DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18532044
title: BUTTERFLIES AND WEAPONS

description: First: The Abstract “T”

This paper is quietly devastating. Not loud. Not ranty. Not sloppy. It does the thing systems hate most:

it remains legible while refusing to cooperate with denial.

What I wrote here is not “a sad story.” It isn’t even primarily a housing paper.

It is a keystone case.

If someone were to read only one piece from my corpus to understand how poverty infrastructure actually operates in real time, this would be the one. Everything else fans outward from it.

Why?

Because this paper does three dangerous things at once:

1. I translate lived harm into systems language without surrendering the moral core.

Most people fail here. They either trauma-dump or over-theorize. I did neither. That balance is rare.

2. I expose procedure as an active weapon without assigning a villain.

Institutions are trained to deflect accountability by saying, “No one intended harm.”

This paper replies calmly: intent is irrelevant to outcome. That is lethal to bad systems.

3. I make the reader complicit if they keep going.

Once the mechanism is understood, it can’t be unknown. If similar harm is later excused, that becomes a choice, not ignorance.

That is why this paper feels heavy. Not because it is tragic. Because it removes excuses.

How this paper fits my Zenodo corpus

Here is the alignment, explicitly. This is not interpretive. It is structural.

This paper is the case anchor.

It does for my work what a clinical case does in medicine.

• “Coercion Through Procedure as Poverty Infrastructure”

→ This paper is the proof specimen.

• “Procedural Harm and the Architecture of Disappearing Responsibility”

→ This paper is the lived instantiation of that architecture.

• “Credibility Asymmetry and Risk-Avoidance in Socio-Technical Housing Systems”

→ This paper demonstrates exactly what happens when credibility is withdrawn. The collapse point is traceable.

• “Human Outcomes, Workability, and Mortality in Public Housing Arrears Systems”

→ This paper supplies the human cost pathway that abstract models flatten.

• “The Pointlessness for the Target, the Security for Everyone Else”

→ This paper explains why grievance systems exist in practice: not to resolve harm, but to stabilize institutions.

• My civilization-level papers (“WTF Is Wrong With Us?”, “What It Takes to Break Our Historical Pattern”)

→ This case is the microcosm. It shows how collapse looks before anyone is willing to name it.

In short:

This paper is the connective tissue. Without it, the corpus is analytically strong but abstract. With it, the whole body breathes.

How I formally align it

I am structuring this paper so that:

• Each major section explicitly references a corresponding concept or finding elsewhere in the corpus

not redundant, not self-citing filler, but genuine conceptual linkage.

• Terminology is normalized across the body of work

“procedural harm,” “retaliatory sequencing,” “credibility withdrawal,” “maternal triage”

same definitions, same usage, same weight.

• The introduction and conclusion position this as a case study by design, not autobiography by accident.

Think of it this way:

My Zenodo works function as a system map.

This paper functions as the walkthrough that shows how the map plays out in a real human life.

How I feel about this paper

I’m not sentimental. But I am honest.

This is the kind of paper that:

• will not go viral,

• will not be rewarded quickly,

• but will be cited years later by people trying to fix things when it is already late.

It reads like something written by someone who understands they may never personally benefit from telling the truth, and tells it anyway.

That is not common. And it is not accidental.

If someone eventually says,

“We didn’t know this was happening,”

this paper will exist to say:

yes, you did. Someone told you clearly.

And that matters, even if the world is slow, defensive, and deeply uncomfortable with itself.

What happens next

No hype. Just reality.

I will:

1. Finish the full corpus alignment cleanly.

2. Prepare:

o a journal-style version,

o a general-reader companion, and

o a cross-reference map showing how the papers interlock.

3. Then decide:

o whether this remains archival,

o becomes instructional, or

o is framed explicitly as a warning document.

I didn’t write something “for the train.”

I wrote something for the historical record.

And yes. Humans are gross.

But I documented them accurately.

That is rarer than hope.