#it emboldens people to go into a public place and basically say ‘because what you write bothers me you should stop’

[uomo-accattivante]

This is so wild! Oscar Isaac is planning to act for Francis Ford Coppola in this film and play him in another film (Francis and the Godfather).

Coppola on Megalopolis: “It’s based on The Catiline Conspiracy, which comes to us from ancient Rome. This was a famous duel between a patrician, Catiline, and that part will be played by Oscar Isaac, and the famous Cicero, who will be Forest Whitaker.” Filming is planned for the Fall of 2022.

EXCLUSIVE: Breathtaking bets on his vision established him as one of the greatest living American filmmakers and a vineyard magnate. Now, Francis Coppola is ready to put a lot of his hard-won chips on the table one more time to make his epic dream project, Megalopolis.

While the financial configuration is still evolving, Coppola at 82 years young is betting big on himself once again, by sharing the financial risks of a film that will cost between $100 million-$120 million. He is in deep discussions with a stellar cast of actors eager to work with the director of The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now!, The Conversation and other classics, on a seminal picture that is decades in the making.

While some conversations are further along then others, the actors Coppola is discussing roles with include Oscar Isaac, Forest Whitaker, Cate Blanchett and Jon Voight, with Zendaya, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange also among those he is seeking. He will also reunite with James Caan, whose role as Sonny Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather made Caan one of the biggest stars of that era. This for a big tapestry film that will have many other actors in the cast.

Deadline has written about Coppola’s Megalopolis hopes for several years – I’ve seen second-unit footage of Manhattan architecture and street sounds that was shot 20 years ago, a campaign that ended after 9/11 shook Manhattan to its core. Coppola’s enthusiasm never wavered.

Emboldened by the recent sale of a portion of his considerable vineyard holdings in Sonoma County to Delicato Family Wines, Coppola has fortified his resources to borrow against, and is ready to gamble once again on his vision to make a movie he feels can be a North Star for a younger audience, and society in general, searching for optimism in a moment where global warming is taking its toll, and polarizing politics and digital misinformation are so pronounced that half the country is resisting Covid vaccines that scientists honed in a remarkably short time to combat a global pandemic.

“It has become like a religious war, in that it’s not about anything logical,” Coppola told Deadline. “I think the big news here is that I am still the same as I was 20 years ago or 40 years ago. I’m still willing to do the dream picture, even if I have to put up my own money, and I am capable of putting up $100 million if I have to here. I don’t want to, but I will do it if I have to.

“I’m committed to making this movie, I’d like to make it in the fall of 2022,” Coppola revealed. “I don’t have all my cast approved, but I have enough of them to have confidence that it is going to be a very exciting cast. The picture’s going to cost between $100 million and $120 million. Needless to say, I hope it’s closer to $100 million. I’m prepared to match some outside financing, almost dollar for dollar. In other words, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. What’s interesting about that is, there was a documentary about my dream studio, when I owned Zoetrope Studios and I was unafraid to risk everything I had in order to make my dream come true. Well, I really haven’t changed my personality, at all.”

While waiting for this Megalopolis moment, Coppola has spent the last few years preparing himself. He has kept off the weight he shed several years ago, and his stamina is in evidence in the way he created new versions of some of his past films, most notably the final installment of The Godfather trilogy that he retitled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club. I hear he will be at Telluride this weekend to unveil restored versions of his films The Rain People, and The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. After doing the work and feeling at peace with those past great films, as Coppola holds court at that festival, I expect the dominant conversation will be about how he is looking forward, toward Megalopolis.

While few filmmakers would ever put their own money on the table, Coppola detailed to Deadline his big bets in the past when studios wouldn’t back him,; the musical One From the Heart plunged him into Chapter 11 back in the early ‘90s, and his risk-taking on Apocalypse Now once threated to cost him the vineyards whose revenues now dwarf his Hollywood earnings. Each time, Coppola found his way back from adversity. The classic Apocalypse Now continues to give him financial comfort.

“You know that I own the negative of Apocalypse Now, and do you know why I own it? Because nobody wanted it,” he said. “And Apocalypse Now these years earns almost as much as we get from The Godfather. Pictures like this [are difficult]; everyone wants to make the next Marvel movie, but no one wants to make a picture that really talks to young people in a hopeful way, that we are in a position to get together and solve any problem thrown at us. That is what I believe, and it is what the theme of the picture really is. Utopia is talking about how we can make the society we live in solve these problems. I believe it is an exciting change from the kinds of movies being offered to the public,” he said. “Mainly because it puts forward a fundamental message that it’s time for us to consider that the society we live in isn’t the only alternative available to us. And that utopia isn’t so much a little experimental place in the country; utopia is a discussion of people, asking the right questions on if the society we’re living in is the only alternative or, if for the sake of young people, there are better choices that should be discussed. That is the influence I dream of this movie having. And for that reason I am willing and capable of investing at a high number, to make it come true. I’m putting together the means of doing that.”

While Coppola set his script in a contemporary city and explores timely themes, the sprawling tale has its origins in ancient Rome.

“The concept of the film is a Roman epic, in the traditional Cecile B. DeMille or Ben-Hur way, but told as a modern counterpart focusing on America,” he said. “It’s based on The Catiline Conspiracy, which comes to us from ancient Rome. This was a famous duel between a patrician, Catiline, and that part will be played by Oscar Isaac, and the famous Cicero, who will be Forest Whitaker. He is now the beleaguered mayor of New York, during a financial crisis, close to the one that Mayor Dinkins had. This story takes place in a new Rome, a Roman epic sent in modern times. The time set is not a specific year in modern New York, it’s an impression of modern New York, which I call New Rome.”

Coppola realizes these serious themes leave him swimming against the tide in an industry fixated with franchises, high concepts and familiar formulas. But he’s been a maverick his whole life and would like to stake himself this one more time, hoping to prevail again.

“This film I want to make, I believe is an exciting change from the kinds of movies being offered to the public,” Coppola said. “Mainly because it puts forward a fundamental message that it’s time for us to consider that the society we live in isn’t the only alternative available to us. And that a utopia isn’t so much a little experimental place in the country; a utopia is a discussion of people asking the right questions on just that subject, and if the society we’re living in is the only alternative or, if for the sake of young people, there are better choices that should be discussed. Hopefully that is the influence I dream of this movie having. And for that reason I am willing and capable of investing at a high number, to make it come true. I’m putting together the means of doing that.

He also understands this turn of events brings him full circle, and it seems to energize him.

“I have some private financiers who want to come in on a partner basis, and I’m willing to match their funds, if I have to,” he said. “Obviously the more money I have to put up, the more complications it gives me, but I am capable of doing it. I am capable of going the whole distance if I really had to. It would be hard for me or anyone to put up $100 million to make a utopian dream of a film, but it is not impossible for that to happen. It has been in the news I just sold one of my wineries to another company. So I’m a position where I don’t have the money but I can borrow it. So basically I am the same position as I was in that Dream Studio period, where I want to see the dream come true and I am not afraid to risk my own money to make it happen.”

###

#oscar isaac #francis ford coppola #megalopolis #forest whitaker #cate blanchett #jon voight #zendaya #michelle pfeiffer #jessica lange #james caan

[cuddlesslut]

Alrighty lets get started!! So i still really new to this so as to not overwhelm my self im going to try and stick to two charcters for now. I’m sorry if its not what your looking for. For the two im going to do my boys Suga and Daichi. Only because i just did Kuroo and  because im still trying to figure out how to write for Reon. I might however come back and write a part 2 with them. 

Prompt : Boys reacting to their tom boyish crushes all dolled up (Daichi & Suga)

just sayin i wrote this while drinking mojitos

P.S. this prompt reminds me of a series called Sinful Sweethearts by @thosenerdy3amthings​ so definitely go check that out!!

Warning: NSFW, FOUL LANGUAGE

Daichi Sawamura NSFW

you have know Daichi basically your whole life

growing up next to him your parents were very close which meant that you two were kept close together 

in fact until you made it to middle school and started playing volleyball for the girls team you had never had any other friends beside Diachi

so it was safe to say that growing up you were more on the boyish side

you were just more comfortable in sweats and baggy workout shorts than skirts. 

you even wore pants to school

even  highschool though you went to a different school Diachi stayed your closest friend you often finding yourself at the Karsuno practice after yours had ended.

 No matter how much your teammates fussed they couldnt convince you to ditch the large hoodies and sweats.

 You and Daichi always supported each other. you never missed his games and he never missed yours (as long as scheduling permited)

the third year boys often teased Diachi for his realtionship with you

“i dont know why yall dont just date already,” suga complained while daichi stated his usual reply “ shes my best friend you know its not like that” he huffs

Suga scowls “ first of all rude im supposed be your best friend, and second it cant be as just friends as you say when you get so protective when the seond years simp for her.”

“i just dont want her feeling weird around the team. you know Noya and Tanaka can be intense,” he explained

“still that doesnt acount for the way Y/N looks at you,” Asahi added to the convo

“what are you talking about Y/n doesnt look at me any special way, we’re just friends ,” daichi stated a little to forcefully almost as if he was convincing himself.

Suga and Asahi share a knowing look thinking about how their captain can be so dense. 

“any way are you ready for your  birthday party tomorrow night ,” Suga asked smiling brightly.

“i told you i dont need a party,” Daichi scolded for the fifth time today.

“ahh c’mon its not everyday you become an adult like the rest of us DI,”

finally admitiing defeat Diachi concluded the conversation.

...

it was finally the next day you were more nervous for this party than any volleyball game you had played.

and here you were standing in the tight black dress Suga with the help of your team, you should never wager against suga

Had convinced you to wear to diachis party tonight

still shell shocked you stood in front of the mirror of the bathroom Suga had chose.

It was weird to see yourself so girly

the black dress clung tight   to your body. leaving little the imagination.

Suga better be glad he won that bet

finally calming yourself you look around for your best friend

Finally catching sight of him Diachi stood with Suga and Asahi next to the bar of the club.

Suga was the first to recognize you a evil smirk hitting his face as he drew Diachis attention to you.

You couldnt help but notice how hot he looked in his button up and dark wash jeans, his shirt clinging so close to his chest.

he looked to damn good you thought as you bit your lip

little did you know the birthday boy was having an epiphany of this own

his eyes raked up and down you mind wandering 

had you always had such a great ass under those baggy sweats

“Happy Birthday Captain,” you teased.

Daichi took a sharp breath suddenly taken back by the way the title fell from your soft lips

all he could think about was how you would sound screaming that from under him.

lost in thought he missed the smirk his best friend had as Suga put his pan into motion

you stood there sway to the beat of the loud club music wanting to dance

“Y/n why dont you take the birthday boy for a dance,” 

you smiled before Diachi could protest saying how how he doesnt dance

you pulled him to the dance floor pushing your ass against him reaching up and wrapping your arms around his neck pulling him close to your body as you grinded to the beat

his hands found their place on your hips  

his cock twitched from the pressure of your ass in that short tight dress rubbing against his crotch

you were not helping his growing situation

bodies getting lost in the movement 

you looked up at the boy had been your best friend your whole life with one thought in you head

the same thought flashed into diachis brain

being bold he crashed his lips into yours 

Lost in the contact the kiss lasted forever getting more and more intense 

your not sure how you to got here

but here you were straddling Diachi in the back of his car

his lips sucking bruises into your neck, his large grabbing your ass as you bounced on his thick cock

“FUCK,” Daichi breathed heavily pulling you down into a sloppy kiss tongues exploring “ youre so tight come for me beautiful.”

“im so close Captain you moan feeling him stretch you.

thats it that one word flipped the switch for him he gripped tight on to your waist to hold you secure as he powerfully drilled his hips up into you.

hitting your spot deeper and with such accuracy you were both driven over the edge as you clinched tight around him pulling his release from him.

you both sat out of breath in the hot car, the widows fogged and the smell of sex stinging the air.

“happy birthday,” you said giving him a quick kiss.

he glanced at the watch on his wrist 

he smirked up to you “you know my birthday isnt over yet,” you smiled already liking where this was going. “lets head back to mine. I’m not done with you yet.” 

Koshi Sugawara Slight NSFW

He’s had a crush for you since the beginning of the school year

He thought you were the most adorable thing he’d seen 

with your sweaters that were  two sizes to big. (sweater paws)

You two became friends through a writing project. 

you too quickly hit it off you loving his wild humor 

its sometimes seemed like hed flirt with you but you figured it was just his personality and you were too shy to do anything

poor suga spent so much time flirting with you but you never paid it any attention so he figured you didnt view him that way and he was okay with that he just wanted to be your friend if nothing else.

and so thats how six months went by of being no more than friends

always returning Sugas simple firsts with a shy smile.

It wasnt until the celebratory party some random third year threw to congratulate the boys on making it to nationals

You sat at your best friend Kyioko’s house. 

This was the first party she was able to convince you to attend and she was making sure it counted.

there would be no big sweaters or jeans tonight 

tonight you were borrowing Kyiokos clothes. 

She dressed in a tight (favorite color) lace halter crop top with the lace exposing just the right amount of cleavage. and a pair of blaack shorts hugging your hips thighs on full display.

it wasnt what you were used to this being the most skin you had exposed to the public in years

thats coupled with the make up added to your face you almost didnt recognize yourself

it wasnt what you were used to and thats why when you reached the party and all eyes landed on you. you were slightly relieved that most of the people didnt recognize you.

it was almost exhilarating 

kind of like playing pretend.

like tonight you werent Y/N shy and closed off

you were a sexy and confident woman

that coupled with the shots you took with Kyioko. you found your new confidence 

thats why when you saw you long time crush and close friend Suga across the room you didnt hesitate to make your way over.

“No way is that Y/n” Daichi gasped causing Sugas attention to slip to where his best friend motioned. “wow i didnt expect to see her here,” Diachi let out with a low whistle.

Suga sucked in a sharp breath not prepared for the sight in front of him.

There you were making you way towards him throw the crowd. a smile on your face but it was hard for suga to focus on that smile when your whole body was on display for him. 

 His eyes trailed from down your figure taking all of the exposed skin that was normally hidden from him. 

the way the lace framed your stomach and cupped your breast. the cut into shirt showing him the most cleavage you had ever shown. moving his eyes down it was hard for him not to whimper at the site of your thighs

this man was entranced in your appearance. hed always thought you were the most beautiful even when you were covered head to toe, but seeing you like this it was hard not to drool.

And he wasnt the only one, Several guys had taken notice of you.

Some stopping you to ask if you were new,  cause there was no way’d theyd miss a hot babe like you at school. 

to which youd just roll your eyes keeping on your way to your target. 

feeling more and more emboldened by the attention you were receiving.

but these boys werent the ones you wanted

being the light weight you are you already had your eyes on your prize

go big or go home 

so you you strode right up to the vice captain

“ W- wow Y/n you look great,” Suga stuttered 

“thanks Suga,” you say placing your hand on his toned forearm

No turning back now the confidence was here to stay atleast for now

Suga took a deep breath as he took a turn being the shy one. not used to the aura you exuded. were you really the shy girl he knew. 

you moved closer enveloping him in a tight embrace

he could feel you tits press tight against him and he was trying not to focus on it not wanting to further anymore of the dirty thoughts crossing his mind

 staying close next to Suga you continued your flirtatious assault

dishing back all the flirts you had held back over the months

Finally the straw broke when one of your favorite club songs played through the crowed house and you pulled him close to dance with you.

“c’mon Koshi dont be so timid,” you teased. 

Suga wasnt sure if it was hearing his given name grace your beautiful lips or the facts that you had pressed your ass against his crotch moving seductively to the music but he snapped. 

Suga placed his hands tight to your hips pulling you closer to him not caring if you felt the growing bulge in his pants.

leaning down “you know if you wanted my attention you didnt have to dress so damn sexy. now i have to deal with all these vultures looking at you,” he whispered his breath hot on your ear.

you turned around wrapping your arms around his neck leaning even closer, 

“then why dont we go somewhere private then we wont have to worry about who’s looking,” you smirked heart racing

“i couldnt have said it better,” Suga said leading you out of the busy room ready to have you to himself. 

🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻

Sorry It took so long to write all my work got deleted and I had to start over! I hope you enjoy it 🍵 Anon!!! 💕💕 @🍵anon

Taglist: @emiyummy @insomniish

#haikyuu!! #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu x y/n #hq #daichi x reader #diachi sawamura #diachi head cannons #sugawara x reader #suga headcanons #haikyuu sugawara #sugawara koshi #haikyuu smut #haikyuu headcanons #🍵 anon

[southeastasianists]

Carolyn* can never get out of her head the memory of her parents bringing her to conversion therapy. The transwoman from South Sulawesi was 13 then, and society expected her to identify as male in accordance with her biological sex at birth.

“Deep inside, I kept telling myself that I’m not sick, that I’m okay,” she recalled.

Carolyn experienced ruqyah firsthand, a form of conversion therapy imbued with Islamic exorcism that is common among Muslim communities in Indonesia. Carolyn’s parents explained away her feminine expression as the work of a malevolent female demon.

At the time, the teenager did not fully grasp the situation she was in. She agreed to go along with her parents’ wishes due to her deeply embedded fear of sin.

Carolyn was taken before the local cleric, who prayed to expel the female demon in her body. The cleric also asked her parents to leave her with him for a few days so she could undergo several rituals.

“But at that time, I refused. I wanted to go home and didn’t want to be there. I was fine, I cried and said to my mom, ‘Mom, I want to go home, I’m fine,’” she said.

After begging her mother, Carolyn’s mother finally agreed to send her home on one condition: she had to stop expressing feminine traits and stop hanging out with her female friends. Carolyn repressed her feminine expression for several years after that day.

“To be honest, I felt very tortured. I felt very tortured mentally,” Carolyn confessed.

Carolyn said she placed a lot of pressure on herself over the years. She never felt that she was a man. She was always more comfortable expressing herself as a woman. In the final year of high school, Carolyn decided to stop lying to herself and her family. She ran away from home and learned to become a hairdresser at a salon that accepted her gender expression.

In the early days of Carolyn’s emancipation journey, her past and concerns over her identity continued to haunt her. Not a day went by that she didn’t fear persecution, socializing with others, fully expressing herself, all the while saddened by the irreparable burned bridge with her family.

Even now, at the age of 32, Carolyn is still traumatized by her conversion therapy experience. She gets easily triggered by watching religious TV shows or films that feature ruqyah scenes.

But ultimately she believes that she made the right choice, because nothing can take away her freedom to fully express herself as a woman and her achievement of becoming a fully functioning adult in a society that generally does not tolerate her people.

“I also feel comfortable and feel very relieved that in the end, I can accept myself as a transwoman. I feel like I have found myself. This is me, I am a transwoman,” she stresses.

In contrast to Carolyn, Sofia*, a lesbian living in the capital, was encouraged by her family to undergo ruqyah when she was old enough. By that time, she was mature enough to make her own decisions; and so she ran away from them.

“At that time, I was 25 years old and I was studying for my master’s degree. My position was quite privileged, right?” Sofia said.

Living in Jakarta, Sofia was more exposed to open discussions on the issues of gender and sexuality. When her mother asked her to go to therapy, Sofia was already certain about her sexual orientation. Furthermore, she had been involved in the advocacy for gender and sexuality issues.

“So I think there was nothing to lose at that time, and my identity is the core of my life,” she said.

However, Sofia’s refusal for therapy did not sit well with her family. She said they still pressured her “recover” to the point that they used violence against her.

“But I didn’t want to. I insisted because they already know me as a lesbian, so why do I have to back off?” she said.

Sofia believes that her knowledge of diversity in gender expression and sexual orientation was one of the biggest sources of courage that emboldened her to emancipate. If LGBTQ+ people are exposed to the same knowledge, Sofia said, they will be able to accept their identities and acknowledge that they’re not the problem — homophobia and conversion therapy are.

“We must fight together to convince the world that being gay is okay. You need to learn about yourself. You’re not sick. It’s society that’s sick,” she added.

Ika*, a transwoman from North Sumatra, experienced conversion therapy when she was 13, 17, and 18. The methods that she went through were quite diverse, ranging from ruqyah, to burial rituals, admission to Islamic boarding schools, and goat sacrifice.

None of them worked. And she said she had to live with the constant pressure from her parents to get rid of her feminine expression, which, according to them, was also the work of a demon.

“What should be removed from my body? Because according to their assessment, there is an evil spirit who made me like this,” Ika said.

“In my opinion, conversion therapy is bullshit.”

Ika now works for an NGO advocating to end HIV discrimination and stigma suffered by trans communities.

‘Individual will’

Conversion therapy is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia, but the matter was hotly discussed recently when several Indonesian queer activists, including Lini Zurlia and Kai Mata, received targeted ads on social media encouraging them to undergo conversion therapy.

“It feels like I was targeted by a group of people. It made me upset, especially because this is very sensitive regarding LGBTQ+ rights in Indonesia,” Kai Mata said.

“What I think the government should do is to make it illegal. I also think that LGBT people in Indonesia deserve the right to live in this country without fear.”

Attempts to contact the conversion therapy service through the ad failed as of the time of this article’s publication. Another conversion therapy center in Jakarta, which claims to use hypnotherapy as one of its “healing” methods, did not come across like it has a vendetta against LGBTQ+ people despite providing the harmful service.

“When does sexual orientation become a problem? It happens when the values that are taught ​​[by people’s environment and family] are different from their sexual orientation,” therapist Adrianto Darma Setiawan said.

Adrianto claims to have treated around 2,500 patients in the last 12 years. About 20 percent of these patients are (or were, if he succeeded) gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The standard therapy to “heal” sexual orientation consists of about about five to six hypnotherapy sessions lasting around three hours per session.

Adrianto said that some of his patients underwent therapy out of their own accord, but most were there due to encouragement or pressure from relatives. The therapist did not say how many of his patients he managed to convert, but said that “recovery” depends on the will of the individual.

The government’s failure

Imam Nahei, a commissioner at the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), said that LGBTQ + groups in Indonesia still have a long way to receive adequate protections from the government. For as long as homophobia prevails in Indonesia, conversion therapy will remain as one of the most harmful and real threats that haunts people from minority sexual groups in Indonesia.

Nahei said that conversion therapy is an obvious human rights violation, yet the state, which should be responsible for protecting all of the country’s citizens, has not done anything to protect LGBTQ+ people from the practice.

“The state has not done anything because, in Indonesia, this issue is still very controversial as it is associated with dominant religious views,” Nahei said.

There’s little hope for progress in this regard when homosexuality and alternate forms of sexual expression are still seen as a deviation or a disorder by the country’s lawmakers, such as House of Representatives (DPR) Commission VIII Deputy Chairman Marwan Dasopang.

Marwan supports the existence of conversion therapy in Indonesia. Not only that, he wants DPR to eventually pass legislation allowing the state to provide the service to the public. If conversion therapy was normalized, he argued, patients would not experience extreme psychological trauma, such as from being forced to “recover” by their parents.

“It needs to be regulated,” Marwan said, adding that discussion on the regulation of conversion therapy are still in their infancy.

Indonesian policy makers, and even psychiatrists, have long gone against the scientific fact that homosexuality and other sexual identities are not a disease or disorder. Their stance have emboldened homophobia, which, in turn, has fostered the continued existence of conversion therapy.

Riska Carolina, director of Advocacy and Public Policy from the Support Group and Resource Center on Sexuality Studies at the University of Indonesia (SGRC UI), said among the many forms of conversion therapy in Indonesia, most are performed with ruqyah. Others who aren’t forced to go the conversion therapy route are still made to see shrinks who practice with heavy religious influence, hypnotherapists, or admitted to religious boarding schools.

“[Conversion therapy] is a threat to the LGBTQ+ community. It is persecution to the LGBTQ+ community. It violates their basic human rights. LGBTQ+ people are not a disease,” she stresses.

Riska believes that regulating conversion therapy would violate the minority groups’ rights even more than they have suffered. Even if the therapy is carried out based on patients’ willingness, Riska argued that it still validates the idea that LGBTQ+ people have mental disorders.

“Conversion therapy must be banned. It is more necessary to provide protection, even though I know that protection is still a long way off. So I prefer that, at least, [the government] treats us equally and gives us affirmative action,” she said.

“I’m ashamed to know that Indonesia is very late in terms of acceptance and it’s already 2021. You don’t need to like LGBT people, but you also don’t need to discriminate against us, especially to the level of torture. What you do with conversion therapy is torturous.”

*Carolyn, Sofia, and Ika’s real names have been omitted, at their request, to protect their identity.

#Southeast Asia #Indonesia #Conversion Therapy #LGBTQIA Rights #Trans Rights #LGBTQIA Issues #Trans Issues

[litheammunition]

The same old misconceptions about climate change are never far away. That fire in the Gulf of Mexico saw the same memes coming out. ‘Oh, I guess I forgot to turn off the AC’, or ‘it’s a good thing we got rid of all those plastic straws’. People love the deny that individuals can have any impact, or that we should feel the need to change our behaviours in any way, because all the blame can be safely parked at the doors of Big Companies instead.

The suggestion is that we shouldn’t have bothered cutting down on single use plastics, or shouldn’t worry about wasting electricity, because our actions are a drop in the ocean, whereas the Big Companies are literally out there setting fire to the ocean for profit.

But why is the ocean on fire? Well, it was an issue with a gas pipeline. Why are they piping gas across the world? Well, other Companies use it. Sure, but what do they use it to make? Uh... well, they use it in the production of plastic and the generation of electricity. Why do they do that? Because it makes them money. How does that make them money? Because, uh, there’s a demand for it. From people like you and me.

The Big Companies are not out here extracting or transporting or burning fossil fuels for fun. They do it because it is immensely profitable for them. Why? Well, setting fire to oil doesn’t transform it into dollars. They aren’t paid by the devil. They’re paid by people who use fossil fuels to meet their energy or plastic needs. Most of those are other Companies, but their demand is fuelled by other Companies, and if you follow that chain to the end you end up with consumers.

If you cut down on unnecessary plastic, you might save a few drops of oil at the end of the chain. But on the way you also cut into the profit of the company using it, and the company they bought it from, and the company that made it. If thousands of us did that, and moved our business to companies using sustainable packaging or paper straws or whatever, the companies would notice. The ones being sustainable would thrive, and others would switch to copy them. The ones using plastic would suffer, and be pressured to change their ways or lose their market share.

Yes, they are Companies. But that doesn’t mean our actions don’t make a difference. Sure, one individual doesn’t. If you vote for the Greens as a third party, that’s not going to stop the Republican or Democrat winning the presidency. But if enough of the population thought the same as you, it would. How many people only don’t vote Green because they know they won’t win? What would happen if they all stuck to their convictions? They might still not win, but they would show others that there is a serious chance of them winning in the future, and embolden even more to vote for them. They would also push the Overton Window and pressure other parties to pick up their policies, just as we have seen from right wing parties in the wrong direction.

If you sit around thinking your voice has no power, it won’t. If everyone thinks that, it won’t. If everyone believes it does have power, it will.

Do you know who those 100 companies are? Mostly gas, oil, coal etc. companies. You can track most greenhouse emissions back to them because they are the ones extracting and burning the fossil fuels. But they aren’t just doing that because they feel like it! They do that because the rest of our society is built on a demand for energy and plastic and other products of those fuels. They are just one end of a long chain. You could also look at the other end of the chain, and say that consumers are responsible for 100% of emissions. That tells you equally little.

It’s also worth pointing out that China is responsible for about 29% of emissions on its own, so simplifying climate change as something to be blamed on capitalism is also incorrect. People have a demand for energy, plastic, fuel. A state-run economy will satisfy that demand in the cheapest way in order to maintain economic growth and compete with other nations. It will act in the self-interested way a Big Company will. But under democracy we have a voice to say we have other interests, and under capitalism we have a voice to say the same. Your wallet is your vote.

Take another chain as an example. Let’s say we need to cut down on beef consumption, what with the land and water usage, and then somebody says okay let’s all cut down in our diets. You then say wait, why should I stop eating my beef three meals a day? I’ve had a look at the figures, and actually all of the beef consumption is by Big Companies! What we need is to wait for the end of capitalism, and only then will these companies stop producing loads of beef for no reason at all. Do you want another mince sandwich?

The most effective way to discourage the Big Companies from clearing more rainforest to increase beef production would be to reduce beef consumption. If we all cut beef from our diet, they would stop expanding, and companies would invest in beef alternatives to compensate, and supermarkets and restaurants in the middle would do the same when they noticed people were no longer buying beef much, and the links would all reinforce each other to help the consumption drop. That’s patently obvious.

But when climate change experts tell us the most effective thing we can do to combat climate change is to cut down on our beef consumption, or try to take public transport or ride share or not drive unless necessary, or to cut down on wasteful single use plastics, why not do them? If we all did, it would impact the shops and the restaurants and the car manufacturers and pressure them into becoming more green to adapt, which is what’s happening with paper straws and artificial meat and electric cars, which is helping. We need more of that pressure, not less, not for everyone to give up and binge on fossil fuel hedonism whilst smugly saying the blame is with the Companies they buy from instead.

It’s basically a chicken-egg situation. Yes, it’s one end of the chain, but it’s also the other. We only use X because they make it, they only make X because they use it. It’s a cycle which will go on forever until one side breaks it. They’re not going to blink first. The Big Companies are not going to willingly sacrifice profits unless consumer behaviour changes, and you know what? Even if they did, that would just create an opportunity for other companies to take their place. 

Countries, communist or socialist or not, are similarly not going to sacrifice their short term economic progress for the same reason, unless voter/popular demand changes. If people want cheap fuel, a ruling party is not going to take it away unless they are extremely secure as well as enlightened enough to want that for other reasons, which is not a common mix. The change has to come from our side: voters and consumers. If we sit waiting for them to change instead, nothing is ever going to happen. We have to make the first step. We have to believe that our step will make a difference, and encourage others to make it with us, and hold firm. It’s nothing guaranteed, but it’s the best chance we have.

#climate

[weaselle]

you guys know what’s happening in places like Hong Kong is largely the fault of Trump and his administration, right? (so much so that I predicted some of it 3 years ago)

Okay I’m going to simplify this a lot for accessibility and brevity, but...

England sort of took Hong Kong from China in the mid 1800′s. Then in 1997 it was sort of given back to China. But that was tricky, because they had spent over 100 years living under a government system completely unlike that of mainland China. So it was deemed a “special administration region” and allowances were made creating a scenario referred to as “once country, two systems”. But, y’know, China wants all of China to do exactly what China says, of course. They don’t like that there is a Hong Kong Bill of Rights that includes freedom of the press and so forth. They’ve been waiting for a way to sort of take Hong Kong all the way back. Most of the people who live in Hong Kong understandably do NOT want that to happen.

China is big. They could just land their whole military there and forcefully take it over, but they would have to fight and kill a lot of people and it would be a bad look to the rest of the world, and, specifically, the U.S. would do things about that forceful subjugation. Even just for the good press, the U.S. would do economic sanctions, and public support of Hong Kong, and side with the U.N. over the terrible use of military forces on China’s own people, etc. China doesn’t want that. It would be delicate and difficult for the U.S. to do, because over-reaction would appear to give China reasonable cause for mobilizing more armed forces, and there’s the matter of various trade relations and large debts between the U.S. and China... navigating it would take an extremely competent politician willing to listen to advisors etc.

Enter Trump, who is incapable of subtlety, international relations, listening to experts, or doing anything intelligent. Furthermore, he is antagonistic and insulting toward China, as well as unable to create consensus of action within the U.S. -- in short, he is belligerent enough to give an excuse for Chinese military action and too politically weak to do anything about it.

China is OLD. China is politically capable. The Chinese have had empires deep in politics and military action for thousands and thousands of years. They are players of the long game. I imagine they’ve been patiently waiting for a situation like this that they could gain from. For China, Trump taking office must have been like playing an intense game of chess and then suddenly your opponent is drunk and having a serious phone argument with their spouse while continuing to play. Time to make some moves you wouldn’t normally risk. Did your opponent notice? No? Try something bolder. 

INSTANTLY upon Trump taking office there were articles in China (which has a strong government control of its media) about the possibility of war with the U.S. -- one prominent article about it, published the day of his inauguration, said war within his presidency was very likely, and called on the Chinese to be ready to fight.

Of course actual war between China and the U.S. has a low chance of being a great thing for China, I think the Chinese government is more interested in creating a useful atmosphere of turmoil and complication to take advantage of.

Within weeks of Trump taking office, China was already making military moves in the South China Sea -- delicate territory, as it concerns several political entities that exist in or have coastlines in those waters. Countries like Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea. China is allied to North Korea, the U.S. is allied to South Korea. So if China has navy in the south sea and army in N. Korea, they essentially have South Korea surrounded. And the U.S. has bases in and complex military agreements with the Philippines, which has twice been a colony of the U.S., has lent us soldiers in at least one war, and relies on our military presence there.

So you can start to see how this is a very delicate situation. China, of course, knows Trump’s administration is incapable of dealing with it. The first moves were not dealt with at all, and so they have been making moves there ever since. While they’ve been moving their Navy into areas we’ve usually prevented, this administration has been busy dealing with Trump dismantling important parts of our country and sticking his head up his own ass on twitter.

This situation not only emboldens N. Korea (which is bad enough) but it puts the Philippines between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, China is literally building islands and placing military installments right up against Philippine waters. On the other hand, the U.S. military is their allied protection against that sort of thing, and we are basically doing nothing at all about that. I imagine the uncertainty and stress of this situation is at least partially responsible for the rather intense political dynamic there in the last couple years. The government has even made an effort to sort of befriend China while remaining our ally. They must be super tense over there.

Meanwhile, this big noisy newsworthy action of China’s in Hong Kong. If the U.S. finally does start trying to intervene with China’s activities, we’ll probably have to start with that because it’s dramatic, it’s flashy, it’s all over the news, and people are actually getting hurt and fighting each other.

But by the time we get that settled, we will have used up most of our public interest and international political capital. We’ll already have pushed about as much as we can to have a say in what China does to people in its own country, as Hong Kong technically is. We won’t have much we can do about the South China Sea expansion. Conversely, if we start with the South Sea, then we won’t be able to do much about Hong Kong, and goodbye civil rights for those people... we might even witness a massacre happen there.

Best case for China, they re-take Hong Kong wholly under the control of their government and end things like their bill of rights, while at the same time controlling the entire South China Sea -- which as discussed is extremely problematic for the U.S. and our allies .

Worst case for them they relent to international pressure regarding Hong Kong (while still having made valuable inroads on their long term goals there) and, if the next U.S. administration is very very good, perhaps they will give up SOME of their acquired south sea expansion. But they’ve been literally building islands and putting military bases there and calling that Chinese territory. Those places are established already. If we try to dislodge them now, it will be an act of war.

So worst case for China, they get a whole bunch of shit to go their way, at the expense of the U.S. and our allies that depend on us.

Situations like this are why people who are threatening to not vote for Biden because they didn’t get their candidate of choice bother me deeply. The democrats are trash in many ways, and Biden is far from my first choice, but he will absolutely be more capable of dealing with issues like this than Trump. He is at least a career politician with experience in these exact areas. Trump is a dangerous idiot.

China is going to be in a position to make large moves we won’t be able to stop soon.

 What would we do if the U.S has to choose between outright war with China (and therefore N Korea too) or letting China help its ally N. Korea take over our ally S. Korea? If they control the South Sea there’s not much we could do, they could simply give supplies and intel to N. Korea while refusing to let the U.S. travel through or over territories controlled by China; they could even claim they weren’t helping N. Korea, that they were just protecting the autonomy of their air and naval space.

At the very least they will surely make significant gains at our expense.

Does anyone really want to risk Trump being the one in charge of the situation coming together over there? He’s already the reason it’s happening.

#china #politics #article

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

You’re literally making it worse

So recently there has been a long list of doxxing’s going on from a person on Twitter called Skai Jackson. She has sicked her followers on several minors over the last month and possibly before hand. Now the reason this kinda ticks me off is:

Doxxing is illegal

Doxxina anyone makes you not better than who you are doxxing for what ever reason you are doing it for. *The only exception being if someone is BREAKING the law in which case contact law enforcement. And NO “hate speech” is not breaking the law*

In doing this to minors who are being ignorant and edgy, she is breeding hate.

Now what do i mean by this? Well since people on this hell site seem to be uneducated idiots who think their fantasy world is real life, here’s a lesson in real life. Hate breeds hate. It always has it always will. And in getting your cult like following to call work places, schools, etc, to try to ruin the lives of these people, you are basically emboldening them. Maybe they are being shitty assholes. And does that suck? Yes. But it’s not against the law. And last i checked. Vigilantism is in most capacities.

It does not matter if she’s canceled minors OR adults. I go by one simple concept. All racists are assholes but not all assholes are racist. You can say something racist and not be a racist if your goal is nothing but pissing people off. Racism is a mindset. It’s an ignorance based on poor belief systems. And even IF these kids WERE racists you won’t make them stop being racist by trying to ruin their lives. You just make their hate stronger. You make their ignorance seem rational. Because you ARE attacking them. And maybe it’s not their fault. MAYBE it was the way they were raised. But you didn’t give them any benefit. You just attacked with malice and the intent to destroy. As if you were somehow a perfect kid yourself? Nah you go put on TV and are now making more money than most people in the US. How about you use that privilege to create rather than destroy. 

Sooner or later people will realize that attacking racists does not make them go away. It only justifies the way that they feel. And you might think, “They NEED to be attacked or they won’t learn”. People only learn one thing from pain and that’s fear. And you might think that’s somehow a good thing but when fear is directed poorly, it turns to unbridled hate. And when that person decides they’ve been attacked enough they might stop being public about what they feel, but you only solidified in their mind that they ARE right. They are right to hate. Meaning sure, they won’t talk about their views in public but they will among their friends. Their families, and their kids. Do you know what this is called? The Streisand effect. 

The more you try to suppress something publicly the more you actually make it MORE public and spread it further. The fact is there is a phrase called, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”. The meaning behind this? Things often are better being public because others can call it out. Others can talk about why it’s ignorant. Others can talk about why it’s wrong. But when you censor it......when you try to hide it, you only hurt your own cause. 

Sure you might THINK things being public means more people are exposed to it but in the public space people are exposed to ALL opinions, facts, etc. Meaning they are getting information from all sides. 

Though lately there has been this movement of:

Let’s call this persons job

Let’s get the person fired

Let’s ruin this persons life

Let’s ruin their family

Let’s hurt them

Why is it the people that seem to want bigotry gone the most are the SINGLE MOST DESTRUCTIVE AND VIOLENT?! And when will you learn that it doesn’t work. It certainly does not help anyone or anything. It’s just you angry and wanting to break things. Because YOU ARE ALL CHILDREN! Racist people exist. And they always will. Racism will never be gone. Does that mean i agree with it? No. Not even remotely. But i would sooner rather a person be a closet racist who keeps his bigotry to him or herself, than some loud temperamental violent racist. Why? Because maybe over that span of time of them being a closet racist, people around them in the work place, or in public makes them realize why they are ignorant and why they are wrong. 

But if you want to know what my biggest issue with all of this is, it’s not even the doxxing. It’s this notion that improvement is impossible and that you are beyond redemption. That growth is impossible and that if you mess up that you can’t ever be better than that mistake. But that’s not how being human works. We mess up. We make mistakes. We get hurt. We hurt others. This is how we learn to BE better. It’s how we learn to DO better. It’s how we grow as people. Fact is if racism against white people were as unacceptable as it was against literally anyone else, many of these celebs and activists would be labeled just as racist as the people they attack. And most are. They just get away with it. 

Fact is if you learn anything from this it’s that you can’t solve things when your only tool is a bludgeon. And making things look better is not done by hitting it over and over. It’s done with attention, care, and understanding of what you are doing. Take it from the person that literally made 100′s *possibly 1000′s* of KKK Klan members quit. He educated them. He listened to them. He approached them with humility and a want to understand. This man is hero to me. And he should be to many others. *And yes i watched it again after i wrote this*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw

#racist #racism #cancelled #cancel culture #doxxing #skai jackson

[abeautifulblog]

12 and 6 for the writing asks?

Yassssss~

12) My favorite place to write is our courtyard patio:

We live in the literal desert, so it gets too hot to be out there during the afternoon, but it’s lovely in the mornings and the evenings, and I’ve got my chair set up with a little rolling desk I built for my laptop. It’s also enclosed, so it’s safe for my blind & stupid cat  to come enjoy the outdoors with me. (No really, I love her but she’s an idiot and also completely blind.)

(And yes, I gave Gene my own hobby when I wrote him as a gardener.)

*

6) Hardest story to write: haaah, I think you guys can probably guess the answer to this, based on which installments took the longest to get out – “Bodies in the Lake” and “Love Like Light.” And the common denominator there was making those nerds bone.

So yeah, now that I can finally talk about what was going on behind the scenes – why did those take so long?

Part of it was just that as the fic came to an end, there were fewer things left to write, so if I got stuck on one thing, there was really nothing else for me to work on in the mean time. “The Old College Try,” for instance, had been in the works since “This House,” but when I was blocked on it, I could put it on the backburner and write six billion remixes of the bake sale instead.

So after the Thanksgiving chapter, when they finally clear the air about Robert’s mental illness, the next item to check off the list was “nerds get sum fuk” – and I really thought they were ready to get down to it. I was planning a comedy romp at a bigfoot-themed ski lodge that would end with them hopping in the sack. I thought their issues were resolved already.

And then it just.

Wasn’t.

Happening.

Was the setting wrong? I’d chosen to put them on holiday as way to shake up the scenery, get them out of their usual (sexless) routine and perhaps embolden them to try something new. Should I have left them at Gene’s house, where Robert feels safe and comfortable? But then what’s the catalyst that makes them do it NOW, when they haven’t done it BEFORE? What makes Robert decide that now is the “right time”? How do I signal to the readers that it’s okay for them to have sex now, when earlier (like in “Ghosts in the Attic”) it would have been disastrous?

But yeah, I had been trying to make them fuck since chapter 18. It’s why that chapter is shot through with sex, why Robert has a boner for basically the entire first half – and not in the freaky-dissonant way that he did in “Ghosts in the Attic,” but as a natural, healthy reaction to his beloved boyfriend rubbing up on him in slinky yoga pants. It was to telegraph that sex is on the agenda, so that it wouldn’t be coming out of left field when they consummated at the end of the chapter.

It’s why the working title for “Bodies in the Lake” was sex_happens.doc – until it became clear that sex wasn’t going to happen. That the issues raised in “Ghosts in the Attic” were still completely unresolved. Indeed, Gene still didn’t even know those issues existed.

Gene is very good at handling Robert’s crises when it’s something he’s been through before with Alex – but when Robert steps off-script, Gene’s suddenly winging it, and it shows. Alex had a lot of sexual partners in the past too – as people who are outgoing and bisexual and dtf often do – but he never did Robert’s brand of self-destructive, self-loathing promiscuity, and so Gene has no understanding of the psychology behind that behavior, or why it’s different from Alex’s form of slutting around.

And then Mary was supposed to just smack some sense into him and shove him back into Gene’s loving arms, but holy shit, did that conversation get derailed. And as an author, when a character looks you in the eye and says, It’s time to talk about this, you let them talk.

That was when my housemate-beta, who’d been there for all my agonizing over how to make them fuck, said, “You have to break this up into two chapters. This conversation here, it’s the emotional climax.” And she was absolutely right, but that’s why the sex got delayed another year. 😫

(I had not, going into that chapter, intended for them to have that conversation. I thought I was showing their character growth in the gym scene at the beginning, which features a number of deliberate callbacks to the first chapter except for all the ways that they’re healthier now, drinking smoothies instead of mimosas and actually TALKING about feelings. I had not realized they were going to DOUBLE THE FUCK DOWN on character growth later.)

So that was “Bodies in the Lake” finally out, after only eleven months (and I do consider that chapter a conscious bookend to “Ghosts in the Attic”), but I still had yet to make them fuck.

(I feel like some exotic zookeeper – like, I have created the perfect conditions for you, have I not, so why won’t you two just fuck already??)

Because it’s not just about being horny and wanting to get their rocks off (anyone with a sex drive knows how to take care of that on their own), it’s about the profoundly intimate connection that sex can be for sexual people. (The misunderstanding around this is something I find distressing in asexual discourse, when it reduces sex to a one-dimensional, even selfish, urge. I understand that not everyone experiences sex the same way, but there’s nothing selfish about wanting to feel that kind of connection with your partner.)

Not to mention that the hard ban on sex would inhibit other forms of intimacy too – that Robert can’t do ANYTHING without part of his brain keeping track of whether it’s okay or not, worrying how far is too far, knowing that there’s a stopping point coming up. It feels analogous to how queer celebrities, before they come out, seem to have almost no public personality whatsoever – Anderson Cooper and Kristin Stewart are the ones who come to mind here – because they’re having to police themselves so stringently lest anything ‘kinda gay’ slip out, that they wind up clamping down on themselves far beyond that. (And then when they do come out and are free to be themselves, it turns out they’re smart and snarky and all-around cool people!) I feel like after the sex barrier’s been broken, Robert would become a lot more relaxed and uninhibited with non-sexual intimacy too.

I’d had the first half of that chapter written for ages – the conversation after Robert comes back to the house and he explains that period of his life to Gene – but I couldn’t seem to give them that final push. I made a lot of attempts, tweaking my approach in subtle ways, but nothing quite rang true.

It was my friend Sam (dude who wrote the Craig fic) who finally said, They need to fight.

(And also that Gene needed to get pushed off his pedestal – “Because I have BEEN that endlessly patient and supportive boyfriend, and it gets old.”)

And as soon as he said it, I realized he was right – I’d done the thing, the thing that every guide on writing sex tells you not to do, which is to neatly wrap up all the characters’ interpersonal issues and tie them off with a bow and then let them fall into bed. It’s what feels logical, but it is death to drama, because then there’s no tension, and no reason for the reader to pay attention during the sex scene that follows, because there’s nothing going to be accomplished in it.

…Buuuut, when I’d spent 100k words writing a love story about careful consent, and a protagonist who doesn’t have a good handle on his own desires, there was no way for me to let them barrel through sex on a full head of passion and talk about it afterwards. It’s why they had to stop halfway through and dial it back a bit, touch base and explicitly confirm that yes, I want to proceed, bring them back from the edge for a while so it clearly wasn’t just their downstairs brains doing the decision-making.

The result is that it’s not as sexy as I might have hoped for, and while I’m a little disappointed about that, it’s checked by the knowledge that – realistically – there’s no way it could have been. Scorching hot sex requires the participants to be uninhibited, and Robert and Gene can’t afford to throw caution to the wind when they’re venturing into a known minefield. They’ll be able to relax into it later, for sure, but for their first time, they had to be mindful and deliberate about it.

(And also hearkening back to a thought Robert had in “Ghosts in the Attic,” that he wanted to make Gene smile and laugh during sex. In essence, that his vision for them, what he wanted out of sex, was more for it to be intimate than for it to be hawt.

Ah well. Stay tuned for the hookup AU – basically, all the scorching-hot sex they weren’t having in Beautiful Day wound up in the hookup AU instead)

So yeah, getting them to bone was definitely the hardest part of this fic. There were so many factors involved thanks to Robert’s various issues, that required a lot of careful calibration – and in the end, he still had to take a leap of faith. And while it’s not my favorite part of the fic, now that it’s done I can get on with finishing the rest of it. The final chapter doesn’t have anything really fraught (that hasn’t already been written), so I’m optimistic that it’s not going to give me as much trouble as the previous two chapters.

#asks #sex happens

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

crime and disorder

Previously on Impeaching the Motherfucker: Donald “Individual-1” Trump tried to use the Oval Office to shake down Ukrainian President Zelensky for a public announcement of bullshit investigations, which Trump wanted to use to discredit American citizens and intelligence agencies.

You may have seen people compare Trump’s scheme to have the Ukrainian president announce investigations into his Democratic opposition to James Comey’s various interventions in the 2016 election. This comparison is not wrong. If anything, it understates the similarities.

The story that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to feed Zelensky about a member of Joe Biden’s family was basically fascist fanfiction by a guy named Peter Schweitzer. Schweitzer worked for Steve Bannon, who led the Trump campaign for a while, at the racist agitprop website Breitbart. His books are funded by the Mercer family. (If you’re struggling to place that name, they also finance the Facebook data thieves at Cambridge Analytica.) As Schweitzer’s lies were being used to pressure Zelensky to abuse law enforcement, they were also being fed to the mortifyingly credulous New York Times. The NYT validated the smear, which gave Giuliani and his crew leverage to increase pressure on law enforcement to take action in the hopes that this would create more news.

These exact same people pulled these exact same moves in 2015 and 2016. Of course, that time the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton, and Schweitzer’s lies were about the Clinton Foundation.* Those lies were debunked as quickly and easily as the stories about Biden, but they were still validated and spread by the mainstream media, in particular by the New York Times. These stories were picked up by the various disinformation trollbot networks throughout the 2016 election and used to drown out the serious stories about Donald Trump’s many financial crimes. And it gave a partisan faction in the FBI an excuse to open an investigation into Clinton.

Giuliani, by his own admission, was also the Trump campaign’s connection to the FBI’s New York field office in 2016. Now he’s telling the press, on the record, that his scheming in Ukraine is an attempt to manipulate the Department of Justice into investigating Biden.

It’s important to remember what happened from there. Short-term, we need to prepare ourselves to keep it from being so effective next time. The impeachment hearings might have discredited this particular line of attack against Biden, but something like this will happen to whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being. Long-term, progressives need to start holding grudges the way conservatives do, not least because our grievances are real. And we have to do this for ourselves because, let’s be honest, most of the mainstream and nearly all of the “leftist” media would rather be rounded up at gunpoint and sent to a gulag than admit they fucked up in 2016.

We remember the EMAILS investigation because it was so public, but in fact, the FBI was also investigating the Clinton Foundation, despite the Department of Justice telling them there was no case, specifically because their “evidence” was just trash from Schweitzer’s book.+

An FBI investigation is a serious thing, even if the director doesn’t use it as a pretext to throw a presidential election. That’s why the FBI is supposed to take it seriously. They’re only supposed to open an investigation if they have an an actual reason. (To state the obvious, debunked conspiracy theories by a political propagandist are not an actual reason.) Then they’re supposed to shut the fuck up and actually investigate, not preen for the media about how great they are for doing all this manly investigating. This is both to protect the reputation of the person they’re investigating and because you can usually investigate something better if you minimize how many people know you’re investigating. When they’re done, they’re supposed to either charge someone with a crime or to close the case and leave the person alone.

The FBI clearly did not take the Clinton Foundation investigation seriously, because if they had been taking it seriously they never would have pretended there was a case there at all, but it was still a serious thing. The existence of this “investigation” bolstered these false propaganda narratives which were intended to distort a presidential election, and which publicly disparaged a world-class charity that has saved millions of lives around the world.

Worse, the bullshit metastasized within the FBI. It ate into the time and attention of senior leadership, when they needed to be making some genuinely complicated decisions concerning the national security threat posed by the criminal syndicate known as the Trump campaign. Instead, they were finding out what happens if you give a mouse a cookie. The faction of the FBI who were abusing their power to hurt Clinton and help Trump seem to have been emboldened by the indulgence. FBI leadership fell into the bad habit of feeding the press, especially right-wing media like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, hints that something crime-y was going on with the Clinton Foundation. A week before the election, after Comey had upended the election with his letter about the emails, “sources” at the FBI were telling a Fox News anchor that there were about to be indictments over something at the Clinton Foundation.

Reading between the lines of various reports, it looks like these pressures within the FBI to support the Clinton Cash propaganda helped desensitize Comey and his bros to the idea of taking dramatic public action against Hillary Clinton. It never occurred to anyone else that they would pull a stunt like this, not because everyone trusts the FBI so much, but because it is so far from what they do. Nobody expects the feds to start wearing mashed potatoes to the office instead of suits, either, not because they have such great fashion sense, but because it’s too bizarre to occur to anyone. But if there were a handful of agents crabbing every day that they should wear mashed potatoes to work, and those agents kept forwarding around a drumbeat of media speculating that maybe they would start wearing mashed potatoes to work, maybe they start to think it’s not too weird of a compromise if they just start wearing mashed potatoes instead of jackets and ties.

Law enforcement abusing its power to influence elections is bad for democracy. But it’s also bad for law enforcement. As long as everyone understands the FBI shouldn’t be expected to get involved in partisan politics, there’s no incentive for politicians to waste time trying to pressure them. But once they caved to this pressure from right-wing media, it showed that they could be manipulated by at least one side, and the Republicans have been hammering them relentlessly ever since. Trump doesn’t beat up on the FBI – or, for that matter, the NYT – because he’s afraid of them. He beats up on them because he knows, from experience, that it works.

Since all that happened, Trump’s had time to purge his dupes from FBI leadership and replace them with people he believes will be even more likely to follow his unethical directives. So that’s not great.

One major difference in Giuliani and Schweitzer’s scheme this year is that they’re trying to outsource their dirty work to Ukraine, which is a lot riskier and a lot more work. In a weird way, this is a slightly encouraging sign for 2020. Even if the real motivation is that Trump is fucking around with Ukraine to please Putin and smearing Biden is just a side benefit, I doubt it would be happening like this, because you don’t actually need to bring your clown sidekick and his clown sidekicks into your clear-cut impeachable offenses. It’s entirely possible that they’re going global because they don’t think the FBI will throw all the rules out the window to help them this time.

On the other hand, the fact that they’re changing the pattern means it could easily get even worse. Right-wing ratfuckers have already attacked at least two 2020 Democratic presidential candidates with false claims of sexual violence. At this point, it’s still the JV squad,± but once we have a nominee, the professionals are going to get involved. It wouldn’t even take Giuliani’s subtlety and finesse to get law enforcement involved, either, just one pro-Trump sheriff’s office in an area the nominee could have conceivably visited. I don’t have a concrete idea of what to do if things take this particular turn, but I’m legitimately worried that we need to brace ourselves for it.

*Substantively, this comparison is unfair, because Burisma is an oil and gas company with a mixed ethical record, while the Clinton Foundation is a clean, transparent charity that has saved millions of lives. The fact that Schweitzer and the New York Times describe them nearly interchangeably says it all.

+The existence of not one but two flimsy investigations into Clinton actually discredits both of them even further, because it shows a pattern of the FBI investigating a person rather than a crime.

±It’s easy to treat the Warren thing as a joke because this particular ratfucker faceplanted so badly, but the lie itself wasn’t funny. Escalating consensual BDSM into a vicious, traumatic beating isn’t some wacky cartoon trope, it’s a type of abuse that real people have experienced.

#mainstream media #disinformation #impeachment #ukraine #trump #fbi #election 2016 #election 2020

[kob131]

What do you feel about the post about Vic mignogna by ultraericthered

https://ultraericthered.tumblr.com/post/183990672385/im-sick-of-the-rangers-spamming-vics-tag-with

Let’s break this down.

Vic is absolutely guilty of inappropriate behavior, misconduct, sexual harassment, and possibly (just possibly) sexual assault towards others. This has been established by his pattern of behavior for years. Monica and the others are being entirely honest in their stories and the allegations are very likely honest as well. How this is even in question, I have no idea, but it upsets and disturbs me that there are so many who are quick to jump to Vic’s defense while simultaneously vilifying his opponents and accusers (and possibly victims).

A, He hasn’t been proven guilty of exual harassment OR assault and inapporiate behavior means nothing.

And B. yeah, no. Monica has been lying via omission for months now, refusing to give ANY details on any incidents DESPITE the fact that those details are REQUIRED to convict him. And before you say she’s scared: she’s openly threatened vic supporters with legal action. Over asking her for info. That is not the behavior of an innocent person.

Oh and C. NOTHING came to light about Vic for MONTHS. The ProJared shit started and ended in the same month.

What gives credibility to the side of Monica Rial, Jamie Marchi, Jamie McGonnigal, Marzgurl, etc. is that not only do their words and allegations line up with accounts of Vic’s skeevy behavior towards fans and women that have been going around the internet for YEARS (It’s honestly astonishing just how far back some of this goes), but how many other VAs, people actually in the industry who might’ve worked alongside Vic and would be there to witness his actions, have come out in Vic’s defense? Can’t really think of much. Meanwhile, how many have been coming out in support of the alleged victims? Quite a handful, even J. Michael Tatum, himself a victim of sexual assault in the past. Apparently, Vic being a primadona and a skeevy womanizing creeper has been an open secret in the VA industry since forever.

And of these guys:

Monica has evaded legal action and refused to give details NECESSARY to convict him

Marzgurl has sactively ENOCURAGE VIOLENCE

And Jamie has been proven to bully people into dropping Vic from cons.

As for the ‘accounts”: they’re eitehr anonyomous accounts, too old to prove...or taken out of context of the people involed.

And by the way. how many famous people probably came out and said ‘that guy’s a commie’ back during the Red Scare? People coming out to help doesn’t MEAN anything without proof. People in the wrong can still come out in droves. And if that doesn’t convince: does that mean rape victims who don’t have public support while their rapists DO are the ones in the wrong then? Same logic of ‘One party has more public support than the other, therefore they’re right.’

What’s damning on Vic’s side of things? Well not only was a thorough investigation into the sexual harassment allegations conducted during the time of the Broly movie’s production prior to Funimation’s decision to lay Vic off (something his fans don’t even seem to realize happened) -

You mean the one where they didn’t give any info and was probably a ‘cut off the controversial figure for profit’ decision?

- but Vic’s response to the whole situation has…just not been how I think an absolutely innocent man getting his career and livelihood threatened by accusation of things he absolutely never did and would never do would respond. Vic’s been pretty sincere and professional throughout this and I give him props for that, but his “defenses” against the allegations have always been along the lines of “I remember things differently” or “I didn’t realize she felt that way - I thought that thing we had was consensual and mutual.” Of course he’s not going to recall those incidents as being ones where he committed sex offenses because he did not see his actions as being such when he committed them. He fails to recognize how and why his behavior is so wrong. He doesn’t knowingly think of himself as a sex fiend and harasser when he acts that way - he really thinks he’s being nice (backed up by the allegation where he repeatedly asked his victim to “let me be sweet to you.”). But those moments were not consensual. The girls and women he touched or romanced were not comfortable with it.-

And Monica has threatened legal action and Marzgurl thretaened PHYSICAL VIOLENCE.

You wanna judge this based on public reaction? Show me where Vic threatens anyone who questions him.

What his intentions were at the time don’t matter when put next against how his victims internalized his actions and how they were made to feel -

No, intentions DO matter. That’s why ‘self defense’ and ‘murder’ are different concepts.

And on top of that, look at how Monica Rial worded her own account:

This, by contrast, is Vic’s wording of his side of things. He “got lazy.” He’s “a work in progress like everyone else.” And my personal favorite: “Voice actors are no different from you: we’re bozos. We’re all dumb humans just trying to do our best.” The emotions are sincere, but the words are unrefined and a bit try-hard in trying to paint a sympathetic image of himself.

And Monica, by your own standards, is trying to appeal to basic human empathy to trick people into believing her. Thing is, Vic is consistent in his actions. Monica has acted contradictory MANY times.

And what’s damning on the side of Vic’s fans and defenders? Well, I could not help but notice that they can be found all over Youtube, hive of the Far Right that it’s become-

Strike 1.

I also could not help but notice that whenever I clicked a video made for supporting Vic and tearing down his opposition and accusers (who, again, could very well be his victims), it was literally ALWAYS a dude speaking.

Strike 2.

It was always some man speaking in defense of this other man who he probably doesn’t even personally know in a situation he wasn’t there to experience and knows next to shit about, and demonizing “waamen” that he also doesn’t personally know. And in all of this, I have not once seen any valid reasoning for why Vic absolutely must be innocent of the allegations made against him other than “he’s a super popular, charming, beloved VA” and “he seems like such a nice guy”. It’s frankly quite terrifying that the immediate default for these people is to stand with the popular, prolific, powerful man (and I don’t want to be an SJW here, but that Vic is handsome, white, straight/cis, and Christian might be a huge part of it

Strike 3-

Not only is this gonna EMBOLDEN the assholes on Vic’s side-

But Monica’s defenders (like YOU) have focused on gender and bullshit instead of anything FACTUAL. You act like anyone whose accused of sexual assault is IMMEDIATELY guilty if the accuser is a woman and teh accused is a man. Never mind how most of these accusations come down to simple miscommunication between the parties and nevermind how if a guy tries coming to the police about being raped, it’s likely HE’LL be arrested. Let alone what happens if the woman gets pregnant and can sue for child support...even if she committed STATUTORY RAPE.

Oh, and Vic’s italian and that culture is very touchy feely. So guess what? You’re racist by your own logic.

and denounce the women who come forward to accuse him as being liars because this is exactly why women who are victimized by men of such power and popularity tend to NOT come forward with stories of their victimization immediately after it happens. Yes, anyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but that doesn’t mean the accusers should be denounced as liars and demonized for daring to mess with the man - they ought to be shown support and respect IF in the case what they say is true and they really were hurt by that man. If they’re proven liars beyond any doubt, THEN they can be given well deserved scorn. But brushing them off beforehand is Not OK. Especially if it’s with conspiracy theories about how this is some big coordinated feminist effort to tear down a great man and destroy his livelihood, or it’s a retaliation from yaoi fangirls who hate that Vic dares to be anti-yaoi and Conservative in regards to gay people.

And yet you condemn Vic before he is proven to be lying.

Sorry, either condemn yourself or be better.

These assclowns have also constantly resorted to the defense of “Oh, hugging other people and kissing them in places not on the lips totes isn’t sexual harassment”. Totally ignoring the little details of the girls getting the hugs typically being total strangers to Vic outside of being fans of his work who are thus underage girls being touched by a grown man who has absolutely no relation to them, that he might have done the same with female co-workers behind the scenes, and that he has done these things on a whim, without the recipient’s consent and without paying any mind to how it might make them feel.

Also ignoring if they give consent like that time someone tried portraying Vic touching a supposedly underage girl only to BACKFIRE as the womana spoke out in defense of the man.

This has been a consistent pattern of behavior with him,

Consistently unproven.

and allegedly, he’s justified it with saying “silence gives consent.” Like a girl or woman absolutely has to verbally say “no” or tell him outright that he’s making them feel uncomfortable for it to be considered wrong and unwarranted. Basically “a lack of a No makes it a Yes.” I can’t begin to describe how gross that is.

So Vic has to be a fucking MINDREADER or else.

Great to know, especially considering how my own condition would make this shit damn near impossible to see.

The worst part is how these IStandWithVic cultists demonize Monica Rial. A woman who, by her own admission, was a victim of rape as a teenager.

Says the man who demonizes Vic.

A woman who has shown nothing but emotional and intellectual honesty and kindness on social media, who has acknowledged that even Vic and his fans don’t deserve to be harassed and hurt, to the point of stating this:

https://twitter.com/Rialisms/status/1095156641543192576

Funny how she says this TWO DAYS LATER than your picture.

But she’s both painted as a vicious liar who’s out to destroy a good, innocent man’s life and career, and is ALWAYS being written off by these dudes as just “the VA for Bulma.” As though she’s had no other notable roles in her long career of voice acting aside from that one character (as opposed to the oh-so talented, versatile and legendary star that is Vic). As though that character has had only one English VA. As though Monica just plain doesn’t matter when put next to a fellow VA in the industry who happens to be a handsome white, straight/cis, Christian male.

Keep being a bigoted douchebag, I can hear the alt RIght cumming.

And as though Monica had any feasible reason to lie about her experiences with Vic and assassinate his character on social media.

*points at you and your blind defense of her*

the pro-Vic crowd seems to think she’s greedy or jealous or just resentful towards Vic as a person, and is out to get him so that she can get money or respect or more roles or petty revenge or whatever.

Literally change ‘vic’ to ‘monica and that’d describe you.

But if that were really the case, how does that account for the friends and family who support her claims? How does it account for the fellow VAs (Jamie Marchi, Jamie McGonnigal, J. Micahel Tatum, Josh Grelle, Justin Briner, Daman Mills) who’ve all supported her claims and have said “Yeah, Vic’s been like that forever.

‘Get social brownie points’

How does it account for the fans and congoers who have been sharing their stories of uncomfortable experiences and encounters they’ve had with Vic FOR YEARS?

‘Stories’ are not truth.

The deck is NOT stacked in Vic’s favor here, so “he’s successful, popular, funny, friendly, charming, talented and a classic VA who’s so well loved in the anime community” is NOT going to cut it as an assumption of his innocence or a defense for his character.

No, that’s the legal system that says ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

He needs to be held accountable for his misdemeanors against people who gave no consent to being touched, hugged, kissed, stalked, romanced, or squicked out by him.

And yet Monica threatening legal action and Marzgurl making THREATS OF VIOLENCE? A-Ok.

It’s a Michael Jackson type of situation - even if he’s NOT done the things he’s being accused of, that does NOT make his creepy behavior towards underage fangirls excusable or alright.

Funny thing about Micheal Jackson-

The accusations, when you actually pay attention, are complete bullshit. Events don’t line up, accounts vary wildly, facts contradict stories. And yet he STILL suffered until the day he died and BEYOND. So thanks for remindidng why, as much as I hate Yellow Flash, Hero Hei and Nick Riekta-

You idiots are the worse evil.

Tl;dr: I shall from now on be referring to this VA as “Vic Cosby Mignogna.” ‘Cause even if he’s not guilty of the heinous shit that Bill Cosby is guilty of, his case is still all too eerily similar.

#IStandWithMonica

So does that mean if I call Monica ‘Monikkka’- She’s a KKK member now?

Oh wait, you wouldn’t give two shits if the places were reversed would you? For your cry of ‘I’m not an SJW!’- You sure do sound like the fucking strawman it represents.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 115: Hard-Boiled Villain Antics

Previously on BnHA: The provisional license exam concluded. Everyone from class 1-A passed except Todoroki and Bakugou. The exam committee announced there would be a special training course for the ones who failed, and they would then receive their licenses as well. They want all the students who made it to phase two of the exam to ultimately succeed because with All Might gone, the world needs as many quality heroes as it can get. The U.A. kids said their farewells to the other schools and prepared to board the bus home. Deku inquired about the weird girl from Shiketsu Academy and was told she had already left, and that furthermore she’d been acting strange for the last few days. We then learned that the girl, Camie, had actually been Toga in disguise, and that she has a shapeshifting quirk which allows her to take on others’ appearances once she drinks their blood. Oh, and. Now she has Deku’s.

Today on BnHA: We take a break from our intrepid hero hatchlings to check in with Twice from the League of Villains. He stares broodingly out the window like a noir character, listens to the news talk shit about Endeavor, watches a group of Tarantino tribute villains rob a store, and gets a phone call from the villain broker Giran. We learn that the League has temporarily split up and are recruiting to expand their organization. We also learn that Twice has more than a few screws loose, the reason being that when he was younger he used his duplication quirk to clone himself, only to have the clones all murder each other one by one until he was the last one standing. If that isn’t fucked up enough for you, perhaps I can interest you in the new villain introduced in this chapter, who goes by “Overhaul” and has a penchant for dismembering peeps. Or perhaps you’re more a fan of the classic villain, in which case the chapter ends with All Might meeting up with our old friend All for One, so, you know. Enjoy that.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 151 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.)

who the fuck is this

he’s staring darkly out of his window and hating all the people he sees walking past

but also there’s a black speech bubble thinking the exact opposite. “I think it’s fantastic”

is this that Twice guy, maybe

I was wondering what you were up to, yes. good catch there

“THIS MAN STARTS HIS MORNINGS A LITTLE MORE HARD-BOILED THAN MOST.” yes, the really hardcore way to start your day is to hate people from windows

holy shit this ominous fucking chapter! right from the get go!

“unleashed.” and the text underneath: “a world where All Might is not coming”

I’m thinking it’s safe to say the villains are winding down from their little break

I’m so curious how Tomura is doing. prediction: still crazy

the narration is saying that the news networks and Internet are constantly buzzing with “idle chatter fanning the flames of anxiety”

jesus christ this is so similar to the real-world climate in the last few years. anxiety and fear-mongering

oh shit the newspeople are talking about Endeavor

depends on whether you’re the type who can accept assholes who beat their wife and kid

(I personally am not)

they’re being really polite about it, but they’re saying that you can’t help but contrast him against All Might

he’s “coarse”

“he just looks like an ordinary person pretending to be a superhuman” I’ll take it a step further; he looks like an asshole not even trying particularly hard to pretend he’s a nice guy. and yeah, he’s strong, but not even in the same realm that All Might was

oh my god it’s a list of top “Moogle” searches for Endeavor. this is the most 2010s shit I’ve ever seen in a manga omggggg

yeahhhh, public opinion is just not on this guy’s side. and good riddance

basically he’s become “the symbol of weakening heroes.” exactly. I feel like all these people must just be like, “is this really the best we can do now omg”

is Endeavor Donald fucking Trump

this is one of the best chapter openers I can recall reading in a long time. there’s something fascinating about watching a well-established fictional world get shaken up and seeing how the people of that world respond. it’s reminding me a little of the post-Goblet of Fire Harry Potter universe. and why do I have a feeling that by the time this series ends, we’ll have progressed all the way to Deathly Hallows in terms of grittiness

the narration is continuing and saying that just as All Might brought hope to everyday citizens, his presence was a curse to villains

and now that curse has been lifted, so “it’s no surprise at all that it’d turn out this way”

and it’s showing some guy robbing an ATM or something. not sure what he’s carrying, but anyways he’s busting through a wall looking happy and deranged

now a pro hero is showing up to stop him

but another villain is cracking the back of the hero’s head with a huge metal pipe

and two more villains are waiting over by their getaway truck

nice Tarantino reference there. bold and unsubtle and in-your-face

and the narration is talking about how villains are feeling more emboldened and more free to run around without fear of consequence. and that the more daring they get, the more villains they inspire in turn, and it goes on and on. “running a red light isn’t scary if everyone does it with you”

we’re seeing the exact same thing happen irl nowadays with racists and nazis and the alt-right and such, aren’t we. my escapist manga is really starting to hit close to home here

now Twice is getting a call from someone

isn’t this the guy who introduced Toga and Dabi to Tomura

damn, manga, you’re really going to make me go all the way back to like chapter sixty-something to check this. fine

yep, it is. chapter 68

he says that in the past two weeks there’s been a surge of black market requests for things like suits and related items

he says it’s all thanks to the League of Villains

really it’s thanks to one specific villain that did all the work and is now imprisoned though. just saying. though no doubt he won’t mind Tomura getting the credit

anyway so Twice is asking why the broker guy called him

probably cuz Toga got Deku’s blood, so now the gang is getting back together to hatch some more schemes

yep

so Twice is like yeah of course I heard, and the broker dude is like okay catch you later then

gotta say, I was already fond of Twice just as a funny and eccentric (you have no idea how much my brain struggled to find an adjective to use in place of “quirky” there, but needless to say I wouldn’t have been able to keep a straight face otherwise) character. but it’s pretty damn fascinating to witness his psyche on display now as well

apparently the League has been separated and scattered for a little while, both to lie low and to scout for more people to join the group

and now we’re cutting to Dabi and he’s just roasting some poor dudes alive

damn son

oh shit what’s happening to Twice

this guy is soooo weird

he says his quirk is “doubling.” “I make one into two”

okay. I don’t get it at all, but

-- WHOA

IS THIS THE FUCKING PRESTIGE OR WHAT. AND WASN’T THIS ALSO A PLOTLINE IN FUCKING CALVIN AND HOBBES

he says each of the clones claimed to be the real one (by “real” I assume “original”) and they started arguing and eventually they all killed each other

and he’s not sure even now whether he’s actually the “real” him

holy shit I would read an entire book about this guy. I want David Fincher to direct a movie about him

it seems like he’s not even really that evil, it’s just that he’s so crazy that the league was the only place he could find that would accept him. “what I was searching for were others who are just as crazy as I am”

I would read a spinoff manga about Twice and his existential nightmare of an existence, trufax. this is so compelling I almost forgot about the fact that we’re thirteen pages into this chapter and so far it’s been all villains and no U.A. kids

-- what the fuck

IS THAT THE GUY FROM EARLIER?? WHO ROBBED THE ATM???

(answer: yes, I just went back and looked)

WHY IS HIS FUCKING HEAD HERE?? IS THIS HIS QUIRK OR SOMETHING MORE HORRIFYING THAN THAT

farewell Reservoir Dogs. you had a brief and uneventful run culminating in THE MOST HORRIFYINGLY GRUESOME SCENE I’VE EVER SEEN SHOUNEN JUMP ALLOW IN THEIR FUCKING MAGAZINE. NOT ONLY WAS IT INDEED HIS FUCKING HEAD, I COUNT LIKE SEVEN OF HIS AND HIS FRIENDS’ OTHER BODY PARTS MORBIDLY STREWN ABOUT AND ROASTING ON THIS OPEN FUCKING FLAME. dude what the fuck

oh boy here we go

now his buddy in a raincoat -- and they all have the same plague doctor masks on btw -- is saying he took the money and let’s get out of here

he’s calling the “YOU GUYS HAVE AN ILLNESS” dude “Overhaul.” okay I’ll admit that’s a pretty badass villain name

and Twice is watching them all like, “oh. more maniacs”

so I’m guessing he’s going to recruit these guys lol

the narration says that both the heroes and villains’ sides have begun to undergo changes in appearance. well, we’ve seen a lot of the heroes’ side of things so far so I guess it’s nice to take a break from that and see what the villains have been up to

is this the prison??

OH SHIT!!!!!

WHAT IS HE DOING COMING OVER THERE TO TALK TO HIM OH MY GOD

“THE DISCUSSION WITH THE BIG BOSS IS ABOUT TO BEGIN” [FRANTICALLY CLICKS TO THE NEXT CHAPTER!!!]

-- except no, damn it, because I gotta check out the bonus page first :/

 bonus

...actually the bonus page is just Horikoshi being excited that there are now two spinoff series. apparently he’s a fan of Illegals. I do want to check that out (especially since he just said Eraserhead has a cameo in it omgggg), but like hell if you think I’m clicking away from this main story just yet. I still have 85 chapters to go and it’s not like things are exactly getting boring omg

#bnha #boku no hero academia #bubaigawara jin #twice (bnha) #dabi #chisaki kai #overhaul (bnha) #all for one #makeste reads bnha #merry christmas everyone #please enjoy this surprisingly violent and disturbing chapter and its dystopian ambiance #I found it surprisingly enjoyable myself #mostly because I love twice so fucking much #I know he's a fucking villain but dammit I can't help rooting for him #he's just so great

[doomedandstoned]

Closer To The End (part II)

~By Billy Goate~

Art by Ruso Tsig

Everyone has bouts of sadness, loneliness, heartache. For better or worse, it's a part of the human condition. There was some discussion after my last article about whether depression is something we can choose to walk into or away from -- like a bad attitude -- or whether in some people it may be more deeply ingrained in the psychological makeup, whether by nature or nurture. I thought it would be helpful to give you a window into my own background so you can understand when depression first made itself manifest and the different strategies taken to deal with it over the years.

Banished from this world, and from its toil I can only watch, grieve and pity Stare at stupid likes, wonder at people's smiles

I get more and more stress Nothing anyone can offer, more or less Done grieving, closer to the end

DON'T KNOW WHY

I vaguely recall spells of melancholy in childhood. The return from summer camp to a boring home with mom vacuuming and dad at work had me feeling quite empty and blue. It was a strange, bewildering state of mind to be in. Mom told me to snap out of it or else. There were a few moments that shattered my reality as a child. Realizing, for instance, that mom and dad were having marital problems. Hearing my pastor of a father say a swear word. Often, I would be startled awake in the dead of night to my mom shrieking at my dad, throwing dishes, insisting that he was against her. My dad was a patient man and knew that all was not right in her world. These things jolted me into new layers of reality, each accompanied by periods of moodiness and anxiety.

By the time I was in the 4th grade, I started having trouble in school. I was placed in one of those "talented and gifted" programs, though I never really understood why. I knew I couldn't see what my teachers were writing on the chalkboard. Panicked, I would ask students nearby what the hell the teacher was writing, only to be scolded for distracting the class. One particular teacher was downright mean to me, until she found out that I was having vision problems and needed glasses. Once she realized I was also the son of a preacher man, she tripped all over herself to be kind. Maybe she felt guilty?

Something else odd happened around this time. I came home with division homework one day and just decided not to do it. I don't remember if it was because my parents were too busy to help or I was just too stubborn to ask. There was no rational reason for it. The next day, I was shamed in front of the entire class by an Admiral Ackbar looking mother fucker named Mr. Davis. "Billy Joe, why didn't you do your homework?" he demanded. "Why?" His hand lifted my chin, forcing me to stare up into his beady little eyes peering menacingly behind his spectacles. Mr. Davis' rosy complexion turned beat red when I answered: "I...don't know."

I don't know anything I don't know anything I don't know anything I don't know who I am

I don't know anything I don't know anything I don't know anything I don't know who to be

SATANIC PANIC

My parents were tethered to a particularly pernicious strain of fundamentalist Christianity that got caught up in the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s. That meant no D&D for me! Urban legends were shared in Sunday school and from the pulpit about young people who had necked because their character "died" in this forbidden game. It was the most sinister proxy for evil that I could envision at that time.

The Satanic Panic put everything else under the microscope: toys, comic books, and popular music were all suspect. A copy of Phil Phillip's 1986 "expose" Turmoil In The Toybox lay on the coffee table, pages well-worn and highlighted. He-Man, G.I. Joe, even Star Wars were viewed as tools of the Devil to recruit a desensitized generation of youth into his heathen horde. I'd wake up from one day to learn about something else I couldn't have, play, watch, or do. Video games would not be far behind.

One day, my mother caught me rocking out to the Scorpions in my room and immediately confiscated my radio, outlawing metal from the house (and basically anything with a rock 'n' roll beat). MTV lasted only long enough for me to be exposed to Metallica's visceral "One" and Guns 'n' Roses' "Welcome To The Jungle." While the classic days of rock's infancy were viewed as a time of innocence (I don't think my folks really got what "Blueberry Hill" by Fats Domino was about), anything stemming from the late '60s counterculture forward was viewed as dangerously corrupting.

Various factions within the church began playing games of connect-the-dots with the songs of Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, tying them into a subservice plot by Luciferian cults and the shadowy elite (at that time Communists -- a favorite boogeyman of the era) who were trying to undermine undermining of God, family, and country by subverting its youth. All of popular culture was roped in with the conspiracy, too. Though the house was cleansed of its ungodly influence, the worst was still ahead.

Soon, my mother started cutting me off from neighborhood friends and finally pulled me out of public school altogether around middle of 5th grade. She had learned about this radical new response to America's failing education system through friends from another church who had just taken their own children out of school. Emboldened, she began homeschooling us in West Texas in the mid '80s, during a time when it wasn't a clearly legal practice. Every time the doorbell rang my siblings and I would run and hide, thinking the truant officer had come to take us away to foster care. I didn't understand at the time what I do now: my mother was mentally ill. Furthermore, she was in over her head. This became apparent when she tried to take on the role of teacher.

While I am extraordinarily grateful for the year or two of solid education she gave me (particularly in the writing and public speaking departments, two areas she and my father were naturally gifted in and which have been the buttress of my career), it wasn't long until she became frustrated with the Abeka and Bob Jones University curriculum we were using. One day, when I was struggling with algebra, she declared that we wouldn't have to learn it. "After all, who actually uses algebra in daily life?" she wondered. We were now self-directed learners, a radical new idea that was controversial even in the homeschooling movement ("un-schooling," they called it). Of course, I wasn't allowed to just sit around and watch TV. Consequently, I shifted my focus to the things that were more interesting to me: music, art, history. Math and science? Not so much.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

For years, I remained blithely unaware of what was happening in the world around me in the world of music. I lived in Arlington during the rise of Pantera, Topeka during one of Guns ‘n’ Roses most controversial shows, and Oregon during the height of the grunge era and the sunsetting of the Grateful Dead -- all of it veiled from notice. My life was devoted to church and, if anything, I tried to convince fellow Christians to separate themselves from the tainted allure of the fool’s gold of popular music, television, and video games. For a while, I was a true believer. Call it Stockholm Syndrome, if you like. Infractions of the moral code -- and the slightest temperament of rebellion -- were met with a freshly cut switch, which would leave stinging welts up and down my calves, tights, arms, and back. Thus my conscience was conditioned.

I remember happening upon the pornographic scene in George Orwell’s 1984 and afterwards feeling that the only right and proper thing to assuage my guilt was to burn the everlasting shit out of this smut. Even then I loved the novel, but I couldn't reconcile my faith with this section of it, so I purged it in the flame of backyard trash barrels. At my most fervent, I also lit the match to a stack of MAD Magazines and comic books. As harmless as they might have seemed to the average Joe blinded to the wiles of the Devil, these were gateways into realms of the flesh. “Walk in the spirit, not the flesh,” I recited to myself as fire brandished the yellowed pages of print, slowly turning them black until they were embers caught up by the wind and scattered into the sky. True story: I once threw away a perfectly good copy of Downward Spiral after one hearing the demonic screams of "Becoming" (not to mention the brash blasphemy of "Heretic").

The me that you know doesn't come around much That part of me isn't here anymore

The me that you know is now made up of wires And even when I'm right with you I'm so far away

This kind of extreme separation from the world really fucked me up socially. For years, I couldn't hold on a conversation with another person my age. What would we talk about? I was clueless about anything happening in the world of sports, music, television, or the culture at large. Even though conversation is no longer a problem for me, I still feel odd about friendships. I have an irrational fear that they're going to be taken away from me at any moment, so I keep everyone at a comfortable arm's length. At times, intimacy feels painfully awkward.

Maybe this is why I'm so notorious for leaving shows immediately following the last song. I’ll give my smiles, shake hands, and say goodbye, but avoid sticking around long enough to really get to know people. I’ve been invited to crash on couches to avoid the long drive home, but I always politely decline. Certainly, I don’t want to come across as rude, I just feel like an outsider to the world -- someone who just doesn’t fit in, doesn't belong. Not now, not ever.

TEENAGE ANGST HAS PAID OFF WELL

As I reached my adolescent years, I began going through prolonged spells of melancholy. The prospect of sharing this with others was extraordinarily embarrassing, so I kept it all bottled up inside. Mostly, I tried walking it out on long excursions through the open field next to our house. I worked through a lot of issues during that time and credit those walks with helping me to keep my sanity. As a matter of fact, I recommend daily constitutionals to everyone as a general principle of good mental health. It would be a mistake not to mention that my belief in an omnipresent God at this time played a medicinal role in helping me to cope with my depression, though my views on religion would one day reverse course.

By 18, symptoms of major depression surfaced like a noxious weed and even God could not get me through it. I prayed, too. God, how I prayed, sometimes hours on end. That year, I fell into a downcast mood that refused to dissipate and remained there for months -- four of them straight. I sought refuge in the music of Tchaikovsky, working my way from the fateful Symphony No. 4 to his Symphony No. 6, the Pathétique. The sounds I was hearing tapped into a new emotional alphabet, impossible to transcribe into any tongue. It was remarkable: somehow the music knew precisely what I was feeling. I finally had a soundtrack to my depression.

One day, a buddy and I joined the military on a whim, though he'd later get disqualified for asthma. I felt the Army would provide a much needed "Be All You Can Be" boost to my confidence and a crash course in normie life. I shipped down range to my duty station, Fort Benning, Georgia, for infantry training. My new home would be with Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 58th Infantry Regiment -- the infamous "House of Pain." In the space of 14 weeks, I was exposed to every aspect of humanity imaginable. From the "shark attack" welcome of the drill sergeants on Sand Hill to the rude middle of the night awakenings for physical training, I was in shock most of the time. Slowly, though, I eased into this strange new world and got my bearings.

Almost a full month into this prison world, we were allowed to visit one of the on-base shopping exchanges. I immediately looked for a CD player and began checking out the music section, trying to see if there were names I recognized. "Guns 'n' Roses? Sure they're cool," shrugged my buddy Bradley, a floppy-eared Gomer Pyle looking dude. "But you really need to check out some Soundgarden, dude." I did, picking up their latest, Down On The Upside, and it was like salve to my soul. The music spoke of being trapped ("...and I don't like what you've got me hanging from") and being eternally at odds with the world ("Born without a friend and bound to die alone"). There was even a song about "Boot Camp," the short album closer. The nihilistic despair was strangely comforting.

I must obey the rules I must be tame and cool No staring at the clouds I must stay on the ground In clusters of the mice The smoke is in our eyes Like babies on display Like Angels in a cage I must be pure and true I must contain my views There must be something else There must be something good far away Far away from here And I'll be there for good For good

The song did not resolve happily, and I feared my life wouldn't either. After a serious injury left me permanently wounded, I began to feel my life wasn't being guided by the Hand of God of all, but the random throes of Fate. Maybe they were the same thing. I resigned myself to the misery of a long recovery, during which time I had to learn to walk again. It's a three beer kind of story, maybe I'll share it sometime. Probably not. Returning to civilian life proved to be even more of an adjustment than the military had been, and my shadows of depression lingered with me even as I tried to remain one step ahead of them.

MELANCHOLIA

I have long held a theory that human beings are not built for the world that we have constructed for ourselves. Whether we're talking Seattle traffic or the constant buzz of social media, the frantic pace of our rapidly evolving technocracy has left us a worried, frazzled mess. The studies are conclusive: almost one in five have experienced depression and one in four struggle with anxiety, with PTSD being a household acronym.

A counselor once asked if I enjoyed being depressed. I found it a bit of a repulsive question. I can tell you that there is nothing glamorous about depression. There's no reason to idolize the angst of those sad Kurt Cobain eyes. Everyone has experienced feelings of being bummed out, and for most folks it is a transitory feeling. It comes when one of life's storms arises and leaves when the situation resolves itself. There's a whole section of us, however, for whom the dark clouds never leaves. It just hovers around our heads, like the oppressive, low-hanging specter of an Oregon winter.

Depression isn't always about feeling sad, either. Often it manifests in a general malaise -- you can't bring yourself to care about the things you used to. Other times, it works in tandem with anxiety, seizing your heart at the thought of all the day holds in store, then punishing you with the feeling of dread. We may feel sad, anxious, or fearful and not be able to give a rational explanation for it. In those moments, I cannot imagine a more miserable place to be. With that said, I hasten to add that my description of depression may not align with your own, as it is an intensely personal experience.

Release your head from the world Keep yourself underground No one understands your mind

Humans programmed like robots Making sure you don't belong No one understands your mind

I suspected I had depression in the clinical sense, when I realized that though I wanted to feel better, all I could do was subsist in the misery. Those of you who've been able to talk yourself out of such states will scoff. My mother, who suffers from a host of afflictions that have never been properly diagnosed, was notorious for telling us kids to "snap out of it." I do understand that kind of no-nonsense perspective. Her father and mother were staunchly independent homesteaders of the WWII generation who braved the untamed wilderness of Alaska and the exotic dangers of Australia. The '60s and '70s generation grew up fearful of losing such independence to mental institutions that locked up people, merely because they acted in ways society didn’t understand. The stigma of psychiatric care was every bit as real as the stigma of mental illness. Thus, her approach was quite practical: take Saint John's Wort, get on a good diet of vegetables and fruits, drink plenty of water, get fresh air and exercise. If that doesn’t work, there’s always Jesus.

Despite plenty of prayer and a multitude of home remedies, depression continued plaguing my mind. People frustrated by what they viewed as an easy fix would imply that depressed folk like me just wanted to be depressed, maybe because it got them attention or they were just spoiled rotten. Soon I stopped sharing altogether. As one friend of mine, a real no-nonsense type, told me: “No one cares. You have to get on with your life.” “How do you manage that?” I asked. “What's your secret?” “You just have to shrug it off,” she concluded. I envied the cold, pragmatic stoicism and wished that I could just shrug my shoulders and let everything slide off. At one point, my depression was so acute, I looked into electroconvulsive therapy, memory loss be damned. During my consultation with a specialist, I learned the procedure had advanced since Jack Nicholson’s unfortunate end as a mental patient in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Ultimately, I decided against it.

SEARCH FOR ANSWERS

As with most human situations, our problems stem from a complex mixture of nature and nurture. I posed a question to my psychology professor one day: "Does depression cause us to think depressing thoughts or do depressing thoughts cause us to be in a state of depression?" His answer surprised and relieved me. "Both," he said.

In Psychology 202, we were in the midst of a chapter on depression and other mental disorders. Having recently experienced the loss of my grandmother, I was feeling especially hopeless and decided to ask my prof another burning question at the end of class. "If a person were to see a therapist, does it go on his record?" In my mind, counseling was for the weak and hideously broken. "Not at all," he responded with a smile. "Even psychologists seek help from other psychologists for their depression and anxiety." Then he really blew my mind: "I have a therapist myself. See her once a month. Sort through a lot of life decisions that way." He also assured me that there was no master file of such visits. While a therapist might keep her own notes, it's certainly not something shared with employers and as a rule is kept strictly confidential, as are all medical records.

My first visit to a counselor was nothing like I'd imagined. I wasn't given pills, invited to lay on a couch and look at ink blots, or even asked questions about my parents. Instead, the counselor initiated an open-ended conversation that encouraged me to articulate the tangled mess of thoughts and feelings I'd been bottling up inside. It was the first time I'd ever talked about my experiences in the military or about the emotional upheaval of my childhood. I felt liberated after just a few weeks of these sessions. For a time, I felt very much on top of my problems. Maybe this counseling thing wasn't so bad after all. I even began to recommend it to my friends and stood up for psychologists when mom would bash the profession in one of her trademark rants.

Promises abound You rarely find it to begin Maybe I'm afraid To let you all the way in

I excuse myself I'm used to my little cell I amuse myself In my very own private hell

I noticed a pattern to my depression: it seemed to be triggered by situations in which I felt helplessly incapable of controlling my environment, decisions, and destiny. You know, other people taking advantage of me, a nightmare roommate, an overbearing boss, unrequited love -- that sort of thing. It was like a switch flipped and all of the sudden the feelings flooded in and surrounded me for days, even weeks.

Feelings of loneliness and disquiet were often compounded by negative thinking about the situation. "What's wrong with me that I can't find someone to be with? Am I that unattractive or uninteresting?" The negative self-talk wasn't helping my situation. In some ways, it even turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd walk around with a scowl on my face, prompting friends and family to constantly ask, "What's wrong? Is everything ok?" That's why I realized it may take more muscles to frown than to smile, but that undersmile sure is a lot more comfortable. No wonder people kept themselves at bay.

I actually started practicing my smile in the rearview mirror on the way to school every day, just so I remembered what that felt like. Fake it 'til you make it, the saying goes. Even if I was feeling like a miserable wretch inside, I certainly didn't want to betray those feelings to the world outside. So I got good at being a fake. When people asked, "How's it going?" I'd say, "Fine, just fine, thanks. And you?" (One of my counselors would later call me on that every session: "How are things really?").

When I got married, depression reached peak levels, only now that oppressive, low-hanging cold front wouldn't burn off with the sunshine. The mood never lifted. It was with me 24-7. It wasn't unusual for me to be severely depressed during the normally halcyon days of summer. I knew something had to be done, so I confronted another long-time stigma of mine: medication.

To be continued...

This whole house of cards crumbling slow If I disappear would you even know? The trap is time and no one gets off of this ride alive

So far under Too much pain to tell And now I'm ripped asunder So far under

#Closer To The End #Depression #Suicide #Doom #Alice in Chains #Mad Season #Nine Inch Nails #Prong #Saint Vitus #Soundgarden #Doomed & Stoned

[dearmrsbitch]

February 8, 2019 - You baby gays...

         Q. Outed my friend: I met Ray the first week at college. He’s gay and I’m a lesbian, and it’s been great to have a friend who gets it. Last week his parents were in town and I ran into them all at a local restaurant and asked them if Ray’s boyfriend was going to join them. It kicked off. His parents were livid, there was a very frosty fight, and then they left town early without a word. He’s livid with me and is telling all our friends what I did.        

         The thing is, while I’m really sorry this happened, Ray told me he was out to everyone. I was the one still in the closet when we met, and he encouraged me to come out to my parents because he’d never felt such relief as when he told his. I have emails where he told me about this and told me I had to come out to my family if I wanted to have a good, honest relationship like he did with his parents. He told me the details of that conversation and about the uncle who didn’t accept him and how his family cut that uncle off. I guess, in hindsight, I should have realized it was a bit perfect—that maybe the reason he was so insistent I come out was a sort of trial run to see how it could go—but I never thought it wasn’t true.        

         I am not mad at Ray for being angry. In my case, coming out was for the best and he helped me with that, so I owe him. And even if I didn’t mean to, I caused him a lot of pain with this. It’s just that everyone that I’ve met here at college also met Ray, and now they’re all really angry at me and I’ve been told I’m not welcome at some events because I don’t make people feel safe. Would it be OK to tell some people that I was under the impression that Ray was out? It might make my life easier, but right now Ray’s the one who needs more support and this could complicate that. Besides, maybe I should have known to keep my mouth shut.       

Dear Baby Gay,

Okay, so, what you did wasn’t malicious, but it wasn’t smart and you need some learning.

Look, even as a bisexual married to a man, there is a level of dealing with human sexuality that basically entails - “IT AIN’T ANYONE’S BUSINESS!”

I get that it’s probably.... a generational divide.  You know, when I was little, you could still play “smear the queer” on the playground and no one batted a fucking eye despite it being way wrong, and then you had this massively quick jump to pro-gay rights, and then you had the DOMA backlash, and then you got Obama and the end of DOMA, and now you have Pride parades in the smallest of towns, legal marriage, etc.  All in less than 30 years.  So, things went from upwards slowly from the 50′s to the 90′s, and then jumped exponentially.  The problem is, despite the public presence increasing, there’s a lot of fuckers alive today who are still backwoods angry bigoted hatemongers, you know, the ones who put the orange bigot in charge of the country?  My grandmother still hates interracial marriage, I mean, she’s not right, but if my cousin’s black girlfriend isn’t comfortable being seen with him in her presence until they have a talk - it’s not my job to go, “Oh, Dave?  Yeah, he’s dating a new girl, she’s lovely, she looks like Gabrielle Union!”  I go, “I dunno grandma, ask him. No one tells me shit.”  Because it’s not my place, but when she does come around, you best believe I will call grandma a racist if she does anything.

It’ll probably be a few more generations before it’ll be entirely safe to ask questions like that as simply as you would ask about a hetero couple.  It’s not right, but it’s happening and with homelessness and mental illness still being a problem, care comes first.

But here’s the thing, even if he had a girlfriend, you do him the basic courtesy of asking if the parents know about the person.  What if they just didn’t want him dating, period?  What if he told them he had a girlfriend?  You don’t know, so you ask.  “Hey, cool, so, any subjects I should avoid at dinner?”  Maybe his parents are religious fundies and you’re working with a new coven, you know?  If it’s you and your relationship, then you act how you want, but when it’s other people and their relationship to other people, you owe them the courtesy of asking what’s up - never assume.

It’s like asking for pronouns, girl, it’s just good manners.  (I mean, for all you know he’s transitioning and hasn’t told them yet so is like - “oh yeah, refer to me as a him or he until they leave and then go back to she, I’m not ready yet.” 

Part of being in the community is owning who you are, but also looking out for each other through understanding that we are all coming from different backgrounds, and some people are in a real place of danger.  I mean, if you accidentally out a black trans woman in public, you could get her killed that day.  Bigots are being emboldened right now - and they attack.

We have to be cognizant to provide support, because people come out on their own time and own terms, and if you out someone, even accidentally, you could lead to estrangement, financial issues, abuse, etc. 

You caused him a lot of pain, and you need to give him space.  Apologize, say it wasn’t intentional, and that you’re here if he wants to be friends, but that you’ll wait for him to come around.  You can’t force it, and you can’t argue your way out of it. 

Deep breath, go read some Bechdel, and wait to see what happens,

Mrs. Bitch

#dearmrsbitch #dear prudie #dear prudence #gay etiquette #baby gays