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dirtydragonthoughts · 19 hours

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I’ll be honest, when one party’s aiding and abetting the genocide and the other’s outright gonna kill all my friends, I don’t really care if the fascists “win”. They’ve won already.

You know who would be delighted to hear that? Trump and Putin. The US far right and the Russian government have poured lots of time, effort, and money over the last decade+ into convincing US leftists and liberals that things are hopeless, there's no point in even trying to make things better, and the Democrats and Republicans are functionally interchangeable. They do this because one of the easiest ways for them to win is if the left gives up and stops trying. Every person on the left they can convince to give up in despair brings them closer to complete control. Defeatism on the left actively supports victory on the right.

I think your statement is wrong on a number of levels, both factual and emotional. It comes from not understanding what the actual options are for the US government and the President specifically, either at home or abroad. And it will allow actual fascism to flourish and make the world far worse than it is now.

On an emotional level, the way to address this is to stop doomscrolling. Stop focusing on the worst things happening in the world. Don't ignore them! but don't let them consume you. Start looking for the things that are going well. Find places in your community that you can get involved in making things better. Even if it's only on a small scale like volunteering in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, it will help you realize that you aren't helpless, that there are things that can be done to make the world a better place. Stay informed about things on a local, national, and international level, but limit how much time and attention you give to things that depress you that you can't affect. Instead of sitting there thinking about all the ways the world sucks and how awful things are, look for things you can do that are productive, and then do them. You'll feel better and you will have made your corner of the world a little better. And you will be a lot less likely to unintentionally fall into the despair, nihilism, and passivity that the fascists want you to be consumed by.

Always remember that the worlds problems are not resting solely on your shoulders, or solely on America's shoulders, and neither is the hope of fixing them. Everyone has things that we can do to make the world a better place, but there are also things that are beyond our control. We can control what we do; we cannot control what others do. We can and should try to make the world a better place, but focusing on the things we can't change has no positive benefits. Focusing on things we can't change accomplishes two things: it makes you feel bad, and it stops you from doing the things you actually can do to make things better. Neither of these things is good for you or anyone else. Look for things you can do and do them. Keep informed on the things you can't change, but don't focus on them.

On a factual level, let's look at "aiding and abetting genocide," shall we?

First, it's important to remember that the US President is not the God-Emperor Of The World. The US government has limits to what it can and can't do in other countries, and both legally and practically. If the US wants to intervene in a problem in another country, there are a variety of things we can do that boil down to basically four categories. It's a lot more complex than this in practice, of course, but in general here are the categories of things we can do:

Send in the troops. Invade, either by ourselves or as part of a NATO or UN operation. (Or maybe just send in a CIA wetworks team to assassinate the head of state.) I hope you can see the moral problems with this option, and also, we've done this a shitton of times over the course of the 20th Century and pretty much every time we've done it, we've made an already awful situation worse. On a moral level, it's pretty bad, and on a practical level, it's worse. Sure, we could stop the immediate problem, but what then? Consider Afghanistan and Iraq. We got rid of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, and everything went to shit, we spent twenty years occupying Afghanistan with pretty much nothing to show for it. (The Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan.) Things were worse when we left than when we arrived. So this option is pretty much off the table (or should be).

Diplomatic pressure. Now, the thing is, they're a sovereign nation, they don't have to listen to us if they don't want to. We have a lot of things we can leverage--including financial aid--but the only way to force them to do what we want is to invade and conquer, and that only works temporarily. Since we can't force, we have to persuade. This requires us to maintain our existing relationship with the country in question, and possibly strengthen it, because that relationship is what we're leveraging to try and influence them to do what we want them to do. If we do not maintain our relationship, they have no reason to listen to us.

Cut ties and go home. Break off any existing relationship and support, loudly proclaim that they're awful and doing awful things and we wash our hands of the whole situation. This keeps our own hands lily-white and pure, but it also means we have zero leverage to work on any kind of a diplomatic solution. They have no reason to listen to us or care about what we think. We can pat ourselves on the back for doing the right thing, but we destroy our own ability to influence anything. Not just now, but also in the future. Let's say the current crisis ends, and then ten years later there's another crisis. If we want to have any effect then, we would have to start from square one to start building a relationship. Cutting ties would be great for making Americans feel better about ourselves, and there are times when it's the only option, but it should be a last resort. If there is any hope of being able to influence things for the better this will destroy it at least temporarily.

Cut ties and impose sanctions. Break off any existing relationship and support, loudly proclaim that they're awful and doing awful things, but also use the might of the American economy to isolate and punish them. We've done this a lot over the 20th Century, too, and it has never actually resulted in the country in question buckling down and toeing the line we want them to. What happens is the sanctioned country has an economic shock (how long it lasts and how bad it gets depends on a lot of factors) and then pulls themselves back together economically, except this time they're more self-sufficient and less reliant on international trade and financial networks. They tell themselves that America is evil and the cause of all their problems, and so not only do they not listen to us, they actively hate us. And they have fewer international relationships, so fewer reasons to care about what the international community thinks about them. So they're most likely to double down on whatever it is they're doing that we don't like. This one is completely counterproductive and utterly stupid. It's great for making Americans feel better about ourselves, but if we actually care about being able to use our influence for good (or, at least, to mitigate evil) this option shoots us in the foot. It encourages other nations to do the very thing we're trying to stop them from doing.

So, with those four options in mind, both option one (invasion/assassination) and option four (sanctions) are off the table for being immoral and counterproductive. That leaves "breaking our relationship and going home" and "using diplomatic pressure" as our only two viable options.

Biden has chosen option two, diplomatic pressure. Yes, he and our government have continued financial support for Israel ... but with strings attached. They have put limits on it that have never been put on any US foreign aid before. They have taken legal steps to lay the groundwork to target Israeli settlers (i.e. Israeli citizens who confiscate Palestinian homes and businesses). We've been hearing reports for months that Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister, and a far-right-wing demagogue) hates Biden's guts, because Biden is pressuring him to stop the genocide and work towards peace. Biden is maintaining the relationship, and he's using that relationship to try and influence things to curb the violence and pave the way for a just peace settlement of some sort. Biden has also mentioned the possibility of a two state solution where Palestine becomes its own completely separate country. That's huge, because up until this point the US position has always been that Israel is the only possible legitimate nation in that territory. If Biden stopped US support for Israel, it wouldn't force Israel to stop what it's doing ... but it would let them ignore us. It would remove any leverage or influence we might have.

Biden's hands aren't clean. But the only way for them to be clean would be to also give up any chance of influencing the situation or working to protect Palestinians now or in the future. Only time will tell if it works, but I personally would rather have someone who tried and failed than someone who didn't even try. You might disagree about whether this is the right course of action, and there's a lot of room for honest disagreement about the issue (there's a lot of nuances that I'm glossing over or ignoring). But please do acknowledge that Biden isn't supporting Israel because he supports genocide; he's doing it so that he can continue to maintain diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop the violence.

Which brings us back to "aiding and abetting genocide." Trump is not like Biden. Trump is good friends with Netanyahu and backs Israel to the hilt. Trump thinks that all Arabs are terrorists (and all Muslims are terrorists) and genuinely believes the world would be a better place with them dead. Biden is continuing to support Israel, but using that support as influence to get them to stop or slow down. Trump would be using that influence to encourage them.

And those are the two choices. Someone who is trying to curb the genocide, and someone who actively supports it.

I really hope you can see the significant and substantial difference between those two positions.

But let's say that you're right and Biden's policy towards Israel and Palestine is every bit as bad as Trump's would be. If there was nothing to choose between them on foreign policy grounds, there would still be a shitton to choose between them on domestic policy grounds. You admit that the right wants to kill your friends, and yet you don't seem to think that stopping them from killing your friends might be a good thing to do.

"We can't save Palestinians, so we might as well let Republicans destroy the rights, lives, and futures of LGBTQ+ people, women, people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, non-Christians, and anyone else they don't like." "We can't save Palestinians, so why bother to try to save the people we might actually be able to save." "We can't save Palestinians right now, so there's no point in trying to build up a longer-term political bloc that might drag US politics to the left over the long run."

Do you get why there's a problem with that line of thought?

#all this #important #us politics

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dirtydragonthoughts · 19 hours

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#I'm an ex smoker #so none of these really apply to me #polls

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dirtydragonthoughts · 1 day

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I've now finished Part 2 of Exiles.

I am so angry about this book. I'm not really mad that someone got paid to write this; I'm over that. I'm now mad that a) someone got paid to edit this book (maybe? Maybe no one did get paid for that, and that's why it's Like This), and b) there are some good little worldbuilding nuggets in here, but they are completely drowned out by the awful prose.

Ok, onto my thoughts about Part 2, behind the cut.

I'm not going to do a specific review of the plot or anything; suffice it to say that this book is a VERY mid MacGuffin quest story (and actually it's now become a two-fer MacGuffin quest, where they're now looking for TWO things). This is just the things that jumped out at me while I was reading, or things that made me stop and go "what the actual fuck."

I'll start with the good! Junkion is actually a pretty cool concept in this book. It's described as a planetoid made entirely out of junk (mostly old spaceships). There is some vague mentions that pirates abandoned their plundered ships here, and they eventually accreted into Junkion, but that doesn't make a huge amount of sense? Why would you bother hauling a stripped ship halfway across the galaxy just to dump it in a specific place? Space is BIG. Just leave it where you captured it. Anyway, there's a scene where Optimus digs down to the center of the planet and finds a VERY old ship. The viewscreen had been busted in by the pressure of the junk outside the ship, but the interior of the ship itself was in good shape. Anyway, I loved the visual idea of that, digging down through debris and finding intact ships down there. Very neat. Prowl also investigates some of these ships, and it's a nice little view into the depth of Cybertronian history.

Oh, Optimus. He has no agency in this book. He is getting hauled around from plot point to plot point by the Matrix, just as if he was on a leash. Go here. Look at that. Pick that up. Go over there. Et cetera. There's a line "He didn't ask any questions, he just went. The Matrix guided him, as it always had." I mean, why even put the Matrix in a living bot at this point? Why not just install it in a drone?

Characterizations and reactions to things continue to be bizarre. For example, when the Autobots first arrive at Junkion, no one really wants to go down to it. (It looks like a dump, so fair.) But Jazz announces he would rather do maintenance instead of going down to the planet. So Optimus assigns a different team, headed by Hound. Then Jazz gets all butthurt and asks if this means he's getting demoted. Jazz. You literally just asked not to go down to the surface. You're getting what you wanted. What is your problem? The sassing continues for another full page. Complete filler, for no reason other than for Jazz to bitch, and then it's never brought up again.

We get our first scene with the Decepticons, who were all knocked unconscious by some kind of space bridge whatever. During the course of this scene, we do a LOT of POV head-hopping, which I hate. We go from Starscream's thoughts to Megatron's, to Thundercracker, back to Megatron, back to Thundercracker, and finally back to Starscream. OMG, just pick someone's view point to describe the scene from! (On the other hand, we see that the "command trine" is now Thundercracker, Skywarp, and Slipstream!)

Oh, and Soundwave (who took a vow of silence, remember that from the first book) has a line of dialogue that's basically just "Yeah, me too." 🤷‍♀️

I LOL'd at the scene were Prowl and Silverbolt are investigating a dead body. Prowl was there because he had previously investigated murders when he was law enforcement on Cybertron. Silverbolt was there because he'd watched a lot of cop shows on TV. No, I'm not kidding:

At the end of this part, Optimus decides that the dangerous mission he's about to embark on needs Sideswipe and Ratchet. He wishes he could take Bumblebee, but because of Bee's voicebox issues he decides that's a bad idea because communication that was clear and quick could be important. Literally one page later he forgets all of that invites Bee on the mission.

And when I was talking about the writing, here's an example:

I've shown this to a few people who've written fic and they all agreed: wtf is this sentence even.

While out for a walk today, Spouse and I workshopped a rewrite of this. Breaking it into multiple sentences would make it MUCH more clear and help with the readability. There are lots of ways this could be rewritten, but here's a (very fast, off the cuff) rewrite on how it could be fixed up.

The Autobots put the Ark in a parking orbit over what appeared to be a population center. The only thing that made this point on the planet stick out from any other point on the surface was the larger concentration of Spark signals the Ark's sensors could identify.

In this sample, I kept most of the same wording, and I even maintained the "focus" of the paragraph being the Autobots sticking their ship in orbit.

A more vigorous rewrite (pulling in things from the paragraphs around it) might be something like:

The surface of Junkion was nearly uniform, with any given point appearing to be nearly indistinguishable from any other point. However, at one particular point the Ark identified a larger collection of Spark signals, and the onboard systems determined this may be a population center. Optimus ordered the Ark to be placed into a parking orbit over that point, in the hopes that they could find out who was in charge on this planet.

(Incidentally, picking a passage of a book or article and rewriting it in your own style is a very valid writing exercise that I encourage everyone to try once in a while.)

On to Part 3.

I'm finally getting around to reading Transformers: Exiles and

omg. It is so bad. Like, bad on multiple levels.

I read Transformers: Exodus a few years ago. It was... OK. Definitely not a great work of literature, and there were some "huh" moments in it, but it was fine. But now I'm starting on the next book. I didn't look at the TFWiki entry for Exiles until last night, but just the Errors section is absolutely sending me. (The idea that the book was panic rewritten by Hasbro just before publication would explain a LOT of the issues I'm seeing.)

As someone who loves the franchise, it physically hurts that this guy was paid to write this. It is completely phoned in. Now, I'm sure he was writing on spec, and was probably handed an outline or specific plot points/characters that needed to be included, but even with that limitation it could have been a LOT better.

Anyway I'm going to jot down some of my impressions in this thread because I want to make sure I remember why I didn't like this book, years down the road when I see the book still sitting on my bookshelf. (If I even keep it, that is up for debate.) I'll even keep away from the things mentioned in the Error section of the wiki entry, since that's low-hanging fruit.

(If you enjoyed this book I'm glad for you, but I am down to just hate-reading it now. Sorry about that.)

Impressions will be behind cuts in case you don't want to spoil yourself for this masterpiece. XD

I've finished Part 1 and some of the things that stuck with me have been:

There's a thing in fiction writing that's often bandied about, how you should show and don't tell. It's hard to explain to new authors what this means, and why it's a bad thing. Well, this book has about a million examples. Instead of showing how a character is feeling, it just tells us. Optimus was stressed. Optimus was worried. Prowl was irritated.

Related to the showing/telling thing, this book loves just giving a laundry list of things that happen, regardless of how important it is. For example, we got a whole paragraph on what happened after a race on Velocitron. None of these details mattered to the story in any way, but we still got a whole half page of detail about it:

We got a multi-page scene of Prowl cultivating an informant. He gets named (Armco). A few chapters later Prowl brings him in saying "Here's someone who can keep his mouth shut" and then IMMEDIATELY someone tries to blow up the Ark, and Armco falls out of the plot, never to be seen again. RIP Armco, we never knew ya.

Weird character note: The Autobots show up on Velocitron and discover there's a schism in the leadership there, with factions forming on both sides. While the Autobots are preparing to leave the planet, the "bad" leader says something relatively innocuous to Optimus, who then punches the Velocitronian in the face. This sets off a giant battle between the two factions, whereupon the Autobots dip and go through the space bridge. Brilliant.

More when I finish part 2.

#piper reads exiles #transformers: exiles #maccadam

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dirtydragonthoughts · 1 day

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One Year of Bluesky

A year ago today my pal Lou Anders asked me if I wanted an invite to a new microblogging site called Bluesky, which was making a little bit of a news splash because Jack Dorsey was on its board, and because it was initially a sort-off offshoot of what was then still known as Twitter, but designed to eventually be a federated protocol, like Mastodon was. I did want an invite. One, I always like…

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#I think I need to get more serious about cultivating my experience on bluesky #signal boost

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dirtydragonthoughts · 2 days

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Fanart of perictione's fic Domestic Affairs! There's so much imagery in this fic that gives me such a clear picture in my mind and the need to draw it, but I loved this little moment!

Textless and lined versions under the readmore!

#oh yes #VERY GOOD #also very good story #tf megatron #tf optimus prime #megop #art rec #fic rec #queued post

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dirtydragonthoughts · 2 days

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#laugh rule #fallout?#skinwalker dog #art rec #queued post

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dirtydragonthoughts · 2 days

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You know, one time I read a fanfic and it triggered my psychosis, sent me into a month long episode THEN a whole year later I was on ao3 just mindlessly scrolling, I came across the fanfic title and it gave me a panic attack, but something compelled me to click it, i didn't read it but i did scroll through it, why? mental illness.

So like... ya

This is me responding to your old(?) post about someone else's fiction not being able to hurt you, this is probably just a me thing but mental illness makes you do things and react to things in insane ways that sometimes you cant control. I knew while reading that it was affecting me in some way, but I kept reading because well, I'm mentally ill, and then a month of my life dissapeared lol

I think I'm trying to make a point about something but I'm not sure

I did after the fact comment to the author and just kinda, told them about what happened, but I didn't harrassed them or something, -

-but when something does what this fanfiction did to me then you're basically obligated to let the creator know I think(they are a really good writer), I'm an adult and the fanfic was in the ballpark of something I would read and if like, 59% of it was taken out and it had a happy ending I would be fine but oh well

Oh boy, I'm starting to have a panic attack just typing this out holy hell anyways uh, I'm not disagreeing with you(?) but I am saying, don't be too quick to dismiss someone who says a piece of fiction fucked with them? idk sorry, have a good one

My friend, the fiction didn't harm you.

Your mental illness harmed you.

Random writers on the internet are not responsible for managing your mental illness for you.

You are responsible for managing your mental illness.

I knew while reading that it was affecting me in some way, but I kept reading because well, I'm mentally ill

This is self harm. You were engaging in self-harming behavior by continuing to read a fanfiction that you knew was triggering to you.

👉 You are responsible for managing your mental illness.

👉 Writers are not responsible for managing your mental illness for you.

And I hate to tell you this but messaging the author about it was absolutely harassing the author.

#signed #on writing

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