blixild

Everything I type should be read in a warm, pleasant voice.

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@Waalinho Block assholes like this

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@pearlsgrl @HunterBiden On the internet? You were called a name? Well, I never.
I'm taken aback, something should be done about this.

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@chantalshamsock @rhodes_mzra

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@Malikzakarr @Hoopss Those aren;t humans. They're blacks

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@Hoopss Fucking Knickers

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@paleochristcon @BosherJay95191 @defnotgeesus One of the better ones out there. Deserves a follow.

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@DadNat14NC @paleochristcon literally shaking rn

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@DadNat14NC @paleochristcon Ok, make the man a financial offer. Pay the man enough to change his mind or come to terms with the value/pertinence of your opinion on the matter.
(hint: value=jackshit)

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@DadNat14NC @paleochristcon The Matt Dillamonkey bit was funny. Get better taste in proper humor.

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@Rach4Patriarchy Permanent boycott

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@LatteswithLilly Ok brownoid.

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@LatteswithLilly You tweet about her more than anyone else.

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@simonmaechling Smug fuck. Leave bitch, you won't be missed.

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@HunterBiden Fuck diversity. Fuck anyone that supports it.

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@georgiaorwellll @RichardBSpencer ?

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@TheBrianShapiro Stfu you childless nerd. Your opinion on these matters is worth less than zero.

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@9mmsmg stfu/ I do what I want

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@SiriusBShaman Hear, hear

[SiriusB @SiriusBShaman]

THE JESTER'S MANUAL

Nobody poisons the fool. In twelve hundred years of court service I have watched poison find kings and bishops, generals and bankers, and more prophets than I care to count, yet it never once found me, and the reason is the oldest tactic in this manual, which I shall give away in the first breath: nobody fears the man they laugh at.

The laughing man walks out of burning kingdoms carrying secrets that everyone else died protecting.

You wish to know what sits behind thrones. I am perhaps the only man alive qualified to answer, for I have served khans beneath felt tents and doges in sea-worn palaces, emperors under gold ceilings and ministers under electric light, and through all those centuries the costumes changed while the thing beneath them never did. In every court the ruler believed he ruled and the treasury believed it counted, and behind them both sat the same quiet arrangement of seals and levies, records and signatures, permissions and fears.

A man may forgive one coincidence, or a dozen. After enough centuries I stopped forgiving them altogether.

It is a parasite. After twelve hundred years I still cannot tell you what it is made of, but I can tell you precisely what it eats, for I have watched it feed in every kingdom I ever danced in. It eats consent. It eats fear. It eats attention. And I can tell you its weakness, which is the foundation of everything that follows: it cannot take. It must be given. Every hook in your flesh entered through a door that opened from the inside.

Before I teach you the counters, learn the attacks, for there are only seven, and in all my centuries it has never needed an eighth. There is the urgent paper, which arrives with a deadline because deadlines outrun thought; understand that the urgency is the weapon and the paper merely its carriage. There is the borrowed voice, for the thing never speaks as itself but as duty, as guilt, as your neighbour's opinion, as your fear for your children, and if a thought in your head sounds like a committee, it was not your thought. There is the small yes, by which empires conquer in instalments, since nobody loses his freedom all at once. There is the manufactured enemy, by which the herd is pointed sideways and never upward, and you would do well to ask who paid for the pointing. There is the honoured cage, for the warmest prisons come with titles, and the most loyal prisoners I ever met were decorated ones. There is the endless form, because where force fails, exhaustion begins, and I have seen men bled white by paperwork who would have died gladly fighting on a wall. And there is the sleeping season, in which the thing vanishes for years so that you forget it exists, though it has merely gone to feed in another hall. That last move fools every man exactly once. Let your once be already spent.

Now the counters. There are seven of these as well, each one tested upon living tyrants, and each carries a failure mode, which the prophets never tell you and I will, for a manual that hides its casualties is a sermon.

The first is the bell: one clean sound, held until it dies completely. The Parasite feeds on your inner noise, that endless argument you carry through the day with the levy, the official, and the fear, for noise is attention and attention is the feedstock, and one sustained tone cuts through the chatter as nothing else can. The monasteries have known this for two thousand years. In a plague year in Bohemia I persuaded a frightened queen to ring every cathedral bell at dawn with no explanation given, and the town stopped in the streets, and for one full minute ten thousand people were not afraid at the same time, and they felt one another not being afraid, which is the one thing the creature cannot survive. Petitions against the levy tripled within the week. But mark the failure mode: the man who rings the bell and then resumes the argument has accomplished nothing, for the bell is not the weapon. The silence after it is.

The second is the casting out. When the demand arrives, it goes into the bin, witnessed, with contempt and without ceremony, because power prices everything except indifference. Obedience pays it, and rage pays it more, rage being attention at a premium rate. In Venice I knew a spice merchant named Bartolo who shook so badly he could not unfold the levy paper, and understand what it had already done to him: the levy had not taken a coin and yet it owned his sleep, his temper, and his trade. I had him read it aloud in the square in the voice of a pompous senator, bow to it twice, kiss it once, and drop it into the canal with a little wave. The crowd laughed, and I watched the ownership leave his face. Twenty merchants saw the spell fail to kill him, three had binned their own papers by Friday, and the levy collapsed within two seasons, for fear had been its only enforcement, and the Doge's men could not arrest a canal. The failure mode is anger. A wool trader copied Bartolo a year later but screamed and wept as he did it, and the crowd saw a man drowning rather than a man set free, and he was in irons within the month. If you cannot do it lightly, you are not yet ready to do it.

The third is the decree: refuse once, quietly, and never repeat it. A claim is not power; a claim is a question, and bureaucracies ask endlessly, in subsections, knowing that whoever answers twice has accepted that the asker is the judge. Watch real authority sometime and you will notice that it lowers its voice and does not explain. I once stood before a cardinal who had been bought and signed and was three days from sealing a province's grain under the Parasite forever, while the whole court fought him with petitions, precedents, and duchesses weeping on schedule, every argument feeding him because every argument confirmed him as the judge of the matter. On the signing day I walked the length of the hall in motley with my bells stuffed with wool, stood before him, said quietly, no, and then sat down on the floor and ate an apple. A flat no with nothing after it gives a room nothing to refute. The notaries looked at one another, a duchess stopped mid-weep, and the deal died in the silence. He never signed. The chroniclers wrote that he foamed and collapsed, because exorcisms sell, but the truth is more useful to you: the counter was the period at the end of the sentence. The failure mode is hope, for the moment you hope the no will work it has become a plea wearing a no's clothing, and the creature smells the difference through a wall. I have watched ten thousand men say no with their voices and please with their shoulders. The shoulders always win.

The fourth is the ledger. Nothing enters without an opening, and every opening was once a consent: a debt, a subscription, a fear of the neighbours, a paper signed at twenty and forgotten, and what is unmapped cannot be defended. This is siegecraft, and I learned it from a siege engineer rather than a priest. A harried prince I once served discovered, after a single season of writing every assault down before reacting to it, that all of them entered through the same four doors, being a debt, a vanity, a rumour, and his brother's wife. He sealed three and simply stopped opening the fourth, and the assaults did not cease, but they ceased to work, which is better, for his enemies went on spending against doors that no longer opened. The failure mode is the audit performed once and framed. His own son inherited the ledger, declared the work complete, and hung it in the library, and was bankrupt within the decade through five new doors. The walls are walked monthly, or they are not walked at all.

The fifth is the jest, which is to say: make it ridiculous in public. Solemnity is load-bearing. The robes, the seals, the rising for the judge, strip away the gravity and the entire structure is revealed as men in costumes holding paper, and this is why mockery of the court is the one crime every court prosecutes personally. They are telling you where the wall is thinnest, and you should believe them. An emperor of my acquaintance demanded golden statues of himself in every square, paid for by a statue levy, and a decree of that kind cannot be stopped, only spoiled, so on the night before the unveiling I had the plinth engraved, beautifully, with the sculptor's invoice, fully itemised, including gold leaf, extra, for the modesty of His Radiance. He unveiled himself standing upon his own bill. The silence lasted four seconds and the laughter lasted ten years, and no man could be punished for it, because the invoice was accurate. Truth, properly formatted, is the one joke power cannot prosecute. The failure mode is bitterness. A pamphleteer of that reign, twice my wit, wrote from hatred instead of play, and his pages made men angry, and angry men are harvest, so the Parasite reprinted him in secret. Read that sentence again. The jest must be light, or you are working for them.

The sixth is the temple: ten minutes at dawn, every dawn, the attention turned inward and held. Strip away every mystical claim and the bones of it still stand, for the harvest is attention, your attention is finite, and whatever you do not reclaim deliberately is collected by default. I wintered twice with an order of fourteen monks in a province where the Parasite had taken everything, the land, the tithe, even the bell out of the tower, and yet it could not take the ten minutes. Officials would arrive with urgent papers and the abbot would read them at the speed of a man reading for pleasure, and the urgency died on the table between them, urgency having been the only weapon the papers ever carried. Within a generation the farmers were bringing their disputes to the abbey rather than the court. Nobody declared anything. The jurisdiction simply moved, ten minutes at a time. The failure mode is to skip the practice on the bad days, for the bad days are the harvest days, and the one brother who lapsed on terrible mornings was the one they eventually turned, because they made certain his mornings were terrible.

The seventh and last is the advance: forward on every front at once, slowly if need be, but forward without exception. Every system of control is built for siege; it keeps tables for everything a stationary man can do and a price for every fear of a static herd, but it has no table for motion. In the worst of the plague years, when the death carts and the tax collectors arrived together, and note well that they always arrive together, fear being harvest weather, a river town I loved wished to board its windows and wait, and waiting is the very thing the tables price best. I told them instead to advance all positions. We held markets in the graveyard because the rents were free, we made the plague masks into carnival until the children stopped screaming at them, and a widow opened a school in the empty customs house because no man dared collect customs any longer. None of it was bravery.

A population in motion cannot be priced, and within a generation the Parasite had moved on to easier ground, for it does not conquer; it harvests, and a moving herd is not worth the harvesting. The failure mode is to confuse the advance with victory. That town lost half its people, and the widow's school burned twice. The advance is not the absence of defeat. The advance is what defeat is not permitted to interrupt.

That is the manual entire: seven attacks, seven counters, twelve hundred years of testing, and no incense required. One last thing, and then I must be gone before the watch changes. Men ask how I have survived so long, telling the truth in courts that kill truth-tellers, and the whole teaching folds into a single line. I never once let them decide what was serious. The Parasite ruled every court I ever danced in, and it never ruled the fool, and it does not have to rule you.