bastards

Because This Is The Most Important Thing To Do In Mid-Pandemic

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As a quick note to my Patreon patrons, as of the start of July they will be charging sales tax on assorted, but not all, patron pledges, thanks to new legal requirements. This affects 36 states of the US and assorted foreign parts, in different ways for each, and may only affect certain parts of some pledges, and so forth.

Fuller details are here and will be e-mailed to you by Patreon on the 1st of June; I’m fiddling with settings and descriptions and so forth to minimize the impact to you, so I don’t recommend doing anything precipitate, please. But we’ll have to see how it works out for each individual in the long run.

If you don’t like it, please be assured that I don’t like it either. I can’t imagine that Patreon like it all that much, for that matter. But there’s nothing any of us can do about it, sadly, given “required by law”.

However, if you’d like to rise up in a bloody revolution, tear down the instrumentalities of extortion and oppression, and hang everyone with a favorable opinion of sales tax from the nearest convenient lamp posts, on the other hand, and have a viable plan to do so, do feel free to get in touch.

Trope-a-Day: Perfect Pacifist People

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Perfect Pacifist People: Brutally, brutally averted.  Any example of this that isn’t an abjectly poor tiny colony in a backwater of nowhere is already dead.  The few counterexamples are only technically pacifist inasmuch as they have a client-state relationship or a  contract with someone like Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC, to do their fighting for them and not tell them about it.

(Subverted by people like, say, the Imperials, who live in a comfortable utopia of peace and happiness – self-consciously safeguarded by the Right to Bear Arms (and, occasionally, the right to arm bears), a willingness to shoot down anyone who fails to grasp that initiating violence is disapproved of around here, and a military and militia both that their neighbors would have to be insane to consider starting a war with.)

Pacifism is impractical in a universe with bastards in it.  And it’s a big damn universe.