#I get on any app and all I see is mischaracterization

[jancysmixtape]

“El isn’t emotionally ready for a relationship”

*Mike and Brenner/Lonnie “parallel”*

“Jonathan only helps if there’s something in it for him”

“Nancy abuses and manipulates Steve”

STOP MISCHARACTERIZING MY BABIES, IM TIRED!!

[emmitaaa4]

Addressing some fandom BS inconsistencies

Gwyn was shadow mommy, Az was shadow daddy, they were gonna have shadow babies with her extra super pliable bones.

I audibly chocked when I read this @nikethestatue (btw everything said in this post was on point). No but seriously this is how they sound, too many of them insisting that there is nothing wrong with basing the likelihood of a ship on who has the more suitable uterus to be with a man... cause supposedly they're just picking up on the hints SJM wrote for them? She likes babies for HEAs so ofc children are the end all be all of a relationship, plus there's absolutely no way that she could ever write an adoption plot SJM is literally adopted and has done it in other series. Selective reading strikes again.

A minimum amount of critical thinking would tell you that 1) the infamous *magical uterus change* scene was about nessian (& feysand), not about any ship; 2) if SJM had written Nesta changing Elain's uterus, it would have given too much away, not to mention 3) how disturbing/violating it would have been for Nesta to change her sister's reproductive anatomy WITHOUT HER CONSENT?! None of it makes sense narratively; my girl Nes would never, especially given the trauma they both suffered from having their bodily autonomy--and so much more--ripped away by the Cauldron.

This argument is so trivialized that I see it every other day on reddit/tiktok/*insert media app*, and yet elriels are the toxic side of the fandom? The ones whom people are allowed to insult, to ridicule for theories all made in good fun, the women that are villainized over a difference of opinion? Don't get me wrong, there's assholes on both sides and people keep calling one another variations of delulu (and the nastier personal attacks). But by painting this fandom-wide villain there is such a lack of accountability for the plethora of harmful talking points spread by other portions of the fandom. (I've been silently reading the anti-elain & anti-elriel tags for like a year, and I'm on tiktok. Yes, I have self-destructive tendencies).

Anyways.

I never understood either how people ever actually thought (or well still think) that gwynriel would happen BEFORE elucien?? It makes no sense logically, narratively, or in terms of characterization & the arc she's set up for Elain, Azriel, and Lucien. Yet it took one controversial bonus chapter for people to decenter Elain in her own story, that is make her choice of romantic partner--which SJM spent 3+ books setting up--Azriel's. It took one bonus chapter that soo many readers are still unaware of, to brush Elain off as a "sexual object" Az is using to distract himself until his therapist-extraordinaire Gwyn comes in and heals him all up. Because ofc she will: she's badass and not the "passive and weak and boring" Eplain (aka "Plant" or "brain dead gardener"), she fits the YA archetype of the spunky warrior-girl so she can handle his darkness, and SJM supposedly spent time fleshing her out because she wrote her as a LI for Azriel; she's made for him, she is what he needs to grow (I actually enjoyed Gwyn's character btw, just pointing out how silly it all sounds). “Next book is a love triangle between Elain/Az/Gwyn” “Elain will turn evil or is secretly evil”. So you're telling me that SJM would pit Elain & Gwyn against each other in a love triangle over a man... all because of a necklace that was not even mentioned once in the actual books? Please, let's be logical for a second.

All this because instead of reading the bonus chapter in the context of the books, some people are reading the books in the context of the bonus chapter. Which now that I think of it is probably why so many people mischaracterize Az the way they do--because yes we know enough of his character to know half of the stuff the fandom diagnoses him with is questionable. Azriel? Entitled incel x fuckboy hybrid (gotta be the first of his kind, minute slay ig)? Interesting tell me more. No joke I saw a semi-popular post on here where a gwynriel said they read the bonus WITHOUT HAVING READ ANY OF THE BOOKS. I'm sorry, ship wars are silly and believe it or not idc who ppl ship, but it makes it hard to take some of the things they say seriously.

All this to say that the fandom isn't even debating the right thing. If you consider everything SJM has said in her interviews:

(she's been planting seeds for Nesta & Elain's book since acomaf; she knows who she is writing the first 2 books about + is keeping things open for the 3rd one--with 5 different ship options--which automatically rules out "Elain will close the series"; she said she's doing research for Elain's book in the ACOFAS bonus & there's seeds for future bookS in acofas; all she said recently about her beloved *heroines* and the themes of fate/true love/choice she finds *very* interesting & wants to discuss)

and if you also consider all she's written in the actual books (elain's characterization + the overarching plot in general & how she fits into it), then it's pretty evident that Elain's book is next.

The question then would be who is the MMC / 2nd PoV in her book, aka would acotar 5 be an elucien or an elriel story? Because logically, gwynriel was always a consequence of elucien. I honestly do not understand how people don't see that.

Oh and they always think they're gagging elriels with the "obviously Azriel is the next MC" as if elriels aren't saying the same thing? And we're the ones twisting info and not making sense. It's just funny at this point.

---sidenote: I realize that this post generalizes some things, and I just wanted to say that I have interacted with lovely eluciens / people on either side of this headache of a ship war. My hard limit is Elain haters though... back off I say 🤺 BACK OFF 🤺

---sidenote 2: I would have written this as a reblog except im not entirely sure how tumblr works and I get no visibility from them rip.

[pinkiepie20000]

Tje amount of men I see on this app making Arlecchino into their submissive waifu or whatever is genuinely baffling like PLEASE look at this woman and tell me she's not a lesbian. I'm SICK and TIRED 💔‼️‼️

Arlecchino kisses women end of discussion 🫶

you are literally so right 😔😔 nit only does she kiss women, she kisses ME. that woman looks like she makes the look of disappointment that your mom gives you in the store after yoh start actin up. like how can anyone look at her and go "heh.. yeah.. that's my little soft uwu waifu rught there 🤓!" like does she not kill people... is she not called insane by other harbingers.... like wdym "she definitely gives the best head!" if she were to give you head it'd be the decapitated head of your grandpa?? like im SICK and TIRED. of seeinv people mischaracterize EVERY SINGLE ONE of the female characters in ANY anime, game, or literally anything?? like raiden, even if she does pull a swordnout from her tits, i still think its pretty weird people call her booba sword like SHUT UPPPP your parents DONT love you AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!! like her lore is something i love considering how it is and the fact people ignore the fact the raiden ei hadn't seen the world jn over 500 years, so obviously everything is going to be different, so of course she'd be oblivious to the current world, they make her seem like some clueless waifu or some shit, and i hate the word waifu because of these people, like why not just say wife? do you have to say waifu? do you have to be weird? theres so many characters they always water down and i dont get why?

like eula, she's a genuine knight, she technically kills people, and she has a deep history with her familys past, so i just wished people would focus on what the characters good traits are, like not their boobs, ass, thighs, or basically all of that, j wish they could focus on how her childhood was and how it lead her to be the way she is now? people hate her because of her family

and shenhe too, she's actually really good lore wise. i think the fact the only thing holding her back from slaughtering someone are those red ropes is really cool, and the fact her dad treated her like that and how he thought she was curse or something, but NOOOOOO. FAN SERVICE. it ruins everything.

i could go on abt this and i WILL.

not only them, lisa too, the fact her vision is fake and she doesn't even get to live her full life is cool? like wtf?

CLORINIDE OR WTV. isnt she like a cop or smt idk but either way its crazy how she actually does a lot of near death shit and people still think she's not who she is

nit only is that an issue with women, its an issue with men too.

most of the time its ALWAYS. sterotypes, like big men, they get turned into these big, possessive, sex hungry dudes when in reality its fucking NEUVILLETTE. like no he wouldn't make you ride it till gr back breaks hed braid yr hair or some shit then go talk with melusines or wtv? same with wriothesley, hes a cool guy, he owns a prison and hes nice to the prisoners

i sound like a fucking nerd rn wtf

[icewindandboringhorror]

Okay, here’s a final answer, just for clarification - 

- 

Firstly, please understand that I’m not angry, and I’m not upset. I just tend to speak very matter of factly, I guess? If I seem cold or something when typing this response, it's not a personal attack towards you or some display of aggression, that's just how I word things sometimes, I don't mean for them to be misinterpreted or want you to think I’m like getting mad with you or etc. Me disagreeing does not inherently equal me being mad about something, it merely means that I disagree, which is an emotion neutral action. If someone said 2+2 = 6, I would disagree, and openly so, but that doesn’t mean I’d also be like, crying about it or upset with them or something lol. 

 I actually even stated so at the end of my tags last time - 

 So, I apologize if you interpreted my tone as being mean, but I was simply trying to be firm and direct in how I said things so you understand that it's a very serious matter, and I didn't want to be light about it. 

There was a bit of jokiness/sarcasm/exaggeration as well I suppose, but again, that’s not an inherent indicator of upset, just the way I speak - especially when your question can be seen as rude to begin with (which usually leads people to care less about faking positive emotions or seeming polite to others. If a person is not polite to you, you’re not likely to watch how you communicate as much or attempt to display high politeness back). My default state is a neutral flatness as I have a very shallow emotional range (shout out to schizophrenia spectrum negative symptoms and other various issues lol), any excessive positivity or “perkiness” or something that I display is just an attempt to be polite and communicate with others in a simple and kindly manner (in real life I’m often seen as too stoic, blunt, detached, cold, etc. lmao, so in general communication with strangers I tend to overcompensate to being excessively polite instead) - but that also means I can accidentally drop that sometimes if I’m being “real” or whatever. 

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Anyway, now that concerns over my tone have hopefully been explained, I’ll address this issue about your previous ask in a numbered list. Please read ALL of this, if you are actually taking this seriously. If you don’t actually read, in detail (no skimming), this entire response, then this is not even a discussion since you’re not willing to genuinely engage in the first place. -  

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Firstly, here is the original ask, for reference  ----

 As for how your question can be rude: 

(1.) In my initial response (in the tags of your answer), I asserted various things, mostly that the question was rude, and that it’s not appropriate to ask people, for a variety of reasons. I’ll explain those in more length here. 

My main point is that even asking the question in the first place is rude. It doesn’t matter how specifically you word it, it’s not appropriate. Just like any personal issue. At least in my culture, it’s typically thought of as inconsiderate and inappropriate to ask random strangers personal questions. for example, it would be rude to approach a random stranger on the bus that you’ve never even seen before and ask them why the have the haircut they do, who their sexual partners are, if they’ve just had a death in the family, how well their marriage is going, what their gender is, etc. etc. 

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(2.) On top of this personal boundary issue, another concern would be that the nature of the question itself is baseless -- 

Would you ask a cis woman why they're a woman? Or a cis man why he chose to be a man? Would you ask a straight person why they chose to be straight?

Would you find it acceptable and polite if a random stranger approached you on the street and asked you for an explanation as to why you're the gender you are? Imagine that exact scenario happening to you, and if you would find it odd or overstepping boundaries at all.  

I doubt you ask this same gender identity question to everyone in your life, to your parents, friends, the cashier at your grocery store.  Why is it only certain groups that need to explain or justify their identities to you? Only certain groups that you feel the inherent need to question? It's a double standard which further serves to prove the question itself is unnecessary. 

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(3.) Additionally, in case you're genuinely unsure of tone (maybe you have difficulty reading social cues or something, that’s understandable) I will explain - the way in which the question was asked has certain implications. 

The statement “Why are you nonbinary? You seem like a pretty girl to me”, implies that - due to your beliefs about me/how you see me, you find it confusing that I could have a certain identity that you see as not matching your perception of me, or that you see as an invalid label, and are asking for me to justify or explain myself/my identity to you because of that. 

Even if this implied meaning was not intentional, it is what most people will interpret upon reading the question, and would be a commonly held understanding. There are other ways you could have asked the question which would be less condescending, yes, but again, the other points still stand (like that the question in itself is impolite to ask to strangers, etc.)

Again, revisit the imaginary scenario of a stranger approaching you on the street and asking you why you’re the gender you are - would there not be some of this implication present? For example, say you’re a man - would it not feel as if someone were questioning your manhood, or implying you weren’t truly a man, or must not be a man ‘correctly’, or that ‘man’ is not a valid label for how they see you? Why else would they approach you and ask you in confusion for you to justify your identity to them? The implication is that they don’t see you as a valid man, or at least not how they see a man, and thus are having a hard time accepting that someone like YOU could ever be a real man - that it’s hard for them to believe you are what you say you are, because they see you differently.

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(3.a)  As an additional sidenote (one which I addressed in the tags replying to you initially), your ask (as well as this more recent one) also made certain assumptions. There are plenty of people who ''look like girls'' or 'look like boys' but aren't as they “seem”, even if you're someone who only believes in a “binary biological sex model” (I’ll include some links at the end about this). It's strange to assume someone's body parts or identity just based off of pictures you see on the internet (which often have specific lighting, angles, or in the case of many people are even edited and etc. I don't do this but it's really common nowadays with phone editing apps and stuff). Just because I appear a certain way to you, in no way implies that I have the physical form and traits you assume I have Consider how you may feel invalidated or uncomfortable if people sent you messages assuming personal things about you that are incorrect or that they have no way to possibly know.

 Your standards and perception are also not universal, various cultures and groups have different ideas about what outward traits would make someone considered a “man” or a “woman”, so making your judgement of someone else’s identity based only on your own (extremely shallow, since it’s only from online pictures) perception of them, is also inherently a bit flawed. 

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(3.b-ish side tangent) In extension to this, your ideas and how you view me are likely incorrect. Just as it is similarly true that, from afar, any assumptions I make about you would likely be inaccurate as well. We are strangers.

For example, if you really knew me, you would know that I don’t pride myself in costumes and makeup - It’s a fun creative activity for me definitely, but I feel no pride over it, I don’t do it to look good or seem a certain way, and actually I resent it in a way, because often it feels like people mostly only pay attention to blurry pictures of me looking silly in cheap wigs, but don’t give that same level of engagement to the other more important things I do that I personally care about 100x more, like my worldbuilding and other projects lol. Absolutely nothing against the people who like my costumes, I appreciate them of course!!, and I still love doing costumes - BUT, to imply that it’s a primary source of pride in my life or a characteristic that defines me over other things, would be a mischaracterization. 

Anyone who knows me in real life would certainly list a million other stand-out traits to define me, rather than ‘pretty make up woman’ (most people I know in real life would also not describe me as ‘pretty’ or as a ‘woman’, just for reference lol). 

Your one sided perception of me (which I’ll address in the next section) may allow you to have a shallow idea of me as some sweet pretty costume girl or something, but just know that the reality is more like: I haven’t had much time lately to do costumes because I’m working on a game and other art which I see as much more important, I haven’t bathed or brushed my hair in weeks because of mental illness/functioning issues, 99% of the time I’m not ‘’dressed up’’ - I wear the same pajamas and cardigan that I’ve worn for the past 3 years and barely wash to the point that it’s disintegrating and leaves fabric scraps around the house lol, I have a little moustache right now and a unibrow and other “””non-womanly”””” traits (at least by common media western standards, which is what I assume you go by), I’m excessively analytical, detached, and in real life you would probably see me as blunt and cold and cynical (also commonly missing social cues) - as well as being hugely asocial/ a hermit and mostly lacking the ability to form attachments to others (So definitely not  ~pretty and cute and approachable~ ghgg), I have obsessive compulsive disorder and am regularly so anxious that I’m throwing up and have various other issues - I’m also not Fun or Cool or Spontaneous because I’m too busy being rigid and high strung lol (even before the pandemic, I don’t like to leave the house or interact much at all with others, I’d rather be in my little controlled environment where I don’t have overwhelming sensory information and distractions raising my anxiety constantly),, and my favorite activities are literally all just stuff like pacing around my home alone talking to myself in different voices creating gods and fake religions for my fantasy worldbuilding while I eat boiled cabbage and light little pieces of paper on fire over a candle to help me think - not doing makeup and other Pretty Woman Things. 

Which I don’t want to be too harsh or focus on this tangent too much, since obviously as you don’t know me in real life, these are all things you couldn’t possibly be aware of, and it simply comes with the territory of posting publicly online - so I absolutely don’t blame you for perceiving me incorrectly. If “pretty” pictures are all you see, then that may very well be the only impression that you have. I just personally dislike this certain interpretation some people have seemed to have of me (you’re not the first person to think of me as a Pretty Makeup Girl or whatever lol), since it’s so completely opposite from the truth of who I am, I feel the need to explain it like this sometimes. Just accepting the false perception some people have of me without any argument feels disingenuous and like supporting a version of myself that doesn’t exist. 

 So anyway, no issue with you personally, but just trying to set the perception of me straight a little more accurately lol.. now, back on topic -- 

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(4.) Lastly, and here’s the main thing I’d like to stress, there's the issue of personal boundaries. Again, you're a complete stranger to me, I don't know who you are, and you have no idea who I am. Even if you've followed me online for years and read every post I've ever made, you still have no idea who I truly deeply am, only a vague scattering of snapshots over time.  

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Here are some definitions for Parasocial Relationships: 

“Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence. Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.”

“Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television.[1] PSI is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show host, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. “

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This is all anyone can ever have with people they follow online. You can perceive them, but you cannot know them or truly understand them. I think this is very important to remain cognizant of in such a massive social media age, as often times people are fostering one sided concepts that are inaccurate or unhealthy (no so much with just you sending me a simple ask, but in a broader sense, how people act towards celebrities, other bloggers, etc. etc. seems to have little boundaries, and often results in a similar manner with people forgetting to maintain acceptable boundaries with those they follow or know about from afar). 

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-- This next part is very important, I think it’s a super valuable way of thinking about this sort of stuff, so if you take away nothing else from this, at least remember this next portion -- 

A very good way to think about online boundaries that I heard someone mention in a post once (though I can no longer find the post), is to take whatever you're going to say to someone online, and imagine saying it in person, in real life, to a barista. Before you send an ask or make a comment, think about if it’s something you would really genuinely say face to face to a stranger. 

Would you walk into a random Starbucks and ask the dude at the counter a bunch questions about their gender identity? Or about his personal life in general? You probably recognize that that would be strange and socially inappropriate. It's similarly inappropriate in a case like this. 

Even though you may feel a sense of familiarity with someone online from reading their social media posts, or even speaking to them once or twice through asks and etc. etc., at the end of the day you don’t really know each other much more than you’d know a random stranger. 

Unless someone is inviting personal questions (like by reblogging those ‘ask me anything’ posts or etc.), or has the sort of blog where they are commonly asking people about/discussing their own intimate personal experiences or etc. (mine is not this way), then questions like this are very out of the blue and similar to asking a random person working at a store things like that. It can be seen as rude and inappropriate in general to give those sorts of questions to people who are complete strangers, and typically comes off as crossing personal boundaries. Again, think about a random stranger asking you these questions, and how you may perceive it. 

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In summary: 

1. The question itself is borne from an double standard and isn't very good to ask in the first place. 2. The way you asked the question was worded  with certain implications. 3.  Your ask is also assuming certain things that you don't know are true, which can be uncomfortable for some people. 4. Even were it not for the three other things, it's commonly considered rude in many cultures to ask serious questions about the personal details of complete strangers, even if it's online. It could prove useful to utilize the ‘barista test’ to better determine this in the future. 

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Final Thoughts: 

Anyway, I wasn't mad and I have no beef with you or whatever lol. Hopefully you can understand what I mean. I've also explained myself as well as I think I can though, so I don't feel like discussing it any more and won't respond to further asks about this. I have a lot of things going on in my life right now (as I'm sure everyone does given the pandemic and everything, you probably do too, so hopefully you can empathize with that), so I’d like to limit my time spent online, especially discussing topics I already don’t like to discuss or am not open to accepting questions about (I just want to talk about cats and elves and stuff lol). 

 If you still can't at least kind of get where I'm coming from then it's perfectly fine to just agree to disagree. If aspects of myself upset you or cause you discomfort, then there's no harm in just unfollowing me or something! Or if you don't even follow me, I would encourage you to block me so my posts no longer come across your dash (or block/unfollow me on whatever other social media you may be seeing my posts on ,etc)., etc. That way you don't have to see content or hear from someone who makes you uncomfortable that way, and there also won't be any need for this to come up in the future. Part of using the internet in a healthy and productive manner is to know when to disengage with certain content and just cut it off/unfollow/block people/etc. if it’s causing you unnecessary conflict or distress, or makes you uncomfortable or etc. to look at. Thank you for the question! Hopefully this response explained things a little better. 

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Links and Further Info: 

On the off chance that you were genuinely curious, here are some resources where you can learn more about people of different gender identities and also hear them explain their experiences, etc.  Since these people are actually openly discussing their experiences/making educational content and are obviously actually open to talking about it,  that would be a better place to field any further questions or learn about things. :3

Here’s some reading - 

Understanding Nonbinary People (link)

Gender Variance Around the World (link)

12 Questions About Nonbinary Gender Answered (link)

About the Sex Binary (link)

Ask LGBT subreddit (link)

one ‘ask a nonbinary person’ blog i found (I don’t know if they’re still active, it’s one of the first ones that came up for me lol, but I guess could be helpful) (link)

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And here’s some videos with people talking about their experience, or being educational - 

(NOTE: I just did a quick google search and did not deeply research these people and their entire histories and etc., so I can’t say I stand by literally everything they say or know what type of people they are, but it’s just a general place to start~!)

A video examining the idea of gender in general and how it even exists and nonbinary people (definitely interesting to watch) (link)

video about nonbinary gender/explanations (probably at least watch this one too) (link)

What is a nonbinary gender? (shorter general info) (link)

answering all your nonbinary questions q&a (link)

Video about binary sex/gender/etc. (link)

5 nonbinary people explain what nonbinary means to them (link)

another video about similar stuff (link)

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[dailyaudiobible]

11/24/2020 DAB Transcript

Ezekiel 47:1-48:35, 1 Peter 2:11-3:7, Psalms 119:49-64, Proverbs 28:12-13

Today is the 24th day of November welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is a great joy and deep comfort to be here with you around the Global Campfire as we take the next step forward in the Scriptures and take the next step forward in the year and toward the end of the year. So, we are reading from the New International Version this week. We have been camped out in the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament for a while now. Today we will reach its conclusion and finish the book of Ezekiel. We are also in the New Testament working our way through first Peter. And, so, we’ll continue that journey when we get there. We’re reading from the New International Version this week. Ezekiel chapters 47 and 48.

Commentary:

Okay. In first Peter today we’re seeing glimpses of how to face marginalization and being sidelined and even being persecuted, how to resist that by not being what is being said. In other words, people are being stereotyped. The way to resist that is to not be that, to not be the stereotype. So, Peter’s writing to people who have fled marginalization and persecution, who are trying to find a place of peace to live out their faith in harmony and they have run. They are all over the place. This is one of the primary ways that the gospel of Jesus Christ spread around the Roman Empire, the known world of the time. But, you know, if you move to an a new place, a new city and you’re trying to get established and get a job and find a place to live and…and then there's this stereotype that gets…that…you get labeled…you get labeled something, then it becomes really, really difficult to navigate. And if you're labeled, “you’re part of a strange religious sect. Like if you hear that about anybody, “oh…they’re…they’re…they're part of a strange religious sect,” well, we really don't have any information whatsoever to go on other than it sounds really bad and negative. And, so, the stereotype is there, and that person is looked at a certain way. And, so, followers of Jesus were considered untrustworthy. They were considered really, really strange, religiously. Like the observance of the Eucharist or communion was…was considered very weird, like a very weird ritual to people who had no experience with it. Basically, it's…it's like it's not a secret that here in the United States…this has been a year of…of unrest as special…especially racial unrest in the exploration of systemic racism and the implications. And one thing that...well it still goes on today…but was much more prevalent in previous generations would be the use of the N-word. A derogatory word used at African American, black people - a label, a stereotype, a word that can be used to marginalize. We have to remember that people, early followers of Jesus, they were perceived as coming out of Judaism. Jews had been marginalized and persecuted and had been labeled for a long time at this point, and that continues in the world until this very day. So, like in some places to be called a Jew, that’s a bigoted label, like that's not a good thing. So, for people following Jesus to be called Christ followers or disciples of the Rabbi, Jesus, or Christians, this is the same kind of labeling that's going on. So, in…in a lot of ways what Peter's writing in what we read today is, “don't be that. If you’re going to be slandered or mischaracterized or stereotyped, then don't be that. Rise above that. Live your life higher. Raise the bar. Be better than that.” So, we see him like, “submit to the local authorities, submit to the national authorities, submit to your employers. Like, live what you say. Live the faith that you claim. Live it because if you're living it, then you will rise above the stereotype and show that there actually is a better way of navigating humanity because of Jesus making that better way of being in this world visible by resisting the stereotypes, by not receiving the labels, by being better than the labels. And, so, I quote Peter here as he kind of concludes some of…of…of his encouragement. “How is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and you endure the beating for doing wrong, but if you suffer for doing good and you endure it this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps.” And, so, that we’re on the same page, this is…Peter's not writing about things that might happen or that could happen or that may be on the distant horizon. He’s talking about…the letters written because these things are happening. And, so, he's counseling how to battle things that are happening and as it turns out it brilliantly, it's so perfect the way he turns the corner and helps us understand that these kinds of…kinds of marginalization's, these kinds of things even happen inside people's homes because maybe one spouse, here's the good news or maybe they both hear the good news, but one spouse believes, and the other one doesn't. And, so, I quote Peter again, “wives in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that if any of them do not believe the word they may be won over without words, by the behavior of their wives,” right? Rising above the labeling. “They may be one over without words by the behavior of their wives when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” Yikes! What's that doing their in a discussion about how to behave in the face of being marginalized? Isn't it in our homes between our spouse and ourselves that we really actually do have to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling? like isn't that the ground zero for however we might go out into the world and resist by not being what we've been stereotyped as? Like doesn’t that have to start at home? Is there any other way to live out what Peter is talking about if it's not there, present in our home? And when Peter says about “hindering your prayers”, he’s speaking to husbands here. That doesn't mean it doesn't apply to both spouses, but husbands may we pay attention. Our homes are places where we…if it's a bad day and things aren't going well and well-worn paths that lead to terrible arguments are being walked down, well we can we can marginalize each other and diminish each other and hurt one another and suppress the voices of each other more dominantly and more awfully inside the walls of our house than we ever would outside. So, for this to…for this whole conversation to land back at home is something we ought to pay very very close attention to. “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”

Prayer:

Father we come into your presence. It would explain a lot. It would be like James saying, “how can you bless the Lord out of your mouth and curse your brothers and sisters who are made in His image out of the same mouth? Surely this isn’t right. Surely, this shouldn't be happening.” And, so, we are confronted with these things and once again you've landed some things in our lap that we cannot look away from. It won't help. And, so, we’re looking to you for guidance in the ways that we've marginalized each other beginning inside our homes and working outward from there. We read yesterday, “we are to be holy because you are holy”, which means we must rise above the stereotype. We must rise above being labeled. We must be the light of the world. And we have a ways to go, we confess. We are not where we should be, we confess. And it's easy enough to know that globally. It's easy enough to know that we are all part of something that has some work to do. Its way different when we understand inside of the four walls of our houses is where that work begins. Come Holy Spirit we need you now. We ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

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And that's it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Good morning Daily Audio Bible this is Diane Olive Braun and Jeff my husband is here with me. It’s so wonderful the two of us listening together. I want to share with you something really special to me. I have been repenting a lot and things I thought that were really special were not pleasing to the Lord, mostly that I wasn’t taking time alone with Him and just focusing on other things more important than Him and I’ve been repenting and…and taking quality time each day. And because I hadn’t been giving special time to the Lord I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep at night. And, so, one night I told the Lord I was so tired because I couldn’t sleep. And I said Lord I’m going to try for 5 or 10 minutes to sleep and I put on Brian’s album, Heart and I said if I don’t fall asleep in five minutes I will get up and clean the house. And, so, I put on his album, Heart and I laid my head on my pillow and three hours later I woke up refreshed and renewed and inspired. Thank you, thank you, thank you DAB community and Brian. Shalom, shalom…

Hi DAB family this is CS from SC. A close friend of mine’s son was in an accident earlier this week. He was driving and with his passenger, I believe his girlfriend, was killed in the accident. He’s been charged with…my friend’s sons been charged with vehicular homicide and driving under the influence. They were both college students both in their early 20s. I would just ask prayer for her family. This young man has…has made some bad choices now. He…he’s always been such a good kid, but he’s made some really bad choices at this point and it’s ended up with some horrific consequences for his girlfriend’s family. So, I would just ask prayer first for her family, for comfort and peace. I don’t know how you get through something like this. I just…I can’t imagine but I would also ask prayer for his family for my friend, just to know how to work through all the challenges that they’re going to have now, the legal battles. And, of course, there’ll be some incarceration I’m sure. So, anyway I would…would just ask that you be in prayer for both families, that they can see God’s will and everything that’s going on and just be there to comfort everybody that’s involved in this situation. Thanks, and have an excellent…

Good afternoon new DAB family God bless you all. Woman who called in in regard to ovarian cancer and her husband suffering from MS, I am believing and thanking God but first and foremost first and foremost for your total healing from the inside out, that every molecular cell that’s in your body is going to be eradicated. I am thanking God for the children that you have that has been helping you fight this. I know that this has been hard for you, but I also know that God is a God delivers and I am believing in His might. Susan from Osceola, Osceola Florida you know the way you’re thanking God in the midst of you losing your son and you yet you’re thanking God for all of the small blessings. Sister I bless you in the name of Jesus. You know that the Lord is going to heal your son Keith. I am so grateful that it’s…you’re in the season with Keith, that you have become so much closer but I am believing that nothing is too hard for the Lord. God bless you. Running Desperately Staying Connected to Jesus. I totally get it. You know when you say that you felt strong when you connected to your DAB family and when you disconnect that you seem weaker. I totally get that. That’s how I felt. You know in my dark seasons you know I felt like Moses you know without with Aaron and Joshua. I totally get it. God bless you. We are still praying for you and I’m praying and believing in your victory. Michaela from Gloucester. Beautiful beautiful song. You know how you’re meeting us in our darkness. That’s exactly what the Lord does. He meets us in our darkness. But I am telling you sister in the name of Jesus I am believing that the Lord will give us the strength to face our tomorrows and to do what’s in front of us because that is the God we serve. And knowing the name of Jesus He is gonna do the same for you in Jesus’ name. I love you. Esther from Orlando.

Thank you God for giving me everything I asked you freed me from my demons and my true self’s now unmasked time is running short now as they say this too shall pass I pray and thank you constantly and there’s not much that I ask the relationship that I have with you I pray will always last last is first and first is last a simple little verse but some men go from good to bad and some from bad to worse help me just be patient God and follow where you lead help me not be selfish Lord and consumed with pride and greed wherever two are gathered I know that you’ll be there keep my mind’s eye simple God and strip my ego bare make me in your image God I’m flesh but still I’m clay fill me with your spirit Lord and renew my strength each day one and one are usually two but you and I are one finish God the work in me you clearly have begun

blindtony1016@gmail.com. I’d like to give a shout out to Terry the Truck Driver and also Melisa. I hope you’re still hanging in there. Know that you are both in my prayers every day and very much loved and thought of and missed. And once again Brian and the Hardin family thank you for this wonderful podcast for God’s Holy Spirit flow keep it flowing y’all. All right. Bye-bye.

Hello, my dear DAB family this is Terry the Trucker calling this evening. It’s Saturday, November the 21st. Today we had a eulogy for my wife’s aunt Marilyn that passed away a few weeks ago just suddenly. It was not expected. This is also the birthday of my oldest stepson Mikey. Died in a car wreck at the age of 14. This is also the day that my wife when we left the church, she told me she had chills that she had a fever and wasn’t feeling right. We took her into the hospital. They tested her for the flu and been with my wife of 32 years. I’ve only known her to be sick one time out of 32 years and they suspect it’s the virus. I just ask you all to pray for my wife for my family and myself. I’m spending the night in my truck less than a block from the house. So, I know I’ve been exposed to her but why take the chance of spending the night if maybe I don’t have it. We’ll know in a couple days if she has the virus for sure but I ask you all to pray for me and I continue to pray for each and every one of y’all as I drive up and down these highways. Terry the Trucker.

[babyitsacrime]

1, 22, 23, and 43 for the OC asks.

First off, I apologize for my absolutely atrocious grammar here and also the fact that I just can’t seem to put things into words.

Secondly I wrote this in a different app and then copy pasted so the formatting is a little whack.

1. Your first OC ever?

Oh gosh this one is a little hard to answer. I think Natalia’s my first OC that I ever fully wrote well but me and my friends used to write a lot of stories/fanfiction in middle school so I have some characters from there too that might be older than Nat. Also there’s like three different versions of Nat (Quizup, Next Gen, and the Nat I have now) , and again the one I have right now is by far the most developed/closest to a whole character.

Okay but I talk about Nat a lot so even though I’m not sure which one actually came first I’ll talk about a character I had in the Homestuck fanfiction my friends and I wrote in middle school. (before you ask, yes it’s the 100 page one I’m pretty sure) (also I’m ignoring the self inserts me n my friends made for our other stories bc those don’t count as ocs and I refuse to accept them as characters dhdksjdjs) But basically she’s a troll named Ninmah Aurora. She was heavily based off of Kanaya Maryam, the iconic Homestuck vampire fashion designer lesbian character so that was interesting. And even though I didn’t actually write that much for her she’s one of my favorite characters because I had so much fun writing her with my friends. Anyways can’t believe I just exposed myself as a Homestuck stan on main but you know what it’s fine.

22. Is there any OC of yours that people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how?

Okay there’s a couple and most of them are small things so I’ll just go by character.

Natalia -

let me just start by saying this: it still baffles me why y’all think she’s cool cshdjsj. She’s kinda a dumb bitch if I’m being honest. Like, don’t get me wrong, she’s super smart and could easily outwit me and honestly any of us, but she’s also plain stupid sometimes in other ways. But like, on the other side of the coin I feel like she almost doesn’t get taken seriously sometimes? I feel like that’s a little on me for usually making jokes at her expense but while she is clueless as to how people function she’s also not plain dumb. A lot of what she says and does is well calculated and even when she does something in the spur of the moment it’s always something logical to her. Hn I don’t know if I’m explaining this right but 🤷♀️. But basically she’s not really cool but also she’s not stupid. (Okay ig being good at Quidditch is pretty cool but that’s not my point)

Also I don’t know why but some people (very few people but it’s still annoying to me) seem to think that her being bi is a huge part of her personality when it’s really not. While she is bi, not everything she does is motivated by that fact if that makes any sense. Like for example, if she’s wearing be a rainbow dress it’s not because she’s (and I quote) "team gay" it’s because she liked the damn dress. Okay I’m rambling now but all I’m saying is that it kinda annoys me when people see her being bi as a hugely defining personality trait. Also she isn’t the only character I notice this happens to.

Ishaan -

Similarly to Nat, whole he does enjoy pranking and such, he’s actually a serious person most of the time. Think of him as more of like a serious and skeptical person who also has a good sense of humor. Although I will say that he does sometimes go out of his way to make a joke sometimes, that’s only sometimes and mostly just to annoy Priya.

Lysander -

Another case of the being gay isn’t his personality. Also??? He’s not gay??? I don’t really know where that came from (like I know who mentioned it to me but I have no clue where she got that from aside from just assuming?) for the record, he is also bi and has a slight preference for girls (mostly bc he likes having an s/o shorter than him but we won’t go into that rn). *slams fists on table* jUST BECAUSE HES FUNNY DOESNT MEAN HES THE TOKEN GAY FRIEND OKAY (okay okay I’m done ranting time to continue)

I also feel like his joking nature is often seen as a sign of him not being as a lack of intellect, but that is in no way true. While he isn’t a genius or anything, he’s a little smarter than average, yet still prone to making dumb decisions because he is still a child. But with more life experience he’ll make smarter decisions while still retaining a joking demeanor.

Priya -

I’m going to keep this one short, but she isn’t as cold and cruel as I sometimes make her seem when I talk about her. I feel like this one’s mostly on me but yeah, she’s a caring person for the most part, just a little misguided and/or dramatic at times.

~I think that’s all of them but I might be wrong? Also none of those explanations make a lot of sense I’m sorry 😔~

23. Introduce an OC that has changed from what your first idea considering what the character would be like.

*drags Nat out again* Here you go.

So I mentioned earlier that there’s like three different versions of her, but in all reality they almost feel like different characters with the same name. However I will say that Next Gen Nat and the Nat I have now (I like to call it her final form bc I think I’m finally happy with her) are similar in many many aspects. But I’ll talk about this Nat because I like her the best and she’s the only Nat I actively use. She was originally intended to be a lot colder/closed off than she is. (Think a lot closer to Aster, but I think pep also had a similar thing with him.) She just ended up becoming a lot softer and a little friendlier than I intended her to be. I’m not exactly unhappy with that though, I feel like this actually added a bit more dimension to her character and it actually gave me a little more room to improve her. It was also bound to happen anyways, especially with the characters she’s friends with/will be friends with. So yeah, it’s interesting and honestly I feel like I’m happy with the changes from what I originally intended her to be.

Hm while I’m here I guess I should also talk about Taemoon.

I don’t know that his personality changed much from my original intent, but his story and intent definitely did. He started as a character that exuded a lack of hope. I don’t know if that sentence makes a lot of sense, but he was originally going to have no chance at happiness in the end. He was supposed to let all of his anger and hurt consume him, making him hell bent on revenge, which would only push him further from anything that could make him happy, but I feel like the end of his story is a lot more hopeful now. I don’t know exactly what it is, but ever since pep asked if Jae Hong could adopt him Taemoon’s life story has become something a lot less disheartening. Now I’ve given him a lot more to live for, and a lot more to make him happy. First off, instead of being alone he now has a family that he quickly grows to trust, and a group of friends with similar experiences that basically become family as well. While he is still very revenge driven, he has a lot more to his life than just that; most importantly he has people he trusts that will keep him from becoming consumed by all of his anger. But yeah, he has become a much more hopeful character as a whole and honestly. I feel like that’s what I really needed. Idk about everyone else but I feel like changing his story to the way it is now really has helped me to feel a lot better in general.

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favor certain traits or looks?

Oh god it’s time to confess 😔🤙

So, as most of you have figured out, most of my ocs tend to be very attractive and very capable (and willing) to step on me. If they’re not that then they’re in the minority.

Aside from being physically attractive as a whole, I’d say that in regards to looks, the more they look like they haven’t slept in weeks and are ready to kill a man, the better. If not that, then it’s an oc that looks like I could cuddle with them for hours on end. There’s no in between.

As for traits I tend to favor, probably the most popular is a bad attitude. If you take a look at some of my most used and/or favorite characters, you’ll find that in most cases the snarkier the better. Honestly this is true of characters that aren’t even mine, I just really have a type. At the same time though, I like these characters to have a secret soft side even if it’s only for one other character they care about. On the flip side, I also like writing characters that are genuinely the nicest people you’ll ever meet. I don’t know why but I just love them so much they are truly my children.

Also. Characters that grin in the face of danger? *chefs kiss* I like characters where you question if what they’re doing is out of courage or a death wish. For this reason so many of my characters play some kind of dangerous sport or enjoy dueling, you get what I mean. This goes for both my Edgy™️ characters as well as my soft characters.

Additionally, I do have a lot of characters that are wealthy. Uh. I think that mostly speaks for itself so I’m not going to comment on it any further than this.

Also. Flowers. For some reason I go for faceclaims that eat flowers. It’s not even something I actively seek out??? Like I’ll find someone cute and I’ll be scrolling through pictures and there they are. Eating a flower. This mostly goes for my guy fcs but yeah. Idk how it happens but it just does and I’ve come to accept it.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

ASM vol 5 #10/811 Thoughts

I suspect I’m gonna be a bit more down on the issue than everyone else!

 Fundamentally the things that put my feelings into conflict with this story are how the past of the characters should be reconciled against the needs of the present.

 What do I mean by this?

 Well in this issue we have Peter being chill with Black Cat and also MJ claiming that for the longest time she couldn’t handle worrying about Peter and this would lead to a cycle of them breaking up and getting back together, and she also felt she was not on his level that she was dispensable and that maybe he should be with someone else. These pieces of dialogue are accompanied by images clearly evoking marriage era MJ which allegedly post-OMD still happened but they were not married.

 If you go by recent history Peter should just not be this chill with Felicia. She is literally a burglar and he was willing to let her walk away which wasn’t his origin entirely about how doing that once killed his uncle? This isn’t even getting into her body count during her Queenpin tenure. I now they provide a sort of fix for that but my point was before that fix happened in the story he was clearly still chill with her and that is BS.

 If you go by the wider history of Peter and MJ her statements do not really add up. Even in the 1990s MJ didn’t literally spend all her time worrying about Peter (she went out partying in Torment for example) and both back then and even before they married she clearly could handle his life, just not handle it in a wholly stressfree manner (because nobody could do that). The idea that this inability to handle his life, specifically the fact that she worried constantly about him, was the reason they’d break up before getting back together is also not true.

 If you even include their break up under Marv Wolfman’s run MJ broke up with Peter the first time mostly due to her commitment issues. The second time they sort of broke up was in Spider-Man vs. Wolverine where there was a miscommunication problem but that was also due to her commitment issues a little bit. However it is obvious Spencer wasn’t referring to that stuff but the stuff during their marriage and during their marriage (I know they weren’t married now but you know what I mean, I’m just using ‘marriage’ as shorthand) they broke up just twice.

 The first time was during Mackie/Byrne’s run and it wasn’t because MJ worried too much about Peter it was because she felt dispensible to him, that she didn’t really matter in his life, that he did not in truth need her and that he didn’t in effect love her much more than he would have loved a mistress or a trophy wife. The second time was in OMIT where they broke up over MJ feeling like being with Peter endangered her family too much. Granted that last one was indeed about not being able to handle his life but it wasn’t about concern for him or even herself as the issue implied. Moreover multiple times during the marriage, in fact very specifically during the issue they reunited under JMS it was made clear to MJ that she WAS indispensible and that Peter truly needed her. He said as much even in Spencer’s debut issue (if you discount the FCBD issue of course).

 All of which means MJ’s statements don’t really ring true to her character or her shared history with Peter. She knows she doesn’t need to be a part of his world to matter. Now I say all that with the caveat that you can of course explain away the discrepancy to a degree. Perhaps in this one moment out of nervousness, or the chance to FINALLY unload her feelings, the sake of brevity and/or some combination of those things MJ is misremembering things.

 There were periods where she found coping with Peter’s life very hard, and they did break up. And perhaps in seeing him with Black Cat and Mockingbird feelings of inadequacy crossed her mind and in this moment all those things are mingling together coalescing into her not truly accurate account of their relationship.* Equally her presenting their relationship as a constant merry go round of breaking up and making up could be her conflating the entirety of their relationship before and after their marriage, including all of Slott’s dumbass teases of them getting back together (and the Superior stuff too). Remember in-universe all the stuff she is talking about played out across several years and their break up depicted in OMIT was several years ago circa this issue (Superior alone played out across 1 year in-universe).

 So there are totally ways of explaining this in-universe, even if there aren’t any for why Peter was so chill with Felicia.

 However this is where we get into the ‘needs of the present’ as I discussed above.

 Because it is plainly obvious to me that Spencer with this story was doing yet more clean up of BND and Slott’s mess more than trying to religiously fit everything into continuity.

 Spencer has done much already to fix things but there is still much that is broken, so much like JMS I think we need to say its okay for him to bend certain bits of characterization in service of over all setting the ship back on course and cleaning up the mess he inherited.

 As I said JMS did this too. To be incredibly harsh right now the fact that Peter and MJ were stayed broken up as long as they did under the JMS run really wasn’t in character for either of them.**

 However his genius game plan was to course correct the series over all and do that by illuminating just WHY their relationship was so important and he did that by examining their feelings about NOT being together and making a story about them working to get back together.

 It was a neccesarry direction to go in as it conveyed to readers on a meta level WHY them being together was a good thing and why it was in fact vitally important to the lead character and over all series.

 Spencer in this story I think was doing something similar.

 On a meta level he essentially connected Felicia losing her memory of who Spider-Man was, of what their relationship was like WITH her mischaracterization since OMD. Which works in-universe perfectly fine but along with Peter’s chill attitude to her it was set up for his big fix of her re-learning his secret and essentially going back to (starting to go back to) what she used to be like and what she always should have been like.

 After all it NEVER made sense for Peter to have kept her in the dark at all so bending his characterization by ignoring her recent activities is equivalent to how he ignored the baggage from post-OMD to just immediately get Peter and MJ reunited.*** Although he again here provides a short yet solid explanation even for that just to address everyone who really was annoyed by Slott’s BS characterization being ignored.

 With the MJ thing I think that storyline existed more for Spencer through MJ to essentially address readers’ (especially recent readers’) beliefs surrounding the character and her relationship with Spider-Man. It was essentially post-OMD MJ bringing up common arguments raised against her being with Spider-Man by editorial and characters within the comics (including her from Slott and other author’s stories) and then through the story debunking them. In this way using Black Cat, Spider-Man’s most famous super hero girlfriend (and sometimes romantic rival to MJ) as a representative of every potential argument in favour of Spider-Man not being with a civilian like her was simply genius.

 It was Spencer writing on a level Slott never did, weaving these disparate plots together organically to deliver a statement on the characters, who are the reason we are reading this after all.

 So that is where I am at with the story.

 Trying to reconcile the technical mischaracetrization with that mischaracterization being in over all service of fixing the decades long mischaracterization and misconceptions of the characters.

 I suspect with time I will be more okay with it and lean more towards the latter. I do hope though we don’t see more stuff like it though because I’d rather the marriage era be celebrated positively than negatively the way post-OMD portrayed it.

 Other points I want to hit up.

 -          Ramos seemed better this issue than in the other ones

-          There were some honestly hilarious scenes like the phone app and the reference to Spider-Man’s hyphen

-          The lack of jealousy from MJ was a nice piece of maturity and subversion of expectations from her, especially given who she was dealing with. I also adored Peter just being up front with her and clear about what went down. You know...doing the resposnsible adult thing. That’s not even great to see in Spider-Man, it’s subverting an annoying as Hell trope in countless pieces of fiction to generate cheap drama.

-          I almost feel Centipede guy is like Scarlet Spider because his costume colours were very reminiscent of Spidey’s but he also adorned a hoody

-          There was a misplaced word balloon which is...c’mon guys try to catch those obvious mistakes...

-          The cover hilarious and a great meta joke.

-          Bandini’s art was still gorgeous

-          I don’t know if all of MJ’s jobs and life prior to working for Stark (which still makes no sense) honestly could be regarded as the opposite of Spider-Man’s career strictly speaking. After all...they both earned money from posing for photos so...Maybe from her pov tha’ts just how she feels about her jobs, a little like how she felt in Unlimited vol 3 #2.

 I’d give this an A- at worst, A at best.

 Which is like...I know I brought up a lot of draw backs but look how far we’ve come in such a short space of time!

 I was honestly jealous of everyone who read this before me! That’s where I am at with modern Spider-Man and it feels good!

  *Also whilst Peter might’ve made his need for MJ explicit in issue #1 that might not have fully convinced her thereafter that maybe he’d be better off with another super person. After all he said what he said after almost dying so he might not have been thinking with a totally clear head.

However given how MJ, in two brilliant little scenes, takes Jarvis’ words of wisdom and also seems to absorb and grow past her insecurity rather quickly you could argue that said insecurity was less truly something weighing on her mind and more a wobble she was having at that moment. We all have little wobbles and moments of insecurity that do not necessarily speak to anything deepset within us.

 **It made a little more sense when JMS retconned in the reason for why MJ left Peter but he didn’t reveal that for the first ¼ of his overall run so MJ appeared to be OOC for that time.

 ***Also once Spider-Man learns Felicia’s misdemeanours are partially his fault because they are connected to her loss of memory which he caused and perpetuated then it makes his willingness to forgive her and (presumably) trust she is on a path to redemption more believable.

p.s. Flash’s death being used as the explanation for MJ and Peter’s reconciliation is a microcosm of the issues I discussed with the story.

On the one hand Flash’s death is at last acknowledged. On the other it’s lack of acknowledgement before this and presumably after this story will continue to be eye brow raising because why be so unaffected by the death of your close old friend?

But at the same time diving into the realistic ark and depressing emotions of grief that should accompany Flash’s death would compromise the necessity of fixing the broken Spider-Man series so once again, we got to ‘bend the rules’ as it were.

[sage-nebula]

sweetchcolate replied to your post: Every single time I see one of those “theories”...

Part of this fandom has a serious confirmation bias: they select the hints that fit with their theory, and tend to discard/forget the other facts. A LOT of people are mixing up Original Story Saeran with his Another Story traits (even though the latter is more of an AU than a true “1 ½ year ago” flashback), and to an even greater extent, mix Saeran’s personality with Saeyoung’s, interchanging them and their roles. I miss Original Story/post secret ends Saeran ._. I’m also seeing quite a few posts about how the reset theory/“x” character loves you in every route/“x” character is the wizard would apply to Saeran and like… y'all are just copy-pasting this stuff from one twin to another, as if they were the same character.

“and to an even greater extent, mix Saeran’s personality with Saeyoung’s, interchanging them and their roles. [. . .]  y'all are just copy-pasting this stuff from one twin to another, as if they were the same character.”

YEP! YEP YEP YEP!!! I’m seeing so much of this and, to be honest, it’s really infuriating!!

Like, sometimes it’s something small, such as portraying Saeran with a space aesthetic / space related things (space is not Saeran’s thing and never has been; Saeran has flowers, and Saeyoung has space). That’s annoying, because it honestly feels like people enjoy Saeyoung’s space aesthetic and so they want to give it to the twin they prefer / feels deserves it more, but at least it’s something small that can be mostly ignored.

But honestly? The problem runs far deeper than that. You have no idea the amount of fics or “Imagines / headcanons” I see in the tags where the twins’ personalities are just swapped. It’s like all of Saeyoung’s good or “desirable” qualities are stripped from him and given to Saeran, and all of Saeran’s flaws are stripped from him and given to Saeyoung. Saeyoung is left with everything undesirable (the inexplicable lashing out, the insecurity, the inability to take care of himself), while Saeran is given everything to make him The Perfect Boyfriend™ (being protective, able to offer great comfort, stability). It feels as if people prefer Saeran, for whatever reason, but they still like certain qualities that Saeyoung has, and so they take the aspects of Saeyoung’s character that they like and transfer them to Saeran so that he’ll be Perfect™ in their eyes. And you know, whatever, people can do whatever they want, but what I absolutely loathe about these instances of blatant mischaracterization is that it’s often done to denigrate Saeyoung, to make him look worse in comparison to Saeran, so as to “justify” MC ending up with Saeran instead. Saeyoung is an incredibly important character to me, and to see him so blatantly misrepresented all the goddamn time in this fandom (not just by Saeran fans, but lately moreso by them) is really, really upsetting.

And yes, the recent upsurge of people trying to prove that Saeran is actually the protagonist of Mystic Messenger / that Saeran is the “true route” is just . . . more of the same. I literally saw someone try to claim that the “I’ve been watching you from the start” lyric in the original OP is evidence that Saeran is the true protagonist / true route, despite the fact that the entire song is from Saeyoung’s point of view (confirmed in game!), and that “I’ve been watching you from the start” does apply to Saeyoung considering that he had to have tapped into the CCTV during the prologue chat to be able to identify that MC is “a cute girl.” The amount of reaching is ridiculous---but again, it’s done in an attempt to take desirable qualities from Saeyoung and copy-paste them over to Saeran. Like, I’m sorry to disappoint anyone, but while Mystic Messenger is an ensemble cast and it is therefore difficult to pin down who the protagonist is supposed to be, if there is any character who can be identified as the protagonist (i.e. the character that drives the plot forward, the character the story centers around), it’s Saeyoung. It’s his search for the truth that drives the narrative forward, that brings the mysteries to light, that ultimately culminates in the true ending of Original Story. His perspective owns the opening song, and hell, he’s even the face of the icon for the app, for crying out loud. I do not like telling people that Saeyoung is the “true route” because I don’t want to diminish anyone else’s feelings for their favorite character (and more on that in a second), but if you’re really determined to identify a protagonist for this story, that protagonist is Saeyoung. The core plot is very much about him and his family, he’s the one the Secret Ends follow, and he’s the one that drives that plot forward. Even when we get to Secret End 02, which is in Saeran’s perspective, it’s Saeyoung’s actions that drive the action along. He’s the one that breaks Saeran out of the hospital, he’s the one who stops Saeran from committing suicide, he’s the one that organizes the party at the end. Choi Saeyoung is the character who drives the action in Mystic Messenger, at least as far as Original Story is concerned (because Cheritz butchering him in Another Story is another conversation altogether). And Saeran? Saeran is an antagonist, because his goals run in opposition to those of the protagonist. This does not change until the very, very end of the Secret Endings. He’s a sympathetic antagonist, but he’s still an antagonist. No amount of reaching is going to change that.

(And it is reaching, and it’s also---I remember that this theory that “Saeran always loved you” originally cropped up even before Saeran’s Route released, and the person who posted it literally said that “since Saeyoung loves you, Saeran must as well” and it’s just---they’re twins, and I know that Saeyoung likes to say that Saeran is his other half, but they are not the same person! Not at all! They’re individuals! Maybe try using some critical thinking to treat them as such, ffs!)

But on that note:

“I’m also seeing quite a few posts about how the reset theory/“x” character loves you in every route/“x” character is the wizard would apply to Saeran . . .”

I’ve seen that, too, and honestly . . .

Like, I’m going to be upfront: I don’t think that Reset Theory is actually canon for any character, Saeyoung included. I think that if it was intended to be canon, it would actually come up as a concrete part of the story that would be unable to be skipped or ignored, much like the player’s ability to SAVE and LOAD is treated in Undertale. The fact that it isn’t says, to me, that Reset Theory was never meant to be a canonical part of the storyline. So while it’s absolutely a fun thing to play with, and while I myself like to play with it (though I like to think of MC as the one who carries over memories, personally), I don’t believe that it’s actually factual, even though, yes, if there was one character who would most likely remember things across timelines, it probably would be Saeyoung since, from an objective narrative standpoint, he is the protagonist.

But with that said, I also think that sometimes people in this fandom take things like Reset Theory and Wizard Theory (which is one which, if I understand it correctly, I actually really hate) too far. What I mean by this is, there are people who try to use Reset Theory to prove that their fave is objectively the best, while all others are inferior---or people who try to use Wizard Theory to prove that a character they don’t like as much can’t / doesn’t actually love MC. (Again, from my understanding, the Wizard is a Cheritz character who exists beyond the realm of the games, but doesn’t actually / is incapable of actually loving the players. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry, but that’s how I’ve understood it.) In my opinion, pushing things like Wizard Theory, or trying to prove that only your fave fits Reset Theory and that none of the other characters could possibly love MC for real is . . . mean. Like, there’s no other way to describe it, it’s just mean. I mean, obviously this is a dating simulation game, and all of these characters are fictional, and none of them could ever actually love the players for real, but the fact remains that a lot of people do turn to this game for comfort. They honestly feel better about themselves when these characters that they adore say sweet things to them. They know it’s not really real, but the nature of the game is immersive enough so that it still does make them feel better when they feel that, say, Jumin, or Zen, or Jaehee really and truly loves them. So to that end, why would you want to make them feel as if their preferred character doesn’t---or is incapable---of feeling that way about them? Why would you want to take that away from them? What do you gain from it? I think that things like Reset Theory are tons of fun to explore in fic, but when you post lengthy meta about how only one character is valid, then that sort of invalidates the experiences of every other character. And I know it might sound weird for me to say that, because I just got through explaining how Saeyoung is the central character of the narrative and how it would make the most sense for him to fit Reset Theory if any character did, but you’re still not going to catch me telling people, “He’s the only real endgame option,” because that’s not true. The Secret Endings are part of his route, yes, and you’ll only find out the actual plot by following his route therefore (since Mint Eye isn’t exposed in any of the other routes, et cetera), but just because his route is the true route for me doesn’t mean that others won’t prefer, say, Yoosung’s or V’s Routes. Maybe for someone else, Zen is the true endgame. Maybe for someone else, it’s Jumin. Their experiences are valid, and there’s no reason to try and make them feel any differently.

So tl;dr, while I think that Reset Theory is a fun thing to explore in fanworks, I feel that it---and especially Wizard Theory---can be very easily used to make other fans feel bad, and that’s not cool. Saeyoung is my favorite, and his is the true route for me, and obviously he does own the Secret Endings. But that doesn’t mean that he’s “canon,” even if he’s the implied love interest, because ultimately the player decides who MC ends up with. If the player puts MC with Saeyoung, great! If not, that’s valid, too. There is no “canon” route, especially for those who care more about the dating than the mystery (which is a valid way to play, since this is, after all, a dating simulator).

And note, before anyone comes @ me: No, my pointing out that Saeran doesn’t love MC in Original Story is not a case of invalidating people’s experiences. It’s a case of pointing out that abusive behaviors and threats =/= love, as well as the fact that Saeran was never intended as a love interest in Original Story (hence why every single Saeran ending in Original Story is a Bad Ending). Rika doesn’t love MC in Original Story, either. Neither does Vanderwood. Neither does Driver Kim, and so on and so forth. The only time Saeran develops feelings for MC is in Another Story, and even then, I’d argue only on his route, since although he says his love was real in V’s Route, he was still in his obsession stage. So no, I wasn’t invalidating, I was just pointing out that he was never in love with MC in Original Story. The RFA members are, but Saeran is not.

Anyway, this is a super long essay, but tl;dr, my space boy deserves better than this fandom and Cheritz so often give him, and it makes me tired. Hopefully someday things can get better. Hopefully.  

[do-you-have-a-flag]

most LGBT/non-white fans aren't happy with how there was still no LGBT representation canonically and how they reduced poe to stereotypical latino tropes, made finn's arc the same as tfa basically (and sidelined him in for adam driver which is just racism lmao) and how underused and underwritten a lot of the characters were/how they mischracterized rey/how they REALLY mischaracterized luke and like the overall pacing was p bad, so white ppl liked it and dumbass kylo stans did too but that it

first off, why u anon, i’m not mean to people who message me generally and i won���t send followers after you because that’s a shitty thing to do, now i have to make a big long response publicly instead of using the messenger app, sorry everyone, long post incoming:I WANT LGBT representation to be canon in star wars but i know that they’re not gonna do it and it’s frustrating but not unexpected. Big budget genre FILMS (tv is different) are so lacking in LGBT content, it’s frustrating that off the top of my head the only example i can think of where it’s not sub-textualised via aliens is Sulu in the Star Trek reboot universe.

but let’s look honestly at how the people who run star wars and the actors responded to questions about LGBT content in interviews: there is spoilers blackout aversion, and actors explicitly supporting fans for their interpretations of characters but at no point was there a promise to show that sort of representation.

Disney has shown before that if they’re going to include LGBT content in their big films they do address it directly, much was made of Lefou in beauty and the beast and there was backlash because the actual content was so minor and still fairly subtextual. 

With the Last Jedi no promises were maid so not getting LGBT content is frustrating for me and others but I can’t fault the film for it only the creators and a criticism of studios and directors and writers does not mean the movie itself is flawed for that specific reason. At least in my view. It’s blaming an absence of a feature that was never promised. would it be better with that feature? YES! but i also think it would have been better for various writing changes but the writing choices that were made are what we have to assess it on.

As to Poe being stereotypically Latino, I don’t live in a country with enough of a latino population to have much insight on that but I will say that I don’t understand this argument. 

my PERSONAL view of Poe in this film is that last time we didn’t get any depth to his character outside of friendly heroic pilot, this time we are starting to be introduced to his flaws, that being his inability to see the big picture, he always makes good strategies and plans and is a great leader and has a sense of humour, these are good qualities, and when he is called impulsive it’s by generals who have the experience to think about the bigger picture where he goes for the most damage on a small scale, Poe has a very complimentary arc to Fin in that they both have to shift their thinking when the resistance is weakened because saving people becomes more important than always beating the bad guys.

so from that understanding of his character I don’t understand what stereotypes are being used here? genuinely please let me know because is it that he’s “hot-headed”? it’s a war and they are losing and because of that he makes the wrong decision and lashes out when he is restricted and believes his superior is making the wrong choice so all the “hot-headed” stuff is really just character complexity and his prominence in the plot is the reason why it’s only applied to him. IDK what other stereotypes there are i legit haven’t seen that criticism actually explained in detail yet so if any latinx fans can let me know i’d be glad

Fin’s arc isn’t the same, yes he’s been sidelined and its annoying because I hate the thing they sidelined him for too but when we do focus on his character they evolve his problems from TFA: running away out of fear and self loathing becomes running from one responsibility because he believes they’re a lost cause in the moment and wants to protect Rey, which becomes planning to sacrifice himself to lash out at first order  in a way that mirror’s Poe’s journey because they both have to think better than that about who they’re fighting for. 

There are so many characters to juggle in the film and by partnering Finn up with Rose they do detract from his character development but only to allow her to help him and introduce her to the stage at the same time as moving the plot along and setting up things for the next movie thematically.  Finn was underserved but it was due to a writing puzzle of balancing an ensemble cast and ultimately at this point his story is supportive of the main plot but not directly a part of it and they could have done that differently but again that’s a writing flaw but not what I would call the worst part of the film i think people took it too hard and would like to hear a response to my reading of Finn’s place in the story in some detail too.

 Also I love Rose and her dynamic with Finn was my fav and desperately needed because they keep having Finn Poe and Rey be separated in these films and we needed that friendly banter and mutual support space filled and Rose is honestly the heart and soul of the resistance even if the casino sequence was written in a very on the nose blatant way these films are for a very broad audience and some people need that stuff spelled out for them. (i’ve seen TLJ twice and both times i think most people in the audience missed the kid using the force at the end which i thought was wonderfully subtle before his posing became blatant visually with the broom)

underuse and underwriting are both side effects of the ensemble cast and i’m willing to forgive the clumsiness of it generally but you’re correct about Rey’s writing, I’ve said it before but everything about her and kylo and snoke and Luke contained in the scenes between the second force skype conversation and Kylo waking up on the floor is the characters making bad choices, that’s why it feels out of character. the rest of the film even when characters make mistakes everyone is behaving consistently and there’s a balance but in that entire segment of the film all four characters make the wrong decisions. the results of these scenes afterwards is fine but i wish they hadn’t decided to have rey trust kylo so readily, considering her character history as a scavenger you know she’d be more skeptical than that.  And with Luke his reticence to tell her the truth is frustrating because that’s what happened to him regarding his father and he should know better, I think the moment of weakness misread as utter betrayal was interesting, not a great choice on the writing side but i’m willing to deal with it. outside of those scenes though it’s like the competent writing suddenly returned! 

Bad pacing? yeah, but it’s the middle film in a trilogy there was a lot of ground to cover.

also listen there’s nothing wrong with being a fan of villians in a work of fiction and personally i loved watching hux suffer and kylo get the door slammed in his face and just because i find his character entertaining doesn’t mean i wanted the rey/kylo romance teasing that happened. I have to accept that the writers are going for redemption arc stuff here but honestly give me complex pathetic villain who dies dramatically at the end and i’ll be happy, 

I wrote out all these paragraphs because you made a whoooole lot of generalisations and i wanted to respond with personal thoughts and specificity,\

 I can’t speak for groups i’m not a part of but i can give my personal reasons for liking the film. at the end of the day it’s not the worst star wars film and of my expectations of the franchise some flaws are a part of it. I LIKE goofiness intentional or not in my genre fiction.

 Representation-wise the LGBT stuff would have been wonderfull but as of right now it wasn’t something i felt should be expected but instead it is something I think should be pressured onto the creators to include canonically because there’s literally no reason not to include it that isn’t getting money from garbage people who hate diversity. 

On a casting level i love the inclusivity of race in the cast, not just with Finn, Poe, and Rose being the majority of our new young heroes, but also of background characters because that sort of understated representation is important too. Do i think the writing could be better? sure, but as far as stereotyping goes i don’t believe there’s deliberate and malicious intent there, any flaws are unintentional on the writers side and their personal biases, but personally I still don’t see the specific problem you’re citing here and would like to hear more about it because I don’t get it.

also pls chill with the “white people and kylo stans” attitude here because i get why people don’t like adam driver, but you’re being deliberately escalating in your language and i’m not okay with that, it’s a false equivalence of the concepts of white complacency when it comes to representation with….. people who like the main villain. 

He’s the main bad guy. he’s played by an actor cast with his looks in mind because he’s one of the few villains who doesn’t spend the whole film behind a mask or with cgi or makeup effects obscuring him, he’s placed in a position of power and given sympathetic elements because a complex villain is more interesting than, oh, say, every simple evil marvel villain who wants to destroy the earth (and I say that as someone who likes marvel films) they knew they couldn’t recapture the appeal of darth vader so they aimed for audience enjoyment in a different way and it worked and it’s pointless to be mad at fans of star wars for liking it’s main villain?

 I’m not saying fans who take it too far by going “he did nothing wrong”/”his victimisation excuses his actions” or who woobie-fy him or who shit on other characters are in the right here, they’re not, and it is frustrating when there’s so many good characters that others lose screen time and complexity to focus on him when he’s a shitty fascist who wants power for himself. 

just like, de-escalate your aggression here because i’m talkative as hell and I also want better representation but I’m also one hundo percent about viewing media and people complexly and in terms of the fiction i thought it was a good film and in terms of the choices by the creators in how they crafted that film i thought they did okay but could have done waaay better and that’s what fans want. 

i’m not gonna speak for most LGBT/non white fans because I’m only a part of one of those categories personally but i’m SURE a chunk of the audience responses in those reviews trashing the movie are from straight white cis dudes who are mad about all the POC in the film or goofy writing choices they feel undermines their view of the movie and they’re objectively wrong about a lot of things but their opinions are still added to that review percentage and the only way to know who thought what from what background and coming from what perspective is to go through every review and make a chart and that sort of research isn’t something i’ve done and you probably haven’t done it either so we can only speak from our view from discussing with friends and online and on tumblr i have seen some lgbt and poc  responses and most of them are positive, a couple of people aren’t and that’s only my dashboard but i can’t assume it represents the communities as a whole

so anyone seeing this long ass post who hasn’t unfollowed me: what’s your opinion?

[glittergummicandypeach]

State Director of Christian Right Legislative Group, ‘Project Blitz,’ Calls for Lynching of Rep. Ilhan Omar (Updated) | Religion Dispatches

UPDATE, July 27, 2020: Rev. Dale Witherington recently returned to the scene of his Facebook crime and wrote that he would be taking time away from Facebook and deleting his app. This was three days after the political blog Bluestem Prarie first reported on Witherington’s Facebook call for the lynching of a “parade” of people including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and one day after RD advanced and took the story national.

It did not go well, with one commenter objecting:

Witherington was back on Facebook on July 13th, offering a classic non-apology apology.  This also did not go well, and he responded neither to his friends or his critics.

Witherington apologized to no one in particular about nothing in particular. He has been silent on Facebook since then.

He could have first apologized to Rep. Omar and stated unequivocally that he does not think she or anyone else should be lynched and that American Muslims like her are fit and welcome to run for and hold public office. But he didn’t. He might have publicly called on the Facebook friend with whom he was agreeing about that lynching to also recant and apologize. But he didn’t. He might have further repented his call for this profoundly immoral and arguably criminal action. But he didn’t. Finally, he might also apologize to the Minnesota State Legislative Prayer Caucus, the state action arm of Project Blitz, of which he is State Director and how his words and actions reflect on these legislators.

He has done none of these things, but he could.

This began as a story about a Christian Right leader who joined in calling for a Member of Congress and others to be hanged for treason. And then it got interesting. 

Screenshot of screenshot, courtesy of Bluestem Prairie.

In a recent Facebook post (since taken down) Rev. Dale Witherington, the State Director of the Minnesota action arm of the Christian Right state legislative campaign, Project Blitz, agreed with a commenter (and Facebook friend) that U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “needs to be Hung.” He added, “I can think of other treasonous persons who can join that parade.” [See image left.]

The political blog Bluestem Prairie which broke the story, posted a screenshot of the inflammatory comments. The comments were scrubbed the next day, soon after they were tweeted by religion scholar André Gagné of Concordia University in Montreal. A few hours later, the entire post was taken down along with all of the 47 other comments. 

We had no idea we were racing Witherington’s apparent growing awareness that his agreement with a call for the lynching of a Member of Congress and others might catch up with him—and that he’d have to scramble to cover his tracks.

“I have not called on anyone to be hanged,” Witherington protested when he was called out by another commenter in the thread. But he had no response when confronted with a screenshot of his words. (RD copied this quote into this story just before everything was deleted.)

Witherington also wrote in the now-deleted post, (sans evidence) about the “likelihood” that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) holds to views incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, and suggested, much like the infamous Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, that Muslims should be barred from holding public office. Rep. Omar, originally a refugee immigrant from Somalia, is the first woman of color to hold federal elective office from Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women in Congress. The threat against Rep. Omar was particularly ill-considered in that she represents the 5th Congressional District, which includes the city of Minneapolis, the epicenter of the protests arising from the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police.

Since her election in 2018, she’s been the target of death threats. And threats like those of Witherington and his Facebook friend are far from the first threats against her life, which makes it all the more remarkable that they would join this rhetorical Republican lynch mob. According to Wikipedia,

“Two Republican candidates for congressional office have called for her to be executed.[173] In November 2019, Danielle Stella, Omar’s Republican opponent for Congress, was banned from Twitter for suggesting that Omar be hanged for treason.[168] In December 2019, George Buck, another Republican running for Congress, also suggested that Omar be hanged for treason.”

Witherington wrote,

“…it is so difficult, if not impossible, for a person with an Islamic ideology to hold office of any kind in the United States. Geopolitical Islam is completely at odds with supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States. The two supporting ideologies are so opposed to one another, they cannot be reconciled. Our systems of government clash. There is no middle ground.”

In another of his now-deleted comments, he said he was relying on his interpretation of a 14th century book on Sharia Law, to explain how Omar’s use of the expression “inshallah”—which most understand to mean “God willing” in the same sense as in Jewish and Christian traditions, as somehow evidence of devotion to an ancient notion of harsh Islamic theocracy.

Of course, this may have been a projection on Witherington’s part, because Rep. Omar from her earliest days as a freshman Member of Congress in 2019 has an unambiguous record of commitment to religious freedom, pluralism and separation of church and state—while Witherington subscribes, as RD reported last year, to the neo-Pentecostal theology of 7 Mountains Dominionism. For Witherington, there may be no long-term accommodation with any religious view outside of a certain circumscribed version of theocratic Christianity, to which religious equality under the law is a permanent obstacle.

Dismantling systems of oppression

The current controversy stems from comments Omar made recently in which she called for dismantling systems of oppression in the U.S. This caused conservatives from Donald Trump to Don Jr. to Breitbart and beyond to wage an aggressive election year series of mischaracterizations of Omar’s statements.

Some claimed that she wanted to dismantle the entire economic and political system of the U.S. and even “America’s Foundation.” A short video produced by the rightwing Western Journal to which Witherington’s Facebook post was responding, claimed that Omar had called for the “complete dismantling of the American way of life.” This false characterization was taken as fact by Witherington who then claimed it was also representative of Islam and incompatible with the Constitution.

Omar’s actual quote read (and is even to be heard in The Western Journal’s video clip):

“As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality. So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression, wherever we find it.”

She also said, although it was not included in the clip:

“We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system; we are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment [and] in the air we breathe.”

Far from calling for tearing down the system, she was calling for reform by eliminating oppressions within various sectors, as well as the system as a whole.

Among the oppressions that Omar did not mention but we might add, are religious bigotry inflamed by racism aimed at everyone who gets in the way or deviates from the theocratic objectives of the Christian Right.

This content was originally published here.

[nataliesewell]

blank pages ;

ALIZA / SCHOLAR - CENTRIC; sweet elite. she may want to take the entertainment industry by storm and make a difference through scriptwriting, but first she must navigate the hectic hallways of high school. a series of oneshots and drabbles, all centered around aliza shah’s time at the prestigious arlington academy.

part one: aliza moves into her dorm room.

“That’s the last of it,” Hareem says, setting the last of the boxes down. She rests her hands on her hips as she takes in the sea of boxes littering the dorm room. “So. You’ve officially moved out, at sixteen. When I was your age, I was lucky to even be allowed to go to the movies with my friends.”

“I guess Dad and Mom trust me more than they trusted you.” Aliza’s lips twitch into a grin.

Hareem rolls her eyes. “Uh huh, laugh it up. We’ll see if you’re still smiling when you have to make your own food... do your own laundry... clean your own room...”

Aliza’s smile had disappeared by ‘do your own laundry’. “Dude, stop scaring me more than I already am.”

“Just telling it like it is. Now, you want me to stick around for a bit?”

“Uh, hell yeah.” While she may not outright admit it, her stomach’s in knots at the thought of staying at Arlington Academy. All alone. No familiar face in sight. (Plus, she wants to put off unpacking for as long as she can.) Aliza’s dreading the inevitable: when Hareem has no more reason to stay, and drives the two hours back home. “You don’t have anything important to do today, right?”

“Nope. I finished my assignment early so I’m good.” Hareem opens the door. “If I remember all those pamphlets Dad insisted on getting for this place correctly, there’s a cafe nearby. Wanna get something from there? My treat. Least I could do, since I don’t have to see your ugly mug at home anymore.”

“I both hate and love you,” Aliza told her sister as they leave her dorm room, locking the door behind them.

“I just hate you,” Hareem counters, even as she puts an arm around Aliza’s shoulders.

They walk down the hallway; the other rooms’ doors are closed, not a soul in sight. Thank god for that. Aliza isn’t prepared to meet the other girls. Not that she’ll ever be.

Hareem looks around, whistling appreciatively. “This place is awesome. Even with all the info and pictures, the pamphlets didn’t do Arlington justice. I mean, we’re walking on a literal red carpet.”

“You getting green with envy?” Aliza teases.

“Very,” her sister says. “My high school looked nothing like this. Hell, even my college is subpar when you compare it to Arlington.”

Aliza hums. “Must be thanks to the rich neighbourhood and richer parents.”

“Oh, definitely. You know, in class, we actually discussed how property taxes play a huge part in determining a school’s budget---” Hareem continues with her anecdote, and Aliza listens intently, even as she finds her chest constricting.

She’s going to really, really miss this. When will she have the chance talk to any of her sisters in person? Or her parents for that matter? A knot begins to form in Aliza’s throat, and she swallows thickly. No, she will not cry. She refuses to.

Aliza holds up admirably, throughout the time they spend at the campus cafe---which is sleek and polished, much like the rest of Arlington---and lasting until she’s seeing Hareem off.

“God, this is so weird,” Hareem says, about to step into the car. “None of us have ever left for school, and now...”

“You’re telling me. I still can’t imagine living here, as nice as it is.” Aliza hesitates for a moment, then moves forward to hug her sister. “I... might miss you. Kind of. A little.”

Hareem laughs, wrapping her arms around her. “Yeah, well, I’m a text or phone call away. And you know Mom will want to FaceTime literally every single day; I’ll pop in from time to time. You’re still in the family group on Whatsapp, right?”

“Unfortunately.” Her family loves Whatsapp too much; her phone pings a million times a day. Normally she doesn’t check the app, but now... Aliza steps out of the hug, watching as her sister gets into the car.

“Have fun being independent,” Hareem tells her.

Aliza rolls her eyes. They both know how shit she is when it comes to being responsible. Still, it looks like she’ll have to learn. Fast. “Thanks for helping me with moving.”

“No prob. Later, nerd.”

Aliza snorts as Hareem rolls up the window, waving when the car peels out of the parking lot. The lump in her throat from before returns with full force, and she hastily blinks away tears.

“Stop acting like a baby, Aliza,” she mutters to herself, stuffing her trembling hands in her pockets and beginning the trek back to the dorms. “I should be happy to get away from Dad and Mom’s nagging. And... and Hareem won’t be able to boss me around anymore. I’m free.” The words don’t reassure her whatsoever.

But it’s whatever! She needs to focus on tomorrow, when classes begin. When her time at Arlington becomes all too real. She’s in the department of performing arts, and will be learning more about writing, just like she had imagined ever since she was offered the scholarship.

As excited as she is, Aliza’s still morose. The moment she enters her dorm room, closing the door behind her, her chest only grows tighter. With a sigh, Aliza carefully walks around the numerous boxes and throws herself onto her bed---she needs to unpack her sheets and blanket, but she can go without for one day---and tries to relax.

She’s crying in earnest within seconds.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: i originally wrote this for the se 30 days challenge (writers edition), but this... took a turn i did not expect. as you can clearly see, lmao. but it would be pretty overwhelming, to move away from home at a fairly young age?? that’s what i think anyway lol.

this series is kind of lax, and won’t be updated all too much at first. mainly because i’m hesitant to introduce the entire cast of sweet elite, since the demo isn’t even out yet. wouldn’t want to mischaracterize anyone. >< and it definitely won’t always be angsty, lmao. promise.

[giftofshewbread]

The Environment is Set on the Mark of the Beast

Published on: April 26, 2020 by  RRadmin7

The Coronavirus pandemic has caused many students of prophecy to wonder if world governments’ efforts to combat the virus will involve the implementation of the Mark of the Beast. If they’re going to make all the citizens of earth line up to get a vaccine, it would be convenient timing to also dispense a microchip implant that will link them up to the 666 financial system.

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire “philanthropist” Bill Gates has legally separated himself from his old company, but both entities are engaged in a mission that could work together. Gates is champing at the bit to implement his long-awaited mandatory vaccination agenda. And what better catalyst for making it happen than the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis?

Microsoft has created a device that could add a tracking code to a mass vaccination. It interacts with the pulse, temperature and brain waves of the human body in order to engage in the buying and selling of cryptocurrency. The ID2020 implant would interact with a computer network system. Oddly enough the publication number of this Microsoft patent is #W02020060606. WO? Could that stand for World Order? WO/2020/06/06/06.

News about Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms. Gates got the ball rolling in mid March as he participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or, when we have a vaccine, who has received it.”

Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease.”

A review by Media Matters stated that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction around March 17 when a YouTube video about the virus “mischaracterized” Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID,” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims.

Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson recently claimed that Gates wants to use “vaccines to track people,” while Fox News host Laura Ingraham—who has met with Trump to discuss the coronavirus—tweeted that Gates and other “globalists” want to use the crisis to track people. Gates’ name appeared on protest signs meant to criticize Ohio’s social distancing order, while former Trump adviser Roger Stone accused Gates of wanting to “microchip” people.

Pro-Trump personalities and regular Trump White House guests “Diamond and Silk” have also pushed conspiracy theories about Gates, tweeting that the Microsoft founder was operating on a secretive “agenda��� to “rule the world with vaccines,” and vowing not to take any coronavirus vaccine that Gates was involved with.

None of these reports about Gates will ever be reported positively by the liberal media, so few people know about his agenda. Since you would have to have an understanding of Bible prophecy to know the dangers of a vaccine that could be tracked, most people would think of it as a good idea.

Much of our modern technology could become very hazardous to our liberties if it was used by a despotic government. Apple and Google are working together on a Coronavirus Tracking App. Smart phones already ‘automatically exchange their identifier beacons with each other. If someone tests positive for the Coronavirus, the app can send a message to all smartphones that came in contact with that person. Apple and Google say the app is ‘voluntary’ in the beginning; it will not be voluntary after they build it into the operating system software.

The mark of the beast is no longer something of the future. I think China’s social credit system is a working model of the Number of the Beast. By the time the Antichrist comes along to make it official, the world openly embraces its financial enslavement.

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six” (Revelation 13:16-18).

— Todd

[theconservativebrief]

Tumblr announced Monday that it would be banning many categories of adult content across its platform, including “photos, videos, or GIFs” displaying explicit material, as well as “illustrations that [depict] sex acts.”

The controversial change will take effect on December 17; existing posts flagged by Tumblr’s censors as violating the new policy will be automatically set to private, meaning that no one will be able to see them other than the blog’s creator.

Debate is raging about what Tumblr’s userbase will even look like at that point, given how much of the community involves erotica and the use of explicit imagery. Discussion of the ban consumed social media throughout Monday evening, and Tumblr users responded with a mixture of outrage, worry, and hilarious memes.

On the one hand, it’s easy to see why Tumblr, now in its 11th year as a social media platform known for “reblogs” and image-heavy content, made this move: it seems very likely that its hand was probably forced by Apple. In November, Apple banned Tumblr’s official app from the IOS store because of reported child pornography on the platform. This led to a sitewide crackdown on pornography that left many users complaining that their NSFW blogs had been unfairly purged in the sweep.

Yet despite last month’s initial purge, the app has still not been restored to the IOS store, in what seems to be a clear ‘fix this or else’ ultimatum from Apple that has almost certainly prompted the current crisis. As Motherboard wrote on Monday in its breakdown of the Tumblr situation, “Apple has repeatedly leveraged its unprecedented power over millions of smartphones to sanitize the apps that are available on iPhones.”

In an email response, a Tumblr spokesperson directed Vox back to the staff announcement, including the staff’s acknowledgment that “filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.”

But on the other hand, many users are outraged over what they see as an attempt to disrupt the entire culture of Tumblr and its community, where erotica and NSFW artwork and storytelling have thrived and flourished — and where marginalized communities who have built safe spaces may now be newly vulnerable.

“According to marginalized and vulnerable people, this change in policy will directly hurt them,” wrote geek icon and power user Wil Wheaton, in a reblog of an inappropriately flagged post which featured nothing more offensive than shirtless men kissing. “And that’s indefensible.”

What’s at issue is not only the question of whether Tumblr can survive its own purge — it’s the question of who Tumblr’s core users are, and what will motivate them to continue building their communities on a platform that seems to be devaluing them and their vital contributions to building Tumblr culture.

Though Tumblr was born alongside most other modern social networks, it’s long been associated with a certain countercultural deviance. Founder David Karp launched it in 2007 when he was just 20, and his much-vaunted hoodie-wearing ethos helped give the site a permanently youthful attitude — even an air of “millennial narcissism.”

Tumblr’s younger, digital-savvy denizens made Tumblr into a center of internet culture, churning out memes and cultivating subcultures from fandoms to study bloggers to digital art collectives. But despite all this, the site has long been plagued by an unfairly dismissive cultural reputation that reduces the entire vibrant platform to a vast repository of porn, and not much else.

The association of Tumblr with porn is part of a longstanding media narrative that has perpetually dismissed the site and its userbase for its relative youth, its progressive politics, its fandom leanings, and its predominantly queer and feminist userbase.

“Every time I make the mistake of opening Tumblr at work I end up seeing a stray boob,” Akila Hughes joked in Splinter News.

This reputation further reduces the community that gave us “Tumblr activism” — the disruptive but progressive political force that grew into a loud generation of real-world activists — down to that of a bunch of women who are only there for porn.

And even the porn itself gets mischaracterized. The fact is that the erotic and NSFW imagery on Tumblr includes everything from fanart to sex education, and is a vibrant and much-valued part of the community. And while data analysts have uncovered that, yes, there is a lot of porn on Tumblr, it’s coming from only a tiny fraction — about a tenth of one percent — of the site’s creators.

And the producers of this pornography are not active members of the Tumblr community. Most of the producers of pornography on Tumblr are pornbots, automated accounts set up to specifically generate NSFW content, much of it designed to lure users to third-party paid content sites.

Still, because pornbots don’t always stay in their lane, it’s easy for users reading random “normal” tags to be exposed to them. The site has tried multiple times to deal with porn in its midst. Users have even tried to help, organizing spontaneous organic pornbot-banning campaigns. But the site’s efforts haven’t been enough to keep it from running into trouble with third parties — most notably, Apple, which, in its ban of anything “overtly sexual,” is not attuned to the blurry lines between porn, erotica, and other types of racy content.

Tumblr has long sagged under the weight of doubt regarding its longterm sustainability. The site plateaued its growth in 2016 at just 23 million users, less than half that of Twitter at the time and a third that of Instagram, which has since ballooned exponentially.

Since the exit last year of its longtime chief David Karp, and the sale of the site to Verizon, rumblings that Tumblr is finally finished have abounded. Meanwhile, Tumblr users have been increasingly at odds with Tumblr’s corporate side, as the business tries to balance potential money-making opportunities with its unruly yet thriving corner of internet culture. Unfortunately, the short-term solution seems to be a pivot away from that grassroots culture towards more rigidly controlled content — which opens the door to a whole new set of problems.

One of the biggest questions on the minds of Tumblr users is whether Tumblr can effectively carry out this policy without nuking everything in its path. The consensus so far, based on both past experience with Tumblr as well as other algorithmic censorship attempts, as well as the abundant reports of posts that are already being inappropriately flagged under the new change: not a chance.

Welp, my Tumblr blog is marked NSFW, bc I curse like a sailor and occasionally I reblog fanart, fine art, and protest art that contains nudity. (Yes, including FEMALE-PRESENTING NIPPLES.) So I guess my Tumblr blog will be on the chopping block too.

So where we goin’ next, y’all?

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) December 3, 2018

It’s important to note that Tumblr is attempting to explicitly draw a dividing line between its users’ creative content and the more hardcore stuff. Tumblr’s new policy defines “adult content” as “primarily includ[ing] photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” That doesn’t necessarily include many types of erotica, which may be sexual and evocative without explicitly depicting sex. And Tumblr is only banning “photos, videos, or GIFs,” not text-based erotica or artwork — except when that artwork portrays sexual acts.

The platform is also trying to differentiate between explicit porn and non-sexual nudity — a tricky bit of semantics that led the site to go with language banning “female-presenting nipples” while protecting “exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding,” among other things. The new policy also specifies that nudity for the purposes of sexual education and other contexts is okay. That should be comforting to the thriving community around sex work on Tumblr, as well as to those who are concerned about its increasingly important role as a de facto sex education site for millions of its users.

But all of these attempts to separate the wheat from the porny chaff raise the question of whether Tumblr will be able to accurately police along these dividing lines without committing overreach and becoming censorship-happy, thus silencing many vital blogs and users.

In the wake of the passage of FOSTA, the anti-sex trafficking bill that has raised internet-wide concerns about censorship, many Tumblr users have spoken out about their anxiety that Tumblr will become a platform of broad and ill-defined censorship which will silence some of the most important parts of Tumblr. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time; in 2013, Tumblr attempted to ban NSFW tags and wound up censoring queer content before backtracking.

And how does anyone, let alone Tumblr’s automatic censors, draw the line between illustrations that depict sex acts and illustrations that simply “feature” nudity?

These questions have alarmed many Tumblr users. Many fanartists and original artists create explicit art alongside non-explicit art as a matter of course; some, like the well-known artist Siij, whose NSFW blog was banned in the November purge, have already been targets of Tumblr censors.

In addition, some users have reported that entire tags are currently being scrubbed of content and hidden from Tumblr’s search; for example, searching for the NSFW tag no longer generates any content. And users who’ve already started receiving emails about their flagged content under the new policy are reporting that their content is being flagged incorrectly.

One Twitter thread compiling reports of incorrectly flagged Tumblr posts collected everything from benign art and fanart to cave photos, safe-for-work vintage photos of black women, and even a reblog of Tumblr’s own announcement:

On a superficial level, this is all hilarious — and, to many of us, hilariously familiar. (More on that in a moment.) But on a deeper level, the giant outcry over this decision reflects a larger anxiety from users — a fear that Tumblr is cracking down, not just on porn, but on the very essence of Tumblr culture: unruly, unsanctioned, and in many ways, united by the very spirit of deviance that Tumblr is trying to kill.

“The reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression,” wrote one Tumblr user in a widely reblogged post. “For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.”

What’s frequently lost in the reductive equating of Tumblr with porn is that, as on LiveJournal before it, much of the platform’s erotica is community oriented — and essential to the vibrancy of that community.

For instance, entire fanart traditions have sprung up around cheeky erotic illustrations and the frequently NSFW artists who produce them. Tumblr also birthed the phenomenon of popular fandom blogs featuring porn stars who look like various fictional characters, peddling erotic content specifically through the lens of shipping. Modern-day Tumblr artists have entirely revived the long-dormant tradition of professional-quality fanzines, many featuring subversive queer content and explicit content.

Then there are the many, many queer and genderqueer and marginalized users who found in Tumblr a positive, identity-affirming community space that simply doesn’t exist on most other social media platforms. As Tumblr users grappled with the news, many spoke out about the degree to which the banning of explicit content could impact untold numbers of individuals who lack the ability to safely explore their identities and their sexualities, on other websites or in real life.

“This is a mistake,” wrote Tumblr user caitercates in a widely-distributed response to the Tumblr staff post. “You say you’re all about “sex positivity” while banning all adult content of any kind? … You are actively deleting a majority of your account base. … your solution is to bleach your site until it’s unrecognizable.”

Not to mention the countless artists and writers who are about to lose their viewer/readership. I understand erotica will still be allowed – but what about the relationships that are fostered between artists and writers? There are so many of us who make fanart of our favorite fics, and a lot of the time that involves smut. This ISN’T A PROBLEM. This is creativity at work, and sex positivity, like you claim to support.

Change this.

EDIT your site. Make positive changes that we as the community have asked for – don’t blanket-ban the content that, tbh, most of us are here for at least in part.

It’s extremely significant that Tumblr users are fighting for Tumblr to walk back this change, because Tumblr has traditionally had a primarily harmonious relationship to its userbase, despite its users increasing distrust of its motives and interests. With the exception of Reddit, which is mainly community-run, Tumblr has given its users more freedom than any other platform in shaping and making the site into what it is.

This is partly due to the fact that Tumblr was never intended to be a grassroots haven for the misfits of the rest of the internet. But that characteristic is part of what has made Tumblr uniquely quirky and offbeat among social media spaces — and it may be the trait that saves it.

There’s a legitimate argument to be made — and one that I, as a longtime Tumblr user, would admittedly like to be true — that people who think banning porn on Tumblr will kill Tumblr really don’t know that much about Tumblr’s core users. Despite the mainstream media narrative, Tumblr has never, ever, been about porn.

Tumblr was built around community, around fandom, around viral absurdist meme blogs and street fashion bloggers. What other social media platform annually sends amateur bloggers to Fashion Week? It was grown from arty hipster landscape photos whose wistful aesthetics were deposited straight onto the collected works of the Chainsmokers. Tumblr has given us feminist art galleries and digital art collectives pushing online art movements like vaporwave, seapunk, and glitch art while showing off, bar none, the best GIF artistry on the planet.

Tumblr’s deliberately hyperbolic language fueled everything from “all the feels” to the rise of One Direction. It’s been called the progenitor of Neo-Dadaism, the wellspring of a vast amount of absurdist millennial humor that’s pushed out of its niche Tumblr basement to hit the mainstream corridors of the internet. Mic shamelessly built its brand by exploiting Tumblr’s politics while Buzzfeed shamelessly built its brand by piggy-backing off Tumblr’s content. It’s the place where angry feminist clapbacks and “your fave is problematic” exist alongside hungover owls and “Mmm Whatcha Say?” — that is, it’s as marvelous, and marvelously frustrating, and deeply surprising, as the internet itself.

It’s tempting to argue that while core Tumblr users will grumble about the site-wide crackdown on porn, they’ll recognize that while they can get the porn from other sites, it will be impossible to replace everything else that makes Tumblr what it is.

That said, the very quirky nonconformity of Tumblr’s users may, in fact, push them to leave. Some users see the site’s push to ban adult content as echoing the downward spiral of LiveJournal, the once-popular early blogging platform which was highly admired for its open-source ethos, its laidback moderation style, and its positive sense of community.

In an infamous pair of 2007 incidents that became known as “Strikethrough” and “Boldthrough,” LiveJournal famously destroyed the trust of its userbase overnight when its own attempt to ban certain types of explicit content resulted in a ban on fanart and other innocent and creative types of content.

The relationship between the site and a userbase that had, until then, been ride-or-die, never fully recovered. In the wake of LiveJournal’s steady overtaking by Russia, many of those users migrated to Tumblr, where they joined the much-larger stream of millennial and Gen Y and Z users who have relied on the site’s user-friendliness and openness to many types of erotica as they built their communities.

A side effect of the ban involved a renewed appreciation for the Archive of Our Own, (AO3), a nonprofit, censorship-free website run by fans which is explicitly set up to archive fanworks in the event of major content crackdowns like this one. Among the other more serious responses to the ban has been a litany of fandom history and advice posts being shared for the benefit of younger Tumblr users and others for whom the overnight implosion of their digital home was a new experience. Especially prominent have been recommendations for alternative sites to Tumblr.

Many users, desperate to recapture the deep sense of community that once existed on LiveJournal, have been advocating for a retreat to a new social platform called Pillowfort, a site which very overtly attempts to combine the best characteristics of LiveJournal and Tumblr with a more laidback old-school approach to fandom and content moderation. That platform, which is currently in beta, is currently down for planned security upgrades. On its Tumblr in response to the news about the Tumblr ban, Pillowfort stated that it plans to “allow NSFW content with very few restrictions.”

Still others looked to Dreamwidth, a blogging platform built on LiveJournal’s open-source code that was originally built in 2008 in response to LiveJournal’s demise. Its owners, too, were ready to welcome the Tumblr diaspora with open arms, just as it welcomed the LJ diaspora a decade ago. Other sites like MeWe also responded to the news by welcoming potential Tumblr refugees.

For many Tumblr users and onlookers, however, the simplest solution seems to be a return to the spirit that built Tumblr culture: when all else fails, make memes.

It was inevitable, for example, that there’d be at least one reference to DashCon, the notorious 2014 Tumblr fan convention that turned into a viral disaster, typified by this famous forlorn image of the “DashCon ball pit:”

At the top of the list of agenda items was the phrase “female presenting nipples,” which received the lion’s share of hilarity from Tumblr users.

free the female presenting nipples. robbieross/Tumblr

Of course, all of this won’t really help answer the larger question of what’s next for Tumblr. But ironically, in response to the news, Tumblr’s userbase has reminded us all exactly what a valuable and irreplaceable role Tumblr has played in the evolution of modern internet culture.

All of the wry humor, the trenchant memes, the progressive social commentary mixed with genuine care for Tumblr’s marginalized communities that Tumblr users have deployed in response to the adult content ban — all of that is a unique combination that’s grown out of Tumblr culture. When it’s gone, there’s no guarantee it will return on another website in the same form. And it definitely won’t be accompanied by the same fabulous GIFs and fanart.

Still, there’s no guarantee that Tumblr’s profit-driven side will prioritize keeping that culture sustainable, even if it does somehow manage to ban adult content and retain its core membership. If that’s the case, then it’s a loss not just for Tumblr users, but for the entire internet. Like Vine before it, another irreplaceable cornerstone of our online world that should have been better appreciated all along, Tumblr might be fated to be loved best only after it’s gone.

Original Source -> Why Tumblr’s adult content ban is about so much more than porn

via The Conservative Brief

[dustinwootenne]

In Mark Zuckerberg We Trust? The State and Future of Facebook, User Data, Cambridge Analytica, Fake News, Elections, Russia and You

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, data misappropriation, #deletefacebook, calls for regulation and pending testimony to U.S. Congress, Facebook announced a series of initiatives to restrict data access and also a renewed selfie awareness to focus efforts on protecting people on the platform. What’s more notable however is that Mark Zuckerberg also hosted a last-minute, rare town hall with media and analysts to explain these efforts and also take tough questions for the better part of an hour.

Let’s start with the company’s news on data restrictions.

To better protect Facebook user information, the company is making the following changes across nine priority areas over the coming months (Sourced from Facebook):

Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. Doing so allowed users to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. According to the company, Facebook Events carry information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall. As of today, apps using the API can no longer access the guest list or posts on the event wall.

Groups API: Currently apps need permission of a group admin or member to access group content for closed groups. For secret groups, apps need the permission of an admin. However, groups contain information about people and conversations and Facebook wants to make sure everything is protected. Moving forward, all third-party apps using the Groups API will need approval from Facebook and an admin to ensure they benefit the group. Apps will no longer be able to access the member list of a group. Facebook is also removing personal information, such as names and profile photos, attached to posts or comments.

Pages API: Previously, third party apps could use the Pages API to read posts or comments from any Page. Doing so lets developers create tools to help Page owners perform common tasks such as schedule posts and reply to comments or messages. At the same time, it also let apps access more data than necessary. Now, Facebook wants to ensure that Page information is only available to apps providing useful services to our community. All future access to the Pages API will need to be approved by Facebook.

Facebook Login: Two weeks, Facebook announced changes to Facebook Login. As of today, Facebook will need to approve all apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events and groups. Additionally, the company no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity. Soon, Facebook will also remove a developer’s ability to request data people shared with them if there has been no activity on the app in at least three months.

Instagram Platform API: Facebook is accelerating the deprecation of the Instagram Platform API effective today.

Search and Account Recovery: Previously, people could enter a phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find their profiles. According to Facebook, “malicious actors” have abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity, Facebook believes most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. This feature is now disabled. Changes are also coming to account recovery to also reduce the risk of scraping. 

Call and Text History: Call and text history was part of an opt-in feature for Messenger or Facebook Lite users on Android. Facebook has reviewed this feature to confirm that it does not collect the content of messages. Logs older than one year will be deleted. More so, broader data, such as the time of calls, will no longer be collected.

Data Providers and Partner Categories: Facebook is shuttering Partner Categories, a product that once let third-party data providers offer their targeting directly on Facebook. The company stated that “although this is common industry practice…winding down…will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook”

App Controls: As of April 9th, Facebook display a link at the top of the News Feed for users to see what apps they use and the information they have shared with those apps. Users will also have streamlined access to remove apps that they no longer need. The company will reveal if information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica may have had data from as many as 87 million people

Facebook also made a startling announcement. After thorough review, the company believes that Cambridge Analytica may have collected information on as many as 87 million people. 81.6% of these users resided in the United Sates with the rest of the affected users scattered across the Philippines, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, India, among others. Original reports from the New York Times estimated that the number of affected users was closer to 50 million.

Mark Zuckerberg Faces the Media; Shows Maturity and Also Inexperienced Leadership

In a rare move, Mark Zuckerberg invited press and analysts to a next-day call where he shared details on the company’s latest moves to protect user data, improve the integrity of information shared on the platform and protect users from misinformation. After initially going AWOL following the Cambridge Analytic data SNAFU, he’s since been on a whirlwind media tour. He genuinely seems to want us to know that he made mistakes, that he’s learning from them and that he’s trying to do the right thing. On our call, he stayed on beyond his allotted time to answer tough questions for the better part of 60 minutes.

From the onset, Mark approached the discussion by acknowledging that he and the rest of Facebook hadn’t done enough to date to prevent its latest fiasco nor had it done enough to protect user trust.

“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough in preventing abuse…that goes for fake news, foreign interference, elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy,” Zuckerberg stated. “We didn’t take a broad enough view what our responsibility is. It was my fault.”

He further pledged to right these wrongs while focusing on protecting user data and ultimately their Facebook experience.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they’re bringing people closer together,” he said. “It’s not enough to give people a voice. We have to make sure that people aren’t using that voice to hurt people or spread disinformation. And it’s not enough to give people tools to manage apps. We have to ensure that all of those developers protect people’s information too. We have to ensure that everyone in our ecosystem protects information.”

Zuckerberg admitted that protecting data is just one piece of the company’s multi-faceted strategy to get the platform back on track. Misinformation, security issues and user-driven polarization still threaten facts, truth and upcoming elections.

He shared some of the big steps Facebook is taking to combat these issues. “Yesterday we took a big action by taking down Russian IRA pages,” he boasted. “Since we became aware of this activity…we’ve been working to root out the IRA to protect the integrity of elections around the world. All in, we now have about 15,000 people working on security and content review and we’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year. This is going to be a major focus for us.”

He added, “While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been tracing back and identifying this network of fake accounts the IRA has been using so we can work to remove them from Facebook entirely. This is the first action that we’ve taken against the IRA and Russia itself. And it included identifying and taking down a Russian news organization. We have more work to do here.”

Highlights, Observations and Findings

This conversation was pretty dense. In fact, it took hours to pour over the conversation just to put this article together. I understand if you don’t have time to read through the entire interview or listen to the full Q&A. To help, I’ve some of the highlights, insights and takeaways from our hour together.

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he’s very sorry. He articulated on several occasions that he feels the weight of his mistakes, mischaracterizations and gross misjudgments on everything…user data, fake news, election tampering, polarization, data scraping, and user trust. He also wants you to know that he’s learning from his mistakes and his priority is fixing these problems while regaining trust moving forward. He sees this as a multi-year strategy of which Facebook is already one year underway.

Facebook now believes that up to 87 million users, not 50, mostly in the US, may have been affected by Kogan’s personality quiz app. Facebook does not know the extent of which user data was sold to or used by Cambridge Analytica. This was not a data breach according to the company. People willingly took Kogan’s quiz.

Facebook has also potentially exposed millions of user profiles to data scraping due to existing API standards on other fronts over the years. The extent of this scraping and how data was used by third parties is unknown. Facebook has turned off access. Even still, it is unacceptable that it wasn’t taken seriously before. Facebook must own its part in exposing data to bad actors who scraped information for nefarious purposes.

Mark believes that Facebook hasn’t done a good enough job explaining user privacy, how the company makes money and how it does and doesn’t use user content/data. This is changing.

Mark, and the board/shareholders, believe, he’s still the right person for the job. Two reporters asked directly whether he’d step down by force or choice. His answer was an emphatic, “no.” His rationale is that this is his ship and he is the one who’s going to fix everything. He stated on several occasions that he wants to do the right thing. While I applaud his “awakening,” he has made some huge missteps as a leader that need more than promises to rectify. I still believe that Facebook would benefit from seasoned, strategic leadership to establish/renew a social contract with users, Facebook and its partners. The company is after all, fighting wars on multiple fronts. And the company has demonstrated a pattern of either negligence or ignorance in the past and then apologizing afterward. One can assume that this pattern will only continue.

There’s still a fair amount naïveté in play here when it comes to user trust, data and weaponizing information against Facebook users. Even though the company is aiming to right its wrongs, there’s more that lies ahead that the company and its key players cannot see yet. There’s a history of missing significant events here. And, Mark has a history of downplaying these events, acting too late and apologizing after the fact. “I didn’t know” is not a suitable response. Even though the company is making important strides, there’s nothing to make me believe that sophisticated data thieves, information terrorists and shape-shifting scammers aren’t already a step or two ahead of the Facebook team. Remember, following the 2016 election, Mark said it was “crazy” that fake news could somehow sway an election. He’s since recanted that reaction, but it was still his initial response and belief.

Facebook is already taking action against economic actors, government interference and lack of truthfulness and promises to do more. Its since removed thousands of Russian IRA accounts. Russia has responded that Facebook’s moves are considered “censorship.”

Not everything is Facebook’s fault, according to Facebook. Mark places some of the onus ofresponsibility on Facebook userswho didn’t read the ToS, manage their data settings or fully understand what happens when you put your entire life online. In his view, and it’s a tough pill to swallow, no one forced users to take a personality quiz. No one is forcing people to share every aspect of their life online. While the company is making it easier for users to understand what they’re signing up for and how to manage what they share, people still don’t realize that with this free service comes an agreement that as a user, they are the product and their attention is for sale.

Moving forward, Facebook isn’t as worried about data breaches as it is about user manipulation and psyops. According to Mark, users are more likely susceptible to “social engineering” threats over hacking and break-ins. Social engineering is the use of centralized planning and coordinated efforts to manipulate individuals to divulge information for fraudulent purposes. This can also be aimed at manipulating individual perspectives, behaviors and also influencing social change (for better or for worse.) Users aren’t prepared to fully understand if, when and how they’re succeptible to manipulation and I’d argue that research needs to be done in understanding how we’re influencing one another based on our own cognitive biases and how we choose to share and perceive information in real-time.

Facebook really wants you to know that it doesn’t sell user data to advertisers. But, it also acknowledges that it could have done and will do a better job in helping users understand Facebook’s business model. Mark said that users want “better ads” and “better experiences.” In addition to fighting information wars, Facebook is also prioritizing ad targeting, better news feeds, and the creation/delivery of better products and services that users love.

Even though upwards of 87 million users may have been affected by Kogan’s personality quiz and some of that user information was sold to and used by Cambridge Analytica, and that user data was also compromised in many other ways for years, the #deletefacebook movement had zero meaningful impact. But still, Mark says that the fact the movement even gained any momentum is “not good.” This leads to a separate but related conversation about useraddictiveness and dependencyon these platforms that kill movements such as #deletefacebook before they gain momentum.

Users cannot rely on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, et al., to protect them. Respective leaders of each of these platforms MUST fight bad actors to protect users. At the same time, they are not doing enough. Users are in many ways, unwitting pawns in what amounts to not only social engineering, but full-blown information warfare and psyops to cause chaos, disruption or worse. Make no mistake, people, their minds and their beliefs are under attack. It’s not just the “bad actors.” We are witnessing true villains, regardless of intent, damage, abuse and undermine human relationships, truth and digital and real-world democracy.

People and their relationships with one another are being radicalized and weaponized right under their noses. No one is teaching people how this even happens. More so, we are still not exposing the secrets of social design that makes these apps and servicesaddictive. In the face of social disorder, people ar still readily sharing everything about themselves online and believe they are in control of their own experiences, situational analyses and resulting emotions. I don’t know that people could really walk away even if they wanted to and that’s what scares me the most.

Q&A in Full: The Whole Story According to Zuckerberg

Please note that this call was 60 minutes long and what follows is not a complete transcript. I went through the entire conversation to surface key points and context.

David McCabe, Axios: “Given the numbers [around the IRA] have changed so drastically, Why should lawmakers and why should users trust that you’re giving them a full and accurate picture now?”

Zuckerberg: “There is going to be more content that we’re going to find over time. As long as there are people employed in Russia who have the job of trying to find ways to exploit these systems, this is going to be a never-ending battle. You never fully solve security, it’s an arms race. In retrospect, we were behind and we didn’t invest in it upfront. I’m confident that we’re making progress against these adversaries. But they’re very sophisticated. It would be a mistake to assume that you can fully solve a problem like this…”

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC: “Back in November 2016, dismissed as crazy that fake news could have swung the election. Are you taking this seriously enough…?”

Zuckerberg: “Yes. I clearly made a mistake by just dismissing fake news as crazy as [not] having an impact. What I think is clear at this point, is that it was too flippant. I should never have referred to it as crazy. This is clearly a problem that requires careful work…This is an important area of work for us.”

Ian Sherr, CNET: “You just announced 87 million people affected by Cambridge Analytica, how long have you known this number because the 50 million number has been out there for a while. It feels like the data keeps changing on us and we’re not getting a full forthright view of what’s going on here.”

Zuckerberg: “We only just finalized our understanding of the situation in the last couple of days. We didn’t put out the 50 million number…we wanted to wait until we had a full understanding. Just to give you the complete picture on this, we don’t have logs going back for when exactly [Aleksandr] Kogan’s app queried for everyone’s friends…We wanted to take a broad view and a conservative estimate. I’m quite confident given our analysis, that it is not more than 87 million. It very well could be less…”

David Ingram, Reuters: “…Why weren’t there audits of the use of the social graph API years ago between the 2010 – 2015 period.

Zuckerberg: “In retrospect, I think we should have been doing more all along. Just to speak to how we were thinking about it at the time, as just a matter of explanation, I’m not trying to defend this now…I think our view in a number of aspects of our relationship with people was that our job was to give them tools and that it was largely people’s responsibility in how they chose to use them…I think it was wrong in retrospect to have that limited of a view but the reason why we acted the way that we did was because I think we viewed when someone chose to share their data and then the platform acted in a way that it was designed with the personality quiz app, our view is that, yes, Kogan broke the policies. And, he broke expectations, but also people chose to share that data with them. But today, given what we know, not just about developers, but across all of our tools and just across what our place in society is, it’s such a big service that’s so central in people’s lives, I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility. We’re not just building tools that we have to take responsibility for the outcomes in how people use those tools as well. That’s why we didn’t do it at the time. Knowing what I know today, clearly we should have done more and we will going forward.

Cecilia King, NY Times: “Mark, you have indicated that you could be comfortable with some sort of regulation. I’d like to ask you about privacy regulations that are about to take effect in Europe…GDPR. Would you be comfortable with those types of data protection regulation in the U.S. and with global users.”

Zuckerberg: “Regulations like the GDPR are very positive…We intend to make all the same controls and settings everywhere not just Europe.”

Tony Romm, Washington Post: “Do you believe that this [data scraping] was all in violation of your 2011 settlement with the FTC?”

Zuckerberg: “We’ve worked hard to make sure that we comply with it. The reality here is that we have to take a broader view of our responsibility, rather than just legal responsibility. We’re focused on doing the right thing and making sure people’s information is protected. We’re doing investigations, we’re locking down the platform, etc. I think our responsibilities to the people who use Facebook are greater than what’s written in that order and that’s the standard that I want to hold us to.”

Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times, “Investors have raised a lot of concerns about whether this is the result of corporate governance issues at Facebook. Has the board discussed whether you should step down as chairman?”

Zuckerberg: “Ahhh, not that I’m aware of.”

Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic: “Have you ever made a decision that benefitted Facebook’s business but not the community.”

Zuckerberg: “The thing that makes our product challenging to manage and operate are not the trade offs between people and the business, I actually think that those are quite easy, because over the long term the business will be better if you serve people. I just think it would be near sighted to focus on short term revenue over what value to people is and I don’t think we’re that short-sighted. All of the hard decisions we have to make are actually trade-offs between people. One of the big differences between the type of product we’re building, which is why I refer to it as a community and what do I think some of the specific governance issues we have are that different people who use..

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[dailyaudiobible]

02/10/2017 DAB Transcript

Exodus 30:11-31:18 ~ Matthew 26:47-68 ~ Psalm 32:1-11 ~ Proverbs 8:27-32

Today is the 10th day of February.  Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible.  I am Brian and I am thrilled that we can come together here at the end of a week. This is not exactly the end of the week. That is tomorrow but it's the end of the work week and I'm glad that we can get together for the rhythm that we’ve established in our lives to take a step forward each day and feast on the word of God.  So we’ll go back out with Moses and the people of Israel as God continues to give instructions for what this new people is supposed to look and act like.  We’re reading from The Voice Translation this week. Exodus chapter 30, verse 11 through 31, verse 18.  

Commentary

It's only been a couple of months since I was last in the land of the Bible and walking the path that we’re reading of today with Jesus.  And these places still exist—the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where Jesus cried out to the Father in anguish and the place where he was arrested in our reading today.  There is a valley between the Garden of Gethsemane and where the high priest's quarters would have been because Gethsemane is on the Mount of Olives. The Kidron Valley runs between the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount and that entire area of the City of David. So Jesus would have been bound and walked the path back across the Kidron Valley into Caiaphas’ quarters where all this is going down.  You can imagine the disciples all running off into the trees, all hiding, all staying on the periphery.  They’re not exactly sure what is happening.  Jesus has told them what is going to happen, but they have this worldview that Jesus is the Messiah and somehow the way that this ends is that he takes over. So they are on the periphery of all this.  Peter is in the courtyard outside as this trial of sorts is taking place.  

If you don’t just read the story and say yeah, I’ve heard this a thousand times, if you put yourself in the story, become one of the disciples, put yourself in these places, not only can you enter into the story, but you find yourself in the story.  Where would you be?  Because we read these stories and we can think easily ‘I would have come in with a sword and shield and rescued Jesus and died if I must,’ but they all said that. They all said that and they had been walking with Jesus all the years of his ministry.  

Peter is in the courtyard of Caiaphas’ quarters.  Not a big place.  I mean, you can imagine these things in your mind and picture this courtyard at a distance, but it's not.  They are close.  Peter was not too far away from Jesus, maybe within ear shot because Jesus ended up in storage rooms and cisterns that were pits for holding the supplies and storing the people that they needed to bring in for questioning and such.  They are not far away from each other, but they are very far away from each other.  Jesus is now a captive.  His freedom has been taken.  There is not really any going back from here.  So you can only imagine the things that were going through his mind after being accused of blasphemy, sentenced to death under Mosaic Law, thrown into a pit to be stored until the proper arrangements could be made, because the Jewish people couldn’t just go stone Jesus or kill him some other way.  I mean, they could by riot, but that would bring more trouble upon them.  The Romans would be brutal in stamping it down.  So they had to get the Romans to cooperate if it was going to be a public, humiliating execution, one that would send a signal to anyone else thinking of believing in this man, Jesus, or having plans of their own similar. Galileans were known to be insurrectionists.  

Then there is Jesus just down in a pit, thinking about what is coming. Sometimes when we think about Jesus’ suffering, we think about the crucifixion, that he had to endure that, and it is grisly and really impossible to imagine, but he endured a lot more than that.  He is already suffering, carrying the weight of all of the lies and misrepresentations and mischaracterizations, all of the upheaval of the world around him, one that he came to rescue, one that was rejecting him outright.  Can you imagine?  Can you imagine that the creation that he had set in motion he was about to submit himself to and allow this creation to kill him dead by torture?  

This is what sacrificial, unconditional love looks like and we can just go through our days just oblivious to it.  We’ve never not known it.  It is done, it's ours, so we can treat it with less gravity than it deserves, but we gather here today because of the moments that we’re reading about in the scriptures now.  This is how we got here and it is costly and compelling, especially if you love Jesus. If you’ve given your heart, if you’ve fallen in love with the Savior, then you can’t read back into the story with indifference.  You have to go there and understand that he loved you first.  He died for you in advance.  Our denials and betrayals, things we see playing out in the disciples’ lives, they play out in our own lives and you have to wonder, is it worth it? Really?  What are we running from?  What are we hiding from?  What more do we want than the true love of the Savior?  What is more valuable than that?  We can say nothing.  Of course, absolutely nothing, but the Bible being the mirror that it is, forces us to look at that question.  What are the distracting things in my life that make me just forget this even happened and take it for granted?  We can start digging up idols in our lives pretty quick that way, so may we invite the Holy Spirit into this moment, the first time we come across the passion narrative, the last moments of Jesus’ life, and give it the gravity and the weight that it deserves.  This is how you have attained eternal life.  It is certainly worth paying attention to.  But what is stealing that eternal life and that intimate relationship with the Savior?  Those things become the idols of our lives that we give our hearts in worship to.  

Prayer

Holy Spirit, we come into your presence inviting you into that.  As we move through this story, Jesus, we are unspeakably grateful because it has been brought to mind, but we just live with this freedom that you have given us.  We’ve never not known it.  All of our lives, from the day that we were born it was in the world.  It was available.  So yes, we know the alternative.  We’ve run our own race.  We’ve crashed our own car.  We’ve destroyed our own lives in different ways.  We walk with the limp and the bruises and the scars of the choices that we’ve made, but we still very easily make them.  We still go after whatever promise is the fastest path to whatever pleasure it is we’re looking for without paying attention to the fact that this cost something.  You came and, in advance of our even being here, loved us and died for us.  So we invite you, Holy Spirit, to begin to reveal in our hearts and actions and thoughts and motives and our will the things that we have prioritized in front of this sobering reality that our salvation came at a cost and our mission in this world is to bring your kingdom and to restore things to how they were supposed to be for us.  Help us, God, because it is everywhere.  Our cultures are built upon these distractions where products become pleasure and pleasure becomes purchasable life and it is all an illusion.  Help us, Lord, because we run from void to void trying to fill it and there is only one way and it is intimacy with you.  So Jesus, we love you.  Your sacrifice, although we know the details, is really beyond what we can comprehend, but we can be grateful because the difference that you have made is irreversible in this world and in our lives unless we consciously choose to betray and turn our backs on you, to be another Judas.  That is not who we want to be.  So come Holy Spirit, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.  

Announcements

Www.DailyAudioBible.com is the website.  It's home base.  It’s where you find out what’s going on around here so check it out.  Resources, events, the More Gathering for Women is coming up.  It's almost Valentine's Day.  I can’t believe that, but it is almost Valentine's Day.  Guys, this would be the ultimate Valentine's Day gift for your spouse or the one that you love.  Send her away for a couple of days in a couple of months and give her space to just be with this Jesus that we’re talking about, this one who loved us before we were ever here and loved us enough to die.  We never get the space.  We never make the space to just be in that story and be in that kind of intimate love.  We never get the time to say the things that need to be said.  We never take the time to hear the things that need to be heard. But the More Gathering is like that. It is a beautiful time to unplug and be with God and it’s remarkable, the things that Jesus says to each individual woman in her own story, in her own station in life.  It's not that God is not willing to speak.  It is that we’re not willing to slow down and listen and this is just a prepared time to slow down and listen and orient life correctly and move properly in a good healthy direction.  So, yeah, it's a great Valentine's Day gift and if you don’t have anybody to give it to you, give it to yourself.  Jesus can give it to you.  So you can check it out.  All the details, all of the particulars, all of the questions that you might have like how do I get there, how does it work, all of that stuff is at www.DailyAudioBible.com.  Just look for the More Gathering.  You’ll find it and you’ll find also everything you want to know.  So check that out.  

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at www.DailyAudioBible.com.  There is a link.  It is on the home page.  And if you find Daily Audio Bible to be life-giving, then thank you for being life-giving so that we can continue our journey together.  If you're using the Daily Audio Bible App, you can press the More button in the lower right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is P.O. Box 1996, Spring Hill, TN 37174.

And, as always, If you have a prayer request or comment, (877) 942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that’s it for today.  I'm Brian. I love you.  I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.  

Community Prayer Requests and Praise Reports

Hi Daily Audio Bible community.  This is Janice from the UK, in midland.  I’ve rung before.  I’ve been listening for a couple years.  This is my second full year now and I'm loving it.  It blesses me.  As I was listening to the prayer requests the other night and praying along with each one of those, it struck me that this Prayer Wall is like a Mexican wave going around the world.  When you think about it, there are people all across the world listening to the Daily Audio Bible whatever time of day it might be for them.  They are all praying at this time.  It's like this huge wave that goes around the earth and as Brian records the next day, that one comes __________ over and there is a next wave coming across.  That really blessed me and I hope that really blesses the people who are ringing with actual prayer requests as well.  Keep going people.  We do pray for you, even if you don’t hear from us.  We’re praying for you.  Thank you.

Hello Daily Audio Bible family.  This is your brother Regid, formally calling from Iraq, now in Nairobi, Kenya.  I really need your prayers.  First, for Brian, so sorry for the loss of your mom.  I'm happy that I heard what you said how it went through a process. It is really helpful.  But I need your prayers.  I’ve been jobless now for 10 months and it is getting very difficult, unbearable with the family and I pray that you guys would join with me and pray that God would open a door for me to get __________ or a job for me to provide for my family.  Thank you so much for your support.  I pray with you always.  I listen. I cry with you.  And please join me.  Let's ask God to open a door because it has taken too long and it is quite difficult.  Life is getting harder.  I can’t pay the school fees for the children.  I can’t provide.  It's hard. May God bless you.  I love you.  Bye-bye. God bless.  

Hi, my name is Kristin and I'm calling for Amanda who has been separated from her husband for seven months.  I encourage you to read Isaiah 40:20-31.  I have that on my computer at work and I read that every day multiple times. My husband and I were separated for 14 months.  I don’t know your situation, but it was a very unhealthy relationship for me.  He was very verbally abusive to me.  But anyway, I wanted to go ahead and give you encouragement to continue to pray even if you don’t see anything.  God is always working.  It took 14 months for me and my husband to get back together and it has been amazing.  He has been so much more open to everything.  He went to church with me.  He has prayed with me.  Just keep praying and pressing into God and seeing what God wants you to do, even if you don’t want to, even if you have a lot of resentment towards him.  It doesn’t matter.  Pray for him because even though we don’t see it, God is always working.  I would also encourage you to write down everything that he said to you, any emotion or resentment that you have against him.  Write it all down and pray over it every day.  It works.  I don’t have any resentment towards my husband anymore and I had a lot.  I filled up a front and back page and probably could have filled up another couple pages with stuff, but God has helped me and he will help you and he will help your situation.  

Hello and good afternoon Daily Audio Bible family.  It's a two for one Jay from New Jersey special.  Okay, so I'm reaching out to my Daily Audio Bible family to get you guys to pray for my family members.  I have a lot of brothers and sisters and some of them are believers. Some of them are not believers, but the long story short of it is many of them are carnal Christians, meaning they believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior but they are living in unconfessed, unrepentant sin.  As a result, they are living in situations that are just deplorable.  My one brother is being exploited by his biological mother. We were all adopted together, and she is exploiting him for all of his money.  He has a learning disability so he can be easily exploited.  But long story short, he was going to kill himself today if it were not for him posting that on Facebook and another member calling me to contact him, so let's pray for him and the rest of my family. Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, we lift up my brothers and sisters and the brothers and sisters of all the Daily Audio Bible family members.  Father, we ask that you will manifest yourself to them in a way that only you know how.  Father, give them the opportunity that you gave us to see the light of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ.  Father, we ask that any situation that they are in it will be an opportunity for you to be glorified.  In the name of Jesus Christ we pray, amen.  Thanks Daily Audio Bible family.  I love you. Have a great evening.  

Good night, Daily Audio Bible listeners.  This is Katie.  I'm calling from Minnesota and it is February 7th.  Well, it would seem that I can’t get, I believe his name Kevin who was recently diagnosed with bipolar and starting life all over, off my mind. I just want you to know, Kevin, that I have been praying for you nonstop, constantly and first I want to say it is so good that you have been diagnosed so that you are able to get treatment.  And I want to say to you also that I know starting over is difficult.  I’ve done that twice in my life in two different countries and I’ve never liked either of them, but what I’ve learned in it all is that if God has brought you to it, he will bring you through it, and so I want you to just trust and believe that.  God has it all laid out for you.  You just need to step out in faith.  Trust and believe that he has you covered because he does.  He will not leave you anywhere that he will not take you through and I am absolutely certain about that.  Also to the young lady, I think I’ve heard you call a second time.  You’re from somewhere in Michigan and you are driving a bus, a school bus, and you’re not certain about where your life is taking you and are seeking direction because you are not happy with your job at the moment.  You are seeking a job that has a better salary, something to that effect. And I just wanted to say to you remember to pray for yourself as well.  Continue to pray to God.  He will provide you with directives.  I’ve been at that place in my life before and trust me when I tell you that God turned up and he directed me and showed me where I need to go and I know for a fact that he will show you where you need to go.  I have been praying for you since the first time you called the program to ask for prayers and I continue to pray for you.  I just want to say guys, just remember to pray for me on February 16 as I take my board exam and just thanks to everyone and know that I pray constantly for every single person that calls in because I do this every day.  

Good morning Daily Audio Bible.  This is Loralee in Boynton Beach.  After much wrestling with the Lord and trying to leave a place of employment that the Lord clearly said ‘this is where I want you, submit to me, I will take care of your needs,’ I have repented and I work for an Orthodox Jewish assisted living community and I have some Jewish widows in their 90s that are coming to me and want to reason in the temple about Jesus and the Old Testament and I have to say what an honor it is and I need these names lifted up as a start:  Rosalie, Elaine, Naomi and Janet.  Please, Lord, I pray that you would open their eyes.  Have the Holy Spirit move as we open your word.  Your word has the power because it is Jesus from beginning to end.  You see the end from the beginning, Genesis to Revelation.  Help me.  Like Paul and Moses, I feel the burden of closed eyes, but only you can open the eyes of the blind, Lord, so this is the scripture.  For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all that I may win more of them.  To the Jews, I became a Jew in order to win Jews.  To those under the law, I became as under the law though not being myself under the law that I might win those under the law.  To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law, not being outside the law of God, but under the law of Christ that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak that I might win the weak.  I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some.  I do it all for the sake of the gospel that I…

[mariaaklnthony]

In Mark Zuckerberg We Trust? The State and Future of Facebook, User Data, Cambridge Analytica, Fake News, Elections, Russia and You

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, data misappropriation, #deletefacebook, calls for regulation and pending testimony to U.S. Congress, Facebook announced a series of initiatives to restrict data access and also a renewed selfie awareness to focus efforts on protecting people on the platform. What’s more notable however is that Mark Zuckerberg also hosted a last-minute, rare town hall with media and analysts to explain these efforts and also take tough questions for the better part of an hour.

Let’s start with the company’s news on data restrictions.

To better protect Facebook user information, the company is making the following changes across nine priority areas over the coming months (Sourced from Facebook):

Events API: Until today, people could grant an app permission to get information about events they host or attend, including private events. Doing so allowed users to add Facebook Events to calendar, ticketing or other apps. According to the company, Facebook Events carry information about other people’s attendance as well as posts on the event wall. As of today, apps using the API can no longer access the guest list or posts on the event wall.

Groups API: Currently apps need permission of a group admin or member to access group content for closed groups. For secret groups, apps need the permission of an admin. However, groups contain information about people and conversations and Facebook wants to make sure everything is protected. Moving forward, all third-party apps using the Groups API will need approval from Facebook and an admin to ensure they benefit the group. Apps will no longer be able to access the member list of a group. Facebook is also removing personal information, such as names and profile photos, attached to posts or comments.

Pages API: Previously, third party apps could use the Pages API to read posts or comments from any Page. Doing so lets developers create tools to help Page owners perform common tasks such as schedule posts and reply to comments or messages. At the same time, it also let apps access more data than necessary. Now, Facebook wants to ensure that Page information is only available to apps providing useful services to our community. All future access to the Pages API will need to be approved by Facebook.

Facebook Login: Two weeks, Facebook announced changes to Facebook Login. As of today, Facebook will need to approve all apps that request access to information such as check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events and groups. Additionally, the company no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity. Soon, Facebook will also remove a developer’s ability to request data people shared with them if there has been no activity on the app in at least three months.

Instagram Platform API: Facebook is accelerating the deprecation of the Instagram Platform API effective today.

Search and Account Recovery: Previously, people could enter a phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find their profiles. According to Facebook, “malicious actors” have abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity, Facebook believes most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. This feature is now disabled. Changes are also coming to account recovery to also reduce the risk of scraping. 

Call and Text History: Call and text history was part of an opt-in feature for Messenger or Facebook Lite users on Android. Facebook has reviewed this feature to confirm that it does not collect the content of messages. Logs older than one year will be deleted. More so, broader data, such as the time of calls, will no longer be collected.

Data Providers and Partner Categories: Facebook is shuttering Partner Categories, a product that once let third-party data providers offer their targeting directly on Facebook. The company stated that “although this is common industry practice…winding down…will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook”

App Controls: As of April 9th, Facebook display a link at the top of the News Feed for users to see what apps they use and the information they have shared with those apps. Users will also have streamlined access to remove apps that they no longer need. The company will reveal if information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica may have had data from as many as 87 million people

Facebook also made a startling announcement. After thorough review, the company believes that Cambridge Analytica may have collected information on as many as 87 million people. 81.6% of these users resided in the United Sates with the rest of the affected users scattered across the Philippines, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, India, among others. Original reports from the New York Times estimated that the number of affected users was closer to 50 million.

Mark Zuckerberg Faces the Media; Shows Maturity and Also Inexperienced Leadership

In a rare move, Mark Zuckerberg invited press and analysts to a next-day call where he shared details on the company’s latest moves to protect user data, improve the integrity of information shared on the platform and protect users from misinformation. After initially going AWOL following the Cambridge Analytic data SNAFU, he’s since been on a whirlwind media tour. He genuinely seems to want us to know that he made mistakes, that he’s learning from them and that he’s trying to do the right thing. On our call, he stayed on beyond his allotted time to answer tough questions for the better part of 60 minutes.

From the onset, Mark approached the discussion by acknowledging that he and the rest of Facebook hadn’t done enough to date to prevent its latest fiasco nor had it done enough to protect user trust.

“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough in preventing abuse…that goes for fake news, foreign interference, elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy,” Zuckerberg stated. “We didn’t take a broad enough view what our responsibility is. It was my fault.”

He further pledged to right these wrongs while focusing on protecting user data and ultimately their Facebook experience.

“It’s not enough to just connect people. We have to make sure those connections are positive and that they’re bringing people closer together,” he said. “It’s not enough to give people a voice. We have to make sure that people aren’t using that voice to hurt people or spread disinformation. And it’s not enough to give people tools to manage apps. We have to ensure that all of those developers protect people’s information too. We have to ensure that everyone in our ecosystem protects information.”

Zuckerberg admitted that protecting data is just one piece of the company’s multi-faceted strategy to get the platform back on track. Misinformation, security issues and user-driven polarization still threaten facts, truth and upcoming elections.

He shared some of the big steps Facebook is taking to combat these issues. “Yesterday we took a big action by taking down Russian IRA pages,” he boasted. “Since we became aware of this activity…we’ve been working to root out the IRA to protect the integrity of elections around the world. All in, we now have about 15,000 people working on security and content review and we’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year. This is going to be a major focus for us.”

He added, “While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been tracing back and identifying this network of fake accounts the IRA has been using so we can work to remove them from Facebook entirely. This is the first action that we’ve taken against the IRA and Russia itself. And it included identifying and taking down a Russian news organization. We have more work to do here.”

Highlights, Observations and Findings

This conversation was pretty dense. In fact, it took hours to pour over the conversation just to put this article together. I understand if you don’t have time to read through the entire interview or listen to the full Q&A. To help, I’ve some of the highlights, insights and takeaways from our hour together.

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he’s very sorry. He articulated on several occasions that he feels the weight of his mistakes, mischaracterizations and gross misjudgments on everything…user data, fake news, election tampering, polarization, data scraping, and user trust. He also wants you to know that he’s learning from his mistakes and his priority is fixing these problems while regaining trust moving forward. He sees this as a multi-year strategy of which Facebook is already one year underway.

Facebook now believes that up to 87 million users, not 50, mostly in the US, may have been affected by Kogan’s personality quiz app. Facebook does not know the extent of which user data was sold to or used by Cambridge Analytica. This was not a data breach according to the company. People willingly took Kogan’s quiz.

Facebook has also potentially exposed millions of user profiles to data scraping due to existing API standards on other fronts over the years. The extent of this scraping and how data was used by third parties is unknown. Facebook has turned off access. Even still, it is unacceptable that it wasn’t taken seriously before. Facebook must own its part in exposing data to bad actors who scraped information for nefarious purposes.

Mark believes that Facebook hasn’t done a good enough job explaining user privacy, how the company makes money and how it does and doesn’t use user content/data. This is changing.

Mark, and the board/shareholders, believe, he’s still the right person for the job. Two reporters asked directly whether he’d step down by force or choice. His answer was an emphatic, “no.” His rationale is that this is his ship and he is the one who’s going to fix everything. He stated on several occasions that he wants to do the right thing. While I applaud his “awakening,” he has made some huge missteps as a leader that need more than promises to rectify. I still believe that Facebook would benefit from seasoned, strategic leadership to establish/renew a social contract with users, Facebook and its partners. The company is after all, fighting wars on multiple fronts. And the company has demonstrated a pattern of either negligence or ignorance in the past and then apologizing afterward. One can assume that this pattern will only continue.

There’s still a fair amount naïveté in play here when it comes to user trust, data and weaponizing information against Facebook users. Even though the company is aiming to right its wrongs, there’s more that lies ahead that the company and its key players cannot see yet. There’s a history of missing significant events here. And, Mark has a history of downplaying these events, acting too late and apologizing after the fact. “I didn’t know” is not a suitable response. Even though the company is making important strides, there’s nothing to make me believe that sophisticated data thieves, information terrorists and shape-shifting scammers aren’t already a step or two ahead of the Facebook team. Remember, following the 2016 election, Mark said it was “crazy” that fake news could somehow sway an election. He’s since recanted that reaction, but it was still his initial response and belief.

Facebook is already taking action against economic actors, government interference and lack of truthfulness and promises to do more. Its since removed thousands of Russian IRA accounts. Russia has responded that Facebook’s moves are considered “censorship.”

Not everything is Facebook’s fault, according to Facebook. Mark places some of the onus ofresponsibility on Facebook userswho didn’t read the ToS, manage their data settings or fully understand what happens when you put your entire life online. In his view, and it’s a tough pill to swallow, no one forced users to take a personality quiz. No one is forcing people to share every aspect of their life online. While the company is making it easier for users to understand what they’re signing up for and how to manage what they share, people still don’t realize that with this free service comes an agreement that as a user, they are the product and their attention is for sale.

Moving forward, Facebook isn’t as worried about data breaches as it is about user manipulation and psyops. According to Mark, users are more likely susceptible to “social engineering” threats over hacking and break-ins. Social engineering is the use of centralized planning and coordinated efforts to manipulate individuals to divulge information for fraudulent purposes. This can also be aimed at manipulating individual perspectives, behaviors and also influencing social change (for better or for worse.) Users aren’t prepared to fully understand if, when and how they’re succeptible to manipulation and I’d argue that research needs to be done in understanding how we’re influencing one another based on our own cognitive biases and how we choose to share and perceive information in real-time.

Facebook really wants you to know that it doesn’t sell user data to advertisers. But, it also acknowledges that it could have done and will do a better job in helping users understand Facebook’s business model. Mark said that users want “better ads” and “better experiences.” In addition to fighting information wars, Facebook is also prioritizing ad targeting, better news feeds, and the creation/delivery of better products and services that users love.

Even though upwards of 87 million users may have been affected by Kogan’s personality quiz and some of that user information was sold to and used by Cambridge Analytica, and that user data was also compromised in many other ways for years, the #deletefacebook movement had zero meaningful impact. But still, Mark says that the fact the movement even gained any momentum is “not good.” This leads to a separate but related conversation about useraddictiveness and dependencyon these platforms that kill movements such as #deletefacebook before they gain momentum.

Users cannot rely on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, et al., to protect them. Respective leaders of each of these platforms MUST fight bad actors to protect users. At the same time, they are not doing enough. Users are in many ways, unwitting pawns in what amounts to not only social engineering, but full-blown information warfare and psyops to cause chaos, disruption or worse. Make no mistake, people, their minds and their beliefs are under attack. It’s not just the “bad actors.” We are witnessing true villains, regardless of intent, damage, abuse and undermine human relationships, truth and digital and real-world democracy.

People and their relationships with one another are being radicalized and weaponized right under their noses. No one is teaching people how this even happens. More so, we are still not exposing the secrets of social design that makes these apps and servicesaddictive. In the face of social disorder, people ar still readily sharing everything about themselves online and believe they are in control of their own experiences, situational analyses and resulting emotions. I don’t know that people could really walk away even if they wanted to and that’s what scares me the most.

Q&A in Full: The Whole Story According to Zuckerberg

Please note that this call was 60 minutes long and what follows is not a complete transcript. I went through the entire conversation to surface key points and context.

David McCabe, Axios: “Given the numbers [around the IRA] have changed so drastically, Why should lawmakers and why should users trust that you’re giving them a full and accurate picture now?”

Zuckerberg: “There is going to be more content that we’re going to find over time. As long as there are people employed in Russia who have the job of trying to find ways to exploit these systems, this is going to be a never-ending battle. You never fully solve security, it’s an arms race. In retrospect, we were behind and we didn’t invest in it upfront. I’m confident that we’re making progress against these adversaries. But they’re very sophisticated. It would be a mistake to assume that you can fully solve a problem like this…”

Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC: “Back in November 2016, dismissed as crazy that fake news could have swung the election. Are you taking this seriously enough…?”

Zuckerberg: “Yes. I clearly made a mistake by just dismissing fake news as crazy as [not] having an impact. What I think is clear at this point, is that it was too flippant. I should never have referred to it as crazy. This is clearly a problem that requires careful work…This is an important area of work for us.”

Ian Sherr, CNET: “You just announced 87 million people affected by Cambridge Analytica, how long have you known this number because the 50 million number has been out there for a while. It feels like the data keeps changing on us and we’re not getting a full forthright view of what’s going on here.”

Zuckerberg: “We only just finalized our understanding of the situation in the last couple of days. We didn’t put out the 50 million number…we wanted to wait until we had a full understanding. Just to give you the complete picture on this, we don’t have logs going back for when exactly [Aleksandr] Kogan’s app queried for everyone’s friends…We wanted to take a broad view and a conservative estimate. I’m quite confident given our analysis, that it is not more than 87 million. It very well could be less…”

David Ingram, Reuters: “…Why weren’t there audits of the use of the social graph API years ago between the 2010 – 2015 period.

Zuckerberg: “In retrospect, I think we should have been doing more all along. Just to speak to how we were thinking about it at the time, as just a matter of explanation, I’m not trying to defend this now…I think our view in a number of aspects of our relationship with people was that our job was to give them tools and that it was largely people’s responsibility in how they chose to use them…I think it was wrong in retrospect to have that limited of a view but the reason why we acted the way that we did was because I think we viewed when someone chose to share their data and then the platform acted in a way that it was designed with the personality quiz app, our view is that, yes, Kogan broke the policies. And, he broke expectations, but also people chose to share that data with them. But today, given what we know, not just about developers, but across all of our tools and just across what our place in society is, it’s such a big service that’s so central in people’s lives, I think we understand that we need to take a broader view of our responsibility. We’re not just building tools that we have to take responsibility for the outcomes in how people use those tools as well. That’s why we didn’t do it at the time. Knowing what I know today, clearly we should have done more and we will going forward.

Cecilia King, NY Times: “Mark, you have indicated that you could be comfortable with some sort of regulation. I’d like to ask you about privacy regulations that are about to take effect in Europe…GDPR. Would you be comfortable with those types of data protection regulation in the U.S. and with global users.”

Zuckerberg: “Regulations like the GDPR are very positive…We intend to make all the same controls and settings everywhere not just Europe.”

Tony Romm, Washington Post: “Do you believe that this [data scraping] was all in violation of your 2011 settlement with the FTC?”

Zuckerberg: “We’ve worked hard to make sure that we comply with it. The reality here is that we have to take a broader view of our responsibility, rather than just legal responsibility. We’re focused on doing the right thing and making sure people’s information is protected. We’re doing investigations, we’re locking down the platform, etc. I think our responsibilities to the people who use Facebook are greater than what’s written in that order and that’s the standard that I want to hold us to.”

Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times, “Investors have raised a lot of concerns about whether this is the result of corporate governance issues at Facebook. Has the board discussed whether you should step down as chairman?”

Zuckerberg: “Ahhh, not that I’m aware of.”

Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic: “Have you ever made a decision that benefitted Facebook’s business but not the community.”

Zuckerberg: “The thing that makes our product challenging to manage and operate are not the trade offs between people and the business, I actually think that those are quite easy, because over the long term the business will be better if you serve people. I just think it would be near sighted to focus on short term revenue over what value to people is and I don’t think we’re that short-sighted. All of the hard decisions we have to make are actually trade-offs between people. One of the big differences between the type of product we’re building, which is why I refer to it as a community and what do I think some of the specific governance issues we have are that different people who use..

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