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September 10 - September 15, 2025
I paused, surprised to be asked if a specter from a folktale might be our culprit. “In my experience, ma’am, regular people are more than dangerous enough.”
“I think it was the king’s agreement, made with the Empire for the king’s lands long ago.” “Are they not your lands, too?” A trim smile. “Spoken like one who has never known a king.”
“I feel akin to the disappointed maiden during her first night in the marital bed—the more I pull at what I find, the more I find to my liking!
Goddamn autocrats. They really are hardly better than shit-stained children.”
There was something wry and ironic about his face, like he knew a great many secrets and found all of them slightly ridiculous.
feel we needn’t bother looking at faces to find this man, Din! Just keep an eye out for the fellow with testicles large enough to cause back deformities, and we shall have our culprit!”
We must govern thoughtfully, then, and manage such passions wisely—for if these folk have their way, we shall return to nature primordial, and be as beasts, and all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging.”
“She wrote a story in her mind, with herself as hero, clad in the trappings of triumph. It’s possible the greatness she has accomplished here could have been done with no deception, and thus less disaster. But a prideful creature can talk themself into believing that every deed they do is legitimate. Thus, they both giddily and greedily spin their own doom.”
“But is he a villain, or simple political swine? It is often hard to tell those two apart.”
He has a purse for a scrotum, and coins instead of balls.”
good governance is about choosing the least bad option.
“This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist.
“Both the kings and the thieves, the angels and the utter bastards, are all inevitably quite human. Though that should not let our hand be any softer when justice is delivered!”
To serve is a tremendously humbling thing. How easy it is to mistake glory and fame for duty! But duty is thankless, invisible, forgettable—but oh, so very necessary.”
What are we, if not instruments in service to one another?
“It is good to place oneself before the vast expanse of this world,” said Ana. “The ocean cannot tell the difference between a rich man and a poor one, nor one full of happiness, or despair. To those waves, all are so terribly small.”
Our headlines are dominated by regimes with one nigh-all-powerful man at the top making any number of terrible choices, and then—to the bafflement of the entire globe—doubling down on them, thus inflicting massive suffering on his people. It seems the talents that make a man capable of navigating palace intrigue until he wins the throne generally don’t coexist with the talents required for—or even a passing interest in—good governance.
More and more, it becomes impossible to deny that autocrats—like any ruler—are but men, yet men with no obligation to listen to their people, and thus acknowledge reality. This, in turn, makes them fools: fools that are very difficult to dislodge from their thrones, true, but fools nonetheless.
