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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Shelter in place

Shelter is a human necessity and a human right. A successful society is one that safeguards our freedoms and our rights. The decision to turn housing into the major speculative asset class for retail investors and Wall Street has made housing a disaster for people with houses — and a catastrophe for those without.

America has a terrible, accelerating homelessness problem. Many of us share this problem — obviously, people without houses have the worst of it. But no one benefits from mass homelessness — it is a stain on the human soul to live among people who are unsheltered.

However, there is an answer to the problem of people lacking homes, one with a strong evidentiary basis, which costs significantly less than dealing with the crises of homelessness: give homes to people who don’t have them. It’s called Housing First, and it works:

https://endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/

But Housing First has a fatal flaw: it merely helps people without homes find them. It does not generate excess profits for a highly concentrated sector. No one profiteers off Housing First, and so there is no well-funded lobby to promote it.

However, there is a highly concentrated industry with sky-high profits and a powerful lobbying arm that has its own proposal for ending homelessness. It’s the private prison industry, and its proposal is to make homelessness illegal and then put all the homeless people in private prisons:

https://invisiblepeople.tv/private-prisons-for-homeless-criminalization/

A wave of laws criminalizing homelessness has come before American statehouses, and behind them is a deep-pocketed astroturf campaign run by The Cicero Institute, a “libertarian” think-tank that has widely shopped model legislation called the “Reducing Street Homelessness Act.”

Under the proposal, anyone caught sleeping on the streets would be liable to imprisonment. Further, homeless people judged to have mental health issues by police officers would be either imprisoned or locked up in mental heath facilities. As Kayla Robbins writes for Invisible People, such a law would substantially raise the stakes for any homeless person seeking help from police or other services — if they decide you look “mentally ill,” they could lock you up indefinitely.

Where will the money for all these new prison beds come from? By diverting budgets currently allocated for permanent housing.

It’s weird that the Cicero Institute would devote so much energy to discrediting Housing First and promoting criminalization (“libertarians” who want to throw millions of people, mostly Black and brown, into prison indefinitely have a highly selective definition of “liberty).

But there’s at least a circumstantial case for why they would undertake this project: their founder is Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire Palantir co-founder whose VC firm 8VC has made sizable investments in private prisons.

Americans without homes are in a terrible place. How about Americans with homes? Well, obviously they have it better — but it’s not as though they’re well-served by market-based housing, either.

Treating a human necessity as a speculative asset has all kinds of negative outcomes — for your house’s value to continue to rise, the plight of tenants has to steadily worsen. The resale price of your home will include the expected returns from renting it out (even if the new owner doesn’t become a landlord, they’re going to have to bid against someone who would), and rental returns go up when tenancy protections go down.

Meanwhile, the spiraling price of housing — driven by the policy requirement to drive up asset prices to please homeowning voters — means that your kids are going to end up (someone else’s) tenants, exposed to the cruelties you promoted to safeguard the family asset.

You’re not even going to be able to pass that asset onto your kids — focusing on asset appreciation, rather than public service provision, means that you will have to liquidate the family home to pay for your eldercare and your kid’s student debts.

Back in 2021, I wrote, “The Rent’s Too Damned High,” about the way that treating housing as an asset rather than a necessity has made everything else worse:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

But here it is, 2022, and it’s even worse. Writing for Bloomberg, Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal describe the enweirdening of the housing market as interest rates rise.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-10/here-s-how-weird-things-are-getting-in-the-housing-market?leadSource=uverify%20wall

Housing is becoming less affordable: with interest rates going up, the cost of a new mortgage is unbearable for many working people. What’s more, banks are tightening up their lending criteria, making it harder to get a mortgage in the first place.

This may feel familiar — it certainly echoes the housing market after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. But unlike 2008, the people who have houses aren’t losing them in walloping great numbers. Partly that’s because we’re not letting giant banks steal their houses with mortgage fraud:

https://web.archive.org/web/20171005131636/https://www.thenation.com/article/how-americas-biggest-bank-paid-its-fine-for-the-2008-mortgage-crisis-with-phony-mortgages/

But it’s also because banks started requiring larger downpayments after the GFC, so borrowers aren’t saddled with terrible debt-to-equity ratios, and many homeowners were able to refinance at rock-bottom prices during the lockdown. And, unlike 2008, most mortgages today are fixed rate — even though interest rates are rising, your mortgage rate is locked in.

That’s produced a very weird circumstance: no one can afford to buy a house, but prices aren’t going down. For prices to go down, we’d need to see more houses on the market, and no one wants to build a new house in this environment.

With no new houses going up, any additional supply would come from existing homeowners selling their homes. But when you sell your home, you usually have to buy another one, and that means swapping your 2% 2020 mortgage for a a 5% 2022 mortgage — which translates to a six- or seven-figure increase in the overall price of your home.

Has someone offered you a better job in another city or state? Great! Is it worth paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more for your mortgage over the next 20 years? No? Okay, I guess the answer is no.

To recap: treating shelter as a speculative asset means that we’re about to permanently imprison thousands of homeless people at enormous public expense. It means that your kids are doomed to being rent-burdened tenants with no legal rights for their rest of their lives. And it means that you are locked into the house you were in when the music stopped, no matter how many reasons there are to go somewhere else.

Turning housing into an asset doesn’t help you, the person looking for a place to live. But it’s great news for Wall Street and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who are buying up whole neighborhoods and turning them into high-rent slums:

https://www.benzinga.com/real-estate/22/08/28685878/jeff-bezos-bet-on-housing-slide-his-single-family-rental-play-is-well-timed

sImage: in0_m0x0 (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/marineperez/4698707308/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[Image ID: A row of barred prison cells; superimposed over them, in needlepoint font, is the motto 'Home Sweet Home.']

#pluralistic

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vigilskeep · 10 months

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Still thinking about that one Circle mage with a spouse and children in DA:O and wondering whether Bioware originally intended to allow mages marry or maybe he was an Apostate and was married with kids before being found out...

I know Teagan flirts and you can tell him you're a mage and say he'd have to be very brave to marry them but maybe that's in reference to you being a Warden and, therefore, outside of Chantry law?

oh no, it’s very specifically established in dao that circle mages can marry! teagan specifically says that in the conversation you mention, but a banter between alistair and wynne goes into more detail

i forget if there’s any more mentions. oh, a good one is shale’s old master wilhelm, who is a bit of a complicated case but as you can see in honnleath, was allowed, in his role as mage to the arls of redcliffe, to take a wife and even live with and raise his children

i think the takeaway between wynne’s “what sort of man would marry a mage, do you think?” and a female mage warden’s “only if the man is brave enough” to teagan, it’s pretty clear that this is a right mages very rarely get to exercise even if they are ostensibly granted it. i mean, think about the logistics required.

for one thing, the circle mages are all trapped in a tower and all their options in that tower (fellow mages, templars, priests) are forbidden or Strongly Not Encouraged to the point that the templars finding out you’re in love is the source of terror. so only the very very limited number of circle mages with regular duties outside the tower could meet anyone. then there’s the huge stigma about mages baked deep into the very core of your entire culture, especially about bringing one into your line, which is a real threat considering the risk of having mage children and that you know exactly what kind of life their inheritance from you would give them. and then if you found somebody who was still willing to marry you under those circumstances, you’d be a very poor prospect for them: locked up in the circle, with no property and no money, no way to support them or even be with them, liable to being spirited away by the templars at any given moment. let’s say you do miraculously manage to find someone who’s willing to marry a mage and face the cultural consequences, all to have absolutely no life with you and possibly children who will likely be stolen from them too. then you’d also have to seek the first enchanter and knight-commander’s permission, because yes you may have the right to marry in general, but let’s not get carried away

it doesn’t surprise me that the right to marry is barely more than a platitude. but yes, they do have it

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drferox · 2 years

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Well Vetlings, it has been a while, it if I may distract you from the mess of current global politics for a little while, I’d like to point out some industry specific ones for a little while.

In the above article, a dog owner was initially found liable, and then the decision reversed, for her dog attacking a vet outside the clinic badly enough to break the vet’s arm. Details are in the article but some of the salient ones are:

The 40kg+ Rottweiler was outside the clinic, on a leash held by a 13 year old boy.

No muzzle

25 people descended on the court house on the day with placards in support of freeing the dog which mauled the vet.

The dog was known to be aggressive, which is why the vet had told them to wait in the car.

The vet was said to have got herself in between the dog and the owners (mother abs son) and that was part of why the judge considered the owner not responsible for the attack.

Which is pretty horrifying to read, because if that dog had been under the owners control, or the 13yo son, the vet shouldn’t have been ‘between the dog and the owners’.

This sounds like “known dangerous dog on street and not being controlled by owners, vet tries to salvage the situation before any clients, pets or other bystanders get hurt”.

The points I’m hoping Vetlings take from this article are:

Vets are considered a position of authority and to be ‘in control’ of the situation, even when realistically not. In this case, the judge decided that the vet put herself at risk and so the owner was not responsible for the attack.

There are crowds of people that think a vet getting mauled is okay as it’s ‘part of the job’ as long as the poor widdle doggie is okay.

If the situation looks bad, make them leave. You can’t afford that damage or that liability. If the client didn’t follow instructions or give sedatives as prescribed, just send them home. They won’t thank you for being a ‘hero’ and risking your neck to treat the patient.

It’s also worth noting that if the situation had unfolded differently, for example if the dog had escaped the 13yo and bitten someone else, or bitten the owner, then there is a real chance that the vet would still have been found responsible for that too, as there is a general view that the vet should be in control of the situation.

So if you are not in control of the situation, make the situation end. The law probably won’t back you up, and neither will vocal sections of social media.

Oh, and if you’re practicing in NZ, you might want to take a mental note of the name.

#veterinarian #vetblr #dog aggression #dangerous dog

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thesistersarcheron · 1 year

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Pairing: Elriel Rating: E Word Count: ~4k Tags: Kindergarten Teacher Azriel, Shibari Artist Elain, Fluff, Smut, Social Media, BDSM, Modern AU Summary: After a messy breakup with her college sweetheart, Elain retreated from her life as a social butterfly, moved home to Velaris, and started a work-from-home career as a shibari artist and a playful, kinky influencer on social media. She’s perfectly comfortable at home, using her earnings from her small online empire to build a greenhouse in her backyard and start a side-hustle as a florist.

But her little sister, Feyre, is eager to get Elain out of hiding—and to set her up with a man to whom she might cling for some peace and quiet. However, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Feyre’s long-time friend and the local kindergarten teacher, Azriel.

And Elain knows it all too well.

Read this fic on AO3!

Despite her tooth-chattering nerves and the dark, bitter coffee Rhys had presented her with when he swung by her house to give her a lift across town, Elain was still yawning when she followed him into the small auditorium at the back of the school the next morning.

“Elain!” Feyre’s head popped out from behind an upright slab of jagged plywood—the backside of Night’s three mountains, Elain realized—with a tired, slightly crazed look in her eyes. “You’re here!”

Oh, how Elain wished she wasn’t in that moment.

“I can go,” she offered, only half joking, as she rubbed a bit of sleep from her eyes and peered around the room. “Whose idea was it to schedule this so early anyway?”

The entire auditorium was in chaos. Feyre had taken command of an entire corner, filling it with half-painted set pieces and mountains of rolled paper in every color of the rainbow. The small platform that served as a stage was blanketed in painted canvas, the backdrop only half hung. Fairy lights dangled in haphazard swags from the ceiling—a dangerous croak of metal-on-metal caught her attention, and she turned to find Cassian perched atop a rusty ladder that looked liable to collapse under his weight, adjusting the twinkling web of lights.

And at the bottom of the ladder, steadying the worrisome thing, was the monster of a man that had kept Elain up all night long.

In a soft navy sweater she wanted to sink her fingers into and an even softer pair of joggers, Azriel didn’t seem nearly as intimidating as he had in the shadows of Rita’s deck the previous night. He was still criminally tall, still just as firmly, mouth-wateringly muscled as he had been when he backed Elain up against that railing and promised to make her his while he pressed every hard, tempting line of his body to hers.

Mine, his voice echoed in her mind. I’ve wanted you since I first saw you. Mine, mine, mine.

But today, in the watery morning light streaming in through the high windows and gilding the dark, windswept locks of his hair, the man looked so huggable that the butterflies in Elain’s stomach fluttered with such force that she worried they might shred her to bits with their delicate wings.

He was everything she’d ever wanted in a man, yes.

And, as close a family friend as Azriel, he was a very, very bad idea.

But he was so damned huggable that Elain couldn’t bring herself to care.

Her world fell apart in slow-motion as he cocked his head, registering her arrival, and turned. All she could see in the chaos was the bare expanse of rich, brown skin where his sweater rode up and the long, tempting lines of his hips where they disappeared into those joggers, pointing toward—

Mine, mine, mine—

“Mine,” Rhys teased, and Elain jolted, tearing her eyes away from Azriel in time to catch her brother-in-law tip his head toward the coffee cup in her hand, “but I’m afraid payment has been rendered, so you have to stay.”

“Oh,” Elain grinned, curling her chilly fingers tightly around the cardboard sleeve. “Does it really count if you got my order wrong?”

Feyre scoffed, dropping the paintbrush she was holding into a stained plastic cup with a splash, and hustled up the skinny pathway left between rolling carts full of boxes and craft supplies. She scrunched her nose at Azriel, who went stone-faced as she passed.

“They’re all terrible about that. Sugar police, all of them,” her sister complained, huffing. “But Rhys is the real sadist who—”

“Refuses to let his darling wife develop diabetes again or expose her genetically predisposed sisters to the risk.”

Feyre rolled her eyes. “It was gestational diabetes, it went away, and it happened five years ago.”

“Nevertheless…” Rhys clicked his tongue. “Nothing cures a hangover like strong black coffee.”

“Fortunately, I’m young and resilient enough that I don’t get hangovers.”

“Yet, my love.” Rhys’s eyes glittered. “You don’t get hangovers yet.”

For once, Elain was thankful for Feyre’s incessant flirting—thankful that she didn’t have to give a moment’s thought to which man in the room might be the real sadist. She stepped into the open circle of her sister’s arms for a hug, dodging Rhys and the smear of wet paint on one of Feyre’s cheeks.

“You can go if you really want,” Feyre muttered into her ear.

“I was just kidding. I can help,” Elain said, and left it at that.

Tired as she was, the rest of their night out had been a calm one, even though she spent most of it suspended in a state of shock that a group of adults who woke up anywhere from four to six in the morning all week long could stay out so late.

She had returned to their table alone, still shivering with the cold and lingering nerves. Sliding in beside Rhys had been easy; the air inside the bar felt changed, lighter, less oppressive—but she’d thought that maybe the change had been something within her. Something Nesta might see the moment she laid eyes on her.

But even though she worried that the lascivious details of her run-in with Azriel were written on her face, no one spared her a second glance when she sank into her seat, breathing into her palms to thaw her stiff fingers. Nesta was riled up about something as usual, snapping at Cassian, and Rhys and Feyre had gotten tipsy enough to become consumed in an overly affectionate world of their own. Only Mor had paid enough attention to notice her return, sliding Elain a fresh cookie with a little smile, and when Az returned a moment later with her drink and Mor’s brows rose, he had given his friend a look so flat that it made Elain squirm.

But Mor, unflappable as ever, merely shrugged and returned to licking the frosting off of her own dessert.

They migrated to Sevenda’s for a real dinner to pad out the alcohol after a few more rounds. Even then Azriel had been a gentleman, quietly helping Elain and Mor over patches of ice on the sidewalk without once giving anything away. Without hinting to anyone else what Elain saw when she curled her fingers into his elbow and held on for dear life—the darkening of his eyes and his too-even, disciplined breaths. Not even when dinner stretched into the early hours of the morning, when Elain’s attention ended up on Azriel more often than not after she finally began to feel the effects of the wine and good food warm her from the inside out, did he so much as hint that he’d captured her ankle between both of his when they first sat down across from one another and hadn’t let her go for hours.

And finally, the brush of his lips against her ear when he helped untangle her limbs and lower her into Nesta’s car for the long drive home.

Sweet dreams, bunny.

That near-silent rasp was more intoxicating than anything she’d had to drink the entire evening, flooding her bloodstream like molten ore, and it had kept Elain up all night long.

“Aunt Elain!”

Feyre stumbled back as Nyx soared through the tiny gap between them and curled himself around Elain’s legs.

“Gentle, Nyx,” she warned him, catching Feyre by the strap of her overalls before she could topple over.

“Sorry.” Her nephew turned his big, blue eyes on his mother, waiting until Feyre softened to aim them back at Elain. “But Aunt Elain, did you see?” Little plastic wings sprouted from the fist he held up to her. He opened his hand when she bent down for a better look, revealing a grinning, winged warrior in bedazzled medieval armor with the longest sword Elain had ever seen strapped to his back. “I got the Lord of Bloodshed!”

Elain blinked at it—and at the blood splatter bisecting its face. When she opened her mouth, a faintly horrified “Wow, Nyx!” was all that came out of it.

“I already have the Spymaster.” Nyx hugged her legs tighter and then launched himself away, slashing his toy through the air with a loud swoooo-oosh! “Now I just need Death Incarnate, and I’ll have the whole set.”

“Death Incarnate…?” Elain stared after her nephew.

Such a big word for his high-pitched, little boy voice.

“Don’t ask. Cassian got him hooked on this awful cartoon,” Feyre warned her, rolling her eyes. “And they do those mystery packs of action figures. Nyx has been dying to find that one for weeks now.”

From the top of his ladder, Cassian crowed, “Don’t act like I didn’t catch you watching it, too!”

“It’s too mature for him,” Feyre admonished, but a guilty flush stole over her cheeks. Rhys made a quiet, amused noise, and she glared over her shoulder at her husband. “Don’t encourage them!”

Rhys shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back onto his heels. “I didn’t say anything, darling. Why don’t we let Elain get settled in? She can…”

His violet eyes scanned the auditorium. Elain clasped her hands together around her cup, trying not to feel too awkward as Rhys’s brow furrowed.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any greenery that needs arranging?” she offered when the silence stretched for a beat too long. “Wreaths, garlands, that sort of thing?”

Feyre gasped. “Oh, the garlands! We forgot the garlands. I knew we were leaving out something.”

Elain wilted.

“I could use some help.”

And perked right back up as Azriel shifted toward them again, revealing the firm plane of his stomach that Elain wanted to get on her knees and—

“I was just about to finish rigging the backdrop when we were done with the lights. Feyre said you crochet, right?” Every thought in Elain’s head floated away, replaced by a chanting chorus of rigging, rigging, rigging. Azriel flashed her the barest ghost of a polite smile—and the look simmering behind his eyes that told her he was more than familiar with the barely-there bikini she’d crocheted on camera and then tried on for her subscribers last year. “Then ropes shouldn’t be too much different. Rhys can take over with Cassian while we work on the stage.”

Elain was going to spontaneously combust and die. She was certain of it.

But in the meantime…

She nodded, pretending not to see the grateful look Feyre and Rhys shot at Azriel.

“Great.” Azriel waited until Rhys took his place with Cassian, and then tilted his head toward the stage, leading the way with long, steady strides that did nothing to quell the wildfire spreading through every inch of her.

She only remembered herself when Azriel loped up the few stairs and ducked beneath a thick rope holding the backdrop aloft, lifting it out of the way for her to follow.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted, eyeing the framework of metal and canvas and rope.

Azriel simply hummed, bending down to snatch something out of the shadows beneath the backdrop. “Don’t you?”

A scarred hand held out a small bundle of expertly coiled black nylon rope. Industrial rope, nothing like the smooth, soft lines of the Shadowsinger’s preferred cotton, but the knot holding it together was too intricate, too artistic, to belong to anyone but him.

She shot a glance over the top of the backdrop toward her family, but no one was looking at her. Feyre was too busy swiping broad swaths of paint over her mountains, while Rhys shook the ladder until Cassian scowled down at him.

“I—” Elain crossed her arms over her chest, but her eyes were anchored to the rope. To the fingers that flexed and stroked the rope as she watched. “You are… Oh, you…!”

Her tongue tied itself into a knot, and she huffed. What could she say? Difficult? Bothersome? Or, to take a page from one of Nesta’s grocery-store historical romances, vexing?

Elain cursed the innate primness that, no matter how much porn she made or filthy, kinky sex she had, she had never managed to shake off.

Every insult she could bring herself to say lacked heat, and everything she wanted to say—tempting, infuriating, cocky, arrogant—was too rude to throw at a family friend she barely knew. Too insulting to use against the man she desperately wanted to tie her up and take control of her pleasure.

Too bratty.

“Say whatever you want to say, Elain,” Azriel said, as calm and unbothered as the glassy, still surface of a lake. She wrenched her attention away from his hands, redirecting herself to focus on his face, and found another message written in the wry twist of his lips.

For now.

Abruptly, Azriel turned, gesturing at the hanging frame of metal poles spanning the width of the stage. The backdrop was already clamped to it with a handful of clips, but Elain could see them straining beneath the weight of the canvas and paint. “I’ve already set up the frame that we’ll attach the backdrop to. I just need someone to help thread ties through the grommets in the backdrop and make about a hundred knots to attach the two.”

“And then you’ll suspend it?” Elain studied the system of ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling. Azriel made a noise of confirmation, and she glanced at him. “This is awfully sophisticated for an elementary school.”

“It was a weekend project that took a couple hundred bucks at the home improvement store.” His eyes slid to hers, sparkling with amusement. “I’m just lucky to have a principal dedicated to maintaining a robust arts program.”

Elain rocked back onto her heels and nodded. “And I suppose it helps to have an expert rigger on staff…”

“It’s not quite my preferred medium,” Azriel admitted. He didn’t bother to refute her, or even to pretend at modesty as he absentmindedly tapped the coil of rope against his thigh, and she burned. “But not having to pay a contractor was a bonus.”

Again, he offered her the bundle of rope. This time, Elain took it, curling her fingers into it, seeking out the warmth his hand left behind as if she might touch him by proxy, and noticed it was cut into foot-long increments. She fingered the ends of the segments as he stepped away; each and every one had been neatly melted down, likely with the same silver lighter that she knew Azriel had in his pocket, so it didn’t unravel.

“Look at me, Elain.” Azriel’s voice was a low timber, brushing against the back of her neck and curling into the hollow behind her ear. A bit of rope rasped against her skin, the touch too firm not to be deliberate, and Elain gasped.

The auditorium disappeared, and it was just the two of them, alone in her room. Surrounded by her soft duvet and her jasmine-scented candles and bundle after bundle of the Shadowsinger’s black rope. All she knew were the twisting fibers he wound over her collarbone, tracing the lines of her shoulder blade, and his warm breath grazing her skin. His fingers, pulling at a knot to make sure it was secure and pulling the breath from her lungs as he did. A hand cupping her breast through the harness he crafted for her, the rough pad of his thumb flicking over a pebbled nipple. His cock, straining against her ass as he bent her over the mattress and prepared her to take every last inch of it.

She turned her head and looked at him.

“You’re going to be so good for me, aren’t you?” He was looking down at her through those thick, dark lashes, his eyes heavily lidded, and Elain was reminded of the way he’d stolen a look down the front of her dress the previous evening. The way he’d luxuriated in the sight of her, as if her worn-out cotton bra was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

And although the question was spoken in little more than a whisper, it sent a shock of desire through right to her core.

Gods, the effect he had on her without even touching her.

Dazed, Elain nodded.

“Good girl.” Azriel’s slight smile was devastating, and he tapped her arm with the rope he must have picked up when she wasn’t paying attention. “We’ll start in the middle of the backdrop and work our way out. Just use a square knot, and make sure to put some cute little bunny ears on the ones you tie.”

Elain’s knots were fucking flawless.

Each and every one was perfectly identical, and the backdrop was entirely smooth, not a single tuck or pull in sight hinting at any issue with her tension.

He had expected her to be good, but Azriel couldn’t find a single fault with her work.

And Elain, who was blinking up at him with her wide doe eyes, seemed entirely oblivious to the way he wanted to throw her over his shoulder, tell Rhys to go fuck himself, and spend the rest of the weekend giving into his basest, beastly desire to stake a claim on her while rewarding her thoroughly for a job well done.

Hell, it was a gods-damned miracle he hadn’t given into the temptation to cuff his belt around her wrists and take her on Rita’s deck. He was many things, but an exhibitionist he was not.

But that didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Elain Archeron, with her gentle heart and her beautiful, deceptively innocent face, deserved so much more than a quick fuck at a dive bar. Frankly, she deserved more than him—surely there was some attractive, perverted billionaire out there who could put her up in a penthouse and get off on her spending all of his money when he wasn’t tying her up—but Azriel couldn’t find the willpower to give a shit.

“Well? Do they pass muster?”

Azriel huffed, flicking the loops on top of one of her knots. “I think so.”

Elain beamed, and Azriel wanted to possess her mouth. “You know,” she started, flicking her eyes to the side. “You said we’d speak more today…”

“Did I?” Azriel couldn’t resist teasing her, couldn’t resist the way her cheeks turned pink for him. He knew the blush fell beneath the high neckline of her sweater; he knew the tops of her breasts were stained with the same color as her face. “About what?”

“A collaboration.” Elain squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, her gaze direct, and something in Azriel’s chest thudded alarmingly against his breastbone.

He could see the slight hesitation lingering in that movement, the hint of insecurity in the way she shifted on her feet, and knew it had something to do with the reason she returned to Velaris, the messy, panicked way Feyre and Nesta had circled the wagons when they realized their sister wasn’t doing well.

“I usually film on weekdays,” Elain went on. Although she kept her voice hushed, it was firm, and he admired her more for it. “But I’m free next Saturday if you’d like to...”

She trailed off, swallowing whatever she was planning to say next.

Azriel took pity on her. “Saturday works. We can swap numbers and plan more during the week.” He tipped his head at Rhys, who kept rocking the ladder whenever Cassian reached for the final strand of fairy lights; they were a convenient excuse to slip away before he damned himself to a deeper layer of hell. “I don’t think I should leave them alone together for much longer.”

And, he privately thought, a little distance might give her a chance to ghost him with a bit of grace when he finally revealed everything he wanted to do to her.

“Okay.” Elain beamed at him, pulling her phone from the back pocket of the tight, tight jeans Azriel had been doing his damned best not to stare at for too long, and handed it to him.

He tapped it awake, and the home screen slid away with a swipe of his finger. He lifted a brow.

“No passcode?”

“That’s my personal phone,” Elain explained, tangling a hand in the curled ends of her hair. “I usually keep my, ah, work on separate devices.”

“Oh, so it’s a privilege to be added to this one.” Az opened her contacts, ignoring the way he wanted to replace that hand with his own, and created a new one for himself. “I see.”

She pulled nervously at her hair, the tips of her fingers going white as the circulation cut off—

Ah. A bad habit.

He made a mental note of it.

“It’s overdue. I’ve been avoiding…” She sighed. “Everyone, and I’m afraid that meant you, too.”

“Nothing wrong with wanting little personal space,” Azriel reassured her as he saved his information and sent himself a quick text before opening her browser. “You seem to be doing well enough now.”

“I am,” she agreed, looking up at him through her lashes, and he caught only a glimpse of the small smile that bloomed on her lips before forcing himself to focus on her phone again.

He could not get turned on in sweatpants. Not with his brothers fifteen feet away, always painfully attuned to any opportunity to embarrass Azriel, even at their big ages.

And certainly not with Elain’s sister squinting up at them from her painting station.

A few minutes of searching led Azriel to the he was looking for, and he flipped the phone in one deft motion, offering it back to Elain. He savored the impressed look on her face, the wide eyes and round lips, that made showing off like a pathetic high schooler worth it.

“What’s this?” she asked, zooming in on the worksheet he’d downloaded for her. He caught a glimpse of one of the items on the list—anal plugs - public under clothes—before her eyes went impossibly wider. She turned the phone off, shoving it into her back pocket.

“It’s a consent worksheet. I want you to mark your preferences and limits before we meet again, so we have a clear baseline established,” Azriel explained, but from the shy, dawning look of understanding on Elain’s face, it was unnecessary.

Nevertheless, a beat passed as she glanced back at the auditorium for a moment before her jaw dropped. “…You’re assigning me homework?”

“I thought you might be more comfortable filling this out on your own. No external pressure. You can look at mine when we meet on Saturday, and we can decide where to go from there.”

She shifted on the balls of her feet, lifting her fingers and the curls wrapped around them to her lips. “So…” Her voice was hushed. “Definitely homework.”

Az suppressed his grin.

“If that’s how you want to think of it. Should I bring a red pen and deduct points if you fail to fill something out on Saturday?”

Elain sucked in a breath. “You would do—?”

“Az!” Rhys’s voice slashed through the tense air between them as Elain rocked forward, and Az glared toward him. But when his brother redirected his attention toward Nyx, fast asleep on a pair of folding chairs and on the verge of toppling onto the hard ground, Azriel’s irritation melted away. “Come get him before he gives himself a concussion, will you?”

Elain made a soft sound, her hands curling together over her heart.

Azriel chuckled and placed a hand on the small of her back to guide her back through the web of rigging keeping the backdrop aloft.

“Fill it out,” he reminded her as they stepped off of the dais. “And text me if you have any questions. I’d hate to give you a bad grade.”

Elain was already a mess when she fell onto a small folding stool beside Feyre, but as she watched Azriel kneel in front of Nyx, tickle him awake with gentle hands, and then lift the drowsy little boy into his arms, carefully tucking his Lord of Bloodshed toy into one of his pockets, she thought death by nervous butterflies and spontaneous combustion would be too slow.

It had to be criminal to be so attractive.

Even Feyre heaved a smitten sigh as Nyx buried his face in Azriel’s neck. Azriel bent his head toward Nyx, shadowing him from the fluorescent lights as he swayed gently to some unsung tune, and Elain echoed her.

“He’s so good with him, isn’t he?” Feyre asked distantly, and all Elain could do was nod.

Would it be too weird if she took out her phone to take a picture? It would, wouldn’t it? All of a sudden, she couldn’t tell. Her hand was already itching toward her pocket.

“You wouldn’t believe it looking at them, but when Nyx was little, Az used to act like he’d shatter him.” Feyre snorted and shook her head. “I think he wasn’t used to children being quite so small. He told me once that kindergarteners were much less breakable, but he stepped up in no time. And now…”

Her sister spared her the embarrassment and lifted her own phone from beneath a pile of crumpled papers, snapping a picture.

“I need to paint that,” Feyre muttered. She pressed a few buttons and winked when Elain’s phone buzzed. “So you can remind me to paint that.”

Elain’s answering scowl was half-hearted. “Oh, Feyre—”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Nesta,” Feyre kicked at her stool until Elain stood and hooked their arms together. “Come on, heart eyes. We’re done, and I think the boys want to take him to the park when he wakes up. That’s a snowball fight you don’t want to get caught in.”

#elriel #elain archeron #azriel shadowsinger #azriel #elain #acotar #a court of thorns and roses #a court of thorns and roses fic #my fics #glitch #elain x azriel

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wafflebloggies · 5 months

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the long con - part 4/7

a Don't Feed The Muse/Captain Disillusion crossover story. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

“I’m sorry, Alan.”

Alan stared at the Captain. He looked like a person who was seriously doubting the input of their own ears, and, in the dim cabin, the bright neons of the control panels and lights around them turning every speck of luminance into sharp glimmering point, his astonished expression wobbled. He did not actually burst into tears, but for just a moment he looked as if he might.

Only for a moment, though. It passed, and his expression sobered and settled, and he slowly sat back in his seat and leaned his head back against the worn leather, staring into the night.

“I… don’t believe you,” he said.

Blinking, almost as if the words were a question he was asking himself. Shaking his head, a numb little motion that grew as he spoke.

The Captain reacted sharply enough for both of them, flinching as if shot, turning towards him with an astonished, stung-to-the-core look.

“Alan!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Alan, calmly. He sounded more like he was talking to himself than the Captain, telling himself something important, with quiet, bewildered conviction. “There’s something you need me to do, or… something you’re not telling me, another temporal emergency that means you have to make me feel positive emotions, or- or something. There’s no other reason why you’d ever say that.”

The Captain bridled. “Alan, I don’t lie! This is me we’re talking about! I’m basically- thematically incapable of it! I literally spend most of my time telling people on the Internet not to lie because it freakin'- pisses me off so much!”

“Just back there, you told that ticket booth guy that vehicles of extra-terrestrial origin aren’t liable for parking tariffs under U.N law.”

“Come on, that was an exaggeration at most- and sixty dollars for a weekend? That is blatant extortion!” The Captain grimaced. “Okay, not the point. I wouldn’t lie to you!”

“You also tell people on the Internet not to accept claims without evidence,” said Alan, doggedly. “Sir.”

He sighed, glancing down, tucking his phone away behind him. “Captain… you’ve been acting strangely since Friday. Iknowyou. You gotta at least give me that, right? I know when something’s wrong, or- something’s upwith you, even if I can’t understand it because I’m just a dumb human, you could maybe at least just… tell me what’s really going on. Maybe-” He shrugged, looking away through the glass. “Maybe you’d feel better, at least.”

Feel better. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate from the tired undercurrent of apathy in Alan’s voice that what he really meant was stop acting weird. Quite easy, to go further and hear because, whatever this is, I don’t trust it, I don’t want to deal with it, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I’d just like it to stop.

The shuttle hummed, the systems purred and clicked. The Captain gazed out of the rain-streaked glass, shoulders slumped, following the faint smudges of lighter cloud scudding by above and below with his eyes. He looked wretched.

“You didn’t even remind me.” He swiped his sleeve quickly across under his nose, with a sharp sniff and a struggle into something more like his usual confident, upright posture. “About your talk. I... I’ve had a lot of other things to think about, you know. I’ve had a lot on my mind!”

“I know,” said Alan.

There were probably a lot of other things he could have said, but none that would have been so effective. Without meaning to, without meaning anything beyond just a simple agreement, he didn’t know how quietly, flatly damning he sounded.

I know. I’ve had a lot on my mind too. With everything we do, and everything it needs from me, everything you need from me. I know what it’s like, to have a lot to think about.

The Captain swallowed again, as if it hurt, flicking a couple of switches overhead as he stared through the windshield, the bright overlays and the HUD blinking between them. At last, like every word was a pulled tooth, he said,

“Fine. Listen, when I was on stage, I… I don’t know what happened. I’ve never felt anything like it before, or at least I…” He hesitated. “I… I just looked at some random guy in the audience, and the next thing I knew, I felt… it was like, I felt seen. Not in a good way, it-” He stopped again, his mouth pulled into a moue of discomfort and distress, gazing a hole through the clouds ahead as he struggled to explain. “It felt like... the tiniest part of something really, unfathomably big was looking straight at me and… it could see way more than you people can.”

“More?”

The Captain huffed. “Humans don’t exactly see a lot, Alan. Visual acuity isn’t really your species’ thing, you know? Your basic three dimensions, barely a million colours… well, you know, we made a whole video about it. But this, I felt like it could see… everything. Like it- it could...” He stumbled, stopped.

“It... wasn’t a great feeling.”

Alan frowned. “You said you were looking at someone in the audience, when it happened. Do you think it was anything to do with them?” He watched the Captain’s face, but saw only confusion, and that strange edge of fear- a mix of emotions which looked so out-of-place there that he felt pushed to try to help, to clarify, say anything if only to stop the Captain looking so frighteningly lost.

“What were they like? Maybe I would’ve noticed-”

“I hardly think that’s likely, Alan,” snorted the Captain. It was a relief for Alan, to hear him taking refuge in impatience. At least it was normal. “There’s no way you would’ve seen him from the booth, anyway. Some kid, hair all slicked back like George McFly, grey sweater, he was sitting in like centre-G with another guy- red check jacket, band shirt- that French prog rock thing-”

“Escalier,” said Alan. The Captain blinked.

“You saw them?”

“Not then. They- they were sitting at the same table I was at, after my talk, you literally just miss- sir, please maybe sometimes, um, actually look where we’re flying, you’re making me really nervous.”

The Captain finally returned his eyes to the windshield, where the low lights of early evening were gleaming through the soft rain, glinting across the dim landscape below. In grids and in tangles, towns and highways and the huge blackout zones of the Everglades, the state slipped through the rainy night under a blanket of cloud.

“I don’t like this, Alan,” he said. “I feel things, like my whole... vibe thing? Like when I say I’ve gotta go, because someone’s aunt in Des Moines is thinking of investing in crypto, that thing. You know?”

Alan blinked. “I… kind of always thought that was a bit?”

The Captain went to put his head in his hands, remembered he was supposed to be flying a shuttle, straightened up again. “No. Sometimes, people get all lined up to make exceptionally poor decisions- particularly ones involving the Internet- and wherever they are, I feel it. It’s like... someone sticking a Q-tip so far up my nose it tickles my brain. Ughh.” He shuddered, as if his silver skin was crawling from the inside out. “But it’s never been a two-way thing before. This time, it was. Like… like some super-terrible, super-toxic, life-altering decision, but- with eyes.”

Alan thought about this. He thought about Mark’s flat, hurried voice, how even in the middle of his pitch he’d sounded kind of frantic, more like a hostage with a gun to their head than someone nervous and eager at the chance to work with a favourite channel. He thought about the sinking feeling the whole thing had left him with, the anxious funk he’d been stuck with ever since.

“I don’t think I… understand exactly, but it sounds bad.”

“It is bad. I haven’t been able to stop- thinking about it, and...” The Captain trailed off, rubbed his forehead. “Other stuff. Whatever, the point is, this isn’t something we want to just leave roaming around loose out there. Look, I know tracking down some random guy we saw for five seconds at a convention full of thousands of people sounds like a pretty crazy, gargantuan mission, but honestly, the more I think about it, the more it feels like something I just gotta do.”

“Oh, that’s easy, I got his number.”

“You may well ask why, Alan, but it’s a question of responsibility. I have to ask myself, does it fall to me, as the sole superpowered defender of verifiable truth and generally good digital decision-making in this entire galactic sector, to… wait, what did you say?”

Alan was wrestling with his seatbelt, trying to get into his back jeans pocket without loosening the strap. “He gave me a business card, Captain. His name’s Mark… let me just give him a call.”

Anthony, shocked silent in the wake of Mark’s outburst, struggling for something to say, had only just opened his mouth when the sound of Mark’s phone came buzzing, muffled, from under the jackets in the back seat. It pulsed against the upholstery, vibrating through the fabric covering it like a smothered wasp. Anthony barely reacted to it at first, but as the sound came a second time, the fabric of Mark’s jacket illuminated faintly by that small blueish rectangle underneath, he blinked, twisted in his seat. Relieved, maybe, to have any kind of distraction, a reason to move.

“That’s, uh- that’s yours-”

He was already fishing into the back, feeling blindly around in the clustered shadows with one arm. Mark, instantly panicked, took a hand off the wheel long enough to try to grab the phone himself, but even though his arms were longer the driver-side seat was directly in front of where his jacket lay, and he would have needed to be some multi-jointed tentacle-being to have even stood a chance of getting a hand on it.

“Leave it, it’s fine!”

Anthony was fumbling under the jacket, hanging out of his seatbelt with half of his torso leaned into the back. “No, I got it- gimmie a sec-”

“I said leave it!” yelled Mark. The rhythmic double-pulse buzz of the phone felt like it was wired directly into his brain, the scraping of an insect buried between his ears. He felt the car start to drift under his control, and returned both hands to the wheel in a hurry, heart lurching, gripping hard. “Just let it go to message-”

“I got it, dude,” said Anthony- puzzled, uneasy, not a little wounded still. “What if it’s your mom?”

He sat back, poked the screen. “Hey, this is- hello? Shit, missed it.”

“See? Put it back, I don’t care who-”

“Wait, I could check the number-” All of a sudden, Anthony’s voice stopped in its tracks. Mark, glancing desperately sideways in snatches as long as he dared, was in a perfect position to see the exact moment that his worst fears were confirmed, right as it happened. Anthony’s brow scrunched, his hands went still, and he looked down at the phone in silence.

“What’re all these notifications?” he said.

“Don’t,” said Mark, but all the volume had gone out of his voice, all of the force, and with it the ability to even try to sound in control. The word sounded more like a small winded plea, and it was ten to one if Anthony even heard it, his finger already tracing and flicking and tapping, his eyes glued to the small screen.

“Thumbnail edited successfully? Thumbnail edited… thumbnail… description edited successfully… video title edited- Mark?”

Mark couldn’t breathe.

“Mark, what’s going on?”

Mark could feel Anthony looking at him. He could imagine his expression far too well even without looking, his accusing eyes, floating in the darkness with the lights flicking past the windows like the last crashing embers of his oh-so-clever plan. He said nothing, swiping the tears from his face with a quick, hot palm, kept staring straight ahead.

“Why did you change the video title?”

One last try. One last try, to explain again what he’d been trying to explain all weekend, to make Anthony see, as if anybody could explain anything well while battling the rising fury and panic that the embarrassment of being caught red-handed only flamed and fuelled, like throwing water on blazing oil. Like he should have to feel guilty, like he’d done something wrong, when he was doing the only thing he could, the one thing left that he’d been forced to do. Anthony was even incapable of understanding how he had forced him to this, forced him to lie and sneak around and feel like some kind of traitor.

“No-one cares about our videos,” he said, as patiently as he could. “This is the only way they’re going to be seen.”

Anthony was shaking his head slightly, automatically, the harsh light from Mark’s phone casting ghastly blue-white shadows up across his shocked, hurt face as he dropped the phone in his lap and turned to look at Mark.

“You’re making us sound like some stupid contrarian clickbait channel-”

“Those channels actually make money,” said Mark, evenly.

Anthony let out a quiet, punctured breath, and Mark didn’t even have to glance at him now to know he had that maddening, sympathetic, pitying look on his face again. He didn’t want to see it, he didn’t want Anthony’s pity. As if pity wasn’t completely useless, as if pity would green-light his mother’s medical coverage, or save her life.

“Look. I know you’re in a tough situation with your mom,” said Anthony, gently. “I get it! But that doesn’t have anything to do with the channel-”

“No, you don’t get it,” snapped Mark. His hands were still neatly at three and six, but his nails were digging into the fake leather of the wheel and he might as well have been driving underwater, or on Mars, for all the attention he was paying to the road in front of his burning eyes. On one level, he was aware that Anthony was not going to be any more easily convinced by being snapped at, or talked to as if he was a particularly stupid six-year-old. On another, he was too angry to care. “My dad’s not helping, our insurance got denied- I have to take care of her!”

“I’m sorry, Mark-”

Injured, understanding, but even now full of a kind of petulant, aggravating sympathy, Anthony’s voice grated in Mark’s ears and on his fraying nerves. To Mark, he sounded just like a whiny kid whose favourite toy was being handed away to someone else. And maybe that was the last straw, to hear so clearly in Anthony’s voice that the channel, the thing that was being dangled relentlessly over Mark’s head as his last thread of hope, was in Anthony’s eyes nothing but a neat toy he refused to give up, something fun he didn’t want to let go of just because it was his too.

“-but this isn’t just your channel! I’m not going to let you ruin this!”

Because this, this, was really the only thing Anthony cared about. Fun. Keeping something fun.

“You asshole-!”

Anthony’s stunned face, his eyes flicking all of a sudden past him, to the road. In the tumbling slowdown of seconds, his mouth opened without sound, the betrayal in his eyes flaring into panic, horror. Mark turned back to the road, far too late, as the car completed its slow drifting slew across the empty road and hit the kerb with a sickening, bone-shaking lurch, mounting it in a series of terrible earthquake bounces. A final glare of light, a snatch of safety rail, before the car dove headlights-first into a black void beyond. A black and crowding host of branches slamming against the windows, a rush of wet wheels tearing at the soaking grass, a final heavy impact that ended in a splintering crash of glass.

Silence.

Slowly, his pulse a jackhammer in his throat, his heart loud as a marching band in his ears, Mark raised his head. For a moment- a jumbled collection of moments- he wasn’t even sure where he was, only that his neck hurt and he felt sore and shaken in every nerve. His grasp on the thread of the world felt as if it had undergone a terminal skip, and he could catch hold of nothing coherent other than the fact that it was horribly, hideously dark, and something awful had happened.

Was happening.

Reality overtook him fast. Everything tumbled into place, and he jerked forwards- tried to- but his seatbelt held him clamped across the chest, a mechanical death-grip too tight to escape.

“Anthony?”

The car was quiet, the headlights, dash, every system dead and dark. The road, somewhere above and behind them, was empty, hidden, lightless. The engine ticked slowly as it cooled, water dripped and trickled, crushed branches groaned in the damp black night.

“Anthony??”

Fresh air started to seep in, cool against Mark’s face, full of rain and the scent of churned earth and bruised growth.

“Anthony!!”

#dftm #muse arg #don't feed the muse #mark mayhew #anthony williams #captain disillusion #alan the intern #alan amelik #my writing

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brasskingfisher · 1 year

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Queer oppression

A thought has occurred to me, what with all this queer division stuff (as in how TERFs and other divisionists are increasingly pushing this idea of “LGB without the T”). I mean you really think that transphobes and the right wing extremists you’re allying with are going to be willing to make a distinction between Trans and other Queer people?

The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw (and I daresay others) had both Catholic and Protestant Churches. The reason why was that Nazi law classified anyone with Jewish ancestry in the previous 3 generations of their family as Jewish (and therefore liable to be deported to an extermination camp). Under the Apartheid system in South Africa there was a category of “Not Obviously White” (NOW), that is to say people with dark skin who were classified as ‘White’ because of their parentage (usually they had ‘white’ parents but a Black great-grandparent). Hell, even straight people caring for AIDS victims in the 1980s were disowned by their families and treated as being ‘tainted’ because of the fact they had contact with “the gays”.

Attacking trans people is the start. Just because you’re willing to throw trans people under the bus now doesn’t mean they’re going to spare you later once they’ve started removing anyone who doesn’t conform to heteronormativism.

#lgbtq #lgbtq issues #LGBTQIA #lgbt history #discrimination #fuck terfs #screw terfs #fuck exclusionists #queer stuff #queer history #queer shit #fuck conservatives #trans rights #trans issues #trans rights are human rights #lgb with the t

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multifandomfanfiction · 2 years

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I Wanna Dance with Somebody Chapter 4

TITLE: I Wanna Dance with Somebody Chapter 4 PAIRING: Willard/OC RATING: T CHAPTER: 4/? SUMMARY: Molly has just moved to Bomont with her older brother Ren after the death of their mother. Where Ren gets into trouble, Molly tries to remain invisible. That is until an awkward country boy tries to befriend her. Can Willard help her regain the confidence she lost? And more importantly, will he help her to dance again?

“Yeah. Give a little bit of gas,” Willard said as Ren revved the engine of the Bug, “Yeah. That sounds good. Cut it.”

Ren turned off the car and got out.

Woody and Willard were over helping Ren with the car while Molly tried and then failed to hide in the bedroom.

Right now she was seated on the floor of the garage, stretching.

Willard tried not to stare at her. Goddamn she was flexible.

“What’s the deal with the preacher’s daughter? She worth all that attitude?” Ren asked.

“I hear, back in the day, she used to be a goody two-shoes. Now she frontin’ like she some hellraiser. Wearing her jeans tight and everythin’,” Woody said.

“You could put a quarter in that girl’s back pocket and tell if it’s heads or tails,” Willard said.

Ren laughed.

“Why? You’re tryin’ to knock boots with her, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. He is.”

“I’m just curious. I ain’t trying to bang her or take her ballroom dancing.” Ren slammed the truck of the Bug and turned to Molly. “No offense.”

She waved her hand at him dismissively.

“Well, that’d be pretty hard, being that that’s against the law,” Willard told them.

Molly’s brows furrowed as she sat up.

“What? Banging a preacher’s daughter?” Ren asked.

“Nah, public dancing’s against the law if you’re under 18 in Bomont,” Woody explained.

“Shut-up.”

Willard and Woody shared a look.

“Wait, wait, wait. Jump back. Are you kidding me? Dancing is against the law?” Ren asked.

“Yeah, man. We got laws up the poop chute around here. You know, I can’t even bring a bandana to school, because they think I’m in a gang. If my face gets all sweaty, I gotta use the back of my hand. Let me tell you somethin’. This country was built on bandanas,” Willard said.

“So…you’re tellin’ me that Bomont High doesn’t have a prom.”

“Well, you know…” Willard pulled a coke out of the fridge. “They got the Fall Ball, right? Okay, so all the churches get together and put it on. The whole town shots up and everybody’s eyes are on you to make sure you’re dancin’ at least six inches away from your girl.”

“You gotta add another two inches for me,” Woody added.

“And for one song, they make you, they make you dance with your mother. I mean, talk about a boner killer.”

“Hey, my sister’s right there!” Ren said, hitting Willard on the arm.

“Sorry, Molly.”

“The schools don’t wanna have dances on their property. They uh…they say they want to be held liable,” Woody said.

“They don’t wanna be held liable for what?” Ren asked.

“Five seniors died in a car crash coming home from a dance, and that’s when the whole town went crazy. They started blaming it on the liquor, the music, the dancing. After a while everybody started thinking dancing was a sin.”

“But we’re talking about the law, right? Not heaven and hell?”

“Yeah, take that up with Reverend Moore,” Willard said as he laid down on Ren’s weight bench.

“So you’re telling me you don’t do anything for fun around here?”

Woody smirked. “I never said that.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

They pulled into the parking lot of Starlite Drive-in.

Molly didn’t think these things still existed. But apparently, it was the place to hang out in Bomont.

They got out of Ren’s car and walked into the concession stand where they met Woody and his girlfriend.

“You hungry?” Woody asked.

“Yeah. What’s good here?” Ren asked.

“We got nachos, hot dogs, hamburgers.”

“Frito pie, all the way. And if you’re a real man, you’ll eat that jalapeno,” Rusty told them.

“You want anythin’?” Willard asked Molly.

She shook her head.

“Woody! Check the door, man. Cop still here?” the cook asked.

Woody looked outside. “Five-O getting his move on. What you got for me, Uncle Claude?”

Claude pulled out a CD. “David Banner. Bootleg. Don’t get too krunk out there. First sign of the police, I’m gonna pull the plug. I don’t wanna get a fine and you don’t wanna get another ticket.”

“Wait. You got a ticket for dancing?” Ren asked.

“He got two tickets for dancing. One more and he's off the team,” Woody’s girlfriend said.

Hip-hop music started and everyone went outside.

They cheered for Woody as he danced.

Ren turned to Willard and smiled.

“Yeah dude. They get into it.”

“Hey, you. Let’s go. Come on, let’s dance,” Woody’s girlfriend said. She grabbed Ren’s hand and pulled him onto the dancefloor.

Rusty tried to get Willard to dance, but he refused.

“You wanna dance?” Willard asked Molly.

She shook her head, chewing on the cuff of her hoodie.

Willard had noticed she only did that when she was uncomfortable. “Wanna go somewhere quieter?”

She nodded.

They went inside the concession stand.

“Sure you don’t want anythin’ to eat?” Willard asked again.

Molly looked at the menu and shook her head.

Willard ordered some nachos and took her hand in his, leading her out back. He sat down at a picnic table and pushed the nachos over to Molly.

She looked at them. She was starving, but she couldn’t eat in front of Willard. She couldn’t in front of anyone. Not since her mother.

Suddenly the music cut off.

“Attention, attention, Ariel Moore. Will you please come up to the front of the diner? Your daddy is here for you.”

“Well, looks like the party’s over. Come on,” Willard said.

Willard and Molly stood up.

She grabbed the nachos Willard purchased for her and they found her brother and Woody.

“Come on. We should be getting home,” Ren said.

“I’ll get a ride with Woody,” Willard told them.

“You sure?”

Willard waved a hand at them. “Yeah. I’ll see you later. Night Molly.”

Molly watched Willard walk off with Woody before getting in the car.

“Willard pay for those?” Ren asked.

“Yeah,” Molly said softly.

“Better eat up then.”

As Ren put the car in drive, Molly took a bite of the nachos.

Later that night, she texted Willard.

Thank you for the nachos.

Taglist: @theforevermorereject @urmomssidehoeposts @multiple-fandoms-girl

#willard hewitt #willard/oc #Willard Hewitt imagines #ren mccormack #ren mccormack imagines #footloose 2011 #footloose 2011 imagines #miles teller #miles teller imagines

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 months

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President Biden speaks on the border deal, promising to sign the agreed Senate measure as soon as it lands on his desk and making clear that the only thing that stands in the way of the border security revamp becoming law is Donald J Trump.

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 26, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 27, 2024

[There is a description of rape in paragraph 8.]

This afternoon a jury of nine Americans deliberated for less than three hours before it ordered former president Trump to pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of raping her in the 1990s. In May 2023 a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in an assault the judge said is commonly known as rape, and for defaming her. That jury awarded Carroll $5 million.

Despite the jury’s 2023 verdict, Trump has continued to attack Carroll. Indeed, he repeatedly attacked her on social media posts even during this month’s trial. Today’s jury found that Trump acted with malice and awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages, $11 million in compensatory damages for a reputation repair program, and $7.3 million in compensatory damages outside of the reputation program.

Trump immediately called the jury verdict “Absolutely ridiculous!” and said he would appeal. “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!” he posted on social media.

Conservative lawyer George Conway responded. “Not so. The United States of America is about the rule of law, something you couldn’t care less about. Today nine ordinary citizens upheld the rules of law. You have no right to maliciously defame anyone, let alone a woman you raped. In America, we call this justice.”

In June 2023 the court required Trump to move $5.5 million to a bank account controlled by the court to cover the jury’s judgment while he appeals it. For this larger verdict, Trump could do the same thing: pay $83.3 million to the court to hold while he appeals, or try to get a bond, which would require a deposit and collateral and would also incur fees and interest. Any bank willing to lend him that money would likely take into consideration that he has other major financial vulnerabilities and charge him accordingly.

This was not, actually, the case that looked like it would incur staggering costs. More threatening is the other case currently underway in Manhattan, where New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron is considering appropriate penalties for the frauds that Trump, the Trump Organization, the two older Trump sons, and two employees committed in their business dealings. New York attorney general Letitia James, who brought the case, has asked Engoron to impose a $370 million penalty, as well as a prohibition on the Trump Organization from doing business in New York.

Judge Engoron has said he hopes to have a decision by the end of the month.

Former president Trump is under pressure on a number of fronts. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance pointed out tonight in Civil Discourse, two separate juries have now found that Trump acted with malice, and it is becoming harder for him to argue that so many people—two entirely different juries, prosecutors, and so on—are unfairly targeting him. Vance speculates that this latest judgment might hurt his political support. “How do you explain to your kids that you’re going to give your vote in the presidential race to a man who forced his fingers into a woman’s vagina and then lied about it and about her, and exposed her to public ridicule and harm?” she asked.

On the political front, much to his apparent frustration, Trump has not been able to bully former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley out of the race for the Republican nomination, and she is needling him about his mental deterioration. The Republican National Committee has been considering simply deciding Trump is the nominee rather than letting the process play out. The Haley camp responded to that idea with a statement saying that if Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, “wants to be helpful she can organize a debate in South Carolina, unless she’s also worried that Trump can’t handle being on the stage for 90 minutes with Nikki Haley.” Ouch.

Trump’s congressional allies’ attacks on President Biden took another hit today after a business associate of Hunter Biden said in sworn testimony yesterday that President Biden “was never involved” in any of their business dealings.

John Robinson Walker said: “In business, the opportunities we pursued together were varied, valid, well-founded, and well within the bounds of legitimate business activities. To be clear, President Biden—while in office or as a private citizen—was never involved in any of the business activities we pursued…. “Any statement to the contrary is simply false…. Hunter made sure there was always a clear boundary between any business and his father. Always. And as his partner, I always understood and respected that boundary.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s attempts to destroy the bipartisan border deal, in which Democrats appear to have been willing to give away more than the Republicans out of desperate determination to fund Ukraine, are being called out for cynical politics. The news is awash today with stories condemning the Republicans for caving to the demands of a man who is, at least for now, a private citizen and who is putting his own election over the interests of the American people as he tries to keep the issue of immigration alive to exploit in the 2024 campaign.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told his colleagues: “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy…. It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.” Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) told Sahil Kapur and Frank Thorp V of NBC News, “I think it’s crap…. We need to get that deal done to secure the border. If they want to keep it as a campaign issue, I think they need to resign from the damn Senate.”

But while Trump is apparently telling Republicans he will “fix” the border if he gets back into the White House, Greg Sargent noted yesterday in The New Republic that when Trump was in office, “[h]e too released a lot of migrants into the interior, and he couldn’t pass his immigration agenda even with unified GOP control.” And, of course, he never got Mexico to pay for his wall, as he repeatedly claimed he would, while President Joe Biden, in contrast, got Mexico to invest $1.5 billion in “smart” border technology and to beef up its own border security.

The White House has refused to abandon negotiations even as Trump trashed them. In a statement today, Biden said that negotiators have been “[w]orking around the clock, through the holidays, and over weekends,” to craft a bipartisan deal on the border, and he called out Republicans who are now trying to scuttle the bill.

“What’s been negotiated would—if passed into law—be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” he said. “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.

“Further, Congress needs to finally provide the funding I requested in October to secure the border. This includes an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl at our southwest border. Securing the border through these negotiations is a win for America. For everyone who is demanding tougher border control, this is the way to do it. If you’re serious about the border crisis, pass a bipartisan bill and I will sign it.”

Biden seems to be signaling that if the Republicans kill this measure, they will own the border issue, but he is not the only one making that argument. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which slants toward the right, wrote: “[G]iving up on a border security bill would be a self-inflicted GOP wound. President Biden would claim, with cause, that Republicans want border chaos as an election issue rather than solving the problem. Voter anger may over time move from Mr. Biden to the GOP, and the public will have a point. Cynical is the only word that fits Republicans panning a border deal whose details aren’t even known.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board went further, articulating what Republicans are signing up for if they continue to prevent funding for Ukraine. Recalling the horrific images of the April 1975 fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to North Vietnamese forces, when desperate evacuees fought their way to helicopters, the board asked: “Do Republicans want to sponsor the 2024 equivalent of Saigon 1975?”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Biden Administration #US-Mexico Border #Corrupt GOP #US House of Representatives #Trump legal woes #TFG #imploding Republican Party #congress #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson

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mariacallous · 1 year

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There was a ripple of laughter in the US Supreme Court on February 21 when Justice Elena Kagan said: “We are a court—we really don’t know about these things. We are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet."

On February 21, the nine justices heard oral arguments in the case of Gonzalez v. Google, a case brought by Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter was killed in a 2015 ISIS terror attack in Paris and who alleges that YouTube’s algorithm aided in the attack by recommending the group’s recruitment videos to people who would be most susceptible to their message. The outcome of the case could decide the future of social media platforms worldwide.

At the heart of the case is the question of whether tech companies should be held liable for harmful content posted on their platforms by their users—something for which they are currently protected under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, a 1996 piece of legislation whose primary purpose was to increase competition in broadcasting and telecoms markets. It is a protection that has shielded companies whose platforms have enormous reach and influence from being held responsible for harms caused by extremist content and disinformation. But it is also a fundamental underpinning of free speech online.

“The purpose of Section 230 was to try to prevent platforms from becoming the soccer ball that gets kicked around whenever people disagree about what appropriate free expression on the internet is,” says Andrew Sullivan, president and CEO of the Internet Society, which filed an amicus brief in support of Section 230. “If you start to mess with this, you’re fundamentally messing with the design of the internet. And that is going to lead to a splintering of the network.”

Debates over Section 230 have largely been confined to the circuit courts—lower levels of the US federal court system—for nearly two decades. That changed after the 2016 presidential election, when Republican lawmakers began to seize on and amplify often spurious claims that platforms were censoring conservative users. That message proved effective in galvanizing elements of their base, and Republican figures have continued to accuse major tech firms, such as Meta and Twitter, of bias.

One prominent example of this supposedly “biased” enforcement is Facebook’s 2018 decision to ban Alex Jones, host of the right-wing Infowars website who later was slapped with $1.5 billion in damages after harassing the families of the victims of a mass shooting.

Many of the actions that infuriated Republicans were those shielded by the First Amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees free speech. Those protections are essentially unassailable legislatively, so lawmakers targeted Section 230 instead.

Starting in 2018, prominent conservatives began demanding changes to the law that would expressly hinge Section 230’s liability protections on how companies treat political speech. High-profile Republicans, including Missouri senator Josh Hawley and Texas senator Ted Cruz, frequently misconstrued the section’s language. “The predicate for Section 230 immunity … is that you’re a neutral public forum,” Cruz said in 2018, interpreting the law as shielding only websites that treat left- and right-wing political views equally.

Recent laws in both Texas and Florida have sought to impose greater restrictions on the way platforms can and cannot police content.

Gonzalez v. Google takes a different track, focusing on platforms’ failure to deal with extremist content. Social media platforms have been accused of facilitating hate speech and calls to violence that have resulted in real-world harm, from a genocide in Myanmar to killings in Ethiopia and a coup attempt in Brazil.

“The content at issue is obviously horrible and objectionable,” says G. S. Hans, an associate law professor at Cornell University in New York. “But that’s part of what online speech is. And I fear that the sort of extremity of the content will lead to some conclusions or religious implications that I don’t think are really reflective of the larger dynamic of the internet.”

The Internet Society’s Sullivan says that the arguments around Section 230 conflate Big Tech companies—which, as private companies, can decide what content is allowed on their platforms—with the internet as a whole.

“People have forgotten the way the internet works,” says Sullivan. “Because we’ve had an economic reality that has meant that certain platforms have become overwhelming successes, we have started to confuse social issues that have to do with the overwhelming dominance by an individual player or a small handful of players with problems to do with the internet.”

Sullivan worries that the only companies able to survive such regulations would be larger platforms, further calcifying the hold that Big Tech platforms already have.

Decisions made in the US on internet regulation are also likely to reverberate around the world. Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation in India, says a ruling on Section 230 could set a precedent for other countries.

“It’s less about the specifics of the case,” says Waghre. “It’s more about [how] once you have a prescriptive regulation or precedent coming out of the United States, that is when other countries, especially those that are authoritarian-leaning, are going to use it to justify their own interventions.”

India’s government is already making moves to take more control over content within the country, including establishing a government-appointed committee on content moderation and greater enforcement of the country’s IT rules.

Waghre suspects that if platforms have to implement policies and tools to comply with an amended, or entirely obliterated, Section 230, then they will likely apply those same methods and standards to other markets as well. In many countries around the world, big platforms, particularly Facebook, are so ubiquitous as to essentially function as the internet for millions of people.

“Once you start doing something in one country, then that’s used as precedent or reasoning to do the same thing in another country,” he says.

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