vexnatos

[vexnatos]

i hope luigi mangione is proven innocent & gets to sue a ton of companies for slander and win & i hope he gets enough money to rebuild his life and get any help for his chronic pain that he needs & i hope he’s able to disappear from the public eye entirely if that’s what he wants

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It's important to remember that Luigi Mangione is being framed for murder. The "evidence" they have on him is absolute clown shoes absurd.

They're trying to win this by swaying public opinion. That's why they're doing movie deals about it and staging ridiculous photo ops.

They're gonna try to give this kid the death penalty to cover up for their own gross incompetence and in the hopes that they scare the working class out of trying to fight back.

Please don't help them do this by using his name as a synonym for political assassinations. Please do not perpetuate the idea that he's guilty.

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maybe, when your comments get you called out by the united states holocaust memorial museum, instead of doubling down and claiming that people are just “hating”, you could realize it’s time to do some reflection

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“israel is tricking us into being antisemitic by using ancient Hebrew words”

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re:wikipedia. you might want to know this btw https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-editors-hijacked-the-israel-palestine-narrative?s=07

there has been a concerted targeted effort to exploit how the wikipedia court works to remove uncomfortable truths and install alternate facts

Yes! I have seen that article before. And also worth noting is a post from last year I think @the-library-alcove made which uncovered a crossover where either one or two editiors changing jewish pages, also were changing native amercian pages with anti native edits.

For those who don't want to give your email address to read the article anon linked as the website requires an email to read, essentially there was a whole discord server dedicated to mass editing zionism, Israel and related pages to the war. They had a full on method on how to not get caught like rotating editing pairs, overwhelming mods with pushback, etc. They created fucking spreadsheets for it.

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Saw a community of "socialists" on Tumblr yesterday. Meanwhile, the same day, our defense attorney got arrested in the country that's considered the alpha and omega of socialism by people like them on the charge of, basically, being a defense attorney.

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Hot fucking take but gunning down two Israeli embassy workers in front of a DC museum while shouting “free Palestine” won’t actually do anything to free Palestine. It just gets two innocent civilians killed, you sent to prison, and the entire movement delegitimized.

Good job 👍

[vexnatos]

amazing. every single word past the first sentence is wrong. the reason you see mostly white people at these rallies is they're the only ones who can safely go to these rallies. black folks and latinos are NOT risking their lives dealing with the notoriously corrupt and murderous american police.

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Greatest freeze-frame from Sam Aronow's latest video

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These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

[vexnatos]

Could've sworn we were all aware the Iranian regime was bad. Could've sworn just a few years ago my dash was full of people posting that Iran in the 70s video and spreading awareness about women getting murdered. Now that the fight is with Jews it's fine though, right? The enemy of (((my enemy))) is my best friend or whatever?

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I noticed an interesting pattern of erasing ethnic minorities on Wikipedia that is not exclusive to Jews. We all know how suddenly, especially since late 2023, Jewish actors, singers and historical figures/figures of interest became anything but Jewish on Wikipedia, with their Jewish background being hidden in 1 or 2 sentences spread out in the article. This also seems to be happening with Druze people. For example, I looked over at the wiki page of Farid al Atrash, who is basically the middle eastern equivalent of Paganini, and he is described (in English) as being "Syrian-Egyptian". His Druze background is only mentioned in his Early Life section, described as "being born to a Druze family". Bro is neither Syrian nor Egyptian, he is Druze. Syria didnt even exist when he was born, but his large community of Druze people in Jabal al-Druze did. In the Hebrew version of his article he is described properly as Druze, and later as Egyptian, after receiving Egyptian citizenship. His mothers wiki page suffers the same fate, she is not referred to as Druze but rather, "born to a Druze family". Every single notable Druze figure I saw on Wikipedia in the world of music, acting, literature etc is not described as Druze, in any of the English articles. In the Hebrew articles however, they are all first and foremost recognized as Druze. Pretty crazy imo

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i need leftists to cope with their post 9/11 + Iraq/Afghan wars Islamophobia guilt in a way that doesn’t involve erasing the fact that, like it or not, Islam is a proselytizing religion that has fueled centuries of colonization, genocide, and imperialism. idealizing Islam as a purer, better alternative to Christianity is in itself Islamophobic, and it also ignores the many communities who have suffered at the hands of Islamic imperialism. it is possible to not be Islamophobic while acknowledging that.

[vexnatos]

…So once again it’s the time of year when I return to this piece of digital art in its most recent version, tweak it a little in the attempt to get closer to what I see in my head, and repost it for Pride. (ETA, 1 June 2025: this year's version of the image is rerendered to reflect the ongoing business of getting the varying skin colors of the Five properly nailed down.)

At the moment I’m looking at These Two Idiots (because honestly, in some ways they are...) and considering, once again with the usual bemusement, how long I’ve been working with them. Of all the characters I’ve worked with in print, the only ones I’ve known longer would be the crew of NCC-1701—and (as of autumn 2024) for the first time in paid writing, a couple of gentlemen named Holmes and Watson.

I first “met” the two characters above in late 1970 in the form of two fellow college students on whom they’d be loosely based: a couple of gents—not gay, as it happens—who were friends to me when I badly needed some. They were a tall dark-haired guy and a short blond one with a mustache that came and went… so that, not even knowing the word “trope” at the time, I'd fallen sideways into at least one.

Less than a year after I met them, I changed schools and educational tracks, and we all drifted apart. But something about those two stuck with me. The nature and depth of their friendship was unusual. So was one way it manifested itself: in ruthless snark that had no meanness or cruelty about it whatsoever—just (sometimes slightly rueful and eye-rolling) affection.

In the late sixties I’d pivoted from the Star Trek fanfic I'd been writing practially since the series premiered, to start in on writing some very derivative epic-fantasy fic strongly influenced by Tolkien. Rather to my surprise, though, as I started nursing school in 1971, the nature of that fiction started to change, and began rearranging itself around two characters who had a friendship like that of my college friends. With them at its core, a rather different and subversive kind of medieval-flavored fantasy world started knitting itself together from various scraps of themes and imagery lying around in the back of my brain.

Even so early in the construction phases of this world, something the characters quickly made plain to me in the writing was that their relationships with one another were not what mainstream 1970s culture would consider conventional. They were unquestionably what we'd now think of as queer… but that was a background issue,* and not at all the most important thing in their lives. They had far more important business to deal with—as became clear as their personalities and priorities started filling themselves out in the foreground.

One of them turned out to be the deliberate, analytical, methodical son of a provincial nobleman, all too aware of the expectations of those around him: that he was eventually likely to wind up running that province himself. Yet at the same time he also became aware that he had other more serious problems—chief among them the discovery that he possessed a nascent power that would kill him young if he failed to master it. And in the last thousand years, no one of his gender ever had.

The other presented himself more and more clearly as a difficult case: someone who wanted very much to be good at the family business, but wasn’t… and knew it. Kind of a screw-up, full of romanticized and unrealistic takes on the world and his relationship with it: repeatedly doing the wrong things for what he was sure were the right reasons. Yet no matter how often he screwed up, he was also the kind of person who keeps picking himself up and trying again, because he’s been told over and over that that’s what people like him have to do: otherwise they’re no use to anybody.

Imagine my shock when I realized that these two men—initially canonically enemies in their adolescence, then best friends as they grew, and eventually much more—were the (incomplete) answer to the question I’d once asked my Mom at the end of the bedtime reading of some fairy tale or other: “Why can’t a prince rescue another prince?”§ Because one of them got himself more than once into situations where he really needed one kind or another of rescuing. The other one obliged him, while once or twice getting rescued (in different modes) himself. Those interlocking patterns started to solidify out of concept and into character detail and plot, while their world grew and proliferated into its own detail around them.

Then, without warning, in 1978 both world and characters decided they were ready to get real. I was abruptly dragged gasping and flailing under the surface of a novel that would begin the tale of what those two characters had yet to become. The period it took to produce that first draft was possibly the most interesting six weeks of my life… and that includes the six weeks during which I first scrubbed in on brain surgery. Day and night, for days at a time, I barely even existed except as something for a novel to come out of. When it was done with me, it just as abruptly dumped me back into my life and wandered away, leaving me staring around, blinking and wondering if anybody’d got the number of that truck. Nothing like it has ever happened to me since, which may be just as well. I’m none too sure that these days I could handle the strain.

The book—which sold within a couple of weeks of its manuscript landing on its first publisher’s desk—kicked off my career as novelist and screenwriter, and in its way proved that the world was at least slightly ready for epic fantasy in which the basic culture was pansexual, polyamorous, and inclusive in ways that hadn’t been attempted before.

So I owe them a debt, those two gentlemen up there: the tall dark curly-haired guy with the amateur strategist’s mind, the blacksmith’s shoulders, and the peculiar sword, his background thought always nibbling away at the question of how to heal the world’s wounds: and the short fair gent who if he could would stay at home, live quietly in town, and work in the local library… except for when saving the world (or his found family) requires him to subsume his work-in-progress kingship and his being into that of his ancestral demigod. Due to the success of the book in which they made their debut, these two became, in their way, the fairy† godfathers of the Young Wizards—and additionally enabled all that Star Trek fanfic I’d started writing a decade before to proceed to its logical conclusion.

More to the point, though, a lot of people in the 1980s and ‘90s who’d never seen queer representation in a fantasy novel, found it first (or at last) while following Herewiss and Freelorn down their shared road. It’s been my pleasure to hold that space for new readers, and to keep adding to it… because—if you ask me—it’s needed more now than ever.

So, to the readership of the Middle Kingdoms works (now pushing half a century old) and everybody else who’s celebrating the season: happy Pride!

ETA: Just noting here for those who might be interested that, as usual, the LGBTQ Pride Bundle at Ebooks Direct is discounted more deeply than usual for Pride Month. With the usual warning to UK readers: friends, our apologies, but due to Brexit we can no longer sell ebooks to you directly. However, most of these works are currently available to UK readers through Amazon.com.

*Not least because everybody else in their world is (at least potentially) some shade of queer, including God.

§ For certain values of "prince". See here for more detail.

† (snicker)

[vexnatos]