#personally victimized by mass effect

[tenleaguesbeneath]

I feel like ME3 kinda leaves the revelation on Chronos Station hanging when EDI is like “oh yeah Cerberus is Indoctrinating civilians and augmenting them with Reaper cybernetics, that’s why they treat their soldiers’ lives so cheaply”

It comes really late in the game, after Shepard’s walked over a pile of Cerberus bodies. Maybe part of that is that by the time she has a chance to rest after having it confirmed, she’s done fighting Cerberus for good. But then, it’s pretty heavily foreshadowed. Grissom has datapads saying they plan to make Phantoms out of the biotic students if they can take them. Eden Prime has a thing where they’re pretending to the civilians they’re occupying that the people they’re kidnapping are being taken away for forced labor and hiding that they’ll never be seen again. fucking Mars has you see their Reaper-cybernetic-altered faces, though you don’t find out about them not being willing volunteers until later. Liara seems to be aware of this given her convo with Aethyta.

I’m not sure if it’s my copy of ME:Legendary or something else but sometimes when I throw them they get stuck ragdolled in a corner with hit points remaining but they’re not getting up, and finishing them always feels kinda grim.

The version of Shepard they portray who has no comment on either doing that or finding out that she’s been doing that to people who were taken from their families against their will and mind controlled is, like...

it says disturbing things about how inured she is to violence. the entire squad, really.

#mass effect #Liara's the one I'd expect to crack first here because she's the one who has the least military mindset #also she's the one who cracks the most on seeing her homeworld attacked by Reapers #also she's the one who has personal experience with losing a loved one to indoctrination #and also on Thessia she freaks out about fighting the things Reapers turn her species into and nobody else does that #I don't remember Ash or Kaidan saying anything about fighting husks being unbearable in ME1 #or Garrus saying anything about Marauders #but no nothing #Jaal takes learning about exaltation worse than anyone in the main trilogy takes Cerberus #and do the Cerberus troops still feel fear? #what we see from more functional indoctrination victims isn't emotionlessness it's rationalization. #so does assault trooper 54317 drop onto the battlefield afraid but thinking the few seconds their life might slow Shepard down worth it?

[thebibliosphere]

Whenever I talk about the medical neglect and ableism I've encountered as a victim of the healthcare system, there's always some cockwaffle who feels entitled to come into my inbox and make the argument of "not all doctors" while talking about how "people like them" (because it's always someone in a field of medicine who does this) are doing their best and it's really hard because so many people fake being ill to get on welfare (Yikes), but like, yeah, obviously #not all doctors, because if all doctors were negligent, bullying scum bags, I'd be dead.

But here's the thing: while I truly believe that the majority of doctors are doing their best in a system stacked against them and their patients, their presence does not negate the mass harm caused by the bad ones. And there are far more bad ones than you realize.

Fuck, John Oliver literally did a segment on this last week:

Yes, the truly bad, malicious doctors are in the minority. Most are just horrifically burned out and fighting a losing battle against a system, killing both them and their patients through a lack of funding and resources and profound overwork.

But the malicious ones do exist, and they will go out of their way to harm patients who don't kowtow to them.

I almost lost my life because when I was in my early twenties, I told a doctor I didn't think she was listening to me, and I disagreed with her assessment of my mental health (she was not a mental health doctor, and I was there for heart palpitations and chronic pain). She retaliated by putting "non-compliant" in my file.

There was also a fun little "doesn't show respect" note too that lives rent-free in my head because I know I wasn't rude. I was polite. I just didn't agree with her, and my refusal to accept her off-handed comment that "you probably have bipolar or BPD" (again, I was there for heart palpitations and chronic pain) meant I was "refusing care."

I wasn't. I just refused to be slapped with a mood/personality disorder when I was there because I kept fucking fainting when I stood up.

(Spoiler alert: it was dysautonomia)

That "non-compliant" marker followed me around for years. It followed me across an ocean and effectively ensured that any doctor I saw was going to treat me like absolute dogshit because no one wants to help Difficult Patients. It wasn't until I was so undeniably ill, literally on the brink of death, that anyone helped me.

I'm alive because of a good doctor. And all the good ones that came after him because of him.

So, I know they exist. You don't have to tell me that.

But I really fucking need you to acknowledge the bad ones and that you're part of a system with a long, long history of abusing minorities and vulnerable people. I need you to acknowledge that because it's the only way we're going to survive this godforsaken nightmare and make things better.

So yeah, #notalldoctors, but if you feel the need to say that because someone talking about being literally left to die by the medical system hurts your feelings, I'm going to have to ask you to take a step back and ask yourself if you're going into medicine for the right reasons.

Namely: do you want to help people, even the "difficult" ones?

Even the ones who might disagree with you?

Even if they're on welfare?

Even if they'll never get "better" in a way that means "cured"?

Just a thought. But hey, what do I know. I'm just someone who experienced hemolytic anemia because doctors kept telling me I was anxious and needed to exercise more 🤷‍♀️.

#chronic health tag #medical abuse #medical neglect #medical #ableism #to all the good health care workers who follow me and leave supportive comments: I appreciate you so much #but you need to come get your fellow drs #and idk #give 'em a shake or something #Youtube

[mr-ribbit]

this isn't meant to soften or reduce the objective transmisogyny + additional hate action going into this, but since the people running these harassment campaigns are acting like they're literal baby children who need their hands held to understand anything, maybe this needs to be said:

what you're doing and how you treat trans women on this website is fucking MEAN. if you want to sit there and honestly convince yourself that you're *not* a transmisogynist or a transphobe or a misogynist or any other type of bigot - like if you genuinely believe that and are confused why people are calling you these things - then maybe we need to start from little primary colored building blocks and tell you that you're being fucking mean and rude and actively harmful to real people who read the things you say. im not sure why we need to start off with "trans women have feelings" - just kidding I know exactly why we need to - but maybe you don't.

no matter who you're talking to, do you honestly think accusing someone you do not know of being a pedophile, en masse, behind their back /and/ in a public forum, is a reasonable way to treat someone for making a tumblr post about video games or political opinions? even if you strongly disagree with the post, you think someone deserves to be treated like that by people they don't know? take a second please and sincerely imagine how that would feel. wouldn't it be scary? wouldn't you wonder who the people were who thought this about you - if they're people you know - if they're just a few people that will continue saying mean things to you forever or if there are thousands of people who choose to dedicate their time and energy specifically to making you feel bad? if you accidentally write a post in the wrong tone or unknowingly interact with a shitty person, that there are uncountable people that will keep track of that just to hurt you later? that's fucking horrifying

and to zone in on what's specifically happening here: do you think randomly accusing people of being pedophiles or sexual abusers has no effect on them? like a lot of you tend to excuse yourself in these discussions by saying "I didn't actually see the context of what they were saying" or "I didn't see that they apologized already" or "I didn't actually understand the post was a joke" or whatever other kneejerk response to make sure *you* aren't seen as a bad person. do you realize that makes you look even meaner? you didn't bother to actually follow up on a thought you had about someone before sending them hateful messages or making public accusations about them? those actions are harmful whether or not you like the victim at the end of the day.

believe it or not some people you send this shit to are survivors of abuse themselves, or have their own historical personal reasons to be weighing in on a touchy subject. when you baselessly decide it's ok to call someone an abuser of any type, that person is probably *also* disgusted by whatever horrible shit you're accusing them of. as someone that hates these things as much as you do in order to attack someone for them: what do you think it's like to have complete strangers think that about you? how many eggshells would you walk on if random people thought so little of you that they were ok doing this?

it's mean. it's heinous, cruel bullying, and if you genuinely think you are not doing it from a place of transmisogyny or hatefuk bias over the victims' identity, then you need to understand that that's not an excuse. "i didn't even know she was trans" ok, it was still mean to call her a pedophile with 200 of your closest friends in public. "im trans so it can't be transphobia" ok it was still mean to assume someone was endorsing abuse when they were talking about being accused of abuse. "i didn't see the post where she said it was a joke" ok it was still mean to actively harass someone without bothering to look into the full context.

at the end of the day, yes, obviously I still think you're all transmisogynist assholes who are clearly willing to gang up on a woman who has nothing to do with your problems simply because she dared to speak on them. i think you're bigoted and unwilling to examine that if it means giving up your vitriol against someone who doesn't like your favorite video game or whatever excuse of the week. but like even if you were just doing it for love of the hate game, it's fucking weird heinous shit and i hope you're happy having that be a central part of your life

to be clear: im not transfemme and if I'm overstepping or talking over anyone please let me know. im not speaking for anyone's actual experiences except my own, which is the experience of being angry at how much literal bullying and harassment I see excused on this so-called progressive queer blogging website

#cw transmisogyny discussion #cw discourse idk #sorry pls tell me if im out of line and for gods sake dont go harass anyone ELSE if you dont like my post

[unbidden-yidden]

I have gotten so many messages from folks who see what's happening to Jews right now, how literally any statement from us that isn't straight up "death to Israel!" "tear it down!" "river to the sea!" etc. - no matter how tempered in other ways or critical of the Israeli government it is - anything even mildly supportive of the terrorism victims/their families in their grief and/or Israelis deserving to live is getting dog piled to an absurd degree. And yes, that primarily targets Jews (because we're the ones primarily speaking on it) but it definitely is also hitting anyone not Jewish who says this as well. Immediately, overnight, the left has made any position that respects everyone's human rights and allows Jews room to grieve our murdered and missing family and friends without telling us they deserved to die in terrible ways completely radioactive. Like literally even the most milquetoaste statement attracts numerous hysterical commentators. And because it's so toxic, people are afraid to speak up.

And I've now heard from a lot of gentiles that they had no idea how deep the rot of leftist antisemitism went, how they've been seeing this unfold with horror, and are afraid to speak up.

Here's what I'll say: those messages give me a lot of strength, because they help me remember that I'm not insane, that this is horrendous, and we are seeing in real time exactly who would have helped the Gestapo find us if they were sufficiently convinced that this is "decolonization." That yes, the backlash really *is* that bad. I hear that affirmation and I appreciate it, and I understand your fear, because it was mine too. I myself strongly considered at the beginning not saying anything about this until I could do so without being harassed. (I decided against that because I am physically incapable of shutting up when it pertains to my people, but I understand the sentiment.)

Here's the thing: this is never going to end - those people who take seriously the question "are Jews people?" are going to be the vocal minority unless and until we all speak out. Jews are 2% of the US population and 0.2% of the world's population - there are literally more self-identified Nazis in America than there are Jews. I would honestly be surprised if there weren't more horseshoe theory leftists in the world than Jews also.

That being the case, we really do need our allies to speak up with us. I think if we all spoke up at once, it might be enough to break the silence-taken-as-agreement and shame everyone but the avowed antisemites (rather than the thoughtless and opportunistic ones) back into keeping their antisemitism under wraps. Which does have the effect of bringing the mob under control. Jews have faced a ton of mob violence in the form of pogroms throughout our history and backlash to Jewish victimhood. (Tl;dr - "How dare you make me consider how I might have benefited from or been complicit in hurting Jews? This is actually the fault of the Jews." is a disturbingly common thought process.) (You may also be wondering what I mean by "opportunistic;" I can explain in another post if people are interested.)

I know it's scary. I am well aware that you might lose friends from this. I personally decided that if those "friends" valued Jewish lives so little, they were never my friends to begin with, but it's different for non-Jews. They may genuinely be your friends. I'm not demanding you do this for me or my community, but I am asking you to consider what your line is for your friends. And if you are able to talk to them, to ask them what makes this group different from all other groups in terms of deserving compassion and human rights, it may just help us to quiet the mob.

And, if nothing else, just privately reminding those of us who are speaking about it that we are grounded in reality and compassion helps combat the mass gaslighting going on.

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

changeling steve whose fae abilities activate early bc of the upside down, which surprises him bc he had no idea he wasn't human

usually changelings are a little weird, but don't become like Full Fae until they come of age, somewhere around 20, but sometimes if their life is in danger or they're otherwise under a great deal of stress, they can Blossom early

steve's never been a little weird. in fact, he's always been good at being Very Normal, always exactly what everyone expects him to be, exactly what everyone wants him to be. when he's young, his parents want a quiet boy they can show off at dinner parties, so steve dutifully bends his personality into shape, polite and good enough at the piano to play something for the grownups and let them coo over him (never too good or too polite, because his parents want him to be a little boy who'll grow into a Man's Man, and that means not liking music too much and climbing trees without getting dirty and pulling on girls pigtails)

when he gets to high school, his parents want him to join sports teams, so he bends his personality again and doesn't think about how easy it is for him to gain the muscle mass and dexterity required, because he must just have some kind of natural talent for it. the team has its own expectations of him: they want a King, someone who's good with girls and likes to kick down at the unpopular masses, so he does that too, picks up on everyone's insecurities the easiest out of all his followers, always seems to know exactly how to twist his words to make his victims feel the worst

then he meets nancy, and it's the first time he's not sure exactly what someone wants from him. sometimes he wonders if she even knows what she wants him to be. he still does his best though, because that's what he does, bending and twisting into the perfect boyfriend, sweet, attentive, a little roguish just to keep the edge on. and for a while it works, even after barb and the demogorgon and the nailbat in his trunk that doesn't fit any of the people he's supposed to be and sometimes makes him itch so much he feels like his skins going to crawl off

but then it's the next halloween, and nancy calls him bullshit and he knows she's right. doesn't know how to not be bullshit though, no ones ever wanted that from him. he could try though, for her, he thinks, if that's what she wants, so he shows up at her house a few days later with a bouquet, only to find dustin henderson demanding he take out his bat again

and later, in the junkyard, while the kids are in the bus yelling and steve's been knocked on his back by a demodog, bat out of reach as he frantically pushes at the heavy weight of the monster on top of him, he curses how weak and useless his stupid human hands are. if he was more like the demodogs, with their gnarled claws and copious amounts of teeth, he'd have no problem winning this fight. and as he thinks it, as he deliriously and desperately wishes he had some kind of natural defense against creatures like this, something changes inside him. it feels like someone's injected pop rocks into his bloodstream, and they seem to collect in his hands, where they're still uselessly scratching at the demodogs tough hide

except, they're not uselessly scratching anymore. now they're carving into the thing like butter, because his nails have gone from blunt and fragile to something long and hard like steel, and the tendons in his hands have shifted and strengthened to be much more effective at cutting through meat. he has claws now. actual, literal claws, a lot like the ones the demodogs have, although his are sort of glowing and shimmering from within like he's full of fireflies. it would explain the buzzing in his veins. but he can't think about that now, has to get this thing off of him, has to protect the kids, has to live another day

and at the same time, across town in a little trailer, the only two witches in hawkins have just gotten hit with a blast of released magical energy that's so strong it sends them physically reeling. eddie actually falls on his ass. wayne helps him up while the kid asks what the hell that was, and honestly wayne isn't absolutely sure himself. doesn't feel human, even if the mortal panic it's laced with feels very human indeed, and it takes him a while to place that fizzy feeling as fae magic. a Blossoming.

so he explains to eddie about changelings, cuffs him good-naturedly around the head when the kid immediately relates it to his nerd game (he does this every time wayne teaches him something new about magic), and explains a little more about fae in general. he's told eddie about them before, but fae tend to keep to themselves, so there's been no real need to explain more than basic etiquette and safety measures eddie should take if he ever came across a fairy in the wild

now though, he explains, he thinks eddie should reach out. that Blossom was early, panicked, which means there's some kid out there about eddie's age who's going through magical puberty into an entirely new species directly after some kind of terrible ptsd-inducing event. so he tells eddie to keep an eye out for them at school, because magical folk gotta stick together, and eddie agrees, because they do, and frankly yeah that sounds like a terrible thing to go through alone and confused

so imagine his dismay when king steve shows up to school the week after, clearly beat to shit and looking confused as hell when the things he reaches for end up in his hand without him actually grabbing them

reaching out might be a little harder than eddie expected. but, cursing himself a little for being too good a person to leave even king steve in the dark like that, he does it anyway.

#and yeah obviously they fall in love #steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things

[bighungrywolf]

Aaaah, nothing like letting Matt give me a good massage after a heavy meal. This masseur works wonders, normally it would take hours to transform my last snack into pure muscle mass. However, with his masterful hands, Matt gets the fella in my guts to stop jiggling within minutes of starting to caress every nook and cranny of my torso, touching the right places to trigger a quick and effective digestion. Best of all, I don't have to pay a penny for these services. The first time Matt wanted me to pay, but just by hinting that letting him live and being safe from my stomach was more than enough payment, Matt instantly understood that I was in no position to demand anything as I listened to my stomach growl at the mere thought of including a delicious masseuse as a snack between meals. I now have a personal masseur to help me absorb the numerous victims that join my stomach on a daily basis, while Matt remains safe from being devoured, at least until I find a new replacement, at which point there will be nothing to stop Matt being on the other side of the digestion process he has so often assisted me in.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Far-right politicians with an explicit history of antisemitism, such as Marine Le Pen, have been praised in recent months for their support of Israel and virulently anti-Muslim sentiment. On November 15th, Elon Musk tweeted out his support for the “great replacement theory”—the idea that Jewish people are engineering white genocide—leading to condemnations from the White House, and from X advertisers such as Apple and Disney. On November 17th, Musk announced an X ban on pro-Palestinian phrases like “from the river to the sea,” which he characterized as antisemitic hate speech. Minutes after the announcement, Jonathan Greenblatt, Director of the ADL, logged on to express his gratitude to Musk, writing: “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”  In a recent article for the far-right Washington Free Beacon, provocatively titled “What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis,”  bestselling British historian Andrew Roberts mounts a rousing defense of Nazism, ostensibly in the name of condemning antisemitism. Although the Nazi government began systematically murdering disabled and queer people even before the start of the war, Roberts insists that their operations were incidentally rather than deliberately sadistic, and that the majority of German people during the war opposed mass murder. If his aim is clearly to demonize the cause of Palestinian liberation as a whole, his exoneration of European fascism as “just following orders” is no less central of a claim. By conflating “antisemitism,” “genocide,” and even “Nazism” with Palestine, Hamas, and Islam as a whole, this kind of historical revisionism works to redeem the European far-right as inherently civilized even in its most barbaric actions.  Any attempt to adopt a more humanist perspective, to take a longer or wider lens on the annihilation of Europe’s Jewish communities, or to relate their struggles and suffering to the struggles and suffering of others would appear to betray the ethos of post-Holocaust Jewishness. Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon both famously argued that the extreme state violence of fascism and the Holocaust was an imperialist backlash, the excesses of colonial violence returning home, only shocking in that it took place on European soil. In his introduction to Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman describes the insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a form of historical decontextualization. Or, more plainly, as a refusal to engage in collective self-reflection. “One way is to present the Holocaust as something that happened to the Jews; as an event in Jewish history. This makes the Holocaust unique, comfortably uncharacteristic and sociologically inconsequential.” Bauman asserts that the underlying rationale for this circular logic, by which abstracted antisemitism is both sole cause and sole effect of the Holocaust, is collective exoneration. It works as a shield for modern European civilization, capable of outliving such atrocities.

[...]

It is not incidental then that, in line with right-wing ideological programs, the mainstream current of Holocaust narratives primarily encourage identification with the perpetrators rather than with the victims. They are propelled by the cause of personal enlightenment, encouraging the reader to look within for evil and to root it out rather than ever looking outward at the world surrounding them. Evil, this version of history would have you believe, is a personal problem and not a systemic one. It can crystallize through a mysterious process into mass evil, a spiritual rot. This gives it a kind of mystical aspect. It is easier from this perspective to believe in the innate evil of some, in the innate goodness of others. This moral binary is frequently mobilized in defense of violence and injustice. In a deleted tweet, Netanyahu called Israel’s ongoing genocidal attack on Gaza “a war between the children of light and the children of darkness.” In a December 2023 speech, Joe Biden reaffirmed his condemnation of Hamas, which he implicitly collapsed into a condemnation of Palestinians as a whole, calling them “a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” Both were invoking this moral binary, the deformed vocabulary of white supremacy and colonialism. For if the world is made up of people who are “good” and “bad,” “civilized” and “barbaric,” rather than of societies shaped by ideologies, then it is possible to characterize an entire group of people as evil, to dehumanize them, to declare them guilty all the way down to their newborn babies, to justify their mass murder. In broader terms, this is a totalizing story about history; one in which the European perpetrators of wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, can redeem themselves by retelling their crimes but this time as witnesses to horror rather than as active participants. They can atone and wash away the sin of what they have done by giving it a narrative structure with an ending and a moral lesson, one in which the Holocaust finds its silver lining in the creation of the state of Israel, one in which Europe becomes civilized again, one in which blame is shifted from Germany to Palestine, and from fascists to anti-fascists. 

#israel #holocaust #genocide #antisemitism

[nocturnowlette]

I don't know if this has been said before, but Everywhere at the End of Time is one of the most interesting examples of mass suggestibility and psychological priming that I've ever seen.

Some people seem to think that suggestions are only something that can be done with trance, but it's simply a core part of human communication. If you've ever gone into the comments of a youtube video that you liked and read a bunch of positive comments and left liking the video more after, you've been suggested.

If someone has ever anonymously insulted you and altered the way you saw yourself for a while, you've been suggested. If you've ever been a victim of losing "the game" or told your breathing is now manual, you've been suggested.

Suggesting someone is the mere act of summoning an idea in their mind that alters their behavior or perception. Even for a few particular series of hypnotic files, there seems to be intentional campaigns run to make them seem "dangerous" and "too effective" to plant the idea in the mind of anyone who listens to it.

In a weirdly similar sense, the buzz around Everywhere at the End of Time is essentially a self-sustaining feedback loop of suggestion. I am not saying that the album is not an experience or is without artistic merit or doesn't affect someone in any way, necessarily. However, I would be much more surprised if listening to repeated degrading loops of old music for 6 hours doesn't exhaust someone's brain.

The idea of it simulating dementia, however, is complete nonsense. I don't know where the idea started, but it seems to be in that perfect zone of "a little hard to believe, but easy to find 'proof' of as you listen". The moment someone finds themselves exahausted from hours of this album, find their brain challenged in a way it normally isn't, suddenly that seed of an idea planted in their head starts to sprout. And, as it continues and the concrete effects mix with the person's paranoia about the suggestion, it will eventually become as real as if it genuinely was. Over the course of 6 hours, at least.

And, once this "effect" was observed enough, it was given cultural legitimacy through personal testimony en masse and pseudoscientific "video essayists" trying to find these magical elements that simulate fuckin dementia. It's so fascinating to see happen in real time, and an interesting isolated example of how an idea can affect not just persons, but people.

Luckily for us, suggestions have a tendency to fade. Your breathing went back automatic again, after all.

#owlette #hypnosis #suggestion #everywhere at the end of time #eateot #music #the caretaker #sociology

[communistkenobi]

I get what you mean through that post about TWD but for the sake of someone who can't articulate why, what is political abt TWD?

do not take what I’m about to say as the only possible interpretation of the walking dead - or zombie apocalypse media more broadly, but twd acts as a handy representative for the genre in the popular north american consciousness I think, so I will be using it interchangeably. But I think there are a couple productive perspectives you can take with this kind of media.

fundamentally I think twd is horror aimed at the middle class. It presents a world where the state is no longer present, where your fear of other people cannot be soothed by calling the police (the protagonist of the show being a cop is notable here). the state in this imaginary is the sole barrier between civilisation and savagery. People turn on each other, loot, destroy property, and are generally untrustworthy. Zombies are an unthinking hoard of non-persons who only spread disease and death. The suburb is no longer safe. The ‘message’ or thesis of twd and shows like it is that human beings are only orderly and polite to one another so long as there is a state to enforce these social norms, and absent that, everyone will turn on each other (the “social contract”). Zombies in this case are less an expression of medical anxieties about a pandemic (although that’s not not a concern), but more so an expression of concerns about ‘mass immigration’ and a general racial intrusion into white suburban life. Zombies aren’t just a plague people deal with, but almost always cause the complete dissolution of American society. I don’t think you can decouple zombies in popular American consciousness from the racial anxieties of white people.

and more deeply than that I think american zombie media is a similar type of expression of what Cesaire calls the boomerang effect - what colonial powers do overseas they will eventually do to themselves. Now he was speaking of Europe’s turn to fascism (fascism in this instance being framed as a form of domestic colonialism), and twd is not necessarily presenting zombies as a punishment we bring on ourselves. America and Canada are also both settler colonial states, meaning that settlers permanently occupy the land they have invaded instead of returning home, so this is slightly different. But I think when people imagine zombie apocalypses, they are working through a scenario where their own civilisation is devastated by some invading force, where their stolen property and land are stolen back from them. They are working through an imagined boomerang effect, a fantasy where they are the blameless victims and their ill-gotten gains are taken from them unjustly. The history of settler colonial states is such a horrific, apocalyptic state of affairs that projecting that back onto oneself is a way of working through that history without ever reckoning with what that means. It is easier to fear colonialism happening to you than to extend sympathy to those who have been dispossessed by your ancestors, and in this configuration, you don’t have to confront your own way of life or the part you play in this history.

And it’s doing other stuff too. I think there’s a lot you can dig into with how masculinity is portrayed in these types of shows - men protecting their families by killing hoards of zombies, by being rewarded at every turn for distrusting other people and being generally anti-social. White men in particular have internalised ideas about masculinity that are bound up in violence and racial superiority, and zombie media provides a handy fantasy in which you’re forced to protect your wife and kids by killing as many people as humanly possible. In this framework, the zombie apocalypse is almost a welcome state of affairs, facilitating a return of traditional masculinity where men can freely express their violent desires, and their victims are mindless diseased non-persons who you are morally obligated to destroy. Zombie apocalypses provide a scenario where masculinity is valuable again. It might be instructive to consider zombie media as “inventing a guy to get mad at” so you have some place to put these ideas about masculine and racial domination. White middle class Americans are probably the safest group of people on planet earth, but because of that sustained safety you need to invent imagined scenarios where the violence of your identity as a white person or a man is still relevant, and so shoving that into a fantasy where you HAVE to kill people is alluring. Of course, whiteness and masculinity still produce a lot of violence in the world and these people are generally violent in both direct and indirect ways (calling the cops on black people, mass shootings, etc), but like it’s harder to consider yourself a conquering hero while dialling 911 you know. I think this is a wish fulfilment fantasy in its purest form, confirming all of their racial paranoias and providing them with a space where they are REQUIRED to kill shitloads of people.

There’s definitely more you can say but I’ll cut it off for now. And just to be clear I’m not saying enjoying twd or the last of us or anything else makes you a white suprematist or whatever, but zombies in popular consciousness are (at least partially) tapping into the anxieties present in white supremacist settler colonial states. I can’t speak to the entire genre, and I’m sure there are instances where zombie apocalypses are presented differently, but at least in this instance twd is generally reactionary and provides a safe space for people to work out their feelings about whiteness and masculinity while living in the imperial core

#asks #book club #<- tagging for cesaire mention. discourse on colonialism is rly good highly recommend #racism tw #zombies

[hussyknee]

"Not publicized to prevent copycats" is an absolute bullshit excuse in a nation of school shooters btw.

Please, please read this.

The Congolese genocide is one of the biggest mass murders in modern history, counting eight to ten million murder victims and millions of others severely injured.

As for Palestine, but the bombardment is somehow more intense than ever, they killed about 178 people including 52 babies the first day after the ceasefire. Zionists got hold of the photo of one of the babies cradled by his grandfather in his tiny shroud, his face waxy and eyes open and glassy in death, and has been passing it around, along with other similar pics of dead little children, claiming they're "obviously a doll". The open calls for genocide from the Israeli general public are more virulent than ever, and the IOF has arrested and imprisoned more Palestinians in West Bank than they released. The increase in intensity may be due to Blinken having told Netanyahu that "he had weeks, not months" to finish up whatever he wanted to do (genocide isn't good for the holiday spirit of the voting public methinks), and Netanyahu reportedly wants to "thin the population" as much as possible and herd the remaining survivors out through the Egyptian border.

Please take the time to scroll the tags at least every other day and reblog one or two posts. Keeping eyes on the unfolding situation helps keep the pressure on and politicians are clearly nervous now! YOU can't do anything, but you help create a vital domino effect for hundreds of thousands of people who CAN organize. Relevance is survival. Don't let these people have martyred themselves in vain!

#my TL is an absolute horror #i can't imagine what palestinians and the general arab diaspora are feeling #to be honest i was expecting this. self-immolation as protest i mean #i can't imagine how more people can witness this without being driven to desperate suicidality #before the truce everyone was kind of numb with the ceaseless trauma #but then the truce allowed them to process the enormity of their losses a little bit? #which was even more cruel imo because when they started up again it just broke the palestinians #this is what we meant when we said there's nothing humanitarian about pauses or truces or anything less than a permanent ceasefire #self-immolation #tw burning alive #tw burning #tw suicide #tw death #tw child death #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #congolese genocide #pro palestinian protests #congolese protests #DRC #war crimes #fuck israel #fuck the USA #ceasefire now #free palestine #free congo #media suppression #knee of huss

[raxistaicho]

Where do you think the people who are specifically pro-Church of Seiros are coming from? Generally fans seem to pick their faction through some combination of their ideology and the lord's personal appeal. However, Church fans seem to mostly rewrite the church's ideology with their headcanons, and while they like the green hairs, it doesn't feel as intense as with the other lords. I guess genocide comes up a lot in their takes, but then they don't seem too concerned with Duscur.

I have noticed a desire from Church of Seiros fans for there to be a religion in a JRPG game that isn't evil (I think the presence of evil churches in JRPGs is somewhat overstated, personally), and I guess they partly project onto that, but that doesn't really explain all of it.

I think the bigger reason is simply that the game gives people a lot of cause to sympathize with Rhea. She's a genocide survivor who never really grew up or escaped from her tragedy. There's several scenes of her emotionally letting down her walls and expressing the long centuries of pain she weathered, and even Crimson Flower, the route where she's at her worst, portrays her end as a wounded, cornered woman, desperately and vainly calling out for her mother to save her. The final panning shot of her corpse is a somber one.

It's far, far easier to picture sad, lonely, and burdened Rhea, the woman who did her best to keep Fodlan together all on her own, than it is to imagine the generations upon generations of people who suffered and died in Fodlan, in the the world she created the social framework of when she glorified Crests as the the manifest approval of the goddess. Just as the game never really questions Edelgard's ideals, only her means, it never questions whether Rhea at least tried to do good, even if she ended up causing more harm than she ever intended.

Media simply primes us to care more about characters and less about nameless masses, see how Strikes hyper-focuses on Edelgard striking down Judith while ignoring how she then spares all of Judith's grunts in that very same moment. See how people praise Claude for trying hard to protect his friends at Derdriu, while ignoring the way he futilely throws away the lives the generic soldiers standing between him and Edelgard. See how people just don't give a shit about Fleche despite her being a perfect reflection of Dimitri, the person so many praise for his character arc, in her final moments.

Because Rhea ties all her work and all her identity to the Holy Church of Seiros, Edelgard fighting it means fighting her. People who sympathize with Rhea more than Edelgard are naturally going to oppose her and want to support the church, though this comes at the cost of building up Rhea's positives and ignoring her own flaws and the flaws of her church.

As for the huge difference in reaction to the Duscur genocide, there's a lot of pieces to it. The biggest thing is that the narrative of 3H just doesn't care about Duscur nearly as much as the Nabateans. The only person of Duscur we ever meet is a character who properly exists on only one route and who does not have plot armor, so in every route other than Azure Moon you'll barely hear about Duscur, and unfortunately because Azure Moon is obsessed with tying everything in Fodlan into Dimitri's personal tragedy we hear more about how Duscur effected him than it did the actual genocide victims. Also we just don't see Dedue weep for the slaughter of his people the way we do with Rhea.

Hope that cleared some things up!

#fire emblem three houses #edelgard discourse #edelgard von hresvelg #edelgard positive #rhea

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Rinat Harash

In over three weeks of extensive coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, National Public Radio (NPR) has managed to commit an impressive amount of journalistic wrongdoings, misleading tens of millions of devoted listeners across America.

Since the atrocious Hamas massacre on October 7, NPR has been overwhelmingly focused on the victimization of Palestinians, while interviewing biased individuals, omitting critical facts, and including outright distortions.

One of NPR’s most egregious reports from this period, which includes all of the above, is Daniel Estrin’s “Examining who carried out the brutal violence in Israel three weeks ago.”

In this despicable attempt to humanize the perpetrators of the deadly carnage, rape and kidnapping, listeners need to suffer through empathy-inducing descriptions such as this:

On October 8, a militant returned to Gaza with Mohammed’s cellphone and personal effects and told Mohammed’s family what happened. He said Mohammed had made it a mile or two inside Israel, and an Israeli aircraft shot him — five bullets to the chest, one near the neck. Mohammed recited a prayer before he died. The neighbor told us Mohammed had led a pretty ordinary life. He didn’t finish his high school matriculation exam. He worked as a taxi driver. He got married, had lots of friends and family at his wedding, started a business selling food products. But everyone in the family and neighborhood knew he belonged to the militant wing of the Iranian-aligned Islamic Jihad.

NPR’s Estrin then turns to interview Mkhaimar Abusada, whom he introduces as “a political analyst” in Gaza.

In fact, Abusada is also Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who has called for violence against Israelis. Surely, this is a relevant piece of information to mention when NPR gives him the platform to say: “Hating the Jews or hating Israel as an occupier … that probably explain the brutality that took place on the 7th of October”.

At the end of the report, Estrin includes an edited version of a phone call from a terrorist to his parents in Gaza on October 7. The full recording of the call, released by Israel on October 25, clearly includes the terrorist’s father congratulating him after the son boasts of killing ten Jews.

NPR’s version — through Estrin’s narration — omits this. Instead, it makes it look like the family wanted the son to return home and never supported his actions. It even goes as far as evoking empathy for their plight under Israeli bombardment.

#npr #media bias #national palestinian radio #national public radio #daniel estrin #mkhaimar abusada #hamas #gaza

[multiversetravelingjournalist]

Arknights: Durin Conlang

So... I just learned that Arknights and its world of Terra has its own version of the vertically challenged underground-dwelling comedy relief people. so, like any sane artist I decided that they too will get their own language alongside the other languages I have cooking for the other nations (which I should make a list for, like the Mass Effect one).

in under an hour of brainstorming, I know these things will be featured:

Grammatical features will be governed by affixes that change and or remove the existing phonemes/suprasegmentals of the root word. in other words, changing the stress and/or tone, the place/ manner of articulation of the consonants, and/or the openness, frontness, nasality, length, voicing, etcetera of the vowel will determine things like tense, plurality, person, and other features that I haven't seen in any other natural or constructed language.

Derivational affixes (those that change the definition of the word itself down to whether it's now a noun or a verb) will use the more traditional prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes, and the rare infix. as well as good old compounding.

derivation includes a tool for doing the verb, a person who does the verb, and the person who is the receiver of the verb. e.g. "weapon", "warrior/soldier", and "murder victim" could have the same root.

the two systems above have their own metaphorical terms to describe how they work and are viewed by native speakers. respectively, they are called "Sculpture" and "decoration". with grammar being viewed as -- in this case -- literally changing and refining the shape of the word. while the derivations are viewed as adding little touches to an already finished work.

The phonology of this language will have lots of plosive. perhaps in addition to using most places of articulation, they are more diversified by secondary articulations like aspiration, palatalization, labialization. maybe there are additional phonemes such as affricates, nasal releases, lateral releases, rhotic releases, that will drive up that plosive count.

Syllables might have plosives and/or affricates in the onset and the other consonants like nasals and liquids in the coda. this is based on English onomatopoeia like "bam", "clang", "crash", etcetera. a sort of friendly acknowledgement at the literary roots that the race is no doubt based on.

These are the things that I am most sure to include in the final version of the language. but they are also subject to change. already I am wondering if I should switch the morphological nature of the grammar and derivational morphologies. seeing as derivation is more like changing the shape of a word more deeply while morphology is more like the bits and pieces you would add afterwards. what would you think?

there are also some features I am considering but not yet sure about committing to just yet. some of those features being:

subject and object person being marked by the manner of articulation in the onset and coda.

tense/aspect/mood/other marking via the properties of the vowel in the root's nucleus.

direction words encoding three-dimensional information due to living in an underground maze-like environment.

a metaphor for time going from light to dark.

This is all I got for now, I'll try to keep you updated on any progress. till then, feedback is appreciated. till next time... ;).

#mvtjournalist speaks #conlang #conlanging #constructed language #conlang idea #fanlang #fanfiction #fanfiction writing #creative writing #arknights #durin #arknights durin #durin arknights #arknights fanfic #arknights fanfiction

[yepthatsacowalright]

For no logical reason whatsoever today I am mentally on fire about the camerawork in Midnight Mass. In the artbook they talk about how scenes are mostly filmed handheld initially and then gradually shift to stationary shots as the story gets more supernatural and just...my god is it effective. When Crockett is filmed handheld like a docudrama in the beginning it feels so freakin’ human. You sense that person standing behind the camera, showing you what they see, at person-level height, moving in a person-like way. The Soolaimon sequence also feels filmed with so much love, like a local islander showing off what makes up this little community they call home. Then in contrast, even in the first episode, there are stationary shots, drained of all signs of life behind the camera, and positioned in places no human could feasibly go. Father Paul drags the trunk into the rectory and we move up onto the freakin’ ceiling to watch him tap on it and get a response from inside. What I find interesting about this too is how the instinct of a horror filmmaker typically is to do the opposite of this. Keep the camera steady at first, make the world feel safe and stable, then switch to shaky handheld when the scares happen to induce anxiety and panic. But handheld-to-stationary makes so much more sense here. Highlighting the imperfect, intimate feel of Crockett Island life vs. the surreal way the mind heightens an experience of fear and trauma. The freeze response of fight/flight/freeze. It isn’t a horror story, it’s a love story hijacked by a horror story, and even the camera is a victim to the horror’s influence.

#never gonna shut uppp about this showww #cinematography #midnight mass #<3

[mckitterick]

Exhibit A: Cops are worthless

More than 800 police were on duty Wednesday - 600 KCPD cops and an additional 250 from outside cop shops - for the Chiefs Super Bowl win parade and rally at Union Station. Despite their heavy presence, they failed to stop a mass shooting.

One person, local KKFI radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed. An additional 22 people were injured, with three still in critical condition. About half the victims are children.

It's believed that the shooting occurred because of a dispute between teenagers who missed each other at least 23 times, not because of terrorism or extremism.

In the wake of this mass shooting - during a run of ever-increasing gun violence (though other crimes are dropping) - Kansas City residents are demanding stricter gun laws. But Missouri state law doesn't allow cities to pass gun-related laws (to stop KC from doing so, specifically), and Missouri has famously lax gun laws.

Cops do almost nothing to protect citizens, and nothing to prevent crime.

They exist merely to punish perpetrators, which has very little effect on violence, especially when state law essentially allows anyone to possess whatever weapons they wish, at any age, regardless of gun safety education, stability, or maturity.

Lots more info on the local NPR news site: X

#mass shootings #Chiefs Super Bowl parade shooting #gun laws #defund the police #Kansas City #I'm okay and everyone I know is too #my screencaps

[sirenjose]

About Weeping Clown's Deduction 5

Acid attacks were a regular if not common occurrence in 19th century Britain, back then known as vitriol throwing, after oil of vitriol, the common name for strong sulphuric acid, an oily liquid heavier than water which was colorless when entirely pure. Nitric acid was also common, which could also be a colorless liquid. Both had a number of legitimate uses.

Acids were mass-manufactured, easily available (and cheap), and generally unregulated until the early twentieth century.

Acid attacks were quite frequent between the 1850s and 1899. Common motivations included personal conflict, jealousy, revenge, etc… Almost without exception, it was thrown at the head, neck, and upper body, sometimes directly in the face.

Didn't become a felony to burn, main, disfigure, or disable anyone with a corrosive fluid or destructive substance, or attempt to do so, until the Offences Against Person Act of 1861.

The severity of the damage depends on the concentration of the acid and the time before the acid is thoroughly washed off with water or neutralized with a neutralizing agent.

It mutilated and maimed victims by destroying skin and supporting tissues; its corrosive action could liquefy muscle and dissolve bone. It combined with water in organic matter, generating a considerable amount of heat, to which the resulting damage was in part due—a charring effect that caused noticeable blackening. If the acid got into the eyes it caused blindness. If the injuries were extensive victims could be permanently disabled; those who recovered were likely to be badly disfigured, with no hope of regaining a semblance of their former appearance prior to the advent of plastic surgery.

In 1930 a horrified witness described how a victim’s skin sizzled and moved as the acid acted.

Although vitriol throwing was certainly painful, it was rarely fatal (poisoning/ingestion is different).

Vitriol throwing continued until the Second World War, after which it became much less frequent. The Pharmacy and Poisons Act of 1933 restricted the sale of strong acid, so weaker corrosive fluids were used.

---

As for the lead paint:

Many cosmetics back in the day contained a variety of chemicals, including ammonia, mercury, opium, arsenic, and lead.

People commonly used lead-based makeup on their skin to look paler, especially upper class white women who chased even whiter skin due to victorian beauty ideals, to show how their privilege never left them working in the sun.

The corrosive nature of lead would leave your skin damaged and in far worse shape after every use, requiring you to use more and more to cover up its effects.

Side effects of lead poisoning, besides creating wounds and scars, include severe headaches, nerve illnesses, memory loss, pain and numbness, and if ingested in large enough quantities, will cause paralysis and death. In children, it also affected their body development and neurological issues.

These thick layers of make-up cracked like porcelain if a woman was too expressive.

#idv #identity v #joker #weeping clown #smiley face #idv joker #identity v joker #idv weeping clown #identity v weeping clown #idv smiley face #identity v smiley face #sirenjose analyses and theories