Tag Archives: anger

Rumeysa Ozturk must be freed

Posted on by Henry

I was going to write about Frieren, which is a wonderfully chill and cozy anime all about the bittersweet mixture of love, regret, grief, and joy found in coming to terms with the mortality of those who mean so much to us.

Instead, this week I’m going to tell you about ICE disappearing a Tufts student off the street in a neighborhood near me. If you haven’t seen the video, suffice to say it’s both chilling and infuriating. A group of masked figures approach a lone woman, lay hands on her, rob her of her backpack and phone, and herd her away to an unmarked car.

Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. She’s a graduate student at Tufts, here on a student visa. She has been disappeared.

These masked figures briefly claim to be police. A few of them pull out hidden badges. At  no point do any of them identify themselves—nearly all of them remain masked, they do not give their names or their badge numbers, they actively resist taking steps that might allow them to be held accountable for their actions. They show up, grab someone off the street, and then roll away.

This is a fucking disgrace.

I am not surprised by this. These scare tactics seem like the natural outgrowth of the abductions performed in Portland, Oregon, during the summer of 2020 (fine, if you want me to mince words, call them “sudden detentions with unmarked vehicles and personnel”). They’re designed to intimidate, to instill fear, and to prevent anyone from holding the (ostensible) law enforcement agents involved responsible for any action they might take. 

This is antithetical to our American democracy. I’ve been furious about so many other things going on in our country, but this one hits especially close to home (literally). Someone has been pulled from my community and dragged over 2000 miles to Louisiana in what looks like a clear attempt by the authorities involved to avoid the consequences of their actions: if they can just do the thing they know the judge won’t allow fast enough, before the judge can rule on it, then they can (probably) get away with it. If this is not criminal, it should be. 

There is no way to have an open and free society when people are pulled off the streets by masked figures and disappeared into unmarked cars. There is no way to have an open and free society when those we charge with protecting us cannot be held accountable by us. There is no way to have an open and free society when you can abduct someone by wearing a mask, waving a shiny prop badge, and moving fast enough that no one can prove you aren’t a cop.

It doesn’t matter that Rumeysa Ozturk is not an American citizen. If you think our laws and our ideals are only for American citizens when on American soil, you have already lost the ideal of America. If you think that the government should only avoid impinging on free speech when you agree with that speech, you’ve already lost the dream of America. If you think someone writing that they “affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people” while talking about Palestinians, and that they urge their university president to “embrace efforts by students to evaluate ‘diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions’” should cause them to lose their visa and be deported, then you are the narrowest, most selfish and short-sighted fool and you are embracing your own destruction.

All of my other thoughts and words here are fury and disgust and bile. I am angry. You should be angry too.

Act. Let your congress people know your thoughts. And show up.

Anger Magic, Quick Setting Exploration

Posted on by Henry

I hinted at this setting idea over a year ago, but… what would a world where anger is a route to magic look like?

How closely tied are those things? Does someone who is angry automatically have access to magic, or is that something that takes more special effort? Is there something about “only some people” etc?

For my personal interest, I want any anger to potentially lead to magic. And I want the magic that comes from that to often be dangerous & uncontrolled.

But… why then would children not cause lots of deaths? Is there something about coming of age or being older? A sufficient concentration of some environmental toxin / mineral / chemical? If it’s that, why wouldn’t fetuses concentrate the already present material in the womb?

Perhaps it’s gradual tissue damage from exposure to an external source of radiation… like, the sun, or a weird alien moon. Probably thinking about WFRP here, and Morrslieb.

Let’s say that anger becomes a reliable route to magic around puberty. That means that most communities, knowing the danger posed by anger-driven magical effects, would work hard to make sure that anger was avoided like the plague. Children would be taught to not give themselves over to anger, to prevent terrible things from happening as they grew older.

This wouldn’t be healthy. Mostly because I’m not interested in it being a healthy way of mitigating anger, but also because I don’t think pathologically avoiding anger for fear of something awful happening is actually good for anyone. This could even create moments when people—consumed by terror—do terrible things to stop someone who looks like they’re getting angry, like murder in self-defense when you know someone else has a gun… grotesque, understandable, awful, socially accepted.

So if the general population avoids anger and wants nothing to do with anger-magic, where would magic users come from? Where would they come in? Who would bother to train any new generations of magic users?

Oh, oh my. What if a person was known as a great and powerful wizard because they had once been utterly furious and were known for flying into a powerful rage at the drop of a hat? And what if, these days, they had resolved the fury which had once driven them? Perhaps they would want to see the world be different, so that people didn’t kill or hurt each other out of fear of someone being angry?

I like the character, an older magician who is no longer able to tap at will into the magic which made them so well known, feared, and respected… but who still performs the role in hopes of changing the world. They might seek to teach and train younger magic users to be able to think through their anger and channel it (anger and magic both) into more productive ends.

I don’t know if this person would be the central character for anything longer than a short story or piece of flash fic, but they feel worth exploring.