#because actions=/= good or bad person and we recognize it

[lmaowh-at]

I hate this notion that "if you worry about being a bad person then you're definitely not a bad person because bad people don't have a conscience and can't self reflect they dont think that what theyre doing is wrong 🥺🥺🥺" like oh my god shut the fuck up can you please actually hold me accountable and talk with me about my actions and not just what I think about them

[themyscirah]

Started thinking about the Amanda Waller + Ben Turner relationship again.... fuck, I'm gonna need a minute

[velvet4510]

A Defense of Snow White’s Prince Florian

“He kissed a random corpse in the forest!”

“He’s preying on a child!”

“He stalked her!”

Please, please, you guys, I’m begging you to actually WATCH the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

WATCH.

THE.

MOVIE.

Because the Prince kissing Snow White is, to me, one of the most heartbreaking scenes in Disney history.

And here’s why.

First of all, the Prince is clearly close to Snow White’s age. He is both drawn and voiced as very youthful. He looks and sounds about 16 or 17, at the oldest. He is NOT a “predator”. He’s a boy who loves a girl, like in any good fairy tale.

Secondly, the Prince meets Snow White early in the movie. She’s NOT a complete stranger to him at the end. And their first meeting is significant. The Evil Queen makes a big deal out of Snow White’s looks, being “the fairest of all”, etc. But the Prince is first drawn to Snow White’s VOICE. He’s captivated by her singing and her kindness to the birds. He sees beyond her looks. He sees past the rags she wears and recognizes that this is a good person, a beautiful person on the inside. Then when she’s startled by him, he’s very polite and soft-spoken, apologizing for frightening her. He’s a total gentleman. Then he serenades her, letting her know how much he admires her. (Words that she has NEVER heard from ANYONE else in her life, by the way.) Then he even smiles at and is kissed by a dove that lands on his finger, hinting he has a connection with animals somewhat like hers.

And then there’s a fade to black. So we actually don’t know if she came out again, if they talked for a while. Maybe they didn’t, but maybe they did. The film doesn’t clearly tell us one way or another. But there is a possibility that they did get to know each other a little there. And if they didn’t, something is still beginning between them. They share warm smiles and affectionate looks. They both feel it, and they both hope to pursue it.

Then Snow White finds out her stepmom wants her dead and has to run away. Which means the Prince noticed her absence.

And the narrative text later tells us that he “searched far and wide” for her after she disappeared. (This guy walked so Fiyero could run, let’s be real.) Imagine the person you’ve been thinking about, hoping to get to know, wondering if they may be the one, suddenly vanished without a trace. And she’s the Princess of your neighboring kingdom. And then the Queen of the same kingdom also suddenly disappears. Wouldn’t you be alarmed? There’s a chance the huntsman may have gone to the Prince’s kingdom for help, and warned him of the Queen’s horrible actions. There’s also a chance that the Queen already had a bad reputation in the area, and the disappearances were a confirmation of what was already suspected. So the Prince nobly tries to find out what happened to his newfound love, worried about her safety. Snow White sings about her hope that she will see him again and tells the dwarfs about him … but the full truth of the situation is that he’s been thinking about her too. It’s a mutual young first love, pure and innocent.

Then the Prince FINALLY finds his beloved… in a coffin. After a “far and wide” search, there she is, apparently DEAD! All his hopes and wishes for a possible relationship with her are dashed. A 17-year-old who once dreamed of reuniting with his first love has just found her dead. He knows absolutely nothing about the poisoned apple’s spell or its cure. He doesn’t know a kiss will save her. He thinks she’s gone. Forever. All he knows is that he has found the girl he loves too late, and he couldn’t help her, despite all his searching. So, he kisses her goodbye. He kisses her as an apology, a sign of regret for lost dreams, a chance that he seems to have been denied. A 2-second touch of her lips to show his devotion. Then he bows his head and grieves.

This moment demonstrates than in him, Snow White has found the genuine love she’s been yearning for. While her stepmother tried multiple times to murder her, now she has someone who genuinely values her, so much so that he searched everywhere to find her when she went missing. Who was so heartbroken and crushed at the notion that she was gone forever that he gave her what he thought was a goodbye kiss, his one and only way of showing what she meant to him before he became haunted by the ghost of her memory, of his failure, of his lost chance at love.

This is a deeply and tragically romantic moment that has sadly been widely misunderstood. Do not slander Prince Florian! He doesn’t deserve it!

[phantomrose96]

Anyway Mouthwashing spoilers

I'm turning Curly over in my head for the narrative punishment he's put through. Like you could you COULD interpret him as a pure victim, framed for Jimmy's crime and forced to suffer in skinless silence while his assailant gets to assume his role but it's more than that, to me. It's not just Jimmy bad Curly good. It's Curly's enablement of Jimmy that sets all of this in motion and, now, how will you take Responsibility, Curly?

It's Curly's "I've known Jimmy a long time. He'll listen to me." It's Curly's brand of leadership that hinges more on being seen as a good leader than on actually taking action. Because being seen as a good leader requires everyone to like him and that's more important to him than actually protecting Anya from Jimmy.

You could say "Jimmy just had everyone fooled into thinking he was a decent guy" except no you can't, because Anya hid the gun from him knowing Jimmy may go ballistic learning she's pregnant with his baby. And she hides the gun because Curly wouldn't. "Why do they have locks on medbay and the cockpit but not in the sleeping quarters?" Anya asks to Curly. Curly knows Jimmy raped Anya but his brand of I Need To Be Liked leadership asserts that Jimmy deserves a seat at the table of this solution. Curly won't do anything. He won't do anything even when he says he'd do anything.

And this is even after Jimmy tore into Curly with left-field accusations about the crew being laid off being something Curly wanted. All the evidence we have says the whole crew is being let go, Curly along with everyone, but Jimmy turns on him and makes it out like Curly wanted this and Curly is the enemy to everyone else on the ship. Curly won't stand up for himself. He won't shut Jimmy down. Swansea holds onto the axe because when locked up the axe requires the Captain to unlock, and maybe Swansea recognizes he's on a ship with a Captain who would not use the axe on the man who needs it.

Curly never wanted anything bad to happen. He never tried to hurt anyone. He never crashed the ship. But he's the one person who could have shut Jimmy down for every horrible sign and action along the way and he didn't he didn't he didn't he didn't. And the very first time he tries to intervene is when it's too little too late. HE gets eviscerated. He gets all his skin burned off. Because of what Jimmy did, but because of what Curly allowed.

And now his chance to act as Captain is gone. His chance to do right is gone. Jimmy is captain now and everyone who knows he's a monster is no longer capable of acting against him. And now skinless voiceless eternally watching, Curly has to lie in his own blood and bear witness to what Jimmy is doing, to everything he enabled. At Jimmy's mercy now like all the others, who physically beats him now and who is there to stand up for Curly? Enable. Enable enable enable.

[centaurianthropology]

Another thing I've been thinking about in regards to 'Murderbot' is how far Murderbot's accusations really go as confessions. I've seen people complain that PresAux are 'ungrateful', as Murderbot constantly characterizes them as such. It complains that they don't appreciate what it's done, don't recognize the efforts it's made.

But it's not taking into account what a bad communicator is constantly is. Yes, PresAux don't really understand Murderbot, but it has put very little effort into understanding them. The miscommunication goes both ways! Murderbot is a deeply self-sabotaging character, constantly walking away from moments it might have made a connection, refusing to explain itself or its actions, and then getting upset when people don't simply intuit them and thank it for what it refuses to put voice to.

It's an incredibly understandable flaw. So many people have the flaw of not explaining themselves, refusing to connect or communicate, and then getting angry when they're not understood. It's refusing to meet anyone half-way, because it's spent its existence being treated as an object. So why should it put forth any effort to explain itself now?

Except it still wants to be understood. It still wants to be appreciated. And when it does put forth that effort with Mensah, it's rewarded. She reaches back. She connects with it, but the problem is that she has other connections. She has other people she's responsible for, and so once again Murderbot feels misunderstood because it won't make the same effort with them, and they don't understand, and Mensah has to choose between chasing after it (again) and trying to keep her people cohesive and alive. She chooses the prior commitment, and she chooses to respect its autonomy.

"It's not your pet" echoes in my head, because I think there is a certain impulse in the audience to woobify Murderbot, to reduce it to a sweet baby pet thing that can't possibly help when it spies on people, or invades their privacy, or refuses to explain why it does what it does, or hurts people in unexpected ways (or very expected ways), or gets upset when people can't read its mind. But it's not a pet. It's a wholly realized, broken person. And it's fucking up every bit as much as PresAux is fucking up. Its war with Gurathin is 100% a mutual affair, where they've both been absolute shit to one another simply because they could. Its refusal to speak to the team in anything like an actual back-and-forth conversation is an understandable reaction to what it's been through, and it's still the wrong call and is actively worsening the situation everyone finds themselves in.

And that's what I like about this show. It's not taking the easy way out with any of these situations. Murderbot is an ASSHOLE, and it's wrong about half the things it says. It wants outcomes it can't or won't work for, and wants recognition for things there is no way for people to have know it did. And haven't we all done that? Haven't we all been in that mental place? Having to make connections is HARD. It's scary and puts you in a vulnerable place and may not pay off. And it's the only way to really live. Right now, Murderbot wants the rewards of connection without the risks and pains of connection.

That's a great place to start a long-term character arc! It's wrong and broken and dumb in the most honest, real ways. It makes massive mistakes, and refuses to acknowledge them, and hopes they just go away. Or it tries to tackle them, and does it in the worst possible way.

And then, occasionally, it gets it right. It opens up, and makes a real and beautiful connection. What it has with Mensah is as good as it is because Murderbot, even just a little, was willing to open up, to be vulnerable, to share pieces of itself. And that's the first thing that really matters in its life.

This show has a hopepunk heart, where genuine connection is not only rewarded, it's the only thing that really matters. It's a lesson Murderbot is going to learn, but it's going to be a slow and difficult path to understanding, just like it is for any of us.

[mycroftrh]

Just saw a post that I otherwise loved but it ended with “[Shawn Spencer’s] tragic backstory is that his parents got divorced” and. No. His tragic backstory is that he was abused.

I can absolutely see why a lot of people wouldn’t get that, because

a) Henry is a main character on the show and largely a protagonist and is, like, engaging and often likable, and the cognitive dissonance of all that being true, while it is also true that he abused another main character, is… a lot.

b) He clearly genuinely cares about Shawn, and if you don’t have personal experience with the complicated dynamics of abuse, that can easily make you assume he must not have been abusing him.

c) Henry genuinely does think he’s doing this for Shawn’s own good (note: this is a very common thing for abusers to think).

d) The way that he abused Shawn isn’t the way we’re used to seeing abuse portrayed in fiction, which can make it harder to recognize.

But, like, they do occasionally do things to remind you that while this isn’t how you’re used to abuse looking, it is absolutely abuse. Remember him stuffing Shawn in a car trunk, while a neighbor looks on horrified (and it being indicated that he did this repeatedly)?

(That episode’s a great example of points a, b, and c at the same time, though, because in the same episode as we see something that’s quite recognizably and blatantly abusive, we see Henry as an action hero rescuing Shawn, very clearly caring about Shawn’s well-being, and the abuse being retroactively justified by Henry and the narrative because it taught Shawn how to do action hero things.)

But the thing is, like, this is actually pretty important to know for real life: abuse can look a lot of different ways; abusers often genuinely believe they’re doing it for the victim’s own good; abusers often genuinely care about their victims; abusers are often otherwise good people and often likable and often people you know and don’t think of as Bad Abusive Villains.

And that doesn’t make it not abuse.

[corevibeself]

𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑁𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝐴𝑝𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝐴𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑌𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓? (PAC)

How to pick a pile: Take a deep breath to ground yourself; once that's done, look at the images below and pick which image you feel most drawn to. This is usually the first one we pick! If you feel drawn to more than one, that is entirely possible, as there may be more messages for you there!

Remember, these are general readings; the messages may not all be for you. Take what resonates and leave the rest <3

⋆˚｡⋆୨✧୧˚ 𝑷𝒊𝒍𝒆 1 ˚୨✧୧⋆｡˚⋆

𝖠𝖿𝖿𝗂𝗋𝗆𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇 𝗉𝗎𝗅𝗅𝖾𝖽 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝗒𝗈𝗎: "𝖨 𝖺𝗆 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖼𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗍𝗈𝗋 𝗈𝖿 𝗆𝗒 𝗈𝗐𝗇 𝗎𝗇𝗂𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗌𝖾"

For you guys, I feel like there’s a need to appreciate just how much you get done and how bravely you push forward. You move through life, accomplishing so much, but you don’t always stop to acknowledge how far you’ve come. It’s like you’re running on autopilot, constantly moving without realizing all you’ve done.

I got the bee card, and I just saw the funniest thing. You guys know how bees have such a short lifespan and just fucking die once they’re done working? That’s the energy I get from you. It’s like, “My work’s done, finally—death.”

Like pause.

You are such a beautiful, sensitive, and creative soul. I feel called to tell you that your ideas aren’t crazy or far-fetched. Whatever you’ve been wanting to do—whether it’s a hobby, a career path, or just a random idea—trust it. Be more confident in those urges, in those moments of inspiration, because they’re leading you somewhere. And if you feel fear around them? That just means they matter to you. Fear wouldn’t be there if you didn’t care.

I also feel like some of you don’t fully see or appreciate your impact on the people around you. Worker bees all look the same, right? But each one pollinates a flower, helping the environment. The honey they make is so delicious it brings happiness to the world—it impacts cuisine, and even health. You have no idea how much every thought and action you’ve had has made a difference in the world around you, because I just saw a vision of someone walking down the street and smiling as they crossed a stranger, and that smile might've meant the world to them at that moment.

I feel called to say you might have doubts or insecurities about your purpose. Maybe it’s not as clear or as big as you think it should be. Maybe you even doubt whether you have a purpose at all. But let me tell you: your purpose isn’t just one thing. It’s not some huge accomplishment meant to look a certain way. It can be, but don’t expect it to be. Your purpose is you. It always has been and always will be. You’re a blank canvas meant to be painted by yourself, not by others.

I also want to say—you might not realize just how good of a friend you are. You’re kind, sensitive, understanding, and so loyal. You’re the person people go to when they feel bad because you know how to hold space for them. Not only that, but you recognize when someone truly needs support, and because you’re intuitive, you also know when something is too much for you to handle emotionally, but that doesn't stop you from helping, because I also see that some of you can have some selfless tendencies, so take care of yourself.

I saw a picture in my mind of someone laughing while everything is falling apart. Honestly, that could be your genuine reaction when things feel like they’re crashing down. But another message I got? You spark change in the people around you—just by being who you are. You might have these amazing ideas for people, and they’re like, “Oh my god, that helped so much!” And you just say thanks—but you need to fully bask in that appreciation.

See your creativity. See your determination. See the change you bring to your environment. See how far you’ve come.

My little worker bee, you are so much more than you believe you are.

⋆˚｡⋆୨✧୧˚ 𝑷𝒊𝒍𝒆 2 ˚୨✧୧⋆｡˚⋆

𝖠𝖿𝖿𝗂𝗋𝗆𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇 𝗉𝗎𝗅𝗅𝖾𝖽 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝗒𝗈𝗎: "𝖨 𝖺𝗆 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖼𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗍𝗈𝗋 𝗈𝖿 𝗆𝗒 𝗈𝗐𝗇 𝗎𝗇𝗂𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗌𝖾"

(this affirmation came out for pile 1, so if you were attracted to pile 1, there may be messages for you there too!)

First off, can I just say—you’re a literal baddie. Like, you’ve got your shit together, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. Because what I’m getting is that you’re a dreamer, pile 2. You might take your sweet time getting where you want to be, but you do it with such grace that I just feel like applauding you.

What you need to appreciate is your sheer dedication to following your dreams. It’s grounded in reality because you take your time—you’re not in a rush like others. You sit, contemplate your next moves, and don’t feel pressured to move the way everyone else does. You’re independent and self-reliant, and that energy radiates. I’m seeing someone looking at you and thinking, “She’s really got her shit together.” That’s what you’re not seeing about yourself.

We live in a society that expects independence, but so many people struggle with it. This isn’t to say you haven’t faced your own challenges—you have—but you handle them so well. Some people hit setbacks and give up, but not you. You keep pushing forward because you’re a boss. I see someone who always gets invited out to parties, but you’re focused on your goals. You prioritize yourself. You set boundaries. And you do it with such conviction that no one would ever guess you’ve had doubts or setbacks. But you believe in yourself enough that fear doesn’t stop you. You are your own clutch, pile 2.

I pulled the frog as your animal card, and when I felt it out, I had this vision of how frogs eat. You know how they wait—calm, patient—letting the bug come to them? They stay perfectly still, knowing their moment will come. That tells me you make things happen even when it seems like you’re doing nothing. It could also mean that an opportunity you’ve been waiting for is about to fall into your lap. So if you’ve been waiting on something, take this as your sign!

⋆˚｡⋆୨✧୧˚ 𝑷𝒊𝒍𝒆 3 ˚୨✧୧⋆｡˚⋆

𝖠𝖿𝖿𝗂𝗋𝗆𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇 𝗉𝗎𝗅𝗅𝖾𝖽 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝗒𝗈𝗎: "𝖨 𝗌𝖾𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖻𝖾𝖺𝗎𝗍𝗒 𝖺𝗋𝗈𝗎𝗇𝖽 𝗆𝖾 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗋𝖾𝖼𝗈𝗀𝗇𝗂𝗓𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖻𝖾𝖺𝗎𝗍𝗒 𝗂𝗇 𝗆𝗒𝗌𝖾𝗅𝖿, 𝖿𝗈𝗎𝗇𝖽 𝗂𝗇 𝗆𝗒 𝗁𝖾𝖺𝗋𝗍 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗌𝗈𝗎𝗅."

My pile 3s awhhh :( ngl I teared up.

You need to appreciate just how beautiful you truly are. This honestly breaks my heart—I can feel it, literally feel how pure you are. I know all we want is to feel worth it, to feel valued, but pile 3, you're not just some average-looking NPC (no one is). You need to stop comparing yourself to everyone around you because you're you. You’re not broken. You weren’t made wrong. You’re not different in a way that makes you an outcast or someone unworthy of love. That’s not the truth.

I love you, and I don’t even know you. So chin up, buttercup.

I know it can feel like the weight of the world is pressing down on you, but the cards are practically begging you to see your value—because you are the one with the power to change how you see yourself. No one else can do that for you. No amount of compliments will ever feel real if you don’t let yourself believe them. So what’s stopping you? Are you your own worst bully? Does self-hate feel more comfortable than self-love? Does accepting kindness make you squirm?

Pile 3, I need you to sit with that. Shadow work is calling. Because no matter how much I wish I could shake you and make you see your worth, only you can do that.

Look in the mirror—really look. The person staring back at you deserves your kindness. They deserve to hear something nice in the morning. They deserve to see a radiant, joyful smile looking back at them.

I won’t sugarcoat it—you may have been through heavy, painful experiences that shook your sense of self-worth. Maybe you’ve been bullied. Maybe you’ve seen or felt things that made you question your place in the world. But you know what’s incredible about you? Even after all of that, you still see the beauty in others. You would never judge someone’s appearance. You would never call someone ugly. Because you know how that feels.

So why not treat yourself with that same grace? Why not be your own friend?

I pulled the Peacock card for you, and the first thought I had was—you know peacocks never see their own feathers? Yet they are some of the most majestic creatures in the world.

Pile 3, that’s you. You are beautiful. You are radiant. You are fucking majestic. So act like it, dammit

______________________________________________________________

Thank you so much for reading!!!I love doing this hehehe, if it resonated, feel free to tell me all about it! I'd love to hear what you guys have to say <3

[ms-demeanor]

Hey friend! So while I'm incredibly skeptical, I'm not strictly against alternative medicine, like you are. I saw you mention reiki, and thought you might geek out on this article like I did:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200308195914/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/

It's called "Reiki Can't Possibly Work. So Why Does It?" and I highly encourage reading the whole thing. It first of all thoroughly debunks a lot of the claims reiki practitioners make but it also details all of the studies that have proven its effectiveness and provides what I find a pretty compelling explanation: that much of modern western medicine is stressful and traumatizing. Of course laying in a quiet room with the lights dimmed while a kind person sits with you and wishes for you to be well is effective. It reduces stress and all of the negative biological processes it triggers, which promotes healing.

The article mentions that for years we didn't understand the mechanism by which acetaminophen worked - we just knew it did. I knew a man who was really into "chakra therapy" in the 90s where he had a set of colored sunglasses that, supposedly, would rebalance one's out-of-whack chakras through light therapy. He found that attending to his throat chakra, yellow, helped him sleep better. Years later, formal studies found that yellow lenses filter blue light and can help regulate circadian rhythms.

When I was really little, my uncle sold magnet therapy products (which claimed to promote circulation?? I think??). I had a huge meltdown at a family reunion and no one could get me to calm down. My uncle put a blanket full of magnets on top of me, and I immediately relaxed. Imagine my surprise hearing that story for the first time as an adult who now uses a weighted blanket for stress.

I agree that people need to be really careful about these practices, about getting scammed, and especially about herbal supplements that can have dangerous interactions. I also think there's an extent to which you can analyze the risks and benefits and say, "Okay, I have no idea why this works but it does and there's no major downsides."

Hey so I get a bit heated in this response but I want you to know that I approached this ask in good faith because I know you and I know that we have a lot of the same values and interests and this touched a nerve that was not at all your fault and once I get past the direct response to the article I think I come off a little less. Um. Like the aggression there is not directed at you, it's directed at the article and at one person mentioned in the article specifically who is part of why my reaction to the article is so not good. But I promise after the last bullet point I come off as less reactive, I think. (I'm also publishing this publicly because I think it may be helpful for people to see how CAM stuff often gets away with a veneer of skepticism-that-isn't-actually-skepticism - the article claims to be skeptical but then makes a ton of assumptions and cites some truly mind-bogglingly bad sources that a lot of people won't recognize as bad if they don't have a hair trigger trained by far too much time on the bad CAM parts of the internet).

I've actually read that article a few time times, and would like to do a quick rundown on why I find it unconvincing:

She doesn't cite any decent studies on reiki; one that she does cite is just a self-reported questionnaire response from 23 people in 2002.

While we don't know the exact mechanism of action for acetaminophen, we do know that it does work - it measurably reduces fever and in double blinded RCTs produces reproduceable results in reducing certain kinds of pain. The Science Based Medicine authors cited in the article who called for an end to studies on reiki did so both because there is no plausible mechanism of action for reiki (specifically as energy work, not as 'being in a room with a patient person who listens to you') and because there is no good evidence that it works. (And they wrote a follow-up to the Atlantic article; I like SBM but it's quite sneery, as are most of their write-ups of reiki). When Kisner asks "why should this be different?" when comparing reiki and acetaminophen, the answer is: because there is not only no plausible way that reiki *could* work, there is not any good evidence we have that it works better than placebo.

"Various non-Western practices have become popular complements to conventional medicine in the past few decades, chief among them yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, all of which have been the subject of rigorous scientific studies that have established and explained their effectiveness." This one sentence needs probably twenty or so links in response, suffice it to say that western medicine has emphatically not established and explained the effectiveness of AT LEAST acupuncture and the casually credulous way Kisner accepts that acupuncture is effective (effective FOR WHAT?) throws some serious doubt on her ability to assess these kinds of things.

The title of the article is "Reiki can't possibly work, so why does it?" and that's probably the Atlantic's fault more than Jordan Kisner's fault, but she doesn't ever demonstrate that it works. She says she got a buzzy feeling after her training, she says that patients at the VA were asking for reiki as treatment for pain and sleep disorders, she says that people remembered "healing touches" from parents and loved ones and that the same mechanism might be what makes reiki 'work.' She says that reiki "has been shown by various studies that pass evidentiary muster to help patients in a variety of ways when used as a complementary practice" and the two studies that she includes that weren't just a questionnaire were 1) a non-blinded study of heart rate variability post heart attack where the reiki arm involved continuous interaction with a trained nurse and the other two arms involved resting quietly or classical music (so relaxation as a result of additional focused attention by attentive medical professionals could account for this? Why was the control for this study not having a med student sit and hold the patient's hand?) and 2) a study of patients who sought out reiki who were surveyed after treatment and noted improvement on one of twenty mental or physical markers (this study is like, GOLD for an example of a bad study; no control, self-selected participants who believe in the efficacy of the intervention, exceptionally broad criteria for a positive result - I find it really really really challenging to grant any credence to someone who confidently cited this as an example of reiki "working")

Near the end of the article she says "At the same time, this recalled the most cutting-edge, Harvard-stamped science I’d read in my research: Ted Kaptchuk’s finding that the placebo effect is a real, measurable, biological healing response to “an act of caring.” - if she read any of Ted Kaptchuk's research she didn't link to it; what she did link to was a 2018 New York Times profile of him and Kathryn Hall, researchers at Harvard's Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter program. Being any flavor of journalist and citing Ted Kaptchuk as your source for cutting-edge, institutionally-backed science is disqualifying.

I now need to do some yelling about Ted Kaptchuk.

For clarity: I have as much medical training as Kathryn Hall and Ted Kaptchuk, which is to say: None.

Hall is a microbiologist with a PhD in Public Health, so she at least a background in science. Kaptchuk is an acupuncturist with a BA in East Asian studies and a doctorate in Chinese medicine - notably NOT a medical degree; he was forced to stop calling himself a doctor and had papers retracted after enough people questioned whether the school he claimed he attended even existed and the documents he presented to claim that he was an "OMD" were conclusively translated and did not have any indication that the granted a medical degree of any kind - Science Based Medicine was involved in investigating this because they've been comprehensively anti-quack forever and Ted Kaptchuk has been a quack forever (after recieving confirmation from the government of Macau that Kaptchuk's alma mater was not a medical degree granting institution SBM STILL gave him the benefit of the doubt and had people translate his documentation for final confirmation).

He is also an author on of one of my most beloathed ever studies, which showed that sham acupuncture, placebo, and albuterol all produced the same effect on patient-reported well-being, coming to the conclusion that patient reports can be unreliable and that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma." That fucking line, that stupid goddamned line, gets cited in every piece of woo bullshit about how acupuncture or chiropractic or some scam-ass diet all work, I've run into this study while looking through at least twenty bibliographies and it is one of the biggest, reddest flags that whoever is writing the paper you're reading is full up on some bullshit. Because, see, the paper found that "placebo effects can be clinically meaningful and can rival the effects of active medication in patients with asthma" in terms of *patient-reported* markers, but the fucking study found that only albuterol produced an actual effect in lung function. Here's the sentence BEFORE the one that gets cited all the time: "Although albuterol, but not the two placebo interventions, improved FEV1 [forced expiratory volume in one second - the measure for lung function used in the study and used to diagnose asthma] in these patients with asthma, albuterol provided no incremental benefit with respect to the self-reported outcomes." It doesn't matter if the patient *feels* better if they can't actually breathe! It doesn't fucking matter - feeling better but still having poor breathing leaves you more vulnerable to dying of a fucking asthma attack! I hate this goddamned study so fucking much and it's used all the time to claim that placebo can be just as effective as medicine for making people FEEL better but, like, they're still sick even if they feel better! I HAVE HAD PEOPLE CITE THIS STUPID FUCKING STUDY TO ME AS EVIDENCE THAT I DON'T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT TREATING MY FUCKING ASTHMA BECAUSE I DON'T GET ACUPUNCTURE TO TREAT MY FUCKING ASTHMA. If sham acupuncture makes you feel better when you've got the flu but doesn't lower your fever or make you less contagious, you shouldn't act like you don't have a fever or aren't contagious this study makes me INSANE.

Okay done yelling.

I think this look at placebo in the midst of her article about reiki is really interesting because it's very common for CAM practitioners to claim that it's as effective as placebo - which just means that it's not effective. This is a great explanation from The Skeptic on why placebo isn't and can't be what Kaptchuk, Hall, and the like claim. It's also interesting to me that Kisner didn't choose to link to a 2011 New Yorker profile of Kaptchuk that is somewhat less rosy about his placebo studies and includes this absolutely crushing statement: "the placebo effect doesn’t appear to work with Alzheimer’s patients. Trivers suggests that this is because most people who have Alzheimer’s disease are unable to anticipate the future and are therefore unable to prepare for it."

But to the actual point of the ask: I honestly think it's fascinating how much CAM success probably rides on "well did you listen to the patient and pay attention to what was wrong with them and sympathize with them and help them lay out plan that made them feel like they had some agency in this exceptionally frustrating situation (chronic illness, newly diagnosed issue, totally undiagnosed issue) that they're dealing with?"

I know part of why people with chronic illnesses turn to CAM is because they're ignored and dismissed by allopathic practitioners who are largely looking for horses, not zebras - this is one of the reasons that I'm really big on reminding people that (at least in the US) DOs are fully licensed physicians who use a holistic and patient-centered approach so if you are someone with a chronic illness who has had trouble getting diagnosed or had trouble getting doctors to believe you, swapping your MD for a DO as a primary care physician might be really, really helpful to you.

But the flip side of that is that is that I worry deeply about the question of where harm starts; the example with your uncle is really great because you do have a solid instance of something working but for totally the wrong reason (pressure being the mechanism that actually helped, versus magnets being the reason given by the person who did the treatment). Some of this stuff has very little likelihood of causing direct harm, but has the distinct possibility of having indirect harms, which people in the anti-CAM space generally divide into two categories, treatment delay and unnecessary costs (opportunity costs, monetary costs, wasted effort, etc.)

I'm going to step outside of your specific example and look at magnet therapy generally, which really is a spectacular thing to focus on because it honestly doesn't have any direct harms; nobody is allergic to magnets, the kinds of magnets used aren't strong enough to interfere with medical devices, it's even safer than the whole "well herbalism is sometimes just a cup of tea" thing because there are "safe" teas that can do real harm to large populations! But simply being around magnets is not going to hurt anyone (unless they're swallowed; nobody swallow magnets please).

One of the things that I think goes under-discussed when talking about placebo and CAM is that the people trying the alternative solutions desperately WANT the alternative medicine to work (I suspect that this is why the self-selected study of reiki patients has such a significant finding). They are pulling for it; they may be looking at it as a last resort, or they may be hoping that it will work to avoid a treatment that is more frightening, expensive, or inaccessible. I think this actually contributes a lot to the delay of care that we see with CAM.

The absolute worst case harm I can imagine from magnetic therapy is delaying treatment. Let's suppose we've got a diabetic patient with gradually increasing peripheral neuropathy; they have reacted poorly to gabapentin in the past and are looking for something more natural, and they hear from their chiropractor that magnet therapy can be used to treat neuropathy. They buy some compression socks with "magnetic and earthing properties" and sleep in the socks. Whether through the compression controlling some edema or through the simple desire for the socks to work, they feel some relief from the nerve pain they were experiencing and decide that this is a success. The socks work! They continue wearing the socks with occasional pain, but less than before. However, because they are focused on the lack of pain, they don't notice that it's accompanied by increasing numbness. The numbness significantly increases their risk of injury to their feet, which significantly increases their risk of amputation.

It probably sounds like catastrophizing to say "using magnets could lead to amputation" but honestly I don't think it's that far out of the realm of possibility (every time I post on this topic I get flooded with the saddest stories in the world about people whose loved ones died because of delayed treatment for cancer or heart disease).

The second category of harm is cost, which is honestly pretty minimal with magnet therapy, as long as you aren't spending $1049 on a magnetic mat

or paying a chiropractor to give you magnetic treatments. For some other medically harmless treatments like reiki, cost is the thing that I worry about - while I was looking up information related to the article I found that people are charging anywhere from $60 to $225 a session, and selling multi-session packages for thousands of dollars - and if someone thinks that something works, even if it only works by being in a soothing space where someone cares about you - they'll pay for it.

I'm aware that all of this is also extra complicated because of the cost and lack of access to allopathic medicine - a chiropractor broke my spine because I could pay her $60 per appointment but I couldn't pay $125 to see an MD when I didn't have insurance. People who are sick are going to look for treatment; people who have been denied treatment or dismissed by doctors are going to look for alternative treatments.

But man, I really wish I'd spent that sixty bucks on half of a doctor's appointment because the chiropractor didn't know about the benign tumor that I had that weakened the structure of that particular bone when she did her adjustment; it also didn't make the pain go away, it made a different pain start and get worse because it turns out I was having debilitating muscle spasms that then had a bone injury added in on top.

(Chiropractic, for the record, goes with chelation therapy and many many many many cases of herbalism where it's NOT just cost or delay; people claim these treatments are harmless and they are not. They can do tremendous harm).

But yeah I'm not going to deny at all that all of this would be a hell of a lot better if people (especially marginalized people) didn't have to jump through hoops to prove to a doctor that something is wrong with them, and didn't have to do so in an appointment that attempts to cram whole person care down into fifteen minutes, and didn't have the possibility of bankrupting you. Interacting with allopathic medicine is a nightmare and I totally understand why people want to look outside of it for treatment.

I've just heard too many horror stories and seen too much predatory CAM to cut much of it any slack.

At the end of the SBM response to the Atlantic article, the author (I can't remember if it's Gorski or Novella) makes the point that reiki is a spiritual practice, and that we've known for a long time that spiritual practices can improve a person's well-being in a number of ways; they can reduce anxiety, they can provide community, they can give people a space to feel and express emotions that they certainly aren't going to be able to process in a doctor's office. Spiritual practices can be wonderful, and we know there are a lot of people who they can help. But they aren't medicine, and attempting to replace medicine with them (which I don't think that most reiki practitioners are trying to do, to be fair, but which Ted Kaptchuk DEFINITELY is in trying to 'harness the power of placebo') is a disservice to people who need an inhaler instead of acupuncture.

Also, and I know this was not your point but I have to bring it up because people ask about it whenever discussions of placebo come up:

The placebo effect is not treatment. The placebo effect, whether achieved through deception or when someone says loud and clear "this is a sugar pill" does not improve an illness, but it may improve how a patient *feels* about an illness. In some cases, this may as well be the same thing - if you're dealing with muscle pain because you're stressed and no matter what you do it doesn't go away because your shoulders are always up around your ears and you're grinding your teeth and you're sleeping poorly, then literally just talking to someone who is in an office and says "this is a sugar pill, go ahead and take it" may make your muscle pain feel better, but it isn't going to reduce your stress and it isn't going to last, and if your muscle pain is because you're feeling angina as a result of a partially blocked artery then it SURE AS FUCK is not going to make you better and may mask symptoms that were a warning sign of a much more serious problem. People who are sick deserve actual treatment, and placebo is not treatment, which is part of why Ted Kaptchuk makes me want to tear my hair out.

[vivitalks]

i need to talk about the bad kids and the weight they carry from their parents. because all of them have baggage, whether they know it or not, and it's high time we had a conversation about it.

we all know kristen and adaine's parents fucked them up, but the truth, and maybe this is an immutable truth about the world and all worlds in general, is that every kid bears the weight of their parents' expectations on their shoulders. sometimes the burden is well-disguised; sometimes the pressure is mitigated by a loving relationship — but there's always baggage, and the bad kids are all so used to dragging it along that they don't even realize they're carrying it.

fabian's is easy to recognize. not a day goes by that fabian doesn't think of his father. of what his dad, his treasured papa, not only wanted but expected of him. fabian grew up under the pressure to write your name on the face of the world, to become not just good but Great, to be more than a man — to become a legend, maximum legend, to get it tattooed onto your neck so you never forget your goal, because this is the only way to make your father proud and maybe if you're just like him then your mother will decide to be your mother again. she promised to be better and then she abandoned you. she failed you completely in every way imaginable and her solution was to try again. maybe this child will grow up with a loving mother. maybe she'll get it right this time. but not fabian. fabian doesn't get love, he gets pride, and there's only one way to ensure that his parents are proud.

fig is staggering under the immutable knowledge that she was the catalyst to her parents' divorce. that all of this could have been avoided if she had just never been born. she has so much anger, and it started out directed towards sandra lynn, but now she knows it's anger towards herself, for daring to exist, for ruining a marriage and a life by the crime of being born. poor gilear, saddled with the knowledge that his only daughter isn't even his. and yeah, her mom is a fuckup, but at least that's because of choices she made. fig would have to be in control of her actions to be a fuckup - instead she keeps BEING controlled, from the Dominate Person that led her to nearly sacrifice riz down to the very simple act of being the unplanned child of an affair. she's worse than a fuckup: she's a curse. a plague. and all three of her parents would have been better off if she'd never existed.

wilma and digby thistlespring tried so hard to raise a happy kid. they didn't believe in the stereotypes about half-orcs. not our kid, they said. how could a child of ours be angry? but gorgug is so angry sometimes, and he barely has the language to explain that, much less the skills to manage those emotions. he was so loved, so doted upon, and he tried his best to be the gentle giant, but somewhere along the way he failed, and his parents had no plan for a system malfunction. why would they? wilma and digby never met a bad feeling they couldn't sing their way out of. gorgug could be like that, too, if he tried. if he put his mind to it. it's his fault that he can't keep his rage under wraps. and his parents love him, but they don't understand him, and that hurts them. gorgug is hurting them. the very nature of his being hurts them. he tries to mold himself into the shape of a perfect son, but like everything else in his life, it doesn't fit - he can't give them what they want; he can't become what they devoted all this time to nurturing. he is big and brash and bubbling over with rage sometimes, despite all of his parents' best efforts to teach him temperance and good-naturedness and how to be small, smaller than your body can be, how to tuck in your limbs and take shallow breaths so your bed doesn't break again (again, again, again) and he tries and he tries. it's never enough. he will never be the perfect son, so maybe there's no point in trying at all.

and riz. sklonda. look, how could he not be just like his dad? dad was a badass secret agent, the kind of person riz could only dream of being. he doesn't want to scare mom, but why shouldn't he want to be like dad? except sklonda is scared. she raised him, terrified of what would happen when he learned the truth. his rock, his confidant, his second-best friend (let's be honest, maybe first) — he can't worry her. she has enough on her plate; he can't be a problem for mom. so riz gets really good at taking care of himself. when she can't make it home for dinner, riz knows how many minutes the freezer dinner needs in the microwave. when she can't pick him up from school, riz knows where the nearest bus stop is. and he can't stop solving mysteries, but he can reassure her that he's safe, whether or not it's true — because she needs him to be safe, and riz can't be a problem. he has to be fine. he makes a living being fine. sure, he's in jail for months for a crime he didn't commit, but he's fine. he got kidnapped and almost ritually sacrificed, but he's fine now, mom. i saw dad and he was tortured within an inch of his celestial life and i was almost killed in Hell, but it's fine, mom, because dad is an angel, how cool is that? the important thing is that sklonda can always count on her boy. she can trust him to understand adult things, like the fact that they're poor, and that her demotion might spell bad things for riz's future, and his only shot now is to have a really beefed up transcript so he can maybe get good scholarships, and yeah, that's a lot — god, that's a lot, on top of the harrowing mystery unfolding this year — but. riz is fine.

there's a freedom in hating your parents, in knowing unequivocally that they were bad at being parents, perhaps bad at being people at all. everyone agrees that the abernants were vile, disgusting examples of people at all, much less parental figures. nobody is leaping to the applebees' defense. they failed their children, and their children owe them nothing.

but fabian, fig, gorgug, riz — it's harder when you love the people who raised you. it gets to feeling like the problem is you. like if you were different, if you were better, if you tried a little harder or did something a little differently, then things would be perfect, and that weight you stagger under would go away. if fabian weren't so sentimental. if fig weren't a tiefling. if gorgug weren't so angry. if riz weren't so reckless. you love your parents, and you owe them everything, and this is the least you could do. so why aren't you doing it? why can't you? why are you carrying this weight in the first place?

these four have parents who love them. but that doesn't mean their parents can't also have hurt them. it's inevitable; you grow past the expectations of your parents, and then into something new, something entirely your own, but the bad kids are still growing. they are loved. but they are burdened. both things can be true.

[plutoasteroids]

PAC How Will Your Future Spouse's Mother (Your Mother-In-Law) View You

Pile 1 Pile 2 Pile 3

This PAC is how your future spouse's mother will view you and any channelled messages I may get; it could be confirmations or anything their higher self wants to let you know.

AGAIN, TAKE WHAT RESONATES LEAVE WHAT DOESN'T THIS IS A GENERAL READING. If no pile resonates with you, it's fine don't force anything to resonate...again it's just a general reading.

PILE 1

Your future mother-in-law sees you as a breath of fresh air for their child (your future spouse) and their whole family.

Before your future spouse met you, they may have been going through some toxic cycles, bad habits or some kind of betrayal from someone or people close to them. For some of you your future spouse may have fallen into bad habits of some forms of addiction.

But after meeting you, your future spouse is going to want to change bring in positivty and healthy habits into his life because they don't want to lose you and their mother is going to notice the positive change and be so appreciative of you.

Your future mother-in-law sees you as smart, capable and they think you are really good at your job, hobbies or whatever it is you are good at. They admire how hard you work, and they feel like they won the lottery/ won in life by having you as their child in law (I don't know if that's a real thing so bear with me).

They view you as someone who is responsible and is able to keep a promise and hold accountability for their words and actions. You may even trigger some change in your future spouse's family as a whole because maybe it's the way you carry yourself or your work ethic that will make them go 'Dang we really have to do better; we can't be wasting life like this'.

She'll truly love how you have positively impacted her family.

Also, your mother-in-law said she'll baby you when I was channelling her because she recognizes how hard you work, and she wants to show you that you are appreciated and that it's time to take a rest and let someone else be the one to handle things and take care of you.

PILE 2

First thing I channelled from your future mother-in-law is that she will feel 'iffy' about you. Meaning that she's not sure if she likes you or not. Okay it's more like some things about you may rub your mother-in-law the wrong way like maybe she's more of a traditional housewife and you and your future spouse don't go according to traditional roles of spouses.

For example, if it's more of a straight couple maybe the wife works, and husband is a stay-at-home father.

-Maybe it's a same sex couple and the mother-in-law hasn't come to fully accept it.

-Another is the couple is again a straight couple and the wife refuses to have a child this could rub the mother-in-law the wrong way. There may be a lot of conflict between your future spouse and their mother about you because your mother-in-law would want their child to find someone else because obviously, they aren't so sure about you.

For other people your mother-in-law can try to compete with you for example 'The way I cook chicken is so much better' says your mother-in-law.

(You can take these as it being a sign a that the pile is for you)

But once she gets past those reservations the way she will view you is someone not very stable like you and your future spouse may like to travel a lot and are never in one place for too long and your mother-in-law could be like 'Why can't you just stay in one place it's not that hard'. But also, she sees your creative side, she sees you as a kind, gentle person with so much care within them.

She sees you as someone who has achieved so much that they can't help but praise you. They will also see you as someone very popular maybe you have a lot of followers or just a lot of friends in general.

They see you as the voice of reason, if anything goes wrong you are the best person to ask for advice, you are the best person to mediate an argument, you are the best person to a person, situation or an item fairly without an unbiased opinion (She might drag you shopping a lot and even show you off to her friends), more so because you have an obvious kindness and compassion to you that she can't help but love and admire about you despite her reservations. They will see you as strong, nurturing, courageous and passionate in the way you carry yourself and the way you talk.

They see you as someone who wants to protect their own peace, someone who wants to keep things balanced and harmonious.

-By the way Pile 2 she won't be like that with you forever she'll warm up. (Eventually😭)

PILE 3

I channelled 2 things from your future mother-in-law:

'You're a saint' and 'How can you deal with them'

Your future spouse may be a bit of a handful, a bit chaotic but in the 'I can't help but find it cute' kind of way.

Your mother-in-law finds you transformative, you never stay the same way for too long (not in a bad way) as in you will either only get better and better to them as time goes on or you just straight up change your appearance and aesthetic so much that it just throws your mother-in-law off.

Okay so your mother-in-law feels like you take really good care of not only yourself but your future spouse. They think you're physically so attractive (not in a creepy way), that you take extra care of your appearance, you may eat well and work out often.

But they also see you as creative and compassionate and your mother-in-law is just so happy to have you as part of her family and she may tell you this often from the moment your future spouse introduces you to her.

She feels like you're always on the move, you and your future spouse may travel a lot, you guys may go out a lot to dinners and parties, but I think these parties and dinners will be more on the luxurious side.

she said, 'as they should' (honestly your mother-in law is so supportive of you to the point that after you marry your future spouse, if you want to get married that is, that they won't even introduce you as their in law it's just 'this is my child'

Your mother-in-law sees you as successful, financially stable, attractive, nurturing and just overall they just absolutely adore you.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

big question. i'm cis (afab) and my gf is trans (amab) and i'm sorta having a hard time reconciling something. i've been a hard line feminist since i was about 8, by 12 i was a practical library on everything and anything womens lib. i'm spending a lot more time around trans people especially my gf now and i'm sorta struggling to reconcile the trans experience with my feminism. like- i'll see trans women being like "i hate my body :(" "my voice is awful" "i need [x thing to try to pass] ugh" and like my first thought is always "NO! THATS HOW THEY FUCKING GET YOU!!! THE PATRIARCHY WANTS YOU TO HATE YOURSELF SO YOU ENSLAVE YOURSELF TO CAPITALISM AND LIVE IN A CONSTANT STATE OF NEED FOR NEW PRODUCTS TO WARD OFF THE EVER PRESENT SELF HATRED BROUGHT ON YOU BY SOCIETY" and they go "well then how do i pass/transition?" and i honestly don't know and i also don't know how far it goes before its no longer dysphoria but instead the intentional subjugation of women by patriarchy for profit. i wanna help my fellow ladies but i honestly don't know how to like- apply the feminism i was taught as a child to trans women and i want to learn as soon as possible so that i can start doing it like yesterday

hi there,

I'll be honest: if it feels hard to apply the feminism you learned as a kid to your trans friends, that's probably because the feminism you were taught didn't have trans woman in mind.

luckily, the answer to this is something that I consider to be feminism 101: what a woman does with her body is, ultimately, her fucking business.

listen: I agree with you that the beauty industry(TM) is evil. it's misogynistic, it's exploitative, it thrives by making women feel bad enough about themselves to make them spend money on shit they don't need, etc. we all know this.

now, having said that: women who like makeup or wear heels or get laser hair removal or whatever other asinine thing are not my oppressor, nor are they my enemy. dare I say, we have bigger problems.

we also need to consider that many trans women are coming to these choices from a VERY different place than many cis women are. while I think my fellow cis women really benefit from reminders that they're allowed to stop shaving or wearing eyeliner or dieting or whatever, that's because most of us have had those actions forced on us from very young ages and may genuinely need a hand to feel secure breaking out of those behaviors.

the majority of trans women are not coming from a background where they were encouraged to partake in the same personal grooming habits and modes of presentation as cis women; many of them have, in fact, been ostracized, bullied, threatened, and otherwise hurt because of forays into forms of presentation that are considered feminine. no matter how good your intentions may be, approaching your advice indelicately can, unfortunately, make you come across as no different than any transphobe on the street trying to enforce cisnormative societal expectations. it also must be said that, for many trans women, the ability to "pass" is a matter of security - for having their status as women recognized at all, and to avoid harassment and abuse in public spaces. if you live in America, like I do, politicians in power currently have an extremely explicit anti-trans agenda that can make it harrowing to be visible as a trans person, and trans women in particular are frequently targeted for violence.

there are absolutely critiques to be made the way the many trans women are expected to perform hyperfemininity. the notion that someone is duty bound to drastically change their appearance in order to transition at all is itself extremely rooted in cisnormativity, and "passing" is often contingent on being young, thin, able-bodied, reasonably wealthy, and hewing as closely to Eurocentric standards of beauty as possible. that's not awesome! but that's also not the fault of any individual; no trans person asked to be born into a world where gender norms are so narrow and failing to pass can come with a very real risk of physical danger.

also, if I can circle back to this: again, women who participate in aspects of the beauty industry are not our enemies. there are always going to be some number of women who enjoy doing their makeup or like spending time fussing over their little outfits or want breast implants or whatever. some of those women are going to be trans. my official feminist stance on this is that I don't give a shit, because I believe in bodily autonomy even when it involves things I would not do personally and the choices that individual women make about how they want to style their little meat body don't even crack the top 100 things that I'm worried about right now. it's actually kind of vitally important, politically, that trans people be able to safely pursue their preferred gender expression; while it's not particularly revolutionary for a cis woman to go outside all dolled up, whether a trans woman can do that safely is a pretty basic litmus test for how safe a given space is for queer people. it's a ridiculously low bar, and many places will still fail to clear it.

so, yeah, I don't know, dude. be there to talk to your trans girlies if they want to start unpacking some of the pressure they feel to conform to a very rigid idea of womanhood, but whether or not they can walk down the street in your neighborhood safely is a WAY bigger issue than whether they decide to do voice training or not.

if you really want to cut to the root of the insecurity and vulnerability that the beauty industry thrives on exploiting, your time is much better spent working to ensure the trans women in your life feel safe and supported and have a community where they can find support regardless of how they look.

necessary disclaimer I'm a cis girl, any transfemme folks please share your voice here and feel free to clap my ass if I've said something out of line.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The true, tactical significance of Project 2025

TODAY (July 14), I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's roadmap for the actions that Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect:

https://www.project2025.org/

But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the point. I've only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true significance of Project 2025: The American Prospect's Rick Perlstein, which is unsurprising, given Perlstein's stature as one of the left's most important historians of right wing movements:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

As Perlstein points out, Project 2025 isn't new. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have prepared documents like this, with many identical policy prescriptions, in the run-up to many presidential elections. Perlstein argues that Warren G Harding's 1921 inaugural address captures much of its spirit, as did the Nixon campaign's 1973 vow to "move the country so far to the right 'you won’t even recognize it.'"

The threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new. The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century. As Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it. The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The right wing coalition needs to pander to forced-birth extremists, racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types), frothing anti-Communist cranks, vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc. Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office":

https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/status/1805680183065854083

The constituency for "husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office" is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they're voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Take the "libertarian" wing of the GOP: its members do favor personal liberty…it's just that they favor low taxes for them more than personal liberty for you. The kind of lunatic who'd vote for a dead gopher if it would knock a quarter off his tax bill will happily allow his coalition partners to rape pregnant women with unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and force them to carry unwanted fetuses to term if that's the price he has to pay to save a nickel in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

And, of course, the religious maniacs who profess a total commitment to Biblical virtue but worship Trump, Gaetz, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, and the whole panoply of cheating, lying, kid-fiddling, dope-addled refugees from a Jack Chick tract know that these men never gave a shit about Jesus, the Apostles or the Ten Commandments – but they'll vote for 'em because it will get them school prayer, total abortion bans, and unregulated "home schooling" so they can brainwash a generation of Biblical literalists who think the Earth is 5,000 years old and that Jesus was white and super into rich people.

Time and again, the leaders of the conservative movement prove themselves capable of acts of breathtaking cruelty, and undoubtedly many of them are depraved sadists who genuinely enjoy the suffering of their enemies (think of Trump lickspittle Steven Miller's undisguised glee at the thought of parents who would never be reunited with children after being separated at the border). But it's a mistake to think that "the cruelty is the point." The point of the cruelty is to assemble and maintain the coalition. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the point:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

The right has assembled a lot of power. They did so by maintaining unity among people who have irreconcilable ethics and goals. Think of the pro-genocide coalition that includes far-right Jewish ethno-nationalists, antisemitic apocalyptic Christians who believe they are hastening the end-times, and Islamophobes of every description, from War On Terror relics to Hindu nationalists.

This is quite an improbable coalition, and while I deplore its goals, I can't help but be impressed by its cohesion. Can you imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes work it takes to get antisemites who think Jews secretly control the world to lobby with Zionists? Or to get Zionists to work alongside of Holocaust-denying pencilneck Hitler wannabes whose biggest regret is not bringing their armbands to Charlottesville?

Which brings me back to Project 2025 and its true significance. As Perlstein writes, Project 2025 is a mess. Clocking in an 900 pages, large sections of Project 2025 flatly contradict each other, while other sections contain subtle contradictions that you wouldn't notice unless you were schooled in the specialized argot of the far right's jargon and history.

For example, Project 2025 calls for defunding government agencies and repurposing the same agencies to carry out various spectacular atrocities. Both actions are deplorable, but they're also mutually exclusive. Project 2025 demands four different, completely irreconcilable versions of US trade policy. But at least that's better than Project 2025's chapter on monetary policy, which simply lays out every right wing theory of money and then throws up its hands and recommends none of them.

Perlstein says that these conflicts, blank spots and contradictions are the most important parts of Project 2025. They are the fracture lines in the coalition: the conflicting ideas that have enough support that neither side can triumph over the other. These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking "LOOK AT ME" sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

The right is really good at this. Perlstein points to Nixon's expansion of affirmative action, undertaken to sow division between Black and white workers. We need to get better at it.

So far, we've lavished attention on the clearest and most emphatic proposals in Project 2025 – for understandable reasons. These are the things they say they want to do. It would be reckless to ignore them. But they've been saying things like this for a century. These demands constitute a compelling argument for fighting them as a matter of urgency, with the intention of winning. And to win, we need to split apart their coalition.

Perlstein calls on us to dissect Project 2025, to cleave it at its joints. To do so, he says we need to understand its antecedents, like Nixon's "Malek Manual," a roadmap for destroying the lives of civil servants who failed to show sufficient loyalty to Nixon. For example, the Malek Manual lays out a "Traveling Salesman Technique" whereby a government employee would be given duties "criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) of a population of 20,000 or under. Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Final_Report_on_Violations_and_Abuses_of/0dRLO9vzQF0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22organization+of+a+political+personnel+office+and+program%22&pg=PA161&printsec=frontcover

It's no coincidence that leftist historians of the right are getting a lot of attention. Trumpism didn't come out of nowhere – Trump is way too stupid and undisciplined to be a cause – he's an effect. In his excellent, bestselling new history of the right in the early 1990s, When the Clock Broke, Josh Ganz shows us the swamp that bred Trump, with such main characters as the fascist eugenicist Sam Francis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke

Ganz joins the likes of the Know Your Enemy podcast, an indispensable history of reactionary movements that does excellent work in tracing the fracture lines in the right coalition:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-clock-broke-106803105

Progressives are also an uneasy coalition that is easily splintered. As Naomi Klein argues in her essential Doppelganger, the liberal-left coalition is inherently unstable and contains the seeds of its own destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Liberals have been the senior partner in that coalition, and their commitment to preserving institutions for their own sake (rather than because of what they can do to advance human thriving) has produced generations of weak and ineffectual responses to the crises of terminal-stage capitalism, like the idea that student-debt cancellation should be means-tested:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

The last bid for an American aristocracy was repelled by rejecting institutions, not preserving them. When the Supreme Court thwarted the New Deal, FDR announced his intention to pack the court, and then began the process of doing so (which included no-holds-barred attacks on foot-draggers in his own party). Not for nothing, this is more-or-less what Lincoln did when SCOTUS blocked Reconstruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

But the liberals who lead the progressive movement dismiss packing the court as unserious and impractical – notwithstanding the fact that they have no plan for rescuing America from the bribe-taking extremists, the credibly accused rapist, and the three who stole their robes. Ultimately, liberals defend SCOTUS because it is the Supreme Court. I defended SCOTUS, too – while it was still a vestigial organ of the rights revolution, which improved the lives of millions of Americans. Human rights are worth defending, SCOTUS isn't. If SCOTUS gets in the way of human rights, then screw SCOTUS. Sideline it. Pack it. Make it a joke.

Fuck it.

This isn't to argue for left seccession from the progressive coalition. As we just saw in France, splitting at this moment is an invitation to literal fascist takeover:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/melenchon-macron-france-left-winner

But if there's one thing that the rise of Trumpism has proven, it's that parties are not immune to being wrestled away from their establishment leaderships by radical groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

What's more, there's a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn't an ideology you can change, it's a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker's labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Reviving the role of workers in their unions, and of unions in the Democratic party, is the key to building the in-party power we need to drag the party to real solutions – strong antimonopoly action, urgent climate action, protections for gender, racial and sexual minorities, and decent housing, education and health care.

The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden's capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats' undemocratic structure. Ultimately, the decision to have an open convention or to double down on a candidate whose campaign has been marred by significant deficits is down to a clutch of party officials who operate without any formal limits or authority:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-hole-at-the-heart-of-the-democratic

Jettisoning Biden because George Clooney (or Nancy Pelosi) told us to is never going to feel legitimate to his supporters in the party. But if the movement for an open convention came from grassroots-dominated unions who themselves dominated the party – as was the case, until the Reagan revolution – then there'd be a sense that the party had constituents, and it was acting on its behalf.

Reviving the labor movement after 40 years of Reaganomic war on workers may sound like a tall order, but we are living through a labor renaissance, and the long-banked embers of labor radicalism are reigniting. What's more, repelling fascism is what workers' movements do. The business community will always sell you out to the Nazis in exchange for low taxes, cheap labor and loose regulation.

But workers, organized around their class interests, stand strong. Last week, we lost one of labor's brightest flames. Jane McAlevey, a virtuoso labor organizer and trainer of labor organizers, died of cancer at 57:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

McAlevey fought to win. She was skeptical of platitudes like "speaking truth to power," always demanding an explanation for how the speech would become action. In her classic book A Collective Bargain, she describes how she built worker power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey helped organize a string of successful strikes, including the 2019 LA teachers' strike. Her method was straightforward: all you have to do to win a strike or a union drive is figure out how to convince every single worker in the shop to back the union. That's all.

Of course, it's harder than it sounds. All the problems that plague every coalition – especially the progressive liberal/left coalition – are present on the shop floor. Some workers don't like each other. Some don't see their interests aligned with others. Some are ornery. Some are convinced that victory is impossible.

McAlevey laid out a program for organizing that involved figuring out how to reach every single worker, to converse with them, listen to them, understand them, and win them over. I've never read or heard anyone speak more clearly, practically and inspirationally about coalition building.

Biden was never my candidate. I supported three other candidates ahead of him in 2020. When he got into office and started doing a small number of things I really liked, it didn't make me like him. I knew who he was: the Senator from MBNA, whose long political career was full of bills, votes and speeches that proved that while we might have some common goals, we didn't want the same America or the same world.

My interest in Biden over the past four years has had two areas of focus: how can I get him to do more of the things that will make us all better off, and do less of the things that make the world worse. When I think about the next four years, I'm thinking about the same things. A Trump presidency will contain far more bad things and far fewer good ones.

Many people I like and trust have pointed out that they don't like Biden and think he will be a bad president, but they think Trump will be much worse. To limit Biden's harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he's hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump's harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

[moonsandloons]

I think we don’t talk enough about how Two seems to assume what everyone wants. It’s actually a really good character flaw but I never see anyone talking about it-

My main example of this is with Clock and Winner. Two sees that they’re having issues and wants to help, so they let Clock stay in the kitchen. They never considered that Winner might’ve been uncomfortable with that, they never considered that they shouldn’t meddle in other people’s drama, they just saw an issue and wanted to fix it.

We’ve seen them doing this since the very first episode they appeared in. They took 40 of Four’s contestants! Why didn’t they just wait until the season was over? Did they do it because they hate Four? Were they trying to hurt his feelings? No! They just… Wanted to host a show.

They weren’t thinking about how their actions may affect others, they just saw an opportunity and took it. Why go through the trouble to FIND contestants when Four had already found so many? They were just trying to save themself some trouble, not even thinking about how Four would feel.

A more recent example is when they gave Gaty a job in the kitchen. Of course, she was happy about it, but it doesn’t change the fact that they never ASKED if she wanted to work there. They were sad about her elimination and decided to keep her there. Sure, she was fine with it, but it’s also what led to her eventually being kidnapped.

I just. I love Two very much, and I don’t think they’re a bad person. This isn’t a Two hate post or anything. Just. They have character flaws, please recognize them ^_^

[from-a-farther-room]

Queerness visibility debate aside, one of the things I'm finding frustrating about the sequel is that while there are some great character moments, there are also so many inconsistencies and weird omissions in the film that could mean something, or could just be bad writing/editing, that it's really hard to work out which - if any - of those actually mean something and what's just us putting more thought into it than anyone involved in the writing/editing decisions did.

Take the opening heist. On first watch, this was one of my favourite parts and I do still think it's a lot of fun with some good character details, but on reflection the concept doesn't really add up with what we saw in the original.

In the first film, Andy's so concerned about staying off the public radar that she goes out of her way to delete a holiday snap that she appeared in the background of off someone's phone, and they all seem to take the weight of killing people seriously. Here, they're apparently fine with doing an extremely unsubtle shoot-'em-up car chase through a populated area, not as an unavoidable escape tactic but as a planned strategy. Is this supposed to mean the characters now don't care about visibility or collateral damage to bystanders (sure, maybe Copley could scrub the CCTV later, but that wouldn't do much good if they'd hit a bus full of random people on that road), or did the writers just want a cool car chase and not bother to consider the implications? I assume it's the latter.

In the first film, Nile insists on going in to Merrick's alone rather than let mortal Copley come with her, and once they find out Andy's mortal, they're all shown to be shielding her as much as possible. Here, they're all - Nile included! - apparently fine with a plan that involves the two mortals going into a firefight alone, without kevlar or anything (sure, they snark about Copley undercounting the guards, but there's nothing to suggest that they weren't expecting anyone to be shooting back), while immortal Nile's seemingly just expected to be the get-away driver. Is this supposed to mean the characters have become overly cocky and/or simply stopped giving a fuck about protecting the mortals, or did the writers just want to do a cool fight scene and give Copley some action and not think about anything else? Again, I assume it's the latter.

Now this is pretty standard action movie stuff, but it's disappointing when the first one didn't go the standard action movie route on these things, and it wouldn't have been that hard to do the cool stuff in a way that made more sense - before I saw the film, I was expecting that both the car chase and Andy & Copley fighting in the mansion with no protective gear would be the result of things not going according to plan, rather than that being the plan. 

And it just keeps going from there. Are any of the many, many ways the whole 'last immortal' business doesn't make sense supposed to be a hint that some or all of what we've been told about it isn't actually true, or is it just bad writing? Is the fact that Tuah only tells Booker about the immortality transfer thing - not Andy, the only one of them he seemingly has any relationship with, not Nile, the person it's actually ABOUT - supposed to be a hint that he's secretly in league with Discord and/or has some other agenda of his own, or is it just bad writing? I genuinely have no idea.

When Booker re-joins the group, do we see nothing even resembling an apology or contrition from him because he's actively supposed to be even more of an asshole now, or did the writers just forget that he did actually somewhat recognize how badly he'd fucked up at the end of the first one? Is his whole generally weird vibe supposed to hint that he has something more going on that we don't know about yet, or is it just clunky writing? Again, no idea.

Discord tells Quynh "I pulled you from the ocean because I needed you by my side" - it's not "I saved you when Andy couldn't", it's "I saved you because I wanted something from you". And Quynh doesn't really react to that. Does she not notice the implication that Discord would've left her there if she didn't need her? Does she not care because she didn't expect anything from anyone other than Andy? Does she not care because she never really with Discord as such anyway, just using her resources while it was convenient? Or does she not react because it didn't occur to the writers that there was anything in that statement to react to? No idea.

We see Joe and Nicky still fighting when Andy comes in with Tuah, and then we don't see them interact again until the cliffs of Moher scene, which is a lovely scene in its own right, but doesn't really acknowledge the earlier fight. Are we supposed to assume they did make up to some extent at some point in between, but either it was cut or never written in the first place because it wasn't considered important? Or are we supposed to assume that they haven't properly made up, that moment was just sort of a time-out because they have bigger more immediate problems and they still need to figure things out between them later? Or that that was the extent of them making up, they weren't fine before that scene but it's all good after it? I'm assuming it's the first one because it's my preferred interpretation and I feel like it fits best with how Luca and Marwan played it, but who knows.

In the final sequence with Andy and Quynh, Andy doesn't have the necklace at first, and she doesn't have it at the very end either (Quynh is wearing a necklace with seemingly the same sort of cord at the very end but I can't tell for sure if it's the necklace). But there is a shot partway through (just before the blanket bit) of Andy sitting on the steps in a tank-top where she clearly is wearing the necklace (along with another longer pendant that she was also wearing in the port scene and when first meeting Tuah, but I think not again after that). Does this mean Quynh gave it back to her and they didn't bother to show that, despite it being such a focus earlier, and then they forgot at the end? Or Quynh gave it back to Andy and then Andy gave it back to Quynh all off-screen? Or is it just a continuity error, they forgot Andy wasn't supposed to have it at that point when filming that bit and either never noticed or didn't bother to fix it later? It's probably the last one, but again, who knows.

I'm all for some good speculation, but it's frustrating when it seems like the most likely answer to most if not all of the 'what does this mean' questions is just 'it means nothing and that's not a deliberate choice, they just didn't care'. It's not like the first one was perfect in this regard either (why did Andy say "it's been 200 years" like that was a lot when it seems to actually be the shortest interval between new immortals they've had apart from Joe & Nicky's two-for-one special; how was jumping off the train in the middle of nowhere going to help her get to Afghanistan; etc.) but I feel like more of the probably-careless 'wait what' stuff there was easier to write off because it didn't really matter to our understanding of the characters the way these things do.

[saphronethaleph]

Acting On Instinct

“So… Senator, I admit I’m curious,” Obi-Wan said, that afternoon. “I’ve been hearing a lot about the Military Creation Act.”

Padme looked up at the two Jedi, Obi-Wan and Anakin alike.

“You have?” she asked.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan agreed. “And – I’ll be honest – I’m not particularly sure about the controversy involved.”

“Can you explain?” Anakin requested. “I wasn’t really… any good at politics.”

“During this Separatist Crisis, certain elements of the Republic Senate are of the opinion that we need a standing army,” Padme explained. “And a much more significant navy, as well. I’m of the opinion that… the act is premature.”

Obi-Wan blinked.

“...why?” he asked.

“I cannot condone a course of action that would push us closer to war,” Padme answered.

“Senator,” Obi-Wan said, slowly. “I hope you don’t mind if I speak frankly?”

“I could hardly refuse you, I’m sure,” Padme replied.

“Can I ask first?” Anakin requested.

“By all means, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. “Your apprenticeship is to learn, after all – it’s good for you to work on the areas you struggle with, as well as those where you display great skill.”

“Thank you, Master, that’s very kind of you,” Anakin replied, with a fairly significant amount of sarcasm. “But… Padme, don’t you remember what was happening when we met?”

“...you mean on Tatooine?” Padme said, confused.

“No, not that,” Anakin replied. “On Naboo.”

“I believe what my apprentice is trying to say,” Obi-Wan supplied, helpfully, “is that Naboo was invaded, and was unable to effectively defend itself because it lacked a significant military. Subsequently, you travelled to Coruscant to ask that the Republic do something, and when they proved unable to do something about it within a few hours, you overthrew the government, travelled back to Naboo, and borrowed the Gungan army to solve the whole problem with their army, your security forces, your fighter corps, Anakin in a spare starfighter, and a lot of guns.”

He smiled, pleasantly. “And some Jedi, of course… but what that all means is that I’m very confused about why you’re opposed to the Military Creation Act.”

“Yeah,” Anakin agreed, nodding. “What he said.”

Obi-Wan stifled a chuckle.

“It is precisely because I have seen the damage done to Naboo in war that I refuse to invite it to the Republic,” Padme replied.

“Don’t the Separatists include the Trade Federation?” Anakin said. “It didn’t stop them last time.”

“I respect your ideas, Senator,” Obi-Wan told her. “Please – do not misunderstand me. But I would have expected you to be in favour of the Military Creation Act”

Padme frowned.

“...you do make a good point,” she admitted. “But… to have a peacetime military seems like a bad idea.”

“The problem, I think, is that not having a military at the start of a war is worse,” Obi-Wan said, thoughtfully. “Or is the concern about the idea that this military would allow for a tyranny?”

“There is some of that, yes,” Padme agreed.

“Why not make sure the Chancellor is in charge?” Anakin asked. “He’s a good person.”

“And what about the next?” Obi-Wan asked. “Or the one after him? No, I think there must be a different solution here…”

He considered, thoughtfully.

“Perhaps…”

“The vote on the Military Creation Act to follow,” Mas Amedda said. “Senator Amidala has a speech, and the vote will follow. Senator?”

“Thank you, Vice-Chancellor,” Amidala replied, then looked out into the hall. “Delegates – I recognize that many of you have disagreed with the Loyalist Committee on the matter of the Military Creation Act. I wish to propose an amendment – as follows.”

She cleared her throat.

“The budget for the military will be subject to an annual renewal by the Senate,” she said. “Forty percent of the military will be controlled at the federal level, and the remaining sixty percent assigned pro rata to the funding planets.”

Several seconds of silence hung in the air.

“That’s it,” she added. “I would vote for the Act with this amendment, and I encourage my fellows on the Loyalist Committee to do the same.”

“...ah,” Mas Amedda said, then fell back on procedure. “All members will vote on the Amidala amendment, and then on the Act itself.”

“Mas,” Palpatine hissed.

“What?” Mas replied.

“The Act isn’t supposed to pass,” Palpatine said, tightly. “It’s supposed to fail so that the only way to break the deadlock is emergency powers and the military falls to me personally-”

“Do you have any idea how catastrophic that would have been if I didn’t mute my microphone?” Mas demanded. “Look – you must have a fallback plan.”

“Why do you assume I have to have the fallback plans?” Palpatine asked. “What I don’t understand is why she’s in favour of the amendment, now, I worked hard to make sure she wouldn’t be.”

The vote counts appeared on their little screen, showing the amendment had passed. Then the voting on the Act took place, as well, and it was soon clear that – the act was successful.

Palpatine sighed.

“Well, then,” he said, and took out his comlink. “Dooku. Launch the invasion ahead of schedule. Bring the clones.”

Mas blinked.

“...what?” he said.

“If the Republic is going to get a military, I need to have the invasion happen before it gets one!” Palpatine said, waspishly. “If I can’t get control of the military by emergency powers then I can’t tolerate having it-”

He stopped speaking at the loud roar that had spread from the pods.

“...Mas?” he asked.

“You never told me you were going to have the Republic invaded,” Mas replied – his microphone, clearly, on. “I call for a vote of no confidence-”

Palpatine pushed him off the side of the podium, because at this point he was annoyed enough to take the instant gratification in the moments before everything got quite distressing.

[stradakiev]

Iconic of Doctor Who for making the **20 year old girl suffering from PTSD the only reasonable voice in Lucky Day.

• Ruby is the one reminding her Moms and Cherry that she’s only been going out with Conrad for 5 days and their excitement is excessive. That is her mom’s fridge of photos I don’t think Ruby hung that picture up.

• she spends the entire episode trying to convince Conrad to have literally any reason. The whole reason she’s on his doorstep in the first place is the give him the antidote to the shrek will stop tracking him.

• she called Kate when she saw signs of trouble but didn’t have her come when she was reassured. Then had her come with confirmation (I’ll need to rewatch if we see her contact UNIT after the lights go out I honestly don’t remember)

• she was able to recognize her trauma from traveling with the doctor in a way only really Martha has done before and ask for help/say she needed time and such to heal. (Only counting new who companions and Belinda doesn’t count because she noticed that toxic behavior BEFORE traveling)

• she sought safety with the people she trusted when she was doxxed by Conrad

•BEGGED Kate to stop and see reason and not let things go further when Kate had clearly taken things too far. Ruby was the one who eventually stopped the shreek and ended the situation.

• took time away from UNIT when their actions further traumatized her

I have two things to say about this:

1. The companions are supposed to be our moral compass in the show as their role has traditionally been the audience surrogate. They show us how a “reasonably acting” person would respond to these situations (except for Clara Oswald you fucked up queen I adore you and when you were the doctors moral compass it all crashed and burned so beautifully) and Ruby is HORRIFIED by Kate’s actions so I don’t think UNIT was meant to be a benevolent government organization but a deeply flawed one who Geneva is breathing down the neck of

2. This is a population of people that is so used to not getting taken seriously. (I.e. people don’t take their trauma seriously, they often get gaslit by doctors, society loves to make fun of their interests, I could go on) She is belittled by Conrad and his friends, her friends think she’s bonkers, and her moms just want her to move on from things but she’s traumatized. Yet through it all you see she is the voice of reason and I respect the shit out of that. I definitely shed a tear or two when she talked about how traumatizing everything had been. Of course she is still a 19 year old who gets swept up in things as 19 year olds do but it’s not UNIT good and Conrad bad but there is a battle going on everywhere while normal people are just trying to live their lives.