Note to mods: You removed this two times without stating any reason and this is my third and last time posting this. You also don't respond to modmail. Please tell me what is wrong so I can modify it as you please. It's got 99% upvotes and many awards so I don't think there is something inherently wrong with it.
Hello everyone,
Long time lurker here. I learned a lot from you and wanted to share my findings to give back to the community.
I use these online tools to make my sentences better. Here’s what I work with to brush up my English so I don’t sound like a robot:

Online Oxford collocation dictionary

Sometimes all you need is to check if 2 words go well together.For example, it is correct to say: big help, enormous help, tremendous help, but not: giant help, oversized help.
You can say: What is interesting ABOUT it, but you can’t say: What is interesting IN it.
You can say: a light sleeper, but not: an easy sleeper.
When 2 words go together well in a phrase, they are called a collocation.

• Certain adjectives go with certain nouns,
• specific adverbs follow particular verbs,
• only some prepositions go with certain nouns or verbs.

Online Oxford Collocation Dictionary gives you the specific term which goes well with the word you have chosen.
If you type in the word interesting, you get what verbs go well with it: This seems interesting, It sounds interesting, to find something interesting.
You also get adverbs: extremely interesting, interesting enough, and prepositions: interesting FOR someone, interesting TO people.
When I can’t find a collocation I am looking for in the Collocations Dictionary, I check it out on Lengusa.

lengusa.com

lengusa is a nice little app that gives you dozens of correct sentences from The New York Times, Forbes, Encyclopedia Brittanica, The Guardian, and other credible resources.
This linguistic search engine helps you check if your collocation is grammatically correct. It can also help you find the right synonym for your word, paraphrase your sentence, etc.
Just type in your word in the search bar, and you will get a definition, translation, pronunciation, ngram (popularity of your word or phrase over time, something I really like) and plenty of sentences as examples of your word with the credible sources from the internet quoted below them.
As I already said, it is particularly good when you are not sure if your collocation is grammatically correct and relevant.

Longman Dictionary

Obviously, sometimes I want to check the right meaning of a word. Or to see if a noun is uncountable or countable (so I know if I can put are or is, do or does after it).
I use the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English the most because I’m used to its form and orderliness. It has everything an average dictionary needs.
It gives you the whole word family of your word. For the word interesting, I got: interest (noun), disinterest (noun), interested (adjective), interestingly (adverb), etc.
It also offers the antonym, defines the meaning of your word, a few phrases, several examples in a whole sentence, an explanation of the difference between your word and the one with similar form (such as interesting and interested).
What’s best, there is a thesaurus box which explains the difference between your word and words with a similar meaning: fascinating, stimulating, intriguing
Website Thesaurus.com
I try to find the right synonym for my word so I don’t sound like a robot repeating the same word over and over again.
Thesaurus is an excellent dictionary that gives you all the words similar to the one you have already used.
Thesaurus also gives you a short definition of the chosen word.
Its synonyms are colored with different shades of orange to mark how similar these other words are compared to yours.You also get antonyms to your word given in different shades of grey below the synonyms, as well as sentence examples from the web for the word you typed in the search bar.
At the end of each page, there are related words and synonyms for the word you typed in, as well as their synonyms: absorbing, amusing, attractive, engaging, etc.

Grammarly

Although not ideal, most writers use it because it works as a tiny electronic teacher: it corrects your mistakes by underlining them in red and offers possible correct options. It also gives you a short explanation of why they are correct in the right-hand margin.
You can use it in Word, Wordpress, on Medium, etc.
However, Grammarly is just software, so it‘s prone to interpret some sentences wrong by sticking rigidly to grammatical explanations. In that case, click the option IGNORE, so your word doesn‘t remain in red every time you open the document.
One more good thing about Grammarly is that it has both British and American English options. You can choose the option in your Gmail account.
Despite the fact that it is far from perfect, this writing tool does a great job of detecting even the smallest parts of speech such as articles and prepositions.
However, read carefully their privacy policy and what they do with your data. They can store all your user content on their servers, so think about whether you want to use it. I don’t see any harm in using it for writing, but I don’t work for a big company.
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My writing has significantly improved since I started using these 5 tools. I write every day and working with them became a part of my routine.
One more thing to have in mind if you are wondering how to write better: read quality material. Good books and high-quality articles on many different subjects teach you new phrases and forms. So, go on and find interesting topics, be it history, science, drama, politics, or philosophy. Read good content and something will stick in your mind.
I hope this helps someone out there and let me know if you have any questions.

Have you ever read the book "The Count of Monte Cristo?" The main character had a lot of good things ahead of him. He had some good career opportunities. He had a girl that loved him. Things were looking pretty positive for him. Suddenly, he found himself arrested and in jail. It took awhile to connect all the dots, and figure out what happened, but he was the victim of conspiracy. Two more people people conspired to defraud him, lie, bear false witness, and ruin him. Has anyone ever been cheated on? They had someone they loved, and there was some sort of adultery? Adultery would be an example of conspiracy, where two or more people were conspiring against someone, and doing some things in secret or behind closed doors.
Conspiracy [kənˈspirəsē]NOUN

1. a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful."a conspiracy to destroy the government"synonyms:plot · scheme · stratagem · plan · machination · cabal · deception · ploy · trick · ruse · dodge · subterfuge · sharp practice · frame-up · fit-up · racket · put-up job · complot · covin

• the action of plotting or conspiring.

We may be able to say that people have lied, they have bore false witness, and conspiracy has happened. Harvey Weinstein would be a more recent example of someone who has conspired against others, and used his position of power and influence in evil ways. Mankind has not "progressed" past this, and someone would be naive or ignorant to thinks so. That is healthy to identify. Someone could be paranoid where they simply think everyone is out to get him without much evidence. That is more where we get into "Conspiracy Theory." Say "I don't know." Not knowing is healthy. It may be healthy to identify that mankind has done some bogus things at times. A Conspiracy Theorist may have thought they knew something and become obsessive about it.
This is a topic that has come up a lot in regards to Marxism. In the US, given two or more people conspired to defraud the US Government, that would be conspiracy a crime.
Link: "What Do The Courts Consider in a Conspiracy Case." Findlaw.com
The comintern, and communism has espouse creating World Wide Proletariate Revolution. Someone who was a communist in the US may have been a Domestic Enemy to the United States Constitution. He was looking to overthrow a lawful government, or supersede the constitution towards their five year plan, and "Communism Now." The Comintern would be an example of Conspiracy a Crime.
Link: "Comintern" Wikipedia
Did The Comintern just go away suddenly, or did they slink further into the shadows, or change tactics? That may take evidence which is longer than I care to write at this time. The evidence may be there.

I want to suggest a QOL improvement which benefits Japanese players.(possibly also other Asian players like Chinese and Korean)
​
--- what is the problem? - searching function of flea market
Japanese translation has been implemented recently and many many Japanese PC gamers who had avoided this game just because EFT had only English version have begun playing this game. But some users are complaining about Japanese edition just by only one reason, the difficulty of using the searching function in flea market in Japanese edition.
Many Japanese players welcomed translations of Quest text and item descriptions, but these are only flavor texts and not essentials to the game play. But the usability of the searching function of flea market is essential to the gameplay.
--- why it is hard to use search function in Japanese?
currently, in order to use the search function of flea market, a player needs to input at least three characters. For example, you can input just three words like "wes" , "win" or "key" to search "west wing keys"
But in some Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese, maybe also Korean, it is hard to input three characters from item names since in these languages one or at most two characters are enough to express a meaning or a word.
In Japanese version of tarkov, "West wing room 301 key" is translated to "西棟 301 号室の鍵".
Of course, in this case, you can just input "301" and search the key but I am talking in general case.
Actually, each English words of the item name like "west", "wing", "room" and "key" are translated into one or two Japanese characters like "西", "棟", "号室" and "鍵" each. You cannot search the item by inputting each of these words, these are too short for the search function to work.
If we, Japanese players try to search an item, we need to memorize not only each words in an item name but also each combinations.
Imagine you must input the exact phrase like "west wing room" to search the key, it is so boring.
​
And what makes it worse, It is impossible to translate English into Japanese directly one by one. So if we know English item names, we cannot assume Japanese version items names. It can have many synonyms, it can be many combinations of different words.
​
You couldn't memorize all the exact item names in EFT, if you were not IQ200.
​
--- how Japanese users tackles this problem now
Currently we can search only items which include English proprietary nouns. or just right-click and use filter by item if you have the item. And put the items you buy frequently into the wish-list.
So play without searching function is not impossible but it somehow harms the play feel.
​
--- how to fix it
Change searching function to work if a player inputs only one character in 2-byte characters language like Japanese(and Chinese and also Korean?)
We can express one meaning by one character. For another example, "燃" means flammable and is used in fuel item names, it is great if inputting that character and searching function works, it can give us the list of both "metal fuel tank" and "expenditure fuel tank" and maybe some other searching noises.
​
edit. formatting

Equivocation only goes so far. Changing someone's tongue does not always do enough or go as far as to change their mind or heart. It's not as black and white as some outline it. There are subtleties to language that go further than denotation. For instance, context, intent, speaker, audience, and tone. Or does it? I want to broach this topic to see what others in this Subreddit think and stimulate a useful discourse on the terminology of mental illness.
About the prolific author, patient, and professor of psychology and bipolar, the following article takes a quick look at the language of "madness": On The Language of Nutiness and Madness
To start a philosophical discussion, we must agree on the facts, in this case, the definitions of the words themselves. So let us begin with this.
The Google tile for definition and etymology in Google's search engine results are the sources I use for the following list (abrv.):
​
LUNATIC:
Definition 1

• Menatlly ill person

Etymology: LATIN "moon" - perhaps related to Dionysus and the maenads, from whom we get the term "mania" and the word for "to rave", hence "raving lunatic"
MAD/NESS:
Definition 2.

• BRITISH mentally ill; insane
• (of a person, conduct, or an idea) extremely foolish or ill-advised.
• in a frenzied mental or physical state.

Definition 3.

• very enthusiastic about someone or something.

ILL:
Definition 1.

• not in full health; sick.

Definition 2.

• poor in quality.
• harmful.
• hostile.
• (especially of fortune) not favorable.

and as a noun...

• evil or harm.

SICK:
Definition 1.

• affected by physical or mental illness.

Definition 4.

• (especially of humor) having something unpleasant such as death, illness, or misfortune as its subject and dealing with it in an offensive way.

WACKY:

• funny or amusing in a slightly odd or peculiar way.

Note on "wacky": mostly benign. etymologically comes from the literal verb "whack". Can be used as a dysphemism.
ECCENTRIC:
Defintion 1.

• funny or amusing in a slightly odd or peculiar way.

Connotation: ambiguous, sometimes positive.
CRAZY:
Definition 1

• mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way.

Definition 2

• extremely enthusiastic.

Note: Etymologically, English, from meaning "full of cracks" (which brings to mind the term "cracked")
INSANE:
Definition 1.

• in a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction; seriously mentally ill.

Note: Etymologically, comes from latin "in-" (not) and "sane" (healthy). Perhaps the cleanest etymology and yet has such a negative connotation now which I think is a pity.
DERANGED:
Google also doesn't give enough information here, because often derangement was a word used to describe sexual activities that had historically (and sometimes in some groups are still) taboo.
DEMENTED:
Definition 1

• suffering from dementia.
• informal•Britishdriven to behave irrationally due to anger, distress, or excitement.

(Note: here Google doesn't go far enough, because the term "demented" often is synonymous with derangement or ill will in a twisted irrational way.)
​
With that out of the way... Clearly there are some problems with the way we talk about illness in general, not just mental illness. From the visceral "raving lunatic" to the silly and fun "wacky" or "eccentric" (genius) and the unfortunate corruption of the word "insane" from it's historically rooted definition of simply "not healthy" to the derogatory way that people use it today.
I think educating people about the history of these words in an information campaign would be an excellent place to start. From Greek mythology to latin language, it could have interdisciplinary applications and historical significance.
With this approach, perhaps the definitions of the words themselves could begin to change (the ones that aren't too far-gone (which begs the question, "which one's are the bathwater and which one's are the baby")). It is my belief that equivocation is quickly seen through, but deeper change is really what we all ought to be going for.
That is not to say that if a word in a particular situation with particular people makes specific parties uncomfortable that they should have to accept new definitions and "get over it". Not at all. But if we address this broadly, perhaps a different approach to language (education, history, and re-imagining).
Individuals' comfort should be respected on an individual basis all the time. But there can be broader approaches that shift things in a large scale way that might have an effect on the lives of individuals living with stigma in such a way that the stigma is reduced or removed.
What do you think? Is there anything to add to this? Have I made any mistakes? Please let me know what you think and I will hear with open ears.

Classical liberals on ‘social justice’

Jacob Hall | Marcus Shera

George Mason University, Virginia, USA
Symposium: New Thinking about Social Justice. The Independent Review, Volume 24, Number 1, Summer 2019. https://www.independent.org/publications/titoc.asp?id=98

1 | INTRODUCTION

In the Summer 2019 issue of The Independent Review, 14 authors took up the call, in the words of Robert M. Whaples, the journal's co-editor, to “explore, reassess, and critique the concept of social justice” (p. 5). We give an overview and commentary on the symposium's articles. Rather than adopting the term ‘social justice’, we recommend returning to the three senses of justice adopted by Adam Smith and explained by Daniel Klein (2017). We articulate and explore Smith's trilayered understanding of justice in contrast to an understanding that gives place to the expression ‘social justice’. Smith's trilayered understanding is in the spirit of addressing the microfoundations of macro phenomena, the spirit of Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978).
The term ‘social justice’ seems to be especially susceptible to miscommunication. Not only do people disagree about a proper conception of social justice, but many recommend abandoning the term together. The term has a history of debate in the classical liberal tradition, often centring on Friedrich Hayek (1976, 1988), John Rawls (1971), and Robert Nozick (1974). Hayek argued that it is wrongheaded to make outcomes, rather than actions, the objects that are assessed in terms of justice. Hayek recommended framing justice in terms of rules of just conduct that evaluate the behaviour of each individual. Nozick's conception centres on the just acquisition and transfer of property, while Rawls is famous for his ‘difference principle’ and thought experiment with the ‘veil of ignorance’.
What makes the classical liberal tradition unique is a dedication to the rules of commutative justice (CJ) – the grammar-like rules of property, person, and promises due. But CJ is not sufficient to describe the complex moral landscape in which we live. What should I be doing with my property? How should I engage with my neighbours in a voluntary setting? Thus, many classical liberals seek out senses of justice beyond CJ.
Moving beyond CJ requires leaving its precise and accurate rules and entering a territory where the guidelines are more loose, vague, and indeterminate. At the same time, it is important to identify an operational logic in articulated senses of justice. Such challenges have given birth to various classical liberal formulations of ‘social justice’. The totality of justice is often described by the rules of commutative justice plus some additional standards of ‘social justice’ (SJ). Thus, for many of the symposium authors CJ + SJ = J. In venturing beyond CJ, we encourage grappling with the loose, vague, and indeterminate nature of justice beyond CJ, as well as articulating an operational logic that puts the actor and the action in the foreground.
In our quest to articulate justice beyond CJ, adopting ‘social justice’ talk prematurely can harm or confuse conversation more often than it clarifies the muddy and murky world beyond CJ. As Thomas Schelling (1978, p. 39) writes:

A hastily chosen term that helps to meet a need gets imitated into the language before anybody notices what an inappropriate term it is. People who recognize that a term is a poor one use it anyway in a hurry to save thinking ofa better one, and in collective laziness we let inappropriate terminology into our language by default.

We explain why Adam Smith's trilayered understanding of justice is preferred as it grounds the complexities of extended injustice in the actions of individuals. We examine each contribution to the Independent Review symposium, and attempt to analyse them through the lens of Adam Smith. We conclude by asking whether or not there is anything left for ‘social justice’ to capture that is not subsumed in the trilayered understanding.

2 | ADAM SMITH'S TRILAYERED UNDERSTANDING OF JUSTICE

We follow Klein (2017) in affirming that Smith articulated three distinct senses of justice in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments (1790; hereafter TMS); and, more importantly for our purposes here, we follow Klein in adopting the trilayered understanding as our own.
Smith's three senses of justice are as follows (Klein, 2017; TMS, pp. 269–270.101):
• commutative justice (CJ): not messing with other people's stuff • distributive justice (DJ): making a becoming use of one's own stuff • estimative justice (EJ): estimating objects properly
The three senses of justice are not disjointed parts; rather, they are akin to nested layers. EJ subsumes DJ which further subsumes CJ. Thus, we speak of Smith's framework of justice as being ‘trilayered’.
We treat each sense in turn.

2.1 | Commutative justice

Commutative justice, or ‘mere’ justice, is the sense of justice most familiar to classical liberals. When the symposium articles refer to Smith's thoughts on justice, it is CJ they are referring to. Conforming to CJ entails not messing with other people's stuff. The specifics of what constitutes ‘stuff’, ‘other people's’, and ‘messing with’ are a function of factors specific to time and place. Thus, within limits, there is variety in the specifics and uniformity in the broad formulation. Smith gets to the heart of the matter:

The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions; and last of all come those which guard what are called his personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises ofothers. (TMS, p. 84.2)

Thus, for Smith, one's ‘stuff’ consists of the tangibles of person, property, and promises due. Smith elsewhere includes one's reputation as a component of the stuff of CJ (TMS, p. 82.9). However, reputation is a complicated affair and it is unclear whether Smith views it as covered by the rules of commutative justice or those of distributive justice. In parsing Smith's thoughts on reputation, Bonica and Klein (2019, pp. 3–4) distinguish between detractions to one's “simple reputation”, which may incite messing with person, property, and promises due, and “intensive reputation”, which do not.
The rules of CJ are akin to the rules of grammar in that they are precise and accurate (TMS, pp. 175.11, 327.1). CJ is upheld primarily by abstaining from coercion and, thus, we only receive negative (or neutral) feedback on CJ. We do not receive positive feedback (praise) for not messing with other people's stuff (TMS, pp. 82.9, 330.8). The fulfillment of CJ is necessary to the well-being of society, and so we feel a stricter obligation to uphold it (TMS, pp. 86.4, 175.11, 211.16). Violations of it are clear and call out loudly for correction, even by force if the situation warrants it (TMS, pp. 79–80.5, 269.10). CJ has a flipside: others not messing with one's stuff. When ‘others’ refers to the government, we call CJ's flipside ‘liberty’. When classical liberals protest against undesirable violations of liberty, they are calling the state out for its violations of CJ. CJ occupies a special place among the other virtues as the “main pillar that upholds the whole edifice” (TMS, p. 86.4).

2.2 | Distributive justice

Distributive justice (DJ) entails making a becoming use of one's own. While CJ is concerned with the individual's actions towards other people's stuff, DJ is concerned with distributing one's own stuff. The ‘stuff’ of DJ is somewhat broader and looser than the ‘stuff’ of CJ. In addition to the ‘stuff’ of CJ, it includes one's energy, attention, respect, admiration, approbation, social capital, and so on. The action up for judgement is the distribution of one's limited resources. Unlike the rules of CJ, the rules of DJ are loose, vague, and indeterminate. The lines between becoming and unbecoming, praiseworthy and blameworthy, are blurry and up for interpretation and debate. Thus, whereas CJ is akin to the rules of grammar, DJ is like the rules of aesthetic criticism.
In a passage on patriotic self-sacrifice, Smith gives us an example of DJ:

The patriot who lays down his life for the safety, or even for the vain-glory of this society, appears to act with the most exact propriety. He appears to view himself in the light in which the impartial spectator naturally and necessarily views him, as but one of the multitude, in the eye of that equitable judge, of no more consequence than any other in it, but bound at all times to sacrifice and devote himself to the safety, to the service, and even to the glory of the greater number. But though this sacrifice appears to be perfectly just and proper, we know how difficult it is to make it, and how few people are capable of making it. (TMS, p. 228.2; emphasis added)

Smith's use of “perfectly just and proper” clearly speaks to DJ rather than to mere CJ. Smith feels that the sacrificial patriot is making abecominguse of hisown.Others may disagree and feel that the patriot's actions were rather unbecoming, but such is the nature of DJ.
DJ is a social virtue in the sense that it is about distributing resources to people. It calls us to make a becoming use of our many social resources. Thus, DJ is concerned with the proper treatment of persons. We can ask ourselves whether the social action of distributing our stuff furthers or detracts from our striving to make a becoming use of what is our own. Smith, in line with the tradition of virtue ethics, recognises that DJ “comprehends all the social virtues” (TMS, p. 270.10). Striving to be a virtuous person, someone fulfilling their DJ obligations, requires the individual to fulfil, and balance, a whole host of virtues.
Smith distinguishes his sense of distributive justice from that of Aristotle's presentation in the Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle, 1962). Smith writes, “The distributive justice of Aristotle is somewhat different. It consists in the proper distribution of rewards from the public stock of a community” (TMS, pp. 269–70.10n). Smith paints Aristotelian distributive justice as consisting of what is a fair distribution of public benefits. Smith's sense of DJ is concerned with how individuals, not merely ‘the public’, distribute their stuff. Furthermore, the stuff of Smithian DJ is more encompassing than the stuff of Aristotelian DJ. Smith's portrayal of Aristotle seems to align quite well with the one provided by symposium contributor Daniel Guerrière (‘Social Justice versus Western Justice’, pp. 25–36). We note, however, that Aristotle's concept of distributive justice is difficult to pin down (Chroust & Osborn, 1942), and that Smith tended to overstate disagreement for various strategic reasons (Matson, Doran, & Klein, 2019).

2.3 | Estimative justice

Estimative justice (EJ) is the most extensive and encompassing of the three senses of justice. It concerns the estimation, or evaluation, of objects. The modifier ‘estimative’ is not one that Smith uses, but it is adopted by Klein to describe Smith's third unnamed sense of justice which Smith affirms and associates with Plato. ‘Objects’ can include tangible objects such as poems and pictures or more abstract objects such as government policies, systems of philosophy, one's own previous actions and estimations, other people's estimations, and anything else we are conscious of. Even the expression ‘social justice’ is an object of estimation.
In a passage immediately preceding his famous discussion of the earthquake in China, Smith speaks of “a sense of propriety and justice” that seems to go beyond the realm of CJ and DJ:

[I]t requires … some degree of reflection, and even of philosophy, to convince us, how little interest we should take in the greatest concerns of our neighbour, how little we should be affected by whatever relates to him, if the sense of propriety and justice did not correct the otherwise natural inequality of our sentiments. (TMS, p. 136.3, emphasis added)

When our sentiments display such an inequality, they reflect a hidden estimation that is incorrect – or estimatively unjust. Tom can be said to do injustice to a painting when he values it too little, and more than justice when he values it too highly. Either way, Tom estimates the painting unjustly.
Suppose Jim watches a movie and estimates it to be worth a rating of 7.5 out of 10. Mary can estimate Jim's estimation and find it either just or unjust. It is important to reiterate that Mary is estimating Jim's estimation, the 7.5. Mary's estimation does indirectly entail her estimation of the movie, but Jim's estimation is the direct object of her estimation.
Like DJ, EJ is loose, vague, and indeterminate. For example, there are no well-defined and clear-cut rules of aesthetic appreciation. Smith's many illustrations and examples in The Theory of Moral Sentiments encourage moral development by prodding the reader's conscience to estimate the actions, estimations, beliefs, and sentiments of others in a medley of scenarios. Smith's The Wealth of Nations can be read as his attempt to get his readers to justly estimate British domestic and international policy – policy evaluation is loose, vague, and indeterminate too. Estimative justice is concerned with the good of the whole. Saying that an estimation of some object is estimatively just is equivalent to saying that the impartial spectator finds it agreeable, and that which is good for the whole is what the impartial spectator finds pleasing (TMS, p. 166.7).

3 | WHY GO FROM ONE SENSE OF JUSTICE TO THREE?

In Part VII of TMS, Smith describes three different ways of articulating rules of morality that he characterises by different historical strains of thought. It is possible that Smith is an unreliable narrator on the specifics of historical philosophy and that Smith's true targets lie between the lines. Nevertheless, Smith's characterisation of historical schools is instructive in articulating the distinction between those virtues that are precise and accurate and those that are loose, vague, and indeterminate. First, the ancient moralists did not mark out a set of grammar-like rules. Instead, their moral prescriptions presume that rules are loose and vague (TMS, pp. 328.3, 341.37). Next, there are those who treat virtues as though they were amenable to grammar-like rules. Smith identifies these as the medieval “casuists”. The casuists attempted to offer precise and accurate rules that circumscribed every aspect of human behaviour. Finally, the scholars of natural jurisprudence limited themselves to those that one is “entitled to exact by force”, namely commutative justice (TMS, p. 330.8). The natural jurisprudence scholars recognised aspects of human conduct other than CJ as a part of justice, but, unlike the casuists, they did not attempt to lay down precise and accurate rules for their fulfilment. We hope to animate the spirit of the natural jurisprudence scholars.
CJ and its flipside, liberty, are conceptually powerful because they give us precise and accurate rules. But reducing moral philosophy to CJ cuts short our moral philosophising. Without senses of justice beyond CJ we have no way to justify our attachment to it nor a way to justify potential exceptions. When striving to articulate justice beyond CJ it is important to keep two points in mind. The first is recognising and accepting that moral standards become loose, vague, and indeterminate. The second is that the newly articulated sense of justice must have a distinctive logic of operation pertaining to the action and the actor. Straying from these two guidelines often results in casuistry or confusion or both.
Most of the authors contributing to the Independent Review symposium desire to elucidate and affirm a sense of justice beyond CJ. We share that desire and applaud them. However, rather than merely adding one other sense of ‘justice’ to our active vocabulary, thereby adopting a bipartite scheme of justice (CJ + SJ), we follow Smith and Klein in jumping from one sense of justice to three.
Distinguishing between DJ and EJ allows us to make sense of justice beyond CJ. Leaping from one sense of justice to three allows us to articulate a coherent ‘justice talk’ that both recognises looseness and maintains a logic of operation. It makes sense to clarify further the difference between DJ and EJ here.
Imagine Tom is a fan of watching tennis, and takes the time to estimate Roger Federer so that he can communicate his estimations to his friends the next time they are on the tennis court. We can view Tom's actions through the lens of DJ. He is distributing his time, energy, and attention to watching and estimating Federer. Because he does this in connection with his tennis friends, and because DJ is social in nature, we may say that his friends are the persons treated by Tom's act of distributing.
Perhaps Tom is estimating Federer not to converse with his friends, but to publish his estimation as a sports writer. Tom estimates Federer to be a 9.5. Thus, EJ is concerned with whether 9.5 is a proper estimation of Federer.
One could argue that perhaps EJ is really a form of DJ in that it is concerned with distributing esteem or admiration to objects. However, it seems inappropriate to say that we have a supply of ‘esteem points’ to distribute to objects as that would require a budget constraint and a finite field of relevant objects. EJ is concerned with all objects, including ideas and other estimations, which are innumerable.
Further, Tom's estimation need not reflect an expression of approbation. If Tom was instead admiring a mountain view, but kept the admiration to himself, that point becomes clearer. DJ attaches to persons, and is concerned with the proper treatment of those persons. EJ lacks that aspect in any simple way. Thus, EJ has a more extensive set of objects; DJ is more attentive to the people to whom we distribute our social resources. EJ is a more elementary operator, and thus encompasses DJ.

4 | JUSTICE IS CONCERNED WITH THE ACTION OF THE ACTOR

Deirdre McCloskey (2008) reads Smith as part of the virtue-ethical tradition. The virtue ethics tradition experienced a resurgence in the latter half of the twentieth century, with works such as Anscombe (1958) and MacIntyre (1981). Justice is a virtue that we are to practise. To maintain that idea, focusing our attention on individual actors, the actual practitioners of virtue, is paramount. Unfortunately, often in discussions of ‘social justice’ talk of the actor and her action is neglected. For justice talk to be meaningful, we need proper nouns and verbs. Did Tom mess with other people's stuff? Did Jim make a becoming use of his resources? Did Mary estimate the object properly?
Justice implies duties. Again, our CJ duties are precise and accurate. We have a duty to not mess with other people's stuff. The rules of DJ and EJ are loose, vague, and indeterminate; nevertheless, they are duties. We have a duty to make a becoming use of our own stuff and to estimate objects properly. Articulating a sense of justice requires articulating its operational logic, that is, how it works in practice.
As Thomas Schelling (1978, pp. 135–6) shows us, neighbourhood segregation need not be the product of conscious design; rather, it can arise from the beliefs and expectations of individuals. As Jacob Levy correctly points out in his symposium article (‘Social Injustice and Spontaneous Orders’, pp. 49–62), there are no CJ violations here. However, there is a problem of justice at stake, one that pushes us beyond CJ.
There are many questions that we may ask to start a conversation about the undesirable outcomes we see in the world. If Tom holds on to racial prejudices, is he estimating people properly? If Tom's neighbours harbour no racial prejudices, yet he thinks they do, is he estimating their sentiments properly? Is Tom making a becoming use of his influence over the beliefs, estimations, and actions of Mary? Does Mary, Tom's friend and neighbour, estimate Tom's actions and sentiments properly? Is she making a becoming use of her own stuff in her friendship and respect for Tom? Perhaps Mary should use her resources to impart better estimations to Tom.
Tom's sentiments, beliefs, and character are a product of his estimations. We need not place the entire burden on Tom and his neighbours for the undesirable outcome, but Tom and others are held responsible for their own failures to uphold their duties to DJ and EJ.
The title of Schelling's book Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978) expresses the spirit of our critique of ‘social justice’. We need the trilayered CJ, DJ, and EJ to provide the operational ‘micro’ logics, or lens, for discussing the justice of human behaviour. Smith's trilayered justice is akin to the call for micro-foundations for macro phenomena.
If the estimations and actions of individuals, the micro-motives, are unjust in the DJ and EJ senses, can we then say the macro outcome deserves to be called unjust? Simply put: no. Like poems and paintings, the ‘segregated neighbourhood’ is an object of estimation. Tom can estimate the neighbourhood and find it disagreeable or upsetting. Mary can subsequently estimate the justness of Tom's estimation. But the neighbourhood, as an object separated from an actor and his actions, is neither just or unjust. Losing the focus on the action of the actor leads to a confused practical response, which ultimately detracts from the heart of any issue, namely the individuals involved.

5 | THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW CLASSICAL LIBERALS' NOTIONS OF ‘SOCIAL JUSTICE’

The goal of the Independent Review's symposium is to explore the relationship between classical liberalism and the idea of social justice. Although there is a level of overlap among the 12 articles in their characterisations of social justice, no two are exactly alike. We review each symposium article, focusing on how the authors address key questions concerning social justice and highlighting the similarities and differences between their approaches. We quote the authors when we can, though many authors leave the readers to infer a definition of ‘social justice’ themselves.
We focus on three main questions:

1. Do the authors affirm and use the term ‘social justice’? If so, how do they define it? If not, why not?
2. Do the authors stress the idea that justice concerns the action of an actor in articulating justice, or do they neglect it or even reject it?
3. Do the authors remain primarily within the terms of Smith's idea of commutative justice? If not, is it apt to understand their idea of ‘social justice’ as akin to Smith's ideas of distributive justice and estimative justice?

5.1 | What does social justice mean to the classical liberal?

Of the 12 contributions to the symposium, eight affirmatively use the term ‘social justice’.At first glance, it may appear that we have a sort of consensus appearing. Yet a closer inspection of the authors' definitions reveals that the affirmative camp has no clear unifying focus. Some authors concentrate on aspects of individual conduct while others neglect how the individual is involved. Some focus on economic factors while others are more interested in dignity and virtue. Although they may agree on many policy positions, they do so in spite of their differing conceptions of social justice.
In ‘Opting Out: A Defense of Social Justice’ (pp. 13–24), James R. Otteson, the prize-winning essayist, defines ‘social justice’ as:

…first, the removal of formal restrictions placed on any individuals or groups that limit their ability to achieve a flourishing life as they themselves understand it. A second step would be endorsement of political and economic policy that rewards people for engaging in cooperative behavior and partnerships that provide benefit and value to others as well as to themselves – and that hence punishes or disincentivizes behavior that benefits one person or group at the expense of others. (p. 20)

Even if classical liberals were reluctant to use the term ‘social justice’ in the past, Otteson's definition of the term should be familiar to advocates of the free market. Social justice is built upon two pillars: Smithian justice (what we are calling commutative justice) and David Hume's idea of enlarged and benevolent sentiments (pp. 17–19). Otteson further builds his conception around what he calls the “opt-out option”, or the ability to say “no” (p. 19). When we have to mutually respect each other's boundaries, we develop a respect for each other's humanity. Every individual has the power to say “no!” to any given association or interaction.
Vincent J. Geloso and Phillip W. Magness (‘Social Justice, Public Goods, and Rent Seeking in Narratives’, pp. 37–48) articulate their sense of social justice as being synonymous with “relational equality”, which “holds that the way in which one individual is treated ought to extend to all other individuals” (p. 38). They also introduce the concept of “rent-seeking in narratives”, whereby actors that benefit from relational inequality perpetuate narratives about peoples to maintain their privilege. Although they use the term ‘social justice’, they lean heavily on the term ‘relational equality’, ceasing to refer to social justice after the introductory sections. Stefanie Haeffele and Virgil Henry Storr (‘Is Social Justice a Mirage?’ pp. 145–54) adopt a similar concept to that of Geloso and Magness. They focus their attention on the fairness and generality of the rules of the game and the impartiality of the referees (p. 150). They also emphasise that some games will systematically favour some people over others. If people are not able to choose what games they play, one can call the system unjust.
Jacob Levy directs our attention towards “the amplification of initial injustices through the complex workings of an emergent order as its own kind of injustice” (p. 58). He does not want to put forward a “positive theory of social justice”, but wants us to consider, contra Hayek, that even events that were part of no one's intention or design are legitimate questions of justice (p. 57). Levy leans on Adam Smith to note that, simply because some form of behaviour is unenforceable, that does not tell us whether it is an issue of justice. Levy wants to complement Nozick's understanding of justice with Hayek's description of a spontaneous order, in a way that Hayek himself failed to do. He provides the example of neighbourhood segregation, which we tackled above. At no point during the process of “white flight” does any of the “fleers” explicitly violate any rules of just conduct, but the injustice of segregation persists. Levy expands this type of injustice to potentially include “microaggressions” and structural racism (p. 60). Levy emphasises, therefore, that although such injustices may not be simply legislated away, we are still right to call them injustices and do our best to remediate them.
In their affirmations of social justice, the approaches of Kevin D. Vallier (‘Hayekian Social Justice’, pp. 63–72) and Anthony J. Gill (‘An Exchange Theory of Social Justice’, pp. 131–44) are more formulaic. Vallier articulates a simple, explicit conception of social justice as restricted utility: “Society should be governed by the system of general rules that we can predict will maximize average utility with a utility floor” (p. 63). He also follows Hayek in arguing that we should hesitate to tear up the system as a whole and rather seek to better our system rule by rule by testing each against the meta-rule given above. Anthony Gill notes that defining an outcomes-based version of social justice is no easy task under conditions of diverse preferences and uncertainty. Gill offers us two criteria that bound the field in which actors can play freely to “search and discover” fair outcomes: first, that interactions are Pareto-efficient (no actor is made worse off in a bilateral set of interactions); and second, that “distributional justice increases as the gains from trade within a bilateral interaction tend toward equitable distribution” (p. 133). Gill proceeds to show how, as a society grows in size and anonymity, the equitable distribution becomes ever more uncertain, and from this he argues that, regardless of uncertainty, markets do a better job at hitting the socially just price target than a central planner would.
Social justice affirmers John A. Moore (‘Social Justice: Intersecting Catholicism, Citizenship, and Capitalism’, pp. 119–30) and James R. Stoner Jr. (‘Civil Society and Social Justice: A Prospectus’, pp. 85–94). root their conceptions of social justice in the intellectual history of the Catholic Church. Both reference the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) for inspiration. Stoner Jr. emphasises the historical development of the term ‘social justice’ as a conversation between two papal encyclicals and the Italian priest Antonio Rosmini, credited with coining the term (p. 90). Stoner Jr. defines social justice as follows:

First, social justice includes recognizing the basic rights of individuals out of which civil society developed: the rights to life, to personal liberty, and to property, including rights of exchange and communication … Second, social justice would include just arrangements within the various associations and institutions of civil society. … Finally, social justice ought to include limits on the reach of its own principles, on the one hand in the name of the family, on the other in the name of the state. (pp. 92–3)

Moore alludes to a realm beyond the mere happiness of individuals where they achieve fulfilment and self-actualisation (p. 129). In religious communities, social justice won't be limited to the circles of this world. The term ‘social justice’ seems to have a stable focal definition in Catholic communities, at least viewed from the outside, but it differs from most conversations outside the Church, where there is little institutional prestige to lean on.
Detractors of the term also seem to have different targets in mind. Daniel J. D'Amico (‘Knowledge Problems from behind the Veil of Ignorance’, pp. 73–84) primarily criticises Rawls's conception of the veil of ignorance. Adam G. Martin (‘The Mantle of Justice’, pp. 107–17) combats potential criticisms of Hayek, and agrees with Hayek that ‘social’ is not a meaningful qualifier of justice. Daniel Guerrière contrasts the visions of modern democratic socialists with the ‘Western justice’ of Aristotle and Plato. In his conclusion, he states that there are three potential meanings of ‘social justice’:(a) Catholic social thought, (b) the justice of Plato's ordered polity, and (c) the disposition to promote the welfare of others (pp. 34–5). R. Scott Smith (‘Social Justice, Economics, and the Implications of Nominalism’, pp. 95–106) claims that social justice and critical theory are “wed to nominalism” and criticises them on those grounds (p. 95). A nominalist, as opposed to a realist, theory posits that only particulars exist and that justice has no universal qualities that humans can co-participate in. Like the affirmers of ‘social justice’, the detractors dance around a common set of issues, but analytically are often attacking different sets of ideas.

5.2 | Do the authors stress the actions of individuals?

As discussed above, justice is concerned with actors and their actions. Of the 12 symposium contributions, only nine discuss and stress the actor and the action in their thoughts on social justice. Adam Martin approvingly discusses Hayek's rejection of ‘social justice’ on the grounds that justice applies to individual conduct (p. 107). Hayek, and by extension Martin, follow Smith in articulating the view that justice is a virtue that we are to uphold. Martin argues that “claiming a distribution is unjust is problematic because no identifiable individual or group can be said to have caused the purportedly unjust outcome” (p. 107). Daniel D'Amico primarily addresses the difference between Rawls and Hayek and focuses on the rules and institutions that are just to uphold (p. 74). To D'Amico, Rawls neglects the historical context that would make one set of institutions better than another. “Attempting to ascertain the normative dimensions of a particular social norm apart from the real social context within which it was developed is comparable to asking what is the just price for a particular commodity” (p. 75). He does not directly require that any institution follow Hayek's criterion to apply to individual conduct, but it may be inferred that the historical development of rules would force them to be applicable to individual conduct.
R. Scott Smith, John Moore, and Daniel Guerrière in their respective articles maintain the idea that justice is a virtue and entangled with the action of an actor. For Moore, social justice is about individuals and their responsibilities towards other community members rather than economic outcomes (p. 120). Moore maintains his stress on the actor and her action throughout his article, and touches on the theme of micro-foundations and macro-behaviour within his Catholic framing (p. 127). He emphasises the importance of agency, virtue, and subsidiarity as “concepts [that] speak to human activity at a ‘ground’ level and seek to elevate individual human experience through self-development and specific actions” (p. 127). Moore approvingly quotes Michael Novak (2009, p. 1): “… we must rule out any use of ‘social justice’ that does not attach to the habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. ‘Social justice’ is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud” (p. 120). Guerrière accentuates the action of the actor as well as highlighting the importance of the micro-foundations of macro-behavior. He writes:

[J]ustice is not a societal structure or condition, which is always a datum; any just or unjust social condition is an institution of the acts of individuals, hence posterior to just or unjust conduct. Ifno one acts justly or unjustly, there is no just or unjust social structure. … A social, political, or economic configuration may be just or unjust only insofar as it is the deliberate consequent ofvoluntary behavior. (p. 28)

James Stoner Jr. believes that an overemphasis on individual rights can lead us to neglect the duties that we have to family, friends, and the broader community (p. 91). For Stoner Jr., individual rights need to be complemented with a sense of duty to various social institutions. “As these associations and institutions vary in scope and purpose, so the principles of justice within them would vary: authority and reward within a firm are different from authority and reward within a school, and they are in turn different within a club” (p. 93). He does not explicitly require that the rules that govern institutions apply directly to individual conduct, but as an institution becomes more local we can infer that its rules are more consistent with the logic of individual action.
James Otteson addresses Hayek's insistence that justice focus on individual actions, but dismisses it as “idiosyncratic preference” (p. 13). He likens Hayek to a Platonist who simply prefers his own formulation of the eternal meaning of ‘justice’ (p. 14). Otteson's conception of social justice places the individual in the analytical background. His social justice concerns individuals to the extent that the world is populated by individuals and that his conception of a socially just world prioritises Smith's CJ. Otteson's social justice does not concern the actor and her actions, but rather is about what a good world would look like. His call for endorsing a political economy that incentivises mutually beneficial behaviour is relevant to those with political and rhetorical power, and may be, in the vein of Haeffele and Storr, addressed to the ‘rulers’ of the game. Otteson, however, does not do that.
Jacob Levy notes that Hayek was right to emphasise the rules of just conduct for individuals, but wrong to restrict his idea of justice to those rules (p. 51). He believes that Hayek may have favoured a form of distributive justice more akin to Aristotle's “public distributive justice” as the distributor of the public funds is an individual whose conduct we can judge (p. 55). Levy is most interested in a kind of injustice that cannot be attributed to to an individual, one that is the result of spontaneous order. For Levy, an individual who moves out of a neighbourhood as a response to falling home prices is not violating any obvious principles of justice. In fact, we might say that they are obliged to do so to protect their family's financial well-being (p. 59). If a cycle of poverty or oppression perpetuates itself due to some initial and obvious injustice, such as slavery, it may not be corrected by offering restitution for the initial injustice itself. The original violation may have created a pattern over and above itself that it is no longer related to. Levy looks at social ills today, but is unable to locate the individual acts of injustice at the micro level. Levy finds the persistent social ills incongruent with the logic of individual action, but intuitively still unjust.
Kevin Vallier addresses Hayek's critiques of outcome-based schema of justice and founds his own understanding of social justice on Hayek's idea of immanent criticism (p. 64). Every rule that we develop for our schema of justice ought to be applicable to the direct conduct of individuals, but we can adopt higher “meta-rules” to critique individual rules. These meta-rules constitute “holistic” justice or the order of social justice, while the “particularistic” rules remain directed towards the conduct of individuals. Vallier reads Hayek as a Kantian contractarian whereby each rule must be simultaneously willed to be universally applied, and also that the rules themselves must conform to individual conduct (p. 66).
Anthony Gill rejects outcome-based conceptions of social justice since human preferences are subject to uncertainty and change. He prefers a “procedural definition” that provides the greatest number of opportunities to individuals (p. 132). His first criterion, to uphold a Pareto-efficient set of outcomes, rests upon no trade being made coercively. The choice between trading voluntarily and using violence is a matter of individual conduct. The second criterion is to offer fair distributions in trade, which Gill also describes as dependent on the traders' willingness to bargain fairly (p. 133). Both of his criteria focus on the conduct of individuals in real situations, though he concludes pessimistically that they are likely unrealisable standards.
Vincent Geloso and Phillip Magness's concept of relational equality can primarily stand in for individuals treating each other on the same terms. They note that “relational equality has a quality whereby it links the individual to the society”, and furthermore the “[u]neven treatment of individuals (i.e., relational inequality) limits heterogeneous individuals' ability to make contact” (p. 39). The concept of rent-seeking in narratives is a way of exploiting relational inequality to some particular advantage, and will quite often be to the detriment of the wider society. The concept of relational equality would remain applicable to individual conduct whether or not the individual concerned is a government actor or a regular citizen.
[cont'd in comments]

The following is a response, continuation, and perversion of this poem, delivered to us through the divine intuition of one of God’s Most Perfect Vessels: https://www.reddit.com/nonpoetry/comments/jn63qm/the_problem_of_form_resolved_by_the_maste?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf (Please, oh wondrous Library mods, forgive your humble servant for sharing a link in this post.)
I am forever indebted to the Master’s eternal and ever-flourishing insight.
—
Quality originates as a movement, a springing forth, a constant uncoiling, progressing, manifesting, elaborating, multiplying, dissipating and returning, congealing, bursting, whizzing, blooming, propagating, and only ever approximating something like rest in the manner of idling, which is like a jittering or turning in place— a circle. Everything is moving, but not everything is thought to be moving— rest is a thinkable state, thought only as the negation of movement, which is the original (and true) perceivable state. When movement is perceived purely, untainted and unmixed with the thought of rest, it is perceived as the manifestation of a quality or collection of qualities— often simply as a verb. Without the thought of rest, the movement can only be abstractedly referred to as a “something,” when, in actuality, what we perceive is a “moving.” “Something” whizzed past my window— I didn’t perceive an actual “something,” but only an abstract one— though I did perceive “whizzing.” This “whizzing” is understood as a “something,” but not perceived as one. This is how it seems to me. Only when this “something” is imbued with the thought of rest, or, as the Master correctly postulates, the movement is given in its stillness, can we perceive an actual something, a definable, categorizable one— a thing, or noun. It wasn’t just “some” thing that whizzed past my window, but, now, a bird. The bird is given through form as the vehicle of the something, which is the vehicle of the whizzing, which, itself, is the vehicle of the whizzing quality (the “whizzingly”). Quality, apart from its movement, is never perceived directly or in itself, but must necessarily impart its essence through a vehicle, which is movement. This movement is the essence of matter, which is to what form gives shape. Something in movement is the mediator between form and quality, stillness and moving (or originating). Matter is the “something” that becomes a “thing” in stillness. To be more precise, one first senses the quality— then perceives its movement— understands this movement through its vehicle, matter (“something”)— and lastly conceives the thing. I could have said that “A bird flew past my window”— but I did not. I specifically perceived a “whizzing” (which, to digress slightly, is pertinent and conclusive proof that there are no such things as “synonyms”— the trouble here is in forgetting that words are meant to denote things, and every thing springs forth from a specific quality— but this matter should be treated of more fully elsewhere.) This “whizzing” is both movement (perception) and quality (sensation). It evokes both the movement and the essence of the movement. This is the “whizzing movement” of matter, or a matter, or matters. So then, we have the quality, which is the essence of the movement, which evokes itself through the vehicle of matter; what then of form? What then is this “thing”—this noun? What is this conception?— for a thing is certainly a concept, a grouping distinct from a mere “something,” which is sensed, perceived, and understood as matter with a certain quality and movement, but not yet thought as any definite thing. Form then must be the tracing of a concept, for, as the Master clearly says, form is the stillness of a movement. By this, we may, for our purposes here, interpret this sagacious pith to mean that the movement of a quality traces a path in matter, and this path, this outline, is the emergence of the conception that gives us the thing. In perhaps an analogous way, one may refer to Boehme’s Mind as the movement (something similar is inferred in a certain zen koan about two monks arguing over a flag) that is thus the Chariot of the Soul, which is the original quality, that links one directly to the Invisible Spirit, and through which the Imagination can direct one to the pure and holy Thoughts of this Originating Spirit. The path (the movement-stillness of the Imagination) of the Soul (quality) in its Chariot (movement) traces out these Thoughts (these concepts) in the siderial realm (in matter, or what Boehme erroneously [though forgivably] refers to as that sophistical contrivance dubbed “substance” [see Schopenhauer’s critique of the Kantian philosophy]). This path, the moving-still of the Imagination, is what we call form. The Imagination is the instigator of form which, when applied in Love, converts matter into the fluid and mercurial similtude of the Originating Spirit, but, when utilized with Arrogance, never leads back further than to the Harshness and Bitterness of the First (Automatic) Principle. This Arrogance leads one to confound the Fire of Wrath with the Divine Light of Love and turns one over to the legions of the Dark and Fallen Prince. In more sober (albeit much less enlightening) terms, Love is the condition in which the Imagination has the greatest flexibility in marking out its conceptions— in attributing form to matter. In Arrogance, one mistakes the hard and bitter stones of one’s Imagination, one’s sedimented conceptions, for the true, fluid, and floral proliferation (Multiplication) of the Divine Essence; in Arrogance, it is almost as though one has no Imagination, or rather that one has the vanity to deny one’s self the faculty of Imagination, and instead erect one’s self as a jealous deity, who allows no other conceptions to take the place of what one refuses to identify as one’s own. This Luciferian principle presumes too much of the Fire, which is essential only to break conceptions, to loosen the strict forms of things, to incite form (the moving-stillness of the Imagination) to continue in its mercurial delineation of the true Heaven, the Divine Paradise of Love and Light. Without the conversion of Fire into Water, the Fire remains fixed in a Bitter and Ever-Turning Wheel of Wrath, brutalizing and poisoning the aching Mother, who hath done us no harm and wishes us well.
so that’s something like form.

Adamant: unyielding; a very hard substance Adroit: clever, resourceful Amatory: sexual Animistic: quality of recurrence or reversion to earlier form Antic: clownish, frolicsome Arcadian: serene Baleful: deadly, foreboding Bellicose: quarrelsome (its synonym belligerent can also be a noun) Bilious: unpleasant, peevish Boorish: crude, insensitive Calamitous: disastrous Caustic: corrosive, sarcastic; a corrosive substance Cerulean: sky blue Comely: attractive Concomitant: accompanying Contumacious: rebellious Corpulent: obese Crapulous: immoderate in appetite Defamatory: maliciously misrepresenting Didactic: conveying information or moral instruction Dilatory: causing delay, tardy Dowdy: shabby, old-fashioned; an unkempt woman Efficacious: producing a desired effect Effulgent: brilliantly radiant Egregious: conspicuous, flagrant Endemic: prevalent, native, peculiar to an area Equanimous: even, balanced Execrable: wretched, detestable Fastidious: meticulous, overly delicate Feckless: weak, irresponsible Fecund: prolific, inventive Friable: brittle Fulsome: abundant, overdone, effusive Garrulous: wordy, talkative Guileless: naive Gustatory: having to do with taste or eating Heuristic: learning through trial-and-error or problem solving Histrionic: affected, theatrical Hubristic: proud, excessively self-confident Incendiary: inflammatory, spontaneously combustible, hot Insidious: subtle, seductive, treacherous Insolent: impudent, contemptuous Intransigent: uncompromising Inveterate: habitual, persistent Invidious: resentful, envious, obnoxious Irksome: annoying Jejune: dull, puerile Jocular: jesting, playful Judicious: discreet Lachrymose: tearful Limpid: simple, transparent, serene Loquacious: talkative Luminous: clear, shining Mannered: artificial, stilted Mendacious: deceptive Meretricious: whorish, superficially appealing, pretentious Minatory: menacing Mordant: biting, incisive, pungent Munificent: lavish, generous Nefarious: wicked Noxious: harmful, corrupting Obtuse: blunt, stupid Parsimonious: frugal, restrained Pendulous: suspended, indecisive Pernicious: injurious, deadly Pervasive: widespread Petulant: rude, ill humored Platitudinous: resembling or full of dull or banal comments Precipitate: steep, speedy Propitious: auspicious, advantageous, benevolent Puckish: impish Querulous: cranky, whining Quiescent: inactive, untroublesome Rebarbative: irritating, repellent Recalcitrant: resistant, obstinate Redolent: aromatic, evocative Rhadamanthine: harshly strict Risible: laughable Ruminative: contemplative Sagacious: wise, discerning Salubrious: healthful Sartorial: relating to attire, especially tailored fashions Sclerotic: hardening Serpentine: snake-like, winding, tempting or wily Spasmodic: having to do with or resembling a spasm, excitable, intermittent Strident: harsh, discordant; obtrusively loud Taciturn: closemouthed, reticent Tenacious: persistent, cohesive, Tremulous: nervous, trembling, timid, sensitive Trenchant: sharp, penetrating, distinct Turbulent: restless, tempestuous Turgid: swollen, pompous Ubiquitous: pervasive, widespread Uxorious: inordinately affectionate or compliant with a wife Verdant: green, unripe Voluble: glib, given to speaking Voracious: ravenous, insatiable Wheedling: flattering Withering: devastating Zealous: eager, devoted

I wrote a suggestion on how to create a Space Marine OC (the whole thread is a good reading for aspiring fan authors so I'll link it), and it got me thinking about writing within the 40K setting. Back in the day when Black Library still had their own forum, I saved Matt Farrer's annotation of the Turkey City Lexicon (the original, pre-internet version of TV Tropes). I searched the subreddit for it earlier with no results, so I'll share it again here.
—
Please note: The Turkey City Lexicon is specifically, explicitly non-copyright and is encouraged to be shared/reposted/expanded. Posting it here in its entirety violates no copyright legislation in any country - in fact, Matt Farrer himself asked us to share it with our fellow writers. Hat off to you, Mr Farrer, for your contributions to the 40K lore from a longtime fan.
—
[Originally posted to Black Library Online, November 2004, by user Matt Farrer]
The Turkey City Lexicon (Annotated with some Games Workshop observations)
The Turkey City Lexicon is a terminology guide that’s been floating around in one form or another since the late eighties (Google will turn up plenty of hits if you want to see one of the original copies; I got this one from the SFWA website). The Lexicon is deliberately not copyrighted and is intended to be copied at will and passed on to other writers (note that you shouldn’t try this with anything else on the SFWA site, if you go there – there are some great articles but most of them are copyrighted).
There’s a tendency for people to look at the Lexicon as a list of “common mistakes” or “things not to do”, which is not entirely correct as I understand its purpose. Certainly seeing a common problem set down pithily can help crystallise that particular example of bad technique, but a couple of the terms in here are complimentary and many others aren’t necessarily fatal problems. As in “you might want to watch out for funny-hat characterisation on page four, although with the narrative voice you use it works well”. What it is meant to be is a useful resource for critiquers, giving you a quick and easy shorthand for a known quantity you’ve observed in writing. In the above example, you don’t need to spend half a paragraph describing a shaky spot in the characterisation, you have a quick term to cover it and save space and time for both of you.
The early, simple version of the lexicon by Lewis Shiner was expanded and added to by Bruce Sterling, not, in my opinion, always for the better. There are no real differences in actual content between the two, so for this version I’ve picked whichever version of an entry I thought was better phrased. The GW-specific notes are my own – I’ll add more as I think of them, if I have the time. Discussion of any or all of the entries is of course welcome - it's what I'm posting this for.
Anyway, let’s get on with it.
The meta-rule:
Cherryh's Law
No rule should be followed over a cliff. (C.J. Cherryh)
MF - There are times when the literary or dramatic effect of breaking any supposed "rule" about writing is going to be worth it, and that includes any and all of the points about writing offered in the Lexicon. Such principles are based on experience that shows that certain approaches work better than others, but getting carried away with imposing a set of rules as though they were holy writ simply turns into an attempt to stamp out creativity and have every writer write exactly alike. Know the principles, understand why they work as they do, but don't wear them like shackles.
Part One: Words and Sentences
Brenda Starr dialogue
Long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters. Such dialogue, detached from the story's setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if suspended in mid-air. Named for the American comic-strip in which dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan skyline.
"Burly Detective" Syndrome
This useful term is taken from SF's cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne's proper name, preferring euphemisms like "the burly detective" or "the red-headed sleuth." This comes from a wrong-headed conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible words, such as "vertiginous." Better to re-use a simple tag or phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.
Brand Name Fever
Use of brand name alone, without accompanying visual detail, to create false verisimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBM's and still have no idea with it looks like.
"Call a Rabbit a Smeerp"
A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. "Smeerps" are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)
Gingerbread
Useless ornament in prose, such as fancy sesquipedalian Latinate words where short clear English ones will do. Novice authors sometimes use "gingerbread" in the hope of disguising faults and conveying an air of refinement. (Attr. Damon Knight)
Not Simultaneous
The mis-use of the present participle is a common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. "Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau." Alas, our hero couldn't do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into "Ing Disease," the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in "-ing," a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)
Pushbutton Words
Bogus lyricism like "star," "dance," "dream," "song," "tears" and "poet". Used to evoke a cheap emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties, getting us misty-eyed and tender-hearted without us quite knowing why. Most often found in titles.
Roget's Disease
The ludicrous overuse of far-fetched adjectives, piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous, leprous, synonymic heap. (Attr. John W. Campbell)
"Said" Bookism
An artificial verb used to avoid the word "said." "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the English language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," "he ejaculated," and other oddities. The term "said-book" comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the word "said," which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in American magazines of the pre-WWII era.
Tom Swifty
An unseemly compulsion to follow the word "said" with a colourful adverb: "'We'd better hurry,' Tom said swiftly." This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without a clutter of adverbial props.
Part Two: Paragraphs and Prose Structure
Bathos
A sudden, alarming change in the level of diction. "There will be bloody riots and savage insurrections leading to a violent popular uprising unless the regime starts being lots nicer about stuff."
Countersinking
Expositional redundancy. "'Let's get out of here,' he said, urging her to leave."
Dischism
The unwitting intrusion of the author's physical surroundings or mental state into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision -- when this is actually the author's condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. "Dischism" is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)
False Humanity
An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or contribute to the point of the story. The actions of such characters convey an itchy sense of irrelevance, for the author has invented their problems out of whole cloth, so as to have something to emote about.
False Interiorisation
A cheap labour-saving technique in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, afflicts the viewpoint-character with a blindfold, an attack of space-sickness, the urge to play marathon whist-games in the smoking-room, etc.
Fuzz
An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun."
Hand Waving
An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw. (Attr. Stewart Brand)
Laughtrack
Characters grandstand and tug the reader's sleeve in an effort to force a specific emotional reaction. They laugh wildly at their own jokes, cry loudly at their own pain, and rob the reader of any real chance of attaining genuine emotion.
Show, Don’t Tell
A cardinal principle of effective writing. The reader should be allowed to react naturally to the evidence presented in the story, not instructed in how to react by the author. Specific incidents and carefully observed details will render auctorial lectures unnecessary. For instance, instead of telling the reader "She had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood," a specific incident -- involving, say, a locked closet and two jars of honey -- should be shown.
Rigid adherence to show-don't-tell can become absurd. Minor matters are sometimes best gotten out of the way in a swift, straightforward fashion.
Signal from Fred
A comic form of the "Dischism" in which the author's subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: "This doesn't make sense." "This is really boring." "This sounds like a bad movie." (Attr. Damon Knight)
Squid in the Mouth
The failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author's remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth.
Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in fact make this a stock in trade, "squid in the mouth" doubles as a term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible, divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer. (Attr. James P Blaylock)
Squid on the Mantelpiece
Chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they should be fired in the third. In other words, a plot element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis. However, in SF plotting the MacGuffins are often so overwhelming that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse. It's hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad's bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city. This mismatch between the conventional dramatic proprieties and SF's extreme, grotesque, or visionary thematics is known as the "squid on the mantelpiece."
MF – I’ve heard several versions of the supposed “Chekhov’s Gun” principle, no two of them meaning exactly the same thing. For example, the version I first heard is “If a character produces a gun, then it should be used to shoot someone, or threaten someone, or go off by accident, or fail to fire when it’s needed, and so on. If it does none of these things, then it is superfluous and should be taken out altogether.” That’s a point about narrative tidiness rather than timely deployment of plot elements.
White Room Syndrome
A clear and common sign of the failure of the author's imagination, most often seen at the beginning of a story, before the setting, background, or characters have gelled. "She awoke in a white room." The 'white room' is a featureless set for which details have yet to be invented -- a failure of invention by the author. The character 'wakes' in order to begin a fresh train of thought -- again, just like the author. This 'white room' opening is generally followed by much earnest pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which can be cut, painlessly.
It remains to be seen whether the "white room" cliche' will fade from use now that most authors confront glowing screens rather than blank white paper.
Wiring Diagram Fiction
A genre ailment related to "False Humanity," "Wiring Diagram Fiction" involves "characters" who show no convincing emotional reactions at all, since they are overwhelmed by the author's fascination with gadgetry or didactic lectures.
MF – A trap hard SF often falls into, in my experience. I suppose the related ailment in GW fiction would be “fluff-diagram fiction” (sorry Gav), in which the story is sidelined by the author’s desire to lay out in detail some aspect of his take on the game-universe.
You Can't Fire Me, I Quit
An attempt to diffuse the reader's incredulity with a pre-emptive strike -- as if by anticipating the reader's objections, the author had somehow answered them. "I would never have believed it, if I hadn't seen it myself!" "It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life!" "It's a one-in-a-million chance, but it's so crazy it just might work!" Surprisingly common, especially in SF. (Attr. John Kessel)
Part Three: Common Workshop Story Types
Adam and Eve Story
Nauseatingly common subset of the "Shaggy God Story" in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!
MF – Not an issue for GW writing for obvious reasons. See Alfred Bester’s “Adam With No Eve” in the brilliant anthology Starburst for a rather good twist on the idea.
The Cosy Catastrophe
Story in which horrific events are overwhelming the entirety of human civilization, but the action concentrates on a small group of tidy, middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon protagonists. The essence of the cosy catastrophe is despite the supposed devastation the hero actually has a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, fancy cars for the taking) while everyone is dying off. (Attr. Brian Aldiss)
Dennis Hopper Syndrome
A story based on some arcane bit of science or folklore, which noodles around producing random weirdness. Then a loony character-actor (usually best played by Dennis Hopper) barges into the story and baldly tells the protagonist what's going on by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)
MF - Not unrelated to Roger Ebert's remarks about the Talking Killer device, aka "Before I kill you, Mister Bond..." The killer gets the protagonist at his mercy and then decides to put off killing him so that he can fill the hero in on exactly what's been going on, and bring the reader up to speed at the same time. You know, like I did at the end of Crossfire. Although this is a plot device rather than an actual story type.
Deus ex Machina or "God in the Box"
Story featuring a miraculous solution to the story's conflict, which comes out of nowhere and renders the struggles of the characters irrelevant. Oh look, the Martians all caught cold and died.
The Grubby Apartment Story
Writing a little too much about what you know. The penniless writer living in a grubby apartment writes a story about a penniless writer living in a grubby apartment. Stars all his friends.
The Jar of Tang
"For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!" "For you see, I am a dog!" Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire pointless story contrived so the author can jump out at the end and cry "Fooled you!" For instance, the story takes place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.
This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. "What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?" is an example of the former; "What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to set up their own society?" is an example of the latter. Good SF requires ideas, not conceits. (Attr. Stephen P. Brown)
When done with serious intent rather than as a passing conceit, this type of story can be dignified by the term "Concealed Environment." (Attr. Christopher Priest)
Just-Like Fallacy
SF story which thinly adapts the trappings of a standard pulp adventure setting. The spaceship is "just like" an Atlantic steamer, down to the Scottish engineer in the hold. A colony planet is "just like" Arizona except for two moons in the sky. "Space Westerns" and futuristic hard-boiled detective stories have been especially common versions.
MF – Then again, one of the fun things about the GW settings – the 40Kverse more than the Warhammer world, it seems to me – is the way you can rip all kinds of stuff off and stuff it in there to do a 41st-millennium tribute to it. Not necessarily a bad thing, providing you don’t end up in Bat Durston territory (more about him another time).
[From another post:] In case you are not familiar with the term, a Bat Durston refers derogatorily to a science fiction story which is little more than a traditional western using sf settings and icons. Taking the comparison to alternate history, the better stories in this genre should create the story’s world for some reason other than merely creating a nice setting for an adventure.
The Kitchen-Sink Story
A story overwhelmed by the inclusion of any and every new idea that occurs to the author in the process of writing it. (Attr. Damon Knight)
The Motherhood Statement
SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately "burn the motherhood statement." (Attr. Greg Egan)
MF - He wasn’t kidding, either. Greg Egan writes some of the most powerful and disturbing hard SF I’ve read, precisely because he’s not afraid to back away from the full implications of the science and technology he writes about.
I think that 40K writing is vulnerable to this to a certain degree: I’ve seen quite a few stories that dip a toe into the grim, violent, insane world of the 41st Millennium, stay there for a moment but quickly falls back into “but the Imperium is actually an OK place and lots of people there are nice and happy just like us”.
Discussion on this welcome.
The "Poor Me" Story
Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can't get laid. (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)
Re-Inventing the Wheel
A novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a situation already tiresomely familiar to the experienced reader. Reinventing the Wheel was traditionally typical of mainstream writers venturing into SF without actually reading any of the existing stuff first (because it's all obviously crap anyway). Thus you get endless explanations of, say, how an atomic war might get started by accident, and so on. It is now often seen in writers who lack experience in genre history because they were attracted to written SF via movies, television, role-playing games, comics or computer gaming.
MF – Not that coming into the genre that way is a bad thing per se, but when a writer hasn’t had much exposure to written specfic in this way it usually shows, and not in a good way. To quote Terry Pratchett, you should be importing, not recycling.
The Rembrandt Comic Book
A story in which incredible craftsmanship has been lavished on a theme or idea which is basically trivial or subliterary, and which simply cannot bear the weight.
The Shaggy God Story
A piece which mechanically adopts a Biblical or other mythological tale and provides flat science-fictional "explanations" for the theological events. (Attr. Michael Moorcock)
MF – Although he wrote them himself: arguably his finest and most powerful story, called “Behold The Man”, does this for the life of Jesus. I remember it disturbed me when I read it, and I’m not even religious.
The Slipstream Story
Non-SF story which is so ontologically distorted or related in such a bizarrely non-realist fashion that it cannot pass muster as commercial mainstream fiction and therefore seeks shelter in the SF or fantasy genre. Postmodern critique and technique are particularly fruitful in creating slipstream stories.
The Steam-Grommet Factory
Didactic SF story which consists entirely of a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick. A common technique of SF utopias and dystopias. (Attr. Gardner Dozois)
MF – See the opening of Huxley’s Brave New World for an example of this done effectively.
The Tabloid Weird
Story produced by a confusion of SF and Fantasy tropes -- or rather, by a confusion of basic world-views. Tabloid Weird is usually produced by the author's own inability to distinguish between a rational, Newtonian-Einsteinian, cause-and- effect universe and an irrational, supernatural, fantastic universe. Either the FBI is hunting the escaped mutant from the genetics lab, or the drill-bit has bored straight into Hell -- but not both at once in the very same piece of fiction. Even fantasy worlds need an internal consistency of sorts, so that a Sasquatch Deal-with-the-Devil story is also "Tabloid Weird." Sasquatch crypto-zoology and Christian folk superstition simply don't mix well, even for comic effect. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)
MF – I’m not as convinced as the Lexicon that these two genres are utterly incompatible. Well, obviously not, since I work in a setting which combines them without hesitation. Which isn’t to say that the combination doesn’t need to be handled delicately, since those aforementioned different mindsets lead to different storytelling conventions as well as different world views.
The Whistling Dog
A story related in such an elaborate, arcane, or convoluted manner that it impresses by its sheer narrative ingenuity, but which, as a story, is basically not worth the candle. Like the whistling dog, it's astonishing that the thing can whistle -- but it doesn't actually whistle very well. (Attr. Harlan Ellison)
Part Four: Plots
Abbess Phone Home
Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.
And plot
Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular.
Bogus Alternatives
List of actions a character could have taken, but didn't. Frequently includes all the reasons why, as the author stops the action dead to work out complicated plot problems at the reader's expense. "If I'd gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn't want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then..." etc. Best dispensed with entirely.
Card Tricks in the Dark
Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punchline of a private joke nobody else will get, or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia only the author is interested in. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose. (Attr. Tim Powers)
Idiot Plot
A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author's convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)
Kudzu plot
Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path.
Plot Coupons
The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy plot. The "hero" collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that "the author" can be substituted for "the Gods" in such a work: "The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest." Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance. (Dave Langford)
MF - Nick Lowe expands on the idea in an excellent article at www.ansible.co.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html . Cheers to Bill King for the link.
Second-order Idiot Plot
A plot involving an entire invented SF society which functions only because every single person in it is necessarily an idiot. (Attr. Damon Knight)
MF – The assertion that this applies to the 40K Imperium is not a new one. Floor’s open…
Part Five: Background
"As You Know Bob"
A pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is also known as "Rod and Don dialogue" (attr. Damon Knight) or "maid and butler dialogue" (attr Algis Budrys).
The Edges of Ideas
The solution to the "Info-Dump" problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, for example, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the centre of the idea) are not important. What matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don't need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people's lives have been affected by their background.
Eyeball Kick
That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a "crammed prose" full of "eyeball kicks." (Rudy Rucker)
MF - See the other thread.
Frontloading
Piling too much exposition into the beginning of the story, so that it becomes so dense and dry that it is almost impossible to read. (Attr. Connie Willis)
Infodump
Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. Info-dumps can be covert, as in fake newspaper or "Encyclopedia Galactica" articles, or overt, in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures. Info-dumps are also known as "expository lumps." The use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as "kuttnering," after Henry Kuttner. When information is worked unobtrusively into the story's basic structure, this is known as "heinleining."
"I've suffered for my Art" (and now it's your turn)
A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.
Nowhere Nowhen Story
Putting too little exposition into the story's beginning, so that the story, while physically readable, seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly interest. (Attr. L. Sprague de Camp)
Ontological riff
Passage in an SF story which suggests that our deepest and most basic convictions about the nature of reality, space-time, or consciousness have been violated, technologically transformed, or at least rendered thoroughly dubious. The works of H. P. Lovecraft, Barrington Bayley, and Philip K Dick abound in "ontological riffs."
Space Western
The most pernicious suite of "Used Furniture". The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy.
Stapledon
Name assigned to the voice which takes centre stage to lecture. Actually a common noun, as: "You have a Stapledon come on to answer this problem instead of showing the characters resolve it."
Used Furniture
Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.
Part Six: Character and Viewpoint
Funny-hat characterization
A character distinguished by a single identifying tag, such as odd headgear, a limp, a lisp, a parrot on his shoulder, etc.
MF – This can work if done deftly and with minor characters. Stephen King excels at it, and Ed McBain is pretty good too.
Mary Sue
A ridiculously perfect and idealised character, moving through a story which serves no other purpose than demonstrating how ridiculously perfect and idealised Mary Sue is. None of the other characters have anything to do other than rave about Mary Sue's wonderfulness; challenges and obstacles exist only for Mary Sue to solve effortlessly to admiring gasps from everyone else.
Also known as "avatars" or "self-insertion", since the most common Mary Sues are thinly-disguised versions of the author and are more about wish-fulfiment fantasies than conventional storytelling. Endemic to fanfic; the term apparently originates from an early and infamous example in an old Star Trek fanzine.
MF - There are lots of definitions and examples of Mary Sue, although the term as it's used here isn't really attributable to one author any more. The definition supplied here owes much to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's rather good one at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004188.html .
GW fanfics and homebrew backgrounds aren't immune either - you can find them pretty easily once you know the signs. The twist is that the Mary Sue is often a Guard regiment, Space Marine Chapter, Eldar Craftworld or an entire galactic state.
Common warning signs: "The Mary Sue Regiment fought so ferociously in the Battle of Sueville that even the [famous Space Marine Chapter] were awe-struck that unaugmented humans could fight so hard, and their Chapter Master officially declared the Mary Sue regiment the equals of Space Marines". "Inquisitor Mary Sue has demonstrated such amazing ability that the High Lords have personally ordered that nobody is allowed to stand in her way or question her actions". "Now that it has declared independence from the Imperium the Mary Sue Republic has become a haven of enlightenment and progress, where technology is being developed at an exponential rate with no aura of superstitious mysticism, painless and fully-effective techniques to protect psykers from daemonic attack have been developed, alien races of all kinds are putting aside their differences and living contentedly side by side, and where every Imperial who sees what's going on immediately defects once they see how wonderful and free life among the Mary Sues is".
I've since found out that even the original "Ensign Mary Sue" in that old seventies fanfic was a satire on the trope, so clearly it was already a fiction cliche by then.
Mrs. Brown
The small, downtrodden, eminently common, everyday little person who nevertheless encapsulates something vital and important about the human condition. "Mrs. Brown" is a rare personage in the SF genre, being generally overshadowed by swaggering submyth types made of the finest gold-plated cardboard. In a famous essay, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," Ursula K. Le Guin decried Mrs. Brown's absence from the SF field. (Attr: Virginia Woolf)
...stamped on their forehead
The story lets a character get away with something illogical or impossible because they have "hero" (or "villain", "sidekick", disposable underling", or whatever) stamped on their foreheads. There's nothing wrong with heroes triumphing against the odds or villains being brought low through their own flaws, but those consequences need to come about because of the characters and their actions rather than despite them.
Adapted from Aaron Allston's roleplayers' glossary from a few years ago, which included "He's got 'PC' [player character] stamped on his forehead" as an all-purpose excuse for why characters unquestioningly accepted or trusted one anothers' actions while treating non-player characters differently. (Aaron Allston.)
MF - This was partly prompted by the "script immunity" and "Hollywood Shield" ideas in the discussion thread, although the scene I had in mind for it was actually in Walking Tall, where the main character is manifestly guilty of all manner of assaults and property destruction but is acquitted in court when he makes a sentimental speech about down-home values. It doesn't even resemble making a legal case for his innocence, but he gets let off because he's got "hero" stamped on his forehead.
Submyth
Classic character-types in SF which aspire to the condition of archetype but don't quite make it, such as the mad scientist, the crazed supercomputer, the emotionless super-rational alien, the vindictive mutant child, etc. (Attr. Ursula K. Le Guin)
MF – You can pick the GWverse submyths for yourselves, I’m sure.
Viewpoint glitch
The author loses track of point-of-view, switches point-of-view for no good reason, or relates something that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.
Part Seven: Miscellaneous
AM/FM
Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fething Magic."
MF – Except the original Lexicon didn’t say “fething”. :grinning_emoticon: Well worth remembering for 40K and Necromunda fiction, which deliberately shies away from the sleek, clean, super-reliable dream-tech of settings like Star Trek.
Consensus Reality
Useful term for the purported world in which the majority of modern sane people generally agree that they live -- as opposed to the worlds of, say, Forteans, semioticians or quantum physicists.
Intellectual sexiness
The intoxicating glamor of a novel scientific idea, as distinguished from any actual intellectual merit that it may someday prove to possess.
The Ol' Baloney Factory
"Science Fiction" as a publishing and promotional entity in the world of commerce.
—
Additional suggestions from other forum members:
User Chiron: Script Immunity
The tendency of lynchpin characters to be blatantly immune to harm, despite the fact that they consistently place themselves in situations that they cannot reasonably be expected to survive.
User Vortemir: Hollywood Shield / Imperial Stormtrooper Syndrome
Bad Guys will never be able to hit essential characters no matter what they're armed with or how hard they try.
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[Originally posted to Black Library Online, October 2004, by user Matt Farrer]
A term from the Turkey City Lexicon that might be useful here is the "eyeball kick", Rudy Rucker's term for that perfectly-turned descriptive phrase that creates an instant, telling visual image for the reader. An example that springs to mind from the opening of Necropolis:

After a minute or so, raid-sirens in the central district also began keening. The pattern was picked up by manufactory hooters and mill whistles all through the lower hive, and in the mill whistles and outer habs across the river too. Even the great ceremonial horns on the top of the Ecclesiarchy Basilica started to sound.Vervunhive was screaming with every one of its voices.

That last line provides the eyeball kick.
Some other examples that spring to mind: "[he] screamed out two mouthfuls of silent spun glass" (Stephen King); "the sky above Chiba City was the colour of a television tuned to a blank band" (William Gibson); "a great moist loaf of a body... features as bunched as kissed fingertips" (E. Annie Proulx); "[after walking through snow] my feet, in wet socks, slowly turned to marble and fell off" (Donald Westlake).
I don't know if there's a way you can break down an eyeball kick to pick apart the technique, since its whole impact comes from lateral thinking and the effect of an incongruous image that nevertheless fits exactly with what you're describing. It's an imagination thing rather than a technique thing. However, the paragraph from Necropolis that I used above is also a very good example of how to maximise the effect of a good piece of description, and worth having a closer look at.
Firstly, the rest of the paragraph has been describing the machinery that makes the sound, and doing so in fairly neutral, inorganic terms: "keening", at the start of the para, is about as close as we get to an emotive word. The rest is a pretty calm description about how a series of klaxons and horns are going off. That increases the wrench when we suddenly switch gears into words that you'd use to describe a living being in agony: "screaming with every one of its voices", which gives weight to the sense of foreboding that dominates the early pages. This is reinforced further by the way that the previous sentences tend to be longer, with more connecting commas and lots of adjectives to slow their rhythm and give a more discursive feel, while the last sentence is a simple, flat declarative. Using the rhythm of words and sentences for a setup and payoff like that is a very good way of driving home a piece of exposition or description, and it's something that Dan uses quite a bit.
Secondly, look at the way that the passage, which at first blush is about the sounds of the sirens, actually helps build a visual image as well. We've been going through all the various parts and districts of Vervunhive, watching as different kinds of buildings in different areas go off. Look at how the mental "camera" moves down the lower hive, then down the river, then up to the top of the Basilica. Then in the last sentence we get an eyeball kick that describes the whole of Vervunhive as a single entity: the effect is like pulling back sharply from an individual scene or building and seeing the whole Hive at once. And that concludes the main piece of visual scene-setting at the opening: notice that in the next line Dan can start in on conversations between individual characters around the Hive because the major scene has been laid out.
The broad point to take away from this is that each piece of text should work on as many levels as possible, and even a short passage like that one can be far more than the sum of its parts. I suspect that the reason a lot of bad fiction (including, I am sorry to say, a lot of fanfic I've seen) seems so flat and plodding is that each sentence is put down to do one thing: make a statement, provide a description or what have you. But there's no depth to the prose, no interaction between them to create any rhythm, or momentum, or startling switch in imagery. It's like a song from your favourite band, with each element (vocals, percussion, each instrument) separated and played end to end. It sounds so much better when they're all working together.
—
That's it. Got any suggestions for new 40K-specific tropes to add?

The Constitution of the American people and the United States

Capitalism: is - an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
Capital: wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing.
Socialism, n. 1. A political and economic theory of social organization based on collective governmental ownership and democratic management of the essential means for the production and distribution of goods;--we the people are a collective. We meet in congress. We vote. We have free speech and the right to ideology (belief), and the right to petition and to protest. We are a collective. A society. E pluribus unum.
Economic polices or theories are not promoted by the Constitution. Neither capitalism nor socialism are enforced by the constitution. The constitution is not a capitalist charter. It is a “social contract!”
The letter and spirit of the constitution supports “socialism”. It begins “we the people”—not we the corporations or we the property owners or we the aristocracy or we the capitalists or we the entrepreneurs or we the special interests or we individuals or we whites or only we individuals with exploitative capitalist interests. The preamble—in other words the axiom of the Constitution—for which all else depends on—the purpose and aim, insures “the general welfare” and “tranquility” for our “prosperity”. It does not exclude “socialism” or “socialists”—which is merely an idea and an idea that is harmonious with the founders.
Article 1, Section 8 delineates the powers of Congress, empowering Congress to make all laws necessary and proper to establish post roads and post offices, promote science and arts (e.g., tech, crafts, trades, public speaking, civics, state craft, education), to regulate banking and commerce, to establish, regulate and arm militias (cooperative by nature), to coin money and regulate currency.
It does not empower private enterprises to coin money or regulate currency. It does not prohibit credit union or public banks—in fact, it infers banks ought to be public, not private. It does not exclude regulation of extraction and production. In fact, commerce includes extraction and production.
The electoral process includes the people. It does not empower corporations or corporate person-hood nor does it exclude underprivileged or less fortunate. In fact, the nation stands to empower and protect the less fortunate—to establish equality and justice for all; the constitution exists to empower the people. (half a million peopel died to amend the constitution, to abolish slavery, a form of capitalism. They died for equality, for the less fortunate, to amend the constitution, to bring the constitution in line with its spirit). Socialism is democracy. Democracy is socialism. The framers used the word democracy in debates. One of the original political parties derives from the word democracy. The Ninth Amendment insures that all rights and privileges not specifically listed in the constitution are retained by the people. The 10 amendment grants the same to the states—meaning direct democracy or “socialism” is a right retained by states and we the people. What is socialism? One must define what “socialism” is not. It is not authoritarianism. It is not totalitarianism. It is not “statism”—whatever that means. It concerns community, comity, and cooperation. A house divided cannot stand! What is the constitution?— social contract among we the people to establish community, comity, cooperation, equality, the general welfare, tranquility, peace, justice, democracy, taxes (public cooperation for public works). Do all “socialists” adhere to the same ideologies? Do capitalists? Why is that we allow nuances in capitalism, but not “socialism”? Apparently, capitalists can have differences of opinions, socialist cannot. Define capitalism. It literally means to exploit people for profit—that includes information, democracy and free speech. It is synonymous with slavery and antithetical to the letter and spirit of the constitution. Slavery was abolished.
Furthermore, “property” is not defined in the constitution. (albeit, the takings clause of the fifth amendment says: ‘private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation (unless by due process of law)” —this is reasonable as no one should be ripped from house and home. Socialists believe everyone is entitled to housing. White collar criminals and corrupt lawmakers can in fact be stripped of land and property by due process of law—if they commit fraud, crimes against humanity or society (including pollution and degradation)—as we did after the civil war with treasonous slave-owning capitalists. Property is not a table, a chair, or an acre of land. It is the bundle of rights which the owner is entitled to employ those objects. Those rights may be held in trust. The constitution does say—”we the people” (a collective noun) have the right to property. Property is and can be held in common in America…in trust. The government owns property. Cooperatives own property. Associations. Properties can be held in trust. America has the biggest national park system in the world—land in trust—owned by the people and for the people. Nothing in the constitution prohibits government—which is empowered to make all laws necessary and property to insure the general welfare—from making laws that protects all property for the people and our prosperity. All Property could be public. Laws could be made that prohibit private ownership of property—in other words, individuals would “buy” property or “lease” it as we lease cars or finance cars from banks (public community credit unions) or land trusts, from the people who own it collectively for our prosperity (a truly socialist idea). So, when we buy it we merely hold it in trust. We cannot pass it down. We lease for a term—say ten years or 20 years or 50 years or even 75—if we live that long. After the term of trust, the property is returned to the market held in trust by the people. This would preserve and protect certain properties, lands, and natural resources. We already need to apply for permits to make any major changes to property. Every community has “permits”. Permits exist to insure public rights and community needs and preferences. —the community, not individuals. This is socialism.
A public library is socialism. The post office is socialism. The police are not private enterprises—they are supported by taxpayers and under the authority of the people. Fire departments, like city snow plows and buses are public municipal organizations paid for by the people—taxpayers. They are not for profit organizations. Interstate highways are public roads paid for and maintained by the taxpayer—we the people! The armed forces are socialist constructions (capitalists are trying to undermine our armed forces establishing for-profit mercenary organizations, turning death and destruction into a commodity —all of them guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity!)
The first amendment empowers we the people to dissent, to protest and to publish ideas—which includes economic ideas—allowing and encouraging the people to progress and evolve and make new laws. Nothing in the constitution demeans those ideas or economic polices which the people might promote and enforce.
In short, socialism is not prohibited by the constitution or American laws and capitalism is not encouraged or protected by the constitution. But the letter and spirit of the constitution is in fact fertile soil for socialist ideas and laws. The capitalist notions and rights were essentially abolished with the 13th amendment. If you believe you have a right to exploit people (which is mistreatment) and inequality, and impoverishing, than you are capitalist. If you believe people only have free speech so far as they have wealth to voice it—you are a capitalist. If you believe people should be allowed to suffer or die, when they get sick, if they dont have money, you are a capitalist. You do not believe in the general welfare. If you believe you as an individual have a right to pass urine or feces in my breakfast cereal (pollution) you are a capitalist. You do not believe int he general welfare. If you believe you have a right to sell weapons of mass destruction and ammunition to unstable countries and people, encouraging death and destruction (and it is for profit)— you are a capitalist. (for if you cared about people or planet or rights or democracy or freedom or defense you would not be getting rich off the pain of others)—is this individualism? the right to kill and enslave and impoverish? Civil society abhors these things. The constitution is a social contract in pursuit of life, liberty, tranquility, equality, prosperity, welfare and pursuit of happiness, in pursuit of democracy… in order “to form” a “more PERFECT UNION”… Eco-socialism. One cannot be free or healthy if they are shackled by poverty wages. If you are okay with that you are a capitalist, but the US Constitution is NOT yours—it belongs to the people…even those who cannot afford a home because they are being exploited, or weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth—and they have a right not to be exploited and the right to equal justice. Unfortunately, capitalists and fascists have corrupted the constitution and American law and democracy and so they will tell you, the constitution is anti-socialist—but it is they who oppose the spirit of the revolution.
Capitalism is not compatible with democracy. Under capitalism, only capital equals free speech and suffrage. Not people. But Capital is not human, it is not living, it is not a citizen and cannot agree to a social contract. Capital does not have rights. Yet capitalists claim the Constitution is a capitalist regime. We give capital (much of it inherited as the aristocracies of monarchies) supreme power and subvert the constitution. But Organizations, such as corporations or businesses, do not have rights—they are not people. They are permitted privileges and immunities by we the people, the citizens, and we do it with legal terms, not the authority of religion or a king or supreme cabal. Corporations or capitalist entities do not possess inherent natural rights—they are just organizations of individuals conspiring in business to extract wealth from the community and the planet at the expense of the people and the general welfare for personal gain—in contrast to the very idea of a republic or democracy and our constitution.
The State—being we the people—is an organization. Congress is an organization—by we the people, of we the people, and for we the people—not corporations or business or capital or special interests. Therefore, the state—we the people—have every right and all rights to regulate, preserve and protect all wealth and other assets for the people, the collective, the state. This is the constitution—the collective organization of our rights, our laws, our tranquility, our happiness, and our prosperity. The means to this end is debated and solely up tot the collective and requires evolution. The conversation is generational. It is along conversation. It is a process of competing ideas and struggles and awakenings, as is evolution. If a particular economic theory is deemed harmful to society and our values and in violation of democracy and the constitution we the people have every right to abolish it.
Socialism is part of the Constitution... along with Democracy, Republicanism, Libertarianism, populism, elitism, oligarchy, theocracy, racism, egalitarianism, vegetarianism, and many other kinds of isms. Our constitution is compatible with anything you can vote for, which includes all of the above.
What our constitution isn't compatible with is a one-party State (or a mere two-party state, which is considered two wings of the same capitalist party) or any other system that doesn't permit alternative views. So if socialism, fascism, capitalism, corporatism or crony capitalism is enforced as the only system as in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or many kinds of dictatorships, it is incompatible with the constitution. The two party-system, being one capitalist party, is therefore, incompatible with the Constitution and democracy and/or a democratic-republic or any republic—for it demands everyone is the same, everyone conforms, everyone competes, everyone serves the self—and that is no republic. It is not freedom. It is not equality. It is not representative of we the people! It is not tranquility. It does not serve the general welfare. Therefore, our current system and government of one party with two wings is unconstitutional.
Capitalism and fascism are inherently harmful to society, our values, democracy and the constitution. Socialism is not monolithic. But socialism, as defined today and as defined above, is inherently democratic and inherently compatible with the constitution. The penumbra of the Constitution is socialism. The Constitution proclaims that it exists to evolve and make the union more perfect. It seems to see socialism as the ultimate end of the Constitution and American society. Eventually, the centennial conversations will develop herd immunity to capitalism—which is a cancerous growth cannibalizing the body politic.
*Among the Powers of the Earth, an analysis of the constitution and proposals for amendments is imminent . Coming t book store near you.

The following is a response, continuation, and perversion of this poem, delivered to us through the divine intuition of one of God’s Most Perfect Vessels: https://www.reddit.com/nonpoetry/comments/jn63qm/the_problem_of_form_resolved_by_the_maste?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I am forever indebted to the Master’s eternal and ever-flourishing insight.
—
Quality originates as a movement, a springing forth, a constant uncoiling, progressing, manifesting, elaborating, multiplying, dissipating and returning, congealing, bursting, whizzing, blooming, propagating, and only ever approximating something like rest in the manner of idling, which is like a jittering or turning in place— a circle. Everything is moving, but not everything is thought to be moving— rest is a thinkable state, thought only as the negation of movement, which is the original (and true) perceivable state. When movement is perceived purely, untainted and unmixed with the thought of rest, it is perceived as the manifestation of a quality or collection of qualities— often simply as a verb. Without the thought of rest, the movement can only be abstractedly referred to as a “something,” when, in actuality, what we perceive is a “moving.” “Something” whizzed past my window— I didn’t perceive an actual “something,” but only an abstract one— though I did perceive “whizzing.” This “whizzing” is understood as a “something,” but not perceived as one. This is how it seems to me. Only when this “something” is imbued with the thought of rest, or, as the Master correctly postulates, the movement is given in its stillness, can we perceive an actual something, a definable, categorizable one— a thing, or noun. It wasn’t just “some” thing that whizzed past my window, but, now, a bird. The bird is given through form as the vehicle of the something, which is the vehicle of the whizzing, which, itself, is the vehicle of the whizzing quality (the “whizzingly”). Quality, apart from its movement, is never perceived directly or in itself, but must necessarily impart its essence through a vehicle, which is movement. This movement is the essence of matter, which is to what form gives shape. Something in movement is the mediator between form and quality, stillness and moving (or originating). Matter is the “something” that becomes a “thing” in stillness. To be more precise, one first senses the quality— then perceives its movement— understands this movement through its vehicle, matter (“something”)— and lastly conceives the thing. I could have said that “A bird flew past my window”— but I did not. I specifically perceived a “whizzing” (which, to digress slightly, is pertinent and conclusive proof that there are no such things as “synonyms”— the trouble here is in forgetting that words are meant to denote things, and every thing springs forth from a specific quality— but this matter should be treated of more fully elsewhere.) This “whizzing” is both movement (perception) and quality (sensation). It evokes both the movement and the essence of the movement. This is the “whizzing movement” of matter, or a matter, or matters. So then, we have the quality, which is the essence of the movement, which evokes itself through the vehicle of matter; what then of form? What then is this “thing”—this noun? What is this conception?— for a thing is certainly a concept, a grouping distinct from a mere “something,” which is sensed, perceived, and understood as matter with a certain quality and movement, but not yet thought as any definite thing. Form then must be the tracing of a concept, for, as the Master clearly says, form is the stillness of a movement. By this, we may, for our purposes here, interpret this sagacious pith to mean that the movement of a quality traces a path in matter, and this path, this outline, is the emergence of the conception that gives us the thing. In perhaps an analogous way, one may refer to Boehme’s Mind as the movement (something similar is inferred in a certain zen koan about two monks arguing over a flag) that is thus the Chariot of the Soul, which is the original quality, that links one directly to the Invisible Spirit, and through which the Imagination can direct one to the pure and holy Thoughts of this Originating Spirit. The path (the movement-stillness of the Imagination) of the Soul (quality) in its Chariot (movement) traces out these Thoughts (these concepts) in the siderial realm (in matter, or what Boehme erroneously [though forgivably] refers to as that sophistical contrivance dubbed “substance” [see Schopenhauer’s critique of the Kantian philosophy]). This path, the moving-still of the Imagination, is what we call form. The Imagination is the instigator of form which, when applied in Love, converts matter into the fluid and mercurial similtude of the Originating Spirit, but, when utilized with Arrogance, never leads back further than to the Harshness and Bitterness of the First (Automatic) Principle. This Arrogance leads one to confound the Fire of Wrath with the Divine Light of Love and turns one over to the legions of the Dark and Fallen Prince. In more sober (albeit much less enlightening) terms, Love is the condition in which the Imagination has the greatest flexibility in marking out its conceptions— in attributing form to matter. In Arrogance, one mistakes the hard and bitter stones of one’s Imagination, one’s sedimented conceptions, for the true, fluid, and floral proliferation (Multiplication) of the Divine Essence; in Arrogance, it is almost as though one has no Imagination, or rather that one has the vanity to deny one’s self the faculty of Imagination, and instead erect one’s self as a jealous deity, who allows no other conceptions to take the place of what one refuses to identify as one’s own. This Luciferian principle presumes too much of the Fire, which is essential only to break conceptions, to loosen the strict forms of things, to incite form (the moving-stillness of the Imagination) to continue in its mercurial delineation of the true Heaven, the Divine Paradise of Love and Light. Without the conversion of Fire into Water, the Fire remains fixed in a Bitter and Ever-Turning Wheel of Wrath, brutalizing and poisoning the aching Mother, who hath done us no harm and wishes us well.
so that’s something like form.

Here's a short story I wrote recently about an alien visitor to Earth. It started when was thinking one day about what an alien language might be like and what aspects of their culture an alien visitor would be interested in sharing, and then I fleshed it out from there. I first shared this to the "Aliens" sub where one of this sub's members came across it and suggested that it would be a good fit here, so here it is. Hope you enjoy it.
For what was supposed to be the most monumental event in the history of human civilization it was actually pretty anticlimactic. No giant mothership; no shadowy figure emerging from the mist; no tense standoff with guns drawn... Hell, we never even saw him coming.
The morning of 12/12 was really just like any other, other than the fact that there he was, standing outside the White House, just waiting for us to show up. We found out later he'd actually arrived before sunrise and had been waiting out there for exactly two hours and twenty-nine minutes before anyone saw him. Not that he was trying to hide; he was just too polite to even try knocking.
If it had been some kind of crazy giant alien ship, I'm sure he wouldn't have had to wait so long. But right there next to the bushes just a few yards outside the front door to the White House was the most basic landing pod you could possibly imagine. At least we all assumed it was just a landing pod; we didn't find out until later that it was his actual ship, which he'd actually used to travel the entire 32+ light years from his home planet even though it was nothing more than a tube, barely big enough for him to fit in, with no apparent means of propulsion or external features whatsoever. And even later, when he showed us the interior, it was just completely empty; no apparent life support systems, no avionics, no control systems, no instrumentation, nothing.
And I wish I could say it was due to its hyper-advanced stealth technology or some kind of undetectable cloaking device that it was out there for so long before anyone saw it. But even if it did have something like that (and we still don't know if it did), that really wasn't why; as crazy as this sounds, it was just too small, and came in too fast, for any of our systems to even detect it on its way in. And by sheer coincidence, it just so happened to land in a "dead spot" where the security cameras could barely see it. It still should have been spotted right away, sure. But I saw the footage myself and can't say I would have spotted it either.
As for the lack of a "tense standoff" (or any standoff), the fact that he spoke perfect English had a lot to do with that. That plus the fact that he looked just barely humanoid enough that the Secret Service guy who first saw him thought it must have been a guy in a suit.
We later learned that his perfect English was actually due to the translation device attached to his mouth (which appeared to be his mouth); it turns out he knew how to speak and understand English with complete mastery—learned from nothing but the TV and radio transmissions they were able to pick up from halfway across the galaxy—but their species was simply incapable of speaking in any way that a human could actually understand due to the inherent limitations of their vocal systems, and physical inability to reproduce enough of the sounds necessary for human language.
The perfectly understandable assumption from that, of course, would be that they had already evolved far beyond vocal communication (i.e., to telepathy). But no, they still spoke with each other with words, more or less like we do.
He later explained that their vocal limitations were a fairly recent development, at least from an evolutionary standpoint; it was just a few thousand years prior that they had vocal capabilities much like ours, with the capacity to speak countless native languages, some of which were quite similar to English. But at one point they had decided to standardize upon one global language, and it was from then onward that as their language continued to evolve over time, so did their vocal systems. And eventually, through a combination of evolution and bioengineering, their species came to be uniquely and perfectly suited for the reproduction of their one language with near-perfect clarity, though at the expense of all other potential languages.
Oddly enough, their language (and language in general) was one of the things he was most interested in talking about. Not how to speak it per-se, though he did teach us some of that (fortunately the limitation only went one way, and we were able to at least reproduce the basic sounds well enough to say words and phrases that he could understand—just barely). Rather, his primary interest was in sharing some of the features that their language possessed, possibly with the idea that we might someday decide to incorporate some of those elements into our own.
One of the things he spoke about at-length was how their language had gone through several "redesigns" throughout its history, where its vocabulary, pronunciation, and even its most fundamental rules were altered and simplified in order to enhance its efficiency at conveying information as accurately as possible while eliminating virtually any possibility for misunderstanding (or misrepresentation).
From the way he described the process, I can't say we have anything comparable when it comes to written/spoken languages, though I suppose the closest analogy would be the way computer programming languages go through intentional revisions over time, or the way that computer operating systems might be rewritten and revamped dramatically from one version to the next while fixing bugs and improving efficiency.
One of the first things they did, in in the earliest of their "major" revisions, was something which made their language unlike any on Earth: the complete elimination of homonyms (different words that sound the same), homographs (words that are spelled the same but mean different things), and synonyms (different words which share the same meaning).
Think about that for a moment; what they did was essentially recraft their entire language in such a way that every single word was unique in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. And not only did this require the modification (or outright elimination) of most of the words in their entire vocabulary, but it also necessitated the creation of an almost incomprehensible number of entirely new words in order to serve the same functions as those which had been eliminated.
On top of that, a smaller (yet still fairly vast) number of new words was also needed for cases where a surviving word which had multiple definitions was standardized to its primary (now, only) definition, but where no surviving words could accurately convey those eliminated definitions.
And adding even further to this herculean undertaking was the simple linguistic inevitability that to maintain the uniqueness of every single word requires some combination of longer words (both letters and syllables); more letters that can be chosen from; more possible spoken sounds, accents, and intonations; or, in their case, all of the above.
To use an example from English, let's take the words "so", "sew", and "sow". All three are homonyms since they're pronounced identically, but "sow" also has an additional pronunciation which has a different meaning (a female pig, as opposed to the act of planting seeds), while "so" has one pronunciation but two different meanings (either to emphasize the extent of something, or as a conjunction).
Thus:

1. "Sew" would be eliminated and replaced.
   
2. Only one of the two definitions of "so" survives while the other must be replaced.
   
3. The female-pig definition of "sow" can remain while the planting-seeds definition must be replaced.
   

But there's also another, less drastic option for #1: Since the spelling of "sew" is already unique, you could keep its spelling unchanged and simply modify its pronunciation to something unique (e.g. "soo"). And that's exactly what they did, where practical, to keep as many of their original words as possible, or at least as familiar as possible, either with just a slight tweak to the spelling or by appending an extra syllable.
However, in most cases a simple "tweak" was simply not an option, due to an inviolable rule that they established before even the first change was made: None of the changes to any words could violate their universal, standardized rules for spelling and pronunciation (and this rule was retroactive as well, thereby requiring a reworking of all previous words which violated these rules).
This meant that they couldn't simply change the spelling or pronunciation of words arbitrarily, nor could they, in most cases, change one without that directly impacting the other. And by imposing this rule on themselves, they dramatically limited the number of options available for modifying existing words—at least not without adding more syllables.
Thus for all of their linguistic genius, it didn't take long after this first phase was implemented (which, almost inconceivably, they were able to complete within just a few years) that they ran headlong into a fairly serious problem: Their language now required vastly more syllables to be spoken, and vastly more letters to be written, in order to convey the exact same amount of information as before.
But this was something they had fully anticipated, and out of necessity had planned to address in their second major revision which came a few years later, now that the vast majority of the population had become fully fluent with what was essentially an entirely new language.
It was at this point—after putting up with several years of extreme linguistic inefficiency (during which they suffered tremendous losses in global productivity, albeit with the lowest unemployment levels in their recorded history)—that they finally implemented the solution via the Second Revision. To do so, they borrowed a concept which was also straight out of computer languages (including our own): a concept known to us as "single instruction multiple data" (SIMD).
The basic premise of SIMD is that you take a frequently-used combination of computer instructions and replace them with a new one which performs exactly the same tasks; then, any time you need to use that same set of instructions, you simply use the new one which does all of the exact same "work", but in a single step.
In their case, they did the same thing but for words, taking their most frequently-used combinations of words (even in some cases fairly complex concepts) and "grouping" them into a single new word which conveyed all of the meaning and nuance of what would have taken multiple words and far more syllables to convey. And not only did this solve their problem, but once the Second Revision was completed they found that their speaking and writing/reading rates were actually even faster than ever before.
Since then, they've continued to implement even more of these "grouped" words over time (based on real-world frequency of use) and in some cases even created grouped words which contain previously-grouped words. So far, the most densely-grouped of these go three "levels" deep, though there is theoretically no limit to how many "levels" of meaning could potentially be consolidated into a single word.
These First and Second Revisions were clearly the most significant, both in effect and the sheer magnitude of their undertakings, but it was actually the Third Revision which I found most interesting; it was then that they implemented two features which had, to some extent, always been present in their language, but not in the universal and standardized way that it would eventually become.
The first was what could be considered a complete integration of mathematics into their language. Which actually sounds more complicated than it is; essentially they established clear grammatical rules which stated that any time there is a potential range of conceptual values to what someone is attempting to communicate, that value must be quantified—not just with vague words like "few", "many", or "most"—but numerically, with an actual mathematical value, every single time.
And this rule applies even to situations that we probably wouldn't even think of as being mathematical in nature. To use some examples from English, let's say something will "protect" you, or "prevent" you from being harmed; does that mean it offers total protection and prevents harm completely? Or just partially? And if just partial, at what point of the infinite points along the spectrum do you qualify as being "protected" vs unprotected?
Or how about a more common example; if you express that something "doesn't work", does that mean it's completely non-functional and isn't working at all? Or just that it's not functioning at a level of performance that you would consider acceptable?
Situations like these simply do not exist in their language since in every potential instance, the available words that they can choose from have either been firmly established as expressing absolutes, or there would always be an expression of quantification accompanying it to eliminate ambiguity.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that a precise number must always be given, even when a precise number isn't warranted, or simply isn't feasible. Because that's where the second feature comes into play: if the numerical value conveyed is intended to be just a rough estimate, that would also be directly incorporated into their syntax, thereby pairing every numerical quantification with an indication of confidence/precision. So if you want to say, "most", i.e. "more than 50% but less than 100%", you can still do so; or you can just as easily convey "somewhere in the 55-65% range", or "exactly 70%" and do so while using far fewer letters and syllables than it would take in any human language.
And it was soon after they came up with this idea that they also very quickly realized it would be equally useful in non-mathematical contexts, as a general "confidence" indicator in order to express whether something is being stated as absolute fact, as pure opinion/speculation, or anywhere in between.
Once all of these features were implemented (subsequent revisions did occur every few years, but they were far less wide-ranging in scope), their intended effects became very quickly realized; virtually all misunderstandings, miscommunications, and the inevitable conflicts and pseudo-disagreements which inevitably arise from them became a thing of the past. He was very careful not to overstate his point here, and made clear that arguments remained plentiful throughout their society; however, after these changes such arguments only occurred as a result of actual disagreements, not just people "talking past" each other or simply saying the same thing in different ways.
Just think: How many times have you seen two people arguing over a particular idea or concept where they were clearly operating under different definitions, and thus it was entirely possible that they did not even actually disagree on the matter being discussed?
And how many pitiful arguments have you seen which essentially consisted of nothing more than one side saying, "Not all [noun] are [adjective] but some are!", and the other saying, "Some [noun] are [adjective] but not all!"
Too many. And it is exactly those kinds of pseudo-arguments which simply never occur in their society, since their language has essentially been inoculated from the toxic effects of such rhetoric.
And perhaps most importantly, once these first three Revisions were in place, propagandistic bad-faith misrepresentation and rhetorical sleights-of-hand became, if not impossible, far more difficult to attempt and far easier for anyone to see. With every word having one clear-cut meaning, equivocation fallacies became, quite simply, impossible; after all, how can you try to exploit the fact that one word has multiple definitions in order to mislead, when there are no longer any words with multiple definitions to exploit?
Just take a moment to imagine where might our state of scientific progress be today—and whether the 21st century Science Riots would have even occurred—had our language been like theirs? Or just imagine the ripple effects throughout history if just ONE of our words had this feature, i.e. the one which has been exploited through equivocation more than any other, with at-times devastating consequences, i.e. "theory"?
Anyway, enough about that. It was after almost a full month of discussing nothing but their language that we eventually moved onto other topics like their culture, beliefs, and philosophy.
And at this point I know exactly what you're wondering: What was his take on "war"?
I guess you're wondering how I knew that. Well, we actually had some surveys done in those first few days after he arrived (all conducted via third parties, of course) just to get a feel for what kinds of questions the general public might eventually have, and maybe even get some ideas for questions we should ask him that we might otherwise have not considered (which turned out to be hopelessly optimistic; the grand total of useful ideas we got from those surveys: zero).
But one of the common threads that came up over and over—being the first mention in almost 100% of the surveys—was this notion that he (or any hypothetical alien visitor) would find the very concept of "war" to be utterly preposterous, possibly even to the point that he would be completely baffled that such a thing could possibly exist.
Unfortunately that wasn't anything close to the reality, for reasons which should have been fairly obvious. I mean, sure, on his home planet his species no longer practiced anything remotely resembling "war", and hadn't in countless generations. But certainly they had engaged in war throughout much of their recorded history, and had even come close to global self-annihilation on multiple occasions.
But even if that hadn't been the case, he revealed to us that war is something which virtually every single advanced alien civilization they have ever observed or encountered had clearly engaged in on a frequent basis, in the past if not currently, thus making it one of the most universal of all societal concepts.
The only exceptions? He said there were actually a handful of civilizations throughout the galaxy–though these were vanishingly rare–where the entirety of their archaeological and recorded histories had absolutely no record of war. But, he noted, in every one of these cases their histories also had suspicious and clearly unnatural "gaps"–just total voids where it's as if literally nothing happened for years, decades, even centuries. Most likely, they concluded, these histories were either systematically erased in order to hide something in their past, or that everything prior to those points–all history, all archaeological evidence–had been completely annihilated... most likely by war.
Oh, and speaking of those surveys? The second most common response, regarding human behaviors that an alien might be baffled by: laughter. And when we told him about that, and asked if their species has anything like laughter? Well... he laughed (not that we knew that's what it was at the time, we actually thought we had pissed him off).
It turns out that laughter (or the alien equivalent), rather than being some kind of nonsensical, bizarre quirk of human behavior, is also virtually universal among alien civilizations. He explained that its evolutionary value in any kind of social/communal society is so great that they have never observed a single advanced species which doesn't possess it. Essentially, he confirmed that our theories about the purpose of laughter are correct: originally evolving as a means to indicate that an apparent threat actually isn't one (or that an apparently dire situation isn't as serious as it appears to be), then eventually evolving to become a means for establishing rapport, bonding, and trust.
As for something which wasn't universal, but would actually make their culture unique among Earth societies? Well, how should I put this... Are you familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment? It's one of the oldest of all psychological experiments, which in its original form presented each of its participants (all children) with two options: Have one marshmallow now, or wait 15 minutes (while that marshmallow sits within reach), at which point they would be given that marshmallow plus another one. Just a simple test of delayed gratification, to see whether the kids were able and willing to forego immediate reward for the prospect of double the benefit. And as you might expect, about one-third of the kids ate the first marshmallow right away, about one-third tried waiting but eventually ate it, and about one-third waited the full 15 minutes and were rewarded with two.
Which sounds pretty mundane, maybe even fairly ridiculous as far as experiments go. But the interesting part is what came later–far later–as they tracked the progress of these children throughout their childhoods, and in some cases even into adulthood. And what they found was that the last set of kids–the ones who were willing to wait for that second marshmallow–turned out to have significantly better test scores, better grades, better health, and even, as adults, more-successful careers than the other kids, whereas those in the first group fared these worst.
So what does all of this have to do with him, and his culture? Well, imagine a society in which every single person–kids and adults alike–fall into the latter category, but to the greatest theoretical extreme imaginable. So not just a society in which procrastination and short-term thinking no longer exist, but one in which present and future have essentially ceased to have any meaningful distinction, and where every decision made–from the grand to the day-to-day mundane–is based on the pure calculation of total benefit, from now until eternity.
This was a natural progression over the course of their civilization's development as they became more and more forward-thinking over time, but it wasn't until what could be loosely translated as their "Renaissance" that they fully completed this philosophical transformation on a complete societal level over a period of just a few years. And the effects of this transformation became immediately evident, with dramatic improvements in crime reduction, health (particularly addictions, which were virtually eradicated), productivity, education, scientific advancement, and general happiness.
It was then a few decades after that, perhaps as an inevitable consequence, that they went through a Second Renaissance–one which also involved the near-total dissolution of another distinction, this time not between present vs. future but between the well-being of self vs. the well-being of others.
Essentially it was during this time that they came to the society-wide realization that there is ultimately no moral justification to put your own interests above those of anyone else's, particularly since—as he put it—the person you happened to be "born into" was ultimately decided by sheer chance, and you could just as easily been born as anyone else, past or present, living or dead.
Which isn't to say that every member of their society places everyone else's interests on perfectly equal footing with their own; as he explained it, it is simply not possible to know anyone's needs and desires better than you intimately know yours, and thus they still consider society's interests best served by doing your best to fulfill your needs and desires, and to strive for personal improvement to the fullest extent possible. And nor was it the case that this caused them to become some kind of collective "hive mind" where they lost all sense of individuality; if anything, the degree of freedoms and the range of avenues for complete self-expression/realization available to each member in their society went far beyond anything ever observed on Earth.
But the effect of this Second Renaissance was at least equally profound as the first, as all decision-making became pure cost/benefit analyses of what would result in the greatest total benefit, whether to the individual or society at large. And this was achieved through no coercion, and without even any change in laws (in fact, a tremendous number of laws were ultimately eliminated since they no longer served any purpose).
And it wasn't long after this Second Renaissance that they began reaching out to the other civilizations throughout the galaxy that they had previously just observed from afar, and began sending out emissaries in their speed-of-light ships, like the one they sent to visit us.
You know, it's funny... As I'm recording this, I can't help but think about all the time I've spent arguing with crackpots online, ridiculing and debunking the biggest, craziest conspiracy theories: That the Moon Landings were faked. That the Mars Landings were faked. 9/11 was an inside job (or faked). The 2020 Election... But the 12/12 Visitation is the one I never touched. Go back and check out my social media archive and my entire posting history if you don't believe me. And here I am, 32 years later, not debunking a conspiracy, but confirming the biggest one of all.
So why am I doing this? I'm not sure, really. But I think more than anything else, I just feel bad for how much we did him wrong. He was completely up-front with us, right from the beginning: He didn't come here to share anything about their technology—just their culture, beliefs, and way of life. And he was 100% clear that this was for our benefit, not theirs. He even clued us is in to the fact that of all the alien civilizations they had ever monitored, the only ones that had ever suffered total irreversible extinction did so as a result of their own technologies gone awry (or, in a few cases, the technologies of other planets' civilizations, if you know what I mean).
Of all the rest–even those which faced extinction-level events on a scale that our planet has never even seen in its history (gamma ray bursts, direct comet strikes, even in one case a micro-black hole which tore right through the center of their planet)–all of these civilizations managed to survive, and in some cases eventually recover.
As for us specifically, he said our current level of technological progress is already far beyond what they would consider our capability to responsibly handle, and thus anything they could possibly contribute to that technological progress—no matter how seemingly benign such technologies may be—would only serve to further increase that divide and further magnify our chances of complete self-annihilation.
And we were OK with that stipulation at first, or at least we pretended to be. After about six months with him, during which he shared everything he could (or would) for 24 hours a day (one thing I forgot to mention earlier: he had no need for sleep), we eventually exhausted things to ask him about. And yet after all that, we still knew no more about their technology than we did on day one.
Even his ship was a complete non-starter. Had it been anything even remotely similar to our own, I'm sure we could have reverse-engineered it, or at least gleaned something from it that could have put us light years ahead of any other country on the planet. But there was absolutely nothing about it that had even the slightest corollary to what we currently have, or had ever even theoretically conceived of. It was basically the equivalent of taking the most advanced supercomputer on the planet and sending it back in time to the Stone Age. Or to an ant colony.
Maybe someday we'll be able to unlock its secrets, but my guess is we're at least hundreds of years from even having a chance at cracking its most basic functions (at which point, maybe we'll realize it really was just a landing pod).
So of course, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone what we did next. Now, I say "we" loosely, since I certainly had no say in it. Which I'm sure might seem incredibly self-serving at this point, but all I can give you is the truth: The day we got everything we could out of him and he refused to divulge any more secrets, we finally resorted to what we've always resorted to. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Coercive interrogation. Learned helplessness. Torture.
And do I even need to say that this turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of all time? First off, it didn't work; months of almost non-stop torture using every method we could possibly come up with, and we got nothing more out of him. He was completely unfazed, and not because it didn't hurt him; some of the... methods we used sent his biometric readings off the charts. He was clearly experiencing tremendous physical distress, vastly more than I could ever imagine any human being able to handle.
But no matter what we did, he just took it. And if he even cared, he kept it completely internalized. Just completely stoic, from beginning to end. Even his demeanor and attitude towards us never changed; after all of that—45 days of almost non-stop agony—he still wanted to tell us more about their language. And he was still just as polite as that first day waiting patiently outside the White House.
It's always been rather amusing to me... Of all the many believers in the 12/12 Visitation, how many wildly different, even completely contradictory reasons they've come up with for why it would've been kept under wraps all this time.
Either, "It would cause a total collapse of the world's remaining organized religions", or "It would cause unprecedented numbers of people to turn back towards God, and away from The State".
Either, "It would cause mass chaos and a total breakdown of society", or "It would cause everyone to unite behind our common humanity, and thus end all war and conflict which would cause a total collapse of the military-industrial complex".
The truth is, it wasn't originally anyone's plan to keep it under wraps. Some of the details, sure. But we all figured we would make the big announcement eventually. We even commissioned a task force of some of the brightest minds on the planet—under the guise of a purely hypothetical scenario, of course—and they all came to the same general conclusion: Of all the possible reasons for why a government might keep an alien visitor a secret, those fears were pretty much completely overblown.
Realistically, they figured, there would be no mass chaos, no mass peace, no collapse of religion or of society or really anything else just because an alien decided to come visit us. A hundred years ago maybe that would have been a different story. But after everything we've seen in our lifetimes? I think we could have handled it. And all of the experts did too.
But how the hell could we have revealed him to the world after all that? After everything we did to him?
And I still can't help but wonder... What if it was all a test? I mean, clearly, in a figurative sense it certainly was—and one we failed horrifically. But what if it was actually a test?
I just can't get past the question of why they would even bother sending a representative in-the-flesh, instead of just some kind of A.I. or digital representation or even just a recording with all of the information that he shared with us.
Were they just trying to see how we would treat him?
And if we had treated him humanely, and respected his stipulations (as any reasonably-civilized people would have), what then? Would he have opened up to us with their technological secrets? Would he still be sharing them with us today? And more importantly, would we still have—metaphorically speaking—our souls?
Ultimately, I suppose this is all fairly moot anyway, given what's coming next. By our calculations it's just five days away, give or take a day. And all I can hope for at this point is that some of us make it, and that maybe what I'm recording here makes it through. And maybe someday we can recover, countless generations from now, and maybe they'll give us another shot.
But if not, I can't say it wasn't deserved.
https://www.wattpad.com/911423355-the-visitation