#2021” public records
Photo
Amy Klobuchar, US Senator from Minnesota, on January 6 2021, prior to recess: “January 6 is not typically a day of historical significance for our country. For centuries, this day is simply the day that we receive each State’s certified electoral votes, and it has come and gone without much fanfare.”
Proceedings and Debates of the 117th Congress, First Session. Congressional Record 167, issue 4 (2021, January 6). Full text available at: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CREC-2021-01-06/summary
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17/12/23 this masterlist has been completely, vetted, revamped and reformatted with free access to all reading and viewing material. It will be updated and edited periodically so please click on my username and reblog the current version directly from me if you're able.
The Big Damn List Of Stuff They Said You Didn't Know
(Yes, it's a lot. Just choose your preferred medium and then pick one.)
Podcasts
Backgrounders and Quick Facts
Interactive Maps
Teach-Out Resources
Reading Material (free)
Films and Documentaries (free)
Non-Governmental Organizations
Social Media
How You Can Help
Podcasts
Cocktails & Capitalism: The Story of Palestine Part 1, Part 3
It Could Happen Here: The Cheapest Land is Bought with Blood, Part 2, The Balfour Declaration
Citations Needed: Media narratives and consent manufacturing around Israel-Palestine and the Gaza Siege
The Deprogram: Free Palestine, ft. decolonizatepalestine.com.
Backgrounders and Quick Facts
The Palestine Academy: Palestine 101
Institute for Middle East Understanding: Explainers and Quick Facts
Interactive Maps
Visualizing Palestine
Teach-Out Resources
1) Cambridge UCU and Pal Society
Palestine 101
Intro to Palestine Film + Art + Literature
Resources for Organising and Facilitating)
2) The Jadaliya YouTube Channel of the Arab Studies Institute
Gaza in Context Teach-in series
War on Palestine podcast
Updates and Discussions of news with co-editors Noura Erakat and Mouin Rabbani.
3) The Palestine Directory
History (virtual tours, digital archives, The Palestine Oral History Project, Documenting Palestine, Queering Palestine)
Cultural History (Palestine Open Maps, Overdue Books Zine, Palestine Poster Project)
Contemporary Voices in the Arts
Get Involved: NGOs and campaigns to help and support.
3) PalQuest Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question.
4) The Palestine Remix by Al Jazeera
Books and Articles
Free reading material
My Gdrive of Palestine/Decolonization Literature (nearly all the books recommended below + books from other recommended lists)
Five free eBooks by Verso
Three Free eBooks on Palestine by Haymarket
LGBT Activist Scott Long's Google Drive of Palestine Freedom Struggle Resources
Recommended Reading List
Academic Books
Edward Said (1979) The Question of Palestine, Random House
Ilan Pappé (2002)(ed) The Israel/Palestine Question, Routledge
Ilan Pappé (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, OneWorld Publications
Ilan Pappé (2011) The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Yale University Press
Ilan Pappé (2015) The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, Verso Books
Ilan Pappé (2017) The Biggest Prison On Earth: A History Of The Occupied Territories, OneWorld Publications
Ilan Pappé (2022) A History of Modern Palestine, Cambridge University Press
Rosemary Sayigh (2007) The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Bloomsbury
Andrew Ross (2019) Stone Men: the Palestinians who Built Israel, Verso Books
Rashid Khalidi (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917–2017
Ariella Azoulay (2011) From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, Pluto Press
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir (2012) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Stanford University Press.
Jeff Halper (2010) An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Pluto Press
Jeff Halper (2015) War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification
Jeff Halper (2021) Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State, Pluto Press
Anthony Loewenstein (2023) The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the Technology of Occupation around the World
Noura Erakat (2019) Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Stanford University Press
Neve Gordon (2008) Israel’s Occupation, University of California Press
Joseph Massad (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Routledge
Memoirs
Edward Said (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestine Lives, Columbia University PEdward Saidress
Edward Said (2000) Out of Place; A Memoir, First Vintage Books
Mourid Barghouti (2005) I saw Ramallah, Bloomsbury
Hatim Kanaaneh (2008) A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel, Pluto Press
Raja Shehadeh (2008) Palestinian Walks: Into a Vanishing Landscape, Profile Books
Ghada Karmi (2009) In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso Books
Vittorio Arrigoni (2010) Gaza Stay Human, Kube Publishing
Ramzy Baroud (2010) My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story, Pluto Press
Izzeldin Abuelaish (2011) I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, Bloomsbury
Atef Abu Saif (2015) The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary, Beacon Press
Anthologies
Voices from Gaza - Insaniyyat (The Society of Palestinian Anthropologists)
Letters From Gaza • Protean Magazine
Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1992) Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Columbia University Press
ASHTAR Theatre (2010) The Gaza Monologues
Refaat Alreer (ed) (2014) Gaza Writes Back, Just World Books
Refaat Alreer, Laila El-Haddad (eds) (2015) Gaza Unsilenced, Just World Books
Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke (eds)(2015) Palestine Speaks: Narrative of Life under Occupation, Verso Books
Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing (eds) (2022) Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Haymarket Books
Short Story Collections
Ghassan Kanafani, Hilary Kilpatrick (trans) (1968) Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, Lynne Rienner Publishers
Ghassan Kanafani, Barbara Harlow, Karen E. Riley (trans) (2000) Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, Lynne Rienner Publishers
Atef Abu Saif (2014) The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, Comma Press
Samira Azzam, Ranya Abdelrahman (trans) (2022) Out Of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam
Sonia Sulaiman (2023) Muneera and the Moon; Stories Inspired by Palestinian Folklore
Essay Collections
Edward W. Said (2000) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press
Salim Tamari (2008) Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture, University of California Press
Fatma Kassem (2011) Palestinian Women: Narratives, histories and gendered memory, Bloombsbury
Ramzy Baroud (2019) These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, Clarity Press
Novels
Sahar Khalifeh (1976) Wild Thorns, Saqi Books
Liyana Badr (1993) A Balcony over the Fakihani, Interlink Books
Hala Alyan (2017) Salt Houses, Harper Books
Susan Abulhawa (2011) Mornings in Jenin, Bloomsbury
Susan Abulhawa (2020) Against the Loveless World, Bloomsbury
Graphic novels
Joe Sacco (2001) Palestine
Joe Sacco (2010) Footnotes in Gaza
Naji al-Ali (2009) A Child in Palestine, Verso Books
Mohammad Sabaaneh (2021) Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine, Street Noise Book*
Poetry
Fady Joudah (2008) The Earth in the Attic, Sheridan Books,
Ghassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah (trans) (2012) Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems, Yale University Press
Hala Alyan (2013) Atrium: Poems, Three Rooms Press*
Mohammed El-Kurd (2021) Rifqa, Haymarket Books
Mosab Abu Toha (2022) Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, City Lights Publishers
Tawfiq Zayyad (2023) We Are Here to Stay, Smokestack Books*
The Works of Mahmoud Darwish
Poems
Rafeef Ziadah (2011) We Teach Life, Sir
Nasser Rabah (2022) In the Endless War
Refaat Alareer (2011) If I Must Die
Hiba Abu Nada (2023) I Grant You Refuge/ Not Just Passing
[All books except the ones starred are available in my gdrive. I'm adding more each day. But please try and buy whatever you're able or borrow from the library. Most should be available in the discounted Free Palestine Reading List by Pluto Press, Verso and Haymarket Books.]
Human Rights Reports & Documents
Information on current International Court of Justice case on ‘Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’
UN Commission of Inquiry Report 2022
UN Special Rapporteur Report on Apartheid 2022
Amnesty International Report on Apartheid 2022
Human Rights Watch Report on Apartheid 2021
Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ 2009 (‘The Goldstone Report’)
Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, International Court of Justice, 9 July 2004
Films
Documentaries
Jenin, Jenin (2003) dir. Mohammed Bakri
Massacre (2005) dir. Monica Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen
Slingshot HipHop (2008) dir. Jackie Reem Salloum
Waltz with Bashir (2008) dir. Ari Folman † (also on Amazon Prime)
Tears of Gaza (2010) dir. Vibeke Løkkeberg (also on Amazon Prime)
5 Broken Cameras (2011) dir. Emad Burnat (also on Amazon Prime)
The Gatekeepers (2012) dir. Dror Moreh (also on Amazon Prime)
The Great Book Robbery (2012) | Al Jazeera English
Al Nakba (2013) | Al Jazeera (5-episode docu-series)
The Village Under the Forest (2013) dir. Mark J. Kaplan
Where Should The Birds Fly (2013) dir. Fida Qishta
Naila and the Uprising (2017) (also on Amazon Prime)
GAZA (2019) dir. Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane
Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) dir. Abby Martin
Little Palestine: Diary Of A Siege (2021) dir. Abdallah Al Khatib
Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story (2021) | Al Jazeera World Documentary
Gaza Fights Back (2021) | MintPress News Original Documentary | dir. Dan Cohen
Innocence (2022) dir. Guy Davidi
Short Films
Fatenah (2009) dir. Ahmad Habash
Gaza-London (2009) dir. Dina Hamdan
Condom Lead (2013) dir. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser
OBAIDA (2019) | Defence for Children Palestine
Theatrical Films
Divine Intervention (2002) | dir. Elia Suleiman (also on Netflix)
Paradise Now (2005) dir Hany Abu-Assad (also on Amazon Prime)
Lemon Tree (2008) (choose auto translate for English subs) (also on Amazon Prime)
It Must Be Heaven (2009) | dir. Elia Suleiman †
The Promise (2010) mini-series dir. Peter Kosminsky (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Habibi (2011)* dir. Susan Youssef
Omar (2013)* dir. Hany Abu-Assad †
3000 Nights (2015)* dir. Mai Masri
Foxtrot (2017) dir. Samuel Maoz (also on Amazon Prime)
The Time that Remains (2019) dir. Elia Suleiman †
Gaza Mon Amour (2020) dir. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser †
The Viewing Booth (2020) dir. Ra'anan Alexandrowicz (on Amazon Prime and Apple TV)
Farha (2021)* | dir. Darin J. Sallam
Palestine Film Institute Archive
All links are for free viewing. The ones marked with a star (*) can be found on Netflix, while the ones marked † can be downloaded for free from my Mega account.
If you find Guy Davidi's Innocence anywhere please let me know, I can't find it for streaming or download even to rent or buy.
In 2018, BDS urged Netflix to dump Fauda, a series created by former members of IOF death squads that legitimizes and promotes racist violence and war crimes, to no avail. Please warn others to not give this series any views. BDS has not called for a boycott of Netflix. ]
Planning to link two separate posts here listing all the books in my drive and all the films I couldn't include here. Check back for updates.
NGOs
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement
Medical Aid for Palestinians
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor
Palestine Defence for Children International
Palestinian Feminist Collective
Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
Institute for Palestine Studies
Al Haq
Artists for Palestine
The Palestine Museum
Jewish Currents
B’Tselem
DAWN
Social Media
Palestnians on Tumblr
@el-shab-hussein
@killyfromblame
@apollos-olives
@fairuzfan
@palipunk
@sar-soor
@nabulsi
@ibtisams
@wearenotjustnumbers2
@90-ghost (is in Gaza right now. Please donate to his GFM and boost it.)
@tamarrud
Allies and advocates (not Palestinian)
@bloglikeanegyptian beautiful posts that read like op-eds
@vyorei daily news roundups
@luthienne resistance through prose
@decolonize-the-left scoop on the US political plans and impacts
@feluka
(Please don't expect any of these blogs to be completely devoted to Palestine allyship; they do post regularly about it but they're still personal blogs and post whatever else they feel like. Do not harrass them.)
Gaza journalists
Motaz Azaiza IG: @motaz_azaiza | Twitter: @azaizamotaz9 | TikTok: _motaz.azaiza (left Gaza as of Jan 23)
Bisan Owda IG and TikTok: wizard_bisan1 | Twitter: @wizardbisan
Saleh Aljafarawi IG: @saleh_aljafarawi | Twitter: @S_Aljafarawi | TikTok: @saleh_aljafarawi97
Plestia Alaqad IG: @byplestia | TikTok: @plestiaaqad (left Gaza)
Wael Al-Dahdouh IG: @wael_eldahdouh | Twitter: @WaelDahdouh (left Gaza as of Jan 13)
Hind Khoudary IG: @hindkhoudary | Twitter: @Hind_Gaza
Ismail Jood IG and TikTok: @ismail.jood (announced end of coverage on Jan 25)
Yara Eid IG: @eid_yara | Twitter: @yaraeid_
Eye on Palestine IG: @eye.on.palestine | Twitter: @EyeonPalestine | TikTok: @eyes.on.palestine
Muhammad Shehada Twitter: @muhammadshehad2
(Edit: even though some journos have evacuated, the footage up to the end of their reporting is up on their social media, and they're also doing urgent fundraisers to get their families and friends to safety. Please donate or share their posts.)
News organisations
The Electronic Intifada Twitter: @intifada | IG: @electronicintifada
Quds News Network Twitter and Telegram: @QudsNen | IG: @qudsn (Arabic)
Times of Gaza IG: @timesofgaza | Twitter: @Timesofgaza | Telegram: @TIMESOFGAZA
The Palestine Chronicle Twitter: @PalestineChron | IG: @palestinechron | @palestinechronicle
Al-Jazeera Twitter: @AJEnglish | IG and TikTok: @aljazeeraenglish, @ajplus
Middle East Eye IG and TikTok: @middleeasteye | Twitter: @MiddleEastEye
Democracy Now Twitter and IG: @democracynow TikTok: @democracynow.org
Haaretz* Twitter: @Haaretz | IG: haaretzcom
Mondoweiss IG and TikTok: @mondoweiss | Twitter: @Mondoweiss
The Intercept Twitter and IG: @theintercept
MintPress Twitter: @MintPressNews | IG: mintpress
Novara Media Twitter and IG: @novaramedia
Truthout Twitter and IG: @truthout
[*Please note that Haaretz is an Israeli Liberal Zionist newspaper and heavily propagandized against Palestine. It's included here only as a Zionist critic of the Israeli government and IDF from within Israel.]
Palestnians on Other Social Media
Mouin Rabbani: Middle East analyst specializing in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian affairs. Twitter: @MouinRabbani
Noura Erakat: Legal scholar, human rights attorney, specialising in Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Twitter: @4noura | IG: @nouraerakat | (http://www.nouraerakat.com/)
Hebh Jamal: Journalist in Germany. IG and Twitter: @hebh_jamal
Ghada Sasa: PhD candidate in International Relations, green colonialism, and Islam in Canada. Twitter: @sasa_ghada | IG: @ghadasasa48
Taleed El Sabawi: Assistant professor of law and researcher in public health. Twitter: @el_sabawi | IG
Lexi Alexander: Filmmaker and activist. Twitter: @LexiAlex | IG: @lexialexander1
Mariam Barghouti: Writer, blogger, researcher, and journalist. Twitter: @MariamBarghouti | IG: @mariambarghouti
Rasha Abdulhadi: Queer poet, author and cultural organizer. Twitter: @rashaabdulhadi
Mohammed el-Kurd: Writer and activist from Jerusalem. IG: @mohammedelkurd | Twitter: @m7mdkurd
Ramy Abdu: Founder and Chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Twitter: @RamyAbdu
Subhi: Founder of The Palestine Academy website. IG: @sbeih.jpg |TikTok @iamsbeih | Twitter: @iamsbeih
Allies
Lowkey (Kareem Dennis): Rapper, activist, video and podcast host for MintPress. Twitter: @LowkeyOnline IG: @lowkeyonline
Francesca Albanese: UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories. Twitter: @FranceskAlbs
Sana Saeed: Journalist and media critic, host and senior producer at Al-Jazeera Plus. IG: @sanaface | Twitter: @SanaSaeed
Shailja Patel: Poet, playwright, activist, founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice. Twitter: @shailjapatel
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores: Researcher in curriculum studies, decolonial theory, social movements. Twitter: @Jairo_I_Funez
Jack Dodson: Journalist and Filmmaker. Twitter: @JackDodson IG: @jdodson4
Imani Barbarin: Writer, public speaker, and disability rights activist. IG: @crutches_and_spice | Twitter: @Imani_Barbarin | TikTok: @crutches_and_spice
Jewish Allies
Katie Halper: US comedian, writer, filmmaker, podcaster, and political commentator. IG and Twitter: @kthalps
Amanda Gelender: Writer. Twitter: @agelender | (https://agelender.medium.com/)
Yoav Litvin: Jerusalem-born Writer and Photographer. IG and Twitter: @nookyelur | (yoavlitvin.com)
Alana Lentin: Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. Twitter: @alanalentin
Gideon Levy: anti-Zionist Israeli journalist and activist. Twitter: @gideonle
How You Can Help Palestine
How to be an Ally 101
URGENT‼️📢: Global Strike Guide
If any links are broken let me know. Or pull up the current post to check whether it's fixed.
"Knowledge is Israel's worst enemy. Awareness is Israel's most hated and feared foe. That's why Israel bombs a university: it wants to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism."
— Dr. Refaat Alareer, (martyred Dec 6, 2023)
From River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸
-----
Edit 1: took the first video down because turns out the animator is a terf and it links to her blog. Really sorry for any distress.
Edit 2: All recommended readings + Haymarket recommendations + essential decolonization texts have been uploaded to my linked gdrive. I will adding more periodically. Please do buy or check them out from the library if possible, but this post was made for and by poor and gatekept Global South bitches like me.
Some have complained about the memes being disrespectful. You're actually legally obligated to make fun of Israeli propaganda and Zionists. I don't make the rules.
Edit 3: "The river to the sea" does not mean the expulsion of Jews from Palestine. Believing that is genocide apologia.
Edit 4: Gazans have specifically asked us to put every effort into pushing for a ceasefire instead of donations. "Raising humanitarian aid" is a grift Western governments are pushing right now to deflect from the fact that they're sending billions to Israel to keep carpet bombing Gazans. As long as the blockades are still in place there will never be enough aid for two million people. (UPDATE: PLEASE DONATE to the Gazan's GoFundMe fundraisers to help them buy food and get out of Rafah into Egypt. E-SIMs, food and medical supplies are also essential. Please donate to the orgs linked in the How You Can Help. Go on the strikes. DO NOT STOP PROTESTING.)
Edit 5: Google drive link for academic books folder has been fixed. Also have added a ton of resources to all the other folders so please check them out.
Edit 6: Added interactive maps, Jadaliya channel, and masterlists of donation links and protest support and of factsheets.
The twitter accounts I reposted as it was given to me and I just now realized it had too many Israeli voices and almost none of the Palestinians I'm following, so it's being edited. Check back for more. I also removed sources like Jewish Voices of Peace and Breaking the Silence that do good work but have come under fair criticism from Palestinians.
Edit 7: Complete reformatting
Edit 8: Complete revamping of the social media section. It now reflects my own following list.
Edit 9: removed some more problematic people from the allies list. Remember that the 2SS is a grift that's used to normalize violence and occupation, kids. Supporting the one-state solution is lowest possible bar for allyship. It's "Free Palestine" not "Free half of Palestine and hope Israel doesn't go right back to killing them".
Edit 10: added The Palestine Directory + Al Jazeera documentary + Addameer. This "100 links per post" thing sucks.
Edit 11: more documentaries and films
Edit 12: reformatted reading list
Edit 13: had to remove @palipunk's masterlist to add another podcast. It's their pinned post and has more resources Palestinian culture and crafts if you want to check it out
Edit 14 6th May '24: I've stopped updating this masterlist so some things, like journalists still left in Gaza and how to support the student protests are missing. I've had to take a step back and am no longer able to track these things down on my own, but if you can leave suggestions for updates along with links in either the replies or my asks I can try and add them.
#free palestine#palestine resources#palestine reading list#decolonization#israel palestine conflict#israel palestine war#british empire#american imperialism#apartheid#social justice#middle east history#MENA#arab history#anti zionism#palestinian art#palestinian history#palestinian culture#palestinian genocide#al nakba#ethnic cleansing#war crimes#racism#imperialism#colonialism#british colonialism#knee of huss#ask to tag#Youtube
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they have a point though. you wouldn't need everyone to accommodate you if you just lost weight, but you're too lazy to stick to a healthy diet and exercise. it's that simple. I'd like to see you back up your claims, but you have no proof. you have got to stop lying to yourselves and face the facts
Must I go through this again? Fine. FINE. You guys are working my nerves today. You want to talk about facing the facts? Let's face the fucking facts.
In 2022, the US market cap of the weight loss industry was $75 billion [1, 3]. In 2021, the global market cap of the weight loss industry was estimated at $224.27 billion [2].
In 2020, the market shrunk by about 25%, but rebounded and then some since then [1, 3] By 2030, the global weight loss industry is expected to be valued at $405.4 billion [2]. If diets really worked, this industry would fall overnight.
1. LaRosa, J. March 10, 2022. "U.S. Weight Loss Market Shrinks by 25% in 2020 with Pandemic, but Rebounds in 2021." Market Research Blog.
2. Staff. February 09, 2023. "[Latest] Global Weight Loss and Weight Management Market Size/Share Worth." Facts and Factors Research.
3. LaRosa, J. March 27, 2023. "U.S. Weight Loss Market Partially Recovers from the Pandemic." Market Research Blog.
Over 50 years of research conclusively demonstrates that virtually everyone who intentionally loses weight by manipulating their eating and exercise habits will regain the weight they lost within 3-5 years. And 75% will actually regain more weight than they lost [4].
4. Mann, T., Tomiyama, A.J., Westling, E., Lew, A.M., Samuels, B., Chatman, J. (2007). "Medicare’s Search For Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not The Answer." The American Psychologist, 62, 220-233. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2007.
The annual odds of a fat person attaining a so-called “normal” weight and maintaining that for 5 years is approximately 1 in 1000 [5].
5. Fildes, A., Charlton, J., Rudisill, C., Littlejohns, P., Prevost, A.T., & Gulliford, M.C. (2015). “Probability of an Obese Person Attaining Normal Body Weight: Cohort Study Using Electronic Health Records.” American Journal of Public Health, July 16, 2015: e1–e6.
Doctors became so desperate that they resorted to amputating parts of the digestive tract (bariatric surgery) in the hopes that it might finally result in long-term weight-loss. Except that doesn’t work either. [6] And it turns out it causes death [7], addiction [8], malnutrition [9], and suicide [7].
6. Magro, Daniéla Oliviera, et al. “Long-Term Weight Regain after Gastric Bypass: A 5-Year Prospective Study - Obesity Surgery.” SpringerLink, 8 Apr. 2008.
7. Omalu, Bennet I, et al. “Death Rates and Causes of Death After Bariatric Surgery for Pennsylvania Residents, 1995 to 2004.” Jama Network, 1 Oct. 2007.
8. King, Wendy C., et al. “Prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorders Before and After Bariatric Surgery.” Jama Network, 20 June 2012.
9. Gletsu-Miller, Nana, and Breanne N. Wright. “Mineral Malnutrition Following Bariatric Surgery.” Advances In Nutrition: An International Review Journal, Sept. 2013.
Evidence suggests that repeatedly losing and gaining weight is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function [10].
10. Tomiyama, A Janet, et al. “Long‐term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6 July 2017.
Prescribed weight loss is the leading predictor of eating disorders [11].
11. Patton, GC, et al. “Onset of Adolescent Eating Disorders: Population Based Cohort Study over 3 Years.” BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 20 Mar. 1999.
The idea that “obesity” is unhealthy and can cause or exacerbate illnesses is a biased misrepresentation of the scientific literature that is informed more by bigotry than credible science [12].
12. Medvedyuk, Stella, et al. “Ideology, Obesity and the Social Determinants of Health: A Critical Analysis of the Obesity and Health Relationship” Taylor & Francis Online, 7 June 2017.
“Obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition [13, 14] and its appearance may be a protective response to the onset of numerous chronic conditions generated from currently unknown causes [15, 16, 17, 18].
13. Kahn, BB, and JS Flier. “Obesity and Insulin Resistance.” The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Aug. 2000.
14. Cofield, Stacey S, et al. “Use of Causal Language in Observational Studies of Obesity and Nutrition.” Obesity Facts, 3 Dec. 2010.
15. Lavie, Carl J, et al. “Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease: Risk Factor, Paradox, and Impact of Weight Loss.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 26 May 2009.
16. Uretsky, Seth, et al. “Obesity Paradox in Patients with Hypertension and Coronary Artery Disease.” The American Journal of Medicine, Oct. 2007.
17. Mullen, John T, et al. “The Obesity Paradox: Body Mass Index and Outcomes in Patients Undergoing Nonbariatric General Surgery.” Annals of Surgery, July 2005. 18. Tseng, Chin-Hsiao. “Obesity Paradox: Differential Effects on Cancer and Noncancer Mortality in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.” Atherosclerosis, Jan. 2013.
Fatness was associated with only 1/3 the associated deaths that previous research estimated and being “overweight” conferred no increased risk at all, and may even be a protective factor against all-causes mortality relative to lower weight categories [19].
19. Flegal, Katherine M. “The Obesity Wars and the Education of a Researcher: A Personal Account.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases, 15 June 2021.
Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called “normal weight” people are “unhealthy” whereas about 50% of so-called “overweight” people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone [20].
20. Rey-López, JP, et al. “The Prevalence of Metabolically Healthy Obesity: A Systematic Review and Critical Evaluation of the Definitions Used.” Obesity Reviews : An Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, 15 Oct. 2014.
While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national obesity rates (nearly 35% for adults and 18% for kids), the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as fat overnight—to match international guidelines. But critics noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs [21].
21. Butler, Kiera. “Why BMI Is a Big Fat Scam.” Mother Jones, 25 Aug. 2014.
Body size is largely determined by genetics [22].
22. Wardle, J. Carnell, C. Haworth, R. Plomin. “Evidence for a strong genetic influence on childhood adiposity despite the force of the obesogenic environment” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Vol. 87, No. 2, Pages 398-404, February 2008.
Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index [23].
23. Matheson, Eric M, et al. “Healthy Lifestyle Habits and Mortality in Overweight and Obese Individuals.” Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine : JABFM, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 25 Feb. 2012.
Weight stigma itself is deadly. Research shows that weight-based discrimination increases risk of death by 60% [24].
24. Sutin, Angela R., et al. “Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality .” Association for Psychological Science, 25 Sept. 2015.
Fat stigma in the medical establishment [25] and society at large arguably [26] kills more fat people than fat does [27, 28, 29].
25. Puhl, Rebecca, and Kelly D. Bronwell. “Bias, Discrimination, and Obesity.” Obesity Research, 6 Sept. 2012.
26. Engber, Daniel. “Glutton Intolerance: What If a War on Obesity Only Makes the Problem Worse?” Slate, 5 Oct. 2009.
27. Teachman, B. A., Gapinski, K. D., Brownell, K. D., Rawlins, M., & Jeyaram, S. (2003). Demonstrations of implicit anti-fat bias: The impact of providing causal information and evoking empathy. Health Psychology, 22(1), 68–78.
28. Chastain, Ragen. “So My Doctor Tried to Kill Me.” Dances With Fat, 15 Dec. 2009. 29. Sutin, Angelina R, Yannick Stephan, and Antonio Terraciano. “Weight Discrimination and Risk of Mortality.” Psychological Science, 26 Nov. 2015.
There's my "proof." Where is yours?
#inbox#fat liberation#fat acceptance#fat activism#anti fatness#anti fat bias#anti diet#resources#facts#weight science#save
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How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage
I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition
And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth
That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.
The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.
That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.
The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:
https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator
It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/
When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706
Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."
It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."
It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.
That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22
While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.
Google forcefully disputed this claim:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297
They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.
Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:
https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529
She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.
I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.
I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.
Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:
Make everything as complicated as possible;
Make everything as secret as possible;
Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
Image:
Jason Rosenberg (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/
CC BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
--
Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/
CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
#pluralistic#secrecy#opacity#google#antitrust#trustbusting#wired#working the refs#megan grey#semantic matching
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On the incredible danger of the quaint, English village....
Although I live in Texas, thanks to various streaming services I get to watch a great deal of British T.V. I have noticed that these shows (Midsomer Murders, Dalziel and Pascoe, Waking the Dead, Shakespeare and Hathaway, Vera, Rosemary & Thyme, Wycliffe, etc.) share a common theme.
And, after a certain amount of research I discovered that, believe it or not, the third leading cause of death in the UK seems to be "Moving to a quaint, country village".
While “Getting murdered in a quaint, English, village” killed slightly fewer UK Residents in 2021 than "Cancer" and "Heart Disease" it was distressingly close. Even worse it came in only slightly ahead of "Attending a weekend party at a stately country home", which is in itself a fairly lethal pastime. In fact “Attending a weekend party at a stately country home” WAS the second leading cause of death in Britain between 1919 and 1939, but began to decline after the war as the Labour Govt. raised taxes and the number of country homes dropped drastically; thus causing a steep decline in the number of weekend parties one could be murdered at.
In any case my research indicates that IF you are British, AND you are feeling down, depressed, and suicidal, there is no reason for you to run your car off a cliff, or take a trip to Switzerland.
In fact, you need only do the following
1) move to a lovely, quiet, English village where nothing ever happens, but the murder rate is (adjusted for population) is far higher than that of South Chicago or East L.A.
You might think that such a village would be hard to find, but apparently England is simply teeming with them. Places with highly competitive flower shows or bleak, cliff filled coastlines seem to be particularly deadly.
2) Change your will, and make sure to mention this to the former beneficiary. (This is vitally important!) Also make sure to let them know where the new will is kept. The top drawer of your desk is probably the best place, no need for locking file cabinets or bank safety deposit boxes!
3) Develop a keen interest in local land titles and/or genealogy. In fact you should probably announce that you are writing a book on the subject. (It is suggested that you do so in a crowded pub.)
In any case make sure to spend plenty of time at the local public records office researching this while receiving vaguely threatening remarks from various upset neighbours. If you receive any threatening notes make sure to save them in an easily discovered drawer somewhere, but do NOT mention them to anybody, and certainly do not heed any warnings you are given about a need to “back off”. That last one is ESSENTIAL.
4) Stand against the most popular member in the election for Parish Council. Threatening to win the local flower show is also a good move.
5) Always leave the door or doors unlocked at night. (This includes your car.) Even if you have lived in London for decades, discard any habits you may have about locking up as soon as you move to the quaint, country, murder hole.
6) Never close any curtains or blinds, that way your future assailant always knows exactly where you are and what you are doing.
7) Either don't have a phone or keep it in an inaccessible or hard to find place.
8) Never, ever have any useful weapons nearby or if you do ensure you lose of drop them immediately on seeing your assailant.
Do this, and you’re guaranteed to be pushing up daisies by Christmas.
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Hi there - I'm trans and Jewish and I'd like to share my perspective on the "trans genocide" thing. I don't think we're experiencing active genocide in the US; that's definitely an extreme and offensive statement to make regarding what's happening. However, I do think that the increasing legislation attacking trans rights and autonomy as well as an increasingly polarized public view of trans people points to the potential for a worse situation that moves closer to genocide.
Now, personally, I live in a state where no laws limiting trans rights have passed. I was able to legally begin my medical transition when I was 15, I've never experienced transphobic violence, and the majority of people around me are supportive of my transition. My experience is similar to most other trans people in my area, with varying degrees of familial support.
But nation wide, we have seen an increase of trans people being murdered, and a massive increase in anti-trans legislation. This legislation aims to strip trans people of their autonomy and privacy. It seeks to put trans children in danger, remove information about what it is to be trans or queer from children's access, and enforce archaic ideas about what it means to be a man or woman.
Most of this is happening because right wing politicians can capitalize on moral outrage and fear to win votes. They're scapegoating trans people instead of trying to improve the lives of their constituents. This is kind of politician's thing, so it's not surprising in any way. However, when those policies successfully do win these politicians support, they'll have to make them more extreme. They'll want to make it illegal to exist as a trans person in public.
Now I'm not saying that that's genocide. I think we're an awfully long way off from trans people being mass arrested for being trans, and then murdered by the state. But we are in a rising climate of fear, and I don't think the trans people calling this the seventh stage of genocide are doing so out of bad faith. I think they're doing that because they are terrified of having their right to take life-saving medication, or have protection in the workplace, or be able to use a bathroom, or have children, or wear what they want to wear taken away. And they're terrified of those things because the bills on the table in states across the country put those rights in jeopardy. And if calling this a genocide makes people pay attention? I'm not super mad about it.
Hi, thank you for sharing your perspective on this. I appreciate it.
Your fear is primarily based on sensationalist headlines and interpretations of the law that are unfounded. I can assure you, you are not even in the early stages of a genocide.
But nation wide, we have seen an increase of trans people being murdered
In 2021, the Human Rights Campaign recorded 50 deaths of trans, nonbinary and GNC people.
In 2022, the HRC recorded 38 deaths (source). So. If we take these numbers at face value, that's a decrease of nearly 25% in one year, in a growing section of the population.
Taking these numbers and the size of the transgender population in the US (1.6 million), in 2021, trans people had a death rate of 3.1/100k, and in 2022, this dropped to 2.4. Again, the numbers provided by the HRC include nonbinary and GNC people, and accidental deaths.
Some of these aren't even murders or intentional homicides. They just say they were killed. I wouldn't consider these numbers reliable whatsoever, but they're the only estimate we have for now. There are so few trans deaths that they can fit on a single Wikipedia page, along with a little blurb about their life and who they were. It would be impossible to do something similar with victims of femicide, since there are too many to count. This page lists victims of femicide, only in Canada, only in 2022, and it is nearly as long as the Wikipedia page I listed above.
This is a perfect segue to my next point, which is to compare trans genocide to femicide, which is actually real. Women are killed so often that the UN has to categorize female murder victims as either killings (unnatural deaths), intentional homicides or gender-related killings (hate crimes, therefore considered in femicide statistics).
The intentional homicide rate for female victims in the US is 2.9/100k (data from 2021), and it is steadily increasing after having been on the decline since the mid-90s.
That only includes the pink and red circles shown in the UN's chart, not accidental deaths or unknown deaths like the HRC includes in their counts. Some countries have as many as 10.6/100k women die a year.
TL;DR: The murder rate for trans people in the US is not increasing, it is decreasing. This isn't indicative of a trans genocide in the slightest.
But nation wide, we have seen [...] a massive increase in anti-trans legislation.
As I was saying earlier, this idea stems from sensationalist headlines. It's concerning to me how widespread the misinformation about anti trans legislation really is, when house bills are publicly available online. You can literally do a quick Google search and find that most of these bills are nothing burgers.
Unfortunately, it's easier for you to just go on a website like translegislation.com and have them tell you what these bills say. I'll do some of the work for you and go through how these sites lie to you.
Alabama imposing criminal penalties on providers of trans healthcare? Sounds scary. Let's see what the source they linked, the HRC, has to say.
Ah. So it's specifically regarding transgender youth. As in, minors. This is after going through an insanely long title detailing how bad the bill is. The trans legislation tracker essentially lies by omission, implying that all trans healthcare is being criminalized.
Going to the bill in question, AL SB184, we can see that it actually acknowledges the existence of dysphoria in children.
However, they also acknowledge that this feeling may be fleeting, and that making permanent changes to a child's body solely on account of the child's personal sense of identity is unwise.
I won't go through every single bill here, as this post is already very long, but you get the idea. Feel free to send another ask if you would like me to look at specific bills.
Back to your ask: the way you speak of these bills shows that you've never read them for yourself or know how legislation works, since you're acting like it's the beginning of Armageddon.
This legislation aims to strip trans people of their autonomy and privacy. It seeks to put trans children in danger, remove information about what it is to be trans or queer from children's access, and enforce archaic ideas about what it means to be a man or woman.
I'm assuming by autonomy and privacy, you mean the choice to undergo medical transition and the bathroom/locker room/women's sports issue respectively.
Bills limiting "gender-affirming" care are focused on children, since puberty blockers like Lupron are now known to have very negative and permanent effects. The bills don't ban adults from choosing to take HRT. It's extremely profitable for doctors to continue to prescribe HRT and for surgeons to continue to recommend expensive plastic surgeries. Legislation won't go that route unless there's a massive shift in public perception.
The "Save Women's Sports Act" literally just limits participation in women's school sports to females only. That's it. The trans legislation tracker even acknowledges this.
Most of these bills are copy pasted from eachother, which is why they're all dubbed as "Save Women's Sports." Here's a snippet from HB61 in Ohio:
If someone's sex is brought into question, a simple blood test is all that's needed. Contrary to what the media may have led you to believe, there are no forcible genital inspections. No trans person is being forced to undress for this. Only 6 trans "girls" are affected by this in Ohio, out of 400k total athletes in girl's sports. So I'm not sure why this feels like a precursor to genocide to you.
remove information about what it is to be trans or queer from children's access,
Personally, I don't think children should be aware that medical transition is even a remote possibility unless they are in extreme psychological distress related to their sex. Even then, therapy is usually the best solution. I don't think the "Gender Unicorn," a surprisingly complex graphic created in part by an alleged violent rapist and groomer, should be used in classrooms to teach children about gender ideology. Gender ideology should be taught to college students who are better equipped to form their own opinion, not children who barely know how to read.
There are better, more useful things to push in our education curriculum, like compulsory comprehensive sex ed. That way, young men don't learn about sex through violent pornography, and young girls don't accidentally get pregnant without knowing what it means. This would also be a good time to teach them about sexual orientation. Leaving it up to the parents or focusing on abstinence evidently doesn't work.
enforce archaic ideas about what it means to be a man or woman.
The lack of self-awareness here is pretty astounding. The trans movement actively enforces these archaic ideas of gender by telling tomboys that they might actually be a boy. This implies that femininity is what makes womanhood, which is objectively untrue.
By telling masculine women that they are men and feminine men that they are women, you're literally enforcing the gender roles you say you're destroying.
They'll want to make it illegal to exist as a trans person in public.
You can speculate about this all you want, but you can't see laws limiting child transition and keeping sports sex-segregated as writing on the wall. We're not even close to that.
Now I'm not saying that that's genocide. I think we're an awfully long way off from trans people being mass arrested for being trans, and then murdered by the state.
I'm glad to hear you are moderately sane.
But we are in a rising climate of fear,
Your phrasing reminds me of US politics in the wake of 9/11. When people act out of fear, decisions are made in haste, and wars are started over made-up WMDs. Being fearful clouds your judgement.
Look around you. You're safe and accepted. The trans flag is flown almost everywhere in June. A trans woman won the NCAA National Champion title just last year. For International Women's Day, multiple companies featured trans women. Time Magazine featured many trans women as Women of the Year. Language is now inclusive, so women don't actually exist anymore. We're just uterus havers. This is all to cater to trans people.
Yeah. It's getting to be a bit much, isn't it? Don't you expect the least bit of pushback, especially from women? We aren't living in fear of some invisible boogeyman. We are angry at how rapidly our hard work has been undone.
We're pissed that after decades of feminist progress, we've regressed to being considered non-men once again.
and I don't think the trans people calling this the seventh stage of genocide are doing so out of bad faith. I think they're doing that because they are terrified of having their right to take life-saving medication, or have protection in the workplace, or be able to use a bathroom, or have children, or wear what they want to wear taken away.
Puberty blockers and HRT do not save lives. They actually haven't been proven to have a substantial enough effect on mental health to consider them an adequate treatment for gender dysphoria.
2. Trans people have the same basic human rights as any other human being.
3. Many places are adding gender-neutral bathrooms in order to accommodate the growing trans population. No one is checking your genitals at the door of a bathroom, no one cares that much. I care about girls being assaulted at school by boys in skirts and the school boards covering it up in the name of trans acceptance (x).
4. Trans people remove their own ability to have children by going on puberty blockers, HRT and even eventually physically castrating themselves. If you mean the ability to adopt or foster children, I don't know. Gay and lesbian couples still have a hard time adopting to this day, so progress can be made in that department.
To conclude this hodgepodge of various facts, screenshots and links, I'll leave you with this:
I fundamentally disagree with you that crying "genocide" is in any way helpful for your community. It's not. Most of Western society might have forgotten what genocide looks like or doesn't even know what the word means anymore, but you should know better as a Jew.
The attention trans people get from saying that they're going through a genocide is overwhelmingly negative from people on both ends of the political spectrum at this point. People are annoyed at trans people for making shit up, which ruins your movement's credibility.
When you have to lie to get someone's attention, you've already lost.
#trans genocide#anti trans bills#radfemfox#ask#anon#debunked#rad fem#radblr#radfem#radfem safe#radfems#radical feminism#terf#terfblr#terfs#terf safe#terfsafe#gender critical#radical feminists do interact#radical feminst#radical feminist community#radical feminist safe#radical feminists do touch#radical feminists please interact#radical feminists please touch#femicide#feminism#feminist#sex not gender#female not feminine
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The Ultimate Lestappen Fic Masterlist ™
Hello all. This list has about 70+ fics within it. That’s just under 1,000,000 words solely dedicated to the Carbonara Leclerc-Verstappens. (yes i counted) I’ve tried to maintain my organization throughout, but if something looks a little janky or feels out of place, let me know. (Lord knows I never made this list thinking I would make it public but alas, here we are) The key is simple:
> (Title) +/= (Multichaptered/One-Shot)
(Summary)
!!! (Link)
• (Tags - please note these are just the tags I saw relevant to myself, double check the fics themselves for any other tags you might deem relevant!) *(Word count)
Now I’ve put a ♥️ next to all of my personal favorites. Remember, this is a masterlist and a fic rec if that’s what you’re looking for. I will never read (or record) any fic that is not up to my personal golden standard; so everything you see below has been read and vetted by yours truly 💋 I will also tag my favorite authors at the bottom of this post so you can go view their pages and send them some love :^) Note: All of these works are on Ao3. There is only one WIP in this list and it is stated with the fic. Now go crazy you animals ;))
(p.s. some of the fic descriptions are quite long, but with respect to the authors wishes I feel that it would be a dishonesty to chop them off though so you’ll have to deal with it) Here we go!!!!!!!! (under the Read More)
> Home (Is Wherever I’m With You) + ♥️
Or: Charles leaves Ferrari, tries to win a championship, and learns some things about belonging. All the while, Max is there.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/40801053/chapters/102234501
• Angst, Fluff, Red Bull!Charles *17.9k
> On The Limit = (Series - Objects in the Mirror) ♥️
Two Formula 1 drivers walk into a bar and accidentally have a heart-to-heart.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43252263
• Angst, Heart to Heart *6.8k
> Leave No Space = (Series - Objects in the Mirror)
Max Verstappen fucks men sometimes. Charles struggles to cope.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43505271
• Falling in Love, Charles is depressed, Charles is moving to Red Bull *31.7k
> All To Play For = (End of Series - Objects in the Mirror)
Charles Leclerc is not at Red Bull to win races. He is here to win championships.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46910503
• Nasty Breakup w/ Happy Ending, Charles is so depressed, Pain, Angst, Red Bull!Charles *49.3k
> I Think There’s Been a Glitch = (Series)
or: Max sits on Hüllkenberg’s lap during a press conference. Charles is decidedly Not Normal about it.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46107499
• Teasing, Crush, First Time, Charles POV, Bottom!Max *5.5k
> Room 309 = (End of Series)
or: what happens in room 309
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46397647
• Max’s POV, Smut *8.2k
> Undress Me to the Naked Truth =
or: Charles and Max celebrate post-Austria 2022
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46761448
• Smut, Established Relationship, Bottom!Max *6.8k
> The Rest is Unwritten =
Max ran, like his husbands life depended on it.
Weaving his way around the paddock, murmurs of a black flag and unresponsive boring through the crowds. All he could do was get to Charles.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46203964#main
• Angst, Husbands, Crash *1.5k
> Monaco Malaise = (Series)
Max and Charles have been hooking up for a few months, casually, no string attached — definitely no feelings involved…
The disaster that was Monaco 2021 sees them in Charles’ apartment, with Max having to deal with the fact that Charles can’t get out of his head.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43192021#main
• Smut, Slight Angst, Slight Fluff *8k
> Azerbaijan Abnegation = (End of Series)
After Monaco, Max thought he’d made up his mind about Charles, and their little arrangement.
They’re in Azerbaijan and Charles is everywhere: in his head, in his messages, in his hotel room…
Will Max be able to hold onto his resolve, or will his attempts at self-denial only prolong the inevitable?
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46781737/chapters/117829006#workskin
• Angst, Smut *16.9k
> Ribs =
He wakes up all weird on Monday. Charles can feel it the moment he opens his eyes. It’s like an odd weight on his chest that evolves into something a lot more achy and sharp emanating down his torso as he starts crawling out of bed.
Or: Charles injures himself before the last race of the season. The only option is to power through it.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/44784424#main
• Fluff, Established Relationship, WDC!Charles *2.6k
> You Could Call Me Babe For the Weekend + ♥️
Or: There are lots of ways to love Charles Leclerc, Max maybe learns all of them through the years.
Featuring: puddles, stargazing, unsolicited driving lessons, and the overwhelming fear of growing up.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/42042690/chapters/105559215#workskin
• Angst, Teenagers, Falling in Love *12.3k
> Got Your Tongue =
It’s the middle of the night, there’s a stray cat in Charles’ bedroom, and only one person he can think of to help him. The rest is just a misunderstanding.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46854709?view_adult=true#main
• Fluff *2.9k
> Do You Want Me (Dead)? =
When Charles accidentally comes out to Max it shouldn’t really change anything. It doesn’t change anything.
Until it does. In fact, it changes everything.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/44626003#main
• Angst, Pining, Fluff, Happy Ending, FIFA in Suzuka *12.5k
> How to Babygirl-ify Your Boyfriend: A Comprehensive Guide by Charles Leclerc =
Charles sees someone on the internet call Max babygirl. He’s instantly obsessed.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/45295756?view_adult=true#main
• Smut, Fluff, Bottom!Max *4.5k
> Silly Me (For Falling in Love With You) = ♥️
“We’re not asking you to ‘woo’ him,” Christian says, looking pained at having to say the word ‘woo’, “We just need others to think you’ve wooed him.”
“I’m not following,” Max says, frowning.
“A PR relationship,” Poppy explains. “You pretend to date, making the public think you’re all happy and in love. Then you reap the benefits of being in a relationship without actually having to put in the effort or work.”
“Absolutely not,” Max says, crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s depressing, I’m not doing that.”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/44464324#main
• Fluff, Angst, Fake Relationship, Non-F1!Charles *18.3k
> Glitch + ♥️
Max hums. “Well, at least that means I won’t bump into Charles Leclerc again.”
“Bummer, really,” Daniel says, moving back to his own seat and drinking the little bit of coffee that was still in the cup. “Could’ve been the start of a great love story.”
Lando snorts. “Kids, it all started when I told your father, who had won two World Driver Championships at that point, that he sucked at driving.”
Max sticks his middle finger up at them, and pulls his noise canceling headphones back over his ears. Only two hours left to go, he thinks, wistfully, and goes back to work.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46316224/chapters/116609527
• Angst, Fluff, Funny, Programmer!Max *26.6k
> Heart On Your Sleeve =
The thing about having a racing helmet that constantly displays your emotions for the whole world to see, is that you kind of get used to it after a while. These days Charles almost forgets it’s even a thing.
Almost.
But then he goes and falls in love.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/45717973#main
• Pining, Magical Realism *4.8k
> You Can Hear It In the Silence =
Or, the five times Max and Charles accidentally fall asleep together, and the one time they do it on purpose.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43882683#main
• Pining, Sleep trope, Fluff *7.4k
> You’ll be Alright = ♥️
Charles is not an idiot. He knows there’s a part of him that has been at least a little bit in love with Max for as long as they’ve known each other. But he’s always been able to shove it down. Burying it under rivalries and competitiveness until it was getting hard to differentiate between love and hate. And that had worked, for a really long time.
And then Max had to go and barge into his life and be really fucking cute with his baby.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/45348790#main
• Kidfic, Fluff, Slight Angst, Max is great with kids, Falling in Love *19.2k
> Maximum Formula =
“Welcome back to another episode of Maximum Formula, I’m your host, Emilian, and this is the first episode for the F1 2022 season. There will be plenty to talk about, but first I’d like to introduce our first guest of the season: Charles Leclerc. Welcome to the show, Charles.”
Or, Charles tries to become a world champion with Ferrari.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/45691483#main
• Angst, Falling in Love, Podcast!Max, Identity Hiding *20.4k
> Violent Delights +
Max can’t smell any of his usual aggression beneath the unusual spatter of Omega, sweet yet violent, and it makes his head spin.
“Max,” is all Charles says, voice breathless. He looks over his shoulder, quick, hasty, looks back. His eyes are wider, if possible. “We have— we have fucked up, I think.”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/41445333#main
• A/B/O, Alpha!Max, Alpha!Charles turns into Omega!Charles *15.5k
> Petrol =
Max scoffs. He steps closer, smile a little real. It lets Charles see the tiny freckle on his lip, dark and undying, always zoomed in on when his face is in HD. Chuckling, Max scratches at his stubble. “I didn’t know you liked Red Bull.”
Automatically, Charles corrects, “I hate it.” It says too much.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/41359482#main
• Smut, Angst, Denial, Bottom!Max *4.2k
> It All Reminds Me of You =
Pierre turns, and with him, the object of his distasteful frown. “Why do you have a Red Bull cap in your apartment?”
Charles tenses. He looks between Pierre and the cap, still held tepid between two fingers, dark blue and flat-brimmed and garishly branded with a sick sense of obvious. It feels wrong, just looking at it. There’s a big red 1 emblazoned on the front.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/40279869#main
• Angst, Smut, Secret Relationship, Switch!Max, Switch!Charles *3k
> Proximity =
These kinds of smiles on Max are reserved for other people. Like Daniel, like Lando, like those Dutch guys that come around sometimes and he likes to yell with.
Not Charles.
It’s probably the fourth time Max is acting noticeably strange around him that he notices the freckle on his lip.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/40737591#main
• Angst, Smut *6.7k
> Want It Good Want It All =
When Max puts the disc into the cartridge of his PS4 he isn't sure what to expect.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43761192#main
• Sex tape, Masturbation *2.1k
> Algorithm + ♥️
Tired of all the internal team conflicts, the F1 powers-that-be have developed a simulation-based compatibility test for drivers and their teammates.
or
Five times Max doesn’t find the right partner and one time he does.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/29561109/chapters/72650025#workskin
• Magical Realism, Compatibility Simulations, Fluff, Slight Angst, Some Maxiel in the beginning *16.9k
> In the Dark You Can’t See Shiny Cars +
In the summer of 2022, the quiet neighbourhood of Les Amants in Monaco becomes the epicentre of a strange weather phenomenon.
or
A dark cloud hangs over Charles’ head—unfortunately not just a metaphorical one. Max sets out to investigate.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/41147001/chapters/103144245
• Magical Realism, Charles accidentally controls the weather, Fluff, Slight Angst *14.5k
> Panem et Circenses =
Panem et circenses, the Romans called it. Bread and circus to appease the people.
The bread is always in short supply these days, ever since the wheat fields burned down. So that just leaves-
“The brave new world of Formula One,” Crofty’s voice comes out distorted from the circuit speakers. “Ten teams. Twenty cars. An auspicious new technical programme that combines the top edge AI technology with the most skilled drivers to deliver the best spectacle ever seen.”
-
In a dystopian near-future, Charles and Max drive for survival.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/40704441#main
• Dystopian future, Sentient F1 cars, oppressive Regime, Hope, Angst, Falling in Love *13.2k
> Every Other Sunday + ♥️
The grainy pictures are pieced together like a crude comic strip, sketching a poorly thought-out narrative arc that somehow made it onto the front page of every sleazy newspaper.
EXPOSED!: The secret gay double-life of F1 driver Max Verstappen
-
Max navigates the aftermath of being outed in the press, and Charles is always there.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/34827223/chapters/86722561
• Slight Angst, Fluff, Smut, Max has been outed, Charles does some soul searching, Motorhome club, F1 family antics *34.5k
> Soak Up the Sun =
“What do you think?” Charles asks, leaning back into the seat as he turns the laptop so Max can see the options.
“I think—” Max starts, “—that this can wait until after FP1.”
Charles’s lips curl downwards, and Max wants to kiss the look off his face. “There’s still like an hour until it starts. There’s no one even looking for me yet.”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Lestappen_Summer_Exchange_2022/works/40998603#main
• Fluff, Non-Linear timeline, Getting together *6.8k
> Like a Prayer =
It was sinful to have such thoughts but then Charles had never been one to shy away from sinful desires. Stood at the alter the priest looked glowing, his strong cheekbones and jawline illuminated by a wash of colour. Charles’ gaze followed the beams of light back to the stained glass, he tried not to think too long about the image of Christ etched on to the window. This was a sacred place, but there could be nothing more deserving of veneration than the God who had so kindly sculpted the body of Father Verstappen.
Or
Charles is an F1 driver and Max is a sexy priest.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/works/44838136#main
• Smut, Religion, Priest!Max *3.2k
> We Go Way Back =
They were the same in the end. Yes, Max was an alpha, and Charles was an omega, but that didn’t matter. If you took racing from either of them, there wouldn’t be anything left.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43936200?view_adult=true#main
• A/B/O, Alpha!Max, Omega!Charles, Smut, Fluff *13.8k
> Close Proximity =
A hotel mix-up forces Max and Charles to share a room. There is only one bed.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/works/44503150?view_adult=true#main
• Smut, One bed trope *3.5k
> Pens, fingers and most definitely cock ... a random list of things Max likes to put in his mouth =
Max has an oral fixation, Charles is happy to oblige. This is a story of their developing relationship as told through the things Max likes to put in his mouth!
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/works/44205019#main
• Oral fixation kink, Smut, Fluff *2.7k
> FIA Approved Stress Relief =
It’s the strangest briefing Charles has ever been a part of. Ever. Which is saying something because this time last year he was sat wide eyed as the Fia tried to bring in mandatory checks for Fia approved underwear and intimate piercings. A few team principles had helpfully offered their services and it had ended in a rather heated debate over whether that fell under their job description.
It didn’t compare to this though.
As director of the GPDA it’s been left to George to run through the basics of the brand new Fia approved sex doll. Charles was sure he had misheard but no, as it turns out, the Fia really have lost their minds.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Formula_One_Kinkmeme_Round_One/works/44059752?view_adult=true#main
• Sex Doll, Smut, Pining, Voyeurism *2.3k
> Long Live (The Walls We Crashed Through) + ♥️
“What are you doing?” Charles asked, his voice cracking.
Max blinked at him once before he smirked and said, “Well... I was going to kiss you.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to.”
“Why?” Charles repeated, feeling like his legs were going to give out.
“Is that not a good enough reason?” Max asked.
OR: The childhood best friends to lovers fairy-tale-soulmates fic that nobody asked for. Charles has been in love with Max since he was seven years old.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46190509/chapters/116284681
• Fluff, Smut, Best friends to lovers, Slight Angst *76.8k
> Viva la Miami =
Max raced all over the world and was used to different climates. But there was something about Miami’s sticky, muggy, make-your-phone-screen-fog-up kind of scorching heat that made him feel fucking crazy.
It made him want to strip naked and jump in the bright blue water surrounding his hotel.
It made him want to fuck.
OR: Max and Charles hook up for the first time, and it's very different than what Max had pictured.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46963513#main
• Smut, PWP, Top!Charles *8.2k
> I’ll Be Right Beside You = ♥️
Max stared at Charles’ closed eyes and how they twitched in his sleep. Objectively, Max knew that Charles was probably the most beautiful man he had ever seen. But... this was Charles.
Charles Leclerc.
Big, cry-baby Charles.
Sauber #2 driver Charles.
When did he decide that Charles The Driver would become Charles The Boyfriend?
He wishes he could remember.
OR: The self-indulgent Amnesia AU that nobody asked for. This is my love story to Charles Leclerc, thank you for coming along. Warning: this fic may break you.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/42990660#main
• Amnesia, Graphic Accident, Angst, Pain, Fluff, Smut *50.7k
> Breathe You In (Like a Vapor) =
OR: the self-indulgent story of how Charles and Max fell in love over winter break 2022, in a classic Enemies to Friends With Benefits to Lovers fic that nobody asked for.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/45079192?view_adult=true#main
• Smut, Fluff, Falling in Love *53k
> And That’s How I Foksmashed Dad’s Championship Trophy =
All of that would have been forgivable if not for the Green-Eyed Monster’s complete disregard for the pre-contracted occupation rights of Max’s lap. Such rights had long been pre-determined and belonged to Sassy (and occasionally to Jimmy, she admitted begrudgingly). However, no amount of quiet hisses and vicious glares seemed to penetrate the creature’s thick skull, and he would greedily occupy Max’s thigh for more than 95% of any given afternoon. Sometimes with his head, sometimes with his feet, and a few times he even straddled his entire body over Max; the latter could not have been comfortable for Max, as the Green-Eyed Monster was enormously overweight compared to Sassy.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/43833321#main
• Fluff, POV!Sassy and Jimmy, Funny *6.5k
> Set My Midnight Sorrow Free =
He doesn’t blame Max, not really.
If he could have Charles for one night, he would never let him go either.
Maybe he isn’t the one who is losing; Max is also playing a losing game.
You can’t open yourself to Charles and try to exist in his charmed life without becoming irrevocably enamoured.
When Max let Charles walk into his motorhome, when he let Charles slip into his existence, Max didn’t know it then but the battle was already lost.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/31552340#main
• Angst, POV!Pierre, Falling in Love, Jealousy/Pining *13.4k
> All of You, All of Me (Intertwined) =
Or, two future teammates get high, get on Mattia Binotto's wrong side through an inadvisable escapade involving fairy lights, get on a plane, and get a stuffed armadillo named Chax. In that order.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/42627222#main
• Fluff, Slight Angst, FWB to Lovers, Future Red Bull!Charles *12.8k
> The Grid: A Comprehensive Guide for Handling your Gay Racer Friends =
Or, Charles and Max, and the handbook birthed from their idiocy. Featuring a large number of baked goods.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/33291136#main
• Fluff, Humor, Friends *6.3k
> we're fallin' like the stars, we're fallin' in love = ♥️
"So, do we need a signal for when things are going downhill and you need me to save you?" He asks, a glimmer in his eyes that seems so unfamiliar yet familiar that Max feels it like a sucker punch to the stomach.
"Just have the vodka waiting." Max laughs, flicking his gaze down to the gentle grip that Charles has his wrist in before he releases and Max turns around with pink cheeks and crosses the restaurant to join up with his date once again.
(Lando sets Max up on disastrous blind dates that end up with Max falling for the bartender who was the real set up all along.)
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/27047056/chapters/66033652?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_668986186
• Fluff, Non-Driver AU, Blind dates, Bartender!Charles *8.7k
> Pick Apart the Pieces of Your Heart =
"I reckon-" George says in-between scenes, "- that Charles is Gatsby."
Lando tilts his head back to clock Max's reaction but it's nothing except confusion etched on his face as he scrunches his nose up trying to figure out what George means,
George holds his hand up and continues to explain, "Gatsby threw all these big parties in the hope that Daisy would go to one of them, right? Charles throws a party every other day and I think it's because he wants you to go." He says to Max
alternatively, Charles is Max's nightmare neighbour until he's something much more than that.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/25489348/chapters/61832617?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#main
• Fluff, Angst, Non-Driver AU, Apartment neighbor AU *6.3k
> We’re Making Gold Dust = (Series)
They’re carefully walking, skipping and hauling themselves across any gaps. The morning air feels crisp and fills Charles’ lungs until it hurts, but god, it hurts in the best way that it’s ever hurt him before. He takes pictures, videos but tries to remember the feeling most of all.
It feels like home.
The best people, the best places, the height, the element of danger, it’s everything that Charles hadn’t imagined his life to be five years ago but maybe it’s right after all.
alternatively, a fascination discovered at fifteen leads to love, trust and healing whilst breaking the rules and climbing things that aren't supposed to be climbed.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/24374812#main
• Angst, Non-Driver AU, Parkour AU, Falling in Love *13k
> Two Burning Hearts (It Would Last Forever) =
In the end, it does turn out that your soulmate can be the person you least expect and neither of them don’t think it could have been anybody else.
alternatively, Charles and Max are soulmates and for the most part, they hate it but should have seen it coming.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/23363920#main
• Soulmate AU, Angst *2.5k
> All the Lights (Couldn’t Put Out the Dark) = (Series - The Warming Verse)
“Charles,” Max said, his tone soft again and breaking Charles of his thoughts. “Please just ask me for whatever you want to ask me. You don’t have to keep explaining yourself.”
Charles laughed again, his cheeks bright red.
“Could I... sit on your cock for a little bit?”
OR: Charles is overwhelmed and wants Max to make it better.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46165159#main
• PWP, Cock Warming, Feelings *7.5k
> The Right Place (The Right Time) = (Series - The Warming Verse)
“Charles,” Max said, his tone gentle.
Charles didn’t move his hands away from his face.
“Hey... look at me,” Max said softly.
Charles took a deep breath and finally let his hands fall.
Max looked at him for a long moment, their eyes locked together before he asked, “Would my cock help?”
OR: In the aftermath of the shit show that was Melbourne, Charles turns to Max for comfort.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46332700#main
• PWP, Cock Warming *9.7k
> Something New (Let’s Not Get Complicated) + (Series - The Warming Verse)
Max smiled at him, his expression soft despite how hard he was against Charles’ hip.
“Pretty boy,” Max mused, brushing Charles’ hair out of his eyes.
“Shut up,” Charles huffed, flushing bright red. It only made Max smile harder.
“You’re even prettier when you tell me to shut up.”
“Shut the hell up, Max,” Charles squeaked.
OR: Charles and Max finally talk about their Feelings™
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46896289/chapters/118129207#workskin
• PWP, Cock Warming, Size Kink, Dom/subspace, Daddy kink *31.7k
—Please note there may be more works in The Warming Verse, I may not be caught up***
> Fair Winds and Following Seas = ♥️
Max lets out an impatient sigh and looks at Lando as he washes the shot glass before putting it back. “Well who is it?”
Lando rolls his eyes. “You’re no fun.”
“I’m delightful, now come on,” Max presses, trying not to show he’s getting curious. “Who is this mystery person?”
“Charles Leclerc!” Lando says with a bright smile, he’s almost jumping up and down with excitement. “He’s chartering the yacht for the week!”
“Charles Leclerc?” Max repeats, raising an eyebrow. “The Charles Leclerc, F1 driver for Ferrari, is here?”
Or
Max works on a super yacht during the summer to make some money to invest in his sim racing career and Charles happens to charter it for the week.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/48088906/chapters/121258555?show_comments=true&view_full_work=false#comment_671144260
• Non Driver!Max, Yacht shenanigans, Fluff, Slight Angst, Mentions of Smut *24.8k
> Carry Me in Your Heart (You Know You’re Never Gonna Leave Mine) =
“You are the reason he started learning German?!” Lorenzo practically gasps, honest-to-god glee on his features. Charles hates him.
“But Max is Dutch,” Arthur says.
Charles groans, his hands trailing in front of his face in an effort to disappear from the situation.
-
AU where you can sometimes see through your soulmate's eyes.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/42022176?view_adult=true#main
• Soulmate!AU, Growing up together, Angst, Harsh breakup, Angst with a happy ending *30.2k
> No Brakes On = ♥️
Max is a race car driver. Charles is a movie star. They really shouldn't work, but they do.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/48170218#main
• Actor!Charles, Slight Angst, Character study, Fluff, Strangers to lovers *32.5k
> Lost In Your Current Like a Priceless Wine =
"What did you just say?" Max asks in a flat voice and Charles gives him a strained smile.
"I might have accidentally told my mom that I have a boyfriend and now she's demanding that I bring you home with me for the New Year. Actually, she said Christmas and New Year, but I told her that you were spending Christmas with your own family..."
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/28535271
• Fake dating, Non-Driver AU, College AU, Fluff, Slight Angst *10.2k
> You Got Me =
When Max looks up he stares into pretty green eyes behind black rimmed glasses. His hand is still blindly feeling around to find the books—his brain lagging—as he stares at the guy from last night. He straightens up and Max follows, staring dumbly as he holds out the books for Max to take.
“Thanks,” Max says, feeling like an idiot as he takes the books, their fingers brushing for a split second. This was not how he wanted to meet again. “Again, I’m so sorry.”
The guy smiles and Max thinks he might just die a little when he notices he has dimples. Of course he has dimples.
Or
Max falls head over heels for the cute guy at a college party and he can't stop thinking about him (aka the lestappen college au nobody needs).
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49182076#main
• College AU, Fluff *16.6k
> This Feels Like Falling in Love =
Five kisses throughout their lives, and the one that started it all.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49162735/chapters/124043815?
• Podfic, 4+1 fic, Kid fic *3k
> Closest I Get = (Series)
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal or anything, right? It can be just about sex, nothing else.” Charles steps forward, into Max’s space. Reaches out a hand, lets it run over Max’s cheek, leans a little closer. “Just sex,” he whispers, in the ever diminishing space between them as Max leans into his touch.
“Fuck,” Max whispers, screwing his eyes shut, breathing deeply through his mouth. “I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t-“
Charles cuts him off by lurching forward and pressing a kiss to Max’s mouth, quick and fleeting, but then Max groans, grabs Charles’s waist, pulls him closer, kisses him hard. Charles melts into it immediately, overwhelmed by Max’s scent, by his hands on Charles’s waist, his mouth on Charles’s.
It’s like something clicks into place, when they kiss.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49230871#main
• A/B/O, Alpha!Max, Omega!Charles, PWP, Angst *4.8k
> Heart Held Close = (End of Series)
“Just sex,” Charles whispers in his ear, and he’s coming closer closer closer and Max is getting swallowed by the sun, Charles’s smell bright and enticing and all around him.
Max let’s out a heartfelt, “Fuck,” as he feels himself tipping forward ever so slightly, his rut dumb brain taking over, ignoring the little voice in the back of his head that is still screaming at him that this is a terrible idea. “I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t-“ He tries, but it’s weak at best.
And then Charles kisses him, and it’s all over.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49276354#main
• A/B/O, Smut, Angst, Happy Ending *7.8k
> A Force More Powerful Than Gravity =
Charles studies goop in his lab. Goop is actually a very attractive alien.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LestappenWeekSummer2023/works/49302043#main
• Non-Driver AU, Alien!Max, Scientist!Charles, Fluff, Slight Angst *4.5k
> Give Yourself Up To Me =
For the safety of his people, Crown Prince Charles is willing to do anything.
Anything.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49300402/chapters/124403428?
• Non-Driver AU, Royalty AU, Angst *1.5k
> Amazing Grace =
“I win!” Charles announces when he has Max pinned to the ground by his wrists, a wild grin on his lips. His chest is heaving, there’s some dirt on his cheek and in his hair, and Max can’t help but grin up at him.
“No you don’t,” He argues, mirth in his eyes. “You only win when you capture my sword!”
-
They're teenagers. And then they're not.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49325872/chapters/124469185?
• Non-Driver AU, Swordsmen AU, Angst *1.5k
> Red Bull’s Golden Puppy =
In a memory box tucked away deep in their minds, Charles, Max and Chloe Leclerc-Verstappen, share their biggest memories and photographs. Adopting a pet named after the original Red Bull golden boy Sebastian Vettel would soon join that club.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LestappenWeekSummer2023/works/49313617#main
• Kid!fic, Future family, Established Relationship, Fluff *1.4k
> This Love Asylum =
“Are we still having dinner with your mother?,” Max asked, his arm still on Charles’s waist, Sebastian’s low whistle now hard to miss. “I didn’t know you went to dinner with the Leclercs.”
“Hmm? Oh yeah, I do! My mum told Pascale I was only having takeout when I’m here. It worries her, you know? So when we’re here, I’m supposed to have dinner with Charlie and his mum at least once a wee—ow! Hey!” Charles had elbowed Max, causing the latter the pout while another pout was already on Charles’s face.
“I didn’t know Sophie and Pascale were friends either,” Sebastian was having the time of his life and Max being oblivious about Charles’s whole situation was the icing on the proverbial cake.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LestappenWeekSummer2023/works/49312864#main
• Fluff, Sebastian!POV *1.5k
> Dangerous Games =
Too late, Charles realises he’s been standing rooted in his spot, and Max looks over his shoulder, a questioning look on his face, “Is everything al—,”
“Suck my dick.” Charles blurts out.
Max’s eyebrows shoot up. Charles’ cheeks are bright red. “What?”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LestappenWeekSummer2023/works/49276297#main
• Non-Driver AUCollege AU, Blowjob, Slight Smut *1.9k
> Eighteenth Summer =
Max wanted to burn it into his memory, engrave bits and pieces of it into each of his senses. The way the blue sky reflected off of Charles’s massive sunglasses, the smell of the hot asphalt mixing with Charles’s cologne, the nearly hysterical sound of their laughter as their playlist finally shuffled to Mr. Brightside; everything felt so precious. So fleeting. Moments memorialized on the 101 northbound, flying out of their open windows and away from his greedy fingers.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49253491/chapters/124280527?
• Fluff, Angst, Happy Ending, Summer in California, High School AU *5k
> Middle Child Syndrome +
After all, Charles being a middle child always made a lot of sense to Max.
Max’s unwillingness to deny Charles anything always made a little less sense to Max.
Standing on the third place podium beneath the Monegasque flag made a lot less sense to Max.
The fact that he wasn’t mad about it, a warm sense of acquiescence spurred by Charles’s smile, made it all click.
He was in love with Charles Leclerc, and he always had been.
Or: A small collection of memories leading up to a realization on the podium of Baku 2023
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46979311/chapters/118348648#workskin
• Fluff, Realization of Feelings *3.6k
> Rules of Engagement =
“Take me with you then!” Max felt his eyes go wide, his jaw literally dropping at the suggestion. “Tell them I’m like. Say I’m your fiancé, mate.”
The heat had melted Charles’s brain, Max decided, staring at him blankly.
“No.” He deadpanned.
“Mate it’s genius! You won’t have to do anything, just stand there. Let me handle it. Them. The women.”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49006156#main
• Fake Relationship, Roommates, Non-Driver AU, Socially inept!Max *7.2k
> All the Stars We Cannot See = ♥️
Sitting on his roof, bathed in wintery silence, Max prayed to be rescued. To whom, he wasn’t sure. Maybe the force that branded his wrist, the universal power that decided who to tie him with forever. Perfectly. Something like fate.
Max prayed to fate, then.
“Am I interrupting something?” The man’s accent was French, his tone unusually assertive for a question of intrusion.
“It’s not my roof,” Max shrugged, hopping back onto the ledge.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49182697/chapters/124096612?
• Soulmate AU, Non-Driver!Charles, Mentions of Child Abuse, Mentions of Sickness, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Happy Ending *9.8k
> Lie to Me =
5 times they told the truth + 1 time they tried to lie
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49206214?view_adult=true#main
• Soulmates AU, Angst, Smut *5.3k
> Shut Up and Drive +
Max pointed at Charles’ bags. ‘Is this all you're bringing or will there be more?’
Oh so he was making fun of him now, well Charles could do the same. ‘You mean more than the four white t-shirts you brought?’
Max blinked at him for a couple of seconds before his entire face lit up and he giggled. He giggled.
‘Good one, and I actually brought five t-shirts,’ Max replied, still smiling.
Was he serious? Charles hoped not.
OR: Charles and Max are 'forced' to go on a road trip together, whatever could go wrong?
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49181029/chapters/124092070#workskin
• Road-trip, One bed trope, Enemies to Lovers, WIP *
> Partiality =
“Okay, this is—,” Max stops himself. His eyebrows knit together and he’s obviously frustrated with something. “I know this isn’t what you wanted,” He says slowly, when he gathers his thoughts. “But I’m not going to force you to treat me like your—,” Max makes a face. “Your alpha.”
Charles coughs. “But… You are.” He points out.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49230259?view_adult=true#main
• A/B/O, Alpha!Max, Omega!Charles, Fluff *2.4k
> You Went, and It Was Night =
“I can hear you thinking from here,” Max says suddenly. His voice sounds husky, used, wrecked. It sends a shiver down Charles’ spine. He did that. “You’re being very loud.”
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49182070/chapters/124095055?
• Slight Angst, Fluff, Charles is thinking *900 words
> Sort You Out (Heart Out Series) =
Charles can't tell which is worse — that he can't remember the sex he had with his childhood rival, or how according to her, it wasn't even good.
!!! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49340395/chapters/124508077?
• Girl!Max, Pining Charles, Slight smut *6.3k
Here are some of the best authors in the Lestappen field. Please go follow and send them some love!! They are doing the Lord’s work!!!!!!
@nyoomfruits (nyoomfruits on Ao3)
@drivestraight (Linearity on Ao3)
@fabbyf1 (Fabby on Ao3)
@charlescoded (lazarusgreeneyes on Ao3)
@fueledbyremembering (NovaCloud on Ao3)
@wanderingblindly (Wanderingblindly on Ao3)
@hoewedeshummels (Monzas on Ao3)
-Only Ao3 username is known-
Actparci
Anney
*Authors, if you want to be untagged, or you want your fics pulled from the list, shoot me a dm :)
#lestappen#max verstappen#charles leclerc#max x charles#charles x max#formula one#formula 1#f1#f1 fic#f1 fanfic#fan fiction#ao3#fic rec#masterlist#1633#3316#cl16#mv33
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Heard this morning (27 March, 2023) A transcript for this piece is not yet up. They're usually up in a couple of days.
~3 minute listen.
This one right-to-repair law got through in just one state, because the lawmaker who introduced it narrowed its focus down from "The right of everybody to repair anything" (too many businesses to lobby against that) to "the right of wheelchair users to repair their own wheelchairs."
On the one hand it's great. On the other hand, it's a reminder of how marginalized we are in society.
Next thing to fight for: the right of farmers to repair their own farm equipment.
One state's gotten started. Forty-nine to go...
Transcript is now up. I've put the full thing under the cut.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Somewhere on your list of life's annoyances is probably this - manufacturers who won't let customers fix products themselves. Some states are pushing back with right-to-repair laws. Andrew Kenney from Colorado Public Radio visited with one of the first people to use a new right-to-repair law for powered wheelchairs.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHEELCHAIR WHIRRING)
ANDREW KENNEY, BYLINE: Bruce Goguen, who's 68, has used his powered wheelchair for so long that it feels like an extension of himself. He has multiple sclerosis, which affects his speech.
BRUCE GOGUEN: I just think of it as legs, as being my legs.
KENNEY: And that means when he got a new chair last year, every detail had to be right, like the speed of its different modes. His wife, Robin Bolduc, says each one of those adjustments required a visit from an authorized technician. It took weeks.
ROBIN BOLDUC: We would have to call someone, make an appointment, have them come out and say, gee, I'd like to change it so we're walking just a little bit faster.
KENNEY: On one of those visits, Robin realized that the technician wasn't using some specialized device to change the settings. It was a smartphone app. She even found it on the App Store, but it was only available for authorized users.
BOLDUC: Well, I want the app. And he was like, you can't have the app. But I want the app.
KENNEY: That would've been the end of the road, except that Robin and Bruce knew that Colorado's new wheelchair right-to-repair to repair law had just gone into effect. Representative Brianna Titone is the sponsor of the new law. Back in 2021, she originally proposed a much broader bill that would've applied to computers, cellphones and more. That meant an uphill fight against lobbyists for everything from hospitals to tech giants.
BRIANNA TITONE: So I did not win that fight. I lost that fight pretty bad. So that's why the following year, we pared it back to the people who really deserve to have this right. And that were the people who were in wheelchairs.
TITONE: The narrower, wheelchair-focused law passed the legislature last year with the help of advocates like Bruce and Robin. Once it went into effect on New Year's Day, Robin called the manufacturer to demand access to their app.
BOLDUC: They were not prepared. Right. Which - understandably, we're the only state. And it was day one, right? So they were not prepared.
KENNEY: In a committee hearing last year, Tonya Hammatt of National Seating and Mobility, a wheelchair vendor, warned state lawmakers that power wheelchairs are too complex for DIY jobs.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TONYA HAMMATT: This bill will allow anyone to perform complex repairs to power wheelchairs, which may lead to negative outcomes for the end user.
KENNEY: But after Robin showed Bruce's wheelchair's maker the text of the law, they agreed, sending out two staffers to get the family set up with the internal software.
BOLDUC: They gave me the code to get into the app. We played around. We programmed.
KENNEY: The couple have been tweaking the wheelchair's different modes, searching for the perfect speed for Robin to jog alongside Bruce or the right settings for a steep walking trail.
GOGUEN: It's wonderful. It's very wonderful.
KENNEY: And their success could have broader effects. They've been told the manufacturer is working on a public-facing app for everyone else who wants to use it. The company didn't respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, right-to-repair laws are gaining momentum around the country, says Kevin O'Reilly of the advocacy group PIRG.
KEVIN O'REILLY: We think that this first bill was the crack in the dam that we needed.
KENNEY: That includes a new bill from Representative Titone that guarantees similar rights for farmers to repair their increasingly high-tech tractors and other equipment. It's poised to clear the state legislature in a matter of weeks. For NPR News, I'm Andrew Kenney.
(SOUNDBITE OF EDAPOLLO'S "BY THE RIVER")
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In the 1920s, a series of greed-based, racially charged murders of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation occurred in Oklahoma. (The linked article is a gift 🎁 link, so anyone can read the entire article, even if they do not subscribe to The New York Times.)
The article's authors, Jim Gray and David Grann, also point out how legislatures in red states like Oklahoma have created laws that are being used to prevent the teaching of significant racist incidents in American history for fear that it could be implied that students are being taught that they "'should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress' on account of their race or sex." Consequently, teaching about the Reign of Terror against the Osage Nation is being stifled in some Oklahoma schools.
Here is a video about the murders.
youtube
.Below are some excerpts from the article:
During the early 20th century, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were systematically murdered by white settlers. Yet outside the Osage Nation, the history of this racial injustice — one of the worst in American history — was distorted and then largely erased from memory.
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film directed by Martin Scorsese, shines an extraordinary light on these events and provides a long overdue opportunity to restore them in our consciousness. But ironically, at the same time that the film is being released, there is a new attempt to suppress the teaching of this very history in the state where it took place.
In 2021 the Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill prohibiting teachers in public school from instructing several concepts, including that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race or sex. The vagueness of the law has caused teachers to censor themselves, for fear of losing their licenses or their school’s accreditation. In a high school classroom in Dewey, Okla., copies of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the nonfiction book behind the film, were left unread because the teacher worried about running afoul of the law. Another teacher confessed that she was uncertain if she could refer to the settlers who murdered the Osage as white.
At stake in these fights is not only factual accuracy. It is also how new generations will be taught to record and remember the past — both the good and the bad — so that they can learn to make their own history.
The story of what’s now called the Osage Reign of Terror is essential to understanding America’s past. After vast oil deposits were discovered under their lands, the Osage were suddenly, by the 1920s, among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. In the year 1923 alone, the roughly 2,000 Osage on the tribal roll received a total of more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.
As their wealth increased, though, it unleashed an insidious backlash across the country. The U.S. government passed legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their fortunes — a system that was both abhorrently racist and widely corrupt. Then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances: There were shootings, poisonings and even a bombing.
[color emphasis added]
I encourage you to read the entire article. It is tragic that red states are so afraid of their racist past that they are making it extremely difficult for children in those states to learn about the racist underbelly of American history, and how that history continues to reverberate in our society.
_______________
Video source for gif (before edits/caption)
Originally posted 10.21.23; last edited 01.20.24
#osage murders#oklahoma#american history#killers of the flower moon#censorship#anti-crt legislation#david grann#jim gray#Youtube#the1920s channel#the new york times#my gifs#gift link
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The latest on the heat wave:
At least eight heat records fell Monday.
Lytton recorded a high of 40.2 C — the highest temperature anywhere in Canada this year.
Environment Canada has issued heat warnings along British Columbia's South Coast.
Several cities in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley have opened up dedicated indoor cooling centres.
A repeat of the 2021 heat dome is not in the forecast, but health officials suggest people stay out of the heat, drink plenty of water and limit activity this week.
Advocates are calling on municipalities to consider setting a maximum temperature for rental units.
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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At least 350 women have been killed by a man since the murder of Sarah Everard – the equivalent of one woman dying every three days, The Independent can reveal.
Frustrated experts said the government is still failing to protect women as the sobering new figures came to light on the third anniversary of Ms Everard’s kidnap and murder by a serving police officer.
Her death was hailed as a watershed moment which sparked an outpouring of anger over women’s safety and shone a light on the epidemic of violence against women and girls.
But campaigners have said promises to tackle the crisis were “empty words” as they warned: “So much more needs to be done.”
The figures, shared with The Independent by the Femicide Census, showed at least 350 women have died with a man responsible or a principal suspect since Ms Everard’s death on 3 March 2021.
“That’s an average of one woman dead at the hands of a man every three days,” executive director Dr Karen Ingala Smith said.
Of these, eight in ten had a relationship with their killer, with 43 per cent killed by a former or current partner, 12 per cent by a family member, 15 per cent by a man who knew them.
Around 28 women – which accounts for eight per cent of cases – were killed by a stranger, like Ms Everard.
She added: “The figure of eight per cent of women killed by men in the UK being killed by a stranger is consistent with the average since our records began in 2009. So ask me whether anything has changed since Sarah’s murder, and my answer is no.”
The figures come after an inquiry into Ms Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens uncovered an astonishing string of blunders in the recruitment of the predator to the Metropolitan Police and eight missed opportunities to stop him in his tracks.
The 33-year-old marketing executive was walking home in Clapham, south London, when she was tricked by Couzens, who falsely arrested her before driving to Kent where he raped and strangled before dumping her burnt body in a woodland.
In the aftermath of her death, thousands of grieving women gathered for a vigil at Clapham Common calling for action to prevent to male violence against women and, simply, the right to walk home safely.
Anna Birley, co-founder of vigil organisers Reclaim These Streets, told The Independent: “We were promised that tackling violence against women and girls would be a priority for this government, but these figures show that this was all empty words.
“Women are still being murdered by men, demand for domestic violence services remains at record highs and rapes are still going unprosecuted.
“By failing to grasp the scale of the problem and failing to take meaningful action to keep us safe, this Government is failing women.”
Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said each of the 350 women who have lost their lives in the last three years have been failed by society.
“While we’ve heard lots of promises and seen top level commitments to tackling violence against women in the last three years, there is so much more that needs to be done,” she told The Independent.
“There is a failure to prioritise preventing violence in all the work promised to tackle it. We need to see the police response to all forms of abuse improve, with better detection, early intervention, and protective steps taken when women report violence to reduce the risk of femicide.
“Police and justice agencies must take action to stop known perpetrators from frequently re-offending against women and girls.
“We must also see work to shift attitudes across society, including the sexism and male entitlement that drives violence against women and sees it normalised and trivialised.”
This starts with high quality education and well-funded public information campaigns, she said, adding: “Until we tackle harmful attitudes and the inequality that puts women and girls in harm’s way, we won’t be able to improve women’s feelings of safety and freedom.”
The calls come after this week Labour MP Jess Phillips read out the names of every woman killed last year in House of Commons, warning the “epidemic of violence against women and girls has not abated”.
She said: “All of these women mattered, they need to matter much more to politics. And I urge again, as I have for years, for the Government to have a strategy for reducing femicide. Warm words and no political priority will never make this list shorter.”
It is the ninth year that the MP has read victims’ names to the chamber, adding each life lost was a testament to failure to prioritise women’s safety.
She added: “I am tired that women’s safety matters so much less in this place than small boats. I am tired of fighting for systematic change and being given table scraps.
“Never again do I want to hear a politician say that lessons will be learned from abject failure - it is not true.
“This list is no longer just a testament to these women’s lives, it is a testament to our collective failure.”
Jhiselle Feanny, co-founder of Killed Women - a campaign group of families bereaved by male violence against women, described the latest figures as “devastating”.
She said: “Each represents a life brutally taken. And a family facing the unimaginable, their whole world destroyed. “Three years, so many lives, endless announcements, headlines, reviews, reports and lessons learned. And yet here we are, listening to the latest death toll read out in Parliament.”
She said attacks on women were “preventable crimes” after a survey of bereaved families last year found almost seven in ten believed their loved ones’ death was preventable, while two thirds said the killer had a prior history of violence.
“These deaths and injustices are not inevitable. The murders of women are not unavoidable tragedies, but preventable crimes,” Ms Feanny added.
“We urgently need decision and policy makers to act, so women can live free from fear, threat and violence.”
A government spokesperson said: “We are committed to tackling violence against women and improving the police response to these vile crimes. We have classified it as national threat alongside other threats such as terrorism and introduced the first ever dedicated national policing lead.
“The Angiolini inquiry has looked into issues around police culture and the government will continue to work with police partners to ensure that proper standards are upheld at all times.”
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Part of It
Synopsis: Y/n has been the social media manager for the Argentina National Team for a few months now. She’s unofficially everyone’s favorite employee
young fem argentine reader x platonic argentina national football team
A/N: this fic will be regarding the entire team, but it will mainly feature: Alvarez, Fernandez, Molina, Garnacho, Messi, and De Paul, because those are the players I know the best.
more a/n: also please don’t be surprised if some of the info in this fic is false and the players are ooc, im not based in argentina so I could easily get a lot of these things wrong
. so
. for as long as you can remember, the only thing you’ve loved more than playing football is being behind a camera
. as a kid whenever you weren’t on the pitch itself, you were recording your teammates and friends, creating their own personal highlight reels
. and like every other kid in Argentina, you spent your entire childhood playing football
. but it wasn’t until you were a teenager when you started to discover your love for camera work
. it started when a teammate of yours asked you to record something for social media, initially as a joke
. but then the video got a couple hundred views, and you quickly began to love the feeling of creating something people can visually enjoy
. your teenage years were filled with football and videography
. then by the time your senior year came around, you knew you wanted to by apart of both scenes however you could in the future
. leading to your commitment to Cordoba National University with a major in communication and media studies
. you graduate in 2021, and spend a few weeks looking for jobs
. then you find Cordoba fc and their opening for a new social marketing manager
. you get hired within two weeks of applying as a social media manager
. because the Cordoba community is pretty small, you can spend a lot of time getting to know the players and the fans really well
. you learn a lot there, as it’s your first work experience for a professional football club
. you work there till the end of sepetmber/mid october, because through a few of your co-workers, you learn that Central Cordoba has an opening for social media manager
. which of course, you applied to and by the end of November, you’re part of the Central Cordoba staff
. it was a lot of fun; hanging out with players, befriending other staff, traveling with the team, and obviously, managing their social media
. you prove to be extremely efficient there, bringing in thousands of new fans
. which builds your reputation as an employee a lot
. and suddenly, you’re getting offers for different clubs around argentina
. only 1 stands out to you though
. Argentina’s national team offer
. because apparently, due to the world cup occurring at the end of the year, the communications directors wanted more publicity before the competition
. you obviously reply back, and a few weeks later you’re invited to their headquarters for an interview
. at first, you didn’t think you got the job because it took a while to hear back from the directors
. but then you wake up to yet another email waiting for you
. and you are officially argentina’s social media manager
. your first day is technically in april
. but you don’t meet any of the players until the end of that month
. you didn’t even know you were gonna meet the players that day so you were severely unprepared
. one moment you were making coffee with your co workers
. then lionel messi walks in beside rodrigo de paul
. they caught you by surprise
. both of them were really nice though
. you eventually learn that they all are
. your job mainly consists of filming the team together and managing the their social media accounts
. this is how you get to know each of the players
. you click with julian the most at first because of the age similarity
. he becomes your best friend within your first week
. any meetings that the both of you are included in are spent sitting on opposite sides of the room because you were told your friendship is “a disturbance to the work environment”
. you guys make it up by being attached to the hip before and after practices though
. a third of your camera roll is funny candid’s of julian
. you guys are bus seat partners and make fun out of annoying the other guys
. enzo is another close friend of yours
. you guys are always gossiping about something
. “did you hear about the new intern?”
. “apparently, somebody was found with somebody else in the break room after the meeting last week”
. “I swear he wasn’t even sick that one time, he was just at a party the night before”
. he tries to convince you to dye your hair like him
. and when you refuse, he lets you make up for it by helping him tone in
. you guys are always laughing together, no matter what the situation is
. you and molina have such a playful relationship
. you’re always making fun of him for no real reason
. he’s just trying to defend himself
. you do it for all of them, but his birthday photo dump is always the worst
. you two are always wandering around headquarters, looking for either someone to bother or something to entertain yourselves
. it always ends it great content though
. you have a soft spot for alejandro
. mostly because he has a crush on you and tries to play it off
. but you’ve known since the first few times of hanging out with him
. when you’re filming concent for the argentina pages, you’ll see alejandro trying to show off at least three times a video
. you find it hilarious
. the other guys tease him relentlessly for it
. you two are still good friends regardless
. he tries to be protective of you even though he’s literally four years younger than you
. again, you find it hilarious
. and he always gets shit from the other players
. leo is such a dad to you it’s funny
. he was so nice the first time you met him, and after that he unofficially adopted you as a daughter
. even though he’s only like 13 years older than you
. shows his care in small ways
. making sure you never get hit with a ball when you’re sitting in to a practice
. coming into your office when you’re both in headquarters to check on you
. making sure you’re safe when you’re traveling with the team
. whether it be just assigning another player to look after you or a whole ass bodyguard
. also protecting you from rodrigo
. because rodri is like an older brother to you
. super playful
. always teasing you
. agreesive type of love
. y’know those videos of rodri always picking up julian and stuff?
. like that but a smidge gentler
. this is where messi comes in
. insisting he put you down and let you do your job
. rodri also tries to convince you to get tattoos
. honestly that’s a whole team thing
. playful peer pressure is real there
. anyway
. you, julian, and enzo are such a trio
. getting up to the most random shit in other countries after games
. you guys were two seconds away from jumping into a canal in italy
. but then here comes leo
. scolding you guys like his children
. and sending you back to the hotel
. also, you have a jersey from almost every player on the team because before you got your own jersey, you always just picked someone random to wear on game days
. but then rodri started frowning when he saw you in julian’s jersey because apparently, you hadn’t worn his shirt in a few games
. and now you have a separate drawer just for jerseys
. oh and the world cup
. that was so fun for you
. traveling with the team to qatar
. hanging out in stadiums during practice, half upset because it felt like a million degrees
. but half in awe because holy shit you’re in qatar for the world cup
. you’re on the edge of your seat for every game
. the final almost killed you
. you were almost crying on the bench next to the other staff
. totally worth it though
. you started sobbing when montiel made the last penalty kick
. because you knew these guys, you knew how much they wanted it, how much they deserved it
. it was a mess of hugs and tears after that
. julian is grinning into your shoulder
. rodri tackled you
. enzo is basically jumping up and down
. you don’t think you’ll ever see alejandro that happy again
. you and molina are crying together
. and messi gives you the biggest hug
. it’s so fun celebrating with the team
. spraying champange with gonzalo
. singing along to music with paulo
. dancing around with lauatoro
. and coming back to argentina after that
. seeing all the fans in buenos aires, looking around and seeing argentine pride everywhere
. surreal
. there’s definitely no feeling like it
. which is why you’re so sad when it’s time to go back to your clubs
. you came to an agreement with central cordoba to go back and work for them during the argentine league
. then coming back to the national team when it called
. so you can’t wait for next season
#reader insert#football imagine#football team x reader#platonic football team x reader#argentina national football team#argentina national team#argentina nt x reader#female reader#argentina nt fic#lionel messi#julian alvarez#enzo fernandez#alejandro garnacho#nahuel molina#rodrigo de paul#all platonic
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I was wondering at what point do you think the Sussex’s reached the point of no return, and when the actually penny dropped for H and M (actually do you think he realises that somethings are literally unforgivable even now.) Obviously we probably know a small fraction of what was happening behind the scenes, and the beloved son making a new life is studiously polite, even if many think KC3 would have his son back in an instant.
So it's a few things for me. I think the Oprah interview and Philip's funeral got the ball rolling; the Platinum Jubilee was the "make or break" moment; and The Queen's funeral was when the penny dropped.
Here's the long version...
First, the Oprah interview and Philip's passing/funeral. Here's a super quick timeline of what happened:
2/16/21: Philip enters hospital to receive treatment for an infection.
2/20/21: Charles is papped leaving Philip's hospital looking upset and very emotional.
2/28/21: First promotions of the Sussexes' interview with Oprah debut in the US.
3/1/21: Philip is transferred to a different hospital to receive treatment for his heart condition. Paparazzi photos of him being transferred via ambulance are published, immediate criticism.
3/3/21: Philip has a heart operation. Palace says it went well.
3/5/21: Philip goes back to the first hospital. Meghan tells people she thinks the palace is making up or using Philip's health to silence them and keep them from releasing the Oprah interview.
3/7/21: Oprah interview broadcasts in the US.
3/8/21: Commonwealth Day Service; Oprah releases new clips cut from the final edit of the broadcast; the interview is broadcast in the UK.
(This is just a small piece of what was happening in those days. There was a ton of other stuff going on too.)
I think Meghan leaking to her friends, who talked to reporters, that they don't think Philip is as ill as the Palace reports was the beginning of the end for them. Okay, so maybe the palace wasn't keeping Harry fully updated on everything that was happening as it happened, but the signs were all there that it was a serious hospitalization.
(And I do believe that that leak about Philip's health is why Harry flew immediately to Charles after the King's cancer diagnosis. Karma served him hard with their public on-the-record denials of how ill Philip and The Queen were so now Harry wanted to do the right thing and go see for himself what was really happen.)
Then there's the whole Oprah interview altogether, which many in the firm - family members and courtiers alike - didn't receive well. Using today's measure of "Piers is what Camilla thinks," then if he was hopping mad over it, then she and the family were hopping mad.
Then Philip died and the way the Sussexes behaved - among them: Harry preempting much of the family with his statement about Philip, Harry's demand to wear his uniform, Harry dicking up the procession, Meghan telling everyone the flowers on Philip's casket were from her, Harry allegedly confronting William and Kate about the Oprah interview, the Sussexes using the family walk for olive branch PR, and (if Harry is to be believed) the Harry-Charles-William peace summit in the Frogmore gardens after the funeral - was the final nail in the coffin about what privileges or support the Sussexes would get from the BRF.
Especially when you consider that on February 19, 2021, the Palace announced that the Sussexes had declined to return and the one-year trial/review was terminated as of March 31st. So on April 9th when Philip passed away and the Sussexes began asserting precedence and privilege, they had no right to any of it. They were non-working royals, bottom of the totem pole.
(Then seven weeks later was the whole Lilibet fiasco and we all know how that went.)
I think the Sussexes' behavior and attitude around Philip's funeral, plus the Lilibet debacle (which we didn't fully learn about until after The Queen passed) directly led to certain decisions for the Platinum Jubilee, which became the "make or break" moment for everyone, not just the Sussexes.
The Sussexes saw the Platinum Jubilee as their chance to relaunch and rebrand as royals because they needed the royal glow to make their soon-to-be-released projects successful and well-received. The firm saw the Platinum Jubilee as a chance to rein the Sussexes in to their new status as "family members" vs "royals."
And, well, we know what happened at the Platinum Jubilee:
The Sussexes were kept away from the Cambridge family.
They weren't allowed in the Trooping carriages and the Trooping balcony.
They weren't invited to the Trooping rooftop party with the rest of the family or to the cousins' lunch afterwards.
They were scheduled to take the "Minor Royals Motorcoach" to the service of thanksgiving.
They were booed on arrival (and departure) at the service of thanksgiving.
They weren't included in the official procession with Charles and the Cambridges.
They were seated on the other side away from the working royals and demoted to the inside of the second or third row "after" Beatrice and Eugenie, instead of being on the aisle.
They were not invited to the post-service of thanksgiving guildhall reception/luncheon and had to do the walk of shame to the car by themselves. (Hence the boos.)
No one went to Lili's birthday party.
Meghan didn't get her "Lili meets Lili" picture with The Queen and Lili.
The Sussexes knew it was game over for them from there. The Platinum Jubilee wasn't the "make it" moment they needed and they didn't get anything they wanted. We know they got nothing they wanted because they threw a hissy fit and left early than planned, suggesting they felt very snubbed.
So I think that was the point of no return as far as the firm was concerned - if the Sussexes could behave themselves at the jubilee and the public was accepting of their presence, then the firm could've worked with them. But the Sussexes didn't behave (Meghan's photo stunt with Peter and Zara's girls, missing their pick-up for the service of thanksgiving, and Meghan's stunt rolling down the car window after a whole fuss about security) and the public made their feelings very, very clear.
I think the Sussexes were probably in denial with how badly the jubilee went, and that's why the interviews Meghan did later that summer were bitter and venomous towards the royal family. I also think the way they were treated at the jubilee weekend also informed some of the things they did and said in the Netflix docuseries as well.
So while the Sussexes were fully aware that they were out after the jubilee (I don't remember now who said it, but there's the famous quote "You never really know if you're in with the royal family, but if you're out, you definitely know") I don't think they understood the impact of what being "out" meant, though. I think they thought they could continue using the BRF for PR as they always did and that The Queen/Charles would always welcome them back with open arms because that's what they always did.
Which is what led to the penny dropping with The Queen's passing and funeral. It's clear that Harry thought he'd be given precedence and priority as The King's Son. which didn't happen. He made demands for it, still didn't happen. He tried to take it by force with the Netflix walkabout, still didn't happen. He caused a PR ruckus to get the public to demand it, it still didn't happen.
I do fully believe Harry was grieving at The Queen's funeral and her committal service. But I believe he was grieving the loss of his royal status a bit more than the loss of his grandmother that day, judging by his body language throughout the day. He knew it was all over then and there, and that bitterness came through in his interviews for Spare, when he demanded that the BRF needed to apologize first and his "they know what they did" comments.
I kind of feel like Harry saw the coronation as a test, where he felt "If I go and they treat me well, it'll all be fine but if I go and they treat me horribly, I'm never coming back again." And, well, the latter happened and he went straight from Westminster Abbey to the airport to go home, which was as big a tantrum as the one they pitched at the jubilee to leave early. And if Charles hadn't announced his cancer diagnosis, or if he didn't have cancer at all, I feel pretty confident saying we wouldn't have seen Harry in London until the May service of thanksgiving for Invictus Games.
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CNN technical director, Charlie Chester, in a secret Project Veritas recording from April 2021: Once the public are no longer scared of "Covid", the climate scam will take centre stage as the new imaginary boogeyman to terrify everyone into submission with.
"They've already announced in our office that once the public is open to it, we're going to start focusing mainly on climate… There's a definitive ending to the pandemic. It'll taper off to a point that it's not a problem anymore. The climate thing is gonna take years, so they'll probably be able to milk that for quite a bit."
"Be prepared, it's coming."
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Left My Friend’s Body Outside the Mithraeum: One New Zealander’s account of the New Zealand stuff in Nona the Ninth
A few points before we begin:
I’ve quoted everything out of context, but probably don’t read this if you don’t want to be spoiled for the book.
I’m just one person (a Pākehā North Islander millennial, for context), but hopefully I caught most of it. Please tell me if you see anything I missed!
If you see something and think, ‘Tumblr user junozeta, why have you included this piece of information when it is very easily Google-able,’ it’s for the sake of completeness.
Kia ora!
Dramatis personae
Stop It, name assumed, lies under counter at dairy, red colour, big sized, four legs
Dairy: A corner store.
John 20:8
Dilworth. Otago. Auckland. Overseas to Corpus. (She likes the word corpus; it sounds nice and fat.) Then another year abroad, where he got the grant and met the men who would make things happen. Special pleading with the New Zealand government and Asia-Pacific Environmental, at his suggestion, then back to the facility outside Greytown.
Here John is reciting his credentials. Dilworth is a private boys’ boarding school in Auckland. (ETA: Please see this reblog by sixth-light for better context.) Auckland and Otago will be referring to the universities, which are notably the only two in NZ with medical schools. I will add that having studied more in NZ than overseas does not afford you a lot of prestige.
Greytown is a small town (population 2,720 as of 2021) in the lower North Island, near Wellington. (I note here that Trentham, the presumptive namesake of the Second House’s Trentham, is also near Wellington, as is Maymorn, which Tamsyn Muir has said Mercymorn was originally named after.)
Chapter 1
“Is that pikelet mix?” she said.
Pikelet: Like a pancake, but smaller and denser.
Palamedes stood like he was playing a game of Hot Chocolate and the tagger was looking right at him. Hot Chocolate was in fashion with her friends at the moment and Nona wanted to get really good at it.
Putting this here to state for the record that I’m not familiar with Hot Chocolate as a name for a game of that kind. (ETA: An anon was, though, as a different name for Red Light, Green Light. See, not all of NZ is the same.)
I’ve met leaders like Unjust Hope before.
“Unjust Hope” could be from “The Ikons” by James K. Baxter, a famous New Zealand poet.
John 5:20
He said, It was the last one that was getting to me. I knew all those bodies by name. Funny to say, but they were my mates, you know? I’d worked on them for such a long time, and they’d given us so much, and now they were going to get dumped in some concrete skip because after what we’d done to them they couldn’t be cremated or buried safely. I hated that.
Mates: Friends. Classic Kiwi.
Skip: A dumpster.
I didn’t have to worry about the public or the media—we had a pet cop, P—. She’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD.
MoD: Probably self-explanatory, but Ministry of Defence.
We only had the demo cans; the mass-produced ones were made in a Five Eyes factory in Shenzhen.
Five Eyes: A surveillance alliance between NZ, Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. As of 2022, not actively military, nor ostensibly involved with China. Much to think about.
I went around to everyone, talking to my favourites—I know it was weird having favourites, but let’s bloody face it, I’d gone weird—not even saying goodbye, just saying it’ll be fine, hang on for me, kia kaha, kia māia.
Kia kaha, kia māia: Well-known Māori phrase meaning “be strong, be brave”.
John 15:23
You wouldn’t believe how stupid guys get over compliments on our looks, I was vain as.
Vain as: “[adjective] as” is a classic Kiwi way to say that something is extremely [adjective].
P— said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther.
Māori TV: Worth noting here that this is a TV channel, and not a generic reference.
Someone’s Honda. Someone’s Mazda. Someone’s four-wheel drive. Someone’s shed. A Macca’s sign.
Shed: A garage.
Macca’s: McDonald’s.
A— and M— moved in with me, and G— set up outside; he was sleeping in his ute. C— was staying with N—, long days. She left us early in the morning and came back the next day with sausage rolls for breakfast.
Ute: A pickup truck. (Short for “utility vehicle”.)
Sausage rolls: A classic NZ food.
You hear all the cicadas in the grass, you hear the dogs in the next town over barking. You hear the moreporks in the trees and the possums skittering over shed roofs.
Morepork: A native owl (Ninox novaeseelandiae).
Possums: Worth noting that NZ has the Australian kind (Trichosurus vulpecula).
He was the bravest dog I’d ever met. Half Chihuahua, half pug. Nan called him Ulysses S. Grunt.
Maybe worth noting here that “Grant” and “Grunt” are pronounced much more alike in an NZ accent than they would be in a North American one.
Chapter 9
Cam ducked into a bakery and came out with a warm and probably radioactive paper bag of pastries that had been under the bakery light the whole time.
Almost certainly a reference to this iconic cultural moment.
She had already got her towel and the old shirt she used to swim in—much easier to go naked, but the others had all objected to this, and Cam had said it would make her a sniper target—and her jandals, and then after masks were tied and hats put on they walked to the beach in the low dusk.
Jandals: Flip-flops. Classic Kiwi.
“I’d give Palamedes the hiding of his fucking life if he wasn’t renting an ass with you.”
Hiding: A beating.
John 5:18
They were lying head-to-head, their eyes aimed at the right part of the sky to see, or in this case not see, the Southern Cross.
Southern Cross: The constellation on the NZ flag. Known formally as, of course, Crux.
There was so much to figure out. But I’d got a dream team on tap, eh? People who could think. C—’s N—, she was on board. C— was still pretending they weren’t dating—she was an artist, so that was cool. If you have two scientists and an engineer and a detective and a lawyer and an artist you’re pretty much sweet as.
Eh: We tend to end sentences with this quite a lot (though of course it’s not just us).
Sweet as: “all good”. Classic Kiwi.
Back then we thought maybe there was something about the ground, something about our particular patch in the Wairarapas, but if we loaded up the ute with a bunch of bodies and looked out for the cops we could do the same thing anywhere else.
The Wairarapas: The region of NZ where Greytown is located. This is an informal way to refer to it, its proper name being the Wairarapa.
“Is that pikelets, Pyrrha? You’re a legend.”
Calling someone a legend to express approval, while not new, has become deeply entrenched in the local consciousness over the last decade or so, thanks to a recognisable anti-drink driving campaign. (If you’ve heard of the “ghost chips” ad, it’s one of those.)
Chapter 12
Crown Him with Many Crowns Thy Full Gallant Legions He Found It in Him to Forgive
He Found It in Him to Forgive: Lyrics from a classic NZ song, “Dominion Road” by The Mutton Birds.
“Why does Pash hate us so much?”
Worth noting here that “pash” (both a noun and a verb) is slang for making out.
John 8:1
You’ve got a wizard out in the wop-wops who’s now got blanket bans from nearly every video upload site and a whole bunch of people have entered the country because of his YouTube channel, the government isn’t all, Love that small-business entrepreneur spirit.
The wop-wops: The middle of nowhere. Often just “the wops”.
Didn’t mention that I’d only gone to Parachute ’cause of the underage drinking.
Parachute: A Christian music festival that existed from 1992 to 2014.
She’d won medals for competition shooting back north in Hamilton, but we’re not talking Jesse James. We’re talking Hamilton.
Hamilton: A city in the North Island (it’s the next city south of Auckland) which it is nationally popular to disparage, especially if you’re from Auckland (this is mutual).
Chapter 16
Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia
Kiriona: Transliteration of “Gideon” into te reo Māori.
“It can’t be my blood. It must be someone else’s. Maybe it’s tomato sauce.”
Pretty throwaway, this one, but when she says tomato sauce this is the kind I think of.
Chapter 18
“Whew!” said Nona. “Is the classroom munted?”
Munted: Busted, fucked up.
John 5:1
There was a lot of it, but we had a lot of people who needed a feed. We sat there with the window cracked so G— could hear us while he manned the barbie, which in the dark gets unwholesome as hell, and we ate off paper plates, and I told them …
A feed: A meal.
Barbie: I think this one should be easy.
He said, Which just goes to show that only getting to NCEA Level 2 isn’t going to stop you making waves in life, right. You can still eat steak, talk to wizards, and take down the government.
NCEA Level 2: This is the qualification you get in your second-to-last year of high school (typically at age 16, which is the age at which you can leave school), and has historically been the minimum you need for university entrance.
This is fairly easy to infer anyway, but John et al. being young enough to have done NCEA (it was introduced in the early 2000s) and old enough to have gone to Parachute to underage drink tells you pretty soundly that they’re millennials.
John 3:20
He said, So I went to the governments that were still sympathetic, sort of, like ours, and all the Trans-Pacifics, and we threw down our evidence.
Probably referring to the TPP.
Not only that, they looked at us and were like, We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?
Pronounce this as “fullas”, with the U as in “up”.
John 9:22
A bunch of the guys were her old coworkers—guys she’d gone through training with in Porirua, beer buddies.
Porirua: A small city near Wellington.
John 1:20
He said, So here’s us, planning to meet these agents in neutral territory, across the ditch, over in the huddle where the Territory refugees were.
The ditch: The Tasman Sea.
But they weren’t only aggro about G—, they were aggro that a nuke might go off and kill a couple million people. I was like, Guys, it’s fine, they’re Australian.
There’s a rivalry.
John 5:4
Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right?
A very recognisable series of ads.
(End of post! If you have learned anything, I’ll be stoked.)
#this is what i was put on earth for#nona the ninth#nona the ninth spoilers#the locked tomb#locked tomb originals
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Pluralistic is four
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and then SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!
Four years ago, I started pluralistic.net, my post-Boing Boing, solo blog project: an ad-free, tracker-free site that anyone can republish, commercially or noncommercially. It's been a wild four years, featuring over 1,150 editions, many consisting of multiple articles:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/
As a project, Pluralistic has been a roaring success. I've published multiple, significant "breakout" articles that popularized obscure, important, highly technical ideas, most notably "adversarial interoperability":
http://pluralistic.net/tag/adversarial-interoperability
"End-to-end" as a remedy for multiple internet ripoffs, including as a superior alternative to link-taxes as a means of saving the news industry from Big Tech predation:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/e2e/
and, of course, "enshittification":
https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
These are emblematic of the sorts of ideas that I've spent the past 20+ years trying to popularize in tech-policy debates dominated by technologically illiterate policy ideas ("abolish Section 230!") and politically illiterate technical ideas (so many to choose from, but let's just say "cryptocurrency"). They require that the reader come along for a lot of cross-disciplinary analysis that often gets deep into the weeds. These are some of the hardest ideas to convey, but nuanced proposals and critiques that work on both political and technical axes are the best hope we have of successfully weathering the polycrisis.
Blogging has always been a part of this project. For nearly 20 years, I posted nearly every day on Boing Boing – 53,906 posts in all! – taking note of everything that seemed important. Keeping a "writer's notebook" in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can't slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas for stories, novels, essays, speeches and nonfiction books. What's more, those ripened ideas are supported by a searchable database of everything I've thought about the subject, often annotated by readers and other writers who've commented on the posts. I call this "The Memex Method":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
Pluralistic marks a new phase in my deployment of the Memex Method. With 50K+ notes in a database, I've gradually turned Pluralistic into a forum for far more synthetic, longer-form work that pulls on threads from decades of research into nothing in particular and everything that seemed important.
Pluralistic is also an experiment in retaining control over my destiny – but not my work. Rather than hitching my ability to reach an audience through a platform that can be enshittified at the whim of a mercurial, infantile billionaire or their venal, callous shareholders, Pluralistic is published web-first, on a site I control, and then syndicated to every platform that matters to me. It's a process called POSSE (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
I want to spread the ideas I fight for, so I post them everywhere, and license them Creative Commons Attribution-Only, encouraging others to repost them. Lots of small sites do this, but so do large ones. Notably, Wired picked up my first breakout piece on enshittification and republished it under the CC terms:
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
This was a really interesting process. On the one hand, I didn't get paid for this feature, which did really well for Wired. On the other hand, nearly 30 years of writing for Wired makes me doubtful that I could have gotten this piece out in the form it emerged, without substantially toning down (or, if you prefer, neutering) the rhetoric that made that piece more persuasive. A commissioning editor from one of the largest newspapers in the world got in touch with me after it came out and said they wished they'd published it – but also that they knew they couldn't possibly have done so. By publishing the story first on my blog, proving its audience, and establishing its canonical form, I was able to get it amplified by a service with a much bigger platform than me, without having to compromise on the form.
That republication gave me the much-maligned "exposure" – but it also carried the message to places it wouldn't have reached on its own. I don't write – have never written – solely as an income source. As both an artist and an activist, connecting with audiences has always been co-equal in my mind with earning my living. That's why I don't do a lot of film-writing: it pays well, but most of it never sees the light of day. It's also why I stopped writing for ad agencies: it paid well, but it didn't matter to me or my audience. To mangle Dr Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote solely for money."
The open nature of this blog, with its many open syndication channels, creates multidirectional pathways for evaluating and refining my attempts at making my ideas understood and my art land. My posts often circle back to points I made earlier, incorporating useful feedback from readers and colleagues, sure, but also anticipating and rebutting those areas where critics have convinced others in various forums. Vanity searching is unjustly maligned: I learn a ton about how to make by work better by lurking in Reddit comments, Hacker News, Twitter, Slashdot, Metafilter and other forums. I also take a sneaky pleasure in knowing that the persistent trolls who reliably pop up to grind their weird axes about me (sometimes referencing blog posts I made decades ago) have taught me how to neutralize them in advance, and it's delightful to see them try their same old lines, only to have other commentators point out that my latest piece makes it absolutely undeniable how wrong they are. Living well is the best revenge, indeed.
Four years. I've been writing Pluralistic for four years. During that time, I've published eight books – and beyond any doubt, Pluralistic helped me get those books into readers' hands. But far more importantly, during that time, I've written nine books – and contracted for a tenth – as the Memex Method paid off again and again.
I don't know how long I'll do Pluralistic for, but I don't foresee stopping any time soon. What's more, no matter what happens to Pluralistic, I can't ever see giving up on the Memex Method, keeping notes in public and making them work for me.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis
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