In this history themed /h/marsey post, we'll take a tour through Egyptian history with the help of some relevant Capys. Cos Aevann's from Egypt geddit?

You gotta be an Egypt person to know Egypt. You can't just dabble in it. Most of my knowledge comes from this:

-- @Redactor0

This is very true lol so this post won't be anything more than a brief overview. The main point is that I thought it'd be fun to make some history themed Capys and use them to -ify Egyptian history. Hopefully someone gets a kick out of this.

People have lived within the boundaries of modern Egypt for at least a million years, with the earliest known cowtools dating back over 400,000 years and the earliest habitation sites around 100,000 years. Egypt served as something of a bridge for people crossing from Africa into Asia and vice versa, and many otherwise unrelated cultures would call part of it home throughout the long prehistoric period

Regarding the early history of Egypt, if not that of all mankind, it's important to note that the Sahara was not always a hot desert as it is now. The region is believed to go through wet and dry periods over time and was at least once an extension of central Africa's grasslands and savannas. Nomadic peoples of the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic could easily spread across Egypt without the difficulty of desert nomadism and the lands supported many lifestyles. Some cultures lived as hunter-gatherers while others herded grazing animals. Many passed in and out of Egypt without settling

Several of Egypt's early agricultural cultures appeared along the Nile river and developed simple farming there. They lived on wild grains and endeavored to care for them, but did not necessarily plant the seeds in organized rows. The Qadan culture lived along the Nile for as long as 4,000 years and were notable for independently inventing sickles and grinding stones However, these cowtools disappear after the culture fell and the people were replaced by hunters and fishers. Something to glean from this ancient history is that in Egypt and perhaps other places, humanity did not necessarily progress linearly from hunter-gathering to agricultural city building. Different lifestyles "took turns" before the Agricultural Revolution truly set in.

(This was supposed to be something like "capymegalith" but grew to become sidebar worthy lol)

Other early cultures actually lived in what is now the desert, surviving off oases and river channels that no longer exist. One noteworthy site, Nabta Playa, was built around what was once a drainage basin as far back as 7500 BC. The area was inhabited into the 4th Millennium BC and gave rise to several stone structures, including what may have been one of the oldest archeoastronomical formations in the world as pictured above. Countless other megalithic structures to be found in the sand seas of the modern Sahara suggest how widespread fertile land in the region used to be.

Another relevant culture, the Harifian, are believed by some academics to have migrated out of Egypt and into the Levant where they merged with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture. Some further believe they may have represented the original people to spread the Proto-Semitic language to the Middle East. Like the Indo-European languages, the Semitic family spread across a vast area and included East African and Canaanite languages alongside Egypt's modern tongue Arabic. Ancient Egyptian itself though is not Semitic in origin, a fact that further alludes to the variety of independent cultures that lived in the area.

The civilization we all know as ancient Egypt arguably owes its existence to the nature of the Sahara. As the desert grew and the surrounding lands became inhospitable, the peoples of Egypt were forced to either leave or retreat to the Nile and live as sedentary farmers. They built cities along the river valley, delta, and remaining oases and learned to use the river's seasonal flooding to water their crops. Sometimes referred to as the Proto-Dynastic or Dynasty Zero, this late Neolithic era birthed the modern Egyptian populace and identity. The people here spoke Egyptian, wrote in early hieroglyphics, worshipped the beginnings of Egypt's recognizable pantheon, and may have even practiced marsey veneration This is also the latest period where the Egyptians developed their beer making -- a five thousand year old beer brewery was discovered in 2021, and the scale of the operation suggests regular beer brewing was well established by then.

According to mythology, the lands of Egypt were divided between the Upper and Lower Nile before being unified by the mythical King Menes, now believed by some historians to have been the same person as Upper Egyptian King Narmer. The pictured dual crown of Upper and Lower Egypt would become a symbol of the Pharaohs from then on.

Egypt's unity lead to the Dynastic Period, a gulf of time stretching thirty-three Pharaonic dynasties from Egypt's Old Kingdom to the end of the Greek Ptolemaic.

Egypt's Old Kingdom is more or less what people often picture when they think of ancient Egypt This era saw the construction of many of Egypt's famous monuments including the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx The tourism it spawned helps to keep the economy going even thousands of years later.

The Old Kingdom gradually declined into anarchy and decentralization, the First Intermediate Period. Unity was restored by the Middle Kingdom, lasting from c. 2050 BC to c. 1650 BC. Middle Kingdom Pharaohs built their pyramids out of mud bricks instead of masonry with casings of limestone, so few of these pyramids have survived into the present. Statues became more and more common in this time, with the block statue design remaining popular well into Greek times.

As the Middle Kingdom declined into the Second Intermediate Period, classical Egyptian records claim the land was conquered by the Hyksos, the word itself coming from the Egyptian term for outsiders. A Semetic speaking people from the Levant, they are traditionally credited with introducing the chariot to the Egyptian people.

Egypt's New Kingdom began under the Eighteenth Dynasty when the Hyksos were driven entirely from the land, lasting from c. 1550 BC to c. 1069 BC. This dynasty included several notable Pharaohs. Akhenaten was infamous for trying to do away with Egypt's pantheon and force the worship of a sun god Aten Some historians even credit him with establishing the oldest known monotheistic religion. His (probable) son Tutankhamun only lived to twenty years of age, but would retroactively become perhaps the most famous Pharaoh of all when his tomb was discovered in 1922. "King Tut's" tomb was unusually well preserved because the entrance had been buried and flooded over, whereas other Pharaonic tombs were robbed of their burial offerings long ago. On that note, New Kingdom Pharaohs didn't use pyramids as cemeteries and hid their tombs in sites like the Valley of Kings

Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great and Ozymandias, conquered much of the Levant, fathered between 80-100 children, and lived to be over 90 He is famous for fighting the Anatolia based Hittite Empire at the Battle of Kadesh, the first recorded battle where extensive details of tactics and formations are known and also the largest chariot battle with thousands of the things deployed at once. Its aftermath also led to the first known peace treaty between nations, and a copy of it hangs today on the wall of the United Nations headquarters.

The Egyptian New Kingdom was subjected to the 12th century BC Bronze Age Collapse, an event caused completely and entirely by the Sea Peoples no really just ask Redactor As opposed to the Hittites or Mycenaeans, Egyptian civilization survived the period but came under the influence of foreign powers once more -- the Third Intermediate Period. Libyan rulers controlled much of the country through the Twenty-Third dynasty, and the Twenty-Fifth dynasty was ruled by Nubians

Nubia was a civilization in modern Sudan that was tied to Egypt's early history and influenced by Egyptian culture. From 754 to 656 BC the Nubian Kingdom of Kush ruled over Egypt as the "Black Pharaohs". They represent the kernel of truth at the center of Hotep ideology

The Kushites were driven out by the Neo-Assyrian Empire's conquest, and Assyria ruled Egypt until its own collapse. The Egyptians had about a hundred years of independence as a break before Persian conquest in 525 BC. Egypt rebelled against Persia in 404 BC but was finally subjugated in 343 BC. Nectanebo II has the distinction of being the very last native Pharaoh of Egypt, as his defeat led to a second period of Persian rule.

Achaemenid Persia controlled Egypt until it was seized by Alexander the Great in 332 BC Upon his death the short lived Macedonian Empire was split between his generals, and Ptolemy established a kingdom that would stand until the days of Augustus Caesar.

Ptolemaic Egypt, the "thirty-third" Dynasty, would also be the last. The Ptolemaic rulers respected the culture and religion of the Egyptians and had themselves seen as Pharaohs. Much art of them was produced in the Egyptian style.

But it's important to note they were Greeks ruling over a conquered people and kept all the important postings in Hellenic hands. The Ptolemaic monarchy produced Cleopatra VII (the famous one) and though there is much pop-history discussion about her racial heritage she was fundamentally Greek. In fact Cleopatra was the only Ptolemaic Pharaoh that ever bothered to even learn the Egyptian language.

In 205 BC, the Egyptian priest Horwennefer led a rebellion against the Ptolemies that wasn't defeated until 185 BC. The remains of a stele made to commemorate the Greek victory would eventually become the Rosetta Stone (But more on that later )

The last Pharaoh and another of the most famous, Cleopatra is most known for her involvement in Roman whatnot and her alliance with Mark Antony led to the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC by the army of his rival Octavian. Though not the first foreigners to rule Egypt, the Romans did not continue the ancient Pharaonic tradition and simply made Egypt into a province of their new empire.

All in all, Egypt's dynastic period is considered to have lasted from c. 3100 BC almost to the first millennium AD. The divisions of dynasties (originally thirty) come from the Aegyptaiaca, a history of Egypt written by the Ptolemaic era priest Manetho, and are still used by Egyptologists today. The last three dynasties were coined later in reference to the second Persian Satrapy, Alexander himself, and the Ptolemaic Greeks.

Egypt remained under Roman rule until the 7th century. It was a major breadbasket province for the empire and among the wealthiest and most populous. It also became one of Rome's first imperial provinces, those controlled by governors appointed by the Emperor rather than the Senate, and was notable for being ruled by an Equestrian governor. The Equestrians were the second of Rome's property based classes (the plebeians and patricians being hereditary classes) and ranked below the Senatorial. To prevent any influential Romans from using Egypt as a power base like Antony, Augustus Caesar allowed only Equestrians to hold the position because they were considered the "lowliest" of Rome's aristocracy. This made Praefectus Aegypti the highest rank an Equestrian could achieve in the early empire.

Christianity eventually spread to Egypt and took hold there until Islamic rule. Alexandria would become a Pentarchy city and also saw the Arian controversy, the first great schism within the Church that produced the breakaway sect of Arianism The tradition of Christian hermits and monasteries actually began in Egypt and spread to Europe from there. The Coptic language also developed during this period and would remain Egypt's common language until at least the 10th century AD. It produced the still extent Coptic Orthodox Church, based on the Coptic Rite rather than a Latin one.

From 618-628 AD Egypt was briefly ruled by Sasanian Persia before Eastern Roman control was reestablished. The near constant warfare at the time between Byzantium and Persia weakened both empires and enabled the very rapid conquests of the Arabian Rashidun Caliphate, the first ever of the great Muslim powers and the empire that ushered Egypt into the contemporary Islamic period. The conquest of Egypt from the Romans was complete by 642 and the lands of the Nile would remain under Arabian Caliphate rule as the centuries went by and as power transferred to the Umayyads, then the Abbasids. Muslim rule had the obvious effect of converting Egypt to Islam, though it was not until about the 9th century that it became more common than Coptic Christianity amongst the common populace.

Also by the 9th century, the power of the Abbasids had declined enough to allow further flung regions of the newly Islamic world to assert regional independence. Originally a Turk brought into Abbasid service as a Mamluk, Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent to Egypt as resident governor in 868 but quickly took advantage of the climate to assert independence and cease payment of tribute. The "Tulunid Emirate" represented the first period of Egyptian independence since the days of Cleopatra and would help to establish the idea of Egyptian nationalism in the face of a previously imperial Muslim world. It came to an end with the Abbasid reconquest in 905, but the Caliphate's direct power was still weak and Egypt was somewhat autonomous under their tributary Ikhshidid dynasty of Mamluk governors.

The next power to rule Egypt was the Fatimid Caliphate, an Isma'ili Shia polity that originally emerged from Tunisia. The Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969 and gradually made it their center of power. They were the ones to establish the modern city of Cairo, proudly setting it up as a proper capital complete with palaces for the Caliph and the official state mosque. One notable Fatimid Caliph was Abu Ali al-Mansur, famous for establishing centers of learning and concluding peace with the Byzantines, but infamous for destroying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and helping to provoke the Crusades

Fatimid power was weakened by conflict with the Seljuk Turks and then the "Franks" (Crusaders) who would capture virtually all of Fatimid territory in the Levant. Crusader leaders like Baldwin of Jerusalem and Amalric of Jerusalem would invade Egypt proper from time to time, damaging the coast and threatening the river delta.

One prominent Muslim commander of the post Second Crusade, Saladin, rose to be the vizier of the Caliphate and used his power to abolish the Fatimids outright in 1171. He took the title of Sultan in 1174 as the founder of the new Ayyubid Dynasty.

Though not born in Egypt and remembered as a leader for the Arab world in general, Saladin is another figure that has retroactively become a symbol of Egyptian nationalism. He was the first to be called Sultan of Egypt and is at least perceived as being a more "Egyptian" leader than the previous Fatimids. Egyptians (Sunnis) also note that he returned the land to Sunni Islam and did away with Fatimid Shia influence.

If nothing else, Saladin made the Egyptian eagle as originally depicted in Pharaonic era symbolism into his personal emblem. The Eagle of Saladin would in turn inspire Egypt's modern coat of arms.

A longstanding tradition of Muslim powers was the usage of slave soldiers called Mamluks. Originally captives from the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, later recruited from a variety of foreign cultures, Mamluks were converted to Islam if not already and made to fight in the armies of the Abbasid Caliphate. The practice continued and evolved over the centuries, with many Mamluks becoming commanders and governors for their masters and establishing hereditary lineages of their own.

Many other post-Caliphate states continued the practice into the early modern period, the Turks themselves making use of Mamluks after converting to Islam and establishing their own states in the Middle East. The Ottomans continued the tradition through the well known Janissary corps, referenced by this very site no less.

The Mamluks of Egypt evolved into something of a knightly caste, and in the wake of the Seventh Crusade they overthrew the Ayyubids entirely and established the "Mamluk Sultanate". The Mamluks defended Egypt and reclaimed territory in the Levant from the Mongols, at one point representing the only major Islamic power in the Middle East to not fall under Mongol domination Alas the Mamluk form of government was somewhat unstable and their intial Bahri Dynasty would go through 25 Sultans in less than 150 years, with the subsequent Burji Dynasty turbulent as well. The Mamluks also had the unfortunate distinction of seeing Egypt through the Black Death. The plague may have killed as much as 40% of Egypt's population and became a recurring problem for the cities of the Nile over a 150 year period.

As Mamluk power declined, Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and became the Eyalet of Egypt. Al-Mutawakkil III, last of the ceremonial Abbasid Caliphs (used to legitimize the rule of later Muslim rulers) was taken from Egypt to Turkey and anointed the Ottomans as the "Fourth Caliphate" from then on.

The conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate opened the way for further expansion in Africa and gave the Turks control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Egypt itself became a breadbasket province once more and produced a disproportionate amount of the empire's food. It also served as Turkey's hub for the transportation of Yemeni coffee and goods from trade routes to India.

Egypt's fortunes waxed and waned with the rise of fall of Turkish power. By the late 18th century the European empires had become stronger in comparison, and Britain was well underway in establishing interests in the area and the lucrative trade route to India.

While still an officer for the French Republic, Napoleon led an invasion of Egypt in 1798 and defeated the initial Ottoman force sent to stop him. Britain took the opportunity to intervene and stranded the French army after sinking their fleet. Napoleon abandoned the troops in 1802 and the French surrended.

The French actually had the romantic study of Egyptian history as a secondary objective of theirs and Napoleon himself established the Institut d'Égypte in Cairo. On July 15th, 1799, French soldiers discovered the famous Rosetta Stone while working on the defenses of Fort Julien to the northwest of Rashid (Rosetta) The stone was handed over to the British after the surrender and was sent to the British museum in London. Its discovery led to the field of Egyptology as it is today.

The significance of the Rosetta Stone is that it contains the same message written in three scripts, Egyptian in Hieroglyphics, Egyptian in Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because Greek was known, the stone allowed scholars to finally figure out how to decipher Hieroglyphics, which is why the earliest Egyptian records can be understood. Otherwise ancient Egypt would be as mysterious as the Indus Valley Civilization, a comparable early civilization whose script remains untranslatable.

Napoleon's invasion permanently destabilized Ottoman power and left a vacuum that would be filled by an Albanian regiment commander Muhammad Ali. Originally part of the force sent to fight the French, Muhammad Ali of Egypt became the dominant figure in Egypt and was recognized as viceroy to the Sultan in 1805. He conquered much of Sudan of his own accord and campaigned for Turkey in Arabia and Greece, but in 1831 he abandoned all pretenses of subservience and went to war with the Sultan. His armies defeated the Ottomans in the Levant and southern Anatolia and threatened Constantinople itself. In line with their post-Napoleonic belief in the "balance of power", European nations were alarmed at the potential collapse of the empire and intervened diplomatically. Muhammad Ali ultimately agreed to peace in exchange for autonomous hereditary rule over Egypt, and his descendants became the royal family that would be recognized until 1952.

And yes, that means modern Egypt's arguable founding father was Albanian

It was also in this period that Egypt began growing its famed cotton as a cash crop industry. The Suez Canal, financed by the French Compagnie de Suez and originally opened under their control, was completed in 1869.

As the 19th century continued, Egypt fell into debt towards Europe it couldn't repay. A European commission led by Britain and France took control of the treasury of Egypt and forgave the debt in return for taking national control of the canal and establishing a permanent military presence. Increased hostility with the locals and Egypt's independent army led to a joint Anglo-French invasion in 1882. From then on Egypt became a de facto British protectorate, such that they ruled over the Suez and began building the Cape to Cairo Railway.

Though until 1914 it was technically still an Ottoman province.

When the First World War broke out in '14, the British made their control of Egypt official by establishing the Sultanate of Egypt, a puppet government without any remaining pretenses of Ottoman influence. Turkey's entry into the conflict as a Central Power led to the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns in early 1915. Ottoman forces opened the theatre with an ambitious raid on the Suez itself, but British forces had broken this offensive by 1916 and soon advanced into Palestine. This long campaign would eventually take the Allies as far north as Aleppo before the unconditional Turkish surrender

Though the Egyptian Sultanate itself was officially neutral throughout the war, tens of thousands of locals were made to serve within the Egyptian Labour Corps and Egyptian Camel Transport Corps

Egyptian resentment to British interference had only grown stronger after the hardships of the war, leading to the nationalist revolution of 1919. The riots and mass demonstrations finally led to Britain's official declaration of independence for Egypt in 1922, the new government taking form as the Kingdom of Egypt. However, Britain held on to many rights including security of communications, defense of Egypt, control of Egyptian foreign policy as well as full control of Sudan and the Suez. The world still considered Egypt an extension of Britain going into the Second World War

Following Italy's entry into the conflict in 1940, an Italian invasion of Egypt was beaten back by the British Western Desert Force in Operation Compass, an extended raid successful enough to send Italian troops scrambling back into Libya. The arrival of German reinforcements and reorganization of Axis forces under the Afrika Korps allowed a renewed offensive into Egypt that would be countered by the first and second Battles of El Alamein -- battles that would go down among the great Allied victories of 1942 alongside Stalingrad and Midway. British forces then pushed on while American forces landed in Morocco, leading to the final defeat of all Axis forces in Africa in May of 1943 During the war Egypt remained officially neutral but provided significant material support to the British. Egyptian troops also defended themselves from occasional Axis attacks and would suffer over a thousand killed and wounded.

Meanwhile, Egypt's yearnings for true independence continued to grow. The Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 promised an end to British military presence beyond the Suez except in cases of foreign invasion of Egypt. With that invasion having happened and ended, Egyptians in the post-war period became more fervent than ever in demanding British withdrawal. In '42 there had also been the infamous Abdeen Palace Incident in which British troops surrounded Egyptian King Farouk in his home and forced him to accept a Wafd controlled government -- the Wafd being a political party and the British believing such a government would be more cooperative for the war effort. Lest he end up overthrown by the British as had happened to Iraq and Iran in the same period, King Farouk capitulated. This incident was seen by the Egyptian people as a national embarrassment and stirred them against the monarchy and existing political parties

In '48 the Egyptian army attacked Israel alongside other Arab powers and were repulsed everywhere beyond the Gaza Strip though an officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser made a name for himself by holding out until the armistice. The stresses of this war inflamed the situation at home as disgruntled army officers began to collaborate against the Kingdom.

In 1951 Egypt withdrew from the '36 treaty and began a Suez incident by cutting off water to the British base and refusing to allow any Egyptian workers to travel there. Egyptian police were seen aiding guerillas and a police station was leveled by British attack. In '52 King Farouk was overthrown and forced to abdicate the throne by the Free Officers Movement, a conspiracy against the Kingdom led by Mohamed Naguib and Nasser. Becoming Egypt's second president in '54 after Naguib, Nasser pressured the British more heavily than before and in '56 he kicked off the Suez Crisis by nationalizing the Canal. Egypt was invaded by the militaries of Britain, France, and Israel but ultimately ended the crisis in control of the canal, still administered today by the Suez Canal Authority established under Nasser. For all these reasons 1952 is considered as the year Egypt gained its true independence, and Nasser is seen as another founding father for the country. (At least that was the impression I got from a boomer cab driver in NYC )

Nasser was seen as a hero to the Arab world after standing against western powers, and in 1958 he attempted to put Pan-Arab nationalism into practice by forming the United Arab Republic with Syria. The government lasted only until '61, but Egypt continued to officially refer to itself as the UAR until becoming the modern Arab Republic of Egypt in '71. Another highlight of Nasser's administration was the Six Day War, a third (but not the last) conflict with Israel

Nasser reigned until his death in 1970 and was succeeded as Egyptian President by Anwar Sadat. This marks the beginning of contemporary Egypt, which in this context is defined by boring modern politics I don't feel like talking about

And that's all for now Hopefully someone somewhere learned a thing or two, or maybe a dramatard will angrily correct something I got wrong. Either works for me

I might do more emote driven history tours if anyone's interested. Brazil might be next cos capybaras are from Brazil geddit? Would this be interesting? Should there be more emotes and less words? Lemme know

Driving home from anytime fitness a few minutes ago I saw a !burgers posting his highly processed and cancerous shopping cart. It shocked me that people in the year of creation 5784 (for a few more days) have not taken advantage of the wealth of nutritional and physiological knowledge available at their fingertips and continue to shovel such filth into their bodies. Then I realized most gentiles are incapable of synthesizing information without having a twitch streamer or propagandist do the research, thinking and interpreting for them. Accordingly, I have written up a guide to proper eating. Enjoy.

Foods

  GOOD:

1. 🫘 Legumes (peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, peanuts) should be the mainstay of your diet. They're filling, packed with fiber, vitamins, protein and slow-release carbs

2. 🍣 Proteins are important if you work out and occasionally if you don't. Some good ones include: chicken, turkey, eggs, sardines, salmon, mackerel, and tuna (occasionally - mercury). For poultry, avoid fried: rotisserie chickens are an option, grilled, roasted or sauteéd chicken breast, etc. I can't comment on seafood because I don't eat it but in theory should be okay too. Soy's fine for women

3. 🥗 Vegetables are great. They include:

• 🥔 Roots (potatoes, yams): filling, provide extra carbs when needed. Potatoes if boiled, baked or steamed then refrigerated turn to resistant starches which are very healthy. Fried potatoes are a tier or two lower. You also have turnips, carrots, and the like, which have vitamins and antioxidants. Carrots are great to snack on whenever and basically zero calorie

• 🥬 Leaves (spinach, arugula, sprouts, cabbage): good for fiber and antioxidants. Iceberg lettuce not included as it is basically water

• 🍅 Tasties (tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, onions, peppers) : have good nutrient profiles and make things yummy. Many are acidic which aids in digestion, cooking and the like. Not, generally speaking, as rich as leaves but certainly more palatable

• 🥒 Pickled and fermented veggies are excellent for digestion

4. 🍌 Fruits have many of the benefits of veggies, and their sugars tend to be healthier, for those with a sweet tooth. Citrus are especially good for reasons listed above. Note that tropical fruits like mangos (while delicious) don't have the nutrient profiles of their darker and more northern counterparts - blueberries, blackberries etc.

  MEH:

1. 🌾 Whole grains whether wheat or rice-based can be eaten if you really need carbs, say after or before an intense workout, but otherwise don't do much for your system. More filling than their refined counterparts, at least

2. 🌰 Nuts and seeds are a mixed bag (), high in beneficial nutrients and protein but also calorific and hard to digest. Consume sparingly

3. 🥩 Red meat whether beef, pork or lamb have the closest protein structure to humans so in theory would be optimal for tissue-building HOWEVER cause more inflammation than protein from sources less related to us. Eat when you need it and stay away otherwise

4. 🧀 Yogurt and certain cheeses, ghees and the like: the vast majority of the world is lactose intolerant so eat dairy rarely and in low-lactose forms. Pros are less inflammation and sometimes probiotic bacteria but besides fat you don't get much from it nutritively

.   BAD:

1. 🍞 Regular Carbs: bread, pasta, corn and rice. Minimal nutritional benefit and a high glycemic index to boot. Most cultures relied on them because they'll keep you alive in a pinch, yield large quantities, and are easy to grow, but we live in the future

2. 🥓 Preserved meats are carcinogenic. Yes they taste good. Eat rarely, when you can't help yourself

3. 🥛 Dairy speaking broadly: milk, butter, cheese, etc. Enjoy acne breakouts

4. 🧈 Most fats: no benefit, high in calories. This includes dressings. Americans, shockingly, can't eat a fresh plant without lathering it in 500 calories of lipid first

.   ATROCIOUS:

1. 🎂 Sugar, pastries, soda etc. Just keep yourself safe before the diabetes takes you

2. 🍿 Highly processed foods. Chips, cookies, snacks, prepackaged "meals", whatever. If it can sit on a shelf for a month without rotting it's got enough preservatives to massacre your gut biome

General Principles

a. 🤏 Minimize calories to what you need to survive and meet your goals - you'll live longer, feel better and look sexier

b. 🧠 Eat with your brain, not your eyes - food is fuel, though a lot of people treat it as a drug or lover

c. 💦 Water, surprisingly, isn't the best hydrator. Anything with particles in solution or suspension, like tea, lassi, soup etc is easier for your villi to grab on to. Otherwise, most of the liquid just flows through

d. 🍱 Don't drink water with a meal, or within ~30 minutes of one, unless you'll choke or are extremely thirsty. It dilutes your stomach's PH, worsening your digestion. If you have to drink with a meal, choose something acidic, like beer or wine

d. 🍳 Protein is useful when you're recovering from an illness or building muscle. Any more than your lb bodyweight's equivalent in grams (in an athletic person! less for most) is wasted, so be smart in how much you take

e. 🫃Carbs, fats and protein over your daily caloric needs all get converted to fat. Certain vegetables are basically the only food you can eat guilt-free

f. 🥘 Cooking is easy! Google a recipe or have chatgpt make you one, get ingredients and follow the steps. It's like legos but even more tolerant of mistakes (within, say, 25%) If you fear making too much, portion it out and freeze, refrigerate, and give to friends and loved ones if needed. They'll likely return the favor

g. 🏪 Stick to the perimeter of the grocery store (rare good reddit advice !nooticers). I get baking supplies, condiments, frozen and canned fruits and veg, and certain specialty items (matzo) from the inside rectangle, but otherwise:

That's all I got off the top of my head. Hope this helps you be the best you

Let me start this off with saying that I am, in true !grillers fashion, an impartial party in the Moon v. Patsy dispute. Obviously, I gave Moon a very fair interview, his first out of prison, and have generally been supportive of his presence on this website. I even gave him $50 to buy a microphone so that he could do interviews with not only myself, but whomever he wanted to talk to next. I'm not saying that to hold it over his head, but to show that I am not "coming after him" or joining le evil heckin groomercord moberino

Let's be clear here: @Patsy deserves to be freed.

you cant heckin call people pedorinos!!1

We here at rdrama pride ourselves on being the last bastion of the ways of ye olde internet - a place where you can call people cute twinks, r-slurs, the n word, you name it. We have cultivated a community where, like the internet of old, slapfights over inane, r-slurred bullshit result in years long rivalries and produce sweet, sweet seething and malding between terminally online homos amongst a tight knit community.

NEWS FLASH: THE SPIRIT OF THE OLD INTERNET IS CALLING PEOPLE P-DOPHILES OVER MILD DISAGREEMENTS

The core argument supplied by the janny cabal is that calling people pedos, without "evidence", is akin to real life harm.

Let me rebute this very easily:

I'm to believe that a fully grown man, who went to prison for years for trolling (unjustly, in my opinion), can't handle being slandered by an r-slur on the internet without janitorial intervention?

Janny Cabal simps: a good faith retort

Let's start out with @arseupwrongo

Our guy here is right in his analysis that p-do flinging is unfunny and r-slurred. He is also spot on in saying how it develops: r-slur 1 cherry picks an out of context, nothingburger comment and lobs accusations. However, is that really banworthy? If being an unfunny r-slur was banworthy, 99% of you neighbors would be sent packing.

>b-b-but it makes people obligated to respond for hours!!1

No it doesn't, literally just ignore it lol. Seriously, you can just say "no I'm not, you're r-slurred" and let the other person keep sperging. Everyone I've gone after on this website only made it worse by responding to my bait. Of all people, my neighbor moon should know this - which is why he isn't posting about it anymore, I'd assume.

Now, let's move on to @sayxirname

Easily the most r-slurred argument I've seen in regards to this !metashit. Do you really, actually believe that calling someone a p-dophile is going to bring the feds here? Do you think that there is a team of feds that tracks the millions of p-do accusations posted online daily and checks up on them? That they will shut down this website because some r-slur called another r-slur a p-do?

Aren't the feds more likely to be poking around because a (wrongfully, imo) convicted terrorist, whom they undoubtedly monitor the online activity of, has made this his home and is a moderator? Get real dude. You are the biggest r-slur on this whole website. How much is the janny cabal paying you?

Lastly, let's go over @UraniumDonGER's comment

This is in regard to @Aevann running around and calling SPAL a p-dophile, justifying his ban and the behavior that many users and jannies engaged in when they baselessly lobbed p-do accusations at him.

SPAL is a fricking schizo psycho btw. He's never once had s*x without a condom, including his WIFE of 8 years, because he was worried about catching STDs. He is deeply paranoid and delusional, yes, but this is also in character for him.

This is the best proof that he is a p-do that anyone can find, and it's baseless speculation at best. He asks for IDs when he takes women out? Wow, what a p-do!

The fact is that he was banned for calling Carp a p-do, and trying to find out why he is a felon. This shook carp so badly that he rage quit the site for months and refused to keep being Aevanns head capo unless SPAL was gone.

I don't blame Aevann for doing this. I don't even blame him for banning Patsy. I just think he should be honest: it's his website and he's doing what he's doing to keep his website running how he wants it to. That's fine, but just be honest brother.

Patsy didn't cross a line by harassing another user, that's what this website is all about. He simply made your life harder and didn't listen to you when you laid down the law. SPAL cannot be credibly accused of being a p-do, he just made your life harder and didnt listen to you when you laid down the law.

Catching a ban on the website comes down to drawing the ire of the janny cabal in 90% of cases. You don't need to make justifications for it, we all know it's true lol.

Final Thoughts

This whole debacle is pure r-sluration, from the top on down. The jannies are being r-slurred, moon was being r-slurred, Patsy was being r-slurred. I'm being r-slurred by making a post that took way longer than I thought it would and wasting a half hour of my day that will ultimately not make a difference. I probably just pissed off a bunch of people I otherwise have a good relationship with for no reason - Patsy will still be banned because he didn't listen to Aevann.

In conclusion, every user on this website, including every member of the janny cabal, is a p-dophile. Except for me, of course.

If you're American, it can be hard to fully conceptualize how the country is viewed by outsiders. America is the promised land, the land of opportunity and plenty, the one location where all your dreams can come true. It's a bitch to get in, but once you're in you've hit the jackpot. Cleaning toilets in the USA is better than dodging bullets from MS13 in Mexico. As a middle-class South African, I wonder whether my life would have turned out better had I been a low-class American on foodstamps. Could I have leveraged it to a better life. The pull of the American Dream tells me yes...

Many immigrants, legal and illegal find their way into America and begin with lower-class job. The plan is to eventually climb the ladder and provide a better life for their children. It's a noble quest, and it would work if America wasn't filled with ills such as racism and police brutality. We see that in today's case which features a young man named Amadou Diallo.

This is a story that has captured my attention due to its brutality, and I'd like to share some of the details with you.

Early Life

Amadou Diallo is one of four children of Guinean descent. The male circumcision rate in Guinea is estimated to be 84.2% (https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12963-016-0073-5/tables/1_), making it highly likely that Amadou is circumcised. He was born in Sinoe County in Liberia on September 2, 1975, and he followed his parents to Togo, Singapore, Thailand, and back to Guinea. Things would change for Diallo, in1996, he received an offer to start a business in the USA, NY with his cousin. Some may be thinking - rather be a mouse in my homeland than a rat in a cesspool, but Diallo did not see things that way. To him, the trip would open up opportunities for his future and career

His plans were to seek asylum once landing in the promised land, and he would falsely admit that his parents died in conflict in mauritious. It's not clear exactly how well his plan worked but by 1997, he was selling video cassettes, gloves, and socks on the sidewalk along 14th Street during the day. How many of us have had to resort to such to keep living. Most of us were born on home base.

Early Death

On February 4, 1999, Amadou was still standing next to his place of residence, completing the consumption of a meal. At about 12:40 a.m., officers Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, and Richard Murphy were looking for a serial rapist. Unfortunately, their search led them to cross paths with Diallo. The police pulled up on Diallo with an unarmed car, pretending to want to ask him questions. Sensing the tenseness of the situation, Diallo ran, pulling out his wallet in the process.

BANG! BANG!

One officer shot at Diallo. The other three law enforcement, believing their partner to be shot, opened fire on Diallo 41 with Diallo getting hit 14 times. Un understandably, Diallo succumbed to his injuries. Eyewitness Sherrie Elliott stated that the police continued to shoot even though Diallo was already down.

This is apparently called a "contagious shooting." Confused cops will continue firing until the supposed threat is stopped. Out of the 41 rounds fired, 19 bullets had fatally struck Diallo. When the four officers searched Diallo's dead body for a weapon, they only found a black wallet and a beeper. Realizing he had shot an unarmed civilian, Carroll cried, "Oh my God! Please don't die!"

"When you think about Amadou, you think of yourself, you think of your brother, your cousin. He could have been anyone. That night, the officers saw a black man standing on the vestibule, that it didn't take time to stop and look, give time," said Kadiatou Diallo to Newsweek. "They just stereotyped him and just killed him without any time to understand that he lived in this building. That he was not a criminal, and this is why in the depths of everything, I didn't know I was creating a movement."

Reactions to Amadialo's case

If you're ever curious about how to cure a mass movement, this is a good case study. George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, by the time these names energe there's already been a pattern of police brutality in these national. There's a conflict of interest and a lack of community involved. I listened to a story about a lady who was two shy to say no to immigrants eating her food. Imagine if that was on the streets and it was an immigrant asking to use her umbrella in the middle of the rain. We need to find common ground between natives and first-generation immigrants regarding what's expected in the USA, and the police need to learn skills of soft deescelation. Shooing a man 41 times without even seeing a gun is paranoid policing, the acts of scared people.I believe feat more than racism encouraged this attack.

Boss, Carroll, McMellon, and Murphy pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges to Diallo's death. The jury, which consisted of four black and eight white jurors, deliberated for three days. When the jury finally reached their final verdict, the officers were acquitted of all charges in Diallo's death. As you can imagine, this caused outrage. In response to the not guilty finding, protestors took to the streets, blocking Fifth Avenue, blocking traffic to Wall Street, and continuing towards City Hall. Seveal public figures made statements regarding the case:

Then-president Bill Clinton made his first comments about the Diallo verdict at a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco. "I don't pretend for a moment to second-guess the jury. But I know most people in America of all races believe that if it had been a young white man in an all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened," Clinton said.

When Newsweek asked what Diallo expects from government leaders today, she answered, "My hope is that all leaders, whether you are government leaders, or community leaders, or teachers, everyone will seize the hands that are extended from these young people. These young people are the first of this movement, let us extend our hand to them and grab their extended hands. Connect with the youth and let them be part of this question, let them be part of the work that we're doing. I am doing my part."

As a result of the terrible incident, the Street Crimes Unit was officially disbanded in 2002.

Erykah Badu's Reaction

As you can imagine, there was an outpouring of music from the Black community, but none seemed to carry the gravtas of the situation quite like she did on the song AD 2000. Erykah Badu rose to fame with her first album Baduizm, released in 1997, which earned her a Grammy award, and it is regarded as being pivotal in popularisng the neo-soul genre. However, I wish to focus more on her position as a Black mother figure within the African American community, particularly to Black men. As Marlo David points out in her analysis of Black motherhood, "Badu uses her music, visual style, and linguistic play to offer an Afrofuturistic vision of family that embraces black women's sexual autonomy and transgressive motherhood as an important part of a black collective identity that resonates in the post–Civil Rights era". Her music is noted for having a nurturing attitude towards Black men and deep concern for the plight of Black men and the social issues they face. This is seen in songs such as Times a Wastin' where Badu takes on a maternal role, warning Black men to take responsibility for their lives and keep guard in a world hostile to them, or A.D. 2000 where Badu remembers Amadou Diallo who was 22 and unarmed when he was shot 19 times by police. As seen in these instances, Badu's position as a Black mother to Black men to a large degree stems as a response to societal conditions. What is being counteracted here is the specific variety of racism directed towards Black men which criminalises, demonises, and devalues Black men. This variety of racism was amplified by the War on Drugs. At times, Badu takes her mothering of Black men to transgressive extremes, as seen with her public displays of support for villainised Black men such as R. Kelly and Bill Cosby.

[Holly-Willoughby-in-white-top-with-WYLDE-MOON-candle.jpg]

To understand Erykah Badu's performance of motherhood, it is necessary to look into the archetype of the Great Mother and how it has been represented in mythology. For this, it is useful to turn to Adrienne Rich. In her 1976 text Of Woman Born, Rich offers a feminist analysis of motherhood, noting the expectations society places on mothers and the unique problems faced by all women who are viewed in terms of their ability to conceive and serve a maternalistic purpose. The text is quite personal at times, as Rich is the mother of three sons, and she reflects on her own experiences raising her children. Far from merely being a diary, she engages in a scholarly analysis of views of motherhood throughout the ages. Citing Gertrude Rachel Levy who has authored books on comparative mythology, she suggests that among early humans, there existed a "Prepatriarchal" consciousness where the archetypal figure of the Mother represented Earth, and then came to embody the duality of birth and death because the earth is both where life emanates and where the dead are buried. These two aspects of the Mother are sometimes separated out as the Great Mother and the Terrible Mother. Hence, as Rich highlights, the Mother contains duality, and her dark deathly aspect are "inseparable from her benign, life-giving aspect" (116).

However, in patriarchal thought, argues Rich, the Great Mother has been associated with the moon and has been devalued while masculine solar deities have taken centre stage. She notes how Apollo "assimilated a number of attractive aspects of the Great Mother" (125). With the sun representing the masculine, and the moon representing the Great Mother, a kind of archetypal imagery occurs which is troubling to Rich. The sun is constant and produces its own illumination. The moon, however, is sometimes not there at all, and only glows thanks to the radiance of the sun. Within this, one could argue, a patriarchal relationship is illustrated. As Rich writes: "with the advent of solar religion, the Great Mother, in her manifold persons and expressions, begins to suffer reductions; parts of her are split off, some undergo a gender change, and henceforth woman herself will be living on patriarchal terms, under the laws of male divinities and in the light of male judgments" (125). According to Rich, this light which illuminates the moon is a dominating and judgmental one. In the year 2000, Badu released her second album, Mama's Gun. As the name might suggest, it sees her adopting the role of a maternal figure in the African American community once again. Her concern with Black males is made evident from the very first song, Penitentiary Philosophy, which as the name suggests, imagines the ways the African American community is trapped in a penitentiary both literally and metaphorically.

Here's my philosophy

Livin' in a penitentiary

Brothers all on the corner

Tryin' to make believe

Turn around ain't got no pot to pee

Make me mad when I see ya sad

Can't stand to see ya hustle doin' bad

But you can't win when your will is weak

When you're knocked on the ground

The first verse imagines Brothers standing idly on the corner, and Erykah expresses empathy for them stating "Make me mad when I see ya sad/Can't stand to see ya hustle doin' bad". However, as a Great Mother, she also attempts to uplift, and proceeds to offer advice to the Brothers, stating "But you can't win when your will is weak". On the song "Orange Moon", Erykah makes use of the same archetypal imagery of the sun and the moon to illustrate the relationship between mothers and sons. However, in Erykah's interpretation, the Great Mother serve as an antidote to the loss of dignity faced by Black men in society, and she expresses this without the minimisation of women.

To understand the myths and symbolism which Badu draws from, it is worth noting that she is part of the Five-Percent Nation, also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, which is a Black consciousness movement and an offshoot of Islam founded by Clarence 13X who was influenced by Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad who he met while he was a member of the Nation of Islam.

The Five-Percent Nation makes use numerology, astronomy, and a complex set of symbols to encode and convey their teachings which centre on the divinity of Black people. Such a philosophy arose in the 1960s in New York, Harlem, as a response to a society rife with anti-Black racism.

Within Five-Percenter symbolism, women are represented by the moon, while children are represented by the stars. This mystical imagery is expressed in the lyrics of 'Orange Moon' where Erykah sings the following:

I'm an orange moon

I'm brighter than before

Brighter than ever before

I'm an orange moon and I shine so bright

Cause I reflect the light of my sun

I praise the day, he turned my way

And smiled at me

He gets to smile and I get to be orange

Once again, as is the case with Rich's Great Mother, Badu positions herself as the moon who glows only through the illumination of the sun. However, Badu, is not just any moon. She is an orange moon, which is a kind of moon which occurs close to the Autumnal Equinox, and it is when the moon shines the brightest which brings to mind beautiful imagery of a glowing orange moon in the night sky. However, rather than see herself in a position of oppression, she praises the day she gets to be orange. Instead of seeing patriarchy in this archetypal imagery, Badu sees harmony.

How good it is, how good it is

How good it is, how good it is

How good it is, how good it is

How good it is, how good it is

Shine so bright

He ruled the day, I ruled the night

Shine, shine, shine

The lyric "he ruled the day, I ruled the night" suggest a relationship of equality despite these differing roles. The imagery of the orange moon also highlights this harmony, as the Autumnal Equinox is when the length of the day and night are equal, giving the sun and the moon equal time to rule over the Earth. It is worth noting that it could be argued that this song is about her eldest son specifically. Her son's name is Seven, and within the Five-Percenter system of Supreme Mathematics, the number seven represents God who is also represented by the sun.

What I argue is that in addition to being a religious praise song, this song, in keeping with Badu's theme as a mother figure, serves to uplift Black men by highlighting their importance within the Black community. With Black men in America being a demographic that has faced staggering incarceration rates and police brutality, to a large degree as a result of the ongoing War on Drugs, Badu offers an alternative, uplifting view of Black men as a source of light and knowledge which illuminates the world.

Comparing Adreinne Rich and Badu, we find polar opposite reactions to the Great Mother archetype, particularly when it is represented as a moon. While Rich sees a patriarchal picture of oppression, Badu sees a beautiful system of harmony. In short, we see the same archetype finding varied expression in Black and White American communities as a result of differing cultural forces. While Rich is afraid of her sons becoming oppressors, Badu is afraid of her sons becoming oppressed.

Conclusion

I like Eryka Badu because she articulates the crux of the issue so beautiful. What would a statue for Diallo do, when therer'll just be anther black victim, causing Dialo's name to be forgotten. How many of you eve remember Diallo's name? Instead she finds an infinite home for him in the cosmos where he can enjoy bringing the beautiful light that illuminates the beauty of women (the moon). It's an image of motherhood that may seem oppressive to some, but I view it as a trauma-triggered response to the fracturing of the Black community where key figures like mother and father are typically found outside the home.

Any, I wished to dispell common views of motherhood in the Black community. Black mothers are deathly afraid of their suns becoming victims which is why they are babied well into adulthood and kept in cribs. It's not social retardation, it's a reaction to a hostile work.

Thoughts, opinions, downmarseys!

I visited gab for the first time in a long time, just to see what was going on. What I saw looked to me like chaos, and as a result, this post looks like chaos. I still don't know what the heck I saw over there but I did my best to write this. It resulted in like a hundred screenshots though.

I found the link to this "free speech forum" advertised on the sidebar of gab, next to where two guys were arguing over whether joo hating is bad because the muslims will win

They are super privacy orientated, according to them

https://arguefreely.com/AboutUs

I think this is the society category:

very bare bones lmao

I dig the grey monolithic design, and I also like the lack of dates.

How is gab.com doing these days?

I think it's doing ok. It's doing better than I thought it would be doing, and has a dedicated user base. There's always a new post every few minutes, even at non-peak hours, and interaction to go around. But it's much different than in 2020.

Random screenshot of the "for you" page:

Very active, actually, and full of seethetards that are too inflammatory for facebook.

"Antisemeticallybeautiful" is this guy's handle

Back in 2020 you'd get a few of these guys, and a few more that were 100% trolling to rile up the boomers there, who told them to STAHP, because we aren't racist, we're just culturally better. I ain't seeing any calls to stop white white white white posting anymore, they're unironic

REMEMBER ALWAYS BULLY HITLERSTRAGS OR THERE WILL BE 30 OF THEM ON YOUR WEBSITE SNEEDING UNFUNNILY AT ALL TIMES

I kind of miss the boomers I used to see, that seem to have been bullied away...

One thing that hasn't changed is CRISISKANG Torbaposts

What in the actual frick is the new cult that is forming on here

Oh no no no... I just dove deep into his profile and I could do a 1000 word writeup on this Aryan Isreallite guy.

I was gonna go into the religion of the Aryan Isrealites but I got distracted by the fact that there's an active redhead group on Gab that this guy pulls from

I mean I got nothing against readheads and all but maybe

uh

This ain't heckin wholesome or trad and they're running a "sexy white women" telegram funnel to who knows where

after a search of groups, I realized there's a bunch of active and specific groups for booba now

BACK TO WHAT I WAS TRYING TO FOCUS ON:

People like this guy talk about nature's laws a lot, they also think really weird things about Hitler restoring Christianity, because they want to think that for some reason. They are also really, really, really, mean if color is wrong reads like demontalk to me.

Torba is vagueposting about it, and getting them riled up

A lot of new features of gab are very reminiscent of facebook. This is probably because a lot of their growth in the last few years is driven by people who left facebook, and not twitter.

Look how facebooky this new layout is:

GAB BUISNESSES

An interesting thing I've noticed since I last interacted with Gab, is that they have an active business listing page.

https://gab.com/businesses

Need a witch doctor? Also need them to be white and republican? Gab/buisnesses is the place for you

The Bioenergetic Revolution Coming in 2024!

ontario speed dating... tf?

COME TO MEXICO

Plenty of jeets spamming every category lol

This is one of the first things I've seen using the "shop" feature

There is no shop listing on this one.

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BUY CHICKEN FOR SELL? I can "register my interest" in joining a cult for $40,000, but I cannot buy chicken

ok I'm out of spoons, that's all, bye

[Apparently I forgot to save the game at the end of the last episode or I saved it under some really esoteric name I don't remember so we're still halfway to Wesel. It doesn't really affect anything.]

Notice how the seasons actually change in this game! If you want a game that's really really good about seasons, look up Shadow Empire. You can play on planets with radically different axial tilt and it actually matters.

Oh no. These people chose to frick with us. You want my briefcase. I'm not giving you my goddarn briefcase.

Like Michael Douglas I try to have Sasha talk them out of this. Didn't work.

We're faced with some ordinary bandits who we should make short work of. But they have a leader who is wearing cuirboulli armor (the same as our people). He's got a shield. He's got a longsword, which is at least comparable to our weapons. And they're of fair quality. This is the first relatively tough opponent we've faced. If you've been made to read a few pages of Clausewitz by some tard you might think this guy is the enemy's "center of gravity" so we'll attack him. Heck no. Anybody who knows anything about fighting knows you go for the enemy's weakness. We'll try to kill off his loser companions. Then when we're in a 4v1 one with him, it will go exactly like in real life. He will die really fast.

The bandits try to hit us from two sides, trying to throw us off. Big mistake. All four of us go east to hit those two. We only have a few seconds alone with them, but double-teaming them it doesn't take long to cut them down. After that it was kind of a blur. We engaged the other three guys but Redactor got the heck beaten out of him and knocked unconscious for reasons I'm not sure of. Must have been a really lucky hit. The rest of the party won the fight though. I think we really need better armor.

Redactor is banged up really bad but the upside to this is that the equipment that tough guy had will get us a good price when we sell it. (Unlike Rimworld, you can stab a guy to death and still sell his clothes to the local thrift store for full price.)

We're hurt bad so we'll go to the nuns for help. It's a different city so they'll help us. Wait. WTF??? Story of my fricking life. I think we got enough money to heal up at the inn but it's going to take time. And as every 40 year old boomer can tell you, time is not on our side. (Literally. Our older characters will lose strength as time goes by.)

I don't know if we're ready for this yet, but let's try to get some quests. Various people have quests but the bankers are the most likely. There's the Fuggers from Austria and the Medicis from Italy. Also the Hanseatic League aren't really bankers but they need to get some tasks done in the same way. The problem is, how are we going to get taken seriously? We haven't done any quests so we're not famous yet. We need someone to talk these people into giving us one. Sasha is very charismatic, but she's not yet 2006 Torino level.

Maybe we can give her a little boost? Redactor knows St. Anthony, who can boost Charisma and Speak Common (the skill of just knowing to speak German well enough to talk people into things). He can pray for St. Anthony to help Sasha. But religion in the 1400s is very transactional. If you want something, you're expected to pay for it. That's where Divine Favor comes in. This is, in terms of gameplay mechanics, your mana. You can't just constantly pray every time you hit a speed bump in your life and expect your problems to be solved for you. When you pray you pay Divine Favor points.

And you're not guaranteed anyone is going to listen. The other crucial number here is your Virtue skill, which appropriately is the most important skill in the game by far. It increases your chances of saintly intervention. You increase it by doing good deeds as a Christian. The higher your Virtue the more likely it is that saints will actually listen to you. Even Yuna has saints that she has no chance with right now. When we combat the forces of Satan and do charity to the poor and oppressed we'll bump that number up.

For the purposes of this LP I'm going to just spend all her DF to make sure she has a 99% chance of being heard.

Wow that's a pretty big impact. Let's see if any of these bankers care. Many of them just will not give you a quest because not everyone needs a party of four bold individuals to solve a problem every day of their life.

Fetch quest. This is actually close to us! The locations for these are apparently completely random so half the time they want to send you across the Empire for 4 florins. But this is near Bremen, in the northwest corner of Germany, close to where we are on the lower Rhine. We can actually try this one. The money is nice but what's even better is gaining Local Reputation in this city and Fame (how well you're known across the country).

I would try to buy some better armor but all they got here in Wesel is 24-quality and I refuse to pay for that. I stop at Osnabruck and at least get something slightly better for Nathan. You have armor for your torso and armor for your limbs. I think my people (barely) have adequate protection for now on their torsos but they still have virtually nothing for their limbs. I think that's where we're getting most of our damage.

On our way we run into a monastery. Huh. This doesn't seem quite right.

Capitalism? As a 1400s guy I find that pretty unseemly, especially in a monastery.

They have a library so we can learn about another saint. The only two I remember are Thomas the Apostle and Margaret. Margaret is some girl who died under horrible circumstances. She does a lot for you in-game because she was widely venerated at the time. But Darklands encourages you to roleplay. Thomas is my favorite apostle. I'm the kind of guy who would insist on literally reaching into the guts of my god to prove He's real. So we'll pick him.

Actually he's gonna be useful sometimes. Just like you'd expect from someone that pragmatic.

I'm gonna quit now just because it is incredibly time-consuming to upscale all the screenshots and put them in the right place. Next time, we're going to that place north of Bremen to get the fetch quest artifact. But we are gonna run into a challenge and it's not gonna be "somebody wants you to kill 20 mobs".

!christians

Note: This was not intended to be an effortpost, but I am too much terminally neurodivergentc so my post just kept on growing and growing!

Either way, summoning all !g*mers to examine the Empire of Autism of the 2020s culture wars in the vidya industry!, I look forward for how well all of these discussions will age within 10 or 20 years!

To start, KiNeurodivergents seem to be showing some restraint, and in a rare moment, are more or less fine with a foid protagonist!

https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1foplzv/ghost_of_tsushima_2_revealed_by_sony_ghost_of/

Now what are the 4chuds and /v/irgins thinking of it?, spoiler:

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689886378

Women bleed out of their vaginas 1 week per month, I don't want to play as one, it's disgusting.

One artificial wombs and s*x androids are created women will cease to have any purpose to exist.

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689874463

because you have yellow fever. you will never have a jap wife though because you're a sexy Indian dude bald manlet

It will be interesting to see how people react to this from both the /pol/ crowd as well as the woke crowd since she pretty much looks like a normal woman. She's not overly doll looking, nor is she ugly like many Western games make women look nowadays. I suspect both sides will just complain anyway kek

even the most basic japanese characters in games with 'realistic' looking characters look attractive when made by asian companies, the west is doomed

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689870975/

remember when video game protagonists were male

Female protagonist

Based but ONLY IF she's a lesbian, or at least bisexual. Here's hoping.

This. Female protagonists are only cringe when they have romance with a guy.

Am I supposed to be mad about getting to dress up a cute ronin girl who plays a stringed instrument while walking down heavily wooded byways surrounded by the falling leaves?

I just am genuinely less interested in games with female protagonists. I am pretty sure women feel the same way about books/films/games with male protagonists. It obviously isn't an automatic no for me or for others, but I am much less likely to play the game if I am forced to be a girl.

Funnily enough if a game has a large variety of selectable characters I then don't care if I end up liking a girl the most. I play Peach in Smash bros and I am not some waifustrag. I've been a Chun Li player since SF4. Stuff like that.

!foidmoment thoughts?

women can`t be a samurai shes probably a rogue ronin

They literally called her a ronin in the trailer. Do you think that's going to stop schizophrenic posting about female samurai?

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689889446

Why do western devs seem to hate Japanese men so much?

Because Jap men hate themselves and have been cucks to the BWC BVLLS fricking their Jap waifus since Feudal times!?

!historychads !coomers

Face it Japbois, you are all femboy cuckies and your women belong to the VVHITE EVROPEAN BVLLS, it is simply how nature works!

ubisoft designed a more attractive jap character than Sony

How the frick did we end up here??

anyone saying a female samurai is not as woke as a black samurai is r-slurred

your brain has been subverted into thinking the lesser sin is better than the greater sin

Sekiro had female bosses. Tenchu had female protagonist. Fighting games have female fighters. Why playing as a female samurai seeking revenge is wrong? They already did a homage to samurai movies with the original.

It's the fricking r-slurred YouTube shitters whining about anything with a female in it

even fricking /r/KotakuinAction seems to be fine with it, only the YouTube/Xitter touriss are the ones sperging at fine-looking foid main character (at least she is not frick ugly tho)

could've easily found ANY average looking japanese woman with a modicum of physical fitness

NOPE, the fat xir it is!

That would have required actually going to Japan, a place that modern PlayStation hates. You will take your genderfluid Asian American mutt and you will like it!

both of my previous statements can be true!

If you're going to force a foid on me then at the VERY least make them appeal to my peepee. Otherwise what's the fricking point.

!coomers

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689882148

This has to be manufactured outrage by groomercord s for the purpose of getting epic /r/gamingcirclecute twinks screenshots.

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689876749

HOW MANY OF THESE FRICKING THREADS ARE TENDIES GOING TO MAKE

THE ENTIRE BOARD IS BEING FLOODED WITH CULTURE WAR CRAP NO ONE CARES ABOUT

4cuck in current year, get used to it chuddy!

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689880627

no point in explaining something obvious to a dumb fricking BIPOC, good day.

the Josh Goldberg terminally online shut in hobo phenotype is real, the Chud phenotype is outdated, /pol/ Chuds no longer look like this they now look more like this:

"muh female protagonist!"

Okay, but let me put it to you this way: Imagine the hot spring scenes.

These are Western modern audience corporate right side of hxstory game devs, not Nipp-dophiles obsessed with hot spring voyerism

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689871519

You can play as a Japanese girl in the new Assassin's Creed game tho

she got blacked not interested

Me going to buy BlackAss Creed Chudows after spending months trash talking it because it includes the premium B L A C K E D scene:

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689885395

I have to wonder, there the frick are you cute twinks coming from? All you r-slurs claiming /v/ hates women protagonist. /v/ has been cooming to women protags since Lara Crost on the ps1. Still cooming to hots girls in Dead or Alive, Stellar Blade, Nier Automata and more. Then all of the sudden in the past week, all you freaks come out of nowhere acting like we hate women protagonists. You tourists need to go back to where you came from.

Every single one of these posters is a tourist

!soyteens

gets called out

gets defensive and tries to larp as an old strag

You're a gcj that comes here and tries to spam the same garbage. There are like seven threads up right now all saying the same shit.

TOTAL REDDITGOD VICTORY

She is not Samurai. Female warriors were a thing. Samurai's wives knew how to defend themselves as a last resort to protect their homes and the Naginata is romanticized often in Japanese art as a weapon women were proficient with. Although this game could go in a boring, horrible DEIfest, a female protagonist as a vengeful warrior is not something you should immediately jump at in a negative light. I would have preferred a game centred around the four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu. Fits the Ghost theme well. As would a Sengoku-jidai Ninja game starring a fictional protagonist of one of the tragic clans of the period. Perhaps the Azai, or even the Oda after Honnoji. You're all fricking cute twinks for making too many threads about shit you don't really give a frick about, or don't care enough to know about.

The Butt Creed girl is unironically cuter though

FRICK YOU... because your right

I have no fricking clue what this is, but I assume it's some kind of gay twitter or groomercord drama.

I love NewGODs so much bros

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689887691

Sony marketers (read: Indians earning about .2 cents a post) are currently invading the board and pretending to be mad about a female protagonist in a certain game in order to get you to talk about it, because the IP itself is kind of mid and doesn't really stand on its own merits compared to a certain other Japan-produced IP with a ninja protagonist.

Don't give Sony any oxygen. Don't reply to their garbo threads. If the people you are interacting with seem willfully ignorant, it's because they are being compensated to do so.

!nooticers !antibharatiya do you think this is true?, are all of the anti-woke goobergaters actually a bunch of poos hired by Sony as a form of guerilla marketing?

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689884557/ghost-of-yotei-va-information

STOP

RAIDING

THE

FRICKING

BOARD

TO

CREATE

FAKE

OUTRAGE

YOU

FRICKING

CUTE TWINKS

PRESUMABLY THE FIRST-EVER THREAD ON /V/ MENTIONING THE GOY GAME:

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689871742/

Ghost of yotei the singular new game that Playstation will be releasing in 2025... my sides

https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/689886712/ (jannied while I was writing the effortpost lol)

Leave to the west to accurately represent how ugly japs actually are, i respect that

https://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/689878937

Company makes good, authentic, passion filled game with no desire to please the "modern audience"

Game is a massive success

Company makes sequel and fills it with "modern audience" shit, using the good will and reputation they received from their first, good game to market the second one

Everyone can see it and it's not even hard.

It happened with TLOU2, RDR2 etc. It's bullshit.

First one was already woke, secondary. You didn't play it, you will never play it, you don't give a single fricking shit about anything except your little "culture war" for having absolutely nothing else in your pathetic excuse of a "life". Now go on and seethe, b-word and cry since that is the only response you've ever learned to someone calling you out while wallowing in your own fricking shit.

A WILD SOIJEWISH CHAD APPEARS!

this makes 0 fricking sense you r-slur

why would the guy who posted that pic be a

i swear to God you're a well poisoning from groomercord yourself

it was always woke so stop complaining chud!

Typically gas lighting. Neck yourself tranner

me or the guy who posted the pic?

So what is the conclusion to this massive wall of text that I spent some few hours working on?, what can we, a bunch of neurodivergent and eccentric individuals posting on an obscure website that is the spinoff of an also-niche defunct subreddit, catered towards "ironic" dramaposting, being adjacent towards imageboards, niche forums, and internet arguments, anger, and autism (AAA), what can we learn from this wall of text existing?, yes, we do indeed learn one simple, yet extremely important thing that is a prominent feature of human civilization in the Year of our Lord 2024:

Self-professed neurodivergent

Daughter of two lawyers

Confused why men ask her what she does for a living on dates, "she's the prize"

Reliant on her parents completely for finances

Finished internship "at a tech company" "program management"

Parents want her to pay her own darn bills (she doesn't), has had arguments about it

Psych degree last year

Internship from March to August

"I enjoy being funemployed" timestamp - uses this word repeatedly

Aspiring social media personality? Plan is to get viral "doing something" so she can start selling merch timestamp

Pays for - utility bills, "some of" food, "some of" nights out

Parents both lawyers timestamp

"You're not gonna get tiktok famous from this show so I hope you're not thinking that." timestamp

"I've been through so much" timestamp

• was called "Miss Piggy" in high school because she was overweight, still seething about it

Didn't give them a statement for the CC timestamp

• Companion card "she knows if I had my own credit card I would be in massive amounts of debt"

• Not sure what the balance is on her card

• Hard cut to baby product ad placement

"Honestly, I just want to be a stay-at-home pilates wife, like not gonna lie, jobs and me do not get along" timestamp

She doesn't know what a CC statement is timestamp

She's missing payments, her mother is on this card too timestamp

Caleb seethes about her blowing at him timestamp

Convo about parents enabling her, mentions a lot of her friends are in the same position? timestamp

She is proud of graduating college timestamp

• really proud of her extracurricular? "cross country, track, a sorority"

• Some D3 university? timestamp

A lot of my scamfluencer friends are funemployed timestamp

• Life coaching, dating coaching, fitness coaching

• She is getting a National Academy of Sports Medicine certification?

CC Statement (4908) timestamp

• $568 minimum payment

• No payment history

• Thinks her parents have been paying? Caleb does not see any payments made at all

• Thinks her mother does not know what her balance is?

• On trips they just "girlmath it on the Amex" ? timestamp

  • "Sister is one of the most hard-working people?"

  • Family is mad at her, arguing over finances

  • Blew her chance at the internship since she didn't get a job offer out of it?

• Crime victim timestamp

  • sexual assault victim?

• Reads out her spending timestamp

• "My dad, I really hope he doesn't watch this because he is gonna flip out" timestamp

• Thinks she spent 1000 total last month, actually it was 7549 [timestamp](

  • There was a hotel fee on there that was nearly a thousand all on its lonesome

• "I don't want to feel like I'm missing out just because I don't have like a cushy job like they do" timestamp

She tries to discuss politics timestamp

• She fails to explain what tax she would want

Owes for a class timestamp

• "Social media package from one of my besties" - aforementioned scamfluencer I assume

• $2'000 - Five strategy sessions how to make captivating content

• "She works in corporate"

"This guy she knows has a large following on Instagram and she paid him $350 and didn't know what he was talking about" timestamp

• Advice on how to run her socials

• Did not get the value she wanted out of it

• 100,000 Tiktok followers

• "How come I'm not able to get followers on tiktok?!"

  • "Because you don't make interesting or engaging content that resonates with people!"

"Was going to do a plant medicine retreat and paid for it and couldn't go because of her medication" timestamp

• I really did want to go to that but I didn't do my research

• Mentions that she is training for a marathon right now

"Everyone in my family has been successful but me, I'm like cursed or something" timestamp

• "I need to go to like ABA [Applied Behavior Analysis] or something"

Has been having medical issues she doesn't want to talk about timestamp

• "Really really set me back in my internship"

Hates the tech industry because the "entitled" guys she's gone out with in the tech industry have made her split the bill timestamp

• "No offense, I would have made you split the bill because I wouldn't have enjoyed the date"

Wants to try and monetize her frivolous spending (through social media) timestamp

Ran a background search on a prospective date to see if he had a criminal record timestamp

Can't stop herself from ordering UberEats

Calls her mother timestamp

• Caleb doesn't talk

• "I feel like you and dad give me too much leniency with my finances" - Cringekino

• Questions about her investment account? "I've been keeping track of the stock that I have"

• Mother is extremely nice and understanding of her fail-daughter

the Sea Peoples

You're saying you want historical accuracy and you bring this up.

We know about the "Sea Peoples" from like 4 sentences on one Egyptian stele and lots of conjecture about the "Bronze Age Collapse" hypothesis which I think has been pretty conclusively proven to be bullshit. Ancient historians had written a million words by 200 AD about who the Pelasgians might have been. This is probably the number one question they had, at least in the Greek-speaking world. But you never hear about them in pop history, do you? You know why? Because there's a lot of contradictory information that doesn't make sense. Strabo struggled with it and couldn't figure it out and gave us our best answer, that he doesn't know. He doesn't even know if they were a nation or if it was just a word that described a certain category of people. You might refer to them in English as "Sea Peoples".

But you've never heard of the Pelasgians, have you? (If anyone actually has please call me out.) Why? Because it's way easier to write up imaginary stories about Bronze Ages and collapses if you're basing it on 4 sentences about one event at one time. The Pelasgians don't make for good pop history because there's too much goddarn evidence. They pop up all over the place for several centuries even into the beginnings of historical time. Herodotus said that the population of Athens were descendants of Pelasgians who had learned Greek. (BTW I think there's a kernel of truth here but basically I don't buy it.) And we've all been taught that Athens was the epitome of Hellenism, which we know because they fought the war against the Persians to save European democracy. Which we only know about because of Herodotus. There ain't a heck of a lot archaeological evidence. (In fact the parts of Herodotus we can actually prove are the stuff that happened in Persia.) So how do we solve this conundrum if we're the 1800s English p-dophiles who invented "classical studies"?

Just don't talk about things. Like most stuff, just never mention it.

• The Pelasgians ever existing.

• The Etruscans being universally recognized by everyone immigrating from Asia and still having part of the population there in Asia.

• All of the ethnic minorities that existed in Greece that we are explicitly told by Thucydides were not Hellenes.

• Most of these Greek authors considering Cyrus to be the greatest thing that ever happened to the world. (Everyone writing in the Greek language must have always agreed with the ideology of the 1800s Greek nation state.)

• Almost all of Greek history is about a bunch of rural shitholes where they had like 400 people who raised goats in the mountains and were a "city" because they had a wall. You've heard about all these guys who supposedly lived together in Athens at the same time but have you heard of Phocis, Locris, Acarnania? Half you r-slurs couldn't find Thessaly on a map.

• Xenophon obviously didn't write any of those works. You know because the author of one book assigned to him explicitly says "read this book by [other guy]" if you want to know about Xenophon. If we believe in anything assigned to Xenophon it is the Cyropaedia(*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyropaedia). Basically the gospels except about Cyrus being the messiah. Extreme efforts have been made to say this is all just historical fiction by Xenophon, a Greek, who really was trying to express Greek ideas about... how the Persian emperor should act... And they totally correspond with Jewish accounts of him (that whole bible thing) and lots of archaeological evidence.

• Metadata on books from back then might not be totally accurate. If you look at the Suda, the Greeks a thousand years ago were debating the provenance of a lot of these and who people were.

• There's no evidence that Euclid was actually supposed to be a person. We know literally nothing about them except they're Egyptian.

• The "Pythagorean Theorem" has nothing to do with Pythagoras and never did until tards started printing math textbooks. That's an easy one.

• Pythagoras is sometimes written about as an avatar of Apollo. Either that discredits everything we've heard about Pythagoras or we have have to start taking every mythological character seriously. Remember that time when Dionysus invaded India?

• Definitions of words. You can claim that words like "polis" and "hoplite" are uniquely about Greeks if you just never mention that they called cities and heavy infantry from the Middle East the exact same thing.

• Western Civilization survived because the Persians never defeated Greece, who were in a war of civilizations and Greeks never liked them. The anti-Persian side won a couple times but later they did unconditionally surrender to the Empire. Western Civilization survived because the Persians didn't give a shit about jannying distant provinces' cultures and they were probably half-Greek already.

• Ancient Greeks explicitly said that the Phoenicians taught them how to stop being illiterate savages.

• The "Minoan Empire", which a British archeologist convenientally "discovered", right before Britain annexed Crete was half-Arab. Just read the story, half the family is from Tyre.

• Thucydides actually gives us real plausible about a lot of things. I mean he gives out like a hundred numbers at least if you read through it and I only recall one that sus and he himself pointed out he didn't trust it. IIRC he said that the population of Attica in his time was about 200,000 and 90% of them lived outside the city. Kinda blows away the whole "city state" thing. He also gives a figure for paying sailors which, if you can do 3rd grade math (I know it's hard for humanities folx), adds up to 50 men per ship. So the whole "trireme" thing, at least as we imagine it, is obviously bullshit. Also Athens from all its activites pulled in about 400 talents/yr. The King of Odrysia did the same. They were equals.

• The obvious turning point in the Peloponesian War if you believe Thucydides [oh yeah, we kind of have to because that's the only reason we know about it] was that the Thracian [Bulgarian] King of Odrysia went up the Danube to fight the Triballi (a very obscure nation but everyone says they're buttholes) and was killed in that battle. It's likely the army was destroyed too because you don't go that far, let your king get killed, and walk home in peace. Odrysia falls into civil war. As soon as Thracians hear the news that the Athens-Odrysia alliance is broken they rise up and take over Amphipolis. Athens is fricked now.

I unironically just consume any post-Roman historical content because they're not even asking the real question.

We're finally ready to risk leaving the city and heading out into the countryside. But first, why would we even want to?

There's lots of things that we just can't get here in Duisburg. Remember how in part 2 I mentioned that knowledge of saints and alchemical formulas is going to be critical later in the game. We can't learn them all here. The shops here don't carry every product we might need. If we want an exotic weapon like a composite bow we'll have to search for a place that sells them. Also most items in the game have a quality rating and different cities are better at making different kinds of items. The best swords can be found in Nurnburg, the best hammers in Prag, and so on. Alchemy requires a lot of traveling to find the various components needed for making potions. If you want training, not all cities have a physician or alchemist who is actually skilled enough to teach you. And of course at some point we'll start doing quests which will send us all over the Empire.

Let's see if we can pick up a little knowledge here before we leave.

Saints

Remember that urban monastery where the nuns healed our wounds? That's not all they do. They have a library where one of our party can learn about a saint. There are many, many saints in the game, I think over 100, but this library gives us the choice of 4 of them. This is one of the things in Darklands that got a young Redactor to go into the real world library and read about these people so I could remember who they are and which ones to pick in the game. Let's see how my hagiography holds up:

• Edward the Confessor - This one is easy. He was a famous King of England.

• St. Jude - We just read about him earlier because coincidentally this happens to be one of the saints that Yuna started the game already knowing.

• St. Albert - I blanked on this one. Tried to look him up but there's a million St. Alberts. Many of the saints in this game are really obscure ones who were important to medieval Christians but forgotten today, not ones who are currently hip and trendy. I think the one referred to here is a king in early medieval England.

• St. Maurice - I used to know about this guy but forgot and had to look him up too. He was an Egyptian general in the Roman army. Long story short, he refused to kill civilians so he was martyred.

TW: If you're religious you might find what I'm about to say a little bit flippant and offensive because we're going to be comparing these saints based on what they can do for us in a video game. I totally get that, but I would argue that keeping them in mind even when doing frivolous things like playing games is a good thing. It never got in the way of me appreciating these peoples' lives and martyrdom. In fact it got me to learn who they were. In a later episode I'll go more in depth about how Christianity is depicted in the game, but for now just trust me that this is not atheist edgelords trying to take down God, either me or the people who made the game.

Having gotten that out of the way, let's ask ourselves, what can these saints do for us? Let's remember who we've already got. Redactor has St. Anthony, who does a lot of great things but is especially good for academics and dealing with people. Yuna has St. Jude, who can bail us out of desperate situations but isn't particularly focused on anything. So with that in mind, let's evaluate our choices.

• Edward - He was a king, so I'm guessing in the game he will help us deal with nobility or something. And IIRC he was a scholar who spent a lot of time studying. That overlaps a lot with what St. Anthony already can do for us.

• Jude - Even though Yuna already knows him, it's actually worth considering having Redactor learn him too. Having two people who can pray to the patron of lost causes would be useful.

• Albert - I have no idea who this is so that rules him out.

• Maurice - He was a soldier, so it's likely that he can temporarily boost our weapon skills. At this point, early in the game, that could give us a crucial edge in a tough fight.

Well that's not exactly what I was expecting. Sometimes saints end up being patrons of all kinds of places, jobs, etc. that are not immediately obvious. I gotta read more about this guy to figure out what he could possibly have to do with alchemy. Unfortunately, note the "Success: 0". He's one of the saints who doesn't just listen to every whiner. Yuna will need to earn the right to talk to him by living a virtuous life. In order to keep things simple for my loyal readers I haven't asked any saints to intercede for me yet, but in a later episode I will explain how that works.

What does this have to do with travel? Remember how the nuns healed us that one time but they're not going to just do it over and over again? Many things in Darklands are like this. It's intended to avoid the "water finds a crack" problem. You can't just always stay in the same place and do the same thing. The librarians here won't let you back in again for a long time, maybe 6 months. But there are other libraries out there.

Alchemy

Let's see if Redactor will be more successful. He knows three formulas for potions. We aren't going to actually make any of them any time soon because we first need to collect the necessary components which involves a lot of traveling and a lot of paying money, two things we haven't done yet. But maybe he can learn a formula now that will be useful later.

Notice that we only managed to find this guy because Redactor knows enough about alchemy. Let's try to trade formulas with him. If we're very lucky he'll accept and we'll get a new formula for free. But it's very unlikely. Redactor only knows those 3 formulas and with 13 charisma he is not, as Richard Nixon would say, a "personality boy". Alchemists aren't trying to be helpful like monks and nuns, they're neurodivergent neckbeards who need their ego to be stroked. Normally we would have Sasha handle a task like this as she has amazing charisma and knows how to speak well, but in this case it's got to be Redactor who does the talking. This is a really low-percentage shot like when I try to talk to girls but hey, it never hurts to try, does it? At least that's what I tell myself when I'm sexually harassing women on the internet.

It actually worked! He just gave us a formula for Stonetar. This is sticky goo, extremely useful stuff. You can use it in battle to slow down your enemies and it helps in all kinds of weird unexpected situations. Someday we will definitely be making this.

Why don't we just do this constantly in the hopes that we'll get lucky again and get another formula? It's like with the library. You can't pester these guys every day. If you want to discover new things you've got to go to new places.

Travel

Okay, I've been jerking you around long enough. It's time to get to what I promised you. We're going to leave town and go out into the wilderness of Germany in 1400, ravaged by plague and warfare, where you're stalked by everything from wolves to satanists to demons straight out of heck.

Note how you're given 6 different options just for leaving the city. These would be relevant if the cops were out looking for us, but we're clean so we can just walk through.

Wow, thanks buttholes for not even removing the fricking copy protection from the game before you sold it to me. I'm used to playing a cracked version where you can just click on anything and it lets you pass. But this time it booted me back to DOS. I guess next time I'll look it up in the fricking manual again just like in living in fricking 1992 again. Last time I saved was before I got that Stonetar formula so that's lost. Anyway, let's try this again.

Okay, here we are out in the open world where we hear that iconic music.

Anton's original marseys still remain among the best.

Let's walk around for a second. Oh wait, we just ran into a random encounter. Dealing with these is half of the game. If you've played King of Dragon Pass or Six Ages you'll get how this works. If you haven't, you're in for a learning experience. We're going to be constantly running into enemies, problems, opportunities, all kinds of stuff as we walk around the Empire.

These are just some old geezers who want an escort to Duisberg. Why not? TBQH there's not actually any purpose for us to be out here other than for me to show you what the world map looks like.

Through this act of Christian charity, Yuna's Virtue has increased. Maybe some of those saints will pay more attention to her.

Where should we go? Let's check out that village to the east.

Okay that's pretty dire. That last sentence "There is nothing you can do here." I have always found really haunting. So yeah, there's some pretty dark stuff going on out here. We'll find out later how that village got destroyed.

Let's follow that road up north. I know Duisberg is somewhere in the lower Rhine area, I think Westphalia. Oh look, it turns out there's another city very close by.

It's Wesel, a city I don't know that well. Just that it's pretty far down the river. I think we're almost getting into the Netherlands. I guess I'll just walk right in. Wait a second. A toll? B-word, please. I haven't paid a dime for music since Napster got started and I'm sure as heck not paying any toll to walk into your little shithole town. Let's have Sasha try to use her charm and get these guards to simp for her.

Frickin' moids, man. Works every time.

Next episode: Actually I'm not sure what to do. So far I've planned these out really well to gradually introduce important gameplay mechanics, but at this point we're in an awkward stage. There's big parts of the game that we can't get into yet just because we can't afford it. Maybe I'll grind for a little while and then we'll be in a position to take on our first quests. And if anything goes wrong I can just savescum and never tell you about it.

Darklands has sometimes been derided by its detractors as "the first RTWP game". Which is technically true, but its mechanics are (intentionally) quite different from Bioware just adapting D&D crap. Today we're going to start scratching the surface of the combat system.

I've been spending some time grinding, just going through the cycle of getting into fights with muggers, selling their stuff, healing, and going out for more. Every few times we win we can afford to buy a new item to equip our characters. Even more importantly, everyone is improving their weapon skills. They're increasing pretty rapidly since we're still at low levels. (Later on as they get closer to 100 they improve much more slowly.) Let's take a look at the current state of our party:

Sasha now has some javelins. These are useful for doing a little damage to the enemy as they advance toward you. Ideally I would equip everyone with some kind of ranged weapon but we can't afford that yet. Looking at her skills, her Edged Weapons ("WEdg") is up to 27, decent enough for dealing with street thugs. Her Thrown Weapons ("WThr") is only at 14 so she's going to need a lot more practice before she can reliably hit with those javelins.

Redactor's simple club has been replaced with a mace, which does slightly more damage and will penetrate the armor of anyone we're likely to encounter soon. His Impact Weapons skill is getting pretty formidable at 35. I am such a chad.

Yuna likewise has a mace now but is much less proficient with it.

Nathan has swapped out his short spear for a long spear which does slightly more damage. His Polearm Weapons skill is up to 30 so he should be fairly deadly with it now.

Notice that I've equipped everyone with a shield. These give a moderate advantage in avoiding being hit, about as good as having 15-20 more points in our weapon skill. They'll be more important later in the game for blocking arrows when we run into enemy archers.

Everyone still has a "light load". That means they can attack a little bit faster and they'll be better in certain situations like dodging traps. Later on we'll have to make some tough decisions about how to equip our people as only the strongest can effectively use the heaviest armor. But for now we can't afford much armor anyway so it's not an issue yet.

Let's go out and look for a fight now. You'll (hopefully) see how much better our party does with better skills and equipment.

Music for that same grove of trees at night.

So far these are very simple fights without much going on in the way of tactics yet. Things will get much more interesting later in the game as there's more interesting maps, more sophisticated weapons and armor, alchemy, and more dangerous enemies.

I have Sasha toss a javelin at one of the enemies but she misses.

Sasha and Yuna manage to take down one of them quickly.

Now that it's 4 vs. 3 we should make short work of them. A guy who is fighting two opponents at once is at a big disadvantage. Here Yuna whacks at a guy from behind him, distracting him so that Nathan can land a powerful blow. With the strength he puts behind his long spear he does tremendous damage and kills him. The fight is over shortly.

We pick up the two javelins that Sasha threw and the cheap armor and weapons from our dead opponents. Nathan and Sasha have been hurt slightly but are still quite ready to fight. This is way better than when we first started the game, when a single fight with these riffraff would make us run away to heal.

Sasha's Thrown Weapons skill increases. Those javelins might not be too useful yet but she's getting good practice with them.

After that I got in another fight and my people got some modest wounds. Nothing too serious, but as their strength gets worn down they don't fight as well, so I figure it's time to call it a night. We can't go back to the nuns to treat our wounds again because they won't just do charity work for you constantly. You've got to at least wait a couple months. So we'll go to the inn and settle down there for a while.

Thanks to Yuna, the best healer in our party, we are each able to regain 2 points of lost strength per day. Sasha isn't hurt so we'll have her just get a job to help pay our rent. Due to her Edged Weapons and Artifice skills she qualifies to be a swordsmith, earning 6pf/day. She could make more money if she was more skilled or we were in a bigger city, but in a bigger city we also would have to pay more in rent.

After a few days everyone is completely healed except for Nathan. Redactor can make 8pf/day as a craftsman because of my high int. Yuna's healing skills earn her 5pf/day.

Now that our party has at least the basic skills and equipment needed to survive low level fights, maybe next episode I'll leave the city and venture forth into the dangerous countryside.

Preamable

In 2016, Democrat Roy Cooper narrowly defeated Incumbent Republican Governor Pat McCroy by 1% in North Carolina - an incredibly impressive result, considering Donald Trump also won the state by roughly 2% at the same time. While McCroy had been a truly awful governor and Cooper's margin was about a c*nt's hair difference between win and lose, that's still a tremendously impressive result. Cooper even repeated the result in 2020, winning re-election by a respectable 4%, when Trump won the state by 1% again. Term limited, Cooper's impressive record and the state slipping out of Donald Trump's may suggest that North Carolina is becoming a Democratic state - not the case, as seen by the downballot elections. Mark Robinson, a hard right Republican, was nominated as the mostly ceremonial Lieutenant-Governor, and Dale Folwell was the moderate Republican treasurer. Still, the Attorney General Josh Stein was Democrat. North Carolina seems likely to be a new swing state in the new, Trumpian party system.

2024

Roy Cooper, the proven winner, was term limited and couldn't run for re-election. In the Democratic primary, the standard, mainstream liberal and Attorney General Josh Stein won by nearly 70%. In the Republican Primary, the hard right Lieutenant-Governor Robinson beat the relatively moderate Treasurer Dale Folwell by 65%

Literally during the exact same day, audio was leaked by a mysterious Sosh Jtein where Robinson called for a 0 week abortion ban, saying on North Carolinas 12 week ban "I would love to get down to six weeks. And I'd like to get down to zero. I would like to push it back as far as we could and eliminate as many abortions as we can." This is exactly what Republicans want to hear, but when even safe Republican states like Ohio and Montana pass ballot initiatives protecting abortion, is not something you want leaked.

So that's how he started. He started with a scandal that could have cost him the campaign. This is the minor thing. It only gets worse/funnier from here.

The Black White Supremacist

Mark Robinson, described by Trump as "Martin Luther King on steroids", has shown a lot of sympathy for the White Supremacist movement, to the point the only thing that stops me from calling him a White Supremacist is the fact he's black - and I'm still fairly confident he is a White Supremacist.

On 2014, he posted on his facebook account "Note to liberals; I'll accept "Gay Pride" when you accept "White Pride"". Calling for White Pride (a phrase created by George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, directly inspired by the Nation of Islam) is a pretty eyebrow raising statement, but it gets a lot better!

He was probably seething when Drumpf compared him to MLK, because Robinson hates MLK. In his shitty book, he says "December of 2007 was when I joined Facebook. Every political thought I had in my head, I put on there, up to and including my posting photos of Martin Luther King and calling him a communist." So understand that while these posts aren't explicit, he's pretty blunt about not liking him;

"I don't like Communist. No matter what 'color' they are."

"Tomorrow I will do my 'service to the community' by going to work to continue to support myself and my family so I'm not a leach on said community." - on MLK day.

"It is at once funny and sad that so many people will follow the lead of a bunch of atheists and worship an ersatz pastor as a deity."

Pooping on MLK is a really bad look, absolutely a race ender if you're white, but Robinson being black has given him a deflector shield. I wouldn't call him a White Supremacist based on any of this stuff. It's the following remarks he's made on the Civil Rights Movement that convinced me;

: "So many things were lost during the Civil Rights Movement. So many freedoms were lost during the Civil Rights Movement. They shouldn't have been lost. (...) You talk about the sit-in movement. We're in a free market system. So we've got a place called Woolworth in Greensboro that won't serve Blacks at the lunch counter. What do you do? You go down there and you sit at the lunch counter and you demand for these people to take your money. How crazy is that?"

: "The Civil Rights Movement destroyed hundreds of very well-run Black schools. They destroyed Black businesses across the nation."

So you have a man that dislikes MLK, dislikes the civil rights movement and called for White Pride. What a bizarre r-slur... and it gets even better. Like a lot of radicals, he has a fascinating stance on;

Da Joos

With Republicans being the party of Israel while the Democrats try to balance their progressive base and not pissing off AIPAC too much, Robinson has been running a pretty strong platform against anti-semitism. Unfortunately for him, he forgot to delete some "interesting" comments on Jews and Nazis on his public facebook account.

: "I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE, THE NAZIS (National Socialist) ARE GONE! We did away with them!" (...) Marxist Socialist and communism pose the bigger threat and control the media. After all, who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?"

So that's a pretty bad statement to make, but jeeze guys cut him some slack. 2017 was practically a different time. Later that same year;

: "Please STOP wasting my time, your time, and the time of your fellow conservatives talking about, and making mention of, the NAZIS who have been DEAD since 1945."

Well, that's not an awesome thing to have leak when you're trying to look strong on anti-semitism. Still, it could be worse right? 2018;

: "It is absolutely AMAZING to me that people who know so little about their true history and REFUSE to acknowledge the pure sorry state of their current condition can get so excited about a fictional 'hero' created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxists. How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?"

Well, that's really bad. Really bad. Also 2018;

: "The center and leftist leaning Weimar Republic put heavy gun ownership restrictions on German citizens long before the Nazis took power. This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash. Repeating that hogwash makes the conservative argument against the current attempts by liberal Marxist to push Unconstitutional gun control measures in this Nation look FOOLISH."

Did he just call the Holocaust hogswash. He of course, refused to apologise for any of these remarks.

So, those are two pretty massive scandals that would, and from all polls, did cost him the election. But then CNN did some investigative reporting, tracking down what he had been saying on his private accounts. This breaking news, less than 24 hours old, and it's all amazing

Minisoldr, and other tales of Coomerism

A combination of tracking down his alt-user name and his weird phrases like "frog's fat butt", "dunder head" and "gag a maggot", CNN were able to track his porn account on a website called "Nude Africa".

He bragged about peeping on girls as a 14 year old, saying "I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered (...) I went peeping again the next morning but after that I went back the ladder was locked! So those two times where the only times I got to do it! Ahhhhh memories!!!!"

Like most Republicans, he's a transphobe, and I'm sorry for the Arachnophobe meme posters, but he's the kind of guy that wants to frick spiders;

: "I like watching on girl porn! That's f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in! And yeah I'm a 'perv' too!"

And despite his hardline stance on abortion, he said on Nude Africa; "I don't care. I just wanna see the s*x tape!"

If you had any doubts that he was a black white supremacist, he also made a lot of awesome non-coomer comments on Nude Africa. Quote: "I'm a black NAZI!", mostly unprompted when talking about Black Republicans, "Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.", "I'd take Hitler over any of the shit that's in Washington right now" which in fairness he's under the Obama Administration and Republicans are just like that when Dems are in power - when Reps are in power, Democrats just call them Hitler.

And finally, good old Martin Luther King. What did "Martin Luther King on Steroids" say about MLK on this porn forum for some reason? He said that MLK was a "commie bastard", a "ho-fricking phoney" (in fairness, he was a ho-fricker) and "worse then a maggot" while calling him "Martin Luther Coon", like George Lincoln Rockwell did.

The cherry on top - he is confirmed to have an Ashley Madison account, and an earlier, minor scandal (minor compared to the SHIT he'd get up to), was that he was a regular at a porn store.

The Trump Campaign was allegedly asking Robinson to drop out of the race, but it's too late for that. The NC GOP are stuck with the Black-Nazi-Coomer, with stories so disastrous constantly, as basically ensured that the Democrats will win North Carolina. There has never been a worse non-incumbent candidate - it's known Presidential Candidates affect the "down-ballot", things like the Senate and Gubernatorial races, but Robinson may be the first candidate to affect the up-ballot, making Trump the first Republican to lose North Carolina since Komrade McShame's blowout loss against Barack Obama - that itself being the first time the GOP lost the state since 1976, when Moderate Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter beat Moderate Northern Republican Jerry Ford.

But while Mark Robinson may be so terrible that he'll make North Carolina a full on Blue State in 2024, he'll live on in our hearts forever. He will be /ourgovernor/ - the biggest, dumbest r-slur to ever become successful despite not deserving it even a little.

https://apnews.com/article/georgia-lgbtq-rights-samesex-marriage-57ede62918ec995f21473f23f5676f80

Georgia's parliament on Tuesday approved sweeping legislation that curtails LGBTQ+ rights, a measure that echoes laws adopted in neighboring Russia.

The bill, introduced by the ruling party Georgian Dream earlier this year, includes bans on same-s*x marriages, adoptions by same-s*x couples and public endorsement and depictions of LGBTQ+ relations and people in the media. It also bans gender-affirming care and changing gender designations in official documents.

The Orthodox Church wields great influence in Georgia, and demonstrations against the LGBTQ+ community are common. Last year, hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in the Georgian capital, forcing the event's cancellation. This year, tens of thousands marched in Tbilisi to promote "traditional family values."

"Traditional family values" are also at the cornerstone of the Kremlin's narrative in Russia, where authorities in the last decade banned public endorsement of "nontraditional sexual relations" as well as laws against gender-affirming care, among other measures. Its Supreme Court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism by labeling what the authorities called the LGBTQ+ "movement" operating in Russia as an extremist organization and banning it.

The new initiative was announced by Georgian Dream after the country in June adopted the "foreign influence" law that critics also denounced as borrowed from Moscow's playbook. The measure requires media and nongovernmental organizations to register as "pursuing the interests of a foreign power" if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad.

That measure ignited weeks of protests and was widely criticized as threatening democratic freedoms and jeopardizing Georgia's chances of joining the European Union. The South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million formally applied to join in 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the bloc halted its accession in response to the "foreign influence" law and froze some of its financial support. The United States imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials in response to the law.

The anti-LGBTQ+ bill was approved on its third and final reading, with 84 of 150 lawmakers voting for it. It now must be signed by President Salome Zourabichvili. Zourabichvili, who has been at odds with the ruling party. She can veto the bill, the same way she vetoed the foreign influence law, but the parliament, dominated by Georgian Dream, can override her and adopt the legislation regardless.

Georgia's constitution states that "marriage is based on the legal equality and free will of the spouses" but does not explicitly ban same-s*x marriage, and the country's civil code clarifies that marriage is a "voluntary union between a man and a woman." The new legislation by the ruling party, which does not have the votes to change the constitution, contains a more explicit ban and is seen as a populist step to win the support of marginal groups.

Georgia will hold a parliamentary election on Oct. 26, with the ruling party seeking to retain its dominance.

Georgian Dream was set up up by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a shadowy billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and served briefly as Georgia's prime minister in 2012. It promised to restore civil rights and "reset" relations with Moscow, which fought a brief war with Georgia in 2008 over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Russia then recognized the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian province, Abkhazia, and established military bases there.

Many Georgians backed Ukraine as Kyiv battled Russia's invasion in 2022. But the Georgian government abstained from joining sanctions against Moscow, barred dozens of Kremlin critics from entering the country, and accused the West of trying to drag Tbilisi into open conflict with Russia. The opposition has accused the ruling party of steering the country into Russia's orbit at the detriment of its European aspirations.

Remember: almost all Europeans passionately support the criminalization of views that they dislike. You will be hard-pressed to find any left-wing Europeans who do not support the criminalization of homophobic speech, just as you will be hard-pressed to find any right-wing Europeans who do not support the criminalization of pro-gay speech. The idea of defending freedom of speech for views that you personally disapprove of flat-out does not exist in Europe. In Europe, defending freedom of speech means defending freedom of speech for views that you personally agree with and censoring views that you personally disagree with. In the '90s, leftists and "human rights activists" in Russia zealously lobbied the Russian government to enact all manner of restrictive laws against "hate speech", to supposedly protect the country from evil Nazis and commies. The laws were passed, of course; and, today, they are used primarily against leftists, LGBT rights activists, and Putin opponents - the exact same people who demanded that the laws be enacted in the first place. The exact same thing is now happening in other European countries, as far-right parties take power and begin using speech censorship laws pushed by leftists in order to silence anyone who opposes the far-right.

People who advocate drawing lines around freedom of speech always envision themselves as the ones holding the pen. They never even entertain the thought that someone else's definition of objectionable speech might differ from theirs.

The putrid diarrhea people of Kiwi Farms - the most rancid, worthless subhuman vermin on the planet, whose lives hold less value than the lives of fleas or ticks - have been largely predictable in their reactions to this, as if sweeping government power of this sort wouldn't immediately be used to shut down their vile online swamp:

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/georgian-parliament-approves-anti-lgbtq-legislation-echoing-measures-in-russia.200574/

User Vyse Inglebard:

God bless you, Eastern Europe.

User osooolemiiio:

Based <s>Khachapuri</s> Sakartvelo!

User Picnic_Boy:

It's almost like they don't enjoy seeing children marching in dildo parades. Weird.

User Toji Suzuhara:

A brilliant decision, you must fight this before it takes root. Otherwise you end up like Cali, which went from democratically deciding to ban gay marriage, to having fetish parades in its largest cities, in less than a generation

User Battlefield2142EU:

Odds are the mainstream media lying about the law just like the so called don't say gay bill in Florida. If journ*lists can't be trusted with reporting news in United States. Why should they treated with reporting news in eastern Europe?

User Nitro!:

All "gay rights" are infringements and it is morally correct to outlaw them.

User SSj_Ness:

You love to see it, too bad America is so cucked to strags and shitskins.

One user - Arcade Gannon - tells the truth and is, of course, immediately swarmed by MAGAt r-slurs:

Bans depictions of homosexuality in media.

Bans public gatherings promoting homosexuality.

This is oppression. They're outlawing public assemblies and broadcasts that go against what the government wants.

User The Punished Mitch:

If banning sexual deviants from corrupting children is oppression I don't want to be free.

User Reinhardo-sama:

Nah, cute twinks and s overplayed their hand. Now they get what they fricking deserve.

Another user - Montalbane - says what anyone with a functioning brain knows is actually going to happen (and is, of course, also swamped by the rest of the r-slur pack for it):

Ban gays from gathering

Label all your opponents as cute twinks and catamites.

Profit.

Gotta respect the hustle.

The same for another user, Miquella:

Now to label anyone they don't like as something so vague as LGBTQ activists to keep the sheeple convinced traditional values means being poor and subservient to the bourgeois class a fricking billionaire lol can't make this shit up idiot clowns

User The Punished Mitch:

It's really quite easy to avoid being labeled an LGBTQ activist, just make sure you don't try to convince kindergarteners that mutilating their bodies, padding out their allowance via prostitution or engaging in anal fisting during recess are acceptable practices and you'll be perfectly safe from accusations of LGBTQ-activism.

User Sperg Coalition:

What the frick is this word salad? Frick off strag lmao

Arcade Gannon responds to The Punished Mitch's "I don't want to be free" comment:

Tyrants love to hear it.

As of this post, the thread is still active, so I'm sure there's more wingcucked r-sluration to come.

Every time a Kiwi Farms member commits suicide, it legitimately makes my day. I am not even being facetious. As I have stated before, Kiwi Farms is a putrid swamp of the internet's worst psychopaths, neo-Nazis, incels, racists, degenerates, sadists, perverts, conspiratards, and QAnon mongoloids, and its members legitimately do not deserve to live. I would once again like to thank @Aevann a million times for making sure that this site does not turn into Kiwi Farms.

@Cream_a_da_crop said it best:

Null and his whole clique of cute twinks are some of the most insufferable people on the internet. I hope that KF gets permanently taken down and Null ends up in a fricking gutter somewhere, out of spite because he is the most unfunny unlikeable wingcucked cute twink on the internet. The users need to shattered into 1000000 pieces and cast to the wind. I don't care if my cow archives are gone there's plenty of documentation elsewhere

By the way, you r-slurred basement-dwelling neo-Nazis who worship Russia: Hitler considered Russians (and all Slavic people) to be inferior subhuman vermin fit for extermination. And, if Hitler had succeeded at wiping Russia off of the face of the earth before being defeated, the world would be a far better place today.

@Aevann, Marseybux for documenting and stirring up rightoid infighting please.

!lgbt !nonchuds !burgers !grillers

Greetings Dramatards

I made a Longpost last week about a short history of Swaziland, as a prologue to Mswati the 3rd, and how the nation got to the point of absurdity that was the current state of affairs, and why the people of Swaziland would just not jump in upheaval and lynch Mswati with regards to the metric shitloads of consecutive clownshows we are a bout to discuss.

https://rdrama.net/post/299957/intro-of-swazilands-insane-history-marseyflageswatini

The TLDR from last Episode on Dragon Ball Marsey , was that back in the early 1900s Swaziland got consolidated alongside the entire South Africa as part of the British Commonwealth, after the Bongs decisively defeated the Boers in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. But where the rest of the South African provinces were combined into a Commonwealth Union, Swaziland and the other Micro State Lesotho, had instead been formed in Protectorates, with much greater autonomy, because both of these tiny nation states were very homogenous and ruled by tribal aristocracy which cooperated already to the maximum extent under the White colonial powers.

Fast forward 65 years, and Post-WW2 Bong empire is crumbling. In the post-WW2 new world order, most British colonies are greater money sinks, than they are resource generators, and compared to the Portuguese and French, the Bongs can't give Independence to their ex-colonies fast enough. But with the complexities of the Cold War, and Britain's anti-communist stance, Britain is unwilling to give the Royal Family, the House of Dlamini, the family of our protagonist Mswati, the reigns of power.

Their global aim is to help create additional Liberal Democracies around the Earth as Bulwarks against the rise of International Communism, and the growing influence of the Soviet Union. Additionally Britain faces increased domestic and International pressure, as the sensibilities of British locals have changed to be more liberal than 70 years prior, and thus Britain deems it pertinent that Swaziland hold free elections, rather than just handing over power the Swazi Royalty and Nobility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbokodvo_National_Movement

In an extraordinary set of events, the fricking people upon being given Democracy and a steadfast liberal Constitution by Bongland, IMMEDIATELY proceeds to eject Democracy and their Liberal Constitution out of existence! (Or at least over the course of two elections spanning over 5 years - by voting for the "Imbokodvo National Movement" aka the Royalty Party ,which degrees in VERY CLEAR TERMS that they would reinstitute Absolute Monarchy under the House of Dlamini!!!!!) The people of Swaziland literally LITERALLY voted for Feudalism!!!

Out of all the fricking nations in Southern Africa, obtaining their freedom from their white colonial overlords, Swaziland is a truly a unique case, in that they decisively ended up with measurably LESS equality than what they had under their colonial subjugators - because under the British Commonwealth Protectorate, Swaziland had English Common Law which gave universal equality and woman's suffrage But the tribal nature of the Swazi peeps meant they wanted to do away with european influence no matter the cost....

Which is how we got to the current nimrod King Mswati the 3rd, whom has ruled Swaziland for the past 40 years, with as must decadence and despotism as you can imagine!

MSWATI THE TYRANT CLOWN:

The myriad of Mswati's controversies are as varied and numerous as they are depraved. Few people outside Southern Africa even know about the guy's existence, but the very real impact his inglorious reign has had upon the living circumstances of his subjects are extreme. For many Swazi reformists and liberals (few as they are compared to the rest of their tribal wingcucked countrymen), it's a deadly serious situation, and the few brave souls daring to protest or bring attention upon the depravity of their small nation state's misrule, often face intimidation, long imprisonment, exile and death.

The greatest and grandest tragedy of Swaziland is that in spite of Mswati's tyranny, stupidity and depravity, his people unironically worships him, and hold their royalty in the highest of regard. They are so tribally insular compared to even the other races of South Africa, that by large the overwhelming majority of Swazi people either approve of his monarchy, or tolerate it because their tribal customs are so deeply embedded within their very cores.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6biqgz/the_king_of_thailand_is_suing_facebook_to_keep/

The depravity and decadence of Mswati can be very closely compared to that of the King of Tailand, who's a class-A-clusterfrick compared to his predecessor, but it's illegal to criticize him.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/illegal-thoughts-how-some-exiled-critics-of-thai-king-are-fuelling-a-revolt-idUSKBN2610B8/

There is quite literally nothing under the sun Mswati can do to lose the support of his subjects, short of actively destroying his very nation, and thus his people tolerate his despotic decadence, even if it includes them actively being impoverished by his avarice and policies.

In no particular order here are the many Dramas of Mswati the 3rd!

[1] ARRESTS OF PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTORS THROUGHOUT HIS 40 YEAR REIGN:

Now just because Swaziland royalty enjoys the placid support of most of its citizens, that doesn't mean all of the Swazi are complacent. Out of the 1.25 million Swazis alive, there have been more than adequate belligerents to Mswati's reign. Especially since the quality of life of Swazis can be even lower than even of that of the poorest rural South Africa, and often IS in fact directly influenced by Mswati's and the Royal family's excessive spending of the national treasury.

And the average living statistics of the average Swazi is already pretty dire, so you'll come to appreciate why they get angry at the king's decadence.

"Over 70 per cent of Swazis live on less than a dollar a day and 25 per cent are infected with HIV or AIDS – the highest rate in the world [EPA]"

https://www.geo-ref.net/en/swz.htm

https://mg.co.za/africa/2021-06-29-eswatini-police-arrest-pro-democracy-protesters/

====(from 2021 article)

Residents in at least four of eSwatini's 59 constituencies held demonstrations over the weekend against the rule of King Mswati III, the last absolute monarch in Africa. The protesters were unfazed by bullets, batons and tear gas used by security forces to enforce the ban on the continuing pro-democracy protests.

Several protesters were injured in the police action. A father rescuing his child, who had collapsed after inhaling tear gas, was allegedly shot in the back on Friday 25 June when the police attacked residents of Msunduza township as they were marching to deliver a petition to the member of parliament from Mbabane East.

Over a dozen others were allegedly arrested from the Siphofaneni constituency in the Lubombo region. The residents there had mobilised for a similar march on Saturday, demanding democratic reforms, including the right to elect a prime minister. The prime minister is currently appointed by the king, along with other ministers in the Cabinet.

Communist leader tortured:

Mcolisi Ngcamphalala, the deputy general secretary of the Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS), was stopped on his way to the march at a roadblock set up by the police. On identifying him, two police officers in plain clothes reportedly seized him and forced him out of the car, ostensibly because he had taken pictures.

"I was kicked all over the body, held by my genitals and bundled into a police van to Siphofaneni police station," Ngcamphalala said. He was allegedly tortured for two hours while being interrogated at the station about the role of the CPS in the protest movement, among other other things.

Struggle for democracy:

In Swaziland, members of parliament are directly appointed by the king for two-thirds of the seats in the upper house and about 12% of those in the lower house. For the remaining seats, only those approved by the chiefs, who exercise power on behalf of the monarch in their respective chiefdoms, can contest the elections as individuals and not as representatives of political parties. Political parties have been banned by the monarchy since 1973.

The application of the law, which automatically criminalises individuals for holding membership of banned parties, has been relaxed since the 2000s in order to avoid criticism from Western powers because Mswati greatly values relations with these countries. However, parties have no space in parliamentary politics in the country.

In such a toothless parliament, which can be dissolved at the will of the king, Simelane has emerged as one of the very few pro-democracy voices. He did not hesitate to meet his constituents when they marched to deliver the petition. However, attempts by the police to stop the protesters escalated the situation into a riot.

====(end article from 2021)

At least once every 2-4 years there appears to be a Swazi protest against the Absolute monarchy, either due to the breaking of news of the latest bad policy or waste of taxpayer money.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-11210849

====(BBC article from 2010)

Police in Swaziland have arrested about 50 people ahead of protests against sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarchy, activists say.

Most of those detained were later freed and hundreds of people marched through Manzini, Swaziland's commercial centre.

Several South Africans trade unionists were prevented from taking part in the march and deported.

King Mswati III and his 13 wives are accused of living in luxury while most Swazis are poor.

"The arbitrary arrest of these political activists, lawyers, trade unionists and journ*lists is nothing short of police harassment and intimidation," the group said in a statement.

====(end quote)

The Mail-And-Guardian, one of my favorite online publications (they are good journ*lists generally), has a literal archive for just Swaziland protests, stretching from when the paper started, and began archiving on the Internet.

https://mg.co.za/tag/swaziland-protests/

https://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-14-protests-in-swaziland-amid-government-crackdown/

====(from 2011 M&G article)

On Tuesday, police also fired tear gas and water cannons, beat protesters with batons and arrested activists to break up the protest, according to organisers.

At least 100 people were detained, including top labour and civil society leaders, unions said.

"The state has responded with extreme brutality and people feel unsafe. Many of our people are in police cells," said Vincent Dlamini, general secretary of the National Association of Public Servants and Allied Workers Union.

Two protest leaders were detained on Wednesday, with one held under house arrest, according to Sipho Kunene, leader of the Swaziland Federation of Labour.

Police patrolled Manzini on Wednesday, arresting people in groups, including four teachers who were speaking to an AFP journ*list in a cafe.

"We are not used to seeing so many soldiers. People are afraid of walking to town. I am afraid this is going to affect business," said one Manzini resident, speaking on condition of anonymity.

==== ARAB SPRINGS IN 2011:

Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini, a staunch royalist, has banned the protest which began as a Facebook campaign modelled on uprisings in North Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring [kaamrev: the Swazis were trying to replicate the Arab Springs uprising and protests against their totalitarian states, as Internet and online websites like Facebook had begone to proliferate amongst even the Swazis whom were connected.]

Police began setting up roadblocks late last week and have raided the homes of activists.

The king has not spoken publicly about the protests but sent his top advisers to meet with union leaders last week in a failed bid to convince them to drop the protest plan.

With 13 wives and a fortune estimated at $100-million, Mswati is ranked by Forbes magazine as among the 15 richest monarchs in the world.

Life expectancy is the lowest in the world, at 32,5 years.

====(end 2011 M&G article)

These arrests, and lack of absolute freedom of speech and the inability to criticize the Royalty, as well as form political parties, have sparked protests, riots and uprisings all the way back since 1980. Here is article from 2010, same story.

https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/swazi-protests-peaceful-despite-arrests-52973

====(from iol article)

"About 2 000 activists - including students, workers and members of banned political parties - met in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga's capital, after Swaziland banned all union meetings and political rallies in the kingdom."

[Oh yes, the protestors whom are often, quite literally chased out of the country by the police of Swaziland would often congregate in nearby South Africa, to hold their protest towards the King and royalty, and the ANC government would refuse to do anything about it cuz, the Swazis and ANC hated each other!!! ]

"Last week, the government refused to acknowledge the demands, dismissing them as the work of "cowards" and foreign groups such as South Africa's ruling African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions." Lol

====(end article)

Anyways you guys get the idea, despite Mswati being a clown, his despotic government is quite seriously oppressive in its own incompetent way, and only few concessions have been made by protests over the past decades.

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of Safrican articles criticizing the Swazi clampdown of protestors pre-Democratization of Safrica in 1993-1994, because the Union/Apartheid government in turn clamped down on any media/journ*lism going against the Apartheid order, and Swaziland was one of the few neutral states actually working with the White regime, and opposing the activity of the ANC underground. But be aware that Mswatsi and the Dlamini family have been totalitarian since 1980.

[2] THE 2012 SOVERIEGN MONARCH DRAMA:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/queen-elizabeth-II/9274690/King-of-Bahrain-lunches-with-Queen-as-human-rights-storm-rages.html

https://archive.ph/rghJl

Now way back in 2012, Dizzy Lizzie from Bongland went to have the bright idea to host the 2012 Sovereign Monarchs Lunch in Buckingham Palace , which celebrated the last remaining Monarchs of the world. I recall this attracted a massive amount of criticism at the time, since many of the Sovereign leaders were extremely barbaric and ruthless in the rule over their subject.

While Bongland's Lizzie was well loved by most Bongs, this was only so because she was a figurehead who spent her time doing charity works for the poor and kissing babies and shit. In most of the rest of the world, the Monarchs have very tangible absolute power over their subjects, and like much of history, most monarchs are bad incompetent leaders.

For the English people themselves, the biggest magnet for criticism, was the King of Bahrain at the time, whom was in the news cycle at the time for the usual brutal dictator shit which United Nationcels b-word about every year.

====(from Telegraph article)

The Middle East ruler is one of a number of foreign monarchs criticised for their human rights records or extravagant lifestyles who have been invited to dine with the British Royal Family.

Buckingham Palace has released a guest list for the Sovereign Monarchs lunch being held at Windsor Castle today - the biggest gathering of foreign royals in the UK since the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding last year.

The Labour MP said many would regret Foreign Secretary William Hague's decision to approve the inclusion of the Middle East ruler.

But the Foreign Office has stressed it is supporting Bahrain in its attempts to improve its human rights.

====(end quote)

But that wasn't the only regime ruler or Monarch criticized, or which brought heat towards this really badly though out publicity stunt of the British Royal family!

For Southern Africans, it was our boi Mswati the 3rd, drawing lightning Many safrican activists decried the Bong royal family legitimizing international relationships with despots, and enabling their continued reign, especially so soon, after the very violent 2011 Swazi protests, which had itself tried to emulate the Arab Springs.

The Arab Springs protest which had been targeted against the rule of SOME OF THE QUESTS ON THE QUEST LIST!!!

====(from Telegraph article)

Guests from controversial regimes include Swaziland's King Mswati III, Sheikh Nasser Mohamed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait and Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Mr MacShane said: ''Arab nations must let their citizens vote in free elections and let them speak without fear of arrest, torture or death. ''For too long we have turned a blind eye to the repression carried out under the rule of royals in Arabia.

''The FCO should protect the British Queen rather than expose her to having to dine with a despot.''

The popular uprisings that toppled a succession of Arab dictators across the Middle East last year failed to ignite significant protests in the Arab Peninsula.

But in Bahrain there were major demonstrations with protesters calling for a greater say in government, these were violently put down by Saudi forces called in by the regime.

Swaziland's King Mswati III, is accused of having a lavish lifestyle while his people starve.

Protests were held outside the African ruler's exclusive London hotel earlier this week where he is said to be staying with an entourage of more than 30 people.

====(end quote)

https://www.dw.com/en/queens-jubilee-lunch-met-with-controversy/a-15958158

[3] FISCAL INDICIPLINE:

"Eswatini has been described as having been gripped by years of fiscal indiscipline, government corruption, and lavish lifestyles of the royal family. The nation has also been described as being on the brink of economic disaster due to these factors."

Basically the joint rule of King Mswati the 3rd, has been constantly plagued with EPIC degrees of financial mismanagement. Imagine the crackiest trailer-trash redneck poorcels whom had inherited a fortune or won the lottery and squanders that money via the most crass lowbrow manner feasible within the span of just 5 years, as they buy luxury cars, fabulous mansions and worthless material crap, because they have never been conditioned to save money or properly manage possessions.

But instead imagine that each time they run out of money, they get to tax the shit out of their constituents instead.....

https://www.swazilandnews.co.za/fundza.php?nguyiphi=488

Our frickboi and family will continue to buy luxury cars over the decades, and will demonstrate poor impulse control even when there are international disasters affecting the nation's economy like fricking COVID

====(from swazilandnews)

MBABANE: King Mswati who rules eSwatini as an absolute Monarch is now appealing for more donations from the international community to mitigate the escalating COVID-19, few months after splashing about R1 Billion buying Rolls Royce and a fleet of BMWs to be used by his family.

On or around May 2020, King Mswati, through Prime Minister Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini appealed to the United Nations for financial support saying the COVID-19 crisis came at the time when the country was fighting HIV, malaria and TB.

But it later emerged that even though the King was appealing for donations, over R500 Million donated by various companies, UN agencies and other international partners to the National Disaster Management Agency(NDMA) under the Deputy Prime Minister's Office was marred by allegations of corruption, as a result, the citizens are struggling to get food parcels and COVID-19 grants.

Our investigation has uncovered that other COVID 19 protective equipment donated by various companies and agencies meant for hospitals are diverted by the Ministers to be used at the palaces while government struggles to fund the fight against the virus from public coffers.

As a result political parties and trade union leaders came hard on the government demanding evidence that the R24 Billion budget announced by Finance Minister Neal Rijkenberg was used to fight the COVID-19.

=====

However, the Deputy Prime Minister failed to respond to our questions this week when asked to explain why the country was surviving with donations after the King splashed about R1 Billion on expensive vehicles to be used by the royal family.

On or November 2019, Chief Mgwagwa Gamedze, the Chief Executive Officer(CEO) in the King's Office told this Swaziland News that the King bought the vehicles from his own pocket. He said the money came through the royal budget approved by Parliament and supplemented through the sale of old cars belonging to royalty, however, no public auction was ever conducted by royalty for the sale of the vehicles.

Eugene Dube, a respected eSwatini journ*list who interviewed the King's Office CEO when the vehicles arrived in the country warned the United Nations and international community at large to refrain from funding King Mswati's government saying the regime does not embrace transparency and accountability hence the funding ends up benefiting only the royal family.

====(end quote)

https://allafrica.com/stories/201310142652.html

"A Swazi newspaper has told its readers that King Mswati III's net personal wealth is estimated at US$200 million (E2 billion), breaking protocol that the personal life of the monarch is never discussed.

The estimate first came from the Forbes magazine in 2007, repeated in 2009 and has been widely reported all over the world and used extensively by critics of the king who say he squanders money on himself while seven in ten of his 1.3 million subjects live in abject poverty on less than US$2 per day."

https://swazimedia.blogspot.com/2007/09/story-swazi-media-missed.html

====(from Swaziblogspot on Forbes 2007 article)

Here's a news report the Swazi media seem to have missed. On Friday (31 August 2007) Forbes.com reported that Swaziland King Mswati III was the richest monarch in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Forbes estimates his net worth to be 200 million US dollars (one billion four hundred thousand Swazi emalangeni).

What Forbes did not report was that about 70 per cent of the Swazi population of 1.1 million people live in poverty with an income less than one US dollar (seven emalengeni) per day. More than half the population is presently receiving food aid from overseas' donors following the failure of crops in the kingdom due to drought. In July UN agencies appealed for 18 million US dollars to help Swaziland, but so far only 3.1 million has been forthcoming, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

====(end blogspot quote)

https://www.forbes.com/2009/06/17/monarchs-wealth-scandal-business-billionaires-richest-royals.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13963463

====(from 11 July 2011 BCC article) [This is what led to Swaziland emulating the Arab Springs riots]

Swaziland's King Mswati III ascended to the throne 25 years ago but he has little to celebrate during his silver jubilee.

An absolute monarch who rules over 1.2 million people, his government is in financial ruin, running out of cash for salaries, health care and fuel.

"My wife works at the university. Last month they got paid late. And they don't know what will happen when it's pay day again," Sikelela Dlamini, the co-ordinator of the opposition Swaziland United Democratic Front (SUDF), told the BBC.

"In the health sector, it's worse. Some people got only half their salaries. There is no money - only panic," he says.

The crisis has been caused by profligate spending - on the royal family of 13 wives, as well as unbudgeted wage increases - and a sharp decline in income because of the global economic crisis and new trade rules in the region, analysts say.

Patient care is at risk, in a country with one of the world's highest rates of HIV/Aids infection.

According to a report in the privately owned Times of Swaziland newspaper, MP Joseph Madonsela told parliament recently that state hospitals would run out of anti-retroviral drugs within two months.

=====

Mr Dlamini says the government - which did not respond to BBC requests for an an interview - is facing a cash-flow crisis on other fronts as well.

"You will see cars parked. There is no fuel; no money," he says.

An analyst with South Africa's Institute for International Affairs, Catherine Grant-Makokera, points out that companies which supply the government with goods and services are not being paid either.

"Even printers haven't been paid," she says.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which sent a team to Swaziland in May to assess the situation, says Swaziland faces a "serious liquidity crisis", and needs to curb expenditure.

=====

The IMF also cited a 4.5% unbudgeted wage increase for civil servants and politicians last year, as well as overspending on "goods and services - notably defence", as other reasons for the financial hole.

"Swaziland is not going to fight a war anytime soon so why this expenditure? It is typical of a dictatorship," he says.

=====

"The king has 13 wives, many children and many more servants. They take a huge chunk of the budget," Mr Dlamini says.

Ms Grant-Makokera believes the monarch may have hindered the government's efforts to resolve the financial crisis.

"But there now seems to be an acknowledgement [by the king] of the need to make adjustments. He has cancelled his silver jubilee celebrations," Ms Grant-Makokera says.

Swaziland has also asked South Africa for a reported bailout of about $1.4m after the African Development Bank turned down its plea for help.

====(end quote)

[4] CONTROVERSY OF THE KING'S MANY WIFES AND KIDNAPPING OF WOMEN FOR HIS HAREM:

Our boi Mswati the 3rd obtained the crown in 1986 at the age of 18, and in that time has obtained 15 wives!

And every year many Swazi women vie for his attention during the "annual Umhlanga or Reed Dance ceremony participated by about 40,000 maidens." Since most Swazi peeps are brokenshit poor, marriage to the King and other viable Dlamini nobles is their ticket out of poverty.

https://ourplanetinmylens.com/umhlanga-reed-dance-festival-eswatini/

But not every single Swazi woman is keen on being the fleshlight of this disgusting lardbucket

Thus EVEN with literally 40 000 women vying for his attention yearly, our degenerate King will still go out of his way to kidnap women who doesn't reciprocate his attention!!! Many accusations have been laid that the King kidnaps Swazi women he takes a fancy to, but had told him to frick off.

They can hold these women captive by threatening their family or by holding their status in Swazi society hostage - thus though it is not the tradidional idea of kidnapping, many women have indeed been held "hostage" against their free will by the Royal family.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/swazilands-royal-bridal-mess/

====(from cbsnews article)

A mother's lawsuit to prevent King Mswati III from marrying her daughter has infuriated the royal family and put it on a collision course with Swaziland's judiciary.

"This is a national crisis," said Jan Sithole, secretary-general of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions.

But the royal family sees it as a simple case of an impertinent woman with no respect for tradition in a nation where the king is above the law.

"We have traditional forums where such issues should be addressed and we are surprised this woman decided to go to court," said Malamlela Magagula, a royal adviser. "The (king) wondered whether (the) mother was really a Swazi citizen or not."

====(end quote)

This is a great example to showcase how usually servile the average Swazi is towards the Dlamini Royal family. The Dlaminis could not even understand why she was opposing the and called into question if the mother was in fact Swazi

====(article continued)

The conflict began after Mswati's aides picked three women he spotted at the annual reed dance festival and took them to secret locations to become his newest wives.

Though many consider it an honor to have a child chosen to be a royal bride, Lindiwe Dlamini was horrified that her 18-year-old daughter Zena Zoraya Mahlangu was taken and decided to sue.

Trade unionists, opposition groups, civic officials, lawyers and ordinary Swazis condemned the royal family's actions.

"Their conduct blatantly undermines the independence of the judiciary and directly interferes with the smooth administration of justice and the rule of law," the Law Society of Swaziland said.

Rights activists have condemned the king's policy of taking brides without asking the women's permission or talking to their families.

"Such a practice, Your Majesty, is degrading, dehumanizing and traumatic to the dignity and person of women folk," Vulindlela Msibi, president of the Human Rights Association of Swaziland, wrote in a letter to Mswati.

====(end cbs article)

[5] THE INSTITUTION AND LIFTING OF UNDER-18 S*X CONTROVERSY:

Back in 2001 the Swazi King instituted a ban for under-18 s*x to try and combat the horrific rates of HIV infections within the country. Ban was unpopular because older Swazi men wanted to s*x supple under-16 girls

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/20/aids

====(from guardian article)

The announcement in the kingdom's papers yesterday coincided with the release of government statistics revealing nearly a third of Swazi 15- to 19-year-olds carry the virus that causes Aids, the scourge King Mswati III had hoped to combat with his appeals to girls to remain virgins.

Alarmed at the high rate of HIV infection, Mswati in 2001 reinstated for five years the "unchwasho" rite, banning sexual relations for unmarried girls younger than 18.

Swazi girls were instructed to wear a tasselled scarf as a symbolic badge of virginity.

If an unchwasho girl was approached by a man, she was expected to throw her tassels at his homestead, forcing his family to pay a penalty of a cow.

====(end quote)

BUT THEN THE CHEEKY FRICKER UNDID THE BAN, BECAUSE HE WANTED TO GET HIS PEEPEE WET WITH A 17 YEAR OLD!

[6] ARTICLE FROM 2005 DESCRIBING KING'S 13TH WIFE, AND THE LIFTING OF THE UNDERAGE S*X BAN:

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4283932.stm

========(from article)

King Mswati of Swaziland has chosen a teenager to be his 13th wife. Phindile Nkambule, 17, was revealed to the public when she took part in a traditional Reed Dance ceremony, in which girls perform before the king.

The announcement comes just weeks after Mswati III ended an official ban on s*x for women under 18. The ban was aimed at curbing the spread of HIV/Aids.

She is reported to have caught the king's eye during the main annual Reed Dance in late August, when tens of thousands of bare-breasted girls took part in a traditional rite of Spring.

Ms Nkambule is younger than the king's first daughter, Princess Sikhanyiso, who turned 18 this month. She will now wear royal loin cloths when she appears in public and has dropped out of school in order to be groomed as the monarch's wife.

Unpopular ban:

Days earlier, the king had rescinded a ban on sexual relations for girls younger than 18. The ban was started by the king in 2001 to fight Aids in a country where some 40% of the population is HIV positive. But the move had been unpopular with Swazi youths and its implementation had sparked controversy.

Just two months after imposing the ban, the king fined himself a cow for breaking it by taking a 17-year-old girl as his ninth wife. The Swazi monarch married his 12th wife, aged 18, in June.

Some Swazis are critical of King Mswati - an absolute monarch whose lavish lifestyle and many wives contrast with the poverty of many of his subjects.

====(end BBC article)

A lot of peeps got extremely angry at Mswati for this incredible display of hypocrisy. As he literally rescinded a 4 year old national law, in obvious result of his attraction towards an underage girl!

This caused such an uproar that the usually servile Swazi women, even went to protest in a unique manner.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/20/aids

====(from gaurdian article)

When the king chose a 17-year-old as his ninth wife in 2001, about 300 young women marched to a royal residence, laying down their tassels in protest.

The king's aides argued the ban was designed to discourage casual relationships, not marriage. But Mswati surrendered the cow, which was roasted and eaten by the young women.

====(end quote)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/swazilands-royal-bridal-mess/

====(from cbs article)

Many Swazis have been annoyed with Mswati since last year, when the king banned girls under 18 from having s*x — a decree he said was intended to halt the spread of HIV.

A few weeks after declaring the ban, Mswati took a 17-year-old girl as his ninth wife. Eventually, he paid a fine of one cow.

Masuku and other opposition leaders complain that Mswati has made himself the final arbiter of Swazi traditions.

"People must passively and submissively accept everything he does as Swazi law and custom," Masuku said. "Anything he likes is Swazi custom. Anything he dislikes is not Swazi custom."

====(end quote)

[6] LaMahlangu controversy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041013054919/http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR550042004?open=&of=ENG-SWZ

An actual case of REAL kidnapping took place way back in 2002, when "an 18-year-old high school student, disappeared from her school in October 2002. Her mother, Lindiwe Dlamini, learned that her daughter had been taken by two men, Qethuka Sgombeni Dlamini and Tulujani Sikhondze, and she reported the matter to the police. Some time later, she was told that her daughter was at Ludzidzini Royal Village and was being prepared to be the next wife of the king."

"The matter went to the High Court, but Swaziland's Attorney-General Phesheya Dlamini intervened. She has since had two children, and formally became the king's wife in 2010."

[7] WHEN KING Mswati WANTED TO NEUTER AIDS INFECTED:

A bit of drama before my time, but the W.E.F. was under fire when it had invited Mswati back in 2002, to a forum.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-05-10-king-mswati-to-wef-swazi-people-dont-want-change/

"Exactly why the World Economic Forum on Africa invited King Mswati III of Swaziland to sit on a panel is a slight mystery. Throughout the WEF, the values of transparency, accountability, good governance and anti-corruption have been highlighted over and over again as essential to Africa's growth. These values are the antithesis of what King Mswati's rule has meant to Swaziland. But he insisted on Thursday that the Swazi people are very happy with their feudal status quo."

https://prezi.com/8qany1lsfzo1/king-mswati-iii-king-of-swaziland/?fallback=1

In 2000, he called during a parliamentary debate for all HIV-positive people to be "sterilized and branded".

https://mediareviewnet.com/2019/11/king-mswati-iii-of-eswatini-africas-only-remaining-despotic-tyrant/

Which as you can imagine caused controversy, since depending on the accuracies of the study being carried out, between 22-40% of Swazis are HIV positive

https://www.ru.ac.za/perspective/2013archive/kingmswatitowefswazipeopledontwantchange.html

Medical people had to go to the king and explain to him that's not just how the virus spreads! For those of you who do not know how aids is spread.

You can get aids via s*x, blood transfusions/contaminations, or literally be born with it, if your mother had AIDS, as the child was connected via the navel tube and blood. So the idea of eugenics for virus victims wasn't as completely batshit.

However, once medical personnel explained the many other ways in which AIDS could be transferred via contact or s*x, the talks about sterilization fell through pretty quick.

HOWEVER, it is a common held belief/conspiracy that our dipshit King Mswati had discovered that he HIMSELF had contracted AIDS from the many liaisons and sexcapades over the years

And THAT'S why the talks fell though! Not because of the uproar of the 25% people infected pushing back!

[8] FINALE: Mswati's SWAG COLLECTION OF WATCHES (for @BWC)

Here's a literal blog for Special watch hobbyists documenting the many and varied extravagant watches which Mswati has worn in public and special occasions throughout the years

https://iflwatches.com/blogs/celebrities/luxury-watch-collection-of-king-mswati-iii

For all your watch autism

That's all, GOOD night!

!africans

Age 29

timestamp

• buys house sight unseen with divorce bucks (330,000/600,000)

• 100,000 more renovating since it was a disaster

• the rest on "spending"

• was spending 5000 a month in past relationship

timestamp

• together for 10, married for 5

• met when she was 19 and he was 40

• "So I definitely think I was groomed in the beginning"

• "So he used money to control me" timestamp

• "He thought that I was cheating on him" claims she wasn't

• thinks she should have taken more

More divorce details timestamp

Debt deets timestamp

CC - $29,294/$29,500, just purchased 6,000 more onto it, 793 interest each month, 3000 this year so far

• "I didn't understand how interest works when I started that card" timestamp

• "Explain interest to me" - she tries

• Transactions get read off - timestamp

• Notable - Sims micro-transactions, "I own all the expansions," Pelaton subscription, $100 "Waterbean" coffee, ChatGPT subscription

• Trying to dispute a LinkedIn Premium she forgot to cancel, Caleb presses her

• "What is the difference between paying something with my debit card and using my credit card?" timestamp

• "I get airline miles which is how I flew here"

• "I have like 400,000 airline miles"

• 2 Cars, both on her credit since his was bad he drives one timestamp

  • 1727 due on his car,

  • 2 months past due - On autopay but there wasn't money so it didn't get paid, claims she's paid it now since husband got 4k on first paycheck (normally 3300, thinks 58,000 yearly), band director, musician on side ("percussionist"),

  • Mazda SUV, $34,000,

  • more than $800 minimum payment a month she doesn't know specifics, 10% interest rate

    • Was underwater on previous car, rolled over onto this one? High twenties purchase price on this car

  • Mazda 3 (2024), hers timestamp

    • Regrets purchasing this one

    • Old car was fully paid off 2016 Mazda 3, she wanted a new car because husband got a new car

    • Worth 28,000 and 18,000 left on it

• purchased a sofa with a subwoofer (using CC) when she had divorce bux

• 4 dogs and 2 cats

• "I'm allergic to both dogs and cats and pollen and trees and grass" timestam

Other CCs not paid off but not as gigantic, not as interesting

How much do you think you spent in a month? timestamp

• thinks 5 or 6 thousand, it's actually $10,333

• Presses the b-word on why she's not actually trying to fix things timestamp

"I had heard about debt consolidation" timestamp

Investing timestamp

• Does not know what an index fund is

• Does not know what the S&P 500 is. "Is that like stocks?"

• "I have like Starbucks stocks, I think, maybe"

Tries to ask her about the school's band timestamp

Caleb went to same Uni as husband at the same time, shits on the music program there and their football program timestamp

• She found him through tiktok, "every time he hears your voice he's like turn that off"

• Caleb recognizes him

• Husband says "his voice is annoying"

• Ton of student loan debt, got a Master's - has not been making payments? On some income-based thing?

  • "Hopefully like there is a change in presidency" timestamp

Went to Europe last summer timestamp

• ran up CC balance

• "money doesn't go as far as I thought"

Budget Breakdown

• Mentions that she didn't know property tax existed?

[Sorry, I forgot to make it so the screenshots get blown up to fill the screen again. Just pls zoom in (you'll see the same thing) and bear with me.]

When we left off I had just gotten through the grueling process of character of generation. Now it's time to start going on some adventures!

Inventory

The first thing we do is find out what goodies our characters have brought with them from their civilian lives. Besides skills and attributes, their previous occupations have provided them with equipment and knowledge of saints and alchemical formulas.

We do pretty badly for equipment. Sasha has a short sword. Redactor and Yuna have clubs. None of them has armor. But what can you expect? A merchant, an alchemist, and a nun aren't going to be walking around with a lot of firepower in their daily life. Nathan was a recruit soldier when he joined us so he has good leather armor and a short spear. He at least is ready for some low-level adventuring. (Note that the game gave everyone an appropriate weapon based on their highest weapon skill.)

If we want to be making moves on the street, this is okay but he still doesn't even have a shield or any missile weapon. We need to upgrade everyone else to at least this level.

When it comes to alchemical formulae, obviously Redactor is the only one who has any. You either are an alchemist or you're not, and there's not much point in having more than one in the party. He knows "Breath of Death" (poison gas), "Arabian Fire" (napalm), and "Quickmove" (agility buff). These are all very useful and having them will be good in the mid game. The problem is, this is pretty high tech stuff. The components to make these are expensive and hard to find and in the early game we will (hopefully) not be running into enemies dangerous enough to actually be worth using these on. I'll be trying to find some low-end formulae that are more appropriate for our party.

Each potion has different versions. Our Arabian Fire formula is the one from Geber, AKA Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. If you subscribe to the "Muslims never invented anything" school of Incelist history, I have to warn you, this game is set in the 1400s so you will be disappointed.

Finally let's see the knowledge of saints we have. This is the 1400s so the intercession of saints is especially important. But you can't just be like "hey, some saint, help me out with this pls". You need a saint who is the patron of the activity you're doing, or the place you're in, or something like that. You need to actually know who they are and what their story is, because they're the patron of something that happened in their life. So a character can only implore that saint for aid if they have studied and understood their life. (This got me as a kid reading medieval hagiography. What other game can claim that?) It's the closest thing in this game to a wizard knowing spells, except it comes from a totally different place than Gary Gygax's belief system about elf nonsense. If you feel like any of this might be anti-Catholic then pls, again, remember this is about the 1400s not about you. I'll go into detail about the saint mechanics in a later episode.

If you remember, Redactor is mainly an alchemist but we had him be a hermit for his last 5 years before he joined the party. He's got knowledge of one saint but it's an important one: St. Anthony. He was a Franciscan friar in the 1200s originally from Portugal who... well he did all kinds of stuff, he was basically the ideal of what you should be like if you're doing that. In the game he's extremely useful. He can heal us a bit. He increases Charisma and Speak Common, vital for any time we've got to talk to anyone. Also Latin and Read/Write which will help in certain situations like dealing with university professors. And he can banish demons, which is important because we're gonna run into some of those.

The saint will always hear you on their day. Saints' days are still a big deal, like the Greeks celebrate the day of the saint you were named after kind of like a birthday. In game I've never used this because you'd really need to have a calendar with you.

Yuna is our nun. Everyone in the party is a Christian of course, that's our whole purpose for going on these adventures, but she's the specialist here. She knows St. Dorothy of Somewhere. I'm not familiar with her. Apparently she's only hears prayers from people with very high Virtue because she won't even consider listening to us. Then we've got St. Jude. One of the apostles but I don't know him well. Patron of hopeless causes, which will be useful because we'll end up in that situation at some point. Then there's St. Longinus. This is the Roman soldier who when they crucified Jesus was like "guys, I think we made a mistake". He also thinks he's too good for us, but perhaps if Yuna gains more Virtue during our adventures he will listen to us.

Plans

I gotta go with Nathan here. We got three members of the party who are running around naked. The core mechanic of the combat system (will explain in detail in a later episode) is about whether a weapon penetrates armor. Our people need at least the most basic level of armor if they're going to fight even the lowest level enemies. Sasha and Nathan have adequate weapons for now, but Redactor and Yuna just have simple clubs, basically tree branches. It would be nice to get them something better.

But how are we going to afford all this? I look in our purse and we only have 10 groschen (money in Darklands will be explained later). Remember how Redactor started out with those formulae for high-end potions? He also started out carrying one of each. These are overkill for any enemy we meet and they're worth a lot of money. So we're going to sell them so we can afford armor and hopefully better weapons.

I go to the local craftsmen, sell our potions (6 florins, wow!) and buy some basic armor for everyone. Redactor and Yuna get cuirboulli, the best kind of leather armor. Sasha gets regular leather and a shield. I'd like to have more (better weapons, some javelins) but I'm feeling fairly confident about our chances in a fight now. We only have 11 pfennigs left, which is basically nothing. So let's try getting into one.

Sasha with her new gear.

First we'll have to kill time until nightfall.

It's worth mentioning here how incredibly outstanding the music is. They did their best to recreate authentic music from the period as MIDIs (this was high tech at the time) and play it through our Soundblaster cards and terrible little speakers.

We wait in the park until nightfall. Then we go out in the streets like Charles Bronson in Death Wish hoping that nobody tries to mug us.

Tbf we don't shoot these guys in the back when they were running away. That always seemed a little much for me. Always kind of left me unsettled like maybe there is a racial thing going on here.

Of course we're immediately set upon by four thugs. They're armed with falchions, these are short machete-like blades.

We don't have a lot of tactical options here since we've only got our own personal weapons. (Later on combat gets more interesting but this admittedly is a persistent problem, that your tactics don't really matter that much.) Most of our people don't do great in this fight, but Nathan quickly turns his opponent into a red streak on the ground. Then he can start stabbing the rest of them in the back. You're at a huge disadvantage trying to dodge two guys' attacks at the same time, so he makes short work of the rest of them.

Conclusion

We pick up a little cash and their weapons and armor. Notice those are 5-quality falchions and 10-quality leather. Every item used in combat has a quality level, with 25 being the baseline. So this is really bad equipment, one of the reasons we were able to beat them. But we can at least sell it for a little money. Unfortunately we're going to need it. Redactor and Yuna got hurt and Sasha lost half her strength. That is, in addition to being the strength she uses while fighting, her long term hit point pool. When strength gets down to 0 you're dead, so if she goes into battle again she risks getting killed.

Our biggest gain from this is that now our local reputation is up to Respected. In Duisburg we will get a little bit better prices and just generally more respect in terms of people cooperating when we ask for jobs or skill training.

Next episode we find out how to heal our party after a tough fight, and hopefully get to see some of the other attractions of the town besides robbers.

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Sneedman who was so tiny he was often mistaken for children half his age. His voice was high pitched and squeaky and whenever he spoke the gentlemen of the little town of Bethlehem would quickly take of their fedoras and bow, thinking that there was a fair lady in their presence. Nevertheless, despite it all, Sneedman got on just fine.

Now Sneedman was in love with a beautiful lady named FrozenChosen who lived two towns away in the Valley of Encante. Whenever he saw the dame pass with her father on their butt-drawn cart his heart would do somersaults, his knees would go weak and suddenly breathing became a laborious task. Her long blonde hair flowed like a rich waterfall down her petite frame. Her round wide eyes sparkled beautifully and her rosy cheeks looked like ripe apples in an autumn orchard. He would often see her softly ask her father to stop the cart and let the butt rest while she collected water for the poor beast from the well. On other days she would pick out stones from the hooves of the butt and pet it lovingly. She always smiled as she did this, as if she was a stranger to suffering and strife. It was easy to see why Sneedman had fallen head over heels for the lady who was beautiful on the inside and outside.

Sneedman had turned eighteen and had finally set out to ask for FrozenChosen's hand in marriage. He had never spoken to her and she had never spoken to him but the pain of keeping his love a secret ripped through his insides and made him feel nauseous and upset. So he packed a knapsack consisting of a small lunch, twenty coins of gold and a red handkerchief as well. At dusk he began the long journey from Bethlehem to Encante, thinking that he could escape the heat of the day under the cloak of the night. Walking down the crooked cobblestone roads wearing his best coat, trilby and suspenders, his heart beat fast in anticipation. What was he to say when he arrived at her door? Would he know where to find her? Would she turn away in disgust or fall lovingly in his arms to embrace their new life together? Either way, Sneedman was more than glad that he would finally get this huge weight off his chest.

After a long walk that lasted well until midnight he reached the borders of the town of Encante. He stood on a knoll which afforded him a view of the entire town. The quaint houses crowded together in the darkness, only visible thanks to the pale moonlight. Ahead of him was a thick forest and on the other end of that was the valley containing Encante. His tummy gave a low grumble which made his gut twist into a knot. Sneedman hadn't eaten supper. He sat down on his soft knoll, unfurled his knapsack and decided that it wouldn't hurt to have a little nibble of his lunch. He munched a few delicious sweet biscuits and sipped on his apple juice, taking special care to leave enough for the next day. After subduing the beast of hunger, he thought it too dangerous to try and cross the forest in the night time and chose instead to sleep on the knoll until sunlight returned again. As he laid his head down and let his eyelids fall shut he was disturbed by a tiny voice.

"Do you have a biscuit to share sir?"

Sneedman woke up started! He looked all around but could not find the owner of the disembodied voice.

"Just one sir, I know that greed is a sin."

Sneedman stood up, his head twisting all over. Was he going mad? There was no one around him at all!

"Who are you?" Sneedman yelled, "show yourself now or we shall have to fight. I may be small but I have swift punches. I shall fight you and I shall win."

"A swift punch you say?" replied tiny voice.

"Oh yes and a nasty kick too! Right in the shins I'm known to kick foes," Sneedman replied bravely.

He held his fists up, still trying to find the source of his voice.

"Where are you then, show yourself," Sneedman demanded.

"I'm here."

Well I'm here too so you couldn't possibly be here."

"But I'm here too."

"Can't be. If you were here I would have seen you."

"Fine, have it your way."

"Well then where are you?!"

"I'm there."

"Where?!"

"Here."

"This is a nasty game you are playing. I shan't spare your shins if I ever find you."

Finding himself irritated by the voice, Sneedman packed up his knapsack and reattached it to its stick.

"Halt, you might kill me!" screamed the tiny voice just before Sneedman could rest the knapsack on his shoulders.

It spoke so loudly that Sneedman dropped his knapsack in fright.

"See what you've done now, that's probably my biscuits crushed to crumbs," Sneedman complained.

"All the better, I haven't a large mouth to begin with," the voice replied.

"I am insane?"

"No, just stupid. If you would just turn your head to your right you would see I was here all along."

Sneedman turned his head. There, on his shoulder, was a green little caterpillar.

"So you're the dastardly fiend. I shall flick you off."

"Please don't do that. I might get lost and you might trample me in the grass without seeing me. Just give a biscuit or two and I'll be gone."

"But I'm off to ask my love for her hand in marriage. The remaining biscuits were to please the servants."

"Well they're all crumbs now, they won't be pleasing anyone anymore… except for a caterpillar of course."

Sneedman scratched his head. The caterpillar had a point. With a sigh he opened up his knapsack, scooped up the biscuit crumbs and placed them in front of the caterpillar, which had crawled into the grass by now. Without so much as a thank you the caterpillar began gobbling up the biscuit crumbs greedily.

"Oh slow down. What would your mother say if she saw you eating with such uncouth voracity?"

"Don't care," the greedy caterpillar replied.

"And a rude little caterpillar you are. Didn't even say thank you. I suppose you shall want some juice to go along with that," Sneedman said sardonically.

"Yes, I will."

Sneedman poured out a little juice for the caterpillar but instead the caterpillar crawled into the glass and stayed there!

"Oi! Get out," Sneedman ordered.

"I shant. If I stay in the grass I might be trampled but here I am safe. Don't drink me. I taste bitter and I will infect you from the inside if you swallow me," the naughty caterpillar said.

Fed up, Sneedman chucked the glass in the grass, sealed it shut with the lid and set off. There was no use trying to sleep again, the morning sunrays were already peaking from the horizon, painting the sky in beautiful shades of pink and peach. Sneedman was scared to enter the forest. There had been many stories of marauding creatures in the forest that ate human brains and spread nasty rumours about postmen. It was only his burning desire and love for FrozenChosen that kept him going as he passed the first tree of the forest and entered the darkness.

The forest was so thick barely any sun broke through the canopy of leaves and branches. As he walked he felt wood creek under his feet and heard the terrible grunts of wild pigs. It was all very scary! He walked and walked until high noon where he had to stop. He found a tree stump and thought it as good a place as any to rest. Sneedman wiped his sweaty forehead with his red handkerchief. He panted with tiredness, wondering when this loathsome forest would end. It was then that a cloud of butterflies flew out from the trees, so thick that for a while Sneedman couldn't see anything. Their wings flashed in colours of auburn, red, crimson and yellow. They looked like a fireball shooting through the air. When they dissipated a capybara stood in front of him with beautiful pink fur.

"I must be insane!" Sneedman said, rubbing his eyes.

"No, just disbelieving," the capybara replied.

The capybara had a sweet voice, sort of like a mother.

"I am Aevann, the guardian of the forest. I welcome you to my wonderful paradise," said the capybara with a smile.

"Paradise? This place is terrible what with all the pigs and darkness."

"Hmph, disbelieving. Just like that goat-loving postman. I'll show you," the capybara said.

The capybara shook its head stomped the ground and said a magic incantation. Suddenly a strange wind blew and everything transformed. The leaves of the trees became soft clouds of pink cotton candy, the ground became rich chocolate and the sweet smell of sugar filled the air. Rabbits burrowed out of the ground and tickled Sneedman playfully. Owls came out the trees and hooted a beautiful tune. It truly was a paradise. For hours Sneedman stayed there with Aevann the pink capybara, chasing rabbits and humming along with the owls. When he grew hungry he ate clumps of chocolate from the ground and picked the cotton candy from the trees. It tasted sweeter than anything he had ever tasted. Soon he had forgotten all about his journey and Encante.

"So you see, this forest really is a paradise," the capybara said as they collapsed in tiredness beside a tree.

"Yes it's glorious," Sneedman said as he stuffed his face with clumps of chocolate.

"I knew you'd love it."

Love… Sneedman's memory was jogged! He remembered FrozenChosen. He had to go before nightfall! Suddenly the capybara's fur became an ugly brown and the cotton candy disappeared. Was it all a spell? He looked at the rabbits he had been playing with. They were actually porcupines. His clothes were torn and tattered and he was smarting in several places. He looked up in the trees. The owls were actually ugly crows which squawked in their horrible voices, which meant that… the chocolates were crow droppings! Sneedman spat and dry heaved, escaping from the forest as fast as he could. In his haste he had forgotten his knapsack. Now all he had left was his handkerchief and his ten gold coins.

It was late afternoon and finally he had arrived in Bethlehem. It was a bustling city alive with energetic vendors, gypsies and ringmasters luring visitors to enter their colourful circus tents. Sneedman ignored it all, although he was hopelessly lost and knew not where to find the fair beauty FrozenChosen. Eventually, he resorted to asking one of the ringmasters. He had a white star painted over his right eye and had only two fingers on each hand. This scared Sneedman very much.

"Excuse me sir, I was wondering where I could find FrozenChosen?" Sneedman asked.

"That'll be ten gold coins," the Kaamrev the ringmaster replied with a rough voice, after introducing himself.

"That's ludicrous," Sneedman said.

"If you want to find FrozenChosen you will pay ten gold coins," the ringmaster said.

"I must be insane," Sneedman said as he pulled out the ten gold coins from his pocket.

"No, just gullible.

The ringmaster snatched the gold coins and fled before Sneedman could chase after him. Sneedman swore and cursed at the ringleader but it was no use. He was long gone. Sneedman sat on a curb, distressed and defeated. He began to cry. He was so close to finding his love and yet he had failed. He was heartbroken. He was soon spotted by a police officer who pitied him. Sneedman told him his story and by the end of it the police officer had lost all sympathy.

"You got swindled by a caterpillar and a ringmaster and you ate crow droppings? Hilarious," the policeman said, "you know you could have just asked for help at the police station or at the very least called beforehand instead of arriving at a stranger's home unannounced asking for their daughter's hand in marriage. Nevertheless, the house is the last one down the street. "

Sneedman thanked the policeman and headed down to the house and knocked on the door. FrozenChosen answered. She was just as beautiful as Sneedman remembered her. Her hazel eyes glowed in the setting sun and Sneedman felt his heart beat just a little bit faster. The moment he had been waiting for was finally here.

"FrozenChosen. So much to say, so many words to say them with yet I still find it so hard to express what I'm feeling inside. I love you FrozenChosen. I love you so much. Mere thoughts of you are enough to send my heart racing to have me gasping for air and forgetting about all the suffering in the universe. Your smile encourages me to be a better person. Your laugh reminds me of what bliss is. Your love is what I need. I may not have biscuits or fancy coins for you but what I can provide is love and a promise to be the best man ever for you. FrozenChosen, will you marry me?"

FrozenChosen's eyes glistened with tears. A smile crept upon her face and I'm pretty sure you know what she said!

The two bought a lovely home in Encante, and with her father's blessings, were married within the year. It wasn't long before they had kids of their own and even a few asses to spare! And to this day they keep Sneedman's red handkerchief right at the door of their home, to remind them of the adventure Sneedman took to find the heart of his love.

Now if Sneedman could do all that, what is stopping you?

Greetings Dramatards

You guys ever wondered about these two micro states on the edges of South Africa? And why they aren't part of Safrica?

https://future.fandom.com/wiki/South_African_Invasion_of_Lesotho_and_Swaziland_(AFOE:_Journey_to_the_end_of_the_Sun)

I found some weird future alt-history thing where South Africa invaded these two micro-nations and was just like "The motive behind the invasion was to boom the South African economy and military power." hahahahahahahaha

ok, ok, let me explain.

BACKGROUND:

Why both Lesotho and Swaziland remained separate and unconquered by the powerful white governments of the Union of SA and Rhodesia is because of extreme levels of tribalism and racial wingcuckery - or at least tribal wingcuckery.

Amongst all of the Tuislands/Homelands designated for black peeps during the official Verwoerd era of apartmaking (to make apart) in the period of 1948-1950s, in which South Africa enshrined segregational policies officially into law, the Tuislande/Homelands which fell most greatly into line was Lesotho and Swaziland.

Throughout all of it's tenure between 1910 and 1993, the Union of South Africa could have squashed any amount of political and military dissent within these regions at any time - SA had the most advanced military of Southern Africa below the Equator, and it would take until the communist Cubans and Soviets imported their advanced modern russian weaponry into Angola and Mozambique before any black nations could even imagine posing a threat to white dominance, alongside the air supremacy which Soviet MIGs projected.

And even during that period, both Lesotho and Swaziland were well within the easy reach of the South African Union military. Instead these micro states remained largely autonomous for different reasons.

BLACK RESISTANCE DIVIDED DURING APARTHEID STRUGGLES:

1st, they never posed a threat to the Autocratic white regimes of Rhodesia and Union of SA. The ANC (African National Congress) and other Black independence underground movements would never be able to find traction within these regions and their peoples. It continues to surprise many liberal peeps when they actually take a glance at South African Black history, to realize that black South Africans resisting Apartheid were never united, were not always socialists and that even the various ANC splinter factions were perpetually bickering.

Many black peeps agreed that they wanted to depose the Union and Apartheid for a better black future, but what exactly that future consisted off varied VERY dramatically! It's also important to know that despite the propaganda and bias of the current government, was that nearly half of all those black groups resisting Apartheid police, despised socialism, and were fearful of communism. Some black groups despised communism because they were what we'd call capitalists, and others despised communism, because they were tribalistic and envisioned carving up the defeated white Union, into new black ethno-nationalist lines, and soviet doctrine opposed that.

The ANC would only emerge the most powerful dominant group by the time the 1980s arrived because of Soviet funding, support and armaments smuggled into the country (it's not like Burgerland or other free nations were providing outside resistance support), which the ANC would use to destroy competing factions, in literal underground ganglike shadow wars.

AND YET, the two regions in which the ANC would never gain ground in terms of propaganda, or winning the hearts and minds of peeps against their Mayo oppressors, would be both Lesotho and Swaziland.

TRIBAL WINGCUCKERY:

The racial/tribal wingcuckery of both these micro nations are truly something to behold. I've spoken a lot here on rdrama.net, about the tribal and racial wingcuckery of Zulus , in South Africa, and how Zulus, or at least their poorest and least educated members can be really foolish and wingcucked when it comes to supporting their corrupt leaders, even when it is literally obviously to their own detriment.

The most famous Zulu wingcuck moment in recent memory, is the 2024 RSA election, in which the dominancy of the ANC supermajority for 30 years in SA parliament had been broken due to the splintering of the ANC voting base, largely into the Zulu and non-Zulu cores, where pretty much all Zulu local and tribal leaders endorsed their people to vote for Jacob Zuma - THE very famous uber corrupt ex-president of South Africa, whom had quite literally sold the ground (mineral/mining contract & tenders) to the corrupt Indian Gupta families during his times in office.

https://www.voanews.com/a/judge-orders-release-of-report-on-zuma-corruption-allegations/3575811.html

This was in SPITE of all of the accounts and proof we had of Jacob Zuma's extraordinary amounts of corruption, nepotism and incompetence.

It didn't matter for them, because their tribal allegiance towards their most infamous Zulu anti-Apartheid freedom fighter overruled all of their emotions.

Now imagine the tribal wingcuckery x 10 = and you have the tribalism of Swaziland and Lesotho in mind!

LESOTHO AND SWAZILAND RESIST ANC:

The tribalism of Swaziland and Lesotho was such, that ANC guerilla fighters could not find lasting strongholds, because the sothos and swazis feared the communists would depose tribal leaders for the sake of equality, they feared their royalty and chiefs would lose their influence over their people, and the lowest status sothos and swazi ALSO DIDN'T WANT THIS! Even if it mean they would literally obtain greater freedom and equality under a new ANC black government rule! Even the majority of women living in such stark patriarchal societies did not want their way of life changed or altered under new communist regimes.

It sounds insane, but the force of peer pressure and society are so great to resist in the face of tradition. Even by the time the 1990s arrived, many peeps in Lesotho and Swaziland still lived as they had 1000 years ago, albeit with T-shirts and denim jeans.

What this meant was that Swaziland and Lesotho were relatively cooperative with the white Dominated autocracies of Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa, while ANC guerilla fighters/ sabotaging bombers who fled there to hide, were often given up by Apartheid police and military. This sounds insane, but in the context of not getting the 1960s early years of ANC hyper militant mentality of the ANC youth which believed they aught to force socialism over Africa for freedom.

In the later years however, just as Nelson Mandela had mellowed in his most extreme views of enforcing communism through whatever means needed, so too had the mentality of much of the ANC's elders mellowed in terms of obtaining compromise, not just with whites, but especially with enabling much of autonomy from government for many Homelands for peeps like sothos and Zulus, and to have multi-national concessions between the new future Democratic South Africa, and her monarchic neighbours, which warmed relationships between the ANC and Lesotho/Swaziland.

PROTECTORATES:

https://www.fotw.info/flags/sz_prot.html

Both Lesotho and Swaziland had been formed in 1906-1910 period when the British Empire had consolidated South Africa post Anglo-Boer war. Lesotho and Swaziland were proclaimed as protectorates of the British Commonwealth. Both were formed as ethnically homogenous states around ethnic boundaries for once (GOOD JOB FOR ONCE BONGLAND ). South Africa would basically never interfere with that, even after 1948, when Apartheid was enshrined into law. As the white Autocracies of SA and Rhodesia already exerted such extreme influence over both nations, and continued to obtain very preferential contracts to mine and extract resources from both of these micro states.

But even then, both micro states were such backwater godforsaken, resourceless shitheaps, that there was never any motive to rule or conquer them. Lesotho was primarily a mountain range, and Swaziland was underdeveloped. Both micro states already had royalty cooperating with the white governments and ruling their respective peeps, and the Union regime had little desire to to be responsible for managing new money-sinks

The poverty and underdevelopment was often so extreme that for the entire duration of Apartheid, black peeps who immigrate into South Africa, even if it meant literally becoming 2ndary citizens, with less rights, due to the crushing poverty just to find work.

A trend continuing to this day, as something like 50% of Lesotho's men work seasonally between 3-6 months of the your outside the country to bring back money to their families back in Lesotho.

https://labordoc.ilo.org/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=41ILO_INST%3A41ILO_V1&docid=alma994007703402676&context=L

MIGRATION OF SWAZIS TO SOUTHERN AFRICA:

The House of Dlamini is the royal house of the Kingdom of Swaziland. Their coat of arms displayed below.

They had ruled the approximate region of modern Swaziland, since about 1745, when the ancestors of modern Swaziland had emigrated from Mozambique and Tanzania, to come and settle in Swaziland, because extreme droughts and weather climate conditions in East Africa at the time, had driven many many ethnic groups southwards into South Africa. Other groups like the Matabeles and proto-Zulus had also been driven southwards, during which time they clashed with local south african black groups now extinct, as well as early Boers in the Free State, and portuguese in Mozambique. It was a time of great flux in populations in Southern Africa!!

https://www.101lasttribes.com/tribes/swazi.html

Swazi peeps can speak much of modern Zulu, because there is large language overlap between them. Both modern Zulus and Swazis are from the same Nguni People Group, originating from the Great Lake areas of Central Africa. Swazis can also have some understanding with modern Mozambique peeps, as they are often proud of anouncing as being the ethic middleground of Zulus and modern Mozambicans.

HISTORY OF SWAZILAND'S MODERN FEUDALISM:

As a further example a to how neutral most of their foreign policies had been for the past 150 years, here is excerpt:

"As the Boers expanded, treaties established boundaries with Transvaal. Though there were wars with the Zulus, the Swazi king Mbandzeni refused a British request for help in 1879 in the Anglo-Zulu war. Shaka never attacked the Swazi during his expansionist activity. In the mid-1800's Dutch (Boer) and English groups settled in the realm by contract with the king on various occasions."

Modern Swazi peeps still live in an extremely stratified society. "The dominant Dlamini clan created a hierarchy of control by amalgamating and ranking through conquest, treaty, and peaceful incorporation over seventy disparate, equal clans under a hereditary monarchy."

Basically through 2 centuries of intermarriage, the large royal family and sub chiefs have absorbed complete clan control over all of the peoples within the country of Swaziland. But Swaziland is also weird because of their incorporation of eurocuck colonial era laws, during their time under the influence of colonial powers of the Dutch/Boers and British.

" The colonial powers altered some Swazi customary legal rules and procedures and imposed Roman-Dutch law as the general law. As a result, Swaziland developed a dual system of law and courts consisting of traditional councils, in which procedures are not controlled by legislative enactments or by codified legal rules, and modern courts, which have been formalized by national legislation."

"Traditional councils consist of the clan/lineage council (lusendvo), the chief's council (bandlancane), and the king's council. Modern courts consist of both Swazi and European-influenced courts at lower levels, including the Swazi Courts, two Courts of Appeal, the Higher Swazi Court of Appeal, and the king on the Swazi-influenced side, and the Subordinate Courts, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal on the European-influenced side. The Swazi Courts Act of 1950 provided for the formal composition of customary courts, the type of law they may apply (customary law), the procedure to be followed, and the limits of the courts' jurisdiction over persons. Swazis may exercise some discretion, depending upon individual circumstances, in choosing which legal forum to pursue a case."

Translation: The ENTIRE Swaziland legal system is under the power and jurisdiction of the monarchy and chiefdom of local clans They technically have modern Roman-Dutch common law, and british commonwealth laws built into their systems, but at the end of the day, the Swaziland nobility and monarchy fricking controls the entire nation's legal system.

In other words, it's literally the last feudal society on earth!!!

As you guys can all imagine, all this shitlib euphemistic speak about "Customary Law" is just a way to refer to a literal feudal society, with modern constitutional laws on paper, but with the real power in the hands of indoenas and the royal family!

This is COMPLETELY inverted from the British Crown in which the royal family is more traditional and ceremonial, and hold no proper real power, and only holds their positions because of their popularity in the public. I've heard that Bong monarchs do hold modern political power in the form of the ability to dissolve the parliament with the Prime Minister, but any actual exercise of such power would be political suicide, and would enflame anti-monarch sentiment, and hasn't ever been practiced within the past century to my memory.

Instead the Swazi royalty holds absolute power, and the country's constitution and common laws are in comparison subject to the whims of the monarchy and nobility.

As you guys can imagine, with such an absolute monarchy system in place, such a ruling system is just prime for abuse and misuse, in the hands of the undeserving. And just like monarchies of the past in Europe, the kingdoms of queendoms were only as strong as the sensible/competent rule of their monarchs. And often tiny kingdoms were destroyed and conquered by more powerful neighbours if their despotic moron rulers could not rise to the occasion.

But in the modern era, with much less conquest going on, and no survival of the fittest forces on states to elect good rulers, such imbecilic and inept rulers can rise to degrees of r-sluration and stupidity.

And oooooooh boi, does Swaziland have a great past 40 years with regards to despotic decadent rulsership!

MSWATI'S FATHER:

The current reigning monarch of Swaziland is the famous Mswati the 3rd. Our boi was born in 19 April 1968, and was 14 years old when his father Sobhuza the 2nd kicked the bucket

Mswati was introduced as crown prince in September 1983 (after his father died), but at that time, since he was only 14 years old, his mother would rule as Regent (whose regent title is Indlovukati or "Great She-Elephant" )

Mswati had to 1st grow up to be 18 years old, and was finally crowned in 25 April 1986, after he had studied in Bongland to become more versed in matters of rule and diplomacy and language, after the urging of his family elders.

But before we get to the current king of Swaziland (Mswati the 3rd), we should talk about his dad so we can understand the influence on his upbringing.

Sobhuza the 2nd ( lived f22 July 1899 – 21 August 1982), was Ngwenyama (the title for King) of Swaziland for 82 years and 254 days, the longest verifiable reign of any monarch in recorded history.

In the early 1960s Sobhuza played a major role in events that led to independence for his country in 1968. Sobhuza would spend his life trying to rid the country of the influence of whitoids, and would visit Bongland multiple times, and would even attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the 2nd in 1953.

https://www.unofficialroyalty.com/king-sobhuza-ii-of-swaziland/

In his visits to Bongland, Sobhuza would constantly b-word and beg the royalty of England, or try and bring his case towards the high courts of England, regarding the independence of Swaziland from the British Empire. He was very influential in the talks between Britain and the independence of Swaziland.

He also "rejected the constitution proposed by the Bong Government, because he didn't want to become a constitutional monarch like the Bong royalty."

Instead in the 1967 pre-independence elections, Sobhuza would form a party called the "Imbokodvo National Movement" which consisted of the National advisors of the King and his nobles. They won BOTH the 1967 election AND the 1973 election which the British held for the independence of Swaziland, because the British literally didn't just want to hand one guy and one fricking family ultimate autocratic power!

Yet in spite of this election, the "Imbokodvo National Movement" party, aka the royalty party won with overwhelming supermajority! The people of Swaziland VOTED their monarch into absolute power TWICE!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbokodvo_National_Movement

From 1910 - 1967, the monarchy of Swaziland had gradually lost power under the influence of Boer and Bong european common law, and had literally through cultural and legal osmosis become more egalitarian, not through any virtuous intent of the european states, but because the dominancy of the Rhodesian and Union of South Africa states held in the region. England in 1910 even had a constitutional Commonwealth law be enshrined in the nation of Swaziland, which gave women there unprecedented equality for the 50 year period - at least in comparison to the very very very conservative Zulu/Swazi/Bantu/Nguni culture at the time.

And for fricking 50 years the peeps living their seethed about it, and wanted to return to tradition, and absolve much of these European laws, even if it meant return to a feudal society in all but name, even if it meant a stark reduction of women's rights, even if it meant literally giving up common law for equality and subordination unto indoena chiefs and the Swazi family - and the people voted for it!

Culture is a strange peer pressure from our ancestors, and even the Swazi women voted for it in overwhelming assent!

ELECTION CRISIS:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032457/http://www.content.eisa.org.za/old-page/swaziland-1964-election

"The immediate context of the election was a wave of strikes in 1962/63 and a general strike in June 1963 that culminated in the imposition of a state of emergency, the shipping in of a battalion of British troops from Kenya and the curtailment of trade union activity"

There was such unrest in Swaziland prior to the 1967 election, that Bongland had to call in troops from neighbouring commonwealth strongholds to keep the peace.

"The INM had considerable resources at its disposal, the prestige that Sobhuza had accumulated through his astute dealing with the British, the persuasive and coercionary power of the hierarchy of chiefs and the support of capitalist interests and were able to persuade the voters that the interests of the King and the survival of the nation were one and the same"

"The INM's victory was overwhelming for it won all eight elective seats with 85.47% of the vote"

ABOLISHMENT OF CONSTITUTION:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14095711

And incredibly, INCREDIBLY, the winning party under the King, would reinstute an absolute monarchy into the very laws of the nation state, and basically immediately banned all political parties and suspended the constitution!!!

SOME EXCERPTS OF SWAZI HISTORY AND HOW THEY WERE CLOSE TO WHITE REGION POWERS:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140913053842/http://www.content.eisa.org.za/old-page/swaziland-demise-democracy-and-consolidation-autocracy-1968-1986

"The first government of King Sobhuza II was headed by a member of the royal family, Prime Minister Prince Makhosini Dlamini, the leader of the Imbokodvo National Movement (INM); the cabinet consisted overwhelmingly of aristocrats, while a white finance minister reflected settler interests and some members of the cabinet were businessmen or professionals (Levin 1997, 84). The government thus largely reflected the power that had been accumulated by the monarchy and the traditional aristocracy and excluded the growing middle and working classes that had voted for the opposition and the peasants who had provided the INM with its overwhelming victory (Booth 1983, 65). At independence Swaziland joined the UN, the Commonwealth and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Throughout the Cold War Swaziland allied itself with the West and had close ties with the USA and the UK and maintained diplomatic relations with Israel and Taiwan, receiving development aid from those countries (Macmillan & Levin 2007, 1159)."

"The choice of a white as minister of finance was aimed at soothing the fears of foreign investors, who were woed by the King and senior INM politicians in the run-up to Independence, and the stable climate in the period that followed investment flows continued, primarily from South Africa (Levin 1997, 84; Macmillan & Levin 2007, 1155). Between 1977 and 1982 real GDP grew by an average of 3% per year "

As you guys can glean, they were never ever a threat to the white totalitarian states of Rhodesia and Union of SA, and even greatly worked WITH then in matters of economy and foreign investment - it was a........weird time period.

THE BULL OF SWAZI:

Our boi King Sobhuza died on 21 August 1982.

"Sobhuza's official incumbency of 82 years and 254 days is the longest precisely dated monarchical reign on record and the world's longest documented reign of any sovereign since antiquity."

He didn't just live long he FRICKED LONG

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/23/obituaries/king-sobhuza-of-swaziland-dies-reigned-82-years.html

Here's a shitlib article written in 1984 about how totally cool this guy was for "blending 500 year old culturally practice with modern law" nonsense and how cool he was for walking barefoot amongst his own people, and how noble savage noble savage and cool he was for fricking reinstituting a fricking absolute monarchy and literally setting back equality and woman's rights 50 years.

BUT AT LEAST HE FOUGHT THOSE WICKED MAYO OPRESSORS!

Also polygamy!

=====(from article)

Known by the honorific "Bull of the Swazi" by virtue of his numerous progeny,[10] King Sobhuza continued the tribal practice of maintaining many consorts.

According to the Swaziland National Trust Commission, King Sobhuza II had 70 wives, who gave him 210 children between 1920 and 1970. About 180 children survived infancy, and 97 sons and daughters were reported living as of 2000. At his death he had more than 1,000 grandchildren.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010725080851/http://www.sntc.org.sz/cultural/swaziculture1.html

"Sobhuza 's grandchildren (list not yet complete): over 1,000."

==========

CONCLUSION: NEXT UP - Mswati the 3rd, son of Sobhuza the 2nd

Join me next time when I cover how much of a frickup Mswati will be when he rules the fledgling nation of modern undemocratic Swaziland from 1984 to current era!

!africans

this is of course, waaay too fking technical for you to actually understand... so please close this post now and go back to eating that bag of dog cum u had saved up for later, i ain't judging!

but academia is waaay too stiff for me, i much prefer the flaccid dicks rdrama has to offer, so here goes:

in his paper "on computable numbers" turing spent the first half of the paper inventing the theory of modern computing, and proving that said machines he theorized can be described by a single finite length natural number, called it's description number. if u have no idea what that means, or even what binary machines code is... srsly i do recommend consulting that bag of dog semen for further info.

now, the fact these machines can be assigned a unique finite-length number, as each binary code for a machine is unique, has the effect that they as a set, can be bijected with, or assigned a one-to-one relationship to, the set of natural numbers. this has the important implication of being able to count them, meaning we can list then out one by one, in some order, without skipping over any. yes, yes, ur mum told u that u can do anything (u can't), but mathcels get very ornery and uptight about what it means to be able to successfully count a set of things, as not all sets are countable. for example u might think u can just count all real numbers, but actually ur too busy drinking dog sperm while cantor chuckles softly in background, so it won't ever happen.

lets move onto the title line: "computable number". the concept is simple, even for you: it's just a number which we can build a machine for, that can calculate any nth digit. for example: pi is a computable number because we can build a machine that can eventually calculate any nth digit of pi. now there are an infinite number of these, obv, and because these computable numbers can be associated with the machines that compute them, and machine are countable... these computable numbers are countable, as well. muster up all of whatever the fuck that is u call a brain, and don't forget it! (u will)

this brings us to the famous §8 where basically everyone thinks turing went on to prove some ground breaking, mind bending, result of the ages, but was actually just a series of fuckups that has largely contributed to the ungodly world of idiocracy we witness today, in which we confused our ignorance for knowledge and declared math as indefinitely incomplete. just like ur parents marriage.

the section more or less goes like:

well, if machines that compute numbers are countable, then the count can be tricked! i could do this by writing a machine that counts through them, and for each nth machine, calculates the nth digit, returns the inverse of that nth digit, and i can use this to build an inversed diagonal number β. because this β would contain a digit different from every other number on the list, it can't exist is the count!

but since that can't be possible, what's wrong here is counting them would be equivalent to solving the halting problem, and there is no known method of doing that, so obviously we can't acktually count them. so therefore the set of computable numbers stays countable, because they aren't able to be counted. furthermore, because this has the disadvantage that it may leave the reader with a feeling that "there must be something wrong", i will present the halting paradox that backs this up! fin. bow down and suck the dick of incompleteness u fools!

now what a fking mess: the set of computable numbers remains "countable", because we have no method to acktually count them!? i must say, i truly am left with the feeling that "there must be something wrong". i appreciate the effort for the modern theory of computing, turing, but ya shouda stopped there... and i don't want to get into the fact literally all of computer science from then until now just dogpiled ontop with biazzare classifications to justify this like "countable" vs "recursively enumerable" that basically does fuck all but jerk off about how right this!

so anyone else spot the error? no, u didn't, don't fking lie to me, u can't do it. ur a fucking idiot like everyone else. u actually drank all that dog cum, and moved onto raiding the cat litter. marsey is disappoint.

but mommy put ur dumbass through a bootcamp cause u failed out of collage, twice, and now u consider urself a "codecel". so let me translate the issue into a language that resembles the utter dogshit u barf up day after day:

inverse_diagonal = (n: number) -> {
  count = 0
  for (comptuable_number) in (enumerate.computable_numbers()) {
    if (count < n)
      count += 1
    else
      return computable_number(n) ? 0 : 1
  }
}

enumerate_diagonal = () -> {
  for (n = 0; true; n++) print inverse_diagonal(n);
}

running enumerate_diagonal is the machine turing claims can calculate β. the problem is it can't actually do that, and it can't do that regardless of whether this would solve the halting problem or not. that halting connection a totally an irrelevant thread turing had no business going down, because there is a more fundamental reason why this doesn't work...

still can't see? ok, i'll throw u a bone, it's a bit healthier than that cat shit u've been munching on. recall that we are counting through the computable numbers, "enumerate" being a fancy word for doing this, so the iterable enumerate.computable_numbers() must iterate over all computable numbers. if turing's claim is to be true, this must also include inverse_diagonal itself, what happens then?

.... no? still don't get it?? god i really am gunna spell out everything line by line, eh? fuck:

• (1) inverse_diagonal is the machine that computes digits of β.

• (2) at some input n, the variable comptuable_number will be the machine inverse_diagonal referring to itself, as if β is to be part of the set of computable numbers, then the machine that computes it will need to eventually be enumerated upon,

• (3) at that point, inverse_diagonal will run the equivalent of inverse_diagonal(n) and get stuck in infinite recursion.

• (4) therefore, you cannot prove the halting process contradictory through means of β, as β cannot give an inverse to it's own nth number, and therefore cannot be a proper inverse diagonal, regardless of any "hidden assumption" about solving the halting problem. that was totally necessary to bring up.

if u can't understand it now, u had no business reading this post in the first place, and just go jump off a building or something fun like that. ur daddy will be proud that u've learned to fly! think of it as "falling with style".

for that one slightly less of a retard still with me:

it's absolutely absurd turing didn't see this. the dude went on to proudly to use an infinite recursion issue in his paradox construction on the very next page, so why didn't he see that here? heck he even intuited a sense of wrongness about these initial thoughts on the matter, but i guess was so enamored by the halting problem he just didn't dig deep enough into β to recognize the wrongness inadvertently he went down. i can't explain that anymore than the idiots that just jumped off a building over an rdrama suggestion, that they voluntarily read

honestly, i accept the dude being fallible, i forgive u turing. u gave us the theory of modern computing, and that really was a fucking stroke of genius for the ages. this mistep is almost entirely not ur fault.

but what i really can't explain is how the flying fuck this went unnoticed for so long.

what the fuck have mathcels being doing?!

Oooh boi do we have a special snowflake today!

Basically as introduction, I'll let the following comment exchange summarize the anti-bong/anti-yank criclejerk in this thread by eurotrash.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmfju7c/?context=8

"Any hard feelings towards the occupiers at all? Or is it mostly the liberators you're angry with?"

Basically this whole thread is circlejerk about the cruelty and lack of remorse of the western Allies during the liberation of France, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, and how many civilian casualties there were during the gruesome fighting in the Western Front theatre.

I don't know how these guys imagined dislodging the wehrmacht forces from civilian strongholds like cities - urban warfare is notorious for being especially gruesome in the modern era. And while the Kraut soldiers were not as suicidal as the Kamakazi Nips, they were still absolutely ferocious and fanatical in their devotion to Hitler and their commanders.

Do not let the popular images/videos of hordes of German soldiers surrendering in their hundreds of thousands dissuade you from the reality that even the late stage german soldiers were devoted to their duty, and fanatical in their carrying out of orders by their superiors to defend, often to the last man. The mass surrendering only occurred in the last 3 months of the war, in 1945.

The entire year of 1944, was one gruesome depraved slog on the western front, as desperate men in their millions tried to murder one another. Also do not be fooled by shitty WW2 documentary, which often showcases one speedy inevitable march of freedom, with the good guys inevitably pushing the coloured front lines all the way to Berlin, from Normandy.

The reality was far more grim, and took immense sacrifice to get there, the western allies suffered half a million casualties, killed or badly wounded, the coalition of Yanks/bongs/frogs/polish. For the men fighting for 18 months in the western theatre, there was barely any solace that the krauts were a shadow of their former selves of 4 years prior, or that they had overwhelming air dominance, the germans were near perpetually on the defense, and defenders have acute advantages over attackers in modern warfare.

It must be taken with this mindset, why things like Strategic Bombing of cities to dislodge the enemy, even civilian cities of allies were considered viable strategies to end this bloody war as quickly as humanly feasible, and only after the war, historians in hindsight could with definitive certainty decry the efficiency or lack of efficiency of strategic bombing.

Additionally, the exiled High Command under De Gaul gave their blessing to the Anglo-American airpower to have free reign on destroying the fascist enemy garrisoned within Frence cities and forts, yet they never receive any fraction of ire or hate by the subhuman types in /r/europe whom are constantly consumed by their anti-bong/anti-yank circlejerk.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmflbw8/?context=8

"Are you accusing me of being a nazi sympathizer because I post a commemoration of the destruction of my city ?"

"Nothing but bad things to say about the RAF. Very little to say about the Nazis."

OMG YOU JUST ACTIVATED A HEKKIN WHATABOUTISMORINOOOOO

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmfnl1a/?context=8

"Because the allies were liberating Europe and destroying nazism, while the axis were conquering Europe and imposing nazism on it. Surely that's clear even to you?"

Useless fat reddit french frick says the following

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmfpxsy/?context=8

"surely I did not know that liberating meant killing people and flattening homes but whatever. in fact, if you can't understand the simple fact that a good side may also commit war crimes it's up too you, there's even a name for that; denial."

Excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me good sir, but your cute twink ancestors didn't liberate my cities in a totally wholesome way, they KILLED civilians!

"The allies liberated your country and others with the strategies, tactics and weapons that were available to them at the time. They did it with imperfect information and unsophisticated command and control. It's very easy for you, with the freedom that was bought for you by others, to criticise those decisions decades later and to say what you, with your extensive experience, would have done differently. The deaths in Le Havre are to be regretted enormously, as are the deaths of c.50,000 allied servicemen who were killed in the liberation of Normandy."

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmklhdk/?context=8

"Is that an excuse for the death of thousands of civilians, something which could be easily avoided? Killing the people they are trying to liberate."

Uhhm actually, you douchebag Bongs deliberately killed the people they were trying to liberate

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmfmzfs/?context=8

Subhuman Frog OP

continues to argue the whole thread about the warcrimes of the Western allies.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmhe3le/?context=8

"How is that a nazi apology to denounce bombing of civilians ? I'm not saying the nazis were right, one can call out Allied wrong doing without being a nazi"

"This whole post reeks of trying to hate the British and Americans for making a questionable bombing run in the middle of the biggest war in history. It's also not possible for it to have been a war crime since the rules on any specific war crime you can tag this as were written after the war."

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmg4fkz/?context=8

"Everyone from Winston Churchill to AC Grayling has written large amounts after deep thought on the US and British bombing campaign. There are shelves of books about it all. Probably a quarter of those shelves is the US' own "The Strategic Bombing Offensive" which is quite critical of the campaign. Andrew Knapp is just one writer and a biased one. You seem fixated on this one small part. What do you think should happen now? Put Bomber Harris or Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt on trial? Stage a replay of WW2 with different acts and a better ending?"

"I'm not trying to change anything or accuse anyone, I just want people to remember." [...how much Bongland fricking sucks]

More eurotrash circlejerk about Westoids = bad

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmfd96c/?context=8

"The short answer is that Bomber Command were basically rogue war criminals."

ISREAL SUCKS POSTING BY COMMIES

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmf76vn/?context=8

My glorious Jewlords continue to commies in their spare time!!

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmf6pra/?context=8

A few brave souls stand against the conjecture circlejerk of the OP and other eurocucks

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1fdevk3/80_years_ago_the_port_city_of_le_havre_in/lmj4bkl/?context=8