transform the conversation around the climate emergency.
Ongoing - ‘AI: Mind the Gap’ Exhibition @ MIT Museum MIT Museum presents its latest riveting, interactive exhibit exploring the tremendous promise, unforeseen impacts, and everyday misconceptions of AI.

Become a star citizen.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-DP7P-GD4P
use code STAR-DP7P-GD4P
If you don't already have a Roberts Space Industries (RSI) account, you'll want to take advantage of the Star Citizen referral code program. Doing so benefits the code provider and grants only you a bonus 5,000 United Earth Credits (UEC), the in-game currency for Star Citizen!
Thanks!!!
Improved New Player Experience : Play the tutorial
Star Citizen features a beautiful sprawling universe full of wonder, adventure, and action. However, it’s easy for new citizens to feel overwhelmed as they take their first steps into life in the 30th century.So, from Alpha 3.19, a whole-new guided mission will welcome new players to the ‘verse, including showing them how to get around, use the mobiGlas, and fly a ship in atmosphere and in space.
Invictus Celebration May 17-29 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/invictuslaunchweek2954#/schedule/countdown
Letter from the chairman https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19848-Letter-From-The-Chairman
Alpha 3.22 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19565-Star-Citizen-Alpha-322-Wrecks-To-Riches
Alpha 3.21 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19477-Star-Citizen-Alpha-321-Mission-Ready
CitizenCon October 21st and 22nd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWa4WoTkV4&list=PLVct2QDhDrB15f0diWl9YaDmL4Je1BkX3
Welcome Back, Pilot! https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18359-Welcome-Back-Pilot
STAR CITIZEN & SQUADRON 42 EXPLAINED
There are two components to Cloud Imperium Games' (CIG) project. Star Citizen is the MMO component, a first-person experience in a simulated 30th-century universe. Squadron 42 is the single-player component, a story-driven campaign where you enlist as a UEE Navy combat pilot. Our current understanding is you will be given the option of having your Squadron 42 character, who musters out of the Navy at the conclusion of the campaign, carry over into the Star Citizen persistent universe, taking with them the reputation and relationships they've built with NPC entities.
[Customers interested the Squadron 42 standalone only] If you only want the single-player campaign, after creating your account (next section) you can buy the Squadron 42 standalone here. You need only wait for the game to be released and become available for download. But take note that when you buy Squadron 42 you also get immediate access to Arena Commander, the online dogfighting module, and Star Marine, the online first-person shooter.
Squadron 42: I Held The Line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDtjzLzs7V8
UNDERSTANDING THE PLEDGE STORE
There are a couple of points I want to make about recognizing what comes with a package. First, game packages may include only Star Citizen, only Squadron 42, or both games. Look at the package's contents for "Star Citizen Digital Download" and/or "Squadron 42 Digital Download." I will show you an easy way to add Squadron 42 to a Star Citizen-only package during the checkout process.The second point of interest concerns ship insurance (also found in the package's contents). Ship insurance covers the ship's hull and factory stock equipment in the event of complete loss. As a part of promotional offers, ships are sometimes sold with lifetime insurance (commonly referred to as LTI), but there are tricks to get LTI on almost any ship and many people will advise you to take advantage of them (often at a cost of $20-$35 USD = Token LTI ). To properly assess of the "value" of lifetime insurance, you should know a few things.
guide https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18381-New-Player-Guide-Star-Citizen

This is a translation of a video called "E. Ponasenkov: a brilliant explanation of religion through the example of a stool!” made by a well-known Russian historian (and overall a very intelligent and interesting person). Too bad not many videos of his are translated into English, so I decided to change it a little bit.
The information he gives you in the video is not unique, but it is put in a really articulate and comprehensive manner. So you can use this to enlighten people.
So, here it is:
Transcription of the video “E. Ponasenkov: a brilliant explanation of religion through the example of a stool!”
"If you want others to respect you (your feeling, your opinion), then you must prove that the thing you believe in exists.
Let's assume. Here we are sitting in the room, talking, and some Mr. Smith comes in. And he points to the middle of the room and says there is a stool here (although there is no stool here), but he sees it, more than that, he believes that this stool created the world, space, mountains, seas and oceans, and we should worship this stool.
If Mr. Smith does not prove to me that this stool a) exists, b) this stool created the mountains, the world, and everything else, you and me, and even this idiot Mr. Smith, I will not be aggressive, of course, but I will laugh at him and generally inform others that, you see, be careful with Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith has some serious mental problems: he sees a stool and thinks that the stool created the world, and so on.
So, if Mr. Smith simply believes that there is a certain stool (non-existent), these are his personal problems and he, well, still has the right to have them. But when he begins to aggressively demand that everyone believe that the stool exists, or at least not laugh at him, this is already aggression against society, this is already dangerous. It may come to the point that Mr. Smith will begin to kill those who do not believe in the existence of the non-existent stool.
Moreover, if Mr. Smith (he’s nuts) gave birth to someone and forced his children... well, because from the cradle... he began to tell them that there is a certain stool, then from the cradle they know that there is a certain stool, although it does not exist. These Smiths (nuts) gave birth to more, and several generations have believed in this non-existent stool for several centuries. And, naturally, one must understand that with the number of years, long time of belief in stupidity, this stupidity will not become smart, and the stool will not appear. It will just be a very long stupidity.
Of course, the Smiths can draw a stool as they imagine it. Well, of course not just like a common stool, but making it look more like the Scandinavians (laughs). But the non-existent stool drawn by the Smiths, no matter how much they draw it and how – well or poorly – then print it on a printer, lithographically, now digitally, it does not appear! And this does not mean that this stool, which was once invented, created the world. Not only because this stool does not exist and Mr. Smith cannot prove that it exists, but also because there are other people who can take you by the hand and walk you to the museum. And you will personally see, you will be able to touch the entire history of the existence of the world before Mr. Smith appeared, his mental illness, and historians will tell you that it was at some particular point in time when Mr. Smith was (unhealthy), and it is from this moment that we know the word... “Stool "(points upwards with his hand – translator’s note). And before that, no one specifically talked about this Stool, no one knew about it, it did not exist.
Here, in fact, I described to you what kind of problem we have with religious affairs.
But, due to the fact that on different continents, at different times, there were many ignorant Mr. Smiths, who were ignorant both due to the era (because there were no scientists and no knowledge), and simply due to, so to speak... there are medical problems... So, on different continents this Stool acquired its own characteristic features (due to fantasies...). These were two Stools, three Stools, four... Best of all, of course, five Stools. Whether these Stools exist, whether there is life on Earth thanks to the Stools, science cannot tell... (laughs).
Simply put: each population gave birth to their Mr. Smith (crazy man). But sometimes this Mr. Smith could be very clever and tricky, he intentionally invented a Stool and announced to everyone that only he knows how to communicate with the Stool so that it does not send a thunderstorm (or vice versa, it makes a thunderstorm in time, rain... crops, harvest... they eat, multiply, over and over...). And he told to bring him these crops for free! He wouldn’t plant them himself, of course, he already knows about the Stool, he knows how to communicate with it - he doesn’t have to work!
This is how priesthood appears, in different variations.
That is, Mr. Smith is either just a dumb-dumb or very tricky. And all these Smiths, Johnsons, Does etc. come up with their Stools due to the fact that the surrounding population does not have objective scientific information about the world. Then it becomes a tradition.
Traditions can be good, such as the traditions of book binding, aesthetics (takes the book in his hands – translator’s note). And there is an ideological, aggressive tradition. And now different populations with different Stools begin to sort things out. “You don’t believe in my Stool!”, “And you don’t believe in my Stool, I’ll cut you right now!”, and begins to slice. The Goodness is happening!
Unfortunately, I do not see this goodness among those who especially deeply believe in the Stool. They immediately have a desire to call the police. Here I am sitting here, I am taking this easy, I’m being ironic, I don’t care that much. But someone immediately starts thinking (with anger): “So! I need to write to the gendarmes... I shall write: Ponasenkov doesn’t believe in my Stool... But I believe in my Stool! Arrghhhh, urghhh... I'll make him believe!!..”
And what do those who send the police need? That is the government? The priests, who stand between the Stool and the regime, who keep the non-reading, uneducated people in this ideological field, say: “So, this is our divine leader (monarch) placed by the Stool on Earth! And we don’t do any protests, demonstrations, anything against the protege of Stool on Earth.” Accordingly, sharing occurs, because the regime provides the stool-people with rooms, escorts, trains, honorary guards! And the people, who are the populus, the population, look and think: “Oh, if he has so much of this gilded stuff on him, if there is a guard of honor with him (those tin soldiers, blockheads), then he must be an important person! This means that he is not like us, especially since he communicates with Stool!..”
Now, this is the formula, this is the structure according to which, one way or another, with that bestial grin or another, with that amount of blood or another, with that amount of hatred and enslavement or another, the system works. The saddest thing is that in recent centuries we began to break out of this to freedom, we began to invent television, radio, technology, all these devices through which you listen and read us (but all this did not exist in those centuries when the Stool inventors had complete control over the intelligence), and the Stool makers cleverly and hypocritically adapted all the inventions of science to their own needs. And, accordingly, primitive people who have learned to press the buttons (they didn’t invent this) now press the buttons, and the ancient text about the Stool appears. And instead of reading a whole bunch of modern scientific books, it’s much easier for them to read one tiny text like this, then make a basic ritual gesture, and assume that this is it: you’ve done everything needed, you can now rest, you don’t have to put in intellect, put in work, you will be healthy, you will begin to reproduce (suddenly...).
All this can be compared with... You know, in The twelve chairs (a famous Russian novel - translator's note) Ostap Bender (the main character, a scammer - translator's note) is playing chess. And when his opponent sees that he has stolen a piece, he says: “Excuse me, I had a piece here!” The arguments are over, Bender was caught lying and stealing, so he grabs all the pieces and throws them in his opponent’s face.
So, scientists know that for a long time there was nothing. Not only was there no Stool, there was no Mr. Smith, and Mr. Smith’s ancestors were not there either, and there was no species of Mr. Smith too. And not even ancestral forms - we already know everything up until the very beginning! Scientists say: it wasn’t there, and then we know exactly when they invented it, who, what, in connection with what, how it developed. Moreover, it developed in one way, but now Stool people look at it differently - there has been an evolution of the stool invention, an ideological, historical evolution!
And these Stool makers, like Ostap Bender, grab the pieces and throw them in the face because they have no arguments. What is meant by piece throwing? These are real assaults, like terrorist attacks, like bomber attacks (especially in one particular Stool group…). These are attacks on exhibitions, attacks on stages in theaters. Those who are more cowardly write to the policemen in order to deal with the thinking people using the hands of the police. All of this is beneficial for the regimes - such things are very convenient as repressive political measures.
It's actually that simple! What I am describing here for so long (several minutes), giving it shape and form, has been known for so long, it has been clear and understandable for many years and it is a shame that in the 21st century, when we had already escaped from this, there were flights into space, science, education (Ponasenkov describes the situation in Russia and the USSR - translator's note) we are forced to discuss this again. This is disgusting, and this is a tragedy for the entire country, the entire population of Russia.
Because the archaization of consciousness, the archaization of social norms of behavior leads to stagnation and terrible lagging. And this gives rise not only to socio-economic problems, but also to wars. You need to understand that archaic society is very militant, it is flawed and militant! But who suffers from this militancy? First of all, this archaic society itself.
Year 2017. "
Here's a link to the video itself, if that's helpful: Е. Понасенков: гениальное объяснение религии через пример с табуреткой! (youtube.com)
Thanks for your attention.

Hi, my name is Zephyr, and I want you to understand why I'm writing this. Why did I even decide to do research and take the time to put this together? I do this not to aggrandize myself nor to become a self-proclaimed prophet. That surely knows the end and is here to warn all. This country and the atrocities she's committed are abhorrent. But I am still proud to be an American. I'm pleased to be an American because of the people who live in this country. Regardless of what the media tries to tell you, I firmly believe people want the best. I think modern politics and the media are purposely dividing us. But I wish to change that by informing as many people as possible. Hopefully, one day in my time or yours, that may happen. In this paper, we will talk about American involvement in Guatemala.
America and Why we are not the"best" by Zephyr
Hi, I'm Zephyr, a guitar player who makes a living from music—from busking (street performing) gigs, studio work, etc. But one of my hobbies is studying and reading. Currently, I'm reading the first great English dictionary by Dr. Johnson. But recently, I've submerged myself in literary theory and am learning the Greek language, which surprises most of my friends. They knew I loved history, but never enough to study the language and pick up on it. However, those are simply hobbies I spend most of my time doing. In actuality, I have no credibility to write this at all. I have no degree (currently enrolled at Deree College of Athens), no certificate (one in communications, but that doesn't pertain to this), and my family doesn't have the creds that could back me up writing this, too. So, what gives me the nerve to write this at all? One thing I do is read all the time, more than most people, even some with degrees, actually, according to the Washington Post article. If you read 5 books in a year, you are already in the top 33 percent in America. If you've read 50 books in a year, you're in the top 99 percent. Before you leave and say I'm being cocky, I just spend most of my time reading and chasing conspiracies. I have over 30 journals in which I've written about many topics, especially the American Government. All I do is research, and I do not trust how we operate in today's society if you ask anyone what happened last year, last month, or last week. They won't know what to say. They will likely take a long pause, and the brain might be scrambled for a minute. It's called information overload. The American media and government work hand in hand to overwhelm the people. Most of the time, it's useless garbage. Unless it's some dumb trend or flashy dance, many will not recall it. Many people swipe away in fifteen seconds or less. But it goes with the question: why have we become comfortable? Why are we just surviving?
USA USA USA
Why are we doing just enough to survive as the "greatest country" on earth? Were the greatest on earth, we should be flying cars or teleporting from place to place? As the best country on earth, we can do such things. As the greatest country on earth, we must be the best at education, health, economy, agriculture, and infrastructure. Our Children must lead the world with new ideas and usher in groundbreaking inventions before they can even vote. Our healthcare should be the best in the world; not a person should die before 80 years old, and mothers giving birth are well taken care of. So much so that not one mother should die giving birth. No way a disease that's been around for over a century should still claim the lives of millions, and no one has come up with a cure. Being the greatest country on earth, crime should be nonexistent, everyone should love and get along, and everyone should obey the law. Also, as the greatest country on earth, our military should be everywhere in every country to be "the peacekeeper," spreading democracy and freedom. So that wars will not start over myths that could kill millions of people. Not overthrowing nations because their ideas go against American interests, not cutting food lines and starving other countries unless they do what we want. They are not secretly funding other armies or starting protests and riots that lead to regime changes and are spreading fear to all countries unless they fall in line. We don't do that as the best country on earth, right?
"Third World Countries"
The 20th-century anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy first used this term in an article published in a French magazine in 1952. Now, you hear it everywhere in reference to a poor country. Let's unpack a series of events that happened in a "third-world country." The beautiful country of Guatemala, proud people who overthrew their oppressors after centuries of oppression and a series of wars and conflicts, finally Guatemala became fully independent in 1841. Now, this country indeed has had its problems, but which country doesn't? I will not lie or be perfidious to get you to agree with my point. If anything, I want you to challenge me and call me out for whatever mistake you think I made. But in your findings you will find no error except the SUFFERING……. that America has caused. Now, to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Guatemala.
Palieraki, E. (2023). The Origins of the 'Third World': Alfred Sauvy and the Birth of a Key Global Post-War Concept. Global Intellectual History, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2023.2166558

Banana Republic
In 1904, O. Henry, an American writer, coined the term "Banana Republic". This means countries that are controlled by a private enterprise that primarily benefits the ruling class. You could say he was speaking metaphorically, but everyone knows he is talking about Guatemala and other countries like it that were being exploited for their natural resources. During the Manuel Estrada Cabrera regime, UFCO (United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Bananas) stepped into the political and economic arena. UFCO quickly took control over vast amounts of land in Guatemala and gave much to the U.S. by Guatemalan President Cabrera, including giving the UFCO tax exemptions, railways, and land grants along the Atlantic coast. His reasoning seemed to be fair and only to help the infrastructure. But this was just not true. He was an evil tyrant who only thought of himself and his masters in the U.S. supporting him. When the workers went on strike against UFCO in 1904, he sent an armed force to open fire on the sleeping quarters of the workers—killing many and injuring more. Over the next 14 years, more revolts and protests continued to happen, with many assassination attempts on Manuel Estrada Cabrera. All failed to remove him until the Tragic Week in April 1920. When revolutionaries of the Union Party gathered together in front of the National Assembly, President Estrada could no longer hold out after a week of fighting. Finally, seeing no other choice, he surrendered to the Unionists and was thrown in Jail, dying four years later. But this was nothing compared to the Banana Massacre of 1928, which killed 2000 people because they refused to work under the poor conditions of UFCO. Guess what the U.S. response was? Communist uprising. Despicable.
https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/09/conversation_banana_republic.php
Hitler of South America

In 1931, Jorge Ubico came to power as a dictator general. The Hitler of South America was a massive supporter of fascism and nazism. Now, you can say he helped the economy by cutting salaries and increasing coffee production during the great depression, but he also killed thousands. He employed spies everywhere to make sure they followed his command. You will read about his projects: building roads and seaports or eliminating wholesale corruption. Indeed he did, but eliminating wholesale corruption under an authoritarian dictatorship who controls 100% of the country is FREAKING POINTLESS. When can you and your family be executed for not following orders? (In other words, the pot calling the kettle black) That's the problem with researching online. It's widely known about the evil and atrocities Jorge Ubcio committed. However, according to specific sources, they still try to be evasive, saying, "he did sustain the economy during the great depression," which is only half the truth. The economy has suffered for decades. Because Jorge Ubico's increased coffee production did not help in the grand scheme, people suffered like always.
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/291/
* I would like to mention something of an extreme importance.
When doing research, you must have multiple sources of information. It's to tell what's credible and what's not. Can a dictator do good things? Yes, a dictator can do good things. Like a good man can do evil things. However, in this case, when I searched for information about Guatemala's economy under Jorge Ubico on Google, I was met with partial truth. The average phone user spends most of Its time on social media and has a poor attention span like I used to have. They will see this and turn away, thus completing their research. I have argued with people who only look at the highlighted sentence of the passage. They did not even read the entire paragraph, and they did not read the article. Because of modern technology, we have become more lazy than ever. Instant gratification has ruined the appreciation of anything if not quick, easy and straightforward. If you can't get it right now, many people swipe away. With little resistance, most people will quit. Even those who aren't Gen-Z became so accustomed to this modern world. But there's a way to help that many don't like. Reading can elevate your mind, give you patience, and help you process information faster and even better at maintaining relationships. I hope this truly encourages you. Please click the link to the article below to learn more about the benefits of reading. *

https://www.piedmont.org/living-real-change/health-benefits-of-reading
Forgive me for the rant. I will discuss this in more depth in my next paper. Let's continue, shall we?

Jorge Ubico gave 42% of Guatemalan land to UFCO. Plus, with more tax exemptions (not like they had enough during the last regime), seventy-seven percent of Guatemalan exports went to the USA. UFCO controls the banana production in Guatemala, along with the telephone, telegraph lines, and railways.
After 13 years of killing, we forced labor and pillaged native lands. Jorge Ubico was overthrown during the October Revolution. Now, we're ending, but I hope you understand what I'm saying. The U.S. backed and supported every dictator and company that suppressed the people of Guatemala. What do Guatemalans do to deserve this? Have they not suffered enough? Have they not been through agony and pain? Spain leaves, and we will come in right after. One dictator is overthrown; we (the U.S.) replace it with another. This leads to what America fears the most: socialism/communism. We made the beautiful people of Guatemala hate each other by spreading propaganda and lies, which caused further strife.
Years of oppression from white colonists telling them you're lower than us, you're not more intelligent than us, not as advanced as us. Mainly because "you're darker than us." I do not pull what they call "race cards" ever. But even a racist would agree. Most Americans don't know about what happened in Guatemala or countries like it because we're idiots. No wonder why the world hates America. Don't listen to those Americans you will run into in certain places saying: America has saved more people than any other country else, and capitalism frees people from poverty. Has this happened? Yes........... IN AMERICA. But we kill millions everywhere else and force many countries to embrace communism or authoritarian-style governments. Then, we label them as savages. But communism is not the biggest threat to America, nor has it ever been. America's greed is the biggest threat to America. This is just one of the many examples of American Imperialism.

Delivering Freedom (Gifts from Heaven)
Delivering freedom is some dumb term somebody on Fox News said in the early 2000s during the Iraq war and stuck with American culture ever since. After Jorge Ubico was overthrown In 1944, the first democratically elected President of Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo, took office. A great man, professor of philosophy and political party leader that swept through Guatemala. He allowed free speech for the press, established social security, and established health and education programs for the people. After a few years as president, he chose not to run in the 1950 election. After the votes were cast, the presidency went to Jacopo Árbenz. Jacopo quickly got to work and continued the reforms of his predecessor. In 1952, he drafted a land reform bill titled 900 decree, which redistributed lands back to the people. By the beginning of 1954, 500,000 individuals had received their lands back, which had been stolen by UFCO. Unfortunately, this was the last straw for UFCO.
(Shortly after the October Revolution of 1944, the U.S. began propaganda about the newly elected president Juan José Arévalo. He claimed the Soviets were working with Jacopo and that he must be stopped. This is not true, but with the help of propaganda campaigns by Edward Bernays, many Americans believed and supported a potential intervention.)



The 1954 Coup D'etat

In 1954, the Guatemalan Coup D'etat, AKA PBSUCCESS, led by Col.Castillo Armas (he was made the new president), started. It ended with the deposing of Jacobo ÁrbenZ, killing hundreds in a 9-day-long campaign. 480 CIA soldiers with U.S. air support invaded Guatemala. It was already evil enough invading, killing and bombing innocent people (some only armed with a knife), but the worst thing was the U.S. denied involvement.
After reading all this, you ask why this matters. What does this have to do with today? In 1984, UFCO merged with ELI M. and became Chiquita Bananas after facing financial hardships. Though this may be true, they chose that name to sound more like "SoUTh AmErCIAN" and wanted to get rid of the name that ties them to the atrocities they committed, especially what they did in the 1982 massacre of 70,000 natives that destroyed 600 villages in Guatemala. Once again, we want to keep the workers of UFCO in check. Just for some bananas………..
Chiquita Bananas = Colonialism.

We must stop supporting companies like this NOW!

Once again don’t feel overwhelmed about anything that you read here. This is only for you to be aware. This is for the betterment of society. This is the beginning of the revolution.
To each individual, the world will take on a different connotation of meaning, and the important thing lies in the desire to search for an answer. -T.S Eliot
References

Prince Wilhelm Between Two Continents (Book about his time in Guatemala during Tragic Week)

https://www.collecteurs.com/interview/the-banana-massacre-and-monopolies
https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/09/conversation_banana_republic.php
Harvard International Review
https://hir.harvard.edu/the-dark-side-of-bananas-imperialism-non-state-actors-and-powe
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2562&context=thesesdissertations
https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/guatemala/violence-and-genocide-guatemala
Other readings
https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-guatemala-genocide-case/

Greetings everyone i want to give my two cents on what i would have done to make this game have same comeback as cyberpunk 2077 got
A. Importance of Handcrafted content

1. Instead of overly dependent on the procedural generation( which was biggest gamble by bethesda) there should have been focus on maybe 10 planets or 12 Planets, all maps as big as skyrim. Yes, imagine a game where not only 1 u have literally 10 planets of same size as skyrim with ton of contents and you can go to whatever city/planet , that would have made a crazy space rpg instead of thousands of empty planets
2. I get it that empty planets are realistic, but Gaming should be fun , empty planets are beautiful but really boring, there are not even random events where ur space colony is attacked by aliens so it dont really matter to me or motivates me to build on a empty planet either. (there are random instance of enemy ship landing but i dont know about attack on my colony)
3. But we would have literally huge maps with lot of cities where u could travel here and there and then maybe add some procedural things in between the distances This would have been better use of resource and time, I feel this should be done in future DLC. A planet with only 1 big city is not good but a planet with 7-8 big city and lot of content is GOTY worthy.

B. Seamless space experience

1. With the procedural tension gone, and only 10 planets or 12, in different solar systems it would be easy to make a no man sky type of space exploration with random space colonies and dungeons in between or any random scripted event as we already seen
2. With it you could fly to planets which would bring the much needed exploration of bethesda game and would not need to suffer from loading screen
3. With that same techonlogy u could land point in planet in a realistic manner so the space exploration wont just be loading screen but rather actually walking.

C. SPACE is not necessarily futuristic bro

1. Wait what do you mean? space is futuristic , i agree that in space u need to travel so u need high tech stuff rockets etc But everyone forgets that It is not necessary that In one solar system it is as developed as other, Bethesda missed a huge opportunity
2. There can be planets in some hidden solar system which has same timeline as medieval times of earth , We know how good bethesda is at creating medieval fantasy world , U literally had an opportunity to create a skyrim type of world which is a relatively old civilization and dont know rockets yet , maybe of 13-14th century
3. Similary u had opportunity to create a present 21st century earth like world ( Hell yea GTA BETHESDA EDITION) with cars modern guns and alll that shit , This will give a unique quest line to both of these world how will they react to futuristic stuff and how will we manage with language barriers. seriously man some really next level storylines could come out of this, and bethesda is already good at creating old timeline maps , ofc not modern , but u get my idea, they could also have done a post apocalyptic planet like fallout which will also have a huge potential for a story line

This can be applied on DLC too , and it would be dope af , this will bring all the fans into one game as some like me like sword and shield world , some like guns, some like laser guns.
D. Story I am a basic person and i didnt see much of a issue in starfield's story i do agree it could have been better but i just dont understand why we dont have phone in this game , like we are probably in 3024 and some npc says go to this planet and talk to him and give my message, just send an email lmao
E. all the other obvious points This include all the things people highlight technical things, bug fixes, random events, loot, buildings, dungeons ,cars etc
F. Technical limitations (optimization , engine etc) Even tho some stuff could be done but there are lot of issues like game engine, optimization of game , these two are a huge issue which limits the developer potential , otherwise developers can just create biggest game ever. Battling this is obviously more relatable for a dev as this involves technical things, but i just wanted to give my opinion what it can implement to make starfield from boring to goated.
tldr : just read headings ( A-F)

There have been a few posts lately related to books and referees and which ones to buy. This is an updated repost of my own survey of books and who they might be useful for, so here I present Frescanation’s Incredibly Incomplete Guide to Ancient Numismatic Literature. It is incomplete because there are tons of books and other scholarship on ancient coins, some of it going back hundreds of years. An exhaustive study would be worth its own book, and this is a guide for new and new-ish collectors. All of these books will be helpful to you in some way as you go on a collecting journey, but not all of them are necessary by any means. Many are out of print, often long so, and books on ancient coins are specialty works and frequently expensive (like a college textbook is). The out of print books can be hard to find and might require using a used or even specialty bookseller (which is often easy now thanks to Amazon and B&N). I am primarily going over the general references. There are plenty of specialty texts, often looking at a single ruler or city or a narrow time period. Warning - this will be a long post.
Books for Complete Beginners
Handbook of Ancient Greek and Roman Coins, Zander Klawans ($15 new)
This is a small paperback book about half devoted to Greek and half to Roman coins. The Greek section is a survey by city and region. The Roman section has a survey by ruler. There is a good intro to reading inscriptions and recognizing reverse types (if you have wondered how someone tells the difference between Fortuna and Providentia, this is a good place to start).
Pros: Cheap, small and easily portable. Readily available. Very easy to use and understand.
Cons: Extremely limited in scope. If you stick with the hobby, you will outgrow this book pretty quickly, replace it with something below, and never look at it again.
Ancient Coin Collecting, Wayne Sayles (6 volumes, $25-50 each used)
This series came out in the late 90s and was a gateway drug for many of us. The series consists of 6 slim hardbound books with great photos and clear text by one of the great educators of the hobby. The six volumes are on General Collecting, Greek, Roman, Roman Provincial, Byzantine, and Non-Classical Cultures in that order. You certainly don’t need a volume for a field you aren’t interested in, but they are all good reads (and might get you interested in something you currently know little about).
Pros: Relatively inexpensive. Gorgeous photographs. If you want to get into ancients but you aren’t sure which segment to collect, this will help you choose.
Cons: This is very much an introduction and not a set of reference books. They won’t help you identify coins beyond the absolute basics. Like Klawans, you will outgrow these and likely not look at them again.
Handbook of Roman Imperial Coins, David Van Meter ($40-75 used)
This book was an attempt to create a “pro” reference for the Everyman collector. The book presents a broad survey of coins by ruler and type from Augustus to the fall of the Western Empire. It contains all of the inscriptions and the majority of the reverse types for each emperor. This is the first book on this list that will really help you identify and date a coin from scratch (you’ll be able to use it help answer those “hey what is this” posts here). There is a decent but limited amount of history on each ruler.
Pros: Reasonably complete. If your budget is very limited and you can only get one reference book, this is a good choice. It is particularly easy to use.
Cons: The production quality is not the best. This is still not a standard reference, and you will never see a coin cited by Van Meter number.
Coinage and History of the Roman Empire, David Vagi, (2 volumes, $50-200 used)
This is an unusual reference. The first volume is all history, and contains pretty complete biographical information for everyone who was on a Roman coin. Some of these are quire extensive, such as the sections on Augustus and Trajan, and some are very limited, as there are many men known only to history by their coins. The value of the history volume may be questionable in the days when a guy like Majorian can easily be looked up online, but Vagi is a good and engaging writer and the whole volume is an entertaining read. The second volume is all coinage, and somewhere between the single and five-volume Sear in scope. Rough values are given in terms of “rarity bands”, and the photography is quite good. If you buy this online, make sure you are getting the complete set.
Pros - Very well-written history. The coin reference is very easy to use.
Cons - This never quite became standard, and you won’t see coins cited by Vagi number. The book doesn’t go into minor variations of type, and is actually much more limited than Van Meter in this regard. Photos are limited to one per ruler, and you won’t get much help identifying a coin with incomplete legends. Pretty much everything in the history volume is on Wikipedia and similar.
Late Roman Bronze Coinage, Guido Bruck ($25 new)
Disclaimer - I don’t own this, but a friend recommended it. This book is designed to help collectors attribute Roman 4th and 5th century bronzes, especially if poorly preserved or damaged. Since these are often the exact coins a beginner first encounters, it might be useful, especially if you have a coin and all you can read is D N CON and part of a reverse legend.
Pros - Cheap, and If you are collecting a lot of $20 and under bronzes, this will save you a lot of trips to Reddit for attribution help (or you can start providing it)
Cons - Very limited in scope, not a true reference
Books for Intermediate Collectors
Roman Coins and Their Values, David Sear (5 volumes, $50-100 each new)
If you are serious about Roman coin collecting, this series is about as close to must-have as you can get. This is the current printing and massive revision of one of the classic Roman coin references. It presents a highly complete ruler by ruler list with a complete catalogue of legends. It then goes through each known reverse type of each denomination in alphabetical order, including minor variations. Each volume contains the same full section on identifying reverse types and dating, so if you only get one or two volumes, you still have it. Each type is listed with a value. These are not always accurate, but very useful in a relative sense. If a coin is listed at $20,000, odds are you didn’t find it for $15 on Ebay. There are photographs for every reverse type (although not for every variation), which helps enormously with attribution. This is always the first place I go when researching a coin. If your focus is narrow, you can easily get by with just one volume.
Pros - This is a standard reference, and citing a coin by Sear number is pretty common. You will be highly unlikely to come across a Roman coin that is not listed here. The culmination of the life’s work of a numismatic legend. It is still available new, and will likely get pricier over time.
Cons - Harder to use, and you do need some idea of what is on the coin to get started. The complete set will run over $300, which is going to seem daunting if buying a $30 coin is a big deal for you, and you’d rather buy coins than books about them.
Special Note- the older, single volume edition is still widely available used for around $50 and under. It only contains about 20% of what is in the new edition, but that 20% is great, and includes most coins you will likely encounter. The photography is not quite as good, and the values are wildly out of date, but it can easily serve as the only reference you ever have.
Encyclopedia of Roman Imperial Coins, 2nd Edition (ERIC II), Rasiel Suarez ($80 new)
This is the newest entry into the field of general Roman coin references and was published in 2011. I really like this book, and if you are a Roman coin collector with a limited budget, get this. Like Sear, it goes ruler by ruler, gives an exhaustive list of legends, obverse types and reverse types, and has representative photography of all reverses. Like Sear, if you know who is on the coin and can read most of the legend, you can can use this to attribute the coin. As a bonus, the book covers the entire Roman period including the East after 476. I’m unaware of any other reference that includes Eastern/Byzantine and traditional Imperial coinage in one volume.
Pros - Aims to a be a single-volume resource for all things from Augustus to Constantine XI, and largely succeeds. Photography is in color and excellent. An absolute bargain for what you get
Cons - You need to know who is on the coin to get started. It’s a big, heavy book. A lot of what it does can be duplicated by online databases.
Roman Silver Coins, H.A. Seaby et al (5 volumes, $25-50 each used)
All silver, nothing but silver, but extending from Republican times through the end of the Western Empire. The best feature of this book is the extensive photography which covers basically all silver reverse types. It is also the best easily available reference that covers Republican silver in any kind of detail. Values are given, but the most recent edition is from 1982 and these are wildly out of date, to put it mildly. (Who’d like to buy an EID MAR denarius for 7000 GBP? Everyone!)
Pros - A lot of collectors focus on denarii, and if you do, these books are hard to beat. The first two volumes will take you from the Republic to Commodus, which will cover Twelve Caesars and Adoptive Emperors, which covers two of the major areas of specialty collecting.
Cons - Obviously, not a bronze coin to be found. For the money, I’d rather have the 5 volume Sear if I had to choose one.
Greek Coins and their Values, David Sear (2 volumes, $50-75 each)
This is the first appearance of a Greek-only reference on this list. Greek Coins are a lot harder to reference and far fewer books have been written for newer collectors.. Roman coins can easily be arranged by ruler and denomination. Greek Coins are arranged by geography, starting in Western Europe and going clockwise around to Africa. Looking up a coin requires knowing that Tarentum is in southern Italy, or that Athens is in Attica and and is listed after Boetia. This was written in the late 70s and has not been revised.
Pros - If you want to collect Greek coins, and don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on books, this is about it.
Cons - Substantially harder to use than Sear Roman, but that’s mostly the fault of the coin series itself rather than Sear.
Greek Imperial Coins and Their Values, David Sear ($40-75 used)
Greek Imperial (now usually called Roman Provincial) coins are frequently neglected by newer collectors. The Romans typically allowed cities to continue to strike their own coins, and many places int he Roman East did so for many years. The legends are in Greek but the types are usually Roman. Sear’s volume is the simplest reference for a diverse series of coins. As a disclaimer, I don’t collect these coins and don’t own this book.
Byzantine Coins and their Values, David Sear ($40-75 used)
Chronologically the last in Sear’s trip through ancient coinage, this is the best introductory reference for coins of the Roman East from the reforms of Anastasius to the fall of Constantinople. As a disclaimer, I don’t collect these coins and don’t own this book.
Coinage of the Roman Republic, Michael Crawford ($130 new)
This is the moist comprehensive and definitive reference for the coins of the Republic. If you collect Republican coinage to any great degree, you need this book. Fortunately, the whole thing is also available online for free at http://numismatics.org/crro/
The History and Coinage of the Roman Imperators, David Sear ($75 new)
This is a very limited book, covering only the period from Caesar crossing the Rubicon to the defeat of Mark Antony at Actium. But that short, tumultuous period is covered in great detail. There is a ton of history, and the book is exhaustive for the period covered. If you are interested in Caesar, Antony, Pompey, or the other figures of the period, this is an irreplaceable book.
Late Roman Bronze Coinage, Carson/Hill/Kent ($50 used)
Note that this is not the same book as the Bruck title noted earlier. This borders on advanced and goes over every minor variation from every mint. This is probably a book that if you really need it, you already know about it.
Books for advanced collectors
I will mention these to mention them. If you are into ancient coins enough to potentially need any of these, you are already well aware of their existence.
The Roman Imperial Coinage, Mattingly et al (10 volumes, $100-250 each)
This is the major scholarly reference for Roman coinage. It is exhaustive to the point that “not in RIC” is a big deal. It is not very user friendly, but if you are advanced enough to need it, you can probably figure it out. If you are a specialized collector, you might only need one volume of this. A full set will easily run $1500, but it will hold its value very well and will likely be easier to later sell than any coin in your collection.
Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum. Various (many volumes, $100-500 each)
There is no RIC for Greek Coins, but this series probably comes closest. It started as a British project to catalogue the great collections of Greek coins. There are 13 volumes in the original series. The project spread to other countries, and there are now over 120 individual volumes under the SNG umbrella. They are usually referred to by the country they come from (e.g. SNG Copenhagen is the Danish Royal collection, SNG America is the American Numismatic Society collection). A specialized Greek collector would be interested in the various volumes regarding their special interest. By the time you need SNG, you won't need my advice on getting it.
Byzantine Coins, Phillip Grierson ($200-400 used)
Probably the best respected single volume reference for Byzantine coinage. Mainly for advanced collectors, but would qualify as the only volume on Byzantine coins you are ever likely to need. Note that Grierson also wrote a book called Byzantine Coinage that is a much more general survey, as well as an intro to the Dumbarton Oaks collection (see below). This book is much cheaper (around $75) and shouldn’t be confused with the more expansive reference.
Catalogue of Byzantine Coins in the Collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Grierson et al (6 volumes, $200 each)
There is no RIC for Byzantine coinage either, but this probably comes closest. It is the catalogue of what is easily the best Byzantine/late Roman collection in the world. The collection itself is searchable at https://www.doaks.org/resources/coins/catalogue#b_start=0

No, Ezra and Sabine would not be a “ship”
To qualify the title, no, Ezra and Sabine do NOT absolutely have to be a couple, but if they were to become one, it would NOT be a ship. A “ship” is a relationship that’s rushed and/or forced with no real development. Ezra and Sabine’s relationship has had years of development. Could they remain as simply friends? Yes, but ironically, it was their “friendship” that felt like more of a ship. It felt like the Ahsoka show, helmed by Dave Filoni, was going out of its way to tell us: “no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends.”
I believe that Filoni made some very poor writing choices to stress something that didn’t really need to be stressed, such that it almost felt like he was in denial. The line “I love you like a sister” was never in Rebels, Filoni essentially had that retconned in, and like many I was put off by their (largely) emotionless reunion. Even if they were “just friends” I believe there would be a great deal more emotion displayed between two people that hadn’t seen each other in some ten years, especially when one of them was in a precarious situation when they parted. I also believe Ezra would be far more curious about Sabine being Force sensitive, perhaps even offering to help train her when she told him that her training hadn’t gone as well with Ahsoka. He did help to train her with the Darksaber, didn’t he? Why that never came up is another discussion, but for now, let’s focus on shipping.
In case you think I’m desperate to have them as a couple, no I’m not. I’m about the furthest thing from it. Like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers) I DESPISE shipping. Absolutely DESPISE it. With a flaming passion. Perhaps for this reason, and maybe some others, like many millennials and Gen-Z’ers (and perhaps some Gen-Xers and boomers), I’m generally wary of nearly all romance in fiction, and generally avoid it in my own work. The sad reality is that romance is perhaps the most abused genre in all of fiction, all throughout history. It has been so badly abused that many people, including myself for the longest time, have equated romance with shipping, though I’m slowly beginning to see that they are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily have to go with the other.
But sadly, many writers, through time immemorial, have not been able to separate them, going back into ancient times and perhaps even into pre-history, that is before languages were actually written down. Some of what is considered great literature; classics like Romeo and Juliet, are predicated on shipping, though at least the consequences of this “whirlwind romance” are shown to be fairly stark. Star Wars itself is no stranger to shipping, resulting in a very awkward incestuous kiss when Luke was shipped with Leia, then Leia was placed with Han and Lucas made Luke and Leia brother and sister, apparently having forgotten his original ship. Later Lucas essentially shipped Anakin and Padme, resulting in some of the most cringeworthy dialog in the history of film. Many fans of the Prequels even have been somewhat critical of Anakin’s portrayal, particularly in regards to the “romantic” scenes, with many describing them as “creepy”. Some have speculated that this was intentional, though personally I think it was just the result of bad writing on the part of George Lucas, and an impatience on his part for Anakin and Padme to become a couple, hence “shipping”.
One might wonder why this is so prevalent in fiction, and tragically, one does not have to look far. Fiction is merely a reflection of reality, therefore the reason that shipping is so common in our stories is that we fall so easily into it in real life. Indeed, entire cultures may be based around shipping, or at least very heavily wrapped up in it. Throughout history arranged marriages have been the norm, and the idea of marrying for “love” is something relatively new. To be fair, I’ve actually met people in arranged marriages who seemed to be fairly happy, but those same people were very open in telling me that many despise that aspect of their culture, and that it is quite normal for those in an arranged marriage to try to get out.
People might come together for “love” without marrying, but even then it often creates expectations that might turn into a burden. Even when a marriage is voluntary and for “love”, people are often left unsatisfied, such that today in the West the divorce rate is something like 50%. Happy, stable, long term relationships seem to be the exception across cultures and across the breadth and width of time. And yet pursuit of love and some kind of relationship seems to be the highest calling for many people, both in real life and in fiction. And it could be that the accumulated disgust is finally starting to boil over.
To be fair, this may not be the first time in history that the pendulum has shifted. You may recall that in Victorian times attitudes changed drastically, as compared to the previously bawdy Elizabethan times. Looking at a play from Shakespear, if you can understand the language, you’ll see all kinds of vulgar references, as well as what I believe are fairly sappy romances like in the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, though I can’t say for certain whether Shakespear was actually endorsing that type of attitude towards “love” or presenting it as a cautionary tale, maybe even something to be ridiculed in some of his other plays.
But regardless, Victorians as you may well know had a very conservative attitude towards anything to do with romance, and would often avoid the subject in many places, or tread very carefully around it, as if walking on eggshells. It’s not that people stopped being romantic, in fiction or real life, but it was treated as something very serious and even dangerous, with many urges repressed or even suppressed entirely. This had all kinds of effects on society, both positive and negative. On the positive side, it reinforced the ideal of people being committed to their partners, and of marriage as a sacred institution rather than a “casual hookup” as was more common in Elizabethan times. Likewise it reinforced ideals of modesty and chastity, which may be coming back into vogue, though under different names. But just as there were positive aspects to these attitudes, so were there negative ones.
Just because the urges I described were repressed did not mean that they disappeared. In fact, they often morphed into things that many would consider “unhealthy”. From one statistic that I saw, in Victorian times about one in every 60 houses was a brothel, with the modern rate being closer to one in 6000. Additionally, the rights of women were often repressed, such that they could not fully express themselves and find their own identity, and path in life, as individuals. Just as Elizabethan ideals gave way to Victorian ones, so did the Victorian ideals gradually begin to erode.
Perhaps it began with the Jazz Age of the 1920’s (the “Roaring Twenties”), or with the increased interconnectivity of people traveling to different parts of the world during World War I, not to mention the cynicism that pervaded throughout the West in response to failed old ideals leading to the deadliest war in history up to that point, but many Victorian ideals began to be seen as a joke, and even resented for their “oppression”, which to be fair was not entirely unjustified. But regardless, people gradually, and at times not so gradually, became more and more “liberated” and promiscuous. This culminated in the Sexual Revolution in the late 1960’s, when what had previously been seen as a vice and even a sin was now seen as not only “normal” but as a healthy form of expression, a virtue even. And just as these ideas were embraced in real life, so too were they reflected in our films, TV shows, and other media, often to the consternation of older people and institutions, like the Vatican. The Catholic Church even went so far as to “ban” certain films, that is to declare them immoral for good Catholics to watch. Many of the films that were banned back then, or at least controversial, like The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, are fairly tame by today’s standards.
It continued through the 70’s, at times warming and at times cooling through the rest of the century, until you could argue it reached a kind of crescendo in the early 21st century with the advent of so-called “dark romance” and the publication of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. (Ironically, many of the themes within this “dark romance” can trace their roots back to the Victorian era, yet another indication that repressing urges without addressing them often doesn’t work out as one might hope.) But as happens all too often, just as something reaches peak popularity is when it begins to go out of style, and that is what we may be experiencing right now. As weird as it may sound, we may actually have come full circle and may be on the cusp of a “New Victorian Age” (complete with “dark romance”, even). Web sites like Porn Hub and OnlyFans, as well as other similar sites, may be the new “brothels”, and what was once openly celebrated may be going underground, to an extent. The effects of this on society have been interesting to say the least, and at times I would even say bizarre.
Whilst many younger people seem content with these changes, many older people are concerned. I’ve seen a number of books, films, and other media receive positive reviews for example based specifically on their lack of romance. Many of these books/films, etc. fall into the “young adult” category, meaning that it is young adults obviously who mostly consume them. At the same time I’ve heard a number of older people, mostly boomers and Gen-Xers, criticize these same books/films for their lack of romance. Even some older millennials seem upset by the changes, as perhaps evidenced by Jennifer Lawrence’s latest film No Hard Feelings (though to be fair that film may be lampooning the older generation’s frustration as well as the younger generation’s frigidity). So just as in the past older people were concerned about the promiscuity of the youth, now it actually appears that many older people are concerned about the youth’s lack of promiscuity.
Who could have seen that coming? But to be fair, the younger generation hasn’t gone completely frigid. As stated earlier, much of the promiscuity has gone “underground”, or online, which many would argue is not very healthy as it might undermine actual relationships, whether they are romantic in nature or simple friendships. And speaking of that, friendships within stories nowadays often aren’t portrayed in a very authentic or compelling manner, perhaps because in ditching romance modern writers haven’t quite yet learned how to replace it with something else. In other words, the “New Victorian Age” may not be an exact repeat of the previous one, but may have its own twists and turns, for better and for worse.
This may all essentially be a manifestation of the Human Condition, in that we just can’t seem to find a happy medium, neither in real life nor in fiction. Thus we keep swinging from one extreme to the other, apparently getting wilder with each swing.
So where does all this leave us? What is it that we really want in our lives, and in our stories? Especially in regards to relationships? I think at some level we all want to see good and healthy relationships between people and/or characters, whether romantic or platonic. I believe at some point we would like to see good examples of both friendship and romance, and I would argue that the best examples of romance have them combined. Even a toxic relationship, if well portrayed or documented, can be instructive and serve as a good example of what to avoid in our lives that we might be happier and relate better to each other. A good relationship, by contrast, can give us something to aspire to and inspire us to not only look for the right kind of person to complement our lives, but to make ourselves worthy of that person. And here I’ll add that I’m perfectly aware that in real life (and thus in fiction) relationships can be very complicated and heavily nuanced, with elements of both “good” and “bad” in them. Just as people change over time so can the relationships between them change, at times getting better and at times worse, sometimes breaking entirely and sometimes growing stronger. Relationships can have just as many layers and dimensions as characters, more even perhaps, and a skilled writer should be able to reflect this complexity. At other times a relationship can be fairly straightforward, simplicity sometimes being the best approach. But regardless, the audience should be able to relate and identify with what they are seeing, such that hopefully they can incorporate the lessons from it in their own lives.
Where can we find good examples of relationships to study? There may be a number of them in the real world, but the trouble with studying real world relationships is that they’re often much more complicated than fictional ones (just as real people are more complicated than fictional characters), and for many of them it is almost impossible to know all the details and nuances because they are often kept private, understandably so, and even if they aren’t it can still be difficult, due to unique circumstances, to see how to relate them to our own lives. Additionally there may be far more disagreement about a real life situation than a fictional one, with many more points of view. To keep things simple, for the purpose of this article I would like to focus on fictional relationships. (And fair warning, there will be some spoilers.)
One of the best places to look, I would argue, would be the films of Hayao Miyazaki. (And this is pretty significant to Star Wars as you will see in a bit.) A film of his that stands out to me the most is Princess Mononoke. Like many of Miyazaki’s films it has elements of romance, and yet subverts them in a way that makes complete sense and feels very genuine, without taking away from any of the accompanying charm. It starts with two young people, San and Ashitaka, and as soon as they encounter each other there is a kind of expectation of romance. This may be inevitable to some degree when you have a man and a woman of about the same age encounter each other in a story, especially if they happen to be adolescents. The expectation may not be inherently bad, and Miyazaki does play with it. Both characters are thrust into dangerous situations, at various points end up saving each other’s lives, and at a certain point I think it is obvious that they have feelings for each other. I was certain that at the end of the film, they would be together, and if things had gone that way, it would make complete sense. Instead, they go in different directions, but remain good friends, and considering their backgrounds and differing worldviews, this ends up making even more sense to the story.
Essentially, Miyazaki could have gone for the more conventional, tried and true “love conquers all” narrative, where the characters’ feelings for each other would negate everything that comes between them, they would somehow find a common ground in spite of their differences, the romance would not only take over the narrative but somehow also solve all the problems in the story, and then the couple would live “happily ever after”. Such an approach is not inherently bad or wrong, and is fairly common in Western media and storytelling. We can see it in films like Fern Gully, and more recently James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which have been compared to Princess Mononoke. As you can probably guess, the problem is that at a certain point such a narrative can become fairly simplistic, and lack nuance.
Miyazaki’s films, by contrast, are very heavily nuanced, and are anything but simplistic. In Princess Mononoke the characters San and Ashitaka don’t help each other simply because they are “in love”, but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how they might feel about each other. Yes, romantic feelings are certainly alluded to, but they are not essential to the plot, for it could have worked just as well without any romantic allusions. And ironically, this makes those allusions even more valid, even if they are unrequited. How so?
Consider that if love is essential to a given narrative, is it not relegated to being nothing more than a plot device? Again, this is quite common in Western media and storytelling, and is not inherently bad or wrong, but when it becomes a trope or cliche, I believe it is the essence of where shipping comes from. Many storytellers get caught up in this, usually without realizing it, and while a story can still work even with shipping, I believe that it usually works that much better without it.
This extends not only to Miyazaki’s handling of romance but also to other things like environmentalism, the conflict between man and nature, and the contrasting ideals of human progress vs. preserving the natural order. Movies like Fern Gully and Avatar, as already mentioned, handle these themes in a fairly simplistic and I would even say hamfisted manner, whereby all progress and technology is shown as being inherently “bad” and in service to “evil”, while everything that’s “natural” is shown to be inherently “good”. Even our notions of good and evil, and right vs. wrong, are challenged by Miyazaki, with nearly all of his characters having complex motives and multiple dimensions to them, as well as understandable reasons for doing the things that they do. Rarely can any one of his characters be branded as a simple “villain”, and rarely is any one individual the source of conflict in his stories, again in contrast to most Western narratives.
I’ll reiterate once more, a simple, straightforward narrative is not inherently a bad thing, whether the themes being dealt with are romantic or anything else. Sometimes it is in fact the best approach. But the best stories in my opinion are usually the most nuanced, that challenge our notions of what we believe to be true, and that force us to think about what we do with our lives and what we could do differently. To that end Miyazaki introduces all manner of themes and motifs within his films that are familiar to us but shows them in a light most of us might not have considered, thus giving more dimension to our understanding of things.
“How is any of this related to Star Wars?” you might ask. It is quite related, and you don’t even have to look all that closely to see it. A very influential figure within Star Wars was very heavily inspired by the works of Miyazaki, and that figure is Dave Filoni.
This video shows the connections in some detail:
https://youtu.be/Q_4L0BbSpHo?si=04jDo6qFCnZT135w
But to summarize if you’ve seen any of Miyazaki’s films, especially Princess Mononoke, I think the callbacks in Filoni’s work will be all too obvious, especially in Star Wars Rebels. Some of the scenes in Filoni’s work look like they were taken directly from Miyazki’s films, and many of the same themes and motifs often come up. The relationship between San and Ashitaka I would argue is very similar to the relationship between Ezra and Sabine, and not just because both couples rode wolves together.
Incidentally, Dave Filoni was also heavily involved in Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I would also argue was at least to some degree inspired if not by Miyazaki then by Japanese anime in general. The relationship between Aang and Katara was developed with great care and was allowed to build very slowly, as opposed to simply shipping them. Likewise other characters very gradually developed as individuals and in their relationships, at times stumbling as they did so, and making mistakes, before finding their way back to the right path.
All of this is in stark contrast to George Lucas, whose character development is often very rushed at best, and at times some might say almost non-existent. So essentially, even though Lucas has said that Filoni has been “like a son” to him, and I believe referred to Filoni as his “padawan”, I would argue that Filoni is ultimately as much a student of Miyazaki as he is of Lucas.
Again, you might ask, “What does all this mean for Star Wars?” It means a great many things. It means that Dave Filoni has taken Miyazaki’s lessons to heart, and can handle things like romance, as well as other kinds of relationships, quite well most of the time. Like Miyazaki he can play with romance, tease the audience with it at times even, leave the romance unrequited, and yet still have it feel satisfying. A prime example of this is the love triangle that Ahsoka was involved in with the young Separatist Senator, Lux Bonteri, and Steela Gerrera. As wary as I am of romance and as much as I despise shipping, love triangles I normally despise even more, but this one seemed to actually work. It never took over the main story, and even though Ahsoka’s feelings were ultimately not reciprocated, she still learned from the experience, and grew and developed further as a character because of it. The other characters involved in this triangle also grew and developed from their involvement, though unfortunately not all of them made it. All in all it was a good bit of storytelling and gave the audience something to consider.
When a relationship in one of Filoni’s stories does bloom into a full blown romance he also generally handles it quite well. For one Filoni is sparing with actual romance, so that when it does occur, it can be that much more appreciated. And rather than rushing or shipping it, Filoni normally takes his time to build it up. An example of this is the relationship between Kanan and Hera. Some might argue that this is perhaps the best developed romance in all of Star Wars, at least in Canon. Built up over four seasons, at times it wasn’t certain whether it was a romance or a friendship, or perhaps even a professional partnership. Perhaps even the characters themselves were not certain, though it was hinted all throughout the narrative that something was going on. To this day I don’t believe anyone can say definitively when it became an actual romance, and I believe Filoni did this intentionally because he wanted to be subtle, rather than making things too obvious and having the romance take over the narrative, as it usually does. When it finally did become obvious as to what was happening, it felt very much earned, in a way that is seldom accomplished in other works of fiction, including Star Wars.
The relationship between Ezra and Sabine was also fairly well written, for the most part anyway, at least in Star Wars Rebels. Ezra was almost immediately smitten with Sabine, but being a young teenage boy, it was understandable that he would feel that way about an attractive girl. Over time he learned to see her more respectfully, as a colleague and even as part of his adopted family, not just as a pretty face. Sabine for her part found Ezra annoying at first (c’mon, what teenage boy isn’t?), but as he matured and she found out more about him she came to understand and respect him more, and see him as a friend and almost a brother, with there being potential for something more.
There were times when the relationship could have been better written, like in the episode “Blood Sisters”, where Ezra was written to be a bit too immature to make Sabine look wiser. But overall, the bond between them developed fairly well; both saved one another at various times, and took risks and made sacrifices for each other’s sake. Both reassured and comforted the other when they needed it, and it was endearing to hear their banter when they became more familiar and trusting of each other.
So why then was I so disappointed in how they were portrayed in the Ahsoka show? The thing is, after how well their relationship was built up in Rebels, as I’ve already mentioned it was strange to see how lackluster and uninspired their reunion was.
Within the Ahsoka show itself Sabine was shown to be almost obsessed with finding Ezra, living in what used to be his home, watching a recording of him over and over again, and calling out his name as she woke up in the middle of the night. She even risked bringing Thrawn back into the Galaxy, which ultimately happened, just so she could see Ezra again. After all that, when she finally does encounter him, her reaction seems fairly casual, as does his, as if they’ve been apart for no more than a week, rather than 10 years. Not too much happens between them afterwards either. Like I said Ezra does not appear all that curious about what happened with Sabine, how she found him, and how it was that she was now Force sensitive. Sabine likewise did not seem curious about what had happened with Ezra, and how he had gotten away from Thrawn. And with Ezra rescued and returned home, suddenly it didn’t seem as though Sabine was all that interested in him anymore, nor he all that concerned with her, though they were just as far apart as they had been at the start of the show. To be completely honest it made me wonder what the point of the whole show was. Were they just working to set up Thrawn’s return to the Galaxy? As some have said, Ezra felt like nothing more than a Macguffin in the show. Was Sabine and Ahsoka’s search for him just a plot device?
Considering how skillfully Dave Filoni had written his stories in the past, what happened in this latest project of his does not make much sense. Was he so concerned about “shipping” and so desperate to avoid it that he inadvertently “shipped” them in the other direction? Was there some sort of external pressure on him about how to write this story to have more of an appeal to “modern audiences”? Maybe some combination of those factors?
And here I’ll add that when I say “modern audiences” I don’t mean that in a contemptuous sense, though you may think I do. If there is any contempt on my part it is for those in charge of telling our stories, or those in charge of those telling our stories, who do not seem to grasp these basic truths. The truth is that audiences at their core don’t really change throughout the ages, only superficially so. Trends come and go but certain truths and ideals are eternal, and universal. How people relate to each other fundamentally does not change, whether they are friends, or more than friends. And deep down, I believe everyone (or nearly everyone at least) wants the same things. Nearly everyone at some point wants some kind of a connection with another human being, to know that they are not alone in the world, and to know that there is someone else who sees and understands things as they do. While this desire can certainly lead to abuse, and absolutely has, it is still innate to us and is not inherently wrong. Finding ways of connecting and relating to other people is one of the great challenges of life, but many would argue it is the most worthwhile of challenges. It may be the whole point of life if you think about it. As complex as it may be, many would argue it is what makes life worth living, and likewise makes for the best stories. Just as it may be the whole point of life many would say that is what most stories are about at their core: people trying to relate to one another.
Sadly, just as in real life, most stories unfortunately don’t quite get it, and the Ahsoka show in my opinion was an example of this, made all the sadder by the fact that Dave Filoni had done quite well with these characters up to that point. We may never know for certain what exactly went wrong and why, or if it can ever be “fixed” at this point, but I can’t help but feel curious. Maybe in the future Filoni will find a way to make it make sense, but I’m not sure how. And to be completely honest I don’t feel quite as enthusiastic to find out as I used to.
Also for the record I would like to add here that there are other factors that put me off from the show, such as Sabine’s Force sensitivity, that came about without much build up. But in this article I specifically wanted to focus on shipping because there seems to be so much misunderstanding around it.
I hope that I was able to clarify some, if not most of this misunderstanding, so that people could better appreciate what shipping is, where it comes from, as well as what it isn’t. Many people today are understandably sick of shipping characters, myself included. But I hope people realize that in overcompensating for something, we often come back around into the very thing that we are overcompensating for. Or sometimes, into something even worse. This may apply to nearly every facet of life, by the way, not just shipping. Finding a happy medium in how we portray our fictional relationships may help us to better understand relationships in real life, as well as how to navigate them. Neither fictional nor actual relationships can ever be perfect but they can always be better. To this understanding then I hope that I was able to give my own modest contribution, and if nothing else I hope we can connect on that.

David Hume

07 May 1711 – 25 August 1776
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
David Hume and a Deflationary Philosophy of History
Tuesday 07 May 2024 is the 313th anniversary of the birth of David Hume (07 May 1711 New Style, 26 April 1711 Old Style, to 25 August 1776), who was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1711. Hume was born on the 7th of May, and Edward Gibbon was born on the 8th of May, although the two were a generation apart, so you can consider today’s episode on Hume as Part I of Enlightenment Historiography, and tomorrow’s episode on Gibbon as Part II of Enlightenment Historiography. I will be touching on many similar issues with regard to both Hume and Gibbon.
Today we think of Hume as a philosopher, in fact as perhaps the most influential Anglophone philosopher of all time. It would be fair to say that Hume is the godfather of the tradition Anglo-American analytical philosophy, or, even more narrowly, the godfather of logical empiricism. In Hume one finds the origins of the is/ought distinction and the analytic/synthetic distinction as we currently understand them, and which have played such a prominent role in analytical philosophy.
Hume also set the tone of empiricism in Anglophone philosophy. The fundamental ideas of empiricism were pioneered by Hume, they achieved their most explicit and uncompromising formulations in the work of the logical empiricists, and now we retain these ideas, but in a highly qualified and conditional form, having learned the limitations of the doctrinaire exposition of these ideas. It is often said that modern philosophy began with Descartes, and Descartes’ work is sometimes characterized as an “epistemological turn” in philosophy. It wouldn’t be too much to say that modern Anglophone philosophy began with Hume, and that Hume represented an “empiricist turn” in philosophy.
All of this is to say that Hume dominates the philosophical tradition in English speaking countries, but in his own time, Hume was a failure as a philosopher. He said that his first great philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature, originally published in 1739, “fell dead-born from the press.” Hume recovered from the disappointment and made a name for himself as an historian. He continued to publish philosophical works, many of which were re-written portions of A Treatise of Human Nature, and others of which broke new ground, but continued to develop his empiricist and skeptical point of view.
Hume left his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published posthumously, probably because he anticipated that it would be controversial, but he published his work on miracles while he was still alive. Section 10 of Hume’s 1748 An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is titled “Of Miracles,” includes this following:

“Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”

This isn’t all of Hume’s critique of miracles, but it is enough to give a flavor of his reasoning on miracles. If there are no miracles, then the kind of providential history we find in Saint Augustine and Bossuet must be false, and we must proceed by understanding history in terms of human motivations and exertion, and we understand human beings by understanding human nature. Hume’s critique of miracles (along with some other ideas of Hume) was picked up by Edward Gibbon, who, for example, tells the story of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge without mentioning any supernaturalistic element.
Tradition has preserved the story that, prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a vision of the cross, and, next to it in Latin, “In Hoc Signo Vinces”—by this sign thou shalt conquer—and then he had a dream in which Christ explained to him the significance of the vision. Constantine had a military standard made that included what has come to be called the Chi-Rho symbol, which are the first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek, and his troops subsequently marched into battle carrying the Chi-Rho symbol and the cross. Echoes of Hume on miracles can be found in the following passage from Gibbon:

“The miracles of the primitive church, after obtaining the sanction of ages, have been lately attacked in a very free and ingenious inquiry, which, though it has met with the most favorable reception from the public, appears to have excited a general scandal among the divines of our own as well as of the other Protestant churches of Europe. Our different sentiments on this subject will be much less influenced by any particular arguments, than by our habits of study and reflection; and, above all, by the degree of evidence which we have accustomed ourselves to require for the proof of a miraculous event. The duty of an historian does not call upon him to interpose his private judgment in this nice and important controversy; but he ought not to dissemble the difficulty of adopting such a theory as may reconcile the interest of religion with that of reason, of making a proper application of that theory, and of defining with precision the limits of that happy period, exempt from error and from deceit, to which we might be disposed to extend the gift of supernatural powers. From the first of the fathers to the last of the popes, a succession of bishops, of saints, of martyrs, and of miracles, is continued without interruption; and the progress of superstition was so gradual, and almost imperceptible, that we know not in what particular link we should break the chain of tradition. Every age bears testimony to the wonderful events by which it was distinguished, and its testimony appears no less weighty and respectable than that of the preceding generation, till we are insensibly led on to accuse our own inconsistency, if in the eighth or in the twelfth century we deny to the venerable Bede, or to the holy Bernard, the same degree of confidence which, in the second century, we had so liberally granted to Justin or to Irenæus. If the truth of any of those miracles is appreciated by their apparent use and propriety, every age had unbelievers to convince, heretics to confute, and idolatrous nations to convert; and sufficient motives might always be produced to justify the interposition of Heaven.” (Chapter XV: Progress Of The Christian Religion.—Part IV.)

Hume’s philosophy, then, not only influenced his own work as an historian, but also influenced the work of his contemporaries, as we can see in this passage from Gibbon. Like Kant and Machiavelli, both of whom I have recently discussed, Hume didn’t write any books on philosophy of history.
Claudia M. Schmidt in her book David Hume: Reason in History, noted that, “Hume does not provide us with a specific work concerning the philosophy or methodology of history.” (p. 379) However, Schmidt does show us how Hume’s history is bound up with this philosophy, and vice versa:

“In the Treatise and the First Enquiry, Hume introduces historical inquiry as a type of causal reasoning in which we judge the probability that an event has occurred in the past by reasoning from evidence that we encounter in the present. This evidence may be conveyed, in whole or in part, through oral reports, extending back to a supposed witness of the event. However, in these cases the historical facts are often ‘disguised by every successive narration,’ as a result of feeble memories, exaggeration, or even carelessness, until the report contains little or no resemblance to the original event.” (p. 379)

Schmidt also recognizes the constitutive role that Hume’s conception of human nature plays in his history:

“…Hume is seeking to account for the actions of historical individuals as effects of their passions and beliefs, characters, and circumstances. In so doing he is applying the principle, regarded by Sabine as a discovery of the nineteenth century, that history is ‘peopled by actual human beings, with human desires and purposes,’ and that the historian’s task includes re-creating the men and women of the past, entering into their feelings and desires, and explaining their actions to posterity.” (p. 400)

Hume’s own self-understanding of the role history in human knowledge is given exposition in a brief essay, “Of the Study of History”

“…history is not only a valuable part of knowledge, but opens the door to many other parts, and affords materials to most of the sciences. And indeed, if we consider the shortness of human life, and our limited knowledge, even of what passes in our own time, we must be sensible that we should be for ever children in understanding, were it not for this invention, which extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation. A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”

Someone who has “lived from the beginning of the world” and who has continually added to their stock of knowledge through the ages might be regarded as a kind of thought experiment. We can ask how such an individual might perceive history and human action historically, and, Hume implies, this is the perspective that history provides us. But there are many kinds of history, and, as I have described in several previous episodes, many ways to engage intellectually with the past. One might reasonably wonder whether the nature of our continual additions to our stock of knowledge shapes our understanding of the world that we grasp, through the medium of history, from its beginning.
So far, Hume’s empiricist history only seems to rule out miracles, and therefore most providential philosophies of history. What positive features would an empirical philosophy of history involve? In the passage I just quoted from Hume some features are implied, and the quote from Claudia M. Schmidt implies an engagement with human nature, which we certainly find in Hume, as well as an interest in a quasi-scientific account of historical causality, with the fully human historical agent caught within a network of casual processes. Later in the Enlightenment this approach came to be called philosophical history, with Gibbon being perhaps the most famous practitioner.
We can find this kind of causal explanation of historical events in ancient history, especially in Thucydides, but this way of history was largely lost in the early Middle Ages, and the chronicle replaced history as a form of historical record keeping. With the advent of modernity, the tradition of history as explaining historical causality had to be rediscovered, and Hume and Gibbon were part of this rediscovery. This process continues to unfold, as the logical distinctiveness of narrative propositions only came be explicitly understood in the twentieth century.
Today we take narrative, explanatory history for granted—that is to say, we take philosophical history for granted. We don’t see it as an innovation, but it was a long, slow process to converge on history as we know it today—a process that co-evolved with the growth of historical consciousness that occurred in parallel with the growth of sophistication in historical research and writing. The process continues today, as historical methodology and historical consciousness continue to grow in parallel and each stimulates the other.
What can we expect from the tradition of philosophical history as it continues to develop? I said earlier that Hume was the godfather of logical empiricism. Can there be a logical empiricist philosophy of history that builds on the work of Hume? The only contribution to Otto Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which was a logical empiricist organ, concerned with history was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Certainly in the work of Kuhn we find philosophical history of a subtle and sophisticated order, but it seems to point in a direction other than that of logical empiricism. It is something of an historical fluke that Kuhn’s work appeared Neurath’s series of logical empiricist monographs.
Hume himself seems to point in a different direction, as I quoted him above as writing about, “continual additions to his stock of knowledge,” which implies a cumulative conception of knowledge that Kuhn is usually presented as having shown to be untenable. Haskell Fain in his Between Philosophy and History (pp. 9-10) calls this Hume’s ‘addition theory of knowledge,’ being, “the view that changing theories and ideas result in an addition to, but not an alteration of, mankind’s conception of what knowledge itself is. Knowledge, like Human Nature, is judged everywhere the same, though methods for arriving at it change.” On the one hand, this does seem to fit with the kind of universalism characteristic of the Enlightenment, and which informs Hume’s conception of human nature. On the other hand, Hume’s passing remark about an additive conception of knowledge does not necessarily exclude the possibility that added knowledge alters earlier knowledge. In the twentieth century, this view has become commonplace in the form of narrativism since Danto, and, as we saw earlier, this narrativism wasn’t made explicit until the 20th century, long after Hume’s time.
Hume gives us little to go on in elaborate a more comprehensive philosophy of history. We are, in essence, grasping at straws with Hume, and Hume’s historical writings do not seem to embody any obvious philosophical principles other than the exclusion of the miraculous. This has continued to be the case with the logical empiricists, whose work built on Hume. It seems that the logical empiricists were as indebted to Descartes as to Hume, as they share the Cartesian disinterest in history. Neurath himself, in one of the monographs included in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, gave something of a sketch of what a logical empiricist history might look like:

“…all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations—in short, a comprehensive cosmic history.” (Vol. II, No. 1, Foundations of the Social Sciences , p. 9)

This is the barest hint of what might be done with the intellectual resources of this tradition. It sounds a lot like contemporary big history, which I discussed in my episode on my paper “A Complexity Ladder for Big History.” Big history fulfills the Humean conception of the function of history giving the individual a perspective as though he had lived from the beginning of the world.
On the other hand, a providential philosophy of history like that of St. Augustine might also be said to give the individual a perspective as though he had lived from the beginning of the world, though the providential world of St. Augustine is distinct from the scientific world of logical positivism. Here the kind of knowledge that is cumulatively added through historical experience appears in stark relief in these two contexts. Hume’s exclusion of providential philosophies of histories that invoke miracles excludes the kind of cumulative knowledge construction that we find in Augustine and those who followed him. Perhaps that is the lesson here: an empiricist philosophy of history is and ought to be primarily defined in terms of what it excludes and less in terms of what it includes.
Empiricism, then, is a principle of selection of history, and giving an account of the problem of selection has been one of the abiding problems for history. An empirical philosophy of history holds the promise of providing a definitive answer to the selection problem. This would be a deflationary philosophy of history that would entirely do without the signs and wonders that inhabit the pages of more credulous historians.
We might believe ourselves to have long outgrown signs and wonders, and think ourselves superior to the historians who once invoked them, but the human mind is not so easily demythologized. We have put aside supernatural miracles and we have replaced them with our own signs and wonders, which we can’t see for what they are precisely because we wholly inhabit the conceptual framework that justifies them. Here, Hume’s skepticism can be the help that we need to extricate ourselves from our presuppositions and thus to carry forward the project of a deflationary philosophy of history.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/D91ilZJx_Xo
https://www.instagram.com/p/C6rucDItCcE/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/david-hume-and-a-deflationary-philosophy:1

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/7VZ9mD9LpJb
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/d1df7e44-1bd1-4c6f-b8af-0571b70b411b/today-in-philosophy-of-history-david-hume-and-a-deflationary-philosophy-of-history
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/david-hume-and-a-deflationary-philosophy-174319950/
​

This post is part of a series of reviews. To see them all, click here.
Historical information found on Shannon O'Sullivan's Doctor Who website (relevant page here and the TARDIS Wiki (relevant page here)). Primary/secondary source material can be found in the source sections of O'Sullivan's website, and rarely as inline citations on the TARDIS Wiki.

Serial Information

• Episodes: Season 18, Episodes 21-24
• Airdates: 31st January - 21st February 1981
• Doctor: 4th
• Companions: Adric, Nyssa (Sarah Sutton)
• Other Notable Characters: The Decayed Master (Geoffrey Beevers), The Tremas Master (Anthony Ainley, Episode 4)
• Writer: Johnny Byrne
• Director: John Black
• Producer: John Nathan-Turner
• Script Editor: Christopher H. Bidmead

Review

I thought you'd appreciate it if I gave you the impression I knew what was happening. We could panic of course, but where would that get us? – The Doctor, to Adric
In many ways, Season 18 is the slow transition away from the 4th Doctor era to the 5th. Full Circle introduced Adric. We've just seen the departure of two core characters from the Graham Williams era in Romana and K-9. And now, it's time to introduce two new characters: Nyssa, and the Tremas Master.
Funny thing is, that wasn't the original plan. For the Master, Producer John Nathan-Turner wanted to bring back an older element of the show around this time, to soften the blow of Tom Baker leaving at the end of the season. He initially contacted Elizabeth Sladen (who played Sarah Jane Smith), then Louise Jameson (who played Leela) to see if they'd be interested in returning. Sladen rejected the idea immediately. Jameson was a bit more interested, but ultimately turned Nathan-Turner down when he said he'd want her to stick around through to the end of Season 19, which she didn't want to do. Eventually, instead of bringing back a companion, JNT decided to bring back the Master instead, having him stand in for a character named Mogen as the main villain of the piece, and using a plot element called "The Source" to revitalize him. As for Nyssa, she was originally meant to be a one-off, but JNT liked the character and suggested she stick around. As such, writer Johnny Byrne retained the intellectual property rights to her character.
And so Keeper of Traken, originally meant to be a completely standard story, turns into a really important one. The introduction of a new companion (even though, like with Adric in Full Circle you wouldn't guess that Nyssa would be sticking around based on the ending of the story), and a brand new incarnation of The Master ensures this. And fortunately, it's a pretty good one.
I do have some complaints though.
For one thing, Keeper goes in really hard on a good versus evil dichotomy. I'm not talking about the way that most Doctor Who stories do. The Daleks are evil, but they are not physical manifestations of capital "E" Evil. But in Keeper of Traken we are introduced to the world of Traken by having its ruler, the titular Keeper explain that anything evil that arrives on Traken is essentially frozen in place. The main of villain of the story, known as the Melkur for most of its runtime before The Reveal, was apparently so evil that he can't evil move his head a little, and only manages to to affect his surroundings by creating a few extra weeds. And that's…fine. Not really my thing, but not something I'd complain about this early in a review if not for the fact that Keeper of Traken is also going for a sort of Garden of Eden idea. The Melkur is equivalent to the serpent in that story, who tricks a gullible woman into sin.
And those two ideas don't work great together. Kassia is presented to us, at least at first, as genuinely good woman, pillar of her society and one of the Consuls that form the core of Traken's government. She knows that Melkur is capital "E" Evil, the first lines we hear from her are an acknowledgment of this. So…how is she tricked exactly? Well, I'll get into it more when I talk about her character specifically, but suffice to say, it doesn't quite work.
I'm also not entirely sure what Traken exactly is. It's presented as a utopian society, with that utopia apparently maintained by people "being nice to each other", as the Doctor describes it. That effect seems to be somehow maintained by the Keeper, that the Keeper somehow is responsible for the general air of goodness that is maintained on the planet. It seems that as the Keeper weakens, more selfish and self-centered motivations start entering the picture. That would serve an explanation for money-focused Foster (essentially a guardsman) Neman as well as the general buffoonery of the ruling Council. It does come with the unfortunate implication of the Source and the Keeper acting as sort of behavior controlling elements, a bit like the Conscience in The Keys of Marinus. I'm not sure that that was the intention though (I think it's the most reasonable read of the story, but I'm not wholly convinced), so I'm not going to take this line down to the point that I did with Marinus, but if that is the case then there's all sort of concerns that should be raised.
But the other side of this is that the idea of Traken as a paradise planet irrevocably changed by the events of the story is a compelling one. The Eden narrative has its problems but the idea that once paradise is corrupted it can never be returned is still an interesting one. I have my problems with how Kassia is written, but I will say that the rest of the cast does pretty well. The slowly built mystery around the Melkur is effective. The Adric/Doctor duo is…weirdly enjoyable. And, while it took a bit, I found myself really getting into the drama of the story by around part three. The fight over the Source and who gets to be Keeper definitely draws you in.
Getting into that cast then, I think I actually want to start with that Adric/Doctor duo. It's worth noting that Matthew Waterhouse and Tom Baker never got along in any capacity. But you wouldn't know it from this story. In fact I'd argue this is the most energized we've seen Baker all season, possibly because, while he might have missed her, not having his turbulent relationship with Lalla Ward constantly a factor presumably made Baker more focused on the task at hand. I'm still not too keen on Adric, and while I think he's over-hated as a companion, I'll never truly grow to like the character. But I think he's at his best here where focus is put on him acting as the Doctor's pupil. Adric is a character who always thinks he knows best, but by this point has developed a healthy respect for the Doctor's greater experience, meaning that he generally listens to the Doctor. It helps keep the character's less enjoyable aspects in check. Sure, he can still be a bit arrogant, but there's a greater authority he'll concede to, while still being able to call the Doctor out on his occasional nonsense.
The Doctor meanwhile is in kind of an odd place this story. There's the return of the Master to deal with of course (more on that later) which, while it takes until episode 4 for him to discover, really energizes the Doctor at that point. And his attempts to mentor Adric really play into the 4th Doctor's strengths, since he's been busy the last 5 seasons mentoring Leela and Romana in their own ways. More than that though he feels surprisingly at home on Traken. I don't know what it is, considering typically he's the one overthrowing false utopias, he seems to be able to navigate this crumbling but still very real utopia, until the utopia crumbles to the point that it's no longer a real utopia. As the story progresses we get one of my favorite late era 4th Doctor scenes where he confronts Tremas. Tremas is holding back the plans to Traken's power source, called the Source, back because only Consuls are supposed to see them, a duty which he is sworn to. The Doctor's response is absolutely scathing: "Well, of course you swore an oath! Now you have to choose: your personal honor against the safety of all of Traken." It's a perfect line, which really underlines the kind of character the Doctor is.
And we meet a new companion this story too. Or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that we meet a new character who will become a companion next story. As mentioned up above Nyssa was not originally meant to be a companion and you can kind of tell that in this script she's not really being set up for any long term involvement with the show. The basics of her character in this story are that she's incredibly loyal to her father Tremas and that she's quite intelligent. She does mount a one-woman (or I guess one-girl, she is a teenager after all) rescue operation of the Doctor and Tremas while they're in prison, showing some pretty impressive levels of bravery and willingness to pull the trigger on a laser pistol (set to stun, I assume). If she had been a one-off character she would have been a memorable one, but not one that would have necessarily gotten the kind of love that, say, Duggan in City of Death. It's a solid enough debut for a new character, but you wouldn't know Nyssa was set to be a new companion from how this story ends as, like Adric in Full Circle there's not indication at the end of the story that she's ever going to travel with the Doctor.
And as for characters aligned with the Doctor and Adric, Tremas really gets a lot more attention than his daughter. Played by Anthony Ainley who will, as a result from this story go on to play the next incarnation of the Master, Tremas is one of the Council who at the beginning of the story is set to become the next Keeper of Traken. It is definitely odd that for almost this entire story Ainley is playing a pure as pure can be good guy. I'm so used to him as the Master that it almost reads as insincere to me, but I know for a fact that's just because I'm used to him as the Master. His performance is actually quite strong, and he has good chemistry with Tom Baker, as the two are working together for much of the story. His character is defined by nobility and a strict moral code, which ultimately does get challenged somewhat in that scene with the Doctor I mentioned up above, but does lead to him being one of the more admirable one-off characters we've had on this show in quite some time. Which may have been intentional, as showing the Master taking over the body of such an admirable man heightens the tragedy.
Oh, and his wife is very important in this story. As I kind of implied up above Kassia is definitely this story's weak link as her character just never quite makes sense. While her love for her husband is her primary motivation, they share very few scenes together after their wedding scene that opens up the story. And honestly we never get the sense that Tremas is really in love with her, which leaves that element of the story feeling very artificial. Instead the focus is on her role as the person whose role is to look after the "Melkur" frozen in the garden. We see her beginning that job as an adolescent and continuing on well into adulthood as she presumably rose in the ranks to become a Consul. The idea, I think, is that she's supposed to develop an affection for the Melkur even though intellectually she knows it's evil through this process. While I absolutely believe that could happen, as I mentioned up above I don't quite buy that it explains her actions through the story.
See, Kassia really doesn't want Tremas to become Keeper as it will take him away from her. It's a selfish thought that the Melkur exploits to get her to do his bidding. And…again that's the problem. Kassia goes way too far in this. At some point a character that is supposed to be a good person should come to understand that framing two random strangers (ie the Doctor and Adric) for murder is taking things a bit far, especially since Traken appears to have a rarely used death penalty for these occasions (of course it does, Doctor Who is pretty much incapable of not using the phrase "the penalty is death" in every other story around this time). Eventually the Melkur gives Kassia a collar that allows him to control her actions from that point on, but I would say it happens way too late in the story. Having the Melkur manipulate Kassia into putting on the collar is probably as far as this should have gone. Instead Kassia reads a lot more evil than I think she was intended. The idea seems always to have been that she was mislead but still basically good, but this doesn't really vibe with how things actually play out.
Of course, the Melkur is a master manipulator. Emphasis on the "master". Yes the "Melkur" is actually the Master, the odd "Melkur" body just being the Master's disguised TARDIS (which later also appears as a grandfather clock). Geoffrey Beevers plays the Decayed Master originally played by Peter Pratt in The Deadly Assassin. I have no idea why Pratt wasn't brought back. While I do think Beevers does a slightly better job with the part, Pratt was by no means bad, and I've never heard anything suggesting that John Nathan-Turner or anyone else working on the show disliked Pratt's performance, or that Nathan-Turner tried to get Pratt but couldn't for some reason. JNT, or course, wanted to bring in a new incarnation of the Master, which was part of the point of this story, but he clearly cared enough about maintaining some continuity that he wanted to bring in the same Master, to the point that they brought back the same costume used in Assassin.
That was supposed to include the mask Pratt had worn, but the rubber mask was in an unusable state, so instead makeup was used. And that's probably for the best. The makeup looks so much more part of Beevers' face than the mask was for Pratt. Beevers is still very much stuck working under a lot of very difficult to act through makeup, but there's at least a little more facial flexibility here. The Master's whole plan in this story is to fix all this though. He wants access to the source to rejuvenate himself. While his ultimate goal of controlling the Source doesn't go to plan he seems to have accumulated enough residual Source energy to take control of Tremas' body…and de-age it at least 20 years. Thus begins Anthony Ainley's tenure as the Master on Doctor Who which will last until the literal final episode of the Classic era.
Which is possibly why this story feels like the true start of the John Nathan-Turner era. Early JNT stories still had Romana and K-9, character that just kind of feel out of place in JNT's version of the show. That's not to say that those stories were bad, but rather that the JNT era really couldn't start in earnest until they were gone. Like the actual start of the JNT era, I would argue that this starts that era off well. Keeper of Traken is highly flawed. The story's ideas feel in conflict with each other, and Kassia, who serves as essentially the secondary villain of the story, doesn't really work. But there's a compelling plot here, and the rest of the secondary cast works quite well. Season 18 continues on a strong run of stories.
Score: 7/10

Stray Observations

• Writer Johnny Byrne was actually Producer John Nathan-Turner's first choice to be Script Editor. The two had worked together when Nathan-Turner was the production unit manager on All Creatures Great and Small – Byrne was a regular writer on that show. Byrne, however, didn't want to move from Norfolk to London to take the job.
• The story was based in part on the idea of "millennialism". That is idea, most commonly associated with Zoroastrianism, that every thousand years there is some sort of great cataclysm.
• The story was originally set in a medieval-esque society, split between the scientific "Greys" and the religious "Blacks". The Source was part of this plot. This was changed by Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead, to avoid similarities with Meglos and its science vs. religion themes earlier in the season.
• Johnny Byrne went on holiday while the story was being rewritten, so Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead did a lot of the heavy lifting in that department. The name Tremas and the Master's clock TARDIS were apparently Bidmead's idea, though JNT was apparently responsible for the creation of the character of Tremas, and Bidmead wasn't a fan.
• It was during the filming of this story that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward's engagement was announced to the public. You'd think that would mean their relationship was going well. You'd be wrong. Tom Baker was in a bad mood during the filming of this story, partially because the relationship wasn't going well, partially because he still missed having Ward on set. It boggles belief that either of these people ever thought it was at all a good idea to get married.
• The story was nearly upended due to a strike by the BBC's electricians. Fortunately only a day of filming was lost, and JNT was able to act quickly to replace it with a day during the filming of Logopolis, so a repeat of the Shada situation was avoided.
• In episode 2 Adric pronounces Nyssa's name as "Neessa".
• In episode 2, the Melkur refers to the Doctor as "Time Lord". Of course later we learn that he is actually the Master. Isn't it a bit odd for the Master to call the Doctor "Time Lord"?
• The Master is revealed towards the end of episode 3, by turning around in his chair to reveal his face, followed by the "Melkur" disappearing with a TARDIS noise. I do wonder how many people realized that this was the Master. The Deadly Assassin was roughly four and a half years prior and the Master hadn't been seen since. It's easy to imagine, with repeats still pretty rare and other means of rewatching nonexistent, that many, if not most, viewers would have forgotten about the Master's new appearance in the interim.
• The Master refers to his TARDIS as his "new ship" implying it's a different one from the one we saw him piloting in the 3rd Doctor era, and possibly different from the one in Deadly Assassin. Certainly, the interior is quite different.

Next Time: We learn that the universe should have ended a long time ago, but has been saved by people chanting numbers.

The history of tarot is a fascinating journey that spans centuries and traverses various cultures. The origins of tarot cards can be traced back to 15th-century Italy, where they emerged as playing cards. The initial purpose of these decks was purely recreational, serving as a game known as "tarocchi" or "triumphi."

1. Early Playing Cards (15th Century):
   
   • Origin: Tarot cards likely originated in northern Italy in the early 15th century. The oldest surviving complete deck is the "Visconti-Sforza" deck, dating back to the 1440s.
   • Function: Originally used for games, tarot decks were adorned with symbolic imagery, including allegorical illustrations and trump cards.
2. Tarot in France (Late 15th Century):
   
   • Migration: Tarot cards crossed into France in the late 15th century, and the game evolved with the addition of the 22 trump cards, known as the Major Arcana.
   • Symbolism: The Major Arcana introduced iconic characters and archetypal symbols, enhancing the cards' allegorical significance.
3. Occult Associations (18th Century):
   
   • Esoteric Interest: In the 18th century, interest in the occult and mystical arts surged in Europe. Tarot cards gained esoteric significance, with scholars attributing hidden meanings to the cards beyond their gaming purpose.
   • Etteilla: The French occultist Etteilla published influential tarot interpretations, contributing to the transformation of tarot into a tool for divination and self-discovery.
4. The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck (Early 20th Century):
   
   • Revolutionary Design: In 1909, A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith collaborated on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, featuring vivid illustrations and intricate symbolism. This deck became immensely popular and served as the foundation for many modern tarot decks.
   • Divinatory Focus: The Rider-Waite-Smith deck emphasized the mystical and divinatory aspects of tarot, influencing the widespread adoption of tarot for spiritual and introspective purposes.
5. Tarot in the New Age Movement (20th Century Onward):
   
   • Popularization: The mid-20th century witnessed a surge in interest in mysticism, the occult, and alternative spiritual practices. Tarot cards gained popularity within the New Age movement, becoming a tool for self-reflection, divination, and personal growth.
   • Diverse Decks: The latter half of the 20th century saw the creation of diverse tarot decks, each with unique themes and interpretations, catering to different spiritual traditions and personal preferences.
6. Modern Tarot Practices (21st Century):
   
   • Global Appeal: Tarot has transcended cultural boundaries and gained a global following. The internet has played a significant role in disseminating tarot knowledge, making it accessible to a diverse audience.
   • Integration with Psychology: Many practitioners view tarot through a psychological lens, using the cards as a tool for introspection, therapy, and personal development.

The historical evolution of tarot reflects its transformation from a simple deck of playing cards to a versatile tool for divination, self-exploration, and spiritual guidance. Today, tarot continues to captivate individuals worldwide, offering a unique blend of ancient symbolism and contemporary relevance.

1. Diverse Tarot Systems and Cultural Influences:
   
   • Cultural Adaptations: Tarot has adapted to various cultural contexts, leading to the creation of decks that draw inspiration from different mythologies, traditions, and artistic styles.
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2. Tarot and Popular Culture:
   
   • Media Exposure: Tarot has found its way into mainstream media, with references in literature, movies, and television series. This exposure has contributed to its widespread recognition and acceptance.
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3. Tarot in Digital Age:
   
   • Online Platforms: The digital age has transformed tarot readings, making them accessible through online platforms and mobile apps. Virtual tarot readings and communities provide a global forum for discussion and learning.
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4. Tarot as a Personalized Tool:
   
   • Self-Expression: Many individuals now create their own tarot decks, infusing personal symbols, experiences, and artistic styles into the cards. This personalized approach enhances the connection between the user and the cards.
   • Intuitive Reading: Modern tarot practices often emphasize intuitive reading, encouraging users to trust their instincts and personal interpretations rather than relying strictly on traditional meanings.
5. Scientific and Skeptical Perspectives:
   
   • Psychology and Tarot: Some psychologists view tarot as a projective tool that can tap into the unconscious mind, offering insights into one's thoughts and emotions.
   • Skepticism and Tarot: Skeptics often approach tarot from a psychological or statistical standpoint, exploring the phenomenon through the lens of cognitive biases and the placebo effect.
6. Tarot Communities and Education:
   
   • Learning Resources: The availability of books, online courses, and workshops has contributed to the education and skill development of tarot practitioners. This has empowered individuals to deepen their understanding of tarot symbolism and interpretation.
   • Community Engagement: Tarot communities, both online and offline, provide platforms for sharing experiences, seeking guidance, and fostering a sense of community among practitioners.

As tarot continues to evolve, its rich history merges with contemporary influences, shaping a dynamic and diverse landscape. Whether embraced for spiritual guidance, artistic expression, or personal insight, tarot remains a versatile and enduring tool that resonates with individuals on their unique journeys of self-discovery.

1. Tarot Ethics and Professionalization:
   
   • Code of Ethics: In modern tarot practices, professional readers often adhere to ethical guidelines. These guidelines emphasize confidentiality, client empowerment, and responsible use of divination tools.
   • Certification and Training: Some tarot practitioners pursue formal training and certification programs to enhance their skills and professionalism, contributing to the recognition of tarot reading as a legitimate and ethical practice.
2. Scientific Research on Tarot:
   
   • Psychological Studies: While scientific research on tarot is limited, some studies explore the psychological aspects of tarot reading. Research has investigated how individuals interpret symbols, engage in reflective thinking, and experience a sense of empowerment through tarot readings.
   • Cognitive Science Perspectives: Tarot's intersection with cognitive science has led to examinations of how the mind processes symbolic information and the impact of belief systems on perception.
3. Tarot and Intersectionality:
   
   • Inclusivity: Tarot communities increasingly emphasize inclusivity, recognizing the importance of diverse perspectives, cultures, and identities. Decks that reflect a broader range of experiences and backgrounds contribute to a more inclusive tarot landscape.
   • Intersectional Readings: Practitioners may integrate intersectionality into their readings, acknowledging the complexity of individual identities and experiences within a broader social context.
4. Tarot's Influence on Art and Literature:
   
   • Literary Works: Tarot symbolism has inspired numerous works of literature, poetry, and art. Authors and artists often incorporate tarot themes to explore psychological, spiritual, and philosophical concepts.
   • Tarot in Visual Arts: Tarot continues to be a muse for visual artists, with contemporary artworks reimagining and interpreting the traditional tarot archetypes in new and innovative ways.
5. Tarot and Holistic Wellness:
   
   • Mind-Body-Spirit Connection: Tarot is increasingly integrated into holistic wellness practices that emphasize the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. It complements approaches like meditation, mindfulness, and energy healing.
   • Wellness Retreats and Workshops: Wellness retreats and workshops may incorporate tarot as a tool for self-reflection, personal growth, and stress reduction, aligning with the broader holistic wellness movement.
6. Tarot and Technology Integration:
   
   • Mobile Apps and Online Platforms: Technology has facilitated the accessibility of tarot through mobile apps and online platforms, offering virtual readings, digital decks, and interactive tarot experiences.
   • Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: Emerging technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have the potential to transform tarot experiences, providing immersive and interactive readings.

The ongoing evolution of tarot reflects its adaptability to societal changes, technological advancements, and a growing understanding of its psychological and symbolic dimensions. As it continues to weave through various aspects of contemporary life, tarot remains a dynamic and versatile tool with enduring relevance.

1. Tarot and Social Media:
   
   • Online Communities: Social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, have become hubs for tarot enthusiasts. Tarot readers share daily card pulls, interpretations, and create educational content, fostering a vibrant online community.
   • Global Connections: Social media has facilitated global connections among tarot practitioners, allowing for the exchange of diverse perspectives, interpretations, and deck recommendations.
2. Tarot in Mental Health Practices:
   
   • Therapeutic Applications: Some mental health professionals incorporate tarot into therapeutic practices, using it as a tool for self-reflection, exploration of emotions, and promoting therapeutic dialogue.
   • Mindfulness and Coping: Tarot readings can be used as a mindfulness practice, helping individuals cultivate self-awareness and coping strategies for managing stress, anxiety, and mental health challenges.
3. Tarot's Evolving Symbolism:
   
   • Living Symbolism: Tarot symbolism is not static; it evolves over time. Modern tarot decks often reinterpret traditional symbols to reflect contemporary values, ensuring that the cards remain relevant and resonant with current cultural contexts.
   • Innovative Decks: Artists continue to create innovative tarot decks that explore diverse themes, introducing new symbols and archetypes that speak to a wide range of experiences.
4. Tarot and Ritual Practices:
   
   • Ritualistic Use: Tarot is incorporated into various ritual practices, from simple daily card pulls to more elaborate ceremonies. These rituals can serve as a form of meditation, intention-setting, or connection with spiritual energies.
   • Seasonal Celebrations: Some practitioners align tarot practices with seasonal changes, using specific spreads or decks to explore themes associated with the solstices, equinoxes, and other significant astrological events.
5. Tarot and Gender Representation:
   
   • Expanding Archetypes: Modern tarot decks often challenge traditional gender roles and expand archetypal representations. Decks may feature diverse gender identities and expressions, offering a more inclusive and fluid understanding of the archetypal energies within the cards.
   • Feminist Tarot: Some decks explicitly adopt feminist perspectives, reimagining traditional tarot symbolism to empower and celebrate the diverse experiences of individuals across the gender spectrum.
6. Tarot as Literary Inspiration:
   
   • Literary Works and Tarot: Tarot continues to inspire literary works, with novels, poems, and plays incorporating tarot themes and archetypes. Authors explore the psychological and symbolic depths of tarot, infusing their narratives with mystical and esoteric elements.
   • Narrative Exploration: Tarot's narrative potential serves as a source of inspiration for storytellers, offering a structure that mirrors the hero's journey or provides a framework for exploring characters' internal and external conflicts.

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theres tons of heavy censorship on youtube nowadays, and it seems to me that a overwhelming majority of not just americans but humanity arrived to their conclusions or stance today because they dont really seem to know or understand much about history and what happened to the world over the past 7 decades or so since wwii.......or those that might have an inkling are living in denial.
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north korea is a creation of USA, if US wanted,she could easily lift all sanctions and embargo and stop persecuting her and maybe offer a hand of friendship and north korea would slowly open up and normalise with the outside world and end the suffering of north koreans....after all china was under the same sanctions as north korea during the 50s,60s,70s by US....at the very least north korea's economy would start improving slightly from ground zero and her people would have better lives.
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but u think USA wants that? USA wants north korea to be the "bogeyman" like so many other countries..just like the former soviet union was the "bogeyman" all the countries in asia and south america that wanted to be communist or socialist after wwii and the fall of the british empire...
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just like iraq was the bogey man, cuba was the bogeyman, libya was the bogeyman...laos and cambodia was the bogeyman.....iran is still a bogeyman......chile was the bogeyman....russia definitely bogeyman and all the ex soviet countries that still believe in the motherland......china is now the new bogeyman since the late 2000s.....
notice how all the countries that was the bogeyman,but after usa invaded or bombed them suddenly they are okay in america's eyes after that?vietnam was taken over by the communist....but USA didnt seem to have a problem with vietnam after the vietnam war?????laos and cambodia is now A ok?notice how iraq is now a "victim" and not a country with "wmds",whatever it was, iraq was a piece of the puzzle that stood in between iran and saudi arabia, eliminating her would open up the path to US domination in the middle east....after all she had already neutralised all the other countries with palestine.....eygpt, jordan etc are all now "us friendly" after all those wars....its just a matter of cleaning up the rest.....syria, yemen, lebanon, libya etc etc
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japan was a rising economic "bogeyman" back in the 80s and USA fixed her once and for all.now Japan not a problem.
anyone remember the us japan trade wars of the 80s? anti japanese sentiments stoked, vilifying of japanese manufacturing....protests and burning of japanese cars.....accusations of intellectual property theft and copy pasta in the press and papers?.....thrillers and novels made portraying Japanese as these mysterious incipherable culture that was incompatible and undermines western values and was out to sabotage america,my favourite novel was the rising sun by michael chricton.....remember the plaza accord?? usa even threatened to impose tariffs as high as 100% on Japan and forbade her to counter or respond the same in kind
.....it was USA who destroyed Japans economy......and threw her nearest and closest ally under the economic bus....in one fell swoop USA crushed japans exports market.....which forced her to take drastic unorthodox measures.....
USA destroyed one of the worlds most successful war command economies in the history of the modern history....
at the height of Japan's economic prowess, Japan's gdp was nearly 60 percent of USA with only 50 percent of her population, and nearly twice as large as west germany and three times UK.....if u did the math, the average Japanese was 20 percent richer than the average american, and nearly 2 to 3 times richer than the british or west germans.
Japan's gdp per cap was an unfathomable $39,000 usd vs US $28,000 at her peak....we are talking about the 80s and 90s where 90 percent of the world's countries had lower than $10,000 usd gdp per cap.
so much the world didnt know or have forgotten, buried under the propaganda machine and media of the west america needs wars and "enemies" my god if the world wakes up and realise all these wars and geopolitical conflicts were all created and invented by USA and leftover from the 20th century.....from all the wars in asia during the 50s,60s and 70s and the middle east during the 70s and 90s and 00s, to the war in ukraine and all the countries that were sanctioned and embargoed in south america are still under sanctions, tens of millions live in abject poverty and misery and suffering for decades in those countries...
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.......and now US wants to make China the new "nemesis" to replace the USSR......the funny thing is China doesnt even care about all of that....all she wants is to make money, to establish economics relations with africa and south america and develop economic ties in eastern europe.......growing and developing alongside each other and the rest of the world but USA obviously doesnt want that......a stronger africa in the 21st century and a stronger south america and stronger eastern europe that are allied with a extremely strong China would weaken her position and hegemony of the 20th century......all of those countries and continents were bullied and oppressed by the USA and the west during the 20th century....countless wars and invasions and bombing campaigns, apartheid regimes.....coup de tats and assasinations and regime changes and instigating civil wars supported by USA......brutal and draconian sanctions.......in asia,south america,middle east and africa.....all to destablise and sow endless discord in this region.....all those countries and continents hate USA and she knows it.....
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i mean China has not been to war since 1979,nearly 4 and a half decades, Asia has not seen a major war in 4 decades after the west finally left us all alone....but all of a sudden USA is pounding the wardrums and inciting fear about war in asia?? how shameless is that? and all those people who lap up that nonsense....she wants to reignite all the old flames like in all the other continents? funny how usa seems to want war everywhere but in her own backyard or american soil itself..or u would like some countries Japan,south korea and philipines to sacrifice themselves like all the other proxy wars in the past???..the amount of warmongering the last 5,6 years makes me think America desperately wants war in Asia more than anyone on this earth. until 2022 ukraine war that is, the ukraine war was the first time America messed up big time, a geopolitical faux pas of epic proportion......the ukraine war opened up a pandoras box of geopolitical forces and consequences even USA couldnt predict or imagine!!!!! energy inflation!!!!! crippling and destablising europes economy,usa most important ally.....flow or exit of wealth from the west to the east.....what was once a perfect ecosystem a perfect synchronicity....between russia and western europe!!!!!!! euros for oil and gas and flowing back to europe for croissants and bmws!!!!!now tens of billions flow to russia and then to china like water pouring from a failed dam!!!!!!! trade between china and russia has ballooned to nearly 200 billion usd.....imagine how insane that is for a country whose gdp is a mere 1.4 trillion!!!!brics expansion.....countries beating a path to join the brics,even france!!!......gdp of brics countries membership now represents 36% of global gdp.......dedollarisation and more!!!!! in the words of churchill "lift up your hearts, all will come right, out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice, we cannot yet see, our deliverance will come, every trace,every scourge of US scourge and imperialist tyranny and "exceptionalism" footsteps will be expunged and bloutted from the surface of the earth!!" well not so much the ccp or any government but for China and the rest of the world.