#People in minority groups have just as much capacity to be abusive as someone who is not.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Hot takes about Severus Snape are a wierdly decent glimpse into how a person with progressive values analyses things. Literally every time someone talks about Snape, it’s like this tiny window into how one-dimentionally people actually think.

Recently saw a twitter post that was a fantastic example. Here’s how it goes (paraphrasing):

Person A:“Snape is POC and Queer coded, that’s why you guy’s hate him uwu lol.”

Person B: “Actually I hate him because he was mean and abusive to children under his care uwu but go off I guess lol”

Both of these takes are designed to be dramatic and/or reactionary. They each use partial truths to paint very broad strokes. These are get-em-in-one-hit quips. This is virtue signalling, if you’ll excuse that loaded phrase. Nobody had a substantial conversation, but now everyone who sees their statement knows the high ground they took.

At least a hundred other people chimed in to add their own little quippy hot takes into play, none of which add anything significant, but clearly made everyone feel very highly of themselves.

So many layers of nuance and complex analysis is completely lost in this kind of discussion. On tumblr, you get more of this kind of bullshit, but you don’t have a word count limit, so you guys just spew endless mountains of weak overblown evidence backing up your bullshit arguments, none of which was really about engaging in a real conversation anyway.

Here’s the thing about Snape.

He is a childhood domestic abuse victim. His abuser is a muggle.

He becomes a student at a magical school that takes him away from his abuser and immediately instills in him the idea that being a part of this magical world is a badge of self-worth, empowerment, and provides safety and security - provided that he keeps in line.

There is a war is being waged in that world over his right to exist (he is a half blood).

He is a marginalized person within the context of the narrative, forced to constantly be in the same living space as the children of his own oppressors who are being groomed and recruited into a hate group militia (the pureblood slytherins). They are in turn trying to do the same to him.

He is marginalized person bullied by children who are also part of his oppressor group, but who have “more liberal” leanings and aren’t direct about why he’s being targeted (the mauraders are all purebloods, Sirius, who was the worst offender, was raised in a bigoted household, the same one that produced Bellatrix.).

He had a crush on a girl who is a muggleborn, and therefore she is considered even lesser than him and carries a stigma to those who associate with her. That girl was his only real friend. In his entire life.

For both Snape and Lily, allying themselves to a pureblood clique within their own houses would be a great way of shielding themselves from a measure of the bigotry they were probably facing. There would have been obvious pressure from those cliques to disconnect with one and other.

Every other person who associates with Snape in his adulthood carries some sort of sociopolitical or workplace (or hate cult) baggage with their association. Some of them will physically harm and/or kill him if he steps out of line. He hasn’t at any point had the right environment to heal and adjust from these childhood experiences. Even his relationship with Dumbledore is charged with constant baggage, including the purebloods who almost killed him during their bullying getting a slap on the wrist, the werewolf that almost killed him as a child being placed in an authority position over new children, etc. Dumbledore is canonically manipulative no matter his good qualities, and he has literally been manipulating Snape for years in order to cultivate a necessary asset in the war.

He is a person who is not in the stable mental state necessary to be teaching children, whom has been forced to teach children. While also playing the role of double agent against the hate group militia, the one that will literally torture you for mistakes or backtalk or just for fun. The one that will torture and kill him if he makes one wrong move.

Is the math clicking yet? From all of this, it’s not difficult to see how everything shitty about Snape was cultivated for him by his environment. Snape was not given great options. Snape made amazingly awful choices, and also some amazingly difficult, courageous ones. Snape was ultimately a human who had an extremely bad life, in which his options were incredibly grim and limited.

In fact, pretty much every point people make about how shitty Snape is as a person makes 100% logical sense as something that would emerge from how he was treated. Some if it he’s kind of right about, some of it is the inevitable reality of suffering, and some of it is part of the cycle of abuse and harm.

Even Snape’s emotional obsession with Lily makes logical sense when you have the perspective that he literally has no substantial positive experiences with other human beings that we know of, and he has an extreme, soul destroying guilt complex over her death. Calling him an Incel mysoginist nice guy projects a real-world political ideology and behavior that does not really apply to the context of what happened to him and her.

Even Snape’s specific little acts of cruelty to certain students is a reflection of his own life experiences. He identifies with Neville; more specifically, he identifies his own percieved emotional weaknesses in his childhood in Neville. There’s a very sad reason there why he feels the urge to be so harsh.

Snape very clearly hates himself, in a world where everyone else hates him, too. Imagine that, for a second. Imagine total internal and external hatred, an yearning for just a little bit of true connection. For years. Imagine then also trying to save that world, even if it’s motivated by guilt. Even if nobody ever knows you did it and you expect to die a miserable death alone.

There are more elements here to consider, including the way Rowling described his looks (there may be something in there re: ugliness and swarthy stereotyping). These are just the things that stand out the most prominently to me.

J.K. Rowling is clearly also not reliable as an imparter of moral or sociopolitical philosophies. I don’t feel that her grasp of minority experiences is a solid one, considering how she picks and chooses who is acceptable and who is a threat.

All of that said, this is a logically consistent character arc. Within the context of his narrative, Snape is a marginalized person with severe PTSD and emotional instability issues who has absolutely no room available to him for self-improvement or healing, and never really has. And yes, he’s also mean, and caustic, and verbally abusive to the students. He’s also a completey miserable, lonely person.

There are elements in his character arc that mirror real world experiences quite well. If nothing else, Rowling is enough of an emotional adult to recognise these kinds of things and portray something that feels authentic.

In my opinion, it’s not appropriate to whittle all this down by comparing him directly to the real world experiences of marginalized groups - at least if you are not a part of the group you are comparing him to. There have been many individuals who have compared his arc to their own personal experiences of marginalization, and that is valid. But generally speaking, comparing a white straight dude to people who are not that can often be pretty offensive. This is not a valuable way to discuss either subject.

Also, I believe that while it’s perfectly okay to not like Snape as a character, many of the people who act like Person B are carrying Harry’s childhood POV about Snape in their hearts well into their own adulthood. And if nothing else, Rowling was attempting to say something here about how our perspectives (should) grow and change as we emotionally mature.  She doesn’t have to be a good person herself to have expressed something true about the world in this instance, and since this story is a part of our popular culture, people have a right to feel whatever way they do about this story and it’s characters.

The complexity of this particular snapshot of fictionalized marginalization, and what it reveals about the human experience, cannot be reduced down to “he’s an abuser so he’s not worth anyone’s time/you are bad for liking him.”

And to be honest, I think that it reveals a lot about many of us in progressive spaces, particularly those of us who less marginalized but very loud about our values, that we refuse to engage with these complexities in leu of totally condemning him. Particularly because a lot of the elements I listed above are indeed reflected in real world examples of people who have experienced marginalization and thus had to deal with the resulting emotional damage, an mental illness, and behavior troubles, and bad decisions. Our inability to address the full scope of this may be a good reflection of how we are handling the complexity of real world examples.

Real people are not perfect angels in their victimhood. They are just humans who are victims, and we all have the capacity to be cruel and abusive in a world where we have been given cruelty and abuse. This is just a part of existing. If you cannot sympathise with that, or at least grasp it and aknowledge it and respect the people who are emotionally drawn to a character who refects that, then you may be telling on yourself to be honest.

To be honest, this is especially true if you hate Snape but just really, really love the Mauraduers. You have a right to those feelings, but if you are moralizing this and judging others for liking Snape, you’ve confessed to something about how you’ve mentally constructed your personal values in a way I don’t think you’ve fully grasped yet.

I have a hard time imagining a mindset where a story like Snape’s does not move one to empathy and vicarious grief, if I’m honest. I feel like some people really just cannot be bothered to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel and living like they live. I struggle to trust the social politics of people who show these kinds of colors, tbh.

But maybe that’s just me.

[scripttorture]

Hi! A minor antagonist of mine survived the genocide/torture of his species (sci-fi setting) as a child. He's now a young adult and suffers from nightmares, memory problems, anxiety, etc. My worry comes from him being an antagonist who is in a position of power now and who ignores/implicitly encourages the extensive abuse/torture of someone beneath him because their people are the ones that perpetrated the genocide. Is this skirting too close to the 'torture survivors are evil' trope?

Honestly I think the best answer to this one is: how many survivor characters do you have in the story?

 Purely from a writing perspective I think that you need multiple survivors in any story focused on genocide. Because if you only have one survivor then you’ll struggle to really communicate the scale of what happened.

 I had an ask a while back about competing communities (I can’t seem to find it-) where I talked at length about how torture and genocide imply communities of abusers and communities of survivors. Because we’re talking about a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of victims.

 So if the genocide is a big part of the background to this story then it should effect more then two characters. Because we’re not just talking about a single ‘abuser’ and a single victim here.

 Think about where you can have other effected characters and how those characters were effected.

 Are there people who got away just in time, missing the worst of it? Do they have survivors guilt? How many members of their extended families did they lose?

 Are there people with tales similar to this antagonist? How did they survive? Did they do things they regret? Conversely do they feel justified in doing what they had to in order to survive? Perhaps they don’t feel like they took any active role in their own survival. Did their families make it? Their friends? How big are the gaps in their lives?

 Were there ex-patriot or diaspora communities away from the areas the genocide took place? How has the genocide effected their politics? How many friends and relatives did they lose? Has it made their community feel stronger, more involved in each other’s growth and safety? Has it led them to open their doors to refugees and survivors of their own species? Has it led them to do the same for other vulnerable groups?

 I was reading the work of a Holocaust survivor a few weeks ago and I was struck by her observation that for survivors this was not something that ended. Yes she was freed from the death camps, yes she lived and yes she emigrated to the USA. But the experience moved with her and (from what I can remember of her words) ‘continued on the streets of Boston.’

 She spoke about how she was the last person left in her father’s line. That entire side of the family had been murdered.

 And that, that is what genocide is for survivors: the holes in their lives where other people used to be. People they loved and cherished. People they passed on the street. Strangers that they connected to however briefly.

 Holes.

 You communicate that to your readers by showing the people who are left and having them show what they lost in simple every day terms.

 When I was a child there was a section of the souk which was full of jewellers. Most of them were Yemeni. And I liked shiny things as much as the next mammal but I never paid the Yemenis much mind. They tended to sell a lot of big, gold pieces, well out of a child’s price range and I didn’t find the style particularly pretty.

 So I’d say my salaams and walk on past to the stalls that sold antiques or Afghani pieces to look at semi-precious stones I could afford.

 They were young men, the Yemenis. They were probably only a decade older then me, if that. They were probably married. They may have had young children. A lot of immigrants in Saudi come over when young and have families (whether those families are with them or ‘back home’), this holds true of my family as well.

 One day the government decided it didn’t want them any more, they changed the visa laws. It did not quite happen overnight but the Yemenis left.

 There’s been a famine in Yemen since 2016. And I wonder how many of those men who smiled and said salaam as I passed are still alive. I wonder how many of them got typhoid when the infrastructure collapsed completely. I wonder how many of their children died and how many of them will be crippled for the rest of their lived because of hunger.

 I could tell you about their neat clothes and carefully slicked back hair. I could tell you how much effort they put into their winning smiles and how they’d try to persuade my mother to stop and look even though she wore horribly unfashionable abayas. (The rich white women all wore terrible abayas as far as I can remember.)

 And that’s genocide. Seen from a remove.

 Survivors are not saints. The urge to put survivors of global atrocities up on a pedestal as if everything they do and say contains exceptional moral insight is… flawed. Surviving something awful doesn’t make people morally worse and it also doesn’t make people morally better. Acting ethically is something everyone chooses to do or not.

 I don’t think there’s anything necessarily ‘wrong’ with having a survivor be one of the bad guys in your story. They’re people and they can make bad decisions like anyone else. As long as they’re not the only survivor in the story. Because you only get that implication when you’ve got one point of representation.

 So include the community. Think about where you can work in other survivors. Think about the diversity of experience there. Think about how to communicate the scale you need to justify the term ‘genocide’.

 There are a lot of books and survivor accounts of the genocides that have occurred since the 1900s. They’re difficult reading but I think picking up a few could really help you understand the kind of scale and diversity of experience you’re aiming for.

 Mao’s Great Famine is a good one for scale but it doesn’t really focus on survivor accounts. I found that made it slightly easier reading. I still haven’t read all of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families but it does contain interviews with people who were directly effected and people in the diaspora community. That may be helpful.

 I think Amnesty International would also be a good source here. There are currently ongoing genocides in China and Burma which you should be able to find a decent amount of information on. The effected groups are the Uighurs and the Rohingya. There are diaspora communities for both groups and interviews with multiple survivors available online.

 There are other genocides happening at the moment, but I think you’ll find the most free, English information and interviews looking at these two.

 Overall, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this scenario so long as you take steps to make sure this villain isn’t the only survivor we see. The message that abused people go on to abuse others only comes across if you have a single survivor. And I really think that your story will be deeper and richer in a lot of ways by including others.

 Survivors are people. Most of the time I say that to encourage people to remember their positive capacities: their passions and relationships. But it goes both ways.

 Survivors are people; which means we shouldn’t paint them all as saints and we shouldn’t paint them all as devils.

 I hope that helps :)

Edit: Typos, whoops. Thank you for catching that.

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Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #tw genocide #writing survivors #writing responsibly #writing genocide #sci fi ask #Yemen #guilt in survivors #attitudes towards torture survivors #writing villains #that became a little personal

[saintprivateer]

I understand the ideas behind the zemenipearls post but can we not just have a nice fictional world? It’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a great nation of saintly people, it’s all fantasy for a reason. I won’t get started on their posts about my girl Nina and my dude Nikolai 😒

Okay... there’s a lot of ground to cover here so boot up cowhand I wrote a LOT

No matter how unlike-this-world a fantasy universe seems, it was still crafted by a real human who IS a part of this world. And humans put their own beliefs and experiences into their stories as the foundation for how ideal/ not-ideal they want the au to be. We use the environment around us as a stepping stone for our stories, and this DOUBLES if the author is saying “This World Is Not Like Ours At All”. The question authors answer of “What exactly is this au not like?” Rounds back to the place we are trying to distance ourselves from, because that is what this au is “not like.” And most often, authors craft these fantasy universes and bring the reader into a whole new world only to go back to a REAL theme of “This World Is Actually More Like Yours Than You Think.” Because that’s usually the entire point. We like fantasy because we want to see our nature mirrored in worlds unlike ours. We love that people can fly and cast spells, but we REALLY love when they’re as human as us in behavior/interests/ actions.

All that’s to say: you can’t actually write a racism-free world if you’ve never experienced a racism-free world. The ideals we want to portray will still be flawed and not 100% ideal, because the notion we have OF this ideal is fundamentally flawed. ESPECIALLY if we are still unlearning our own fallacies to these ideals. Grishaverse has anti-blackness threaded in the pages because there is anti-blackness on Earth and anti-black fallacies in the ideals Leigh Bardugo has internalized (like any other white person). If we can acknowledge the argument that meanings can be found in stories/art whether it was intended or not, then we have to acknowledge Leigh Bardugo wrote in her own prejudice or anti-black ideals into the grishaverse, whether intended or not. She wanted to write a story removed from the racism we know, and that in of itself isn’t a bad thing to imagine. But she still wrote tropes actively harmful to the minorities they represent.

“Why do you have to look for patterns that aren’t there and nitpick on characters? Why does everything have to be about race? Isn’t it enough that our heroes are TRYING to be good?”

When people say this, they usually mean “Why are you putting this in my face? We (the group not affected) were all doing fine until you decided to be grumpy about something, and I don’t want my ideals soiled by your criticisms.”

Imagine seeing the person who’s supposed to represent you and your identity be repeatedly trashed, ignored, dumbed down, dismissed, killed off, etc etc in canon and in the fandom, and when you finally get the courage to bring it up, the entirety of people not affected silence and threaten you for rocking their boat. You really can’t imagine how that actually feels unless you’ve felt it. When you write off the consistently abusive treatment of a community of people in a book as an inconvenient—and thus invalid— topic that “ruins” the characters or plots you want to root for, you’re acknowledging the privilege you have in being able to look the other way when these patterns have been brought to your attention.

There’s a lot you might not catch when you aren’t a part of the communities affected. If someone is gracious enough to extend their emotional and intellectual labor to point it out to you despite the all the gaslighting and harassment they face, the LEAST you can do is have an open mind and release the defenses and previous ideals you’ve cultivated for the characters you love. Black fans don’t owe it to you to spell it out, but they sometimes do! Despite how white fans treat them in return.

You said “it’s not like the Kerch are made out to be a nation of great saintly people.” Great! So we agree everyone should be praised and criticized accordingly? And when it’s pointed out that a character exhibits bigotry we can acknowledge that as a part of the environment they’ve lived in and thus a trait of themselves?

You can enjoy any universe or the characters that come with it in full capacity, and no one is asking you to discard stories entirely because of the mistakes. Nikolai meant and means a lot to me because of the ideals that I crafted in my head from 16 up. He’s a comfort character! He was my vision of a masc-presenting adventurer who got by with wit and charm and aesthetics. The people who love him see something of themselves in him, or someone they love. But he’s still a product of his environment. Just because I don’t want that to be true doesn’t make it untrue. Ravka is fantasy Russia but .*•*~more idealistic*.~*. This doesn’t take away the fact that the foundation is...still Russia. He’s still a privileged white king thats actively oppressing minorities in the story by upholding the kingship as it is, and if he continues the path he’s on, he’s not much better than his heritage. I love Nina to death but she’s still the jarhead kid in your algebra class ready to fight anyone who says her country merits basic criticism. The kingdom of Ravka would need to be entirely dismantled and recreated. Nikolai might seem more progressive than the kings before him, but he’s got a lot to be reprimanded for, and rebuilding can’t even start until he acknowledges and unlearns that. Which...he hasn’t, not fully, and there’s no written proof of him doing so as of now.

Before I made myself research more I got just as defensive of him and others. I’m sure I’ll get defensive over another story and have to relearn everything all over again. It’s a process and you have to check yourself all the time. But it’s a step towards the ideals we want to actually live in. If I want to imagine Nikolai a better man, I have to start from the scraps I’m given.

So yes!! You’re allowed to draw up your own themes and ideals from the stories and reimagine the characters to fit a narrative that makes your heart happy. But it won’t change the reality of the canon universe. Zemenipearls enjoyed the grishaverse so much she made a fan account for it, participates in fan-led events that celebrate the characters (and sometimes leads those events herself), commissions artists to make fanart, and has ongoing works that delve into the expansive universe that better represents her and what she wants for black characters in fantasy. And she STILL gets shit for imploring a conversation about what we all want to ignore away. Why would she put so much energy into this if she didn’t care or believe in this story too? If you also care about grishaverse that much, shouldn’t we be willing to uplift and reimagine by starting where the work needs it most?

Okay I’ve said a LOT SORRY HHHHH BUT TO WRAP UP: Ignoring a fictional character’s faults or repercussions is one thing, and I’m not about to waste energy on making people hold characters in a book accountable. We all see how people treat the Darkling.

But when you participate in or ignore the bullying and threatening that happens to REAL people, when people JUSTIFY that shit as if it merits denying a person their humanity, THATS the actual harm being done. (Not saying you’ve done that, but the mindset I’m seeing here is what feeds into that compliance.)

If we have the energy to protect and coddle our fictional white boys and let them burn the sandbox down, I KNOW we have energy to respect and protect black fans who have just as much say in how they see the story or how they reimagine it. If you have the energy to accept/tolerate the stuff alarkling fans promote, I KNOW you have the energy to put your pride away and acknowledge fallacies in your own ideals for characters. And regardless!!! of whether you “agree” with the criticisms or not, does that mean the person who spoke up about the issue deserves to be harassed?

I’m gonna ask the white ya majority reading this to be humble and open your hearts up to change the way you do for fictional edgy white dudes. Y’all have the SPIRIT but then it funnels into the WRONG IDEAS!!! PLEASE use your heads you’d be unstoppable if you used your privilege to amplify the ones who need amplifying. I promise Cardan BlackBerry and Alesksxxander Marigold aren’t gonna be disappointed in you 😔🙏

#that’s my piece on THAT sorry I’ve had time to sit with this #I wanted to go ahead and get it out on one thing too so I can refer back possibly #fandom racism #anti blackness #grishaverse #Nikolai Lantsov #kos king of scars #Nina Zenik #Ravka #analysis #ya fiction #zemenipearls #tgt the grisha trilogy #soc six of crows #ck crooked kingdom

[fallout-lou-begas]

A lot of people have accused yjj of being racist, particarily in regards to one of their comics involving Joshua graham, and in general saying that they glorify colonization. I mainly understand the other things they’ve done, but the racism seems inexusable. A lot of people have also been saying that yjj and their followers have harassed people. I want to get both sides of the story on this, so basically I’m asking what the deal with all this is?

Hi, anon. I'll provide my thoughts since you asked politely.

This post is quite long and can be considered an extension of my previous post on the matter.

Besides the infamous and self-admittedly ill-informed chancla comic, for which they've apologized, essentially all of the claims that Yesjejunus is racist stem from their depiction of the Dead Horses and Sorrows relative to their depiction of Joshua Graham and their original character Joan in their fanfic No Light (and to a lesser extent Learnin’ the Blues), which is heavily grounded in the setting of Honest Hearts. I think it's unambiguous that the depiction of vaguely defined "tribals" in Honest Hearts, assembled through a mishmash of disparate signifiers and recycled stereotypes and named like Warrior Cats and completely helpless without Joshua Graham's guidance, is indeed thoroughly racist, even if it was intended to be more nuanced and came from a place of self-admitted ignorance on the part of the developers. What I struggle to understand is that the developers and writers of Honest Hearts—and of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole since the entire game is rife with such mishandled, insufficient depictions of "tribals" with no explicit inclusion at all of any specific Indigenous people or presence—are given miles and miles more sympathy and leeway for their poor handling of these characters in the source material than a fanfic writer is for using the tools and setting that they were given by that source material, including the "lore" and naming conventions of the Dead Horses and Sorrows, to tell a story that means a lot to them personally, inspired by their own deepest fears and experiences with abuse, and ignited by their charismatic yet deeply and blatantly monstrous interpretation of Joshua Graham. Given that it uses the setting of Honest Hearts as a backdrop, there aren't any living characters in Honest Hearts who aren't "tribals" besides Joshua Graham and Daniel, and post-canon, Daniel wouldn’t be there. When Yesjejunus is accused of sidelining the Native characters or relegating them to the background, it's because they're just not writing a fanfic about Follows-Chalk or Waking Cloud as main characters: they're writing a specifically intentioned story about the Courier and Joshua Graham, a story that for better or worse remains faithful to the source material’s depiction of Joshua Graham’s unilateral authority over the tribes in Zion, a baked-in element of Honest Hearts and a critical narrative component of No Light. To accuse Yesjejunus of being racist on this principle in and of itself would be like accusing me of being lesbophobic if I wrote a Dead Money-set fanfic with Father Elijah as the main character instead of Christine. If you want something that centers these other characters then you'd just have to read a different story, or write it yourself.

As a final note, I do think that Yesjejunus is a skilled writer. This thought exists simultaneously with the acknowledgement that like everyone else in fandom, they're writing as a hobby and do not have the oversight of an editor on the work that they produce personally and for free. It's not lost on them that there's things about their story that they could have handled differently or more sensitively, such as the oft-cited example of the death of the pregnant Dead Horse character in No Light, with more forethought or planning at the time—even if they were bound by the constraints of Honest Heart's own setting (such as the dearth of non-tribal characters who could have possibly been in the scene instead) while writing the story. Everyone is free to critique this aspect of the story as much as they are to critique any other aspect, or to be discomforted by the whole thing (given it's a very intentionally uncomfortable story throughout), but the suggestion of so many of these "callouts" that Yesjejunus must have been cackling maniacally about the plight of poor access to medical care among real Indigenous people is a suggestion made entirely in bad faith, and one that I simply don't care to entertain.

As for the point about harassing people: if anyone's only evidence of being "harassed" by a single, specific person is anonymous messages on tumblr dot com, then I don't believe the evidence. If people are accusing Yesjejunus' "supporters" or "associates" of harassing people, then if the accusation is that this harassment is occurring either on Yesjejunus’ behalf or otherwise with their approval, then it is also going to require more evidence than the mere existence of the mean anonymous messages themselves. This goes for the rumor that they have "spies" in fandom Discord servers or whatever, too, which is a rumor that I think has only manifested among its spreaders by either self-appointed individuals speaking on no one's behalf but their own, and by the metaphorical snake eating its own tail in paranoia. Yesjejunus, and I, and all of our mutual friends have been nothing but annoyed at best and horrified at worst by the efforts of some self-appointed individuals to "defend" them with such excess vitriol. Speaking plainly, we generally avoid literally any kind of anonymous or public interaction with anyone who's vocally opposed to us as a rule, specifically to avoid this kind of debacle, and when I say "we" and "us" I'm not referring to some sort of shadowy cabal of conspirators scheming to advance the nefarious YJJ agenda, but to a group of friends. I don't know how to explain to some people who question why we praise their work or share their art sometimes how normal friendships work online.

I also take severe umbrage with the validity of the breadth of these anonymous harassment accusations because of how patently fraudulent several other claims are. Yesjejunus has recently been accused of "grooming,” for example, an accusation only even worth considering if one temporarily forgets what grooming actually is and pretends that grooming is when someone older interacts in literally any capacity with someone younger. Some will say that they’re not accusing them of grooming per se, or not of grooming by that name, but in any case, the meaning is that Yesjejunus has interacted with minors and this on its own is intended to scare and upset you. I have seen only two users actually named as "victims" of these “interactions,’ however, sas-afras and comrade-shrimp, but both users have publicly refuted this accusation because neither of them were minors when they first interacted with Yesjejunus. Frustratingly, though, these literal refutations from the literal so-called "victims" are either dismissed out of hand or muddied by hand-wringing mutterings of "well, I could have sworn they were actually minors, though" and "well they claim that they weren't actually groomed, but who really knows." The spreading and trust in completely anonymous accusations, combined with the total rejection of statements from the only people named in these accusations when their statements contradict the accusations, suggests to me that the existence of these actual interactions (and assuming these interactions occurred both intentionally and with Yesjejunus’ being fully aware of the other person being a minor) is not nearly as important as pushing the narrative that "Yesjejunus is a groomer" or “preying on minors” onto the fandom, and ensuring that anyone who doesn't take this claim completely at face value appears complicit in something horrible. As for anyone who still feels "uncomfortable" at how sas-afras or comrade-shrimp or me or anyone who is very much an adult but just so happens to be younger than Yesjejunus could ever become endeared to them, I reiterate that sometimes I don't know how to explain to people how normal friendships work online.

I want to conclude by saying something that I've said many times before: you don't have to like Yesjejunus (or me, or everybody, or literally anyone else) and no one is holding a gun to your head to befriend them or read their work or look at their art. The block and filter and unfollow buttons are very conveniently located on your dashboard and are totally free to use. Everything I've written here is not intended as some argument as to why everyone on the planet needs to be following their blog and leaving kudos on Learnin' the Blues. Still, while I think everybody has the right to curate their own dashboard and remove the content that they don't want to see, I also think it's reasonable for me to not want my friend to get their name dragged through the mud by the exaggerated and misinformed claims of petty, grudge-bearing brigadiers and self-aggrandizing fandom security guards when they'd like to just dump funny shitposts about the Burned Man's chode in peace.

#asks #anon #yesjejunus #discourse

[linkspooky]

This Thing

de·hu·man·i·za·tion 

noun

the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.

This thing A meta on the dehumanization of villains done by the heroes in the manga My Hero Academia, if you’re interested read more underneath the cut.

Before saying anything else, yes crimminals are a group of people who can be dehumanized. People who break the law are still in fact people, and while this is mainly talking about a fictional work it’s worth remembering that dehumanization is a tactic used to justify violence and the taking away of human rights from crimminals and incarcerated people. 

People are still people. No matter what bad things they do they’re still people. And victims are victims even if they don’t present their victimhood in easy to digest ways. The conflict in My Hero Academia is one much more complicated than hero vs. villain because it exists within a society that generates its own villains through intentional neglect. I say neglect, because most heroes seem to be of the perspective that villains are either born evil, or choose to do evil entirely of their own free will and are never victims of circumstances or forced into the livelihood. 

Villain isn’t just what costumed crimminals are called in MHA, it’s a literal legal definition that are given to certain crimminal offenders. We don’t know what exactly the legal ramifications are, but the fact that you can literally be called a villain just for being a repeat offender shows the way hero society views it’s crimminals. 

Villain has different connotations, it means an inhuman evil, not just a person who has done bad things. Police also have much more power in comparison to our society as well, in the manga vigilantes when his sister Makoto brings up the fact that technically her friend who has been accused of villainry is innocent until proven guilty and formally charged. 

Tsukauchi gets physically angry with her. 

What’s important in this situation is the girl they’re arguing about pop step is an innocent victim. She was kidnapped by a man, had a parasite inserted into her brain and is being physically controlled. What she needs to be is saved not put down, but the law is so inflexible it’s only capable of seeing her as a villain not as a person caught in a bad situation who needs to be saved from that situation. 

And it’s much later revealed that there is technically a way to save her life, but because it requires breaking of the laws the police and heroes won’t ever do it. Beating her up won’t save her, it’ll just kill her as an innocent victim of circumstance, and stop her from doing any more damage to the people around her. Even if the police knew the way to save her life they won’t attempt it because it breaks the law. 

Being a by the book cop is all well and good, but when the law that exists doesn’t protect people there’s something wrong with the law. This isn’t an isolated incident either, we’re shown over and over again in the main manga as well this is always how villains are responded to, violent suppression. 

At the start of the manga Shigaraki says this, that heroes and villains are both violent but because heroes are categorized as such their violence suddenly becomes heroic. All Might just dismisses what he says as him being a madman.  

Not only that but in the aftermath of the break in the heroes all attempt to dissect Shigaraki’s character. They all make him out to be some kind of insane person that could have no possible rationale or reason behind his actions. 

They dismiss Shigaraki’s attack as him simply being a man-child who thinks he can do whatever he wants. There’s no possible way that he could have any kind of sympathetic reason or human rationale, because he’s a villain, right? Except we learn later that’s not the case. 

The words that Shigaraki is saying to All Might echo the words of his abuser. Shigaraki is like this not out of his own choice, but because he was deliberately shapped and moulded by someone. The reason why Shigaraki is impuslively violent is because as a literal five year old he was exposed to violence over and over again, and told this is who he was, this is what he was for. 

All Might later discovers that Shigaraki is not only the son of Nana Shimura’s son, a child he was personally responsible for when his mother died but decided to go along with his mother’s plan to abandon him (for his protection) and then also that All for One had specifically raised Shimura Tenko as a weapon against him. All Might knowing completely the manipulative kind of man that All for One is, and that Shimura must have been young when All for One took him in. Is still able only to see Shigaraki as a crimminal. 

He is literally told that he can’t see him as anything other than a villain otherwise his judgement would be affected. At this point it’s not even ignorance, it’s intentional neglect. All Might SHOULD know that something is up with Shimura Tenko and that he didn’t choose to become a villain and was most likely influenced by All for One and yet the heroes all choose to ignore that fact and instead put him down like any other crimminal. 

The problem with dehumanizing crimminals is that cops are not omniscient. Cops make mistakes. Cops are wrong, like... a lot. When you give people the power of law, there are people who are victims who were just trying to survive who are going to get caught up and treated exactly the same as people who are genuinely dangerous and out to hurt others like AFO. There are people who are perfectly innocent sometimes who will get caught up in it too.

People like Tsukauchi and Gran Torino may be good cops, they may be by the book cops, but that’s it. They’re the type that gets angry at the fact that due process exists because they believe that cops always suspect the right people, and that their hunches are never wrong or they could never possibly arrest someone who doesn’t deserve it. Neither of them acknowledge that the system is flawed and often makes mistakes, and because of that they end up believing that the police are always in the right, that the police could never prosecute someone wrongly, and those are dangerous beliefs to have for literally any law system, especially one with guys that shoot lasers out of their eyes.. The reason due process exists is not to slow the hand of justice, it’s because the legal system is really flawed. 

The problem with giving too much power to police is that we don’t exist in a perfect world where the police will obey even their own laws. Why don’t we just put cameras in everybody’s houses? People who aren’t doing anything illegal won’t have anything to worry about. Unless suddenly things like speaking out against the government become illegal because the police now have the power to enforce it. What I’m saying is the rule of law does not necessarily = good or evil. Rules are not always good, and they’re also not absolutes they change all the time, and they also don’t always exist to protect people they need to protect. We see this literally happen in My Hero Acadmia, the government uses it’s power to kidnap a child and erase his name literally the exact same way All for One did so he could be raised as a child soldier. 

The conflict in My Hero Academia is not good guys vs bad guys, especially when the good guys don’t even act as good guys, and a step beyond that rigid laws and adherence to social order is not ever going to solve the problems associated with villains like Shigaraki because those laws are fundamentally unjust. They don’t exist to protect the people who most need protecting, they exist to oppress a minority in order to maintain social order. 

Yes, violent crimminals are still a group of people. They are still human beings with rights. If they’re not guaranteed those rights they will be abused. We’ve literally seen this play out in action. 

Hawks corners Twice, and then says he’ll go out of his way to Save Twice because he personally likes him. The only one of the villains Hawks treats as a human and not just an enemy to put down is Twice, and only because he personally likes him. 

Twice brings up the fact that all of his friends deserve to be saved the same way he is. In fact, he even goes out of his way to say that he would die to save these people, and Hawks just ignores them because he sees no humanity in them only the one he personally likes. 

Then Hawks goes out of his way to mention that if Twice doesn’t stop fighting back, it’s his fault if they die. Twice is trying to argue with Hawks that the people he sees as a danger to society, and that need to be taken down are humans capable of being kind just as much as they are a threat. 

Twice murders him. He goes out of his way to murder him and stab him in the back. Hawks acting in a capacity as a hero, goes out of his way to dehumanize Twice again and again, completely ignore his own feelings and words, and then that conflict eventually escalates to murder. The point is not that Hawks had no choice but to kill him, but rather Hawks convinced himself he had no choice but to kill Twice. 

The problem with applying this extremely harsh and punitive, even war-like view of law and order is that innocent people like Twice who literally only wanted to keep his friends happy will get caught up in it. Hawks literally thought that Twice had a chance for rehabilitation, that of the league he was the one most likely to rehabilitate and he still murdered him.

Heroes aren’t interested in rehabilitation. They are there to beat up villains. For several of them, it’s not even that far of a jump to get to the point where they start justifying killing villains. Miruko is almost excited to murder the Nomu who are, you know, innocent victims of mad science. 

They want to take down Ujiko, but they don’t care at all about his creations which are all former people, and the heroes know this by this point. Finally, I want to discuss one of the most empathic characters in the manga. 

Aiawa is the current guardian of Eri. He participated in the mission to rescue her from Chisaki. He is someone who views Eri as a victim, and never gets upset with her or blames her for her out of control quirk the same way Chisaki once did. 

Not only that but Aizawa himself has had a friend kidnapped and stolen away by All for One. He knows personally what All for One can do to a person, by changing Shirakumo to Kurogiri he completely warped his personality and controlled him to the point where the person he once was was almost gone. 

He knows All for One is capable of having that affect on people, not only that but Kurogiri himself says that Shigaraki is like a lost kitten that he can’t throw away because he feels responsible. 

Aizawa has rescued a victim who is in similiar circumstances to Shigaraki. Aizawa has literally seen his best friend warped and changed by All for One’s hand. It should be obvious what Shigaraki has been through by now, and yet Aizawa doesn’t seem to care about Shigaraki’s circumstances at all.

Shirakumo has done bad things in AFO’s name as well. However, Aizawa decides to see Shirakumo as a victim. Even though Shirakumo is also complicit in the grooming and raising of Shigaraki for what he is, and almost certainly had a hand in manipulating him. 

Aizawa empathizes with Kurogiri because he knows him personally, because he wants Shirakumo back. He doens’t bother to care about Shigaraki, because he doesn’t know Shigaraki personally. It’s not only hypocritical, it’s also just plain ignorance. 

Aizawa is literally given every story reason to care. Shirakumo literally tells Aizawa that Shigaraki is a person he wants to protect and that he’s fond of. Aizawa believes that despite the terrible things he’s done, there’s still the boy who wanted to become a hero somewhere in Kurogiri, and he’s literally proven right. 

Shirakumo still has a chance and is given a chance to become a hero, because Aizawa cares about him because they were friends but that’s about it. It’s not like Aizawa is driven by a very rigorous and strict sense of justice. He’s clearly willing to make exceptions, even for people who have put his students at risk, or even personally attacked him. He’s willing to reach out and understand Shirakumo’s circumstances, so clearly he doesn’t have a completely black and white view of good and evil. However, Aizawa’s reasons for sympathizing with Kurogiri and only Kurogiri are ultimately pretty selfish. It’s because he wants Shirakumo back. He doesn’t care about the circumstances, or even who Kurogiri cares about now he just wants his old friend back. Therefore he has no reason to care about Shigaraki who was victimized in a similiar way to Kurogiri, just because he doesn’t know him. I guess you’re not obligated to care about anybody, but it’s the exact opposite of empathy, especially in a character like Aizawa who has always shown to be especially protective of children. Nobody tries to understand Shigaraki, nobody tries to empathize with him, even though he also once had the exact same dream as both Shirakumo, and even Deku. 

But Shigaraki’s just a monster that needs to be put down and stopped, there’s not a fragment of good in him like there was for Kurogiri, like there was for Twice. 

Aizawa even gets angry at Ujiko for the callous way he treats human lives. For the way they were tossed aside. He’s righteously angry for Ujiko’s victims, especially Kurogiri. But he doesn’t stop to think for a second that Shigaraki is possibly another victim manipulated by the likes of Ujiko. Once again because Aizawa doesn’t personally know Shigaraki, or because Shigaraki is a bad person, who cares if he gets hurt and manipulated by Ujiko. 

So we see by the heroes, Shigaraki referred to as a thing, Shigaraki referred to as an it. He’s just a monster to be stopped. It’s like he’s a boss in a video game the heroes need to kill. 

Even though they literally see him being experimented on by Ujiko, an actual abuser who has used his money and connections to commit inhuman experiments his whole life that too must be Shigaraki’s fault somehow. The heroes are repeating the exact same lines that Shigaraki’s abuser All for One did on him. 

By treating him as a monster. By treating him as a thing that needs to be killed, rather than a person who needs to be saved. They are doing All for One’s work for him by creating a symbol of fear and robbing a lifelong victim of abuse of his humanity. It’s like they want villains like Shigaraki to exist so they can remain heroes. 

#mha meta #league of villains meta #lov meta #my hero academia meta #shigaraki tomura #aizawa shota #kurogiri #shirakumo oboro

[pochapal]

You don't gotta answer this publicly, but what on earth happened/is happening RE: Dogpiling?

this is long but there’s a lot to cover and i don’t know how much information is pre-known going into this.

basically breadtuber sarah z made a 2 hour fandom postmortem video on homestuck. instead of being a genuine look into what made the comic and the fandom so massive and so relevant for so long, she kind of glosses over all that in the first thirty minutes, then spends the rest of the video discussing homestuck’s two major controversies in the least tactful way imaginable. 

the first one she talks about is the hiveswap development hell fiasco, which on paper is an interesting thing to bring up in relation to a lack of content contributing to fandom decline, but sarah’s primary source for all this is a pseudo-anonymous blog run by giovan_h, someone who is notorious for treating dangerous and baseless accusation as fact and for obsessively stalking current and former whatpumpkin staff members to obtain information for said blog. she supposedly tries to bring a balanced argument on what exactly happened in the three year dark period between hiveswap’s supposed release date and when act 1 actually came out by pitting ipgd’s tumblr post (the one that made the odd gentlemen embezzlement claims vis a vis king’s quest) against giovan’s blog (claiming through anonymous and unverified sources that hussie deliberately dicked around and failed to meet a single deadline, then broke contract terms by using the kickstarter money to commission the odd gentlemen to animate act 7 instead of working on hiveswap. there are a lot of other unsavoury claims about hussie and certain other wp members among these blog posts, but that’s the primary relevant gist). 

neither account can actually be verified (ipgd’s post claims their information is spotty because they’re talking around a pretty strict settlement nda and giovan’s sources and accounts are deliberately vague and unverifiable to “protect various parties from retaliation from hussie/wp”) but sarah ultimately comes down and says that she’s inclined to take giovan’s blog as more truthful for. reasons. this is obviously bad because within minutes of the video dropping several wp team members reveal sarah never once tried to get in contact with them, which has led to attacks on the team members because a lot of zealous people looking for an excuse to keep being mad at homestuck in the wake of hs^2′s semi-permanent hiatus were emboldened by a video essayist treating the ugliest speculation as hard fact. as of right now, the hiveswap kickstarter has released a statement clarifying the development situation as best they can (from what i’ve read it does point to them legally being unable to point to/discuss certain things) which has had all the impact of dropping a match onto an oil spill. the anti homestuck zealots firmly believe every word of that post to be bullshit and are accusing the wp team of covering for hussie and his super heinous evil crimes (keep in mind we are still not privy to the internal workings of wp because why the fuck would we be) so the wp team in turn are putting these people on blast for this dangerous harassment (it doesn’t need to be said that as a professional being publicly accused of covering up fraud is a very bad thing) and then as a counter counter response the angry fans are now accusing the wp staff of abusing their power to direct mass harassment towards specific individuals (this amounting to people getting into wp members’ private discord servers and publicly posting mean things they have said about giovan et al which imo only serves to bolster the stalking claims) and the whole thing went very ugly very fast.

the second controversy that sarah brings up is everything involved in post canon homestuck (epilogues, pesterquest, hs^2). here she reverts to more of a passively pro-fandom stance, asserting time and time again how horrible and evil the epilogues and everything else were because of how they took the characters and stories everyone knows and loves and warped them into something unrecognisably terrible, that post-canon homestuck was universally reviled. in a very bad and awkward placement of information she then segues into a kind of hand-wavey discussion of the intense backlash towards certain post-canon trans interpretations (of vriska, june, and roxy) in a very I Am A Cis Woman So I’m Not Qualified To Make Any Statements Here Other Than Transphobes Fuck Off <3 But Also This Is Indicative Of A Growing Fandom Resentment way, which honestly begs the question of why she needed to include this at all. another bad thing here is how she super glosses over the “controversies” surrounding “the advocates for june egbert” and “the writer for vriska’s pesterquest route” - she is obviously referring to former creative director kate here (she kind of confirms this on twitter by saying she didn’t want to mention kate by name in order to not stir up further drama which uh... yeah) and the inexcusably terrible chain of events which led to every single out trans woman working on homestuck to resign to protect themselves from further mass harassment and dogpiling from the fandom.

she instead, for some reason decides to focus on how post-canon homestuck has been a total commercial and creative failure, that homestuck^2 basically shouldn’t have even happened after the fandom’s distaste for the epilogues and that it was not only controversial but also was a low quality mess everyone agreed sucked. she then goes on to compare the hs^2 team to the wp hiveswap dev team, and passively applies the same giovan-esque assertions to the internal workings of hs^2, kind of but not really implying the reasons given for the shutting down of hs^2 were bullshit. this is super bad for the fact that the post canon homestuck team is the most openly marginalised group of people working for hs is in an official capacity, and we have seen time and time again what drawing undue, speculative negative attention towards these people has done. again, reminder sarah did not reach out to a single person who worked/is working on homestuck for what is essentially a drama video disguised as a fandom postmortem. the upshot here is that her post-canon section served to embolden yet another wp-hostile section of the fanbase - those who adamantly believe that only the fandom itself can create worthwhile homestuck projects, and that all writers are evil people who want their queer fans dead (only a partial exaggeration) and produce spite projects which are driven by the steadfast belief that their work is inherently superior to official content by virtue of their fan status. among this group were a lot of people who latched onto any accusation against a team member as fuel to push them out of “ruining” such a beloved franchise so sarah’s video serves as proof that all the hs^2 writers were morally corrupt monsters ruining a fandom space that was meant for minors and queer people (this is all very anti/anti-anti carousel of bullshit nonsense that i have no time for) and thus they’re confident to once again tear down the remaining public facing staff members, ignoring how all this crusade has done so far is drive a handful of trans women and people of colour off of official homestuck projects for their own safety.

then she ends the video with a “oh btw this video is proudly sponsored by audible <3″ bit and it’s just. beyond unbelievably awfully stupid that she deliberately reignited this aggression which has caused untold material harm on marginalised people (that happened less than a year ago!!!) just for the sake of quick clicks and ad revenue. she consolidated the most dogshit takes as fact within the general fandom consensus, sided with some of the worst people to engage with homestuck, potentially detonated the last shreds of stability of this independent marginalised media project, and wrapped it all up with a sponsorship from an amazon subsidiary company of all fucking things. this is obviously a case of an incredibly short sighted decision to cash in on a very complicated and unwieldy fandom history but still the potential consequences here are unfathomable.

#extrarabbitsauce #didn't intend on this being public but i saved as draft and now my only choice is to publicly post this. whatever #got called a terf for liking homestuck^2 whatever pigshit this post potentially attracts will be nothing

[savnofilter]

no nuance november!

a/n: which is basically you have a bunch of opinions and dont explain any of em' and let your followers discuss them (much more suited for tiktok sjsnj). i'll be doing it since it compiles with many topics like fandom, racism, lgbtq+, politics and etc. i highly encourage people to do this simply because why not? feel free to send your own opinions n stuff, i wanna know what my followers think!!

disclaimer!! ⚠️ all of these are broad, not pin pointing certain people or situations. even though these are my opinions these were all in fun and have been collected over the years and will change as time goes on. nothing is sugar-coated so thread carefully. feel free to agree or disagree. :)

warning(s): mentions of racism, p*do micro aggression, fetishizing, toxicity, abuse, politics, labelling, mental health, cancelling, fandoms, ages.

key:

iswis = i said what i said, no explanation to that one.

whe = will happily explain.

stop sexualizing gay/m|m/yaoi relationships. it's not only demonizing to the males, it's also very fetishizing. (iswis)

most times /10 yall root for "feminine men" when you really mean white boys and fetishised asian men on social media. (whe)

bullying someone isnt educating. you either cant cope with the fact people have different opinions from you or you have a struggle with things either always never going your way or the opposite. (iswis)

straight people will never have a say in lgbtq+ issues. stop inserting yourself. (iswis)

white people will never have a say in poc issues. stop inserting yourself. (iswis)

poc will never have a say in black people issues. stop inserting yourself. (vice versa but im black and it happens more often to us lol) (iswis)

using the defense, "but black lives matter, right?" when one black person does something bad isnt facts, youre racist. (iswis)

fandom adults need to stop gatekeeping the target audience (demographics) to animes/shows. (iswis)

poc people can be racist. (whe)

even if a certain site was adult doesnt mean that every adult wants to see your porn. either keep it to yourself or tag properly. (iswis)

saying shit like, "im more xyz than you and im not even xyz" is not only disrespectful but disgusting. just because you believe in a popular opinion of a group does NOT suddenly make you a person in it, get over yourself. (iswis)

dont hate on people for the same things you have done at a young age. (ex: writing fanfic, seggs, etc) (iswis)

blaming a minor/someone mentally unstable for being abused is not only victim blaming, but it enables the notion that people who go those things that they wanted it. (iswis)

going off of that last point, if you do victim blame for situations and been in them yourself you either still havent coped with what you went through and still think it was your fault when it wasnt. (whe)

it's stupid people hate minors for being undeveloped when adults are the reason as to why people get traumas, abused and quite literally are destroying the world right now. (iswis)

gen z is white as fuck. (iswis)

early 2000s kids are equivalent to 90s kids who use to post, "only 90s kids under this" and post something that 2000-5 experienced. (iswis)

dear 2005+ kids, abusing harmful substances and having sex doesnt make you grown. stop it. (iswis)

adults, being able to post porn doesnt make you grown or mature, stop believing that it does. (iswis)

just because it's a coping mechanism doesnt mean it's healthy. (iswis)

avoiding conflict doesnt mean youre mature. if there is an active problem and you know ignoring it will only benefit you and not the actual problem at hand that is selfish. (iswis)

black women generate clout for everyone. when we're hated the person gets patted on the back, someone appreciates black girls they are praised, and people of many groups repeatedly steal from our culture. (iswis)

YES THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING BLACK AND AFRICAN AMERICAN. (whe)

if youre black you do not have to be democrat OR republican, there are many other parties. (whe)

i do not trust either parties, no minority should. (whe)

this 2020 election was not a win for poc people no matter who won. (iswis)

we do not decide whether or not what to do on columbus day. it is up to the natives themselves. (whe)

pointing out other countries (current) faults is not racist. although the issue can be misconstrued, if proper research is done it safe to say it's an educated observation or opinion. (whe)

privilege heavily varies; ex, americans are seen as privileged, while the people who live in it experience a disadvantage because of the societal standards. within the country itself. (whe)

americans, stop saying that america is the worst country and there are other countries who are suffering much worse than we are. yes sometimes it sucks but do not label it as the worst. (iswis + whe)

white people are privileged and will always be until we break the racist issues deep rooted in EVERY community. (iswis)

9/10 when marginalized groups like (women, lgbt) are mostly focused on white people and never address the poc counter parts. using the excuse "well idk much about that" is not good enough and just promotes pseudo-white supremecy. (iswis + whe)

do not use aave. (iswis)

aave is not gen z language, stop calling it that. (iswis)

gay men (white especially) use black women and get praised for the things we do that are called ghetto. (iswis)

yes it is offensive if you touch a black persons hair with or without permission. we are not your pets nor zoo animals. (iswis)

and yes it is offensive if you see a black women with beautiful hair and assume it's fake or ask, "is it yours?" "is it real?" (iswis)

using jailbait as an excuse to lewd minors is just as disgusting. (iswis)

beauty standards for women is rooted from pedophilia. (iswis)

using other pedophilic relationships as an excuse to ship yours is disturbing and you shouldnt be near children at any capacity. (iswis)

everything doesnt need a label. (iswis)

the fact that gangs have been criminalized while mafias havent is racist and feeds the stereotypes that poc are criminals. (iswis)

people are more forgiving to white predators than to poc (neither are good but people let white off the hook more often). (iswis)

if youre okay with your friends being racists, creeps, abusers you are just as bad. (iswis)

although you can like what you like, making dark content shouldnt be as glorified as much as it is. (iswis)

some kinks do deserve to be kink shamed. (iswis)

adults need to be more held accountable when held in situations with minors. (iswis + whe)

everyone perceives the world differently, many people will see the same things you see differently. (iswis)

calling people crazy for questioning the things around them doesnt make them crazy, youre just asleep. (iswis)

the human body can function without a soul. (iswis)

stop disrespecting christianity. you wouldnt do the same with hinduism, islam and etc. (iswis)

the bible was altered by white men and the true meanings have been misconstrued. (iswis + whe)

bullying someone who you THINK is problematic is not excuse to be hateful. youre just scum and feel the need to justify your actions. (iswis)

not everyone has to like you and dont need a reason. (iswis)

just because you dont like someone doesnt mean you have to make a show of it. be mature and move along. (iswis)

yes callouts/cancelling has its place but it's never done right. (iswis)

"cancel culture" wasnt a thing till white people joined in. (iswis)

dont cancel someone for stuff they did years ago. bringing it up is important but not allowing them to understand, reflect, and apologize is not only bullying it defeats the purpose of bringing awareness. (iswis)

big writers need to stop complaining when one fic or a few dont do good. not only does it rub in small writers faces, it shows that if you need people's validation to write you probably shouldnt be writing. some works will be popular and some will flop, get over it. (iswis)

stop witch hunting & crucifying people for shit you have done or your friends have done and going "uwu sorry" when you get caught. (iswis)

90% people believe content creators with bigger audiences. (iswis)

people spontaneously posting, "uwu take care of your mental health" doesnt mean that they actually care. (iswis)

people are always quick to judge people with real mental health such as depression, anxiety, adhd, and etc are always the one to turn and pretend to be exactly what they just mocked. (iswis)

dont have kids if youre not going to take care of them. (iswis)

stop baiting baby otakus (people freshly getting into anime) into watching cp like yarichin bitch club or boku no pico. they are minors, it's not funny, stop it. (iswis)

stop being protective & toxic over anime characters. if they were real they probably wouldnt even like you. (iswis)

just because someone is your friend doesnt mean that they arent toxic or abusive. (iswis)

start believing when people show their true traits. (iswis)

trauma happens in different forms, stop saying something didnt happen because it didnt go the way that has commonly happened or the way it occurred to you. (iswis)

stop saying minors should "know" while also being the loudest to say that our brains arent even developed till 25. (iswis)

the adult age should be raised to 20 years old. (iswis + whe)

tos should be raised to 16 years old. (iswis + whe)

minors take "18+" & "minors dni" out of your bio. (iswis)

yelling at minors for finding the content you freely put out without any care is your fault not theirs. (iswis)

there are plenty of adult sites that are more confined for adults but you guys ignore them because youd rather get popular on writing erotica on a popular social media platform. (iswis)

trying to cancel someone over one mistake and or blowing said things out of proportion is toxic and stupid. (iswis)

if you take someone saying they need to distance themselves for mental health reasons personally and make them feel bad for it youre an actual shitty person. (iswis)

if someone disrespects you, you have the right to say whatever you want in response. (iswis + whe)

stop hypersexualizing everything (adults especially). (iswis)

the excuses of, "they look grown" "i mentally think xyz" "theyre fake" is creepy and weird and yall should come up with a better excuse. (iswis)

yes i do believe minors should be writing for minors only, but i will not give a shit if an adult does if said characters are aged up in every work sfw or not. (iswis)

stop saying teens cant go through traumatic things and cant experience mental illnesses. it just shows that you werent cared for as a child and never get the therapy for it. (iswis)

gen z has a very colonized idea of activism. (iswis)

feminism was never for all women until the rest of us forced ourselves in. and even now it's still an issue whether or not people realize it or not. (iswis)

poc solidarity doesnt exist as much as we try to make it happen. (iswis)

colorism is an issue, and no you will not tell me otherwise. (iswis)

the hot cheeto girl is offensive and demeans black & hispanic culture. (iswis)

stop bashing minors for breathing, just say youre mad youre not young anymore and move on. (iswis)

black men are the white people of black people. (iswis)

there is no reason as to why you anyone would refer to black people as "blacks". nor should you (non-black people) be arguing whether or not to say nigga even with the hard r. (iswis)

if you (pertains to white people) think white privilege doesnt exist but go on to make fun of or ignore minority problems you are the living and breathing example of what we are talking about. (iswis)

loli/shotas are fucking disgusting and people who like it deserve to be tortured for eternity. (iswis)

seriously, stop using theyre "fake" as an excuse. (iswis)

if youre comfortable with being hateful to someone but still consider yourself a nice person because you do the hate minimum to be a decent human, youre either a narcissist or have a god complex. (iswis)

coons have no say in black issues. (iswis)

people need to stop blaming the "home wrecker" for ruining the relationship when it was the s/o's fault as well. there is no home to enter without an owner. (iswis)

stop saying any asian man yo see reminds you of a haikyuu character and or any anime character. it's racist. (iswis)

stop saying any asian person looks like a kpop idol, it's racist. (iswis)

stop downplaying and invalidating when black women go through traumatic things. not only does it promote that we have to be strong and save everyone else's problems, it says that we dont have emotions and cant be a victim which is disgusting. (iswis)

if you say shit like "minors curate your own experience" then go and turn around to say you REFUSE TO TAG YOUR SHIT YOU ARE LITERALLY MAKING THE PROCESS OF CENSORING HARD! (iswis)

white women are just as much of a problem as white men. only difference is sex keeping them apart. (iswis)

stop saying kpop is racist. expecting artists from a different political progression to understand that things can be offensive is bland. (iswis)

people accept boy groups fuck-ups more than they accept girl groups. and most times out of ten, the males are worse. (iswis)

if you engage in nsfw conversation with a minor, it is your fault they responded. (iswis)

anyone can be abused. (iswis)

stop coddling adults and bullying minors. (iswis)

most of you females have internalized misogyny and dont even know it. (iswis)

you can callout issues without having to drag a group of people. same with uplifting. (iswis)

if youre fine with being a sheep unfollow me. (iswis)

seven deadly sins is not a good anime. (iswis)

there is a difference between boku no hero academia fans based on if they call it "bnha" or "mha". (iswis)

ships literally are not serious stop harassing people over ships. (iswis)

do not harass creators of series because they do something with THEIR story. make your own. (iswis)

stop saying horikoshi sexualizes his women too much/mineta is the worst when you guys enjoy shows like one piece, hunter x hunter, naruto and etc. (iswis)

minors often or not are sheeps (heres your sign you dont have to agree with everything other people say). (iswis)

just because minors can be mature doesnt mean that they are adults. stop treating them as such. (iswis)

we should give more voice actors in the asmr (idk what to call it) community more recognition instead of just one. (iswis)

writers are the ones that send hate to other writers. anon hate is so corny and if you do it that goes to show that you are truly a toxic person wearing a fake mask of kindness when youre not on anonymous. (iswis)

stop being mean to smaller writers because they did not have as much luck as you. (iswis)

stop blaming your readers because one story flopped. (iswis)

ignoring someone's shitty actions encourages them to do it more. (iswis)

going to school and getting a job is much harder now than it was before. (iswis)

being an adult doesnt automatically make you mature. just because youre older doesnt mean youre better or you opinion is more valuable. it just shows that you werent heard when you were younger. (iswis)

there should be no reason as to why someone of the age of 18 should be having any romantic relationship with someone who is a minor. (iswis)

hawks is a shitty character. (iswis)

bakudeku isnt toxic. (iswis)

just because bakugo is in a ship, doesnt mean it's toxic. (iswis)

stop shipping male characters together simply because they have screen time together. it's creepy. (iswis)

almost all of 1-a students have ptsd and anything close to the after effects of being traumatized. (iswis)

no, editing characters to be poc is not racist. youre just mad they arent "white" when they never were. theyre asian and come in many colors as well. (iswis)

wanting to only be with a different race to get a mixed baby is fucking disgusting. (iswis)

stop ignoring pedo relationships between older women and younger boys and or with older women in general. (iswis)

males can be abused, stop telling them to suck it up or that they cant go through things. (iswis)

shaming young females about things they cant control is misogynistic and is damaging to their identity and shouldnt be excused. (iswis + whe)

not all females have to shave. (iswis)

what you dont like in someone is the projections you see of yourself on other people that you dont like about yourself. (whe)

popular bl stories extremely misrepresent gay relationships and frankly it's disgusting that theyre boosted as much as they are. (iswis)

jjba isnt ugly, you just watch animes to sexualize the characters. (iswis)

it's shitty that anime and kpop only became cool once white people stated to like it and made it mainstream. go gatekeep family guy or something. (iswis)

if you have been anime fan for a long time you were with bullied/teased for just generally liking it or you were a weirdo who recreated shit from it. (iswis)

weaboo and weeb were bad terms till we made them positive?? literally otaku is the word for it but we use weeb instead lol. (whe)

normalize and promote educating someone without going straight to bullying them. (whe)

haikyuu isnt really a good manga/anime nor is the art style the best but the characters make up for it. (iswis)

stop misusing terms and stop nitpicking definitions to manipulate your narrative. (iswis)

toxic positivity is manipulative and if you have to make it back handed you are not as nice as you like to make it seem. (iswis)

studying a major doesnt mean youre actually good in the subject. (iswis)

normalize people realizing their past mistakes and growing from it. (iswis)

do not self diagnos unless you actually feel like you may have that issue and would like to seek help. mental health is not a personality trait. (iswis)

stop projecting onto people. (iswis)

stop misusing terms and stop nitpicking definitions to fit your narrative. (iswis)

stealing any type of work should not be tolerated. (iswis)

constantly trying to trigger someone to go back to their old ways (being toxic, abusive, addiction, suicidal etc) after changing is toxic and manipulative. (iswis)

if you make jokes about hurting kids and or feel the need speak badly about them i do not want to speak to you. (iswis)

the human brain wasnt developed to understand complex ideas such as death or the universe. (iswis)

we will never truly know what is beyond our skies. (iswis)

thats all, thanks for sifting!

#opinions #hot takes #three t's for the week #read at your own discretion #no nuance november #d dabbles

[newstfionline]

Saturday, February 27, 2012

New York woman loses job, leads pantry feeding thousands (AP) While dozens of New Yorkers lined up outside in the rain, shopping carts at the ready as they waited for free food, Sofia Moncayo led her team in prayer. “We’re super grateful for these people here. In Jesus’ name we pray,” she said, and the group of women around her clapped, cheered and replied: “Amen.” “Now,” she said, “let’s get to work.” By then, they had worked almost nonstop for hours. They picked up heavy boxes, separated thousands of items and removed snow from the curb. They were cold, wet and tired. No one would pay them and they didn’t care. They were just happy to be there for someone else that day. During the coronavirus pandemic, Moncayo has led the food distribution program through Mosaic West Queens Church in the Sunnyside neighborhood. Since then, Moncayo has had her own struggles. She was furloughed from her job at a construction company and remains unemployed. And she also owes five months of rent for the martial arts studio that she owns with her husband in the neighborhood. But she has continued to lead fundraisers and coordinate dozens of volunteers who distribute more than 1,000 boxes of food to families twice a week. “I think helping others has to do something to your brain chemically because if we had not being doing everything that we’re doing, I think this would have been a much scarier time,” she said. “Being able to dig in and help others, it really gives you perspective and helps you believe that you’re going to be OK too.”

Residents of a Texas Border City Long Felt Overlooked. The Storm Made It Worse. (NYT) Surrounded by ranch land, towering mesquite trees and acres of thorny brush, the border city of Del Rio can feel like the definition of rural Texas. Residents said they have long felt alienated from the state’s power centers and bewildered by the shifting approaches to immigration by their elected leaders in Washington. And that is just in typical times. Last week’s epic winter storm, which blanketed the area with more than 11 inches of snow and collapsed the state’s power grid, plunging most of the county’s residents into dark and unheated homes, left many feeling even more isolated, overlooked and forgotten. More than a week later, many shelves remain empty at local grocery and hardware stores, and a notice to boil water was finally lifted in Val Verde County, which includes Del Rio, on Thursday. “I definitely feel that we are a bit unseen and unheard,” said Michael Cirilo, a 39-year-old juvenile detention officer. Like most of his neighbors in Del Rio, a predominantly Hispanic city of about 36,000 residents, he lost power for several days last week. “Sometimes we feel that we’re kind of alone out here.” “When they’re running for office is when we see them,” one man said of politicians.

Not Cages, “Temporary Holding Facilities” (Vox) Generally, migrant children arriving in the US through the southern border are sent to permanent holding facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which are separate from the “cages” used by US Customs and Border Protection. Due to an increase in the number of children coming into the country, the Biden administration has begun reopening temporary facilities, sparking fears for the welfare of children inside. Biden’s camp has said that they have no choice but to reopen such facilities due to COVID-19-related capacity restrictions combined with the increase in border crossings. The children in these facilities are held until they are either matched with foster parents or united with family members in the US. There have been plenty of reports of abuse in both temporary and permanent HHS shelters: these reports include sexual abuse, neglect, dangerous living conditions, and even the administering of psychotropic drugs. To make matters worse, some of these facilities are located in inaccessible areas, making external oversight of their conditions difficult to conduct.

‘I can’t buy food’: As Cuba’s economy worsens, desperate rafters risk their lives at sea (Miami Herald) Marisol Monteagudo’s son gave her a kiss goodbye as he headed out the door to spend a night out with friends in Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud. What he didn’t tell her: That instead of grabbing a drink or watching a movie, they were planning to board a flimsy raft en route to Mexico. That was three months ago. She hasn’t heard from him since. In recent months, U.S. Coast Guard officials have detected a new uptick in Cuban rafters, with the number intercepted at sea in the fiscal year that started in October already surpassing the total for the previous 12 months. Though still vastly lower than previous surges, the recent increase has sparked concern that as economic and humanitarian conditions in Cuba worsen, more will risk their lives at sea. U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal to transform the immigration system is also believed to be a driving factor. “It’s a combination of the rising desperation of a good part of the Cuban population over deteriorating life conditions, as well as the illusion of getting to the United States under a president who is more tolerant of undocumented immigrants,” said Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

Bhutan’s success under the radar (Foreign Policy) There have been plenty of coronavirus pandemic success stories from Asia—Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand—but one small country has gone largely unheralded: Bhutan. Despite its poverty, ratio of 1 physician to every 2,255 people, and its shared border with hard-hit China and India, Bhutan has recorded only one COVID-19 fatality. In the Atlantic, the science journalist Madeline Drexler chalks up Bhutan’s success to quick actions by top officials, clear and consistent messaging from health authorities, and strong public trust in government. But she also identifies an additional factor unique to Bhutan: the spirit of compassion and altruism reflecting its “Gross National Happiness” index. The index considers noneconomic aspects of well-being, including health, as essential to sustainable development.

US carries out airstrike against Iranian-backed militia in Syria (ABC News) The United States conducted a military airstrike in eastern Syria along the border with Iraq targeting Iranian-backed militias in retaliation for a recent rocket strike in Erbil in northern Iraq that left several Americans injured, according to a U.S. official. The airstrike targeted structures in the eastern Syrian town of Al Bukamal that belong to Kataib Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias that have launched rocket attacks in the past against American facilities in Iraq, said the U.S. official. The airstrike was ordered by President Joe Biden in retaliation for a Feb. 15 rocket attack against a U.S. base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil that killed a coalition contractor and left several American contractors and a U.S. military service member wounded.

In Iraq’s Biblical lands, scattered Christians ask ‘should I stay or go?’ (Reuters) A jihadist message, “Islamic State endures”, is still graffitied on the front gate of Thanoun Yahya, an Iraqi Christian from the northern city of Mosul, scrawled by Islamist militants who occupied his home for three years when they ruled the city. He refuses to remove it, partly in defiance of the militants who were eventually beaten by Iraqi forces, but also as a reminder that Iraq’s scattered and dwindling Christian community still lives a precarious existence. “They’re gone, they can’t hurt us,” said the 59-year-old, sitting in his home which he reclaimed when Islamic State was driven out in 2017. “But there aren’t many of us left. The younger generation want to leave.” Iraq’s Christians have endured unrest over centuries, but a mass exodus began after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and accelerated during the reign of Islamic State, which brutalised minorities and Muslims alike. Hundreds of thousands left for nearby areas and Western countries. Physical and economic ruin remain. Iraqi authorities have struggled to rebuild areas decimated by war, and armed groups that the government has not been able to control vie for territory and resources, including Christian heartlands. Christians say they are left with a dilemma—whether to return to damaged homes, resettle inside Iraq or migrate from a country that experience has shown cannot protect them.

US implicates Saudi crown prince in Khashoggi's killing (AP) Saudi Arabia’s crown prince likely approved the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence report released Friday that instantly ratcheted up pressure on the Biden administration to hold the kingdom accountable for a murder that drew worldwide outrage. The intelligence findings were long known to many U.S. officials and, even as they remained classified, had been reported with varying degrees of precision. But the public rebuke of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is still a touchstone in U.S-Saudi relations. It leaves no doubt that as the prince continues in his powerful role and likely ascends to the throne, Americans will forever associate him with the brutal killing of a journalist who promoted democracy and human rights. Yet even as the Biden administration released the findings, it appeared determined to preserve the Saudi relationship by avoiding direct punishment of the prince himself despite demands from some congressional Democrats and Khashoggi allies for significant and targeted sanctions. Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, urged the Biden administration to consider punishing the prince, who he says has the blood of an American journalist on his hands. Rights activists said the lack of any punitive measures would signal impunity for the prince and other autocrats.

Unfriending Myanmar’s Military (NYT) Facebook has announced that they have banned Myanmar’s military from all its social media platforms, a few weeks after the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup. Facebook’s decision comes after years of criticism over how Myanmar’s military has used the site to further their political agenda and spread misinformation. For years, members of the military were behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that demeaned the Rohingya as foreigners illegally living in Myanmar, even though many had been there for generations. Since the coup early this month, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites while continuing to use the platform to spread misinformation and make statements about the state of the country. In response, Facebook wrote: “Events since the February 1 coup, including deadly violence, have precipitated a need for this ban,” adding that the risks of letting the Myanmar military remain on Facebook and Instagram were “too great” and that the military would be barred indefinitely.

North Korea: Russian diplomats leave by hand-pushed trolley (BBC) A group of Russian diplomats leaving North Korea were forced to leave the country by hand-pushed rail trolley as strict coronavirus measures bring travel in and out of the country to a standstill. After travelling 32 hours by train and another 2 hours by bus from Pyongyang to reach the Russian border, the diplomats and their families loaded up their luggage on the rail trolley and pushed themselves the final kilometer to a Russian train station. The Russian foreign ministry singled out the Pyongyang embassy’s third secretary Vladislav Sorokin for providing the bulk of the effort. Photos shared by the ministry showed the diplomats on the trolley with their suitcases amid a wintry landscape. They were also seen cheering in a video as they crossed into Russia.

Massacre by Eritrean troops in Ethiopia’s Tigray region may constitute crime against humanity, Amnesty says (Washington Post) Ethiopian and Eritrean forces committed war crimes during an offensive to take control of the town of Axum in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region late last year, with one massacre by Eritrean troops a potential crime against humanity, according to a report released by Amnesty International on Thursday. The human rights group said that hundreds were likely killed during a roughly 24-hour period from Nov. 28-29, when Eritrean soldiers carried out house-to-house searches and shot civilians on the street. Eritrean troops “went on a rampage and systematically killed hundreds of civilians in cold blood, which appears to constitute crimes against humanity,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s director for east and southern Africa. The United Nations defines crimes against humanity as “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” In its report, Amnesty calls for a U.N.-led investigation into the violence in Axum as part of a broader international inquiry of the conflict between the Ethiopian government and forces aligned with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that began on Nov. 4 last year.

Nigeria faces third mass kidnapping of schoolchildren in 3 months (Washington Post) Gunmen raided a boarding school in northwest Nigeria early Friday and kidnapped around 300 girls, marking the third mass abduction of children since December in Africa’s most populous nation. The assailants struck the Government Girls Secondary School in Zamfara state in a predawn ambush, residents said, waking up neighbors as shots rang out. By daylight Friday, community members were still working together to tally the missing—it remained unclear how many girls were forced into the nearby woods—while police officers scoured the area, which has been plagued by kidnappings in recent months. No one has asserted responsibility for the attack, but criminal gangs known as “bandits” are known to capture groups for ransom—a scourge that has prompted some Nigerians to call for a national state of emergency. The latest high-profile targets across the country’s north: Schoolchildren.

The placebo effect: ‘As a man thinks, so is he?’ (NYT) Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients—especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence—will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air—even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t. You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos—as well as they do to drugs, with some patients—is long and growing.

#headlines #news

[the-real-peter-parker]

There is no one way to internet. I loved Dexter, which acknowledges murder as Bad and illegal, but still revels in it. I loved Breaking Bad, which again, says its bad then does it anyway because fiction. I come from a neglectful household and was reading Snape/Harry when I was 12, living vicariously through Harry finding (illegal, yes) love and appreciation. I've moved on to projecting my issues onto Peter. Sure, in the real world i could read twilight, but as a trans boy I like starker.

I RANT ABOUT ST*RKER HERE PLS SKIP IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ

Okay, this has been in my inbox for too long. I feel inspiration to answer after finding and scrolling through a st*rker blog, as well as someone defending the ship.

You, as the viewer, have the capacity to understand and act upon the knowledge that there are things that are illegal and immoral. Murder is illegal and can get people put in jail. Some drugs are illegal and can get people put in jail for use or for selling. I’m sure we all know that. Pedophilia is also illegal and extremely immoral. I don’t care if you personally have a thing for older men, but a teenager with someone over the age of 40 is an issue.

Snape is a person I personally dislike. He’s a supremacist and only acted against the dark wizard he served because he killed the woman he loved. And, yes, he is a supremacist, and I do not like a supremacist character unless they redeem themselves and act against the original thoughts they had. I’ve seen people ship him with Hermione too. Both relationships are shit, not just because of the age gap, but because they’re likely abusive. Snape hasn’t done shit but look down on his students to the point where he scared someone so badly that his boggart was his professor, despite his parents having lost their mind from torture to a group that Snape supported. So Snape’s character is already problematic, and having an attraction to a supremacist and a shitty person is already kind of an issue.

Love and appreciation can come from anywhere. It doesn’t have to be from a much, much older person in a romantic relationship you’re with. Platonic and familial love can be just as good, if not better, depending on who you are and your circumstances. I’m sure you know that, but when it comes to someone extremely young with a man who legally should not be with them, it’s a problem.

I’m a transman myself, and I project my personality onto Peter. Even if I felt attraction to someone as attractive as RDJ (and I am not going to deny it because people do find him attractive), I would not ship Peter with Tony. It doesn’t matter how much someone thinks their personalities work together or ages up Peter to make him legal. Cause that’s pretty much grooming and that’s also illegal and immoral as fuck. Putting their personalities means you’re putting the canon personality of a child with one of an adult, and it doesn’t change their ages because it’s still what they’re like in canon. I should add that Tom Holland himself has confirmed that Tony is a father figure to Peter. Adding pseudo incest does not bode well for any of you.

I’ve definitely been attracted to celebrities who are like twice my age because some of them are attractive. Am I going to ship characters of massive age gaps together knowing that one of them is a minor? Fuck no. It doesn’t matter how much I project. You’re still, in essence, shipping characters who would be in a relationship that would be frowned upon and get them put in jail. Scratch that because they’re all white. But that’s a longer conversation.

Just cause the media (including TV shows, films, videos, books, etc.) is showing something to be bad or not, it doesn’t mean you have to believe it. Of course, you should know that most of the illegal things are immoral as well. A fictional show participating in illegal and/or immoral acts doesn’t mean the audience has to believe that it’s okay. Like that ship with the Hargreeves siblings in The Umbrella Academy. The writers have specifically said that their relationship isn’t good, but they include it to show how fucked up this family is. They understand it’s wrong, but they’re including it in their work because they feel it’s necessary. A pedophilic relationship in any form of media does not make it good. It’s frowned upon, for good reason, because they know that if it were a real relationship, it’d be pretty fucked up.

You can say “they’re not real people” all you like, but if the two characters you ship came to life with those same personalities, you’d still ship it. It’s the same people, so why wouldn’t you? Fictional or not, it’s giving actual pedophiles the chance to squeeze their way into the conversation and make a point that’ll give them attention. Why do you think they keep trying to insert themselves into the LGBT+ community?

I think I’ll stop here but you can tell I have a lot to say about this and you know I’ve thought about this, considering the months of time I’ve had this in my drafts. If I can get on a computer and add that “keep reading” thing I will definitely do that.

#not peter #rant #asks #anon #st*rker

[canyouhearthelight]

The Miys, Ch. 46

I’m on a roll!  Yet another chapter beta’d by @parisconstantine (in which I learned about French terms of affection), and I’m already 1600 words into chapter 47.  I’m not sure if the next chapter will be a long one or if I’ll end up splitting it into two parts. Time will tell on that front.

Oh! Oh!  Sam and Simon both get last names in this chapter!

This covers the first six hours of the Food Festival, so minor mentions of food.  I can’t think of any other warnings beyond that, but if you find something please shoot me a message so I can update it.  I’m learning every day about things that trigger people, so sometimes I miss things that aren’t glaringly obvious.  However, I’m always willing to learn.  At the end of the day, this is very slice-of-life, after all.

Edit:  I am reposting this, for 2 reasons.  Most importantly, I included some characters in this chapter who I need to attribute to their rightful creators.  So, Thank you @charlylimph-blog for Ivan Thorson and Coffee Williams.  You are an incredible writer, and I didn’t want these two to languish in obscurity after all the hard work you put into submitting them for the last contest.

The second reason is just because I posted it too early and wanted to put it out there for the people who look for my chapters on Tuesdays.  I love you all!

“Okay, everyone for Alpha Shift, sound off.”

“Tyche Reid, Admin Observation, is online.” I could hear the smirk in my sister’s voice.

“Antoine Costa, Support Personnel, online.”

“Sophia, do I really have to do this?” a familiar voice wheedled.

“Yes. I need to know who is my eyes and ears on the ground.”

“Ugh. Zach Khan, Support Personnel, online.”

“Derek Okafor, Civilian Observation, online.”

“Sam Richardson, Civilian Ob-observation, o-o-online.” I couldn’t help grinning that Sam agreed to help out.  Usually, he kept out of any operations on the ship, but he was the original tester for Antoine’s project, so he had just assumed he would be part of today’s actions.

“Maverick Okima, Support Personnel, online.”

“Alistair Worthington, Resource Adjunct, online,” my assistant dutifully called off in a bored tone. Only I could see the sardonic look he shot me.

“Sophia Reid, Resource Command, online,” I breathed in relief.  “Thank you, everyone. You have two objectives today: first, a general assessment of the low-stim session so that we know what we did right and what we can improve on in the future; second, getting feedback on how Mr. Costa’s dampening and proximity updates to the translation chips are working, again with a goal for future enhancements.  Tyche Reid has graciously volunteered to be our control on the chip project, so she will be providing only a baseline evaluation of the low-stim session and the quiet rooms.”  In reality, my sister wasn’t volunteering so much as refusing to get the upgrade until I agreed to do the same.

“Soph, if you are going to keep being so formal, we may as well shut this down now,” my sister huffed. “Mr. Costa my foot.”

“I’m trying to be professional,” I grumbled back. “This is an official Council operation, to be saved for posterity.”

“Do you truly believe that Xiomara will tolerate being referred to as ‘Miss’ or ‘Councillor Kalloe’ for six hours, Sophia?” Antoine asked smoothly.

Fighting back a chuckle, I refused to concede his point. “That’s Simon’s problem, not mine. She and I are on shift in the festival at the same time, so Simon will be running the show from here.”

“And you have deluded yourself to believe that Mr. Rodriguez will continue to address everyone formally?” Alistair scoffed. Et tu, Brute? I had argued with him for weeks to call me Sophia.

“If you start calling me Mr. Okafor, I’m going silent until this is over, Sophia,” Derek threatened.

I threw my hands up defensively, even if most people couldn’t see me. “Fine! I get it, I get it. I’ll chill out with the names, but I am going on record that it was under duress and threat of operative failure.” I shook my head and took a deep breath. “Okay, so, back to the point.  Tyche, your job is providing an assessment of the low-stim Festival session, as it appears to someone without the implant upgrades.  Derek and Sam, your jobs are to evaluate the session with the upgrades.  I need all three of you to report back two specific things: what worked better than your past experiences, and what still sucked.  Maverick, Zach, and Antoine: you are there both in your capacities as support personnel in case something goes horribly wrong, and to make sure I hear about anything they don’t realize shouldn’t be happening.  Everyone clear on your jobs?”

I got six affirmative answers before continuing. “Okay, other than that – have fun!  Try new foods, let me know what to try when it’s my turn, just enjoy yourselves as much as possible!”  With that, I left the group channel open and watched the map of the festival.  The three teams were entering from different points to ensure that, between the six of them, everything could be evaluated. In theory, everything should go off without a hitch.  The vendors were already briefed to be prepared for attendees during this session to provide a list of flavor and texture aversions, and Miys was already stationed in security alcoves to ensure that the vendors were complying and attendees weren’t abusing it.

It was only fifteen minutes before we got our first update.

“Team Try New Foods, reporting early success,” Zach Khan’s voice broke in. “Kosher food stall was an overall hit, the Jainist stall admitted they had nothing that Derek could like except papadums, and Derek tried both falafel and chicken tikka masala.  Jury’s out on the masala, but he likes falafel.”

“I really thought falafel would be too squishy,” I admitted.

“Apparently not,” Zach chuckled. “He said it’s like a meatball, but no meat.”

“I mean, yeah,” I agreed, still dazed. “That’s cool, though.  And the Jainist vendor didn’t give him a hard time about the list?”

“Nope,” he popped the last letter, something he tended to do when he was really excited. “Just smiled, read it, and apologized that everything he had was either spicy, sour, or squishy.”

“How did the Kosher and Halal vendors react to the list?”

“Thoughtfully,” Derek interjected. “The Kosher vendor clarified if I like onions, and the Halal vendor just wanted to know if I meant pepper-spicy or herb-spicy.”

Awesome. “Good job, guys. And congrats, Derek, on the new foods.  Keep it up and let me know.”

Thirty minutes later, not everything was sunshine and rainbows, though. Sam and Maverick had so far reported three vendors whose stalls were too pungent to approach, and Alistair was already in contact with and arguing about the need to keep the dishes covered during the low-stim session. “I understand that the smell is what draws people in, usually, ma’am, but you agreed to keep all smells to a minimum for the first six hours. That includes keeping the atmospheric scrubbers engaged and keeping the dishes sealed.” When the woman on the other end started to argue, he swiftly cut her off. “When you signed up to be open during this session, you were given a list of the restrictions, and you signed off on it. Low Stimulus, and that includes stimulating the nose. You can either seal the food, as you agreed, or we can have your stall closed down for the remainder of the Festival, per the agreement you signed.” With that, he disconnected sighed before turning to me. “So rude,” he informed me with a shake of his head.

“Which stall was that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose in dread.

“Fortunately, just the seafood stall,” he explained. “Along with the Cajun and Jamaican stalls.  So, pungent, but no one has reported nausea as of yet.  Miys is already in the area, trying to dissipate the odor.”

“As long as it isn’t the Japanese stall,” I gulped. They had insisted on serving natto, but explained that it would be sealed in individual portions throughout the festival, and only opened by the person eating it.  While I couldn’t exactly argue, I didn’t have to be happy about it.

I heard from Tyche right at one hour into the event.

“Soph,” my sister practically shouted at me. “Do you want to explain to me why one of the Quiet Rooms looks like you robbed my quarters?”

Oops.  Forgot about that. “Tyche, they’re designed to be relaxing, quiet, and provide low stimulation.  I can’t help it that your quarters are practically a smooshy cave.” Three, two, one…

“A hammock!?” she demanded. “Why don’t I have a hammock?”

“Make up your mind, Tych. Are you offended that the room looks like your quarters, or jealous that it’s better equipped?”

“Both. Definitely both,” she asserted. “Ooo, you included the sound scrubbers we had installed in your quarters, didn’t you?”

“I knew it!” I almost shrieked. “I knew it sounded muffled in my quarters since I got back!  That was completely uncalled for, you brat.  You know I’m hard of hearing!”

“You also have an implant in your brain that directly translates language into your auditory cortex, so it’s not like you couldn’t hear us,” she pointed out. “And all your alerts and alarms were already calibrated for you to see them as well as hear them. What I don’t understand is why you never had Miys fix your hearing.”

“Are you kidding?” I scoffed. “Loud noises are bad enough as it is.  I can’t imagine how it would be if I could hear them better.”

“Aaannnnnnd that’s why we put the scrubbers in your quarters,” she finished. Well, walked right into that one, I admitted to myself. “This room is nice, by the way, once I got over the shock. Quiet, relaxing on the eyes and ears. How buff are the atmo scrubbers? It’s like my nose just quit working, but I can still breathe.”

“Really buff,” I clarified. “I’m not sure how many food and personal odors are going to be at the main event, so I erred on the side of overkill.”

“Do all the quiet rooms look like this?” Antoine asked, his tone full of curiosity.

“They do not,” I grinned. “Antoine, you’re going to love this, I think.  There are five different themed quiet rooms, and two of each for a total of ten. You two are in one of the Dark Rooms.  The Green themed rooms are furnished with plants and small fountains.  Medium theme looks more like my quarters, with lighter grays and some purples thrown in. Cool theme is mostly blues, with diffuse light to give an underwater or polar night kind of feeling.  Finally, the Light themed room is whites and pale yellows, with indirect light to create a feeling like a sunny day.”

A hum of approval. “I think that makes the most sense,” he agreed. “Not everyone finds the same things soothing, but I think you created enough variety to cover everyone.”

“So, how is the event going for you guys?”

Tyche sighed. “It’s going okay, but I’m not entirely certain that’s not because of who I am.  I haven’t seen any flashing lights, no loud music is playing, so that’s good.  The vendors have been very deferential, which I didn’t think to expect, honestly.”

“I don’t think that’s because of you,” I hummed. “Derek is having a similar experience, honestly.  Sam has reported some vendors with fragrant stalls, but that’s been addressed.  Alistair, anything else?”

Without glancing up from his data screen, he shook his head. “Other than the incident with the smells, nothing negative reporting yet. Derek and Zachary have dutifully sent in additional reports regarding the reactions of each vendor to the food preference lists, so far the balance is in the positive. Samuel and Maverick are reporting similar responses.”

“And the upgrades?” Antoine asked hesitantly.

“So far, nothing major…” Alistair trailed off.  “Support personnel are reporting receiving proximity alerts from non-clients, and I’ve received several queries regarding if that is normal?”

“It’s expected,” Antoine sighed. “We are working on an algorithm that would reduce the alert volume for support personnel who are on duty and in the presence of their respective clients, but it wasn’t ready in time for this event.  But, yes, it is normal and to be expected.”

“Understood. Request approval to release a mass communication to all registered support personnel?”

“Approved,” Antoine and I answered immediately.  I continued. “Alistair, do we have any reports regarding the effectiveness of the dampeners?”

“Yes and no,” he stated. “General reports indicate conditions that are difficult to separate from the intended atmosphere of the event.”

“Tyche, are you still on Level Fourteen?”

“Yeah, why?”

“If we send you the reports from any participants in that area, do you have time to corroborate?”

“I mean, I do, but I thought I was supposed to be participating?”

“Sorry,” I winced in contrition. “You’re right. I just… got ahead of myself. Yeah, it can wait until after your shift at the event.  Just make sure you’re recording your observations so you can do an accurate comparison later, okay?”

“We’re both recording full video, Soph,” she assured me, a rustling noise in the background. “I’m about to head back out into it, but I promise to keep my eyes peeled.  I’ll keep shooting reports to you as I make my way through the vendors, okay?”

“Sounds good,” I exhaled, leaning back in my seat as she disconnected.  Watching the map for a few more minutes, I saw all three teams circulating through the event.  Sometimes a team would stop at a Quiet Room for several minutes before continuing.  Small reports were trickling in, some from the three teams, some from vendors, and others from support people who were simply attending the event in a professional capacity.  However, no further urgent matters were reported aside from Derek and Sam finding a handful of new foods each.

Finally, we were approaching the end of the low-stim session.

“Alpha Shift teams, relief teams for Beta Shift are on their way,” I notified them once we were fifteen minutes out from the end. “Beta Shift teams, please report when you are online.”

“Amelie Marechal, Crowd Control, reporting online and heading to rendezvous with Derek and Zach,” a cheerful voice chirped not two minutes later. I managed to smother a chuckle as Alistair scowled at me, remembering our conversation the day before.

“Coffee Williams, Crowd Control, reporting online and arriving to relieve Costa and Reid” came the next, this time a smooth baritone.  I hadn’t spent much time around the man, but Antoine assured me that he was perfect for diffusing difficult situations.

“Ivan Thorson, Crowd Control, online,” followed quickly after.  “Heading to meet with Amelie and relieve Tyche and Antoine.”

The next two Beta Shift members left me speechless. “Conor MacMaoilir, Crowd Control, online and relieving Maverick and Sam.”

“Grey Hodenson, Crowd Control Command, online. I’m with Conor and we are relieving Okima and Richardson.”

Alistair managed to sneak in a couple surprises of his own, apparently.  When I glared at him, he merely smirked at me before tipping a non-existent hat towards me.  I barely caught Mr. William’s teammate checking in before I managed to recover. “Sophia Reid, Alpha Shift Resource Command, reporting for hand off to Crowd Control Command. Grey, confirm handoff?”

“Handoff complete, Sophia,” came the familiar, neutral voice. Finally, they cracked and I could hear a smile in their next words. “Please take care to get some rest between now and Delta shift.  We expect that shift to be crowded, and you will be Resource Observation. Also, I would like to request that you do not allow Xiomara to kill Simon?”

“Hey, that’s a tall order!” I objected, only half-joking. “I’ll try, no promises. And I promise to get some rest.  First, I need Alpha shift teams to come debrief in my office, then I’ll take a rest interval for Gamma.  Deal?”

“Mr. MacMaoilir and I agree that is sufficient.”

“Maverick, make sure she gets some sleep, or I’ll let Tyche give you what for,” Conor interjected. I didn’t even try to suppress the groan that followed.

Introducing the two of them had turned out to be a terrible idea on my part.

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#the miys #science fiction #humans are weird #humans are space orcs #earth is space australia #original fiction #tw: food #cw: food #apocalypse #aliens

[princecharmingtobe]

Rai tries to explain the furry fandom for non-furries for the 24963569356586th time because I have no life~

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir posting this here, I just still often see people in the general internet being confused about or flat out wrong about what furries are and why we like the things we like. So here I go again, taking my frustrations out by making a long-winded tumblr post about it. But hey, if you’re confused by furries or know someone who is, maybe this will help idfk

Just be warned I am an ADHD motherfucker and there will be about 10x more words than necessary.

To start, What Are Furries?

Furries are simply self-identified fans of anthropomorphic animal characters.That is, a character that is an animal, but with many human characteristics. This can include speaking human language, human-like facial expressions, walking upright in a human-like way, wearing clothes, etc. Examples of anthropomorphic (or anthro for short) characters include Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Sonic the Hedgehog, Disney’s animated Robin Hood, Zootopia, and Beastars. All things in which the “animal” characters behave and express themselves like humans. Even movies like The Lion King and Balto have what would be considered “antho” characters, due to their capacity for human thought, speech, and facial expressions, though they would be in a subcategory often referred to as “feral” or sometimes “non-morphic” in which the character still moves and behaves largely like an animal.

So to reiterate, a furry is simply a self-proclaimed fan of anthro animal characters. 

Why Anthro Animals?

I mean the obvious answer is, because it’s fun. It can be really fun and get one’s creative juices flowing trying to figure out how to blend human and animal characteristics. It’s an animal that moves and acts like a human. In what ways is it like a person, and what ways is it still an animal? Popular media like Zootopia and Beastars address that question as major plot points and worldbuilding elements. But it can also be fun to think about just when creating your own characters. And aside from just figuring out how to blend characteristics, the animal aspects of a character can offer more options of expression. Ears can perk up, droop, or fold back, tails can wag, lash, or tuck between legs, growling, hissing, etc. People often use expressions comparing human behavior and emotions to animals. You ever find yourself so happy or exited you think “If I was a dog my tail would be wagging!”

And aside from being an interesting concept to think about, sometimes it’s just aesthetically pleasing.

What is a “fursona”?

Fursona is short for “furry persona”. A BIG BIG part of the fandom is original characters. If you look at a furry art website you might see some art of Judy Hops, Legoshi, Sonic, etc. But mostly you’ll see original characters. They tend to be the main focus of the fandom. Because all the things mentioned above are fun to play with, and the fandom is big on creativity and self-expression. And what good is self-expression if you don’t use it to express... yourself?  A fursona is an anthro animal representation of oneself. Basically “Me, but an [animal].” These can be an accurate representation of oneself (example: someone who is short and meek and skittish might make a mouse fursona) or a more idealized version of who you want to be (example: same short meek skittish person might instead make a lion fursona because they wish they could be more confident, strong, and outgoing). Some people even make multiple fursonas to represent different aspects of themselves (Think Thomas Sanders’ “Sanders Sides” but with fur). In the fandom, your fursona is also often how you represent yourself to others. In real life there are aspects of your appearance you can’t control, or that can be very hard to control. Your height, weight, bone structure, etc. But online as a furry, you can look like anything you want. This is also a very attractive concept to trans folk and queer people in general, which may explain why there’s such a high percentage of queer furries compared to the general population.

What is a Fursuit and Why do People Wear Them?

A fursuit is simply a costume made to look like a furry character. it is pretty much no different from cosplaying comic, anime, or video game characters, except that most of the time fursuits are of original characters instead of pre-existing ones. People wear them for fun and self-expression, just like any other costume. They differ from mascot suits in that they tend to be of higher quality, and more form-fitting and expressive. Fake furries are usually pretty easy to spot on TV because they usually end up in cheap Easter bunny costumes. 

While “fursuiters” are often the “face” of the fandom to outsiders, most furries don’t actually own a fursuit. They are expensive, cumbersome, take work to maintain, and don’t always play nice with certain health conditions and phobias. I personally am apprehensive about getting one because I worry I’ll have difficulty breathing, and I easily overheat. Others simply don’t see the appeal of dressing up. 

Do Furries Think They Are Animals?

Generally speaking: No. People often mix up furries with a subset of otherkin known as Therians. Otherkin are people who believe themselves to be in some way non-human, usually spiritually or mentally a non-human creature. Therians in particular believe themselves to be in some way a non-human animal.  Furries are on the other hand, as I said, just fans of anthro characters. While there are likely furries who are also therians, most are not. 

People who approach furry conventions to yell “You know you’re not really an animal!” at the fursuiters is about the equivalent of going to an anime convention and shouting “You know you’re not really Naruto!” at the cosplayers. 

Is Being a Furry a Big Part of a Person’s Life?

It varies, just like any other fandom. Take anime for example. Some people just watch it and maybe talk to their friends about it and that’s it. Others might go online to view fanart and read fanfic, even go to conventions. And some people fill every aspect of their life that they can with it, filling their home with merch, getting tattoos, even building careers like being a youtuber around it. The same goes for furries. For some people it never goes beyond consuming media and art, while for others it plays a big part in their day to day life.

Is it a Sex Thing? (VERY ADULT AND SENSITIVE CONTENT BELOW THIS POINT)

I won’t beat around the bush here. There IS a sexual side to the fandom, just like any other fandom. Any anime, comic, video game, TV show, book, there is a sexual side to its fandom. Furries are no different. Just like it’s easy to find anime porn, it’s easy to find furry porn. People be making porn, idk what to tell you.

“Isn’t that zoophilia?”

Some people seem to feel that way about it, but no, not really. The thing that differentiates furry porn from watching two dogs hump at the park is that the characters are anthro. They think and express themselves like people, and fans relate to them as they would with human characters.

This

is in no way the same as this

“Do people have sex in fursuits?”

Generally, no, for various reasons. 1. They are expensive and take work to maintain and keep clean, and you don’t want to get various fluids on them. 2. They can be cumbersome and get really hot and stuffy, not ideal. 3. They just aren’t made for it. They don’t usually offer access to ones’ genitals, and thus having sex in them would be rather difficult.

There ARE some people who will get suits specially made for having sex in, with holes in all the necessary places, but you’re not likely to see those out in public. Generally if you see someone walking around in public in a fursuit, you can rest assured it’s probably not been used for sex. 

“Ugh but that’s weird!”

I mean, people dress up and roleplay characters during sex all the time. Is dressing up as Krystal the Fox all that different from dressing up as Harley Quinn? And anyway, what does it matter to you what consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own bedroom? Maybe don’t think too hard about other peoples’ sex lives.

And despite the availability of furry porn, it is not all there is to the fandom, and not everyone participates in that part of it. Heck, there are a lot of minors in the fandom, I was a tween when I was introduced to it, and the only times I was exposed to porn was when haters would “raid” our forums and spam it at us while calling US perverts, all the while being told “Hey, there are kids here!” But no we’re totally the sex-crazed perverts here right?

“I’ve Heard About Furries Who Are Bad People”

Yeah, you probably have. It’s a big fandom and inevitably some of the people in it will do bad things. Again, it’s the same for every fandom. You take any percentage of the human population, you’re going to get a few bad ones. Actual zoophiles, pedophiles, rapists, abusers. If they exist in the general population they’re going to exist in the fandom. But generally when their actions are brought to light they are driven out of our spaces, as with most fandom spaces. No group is perfect and without its bad eggs, but most of us work to keep our spaces safe.

In the end, people looking at a group from the outside tend to only see the loudest, weirdest, most outrageous members, and assume that’s what the whole group is.

[plums-from-the-icebox]

I’m feeling absolutely beyond dreadful as I recently received some of the most emotionally devastating news and I am really not fucking doing okay at the moment. I know this isn’t as cheery and optimistic as all my prior posts but I can’t act like I’m doing okay, I’m just simply not. The way my university handled the case of covid-19 has me absolutely beyond fuming in rage. The man in question, supposedly a 50+years old professor, who has already quarantined himself. Because of this, my university is starting their spring break two weeks early, classes for tomorrow and Friday are suspended, AND all student organization events are cancelled and or postponed until further notice. This is particularly crushing to me because I am involved into two very time-heavy-commitment things. I am involved in one of the biggest LGBTQ student orgs on my college’s campus and we had planned out numerous events , many of which were heavily advocacy-based and that’s just so genuinely upsetting because that’s something I and the rest of the people on the board have wanted to do for a long time because we wanted to do for such a long time. I am/was also in a play that was supposed to open next week. I heard my theatre group say they might put on some type of performance of it in some capacity since spent since literally December prepping for it. Which makes me feel awful because we all worked so fucking hard. I’ve spent so much time, energy, money, and labor and for what? For all of it to amount to fucking nothing??? What the fuck. Very important to mention: they tweeted this information BEFORE actually sending out an email to the general student body at my university which I genuinely feel is incredibly unprofessional and a major misstep on their part. Not only are they creating mass hysteria by giving students the most vague amount of information in regards to finances/in general, they also are contributing to the violent, massive amounts of racism and xenophobia that are directly harming Asian people, and especially East Asian people. Given the nature of all my classes being online as of right now until further notice starting the 23rd, that means I’ll more than likely have to be stuck at home in my apartment more often. I cannot begin to tell you how much I don’t want that to happen. As someone who has the horrible habit of severely socially reclusing himself when he’s insanely depressed (which I know WILL happen) I am literally afraid for the state of my already shaky mental state. Also, my roommate is problematic and toxic (yes I mean that in the genuine definition of the word) as all hell. She’s also racist,transphobic, emotionally immature and overall a really shitty person to live with/ be around and that thought of having to be there even more than before when I essentially relied on the spaces and activities at my university as an escape from my toxic home environment. And no, going back to my hometown is not an option for me either, because my mother is literally emotionally abusive and genuinely a toxic, awful person to be around for long periods of time which would also destroy my mental health. All around? It’s a lose-lose situation for me. Literally half my classes require in-class participation/discussion-based (including the last class needed to complete my minor) which more than likely, HIGHLY LIKELY, will have to further delay my graduation moreso than I currently have to (which originally was postponed to spring 2021 to complete my bachelors but who the fuck knows now) and I’m just already in such a rough space mentally and financially and I’m just really going through a genuine emotional crisis. I’m not doing okay, I can’t sugarcoat it. I haven’t felt this intensely dreadful and depressed in months. I literally broke down in tears in front of other people, something I rarely do anymore, for the first time in over a year so there’s that emotional weight too. It’s been sending me into an already further depressive spiral than I had unfortunately been experiencing thus far this year.Fuck today, truly. I am tired.

#cw: abuse mention #rant #DO NOT REBLOG

[redslushyeldergod]

:/ Rant time :/ Whether or not you want to support certain armchair activism tactics has nothing to do with how left-wing you are. Your attitude towards other people is irrelevant when determining if you're left wing or right wing. A political stance is more about the content than the delivery of your beliefs. Anyone could have the perspective to know that there is a time and place for venting and abrasiveness that's separate from outreach. Yet, both right-wing and left-wing groups might have you insult and talk down to people under the guise of "sharing your beliefs". When they respond with offense, the group member sees the outside world as hostile and unforgiving rather than actually considering that their actions were inflammatory and the thing that provoked that behavior. How far left you are politically also has nothing to do with how much weight you assign large-scale problems versus individual purity. Being legitimately left-wing (as opposed to liberal or centrist) doesn't mean you necessarily have to lose the forest for the trees and attack/shun random-ass individual people who have little to no power in society and aren't actively being hateful. Being left wing does not mean you need to promote wearing "softboi" clothes and call someone's masculine gender presentation toxic, then turn a blind eye to actual toxic gender stereotypes on a large scale. Being left wing doesn't mean you conflate problems on a broad level with individual "awareness" either. Yes traditionally feminine fields of medicine need to serve anyone who needs it, but that does not mean that randos need to be constantly pestering transmasculine people, calling them "womxn" or "menstruators" or "people with vaginas", and labeling any discomfort with being constantly reminded that you see them as women and biological females as "internalized transphobia". It doesn't mean you conflate intersectional theory on a large scale with ignoring hardship that exists on the individual level. Being left wing, at the end of the day, also doesn't mean you think you can't harm people just because you're the most oppressed person in the room. Arguably implying that minorities can't have a capacity for both good and evil is denying people agency and humanity, but more importantly enabling people who are manipulative and abusive to rise through the ranks in spaces reserved for minorities.

#rant #left wing #trans shit #womxn

[go-foxes]

01/BASICS

Full Name: Glory Abigail Hoskins Nickname: Possum (A nickname from her father); JD (Short for “Jane Doe,” when she was in the Louisville foster system) Birthday: May 17th Gender: Cis Female Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Astrological Sign: Taurus (The Week of the Natural). Capricorn Moon. Spoken Languages: English Birthplace: Owls Bend, Missouri Relationship Status: Single

TRIGGER WARNINGS: references to drug abuse, death, abuse, and animal cruelty

02/PHYSICAL TRAITS

Hair Color/Style: A natural redhead, she started bleaching her hair in Louisville, though her roots often show through. No matter how she wears her hair—down, in a ponytail, bun, or braids—it’s usually messy. Eye Color: Green Face Claim: Sophie Turner Height: 5′9″ Tattoos: She started giving herself stick and poke tattoos in Louisville, or letting a friend do them on her, a new habit to distract from ones she left behind in Owls Bend. The first was a minimalist pine tree, in the inside of her left forearm. Then came the initials “MW” on her left ring and middle fingers, easily disguised as nothing more than artistic zigzags. Then came the coordinates of Owls Bend over the inside of her left wrist. When she didn’t want to be limited to what she could do on herself with her right hand, she let a friend do a more artistic design than she could accomplish on her right shoulderblade: a stylized owl inside an acute angle. During the second week of summer practices, she gave herself a fox paw-print over her right hipbone. When she saves up enough money, she wants to get one professionally done, a half-sleeve with a floral/nature motif. Piercings: The two holes in each lobe were done in the bathroom of a group home, and it shows: they’re off-center, unevenly spaced. Her cartilage piercing, however, she paid to get done professionally. Unique Attributes: She has some scattered scars, a mix of a rough-and-tumble childhood and some of the more memorable of Justice’s punishments. Some of the most noteworthy are: a gash on her thigh from tripping into a barbed wire fence when she was young, which required stitches; a scar on the heel of her right palm from being held to a stove; and faint marks on the insides of her elbows.

03/PERSONALITY TRAITS/TYPES

Positive Traits: Brave, adventurous, independent, protective, loyal Negative Traits: Stubborn, rebellious, temperamental, reclusive, escapist Hobbies/Interests: Exy, of course, though she sometimes doesn’t feel like she has as much of a claim on it as everyone else, because she only picked it up in high school, and only vaguely knew what it was when she was growing up in Owls Bend. She also watches a lot of TV: they didn’t have a lot of channels growing up and, even then, some of the fiercest fights among her siblings were fights over the remote. Getting to watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, has yet to get old. She also likes concerts, the kinds in small venues with big mosh pits, after tagging along to some in Louisville. Her oldest interest, though, is nature and the outdoors, but she doesn’t really think of it as much of a hobby—it was always just there.   Major/Minor: Still undeclared Insecurities: Even after a year on the Foxes, Glory still feels like an impostor sometimes. She barely played Exy at all in high school. She doesn’t deserve this. Doesn’t deserve her new life, her fresh start, her second chance, when other people—(or, really, just one person)—won’t get that chance, because they’re dead. She feels extreme guilt for the part she played in her boyfriend’s overdose, for encouraging his partying and substance abuse and engaging in the same habits herself but not suffering the same consequence for them. It’s made her closed-off to the thought of romance, and even close friendships, as she worries that she might be, somehow, bad for the people she loves. Since leaving Owls Bend, she’s felt unrooted and adrift, and her guilt only exacerbates those feelings of solitude.   Quirks/Eccentricities: She has a strong Missouri Ozarks accent that got her made fun of a lot in Louisville.  She hasn’t lost the habit of liking to climb trees, but with Palmetto’s groomed campus lacking the big, old trees of her childhood, she also just settles for being up high and outside, and is the Fox Tower roof’s number one fan. And, though she doesn’t have a car, she has an old fixed-gear bicycle that she rides around campus that she might have liberated from a bike rack when it didn’t move for a couple weeks at the beginning of her freshman year. MBTI Type: ISTP, “The Virtuoso” (Friendly but very private, calm but suddenly spontaneous, extremely curious but unable to stay focused on formal studies, Virtuoso personalities can be a challenge to predict, even by their friends and loved ones. Virtuosos can seem very loyal and steady for a while, but they tend to build up a store of impulsive energy that explodes without warning, taking their interests in bold new directions.) Enneagram Type: Type Eight, “The Challenger” (Eights have enormous willpower and vitality, and they feel most alive when they are exercising these capacities in the world. They use their abundant energy to effect changes in their environment—to “leave their mark" on it—but also to keep the environment, and especially other people, from hurting them and those they care about. At an early age, Eights understand that this requires strength, will, persistence, and endurance—qualities that they develop in themselves and which they look for in others.) Moral Alignment: Chaotic Good Temperament: Choleric

04/FAMILY & HOME

Immediate Family:

Gideon Concord Hoskins (Father)

Miriam (Mother, last name unknown)

Justice Gideon Hoskins (27, b. 1991, sibling to Charity and Virtue)

Charity Joanna Hoskins (25, b. 1993, sibling to Justice and Virtue, ran away when she was 16 and Glory was 9)

Virtue Bethany Hoskins (24, b. 1994, sibling to Justice and Charity)

Honor Elijah Hoskins (20, b. 1998)

Prosper James Hoskins (16, b. 2002, sibling to Mercy)

Mercy Rachel Hoskins (13, b. 2005, sibling to Prosper)

Amity Susana Hoskins (8, b. 2010, sibling to Grace, left Owls Bend w/ her mother when she was 4 and Glory was 14)

Grace Tabitha Hoskins (6, b. 2012, sibling to Amity, left Owls Bend w/ her mother when she was 2 and Glory was 14)

How do they feel about their family?: She never knew her mother, doesn’t know much about her besides her name, Miriam. To listen to her father talk, she left Glory her red hair and her wild spirit, blowing through her father’s life like a summer storm, leaving him and leaving Glory with no full siblings among the Hoskins brood.

She can’t say she blames her mother, whoever or wherever she is. Glory’s watched many women come and go from her father’s life. She knows that her father’s a hard man to love—after all, she spent her entire childhood watching him leave. After Justice and Charity and Virtue’s mother left him for another man in a town over, the next woman he fell in love with, Honor’s mother, died in childbirth. And so by the time Glory’s mother came around he might have still felt infatuation, might have wanted someone at home to take care of his homestead while he was away, but he was done with love.

Justice she hates, a black and bitter hatred that spreads to everything he looks upon with kindness: her father, for giving him the authority he does, letting him lord it over the rest of them when he’s gone; any of her siblings who kowtow to him, even if it’s only out of self-preservation. She was never too fond of Charity when she was younger, she was too quiet, too soft, but Charity was the first Hoskins to run away, and in the years since Glory thought of her more than she ever did when she was still around. Justice told them all that she was “working” a truck stop in Lebanon, but Glory thought it was a lie, nothing more than a cautionary tale meant to scare them into obedience.

Virtue in particular she tormented, with small pranks like hiding frogs in her bed. She was more fun than Charity to bother, because she would actually get angry. And even when Glory grew out of some of those childhood pranks, they never stopped squabbling.

She used to be close with Honor and Prosper, who were closest to her in age, who climbed trees and scrapped in the mud with her when she was young. Honor she lost first, when he first decided he was too old for child’s games with her and Prosper, and then grew too close to Justice. Prosper she lost later—she took him to a party with her when he was a freshman in high school and she was a little older, got him drunk for the first time. When he got caught hungover the next morning by Justice, he sold her out to save himself, and she never forgave him.    

For a long time, Mercy was the baby, trying to tag along after Glory and Prosper without much success. Glory didn’t have time for a sister five years younger than her who couldn’t keep up with her, no matter how much Mercy tried.

Amity and Grace she always resented: she was a teenager then, running away from chores and responsibilities to spend time with newfound friends and newfound bad habits, she didn’t want two younger siblings in the house to watch over. In the end, she doesn’t think it was her father who drove their mother away. It was Justice, fully grown into his adulthood, who didn’t see anything wrong with exercising his power over her they way he did over the rest of his siblings. Glory didn’t think she cared much for Amma and Baby Grace, until their mother left and took them with her, and all the new space in their home felt empty instead of letting her breathe. How does their family feel about them?: In her family, Glory was always the wild one. Always the troublemaker. Always shirking her share of chores, always nowhere to be found. Her father found her wildness charming, and gave her a lot of leeway, which was always an annoyance to her more responsible siblings. She was also the one who stood up to Justice the most, antagonized him and said no to him, and it earned her his enduring hatred and often the resentment of her siblings as well—it was easier to blame her for provoking him than it was to blame him, when everyone knew he wouldn’t ever change. So she was the black sheep, the rebellious one, the one that rocked the boat, and she never much cared when anyone tried to chide her for it.  

She knew that, when she ran away, no one would look for her. The Hoskins kept their business to themselves, they weren’t going to go to the police. But it still feels strange to her to think that her home is still there, going on without her. Has Justice finally gotten married? Does he have kids of his own? (She hopes not.) Her father’s getting older, is he at home more? Has he met anyone else? Does she have more siblings? She took her name back when she came to Palmetto, but she doesn’t think that means that they’ll find her. They don’t pay attention to Exy in Owls Bend. But that doesn’t stop her from wondering if they miss her, now that she’s gone like Charity and Amma and Baby Grace.   Pets: Growing up, they had a lot of land, and at different times they kept different animals, mostly treated as having a purpose, and sometimes shown 4-H and at state fairs, and not as pets: chickens, a couple goats, sometimes a cow or some pigs, a donkey to scare away the coyotes, cats that lived mostly outdoors, an old guard dog named Rufus who was too lazy to do much guarding anymore even when Glory was very young. Glory spent a lot of time with them, because she spent a lot of time outside. As a child, she grew incredibly fond of a pig she’d named Bubba, and while her father had done his best to gently prepare her for the fact that they were raising him for meat, Justice was not as kind about it, and it is one of his earliest torments that she can remember.  Where do they live?: Only in Palmetto. She stayed with Abby over the summer.  Description of their home: The Hoskins have made their home in Owls Bend for generations, held onto it through thick and thin. It used to be bigger, previous generations used to farm more, too, fighting to get money out of the rocky soil. But they sold off bits and pieces in parcels over the years when there wasn’t enough money to be found, sold most of the equipment, too, until they were mostly growing what could be used right there to feed themselves, sometimes selling the excess at farmers markets. Their house wasn’t grand, an old two-story farmhouse with an addition tacked on later that didn’t quite blend in, kept in enough repair that it wouldn’t fall down over their heads but not enough to make it something anyone who didn’t live there and love it would call beautiful: the paint was always peeling on the siding, the brick chimney crumbling; there were always too many shoes and jackets and books and toys and whatever else nine kids could come up with scattered around inside. No matter how certain she felt that she had to get away, there are always things that she’ll remember fondly: the porch swing she used to curl up on late at night; the makeshift fort she’d made for herself out in the woods, piled with blankets and pillows she took from the house; the treasure trove of thrift store clothes she’d hidden out there, too, in an old wooden trunk that used to hold their winter clothes, where Justice wouldn’t find them, changing in the dark and then walking to the end of their long dirt driveway for her friends to pick her up.  Description of their bedroom: Her part of her room at Palmetto now is impersonal, without all the homey clutter that had made up their shared bedrooms at Owls Bend. She doesn’t have much: her clothes feet neatly in her dresser, her shoes under her bed, the beat-up backpack she takes with her to class is the same one that held what little she took with her from Owls Bend. Her desk is the messiest part of her room, strewn with printouts of readings and messy notes, because she isn’t much for studying. She has some cheap posters she’d gotten in an on-campus sale early in the semester, just to break up the whiteness of the walls, hung up haphazardly. Like her old bedrooms back home—(first shared with Mercy, and then with Virtue after Charity ran away)—she doesn’t spend much time there.

05/THIS OR THAT

Introvert or Extrovert? Introvert Optimist or Pessimist? Pessimist Leader or Follower? Not a follower, but more of a loner than a leader Confident or Self-Conscious? Confident Cautious or Careless? Careless Passionate or Apathetic? Passionate Book Smarts or Street Smarts? Street Smarts Compliments or Insults? Whichever one is most honest at the time

06/FAVORITES

Favorite Color: Black or green Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: Glory’s everyday style could be described as thrift store grunge: ripped tights and distressed denim; vintage t-shirts with the collars and the sleeves cut off, the bottom cut off to her navel; black bras and see-through shirts; oversized flannel and black lace; short skirts and shorter shorts; combat boots and converse with holes in them; denim jackets covered in pins and patches; chipped black nail polish, chokers, and smudged eyeliner. The clothes she wears now are a far cry away from the sturdy jeans, sweaters, and t-shirts handed down to her by her older sisters—and sometimes brothers—or the faded florals of her Sunday best from back in Owls Bend, but she learned how to sew then to make her siblings’ castoffs fit her better, and she uses those skills to modify her clothing to her liking now. Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: A lot of her heart is found in the music of her childhood: Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams, where she can close her eyes and imagine the voices of her siblings in the background, the rattle of her father’s pickup truck driving over dirt roads. But a lot of what she listens to these days is more punk and by-gone grunge, blasting it through her oversized headphones on long bus rides to games: Hole, Mudhoney, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden.   Favorite Movies: She’s more likely to binge-watch TV than movies, and when it comes to movies she likes the classics, old musicals like The Wizard of Oz or Singing in the Rain; Disney movies she remembers watching with her younger siblings. And, of course, The Princess Bride. Favorite Books: She read more when she was younger than she does now, so her favorite books are all from the days when she read whatever she could get her hands on, usually while she was out hiding from Justice: The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Redwall, His Dark Materials, Dear America, The Book of Three. Favorite Foods/Drinks: She likes comfort foods: hearty stews, pie, fresh-baked bread. She’s also got a big weakness for fast food, remembers times in high school after a night of partying, when they’d pile as many of them into the back of a pickup truck as they could to go to the McDonalds drive-through a few towns over. Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: The Foxes. Exy wasn’t a part of Glory’s life until recently, so she has no particular allegiance to any professional team, nor a Class I team that she rooted for before joining the Foxes. Perhaps unsurprising for a Fox, she didn’t have any particular affinity for team sports until she found Exy—and even with Exy, the whole team thing isn’t its primary appeal.   Favorite Time of Day: Golden Hour Favorite Weather/Season: Spring Favorite Animal: Even before becoming a Fox, she always had an affinity for Foxes. And for raccoons.

#GLORY. #GLORY: INSP

[politicalprof]

A letter to my former student:

This is going to be a long post, and I realize almost no one will actually bother to read it. But I need to say it. So let’s begin.

------------------

Recently, I had a Twitter exchange with a former student. He’s a really good guy; I like him a lot, and always have. Our interactions are positive and respectful. He’s a veteran of the Persian Gulf War who has gone on to be a teacher, an administrator, and a coach at at a high school. He has been a servant to the nation and the community and deserves nothing but respect for that.

In the course of our exchange, he volunteered the following comment:

“and, please understand that it is possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president - in fact, I've been waiting for a while to cast a vote for someone I actually favored as opposed to against someone I do not!”

What follows is my response:

Of course it it possible to be a conservative without being a supporter of our president -- in theory. In theory, there might be a credible conservative alternative to Donald Trump who might advance a conservative political agenda that you might agree with.

But we don’t live in the world of “in theory.” We live in this world, at this time. And the conservative politics you wish to support no longer exists. Rather, conservatism in its American sense -- belief in limited government, support for independent businesses, a confidence in the rights and capacity of the individual to make choices for themselves and to live with the consequences of those choices (at least in matters not related to abortion rights, which American conservatives do not seem to trust women to exercise) -- has been dying for at least 30 years. Modern conservatism is a mere shadow of its former self, and there is no evidence that there is a credible conservative core inside the Republican Party around which a contemporary conservative movement that looks like the older one might form.

My concern with your impulse to vote against candidates you don’t like (Democrats, I presume) is with the unchallengeable fact that Donald Trump and his enablers now constitute an existential threat to the survival of American democracy itself. Voting for Trump OR his Republican enablers makes one complicit in advancing that threat. Indeed, so long as no serious challenger to Trump and his enablers emerges from within the Republican Party, there is no moral or ethical way to support the party’s candidates -- at least for federal office. (Federalism still allows the possibility of credible Republican choices at the state and local level, at least in some regions.)

I can’t possibly describe all the ways Trump and his enablers have made the Republican Party an existential threat to American democracy. I will focus on five: 1) Trump’s demonization of the media; 2) Trump’s demonization of the weak and defenseless in society; 3) Trump’s demand for the prosecution of his political opponents; 4) Trump’s delegitimation of elections; and 5) Trump’s delegitimation of the rule of law.

Please note that none of these topics has anything to do with daily disputes about regular political issues. I am not addressing the wrong-headedness of Trump’s actions that have undermined NATO. I am not focusing on the stupidity of his unconcern about global climate change, or about his failures in healthcare reform, or his appointment of federal judges. I might critique all of those things, but those are the stuff of ordinary politics. Rather, I am focusing on forces that pull democracies apart. Supporting Trump -- and his Republican allies today -- constitutes a threat to the American republic.

--1. The demonization of the media. OK: all presidents dislike the press. Some, like Nixon, hated the press. But they all seemed to understand that the press was part of the system. They (mostly) all seemed to understand that the often antagonistic relationship between the press and the politicians was a key component of a functioning democracy. They seemed to understand that, as Justice Black put it in his concurrence in NY Times v United States (the Pentagon Papers case), “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Donald Trump does not believe this. In fact, he has openly stated as much, telling 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, “You know why I do it? [Attack the press?] I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” In other words, Donald Trump is engaged in an open, unrestrained effort to undermine the press in order to serve his own power and advance his own agenda. 

In undermining the possibility of a free, critical press Trump is damaging the prospects that any future American people will believe that the press can do the job it needs to do. Once all media is framed as partisan, the notion of information, of facts, dies. And no future president will face constraint by a free press either: what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Trump will not be the last president to rely on the “lyin’ media” frame if Trump manages to convince the American people that no one should believe the press, however imperfect it may be.

Notably, no significant part of the Republican party or its leaders are challenging Trump’s attacks on the media in any meaningful way. They are, if anything, promoting it. As a consequence, supporting either Trump or his Republican enablers threatens a linchpin of American democracy. It cannot be justified.

--2. The demonization of the weak and the vulnerable: The savageness with which Donald Trump treats his targets is remarkable. It has been a long time coming, of course: recall the infamous scenes in which Tea Party activists mocked a homeless veteran for seeking help during the 2010 midterms. But Trump seems to delight, indeed to positively revel, in punching downwards. Like most bullies, Trump focuses on people who can’t really fight back as he spews bile, hate, and mockery at them. His targets don’t just include minorities and immigrants, of course, but disabled persons, people -- usually women -- Trump decides aren’t attractive, victims of natural disasters, and, of course, even war heroes/prisoners/soldiers killed in combat serving the United States.

Please note that the research here is clear: when presidents demonize one group or other, many in the president’s audience end up hating the targeted groups more than they were already predisposed to. In other words, when presidents attack, public opinion measurably shifts in ways that reflect and amplify the president’s rhetoric. 

Trump’s disgusting, hate-filled rhetoric harms the vulnerable and marginalized in society in ways that you and I, who are after all middle class white guys, simply cannot understand -- even as we can empathize with them. And so long as no serious Republican challenger emerges to resist Trump’s vile perversion of our politics, so long as Republican doctrine -- not just Trump’s -- is to serve the powerful and afflict the afflicted, then supporting Republicans, at least at the federal level, is immoral. It also erodes the promise of the American civic experiment to discover if people of different races and creeds and ideas and histories can live together in some semblance of freedom.

--3. The demand for the prosecution of political opponents: Politics is a blood sport, and at least in elections it is zero-sum. My win is your loss. Yet most democracies manage to survive because a norm develops that win or lose, we have to respect others’ rights to participate, advocate their policies, and promote their points of view. Opponents are not enemies. They are competitors.

There has been an undeniable trend over the last 30 years to shift the language of political competition from “opponents” to “enemies.” Not all this shift has been concocted by Republicans, or by Trump, by any means. But Trump is the first president in modern US history to respond to political opponents by insisting that they need to be imprisoned for crimes against the nation. He is the first to systematically incite his supporters to openly chant for the jailing of a political opponent. He is the first since Richard Nixon to demand that the law enforcement agencies of the United States serve his partisan political agenda by investigating his opponents for crimes that they have already been cleared of.

This is the stuff that happens in crackpot countries. Newly-installed dictators purge their opponents, using the levers of power to confirm their authority. But in so doing, they make the stakes of any moment of political transition extraordinarily high: the game literally becomes all or nothing, since the consequences of losing can mean imprisonment. And since the stakes are so high, so is the conflict: no one can afford to lose, so they fight it out to the last breath.

“Lock her up” isn’t funny. It isn’t cute. Weaponizing law enforcement for political ends has profound consequences for the stability of democracy.

Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton and other opponents ought to be imprisoned undermines confidence in the possibility of peaceful transitions of power in the United States. Until I see evidence that anyone on the Republican side is fighting back against Trump’s gross abuse of federal power, supporting him or the party that enables his abuses undermines the possibility of democratic governance as such.

--4. The deligitimation of elections: No one likes to lose. And gerrymandering, and manipulated vote counts, and other forms of voter suppression have been an unfortunate part of our political life since the Republic was formed.

But Trump has exceeded any other president in his all out assault on the norms of electoral politics. He claims he won the popular vote in 2016 ... once you discount the 3,000,000+ votes cast by illegal aliens. Against all evidence he continues to assert that in-person voter fraud is vast -- but only in those elections that he and his party members lose. In 2018 he described legally-prescribed recounts as efforts to “steal” the elections from his team.

All this, meanwhile, is happening when it is clear that the majority of vote shenanigans in the US are perpetrated by Republicans: North Carolina’s Voter ID law was overturned for its explicit racial bias, while both North Carolina’s and Pennsylvania’s Congressional districts were declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered. (Pennsylvania’s redrawn districts produced a balanced outcome; North Carolina’s were not redrawn due to time concerns, and Republicans in North Carolina perpetuated their 10-3 majority in Congressional seats despite the fact that Democrats in North Carolina got 100,000 more votes statewide than Republicans did.) And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the closing of vote stations in minority dominant districts, the purging of voter rolls, and the like -- all of which have been shown to be disproportionately burdensome on people of color.

Given that NO Republican leaders AT ALL have in any way challenged any of this, the entire Republican party is culpable in undermining American democracy as manifested in the need for free and fair elections. There is simply no way to vote for Republicans and also vote for the protection of properly run, properly managed elections. Voting for Republicans today is to support the undermining of free and fair elections in the United States.

--5. The delegitimation of the rule of law: Criticism is one thing. It is unpleasant, but it is fundamentally healthy. But demonization is another thing altogether. Asserting that law enforcement agencies are corrupt -- without evidence -- is corrosive to political legitimacy.

Trump, of course, is engaged in the systematic delegitmation of the rule of law. His understanding of the law is that it should serve his interests and his political purposes. His understanding of any investigation he doesn’t like is that it is a witch hunt.

This, too, is the enterprise of dictators. If the law only works for the powerful, who at the same time insist that they are victims of the law, then democracy cannot function.

And again, the actual Republican party, the one that actually exists right now, has wholly abetted this abuse. They have cravenly cowed to Trump’s rhetoric for fear of facing his tweets, the talking parrots at FOX News, and the hordes of Trumpizoidal maniacs who are likely to show up in primary elections. Lindsay Graham prosecuted the Clinton impeachment for charges ultimately derived from the fact that Bill Clinton lied about getting a blowjob from a woman who was not his wife. Today, he insists that campaign finance payoffs running to hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally spent as part of a scheme to protect a presidential candidate’s election chances are no big deal -- merely lies told to protect the candidate’s family. The hypocrisy would stagger ... at any other time than this one.

Voting for Republicans today inevitably means supporting the subversion of the rule of law. It means supporting the erosion of American democracy.

At this point, Trump apologists usually offer some version of the comment, “both sides do it.” Well, no they don’t. Not to anything close to this scale. Not organized at the very top of the political system, where now the Trump reelection team is being completely integrated with the RNC’s fundraising operation -- for the first time in US history. (The grift is about to get vastly bigger than anyone can even fantasize.) 

America is in trouble. It is time to recalibrate “voting against people you don’t like.” It is time to kill the modern Republican Party. It’s the only way to bring it back to life.

[hayley-lee-mit2150]

Week 6 Reading Response

This week our reading was Tanya Talaga’s “Seven Fallen Feathers”  (Prologue, Ch.1-2). This was a very eye-opening read from its few chapters as it delves into the oppressive natures Indigenous individuals face daily such as the Indian Act. Specifically, the story focuses on Indigenous students who must travel 1-2 hours to attend a school because there are no local schools in their community. This already demonstrates a very sad and convoluted concept. I genuinely do not understand why Indigenous communities do not get more support from the government. I mean, I understand why, but I don’t understand why (if that makes sense). The lack of progress within the education field for Indigenous youth truly baffles me. It was only in the nineties when the last residential school (that forced children to attend, only to “have the Indian ripped away from them”, assimilating them to white culture, and further physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them) was closed. Having lived with an Indigenous student last year, I became more aware of how limited their educational futures are. However, my roommate did not/does not pay tuition, which makes complete sense to me and should be an option offered to all Indigenous students. Unfortunately, this is one of the few and only options available to only a select group/community of Indigenous students. 

Moreover, through the seminar discussion, our group talked heavily about the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. They are the most vulnerable group but are entirely ignored and forgotten by the general public. They somehow became less of priority in the eyes of the justice system when in reality they deserve and require the most attention as they are subjected to greater degrees of emotional, environmental, physical, medical, and educational issues and oppressions. Evidently, the lack of acknowledgment and action demonstrates just how much the government does not care or value Indigenous women in this country. Further, through reading these 2-3 chapters in addition to the seminar discussion, it became evident to me and clicked in my head that, similar to most diversity-hires, most of the time when an Indigenous person speaks it’s solely because the group or individual with the most power needs to give them a time to talk to simply check off the box that says an Indigenous person spoke. Having been a diversity-check/someone put into a certain position to fill a quota, I know first-hand how awful and frustrating this pain is, the pain of being used. I can only begin to imagine this pain whilst bearing the pain of the missing and murdered peers and/or family members on your shoulders.

Furthermore, with the story, the police wait three whole days before searching for Jordan. This would have NEVER happened if a white child went missing. Our seminar group mutually agreed if it was a white child, amber alerts would be sent, there would be extreme social media coverage, in addition to extensive news-attention. However with Jordan, his race and class played an integral part, bringing him down as a priority in the eyes of the police. He like most minorities were viewed as “not that important”. Subsequently, the police made excuses, assuming he was simply running away for a bit. It is guaranteed this protocol and line of thought would not have been followed if Jordan was a white child. Moreover, similar to the Hurricane Katrina media example, where white people were called “survivors” and people of color were called “looters”, the news regarding this issue was very biased, painting the community in a negative light that was not accurate nor relevant.

Ultimately, this truly illuminates how ironic this whole issue is. How is it that the people that were here before anyone else are the minority now? How is it that they are the ones being treated with the least care and acknowledgment? In addition, the book triggered me on how in elementary schools, students are not taught anything bad/negative related to the Indigenous communities. Obviously, this could be debated as students at the elementary age range may not be able to comprehend such graphic and gruesome stories, but even in high school, most students are not taught about residential schools. Personally, I only learned about the real history of Indigenous communities because the two teachers I had were passionate about it and wanted to teach beyond the set curriculum. This book lit the fire in me about how passionate I am about Indigenous rights, specifically, government-funded and organized plans being executed that give these communities the tools and infrastructure to better themselves and their quality of life. In particular, Indigenous communities have the highest rates of diabetes due to the limited agricultural capacity on the reserves in addition to the lack of infrastructure that allows for food to be delivered. Consequently, this results in extreme inflation rates and Indigenous communities having to resort to canned and processed foods to feed themselves. Further, another example would be how due to the same infrastructure issues, menstrual products cost nearly 16x the price of what they would cost in Toronto. It is apparent this community faces a range of intersectional issues that require help beyond giving them funds.