#MeToo Google

[no27-chilis-honda]

what ON the LORD'S GREEN EARTH do you MEAN that RONAN FUCKING FARROW was a GUEST JUDGE on DRAG RACE LAST SEASON?!

[ijustwantedtobeoneofthestrokesuk]

The Book Club

The Internet

Social media goes mainstream. MySpace was big, but it wasn’t something everyone had, or even heard of, and it was at a time when the internet was generational. That changed. 

We no longer go online, we are online. 

In 1999 the internet wasn’t accessible for all. In 2024 we can’t go 10 minutes without using it. Nobody (well, except for David Bowie) would have predicted that. The internet is like an alternative world we live in while we’re living our physical life. If you don’t tweet for a couple of hours, do people really miss you? What if you don’t go on social media, is your online persona in a coma until you log in again? Does actual human engagement actually count anymore? If it’s not on the ‘gram, did it even happen?  

Odd isn’t it but it’s how we communicate with friends, family and the world. It’s how we shop, it’s how we discover, create and learn, it’s how we watch TV and listen to music. It’s everything and what is even madder is that we carry it everywhere on a device the size of our hand. 

Facebook

The origins of Facebook are murky as 19-year-old super geek and founder, Mark Zuckerberg had been working on something similar with fellow Harvard students. Before this, Mark had already created a name for himself in the tech world, pretty much every big name tried to hire him but he chose to go to study at Harvard instead. His first big project was Synapse (2002), a music recommendation program. Microsoft offered $1 million to buy it but Mark turned the offer down.  

Mark used his skills to hack into the computer system at Havard and stole photos of students, which he then used for Facemash in 2003. This platform allowed students to rank their peers, based on their looks. He was then approached by fellow students, who were working on Harvard Connect, a platform that brought students together online. Mark agreed to develop the platform for them but instead he launched The Facebook and they took him to court for fraud. Initially The Facebook was only available at Harvard but it proved to be popular very quickly and launched across more schools in America. 

After leaving school Mark headed to Silicon Valley, he rented a big house with a swimming pool where he could live, work and party with his team. It didn’t take long for businesses to approach Facebook to link up with. Visa and American Express were on board early, record labels followed. Mark met Napster co-founder Sean Parker, the pair clicked instantly, they became roommates, Sean got involved in Facebook and introduced Mark to the right people in Silicon Valley. 

By the end of 2004 there was 1 million Facebook users while the platform was still only available for students. In Spring 2005 The Facebook had its first investor, a venture capitalist taking 11% of the business for $12.7 million, making the company valued at $100 million in just over a year and it was renamed as “Facebook”.

Once users could tag themselves and friends in photos everything changed, Facebook was taking over university campuses. On the 26th September 2006 Facebook became available to the public and it had 5 and a half million users within 2 years of its initial launch. Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy the platform and MTV followed with $1.5 billion, Mark turned both down as he believed he had more ideas to make the product more valuable. 

Twitter

While Facebook was becoming popular amongst students, Twitter redefined the way we communicate with each other. What we share and how we consume news changed after the first tweet was posted on 21st March 2006. 

The 140-character limit was introduced as a text message used to have a limit of 160 characters and they wanted room for their branding. It’s a short burst of information that makes people be creative with what they share. 

Twitter’s rollout to the public was sped up at SXSW where they showcased the site in action. By the end of the festival, 20,000 tweets a day went to 60,000 tweets and a proper public launch came 4 months later. 

After the first year's success, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg got worried and offered $500 million to buy Twitter but they turned it down. The first year and a half was a struggle as the site couldn’t cope with demand. By 2008 300,000 tweets a day, a year later it increased to 2 and a half million tweets a day. 

Despite being used by millions of people every day, it wasn’t until they introduced “promoted tweets” in 2010 when it started generating money, by the end of the year it was valued at $3.7 billion.

In April 2022 super-rich businessman Elon Musk bought Twtter for $44 billion and rebranded it as “X” a year later and it hasn’t been the same.

Blaine Harrison “I have a love/hate relationship with social media. The way it separates you from yourself and forces you to frame your life as part of some kind of Black Mirror-esque beauty competition is so completely toxic. I’ve been so close to deleting it many times, but then one day I’ll wake up to find an amazing work opportunity peering seductively out at me from my inbox, and I get reeled back in. It definitely has it’s redeeming virtues. There’s no doubt that as a band it has put so much power back in your hands, from the point of view of communicating directly with your fan base. That’s worth so much to us.” 

Despite being polarising, social media has given people, a voice. Where victims would have been silenced in the past, now they had power to speak up and push for change. One of the biggest campaigns was this #MeToo Movement but it took 11 years to take off as the hashtag was first used on MySpace in 2006 but hashtags on MySpace didn’t “trend”. When Tarana Burke, who was raped and sexually assaulted as a child and teenager asked for women with similar experiences to talk up, with her, she wasn’t heard loud enough.

That changed on the 15th October 2017 when actress and activist, Alyssa Milano tweeted “Suggested by a friend: if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”, followed by “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”. The next morning there was 55,000 replies, it was trending globally and spread across Facebook too. 

The tweet got people talking, it showed the power of both social media and celebrities as Alyssa was backed by A-Listers including Lady GaGa, Sheryl Crow and Uma Thurman. Although the MeToo Movement has grabbed headlines for people in the public eye it has trickled down into everyday society. 

10 days prior to Alyssa’s tweet The New York Times published an expose against Harvey Weinstein who had basically ruled Hollywood for decades. Actors bravely spoke out, documenting sexual allegations relating to the film producer. Alyssa wanted to keep the discussion going and the tweet proved the scale of sexual harassment and assault around the world. Once people saw one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry taken down, it snowballed and change started to happen. It was power in numbers, with the aid of social media. 

Gemma Clarke “I’ve not particularly noticed more women in music since the MeToo Movement. There has always been females, girls used to be louder and wanted to be heard, not to get lost in the male-dominated music world. L7 were the best at that! The Breeders, Patti Smith etc…  Now there’s less need to make so much noise about being female, that’s how I feel anyway. The Suffrajets chose our name because we were trying to pave a way for more female musicians, we were a band first… now I feel, I’m just a drummer!” 

Kate Jackson “I’d like to think life for women in the music industry has changed for the better but I am very cynical as certain behaviour patterns are quite ingrained within the music industry. The only way to change it is for more women to be involved in production and engineering, both in the recording studio and in a live setting and also for more women to be at executive level within the business structures.” 

It’s no coincidence that there has been a rise in women in mainstream music, the majority of elite-level pop stars in the 21st century have been strong, empowering women. These women have stood up for themselves and others in an industry ruled my male egos. As well as being outspoken, unafraid and unapologetic, these women are talented, creative artists who are hands on in their work, not manufactured puppets that they are often portrayed as.  

Tahita Bulmer “I feel like women are better able to establish themselves as credible musicians,  whereas in the 2000’s, being a girl in a band was like being a talking dog. You were regarded as a novelty and inauthentic unless you ascribed to a white male/female paradigm of credibility such as Kate Bush or any band of 4 white guys in leather jackets. There was no room for humour, colour, or playfulness or voices influenced by black culture or queerness for example, which differed from that and therefore could not be regarded as authentic. I am a mixed-race woman and Andy has always loved afrobeat and latin/cuban rhythms and percussion and that's embedded in his producing DNA, so we could never really achieve that instant credibility. 

I would hope things have changed and those typically "othered" qualities (in music) are now celebrated at the level of the qualities that young white gatekeeping journalists/radio pluggers etc understood as important, which have always typified credible rock-influenced music in the West. In the 2000’s these would include in my opinion,  taking yourself very seriously, wearing black clothing exclusively or particularly, if you are female, ascribing to being a pre-raphaelite, child of nature type in a long white gown with an acoustic guitar, or some other white coded archetype, that was unachievable and alienating for artists of colour.”  

Laura Marsh “Shining a light on women being treated as objects in any way is good for progressing through the shit storm of pricks behaving badly. I hope women feel safer now than I did back then.”  

The #MeToo Movement is just one example of the ways social media has helped the silenced, others include #BlackLivesMatter, #FreeBritney and #FreeKesha. There is a common theme in these cases, the offender is usually white and male.

While Facebook was connecting people and Twitter gave users a voice, other platforms launched that forced on visuals including Tumblr, Vine, SnapChat, Instagram and TikTok. 

Like with MySpace, these products were built with naivety, for the good. They weren’t developed thinking that they would be used for negativity, no safeguarding was put in place and they had grown so big, so fast that once people started to use the platforms for hate speech it was too late.  

MySpace was ahead of the game and ahead of tech, an era when a mobile phone was a phone. The iPnone wasn’t the first “smartphone” but the iPhone changed what a mobile phone was, and its main use wasn’t to make phone calls. Apple launched the first iPhone in June 2007, when MySpace was still alive, but barely. Facebook and Twitter couldn’t have timed their arrival better. 

This was a time when ‘on-demand’ behaviour was becoming normalised. The iPhone gave users to ability to go online, listen to music, watch videos, take camera-worthy photos all on one device for the first time and each year a new device is released, giving users a better experience as technology continues to evolve.  

Mobile phones in general have changed the way we live and communicate, the smartphone has changed the way we create. Remember a time when you’d meet a celebrity, you’d ask for an autograph, now you stick your phone in their face for a photo, capturing the moment is more important than living it. And, the selfie, how mad is that. Seriously, think about it. You take a photo of yourself, edit it, add filters to make yourself look prettier, upload to social media and get a boost of serotonin with every ‘like’. If you don’t get the ‘like’s, you question yourself. It’s odd behaviour really, you don’t go out into the real world and get sad if you aren’t complimented. Camera phones have changed the way we document our lives for the better too. Imagine how amazing it would have been if we had great photographic evidence of everything our grandparents got up to.  

The camera has been a game-changer but the ability to make videos, upload them to YouTube and social media has been something else. Amateurs have been given the tools to create professional-looking content for the first time. Some people suggest that cameras and smartphones have stopped a generation from living in the ‘now’ but when used correctly they have become a powerful medium. 

From BlackBerry and their BBM to FaceTime, we no longer communicate in the same way our parents did. WhatsApp launched in 2009 as, at the time an SMS message was expensive and limited. The app, founded by two former Yahoo employees was initially created for users to update a status quickly but after noticing that their private messaging feature was being used more things started to change for the free service. 

Facebook had already added a chat feature in 2008 then, to compete with WhatsApp they launched the Messenger app in 2011, allowing users to message their friends in real time, then they bought WhatsApp 3 years later.

With a phone in a hand that has a camera and publishing tools (social media and blogging apps) we started unconsciously documenting our lives, you will definitely cringe at your old posts on Facebook and Twitter. When the internet arrived we were told scary stories, don’t go on chatrooms, you’ll get groomed, a few years later we were broadcasting our thoughts to strangers. Literally tweeting anything from what we ate at breakfast to live commentary our opinions on what was going on X Factor. People in real life don’t care, why would strangers on the internet? What was wrong with us… 

Some people actually got good at this and monetized it, becoming bloggers, then we got the birth of “social media influencers”. Brands have always used influencers to sell products, whether that was musicians, actors or models but they were already famous, the arrival  of the “social media influencer” made it look like it was that easy, as if we got an iPhone, start tweeting and brands will give you the job. 

Blogging became the new journalism and social media platforms were the distributors. A blog went from diary entries on a basic layout to websites that offered news, reviews and opinions, often with message boards that gave readers an unedited voice too, unlike the ‘readers letters’ page in a magazine. The likes of Drowned In Sound and Pitchfork became early market leaders and they’ve continued to become influential. Online content has devalued the magazine, many have gone out of print. Those that have survived are the visually appealing ones, the fashion ones. The Face was a bible when it launched in 1980 as it captured the vibe of the decade but in 2004 it went out of print. In 2019 it returned and it arrived with relevance, capturing the looks, sounds and trends of youth culture of the time, looking forward, not back, proving that online hasn’t killed-off print. It just needs to offer something else. 

The internet gave people a platform that they could make their own. Andy Warhol suggested everybody would get their 15 minutes of fame, the bloggers, vloggers and social media influences have created their own space. Perez Hilton was one of the early celeb bloggers, like a trashy tabloid newspaper, but online, without a filter and it became click-bait, the more controversial the story was, the more readers it got and Perez profited from clicks, not quality. 

Everyone has opinions on everything, along with the celeb bloggers, there are fashion bloggers who still compete with institutions such as Vogue but Tavi Gevinson was different. The 11-year-old dressed differently, took photos of them, put them on her blog, Style Rookie in 2008 and it got the fashion world talking. When she was still at school Tavi went to fashion week, wrote for the likes of Pop and Harper’s Bazaar before turning her blog into an online magazine for teens (which had an annual book in print). Tavi has continued to work across different mediums while Rookie collaborator Petra Collins worked with Cardi B and Olivia Rodrigo as well as Vogue, i-D, Adidas and Stella McCartney as a photographer and videographer.

Susie Lau started her blog Style Bubble in March 2008 and she has become an influential voice for fashion both online and offline as has Bryan Yambao who launched Bryanboy in 2004. 

We can type on our phone, we can take photos on our phone, we can also make videos on our phone and YouTube was here for it, even if it was a couple of years ahead of Apple and their iPhone. It arrived with the slogan, ‘Broadcast Yourself’ encouraged users to be a star. Can anybody really be a ‘star’? Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion 18 months after launching, these days it is worth over $20 billion. It is the second most used search engine after Google, used as an alternative to TV and a place where professionally created content is made solely for YouTube and being a “YouTuber” has been a viable career since the early 2010’s. YouTube has brought back the importance of the ‘music video’, and it didn’t need a big budget production. Stormzy’s career took off after filming him, rapping, with his friends in a park. Shut Up was uploaded to YouTube in 2015 and has over 135 million views.

If Facebook has become a comfortable space for boomers and Gen Z are discovering the future on TikTok, Instagram is for the millennials but it didn’t start out as a place that capture your best side. 

Burbn was an app for whisky fans to share their favourite tipple, created by a former Twitter and Google employee. The launch didn’t go as hoped, after discovering that the users favourite tool was that they could share photos. A year after starting Burbn the whole app had a facelift, repurpose and renamed, on 6th October 2010 Instagram was launched to the public. The photo sharing app had 1 million users with 2 months, in April 2012 Facebook bought it for $1 billion, now it is worth over $100 billion and more than a third of American’s using it and it has created another platform for creativies to share content.

Instagram became the platform your snaps, TikTok came along with short-form video content, perfect for a generation growing up with a short attention span and its growth was rapid during the COVID-19 pandemic. The app was the most downloaded app in 2020, it has inspired trends and helped songs become popular but it first launched ot Beijing in 2016 by Bytedance. 2 years earlier, Musical.ly was created in Shanghai where users could make 15-second videos (usually for lip syncing or dance routines) with licensed music. In November 2017 Bytedance bought Musical.ly for $1 billion and it merged with TikTok. 

It has continued to be at the front of pop culture trends, the app has had over 3 billion downloads and Bytedance is worth over $100 billion. 

NEXT CHAPTER

[onbearfeet]

In Which the Wizard School Books Are a Hammer

Okay. I'm gonna tell this story once, and only once, because I think it might help people who are struggling to finally, FINALLY boot J.K. Rowling from their lives.

I can't precisely say I sympathize, but I definitely know how you feel, because I have already had to do this dance with someone I guarantee you've never heard of. I've had all the feelings you've had. I had to find a way through all by myself, and now I'm going to help you so you have an easier time. Okay? Okay.

Content warning: discussion of child sexual abuse (mentioned but not described in detail).

So there's this writer. I refuse to speak or write his name these days, so we'll call him Evil Bob. ("Bob" is my default placeholder name, and this Bob is evil.) Evil Bob was a damn good writer and, frankly, an underappreciated one in his time. I picked up a few of his projects out of the bargain bin on impulse when I was about 12, and after that he was one of my names to conjure with. If Evil Bob had written it, I wanted to read it. He had a kind of perfect workman's style--he did a lot of things pretty well, and he did them in such a way that a bright 12-year-old could see how the trick was done. I learned a lot of basic writerly technique from Evil Bob--things about dialogue and pacing and how to convey character through action and lots of other stuff. Evil Bob unlocked something in my brain, and I really blossomed as a young writer by applying the lessons of his work.

Evil Bob's fiction started to fall off in popularity eventually, so he switched to nonfiction and wrote a damn good history book that won a lot of awards. I read it in college. The man could really interview, I tell you what.

I even got to interview Evil Bob myself, eventually. I was working for a small magazine that wanted to publish an article about a certain minority group's representation in a certain fiction genre, and Evil Bob had written one of the seminal works in that niche, so I tracked down his contact info, called him up, and we had a lovely hourlong chat. He was kind and gracious and funny and --

Yeah, this is where you learn why I named him Evil Bob.

A few years ago, people in Evil Bob's old fiction genre started circulating a list of, shall we say, disgraced writers in the field. Think of it like a MeToo list. The list got passed around every time a new name was added, and at a certain point, after a much more famous name had just been added to it, the list crossed my feed for the first time in a while. I dutifully scanned down it in case there was anyone on it I'd missed; after all, I attended conventions for this genre, and some of these fuckers were on the list for assaulting fans like me, so I wanted to know who to watch out for.

And there, in the middle of the list, was Evil Bob.

Weird, I thought. Evil Bob had seemed chill when I spoke to him, and usually, being 22 with big boobs (as I was when I interviewed him) brought out the perv in these guys if there was any perv to bring out. Well, maybe this was something else--maybe he used a slur on an old tape or something. I googled.

It was something else, all right.

As I sat there googling, Evil Bob was sitting in a federal prison a thousand miles away. He was there because, according to his Wikipedia page, he had been convicted of having so many CSA images on his hard drive that the judge in his case became physically ill. Honestly, I want to know where he got a hard drive that big in the year he was arrested, but I absolutely will not be asking him.

Evil Bob was EVIL. Fuck the carceral state, but also never let that particular dude near kids or a computer again.

So now I had a problem. I was going to stop buying Evil Bob's stuff, obviously--I would drop the man like a hot potato--but I couldn't so easily remove his influence on me. I'll never be 12 years old and digging through the quarter bin at the used bookshop again. There's no way to re-learn the foundations of my artform without Evil Bob. The bastard is part of me, whether I like it or not. He's left his fingerprints on my brain. And while I have negative interest in creating my own criminal hard drive, it's a little hard to shake the irrational guilt (especially since I had been raised in a high-control religious environment where any contact with sin could permanently stain one's soul, and Evil Bob's writing was part of how I escaped, and--you get the idea). I couldn't shed the stink of Evil Bob. I'd written that article. I was covered in the fuckin' ooze.

I'll spare you the six months of angst and self-flagellation. I've been to therapy since this happened. Here's what I eventually decided:

Evil Bob is like a hammer.

My dad gave me an old hammer when I moved out, along with some other miscellaneous hand tools in a paper bag. I bought a toolbox, I put the tools in it, and I use them when I need tools. My dad is an asshole who abused his children, but a hammer is a hammer. Scratch the previous owner's name off the handle, and you can build a pretty fine house with it.

What I learned from Evil Bob are the tools of a trade, and tools are not inherently evil. He taught me how to put sentences together--but I decide what my sentences say. He showed me how to convey character--but I choose what I'm conveying. He made me a writer--but I'm the one writing now.

So I still use Evil Bob's tools, with his name scoured off. I still teach some of those lessons, but he's the one source I don't cite. Oh, that dialogue hack? I picked it up in grad school, pinky swear. Here, let me share it with you for free, with no credit or compensation to the bastard who taught it to me.

I won't pretend Evil Bob wasn't an influence on my younger self, but you'll never hear me speak his legal name. I was one of the few people who really counted themselves fans of his work ... and he'll never get a whisper of a hint of that support from me again. I guarantee you won't be able to track him down from this post, and that's just the way I like it. There's a reason I haven't identified what genre he wrote in, or what his seminal fiction work was about, or whom he interviewed for that prizewinning book.

Damnatio memoriae, motherfucker. This is my hammer now, and it always has been.

So how do we give JKR the Evil Bob treatment?

Unfortunately, the Terf Queen has a larger media presence than Evil Bob ever did. One sad ex-Potterhead won't be able to erase her from culture. But there's a lot more than one of you, isn't there?

The thing is, cultural trends fade faster than you expect. Plenty of celebrities and famous artists of your parents' generation are nobodies now, and it's usually because their work spoke to your parents but not to you. I once witnessed my brother trying to read his sons a 1912 book about Spanish naval history as a bedtime story, and let me tell you, it did not go over well. Some art burns hot and bright and then it burns OUT.

The Potterheads are the parents now. Imagine how easy it would be to just ... stop talking about her. Stop buying the merch. Don't watch the new TV show or play the new game. Don't tell people you used to be a fan--not because you ought to be ashamed, but because you're not going to give her the satisfaction of saying her name. And when your kids ask about your tattoo, just tell them not to get blackout drunk in college.

Damnatio memoriae, motherfucker.

And if you feel the need to explain where you learned your kindness and courage, your unshakable loyalty to your friends (especially the trans ones), your hope in the face of overwhelming darkness ...

... why, that's your hammer. And it always has been.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Forcing your computer to rat you out

Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: “It’s impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it.”

Take Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg insists that anyone who wanted to use a pseudonym online is “two-faced,” engaged in dishonest social behavior. The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit.

From the very beginning, social scientists (both inside and outside Facebook) told Zuckerberg that he was wrong. People have lots of reasons to hide their identities online, both good and bad, but a Real Names Policy affects different people differently:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/22/social-scientists-have-warned-zuck-all-along-that-the-facebook-theory-of-interaction-would-make-people-angry-and-miserable/

For marginalized and at-risk people, there are plenty of reasons to want to have more than one online identity — say, because you are a #MeToo whistleblower hoping that Harvey Weinstein won’t sic his ex-Mossad mercenaries on you:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies

Or maybe you’re a Rohingya Muslim hoping to avoid the genocidal attentions of the troll army that used Facebook to organize — under their real, legal names — to rape and murder you and everyone you love:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/

But even if no one is looking to destroy your life or kill you and your family, there are plenty of good reasons to present different facets of your identity to different people. No one talks to their lover, their boss and their toddler in exactly the same way, or reveals the same facts about their lives to those people. Maintaining different facets to your identity is normal and healthy — and the opposite, presenting the same face to everyone in your life, is a wildly terrible way to live.

None of this is controversial among social scientists, nor is it hard to grasp. But Zuckerberg stubbornly stuck to this anonymity-breeds-incivility doctrine, even as dictators used the fact that Facebook forced dissidents to use their real names to retain power through the threat (and reality) of arrest and torture:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Why did Zuck cling to this dangerous and obvious fallacy? Because the more he could collapse your identity into one unitary whole, the better he could target you with ads. Truly, it is impossible to get a billionaire to understand something when his mega-yacht depends on his not understanding it.

This motivated reasoning ripples through all of Silicon Valley’s top brass, producing what Anil Dash calls “VC QAnon,” the collection of conspiratorial, debunked and absurd beliefs embraced by powerful people who hold the digital lives of billions of us in their quivering grasp:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

These fallacy-ridden autocrats like to disguise their demands as observations, as though wanting something to be true was the same as making it true. Think of when Eric Schmidt — then the CEO of Google — dismissed online privacy concerns, stating “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy

Schmidt was echoing the sentiments of his old co-conspirator, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it”:

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

Both men knew better. Schmidt, in particular, is very jealous of his own privacy. When Cnet reporters used Google to uncover and publish public (but intimate and personal) facts about Schmidt, Schmidt ordered Google PR to ignore all future requests for comment from Cnet reporters:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/

(Like everything else he does, Elon Musk’s policy of responding to media questions about Twitter with a poop emoji is just him copying things other people thought up, making them worse, and taking credit for them:)

https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-founder-twitter-land-of-the-giants

Schmidt’s actions do not reflect an attitude of “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Rather, they are the normal response that we all have to getting doxed.

When Schmidt and McNealy and Zuck tell us that we don’t have privacy, or we don’t want privacy, or that privacy is bad for us, they’re disguising a demand as an observation. “Privacy is dead” actually means, “When privacy is dead, I will be richer than you can imagine, so stop trying to save it, goddamnit.”

We are all prone to believing our own bullshit, but when a tech baron gets high on his own supply, his mental contortions have broad implications for all of us. A couple years after Schmidt’s anti-privacy manifesto, Google launched Google Plus, a social network where everyone was required to use their “real name.”

This decision — justified as a means of ensuring civility and a transparent ruse to improve ad targeting — kicked off the Nym Wars:

https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

One of the best documents to come out of that ugly conflict is “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names,” a profound and surprising enumeration of all the ways that the experiences of tech bros in Silicon Valley are the real edge-cases, unreflective of the reality of billions of their users:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

This, in turn, spawned a whole genre of programmer-fallacy catalogs, falsehoods programmers believe about time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

But humility is in short supply in tech. It’s impossible to get a programmer to understand something when their boss requires them not to understand it. A programmer will happily insist that ordering you to remove your “mask” is for your own good — and not even notice that they’re taking your skin off with it.

There are so many ways that tech executives could improve their profits if only we would abandon our stubborn attachment to being so goddamned complicated. Think of Netflix and its anti-passsword-sharing holy war, which is really a demand that we redefine “family” to be legible and profitable for Netflix:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

But despite the entreaties of tech companies to collapse our identities, our families, and our online lives into streamlined, computably hard-edged shapes that fit neatly into their database structures, we continue to live fuzzy, complicated lives that only glancingly resemble those of the executives seeking to shape them.

Now, the rich, powerful people making these demands don’t plan on being constrained by them. They are conservatives, in the tradition of #FrankWilhoit, believers in a system of “in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”:

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

As with Schmidt’s desire to spy on you from asshole to appetite for his own personal gain, and his violent aversion to having his own personal life made public, the tech millionaires and billionaires who made their fortune from the flexibility of general purpose computers would like to end that flexibility. They insist that the time for general purpose computers has passed, and that today, “consumers” crave the simplicity of appliances:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

It is in the War On General Purpose Computing that we find the cheapest and flimsiest rhetoric. Companies like Apple — and their apologists — insist that no one wants to use third-party app stores, or seek out independent repair depots — and then spend millions to make sure that it’s illegal to jailbreak your phone or get it fixed outside of their own official channel:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

The cognitive dissonance of “no one wants this,” and “we must make it illegal to get this” is powerful, but the motivated reasoning is more powerful still. It is impossible to get Tim Cook to understand something when his $49 million paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

The War on General Purpose Computing has been underway for decades. Computers, like the people who use them, stubbornly insist on being reality-based, and the reality of computers is that they are general purpose. Every computer is a Turing complete, universal Von Neumann machine, which means that it can run every valid program. There is no way to get a computer to be almost Turing Complete, only capable of running programs that don’t upset your shareholders’ fragile emotional state.

There is no such thing as a printer that will only run the “reject third-party ink” program. There is no such thing as a phone that will only run the “reject third-party apps” program. There are only laws, like the Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make writing and distributing those programs a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense).

That is to say, the War On General Purpose Computing is only incidentally a technical fight: it is primarily a legal fight. When Apple says, “You can’t install a third party app store on your phone,” what they means is, “it’s illegal to install that third party app store.” It’s not a technical countermeasure that stands between you and technological self-determination, it’s a legal doctrine we can call “felony contempt of business model”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

But the mighty US government will not step in to protect a company’s business model unless it at least gestures towards the technical. To invoke DMCA 1201, a company must first add the thinnest skin of digital rights management to their product. Since 1201 makes removing DRM illegal, a company can use this molecule-thick scrim of DRM to felonize any activity that the DRM prevents.

More than 20 years ago, technologists started to tinker with ways to combine the legal and technical to tame the wild general purpose computer. Starting with Microsoft’s Palladium project, they theorized a new “Secure Computing” model for allowing companies to reach into your computer long after you had paid for it and brought it home, in order to discipline you for using it in ways that undermined its shareholders’ interest.

Secure Computing began with the idea of shipping every computer with two CPUs. The first one was the normal CPU, the one you interacted with when you booted it up, loaded your OS, and ran programs. The second CPU would be a Trusted Platform Module, a brute-simple system-on-a-chip designed to be off-limits to modification, even by its owner (that is, you).

The TPM would ship with a limited suite of simple programs it could run, each thoroughly audited for bugs, as well as secret cryptographic signing keys that you were not permitted to extract. The original plan called for some truly exotic physical security measures for that TPM, like an acid-filled cavity that would melt the chip if you tried to decap it or run it through an electron-tunneling microscope:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

This second computer represented a crack in the otherwise perfectly smooth wall of a computer’s general purposeness; and Trusted Computing proposed to hammer a piton into that crack and use it to anchor a whole superstructure that could observe — and limited — the activity of your computer.

This would start with observation: the TPM would observe every step of your computer’s boot sequence, creating cryptographic hashes of each block of code as it loaded and executed. Each stage of the boot-up could be compared to “known good” versions of those programs. If your computer did something unexpected, the TPM could halt it in its tracks, blocking the boot cycle.

What kind of unexpected things do computers do during their boot cycle? Well, if your computer is infected with malware, it might load poisoned versions of its operating system. Once your OS is poisoned, it’s very hard to detect its malicious conduct, since normal antivirus programs rely on the OS to faithfully report what your computer is doing. When the AV program asks the OS to tell it which programs are running, or which files are on the drive, it has no choice but to trust the OS’s response. When the OS is compromised, it can feed a stream of lies to users’ programs, assuring these apps that everything is fine.

That’s a very beneficial use for a TPM, but there’s a sinister flipside: the TPM can also watch your boot sequence to make sure that there aren’t beneficial modifications present in your operating system. If you modify your OS to let you do things the manufacturer wants to prevent — like loading apps from a third-party app-store — the TPM can spot this and block it.

Now, these beneficial and sinister uses can be teased apart. When the Palladium team first presented its research, my colleague Seth Schoen proposed an “owner override”: a modification of Trusted Computing that would let the computer’s owner override the TPM:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

This override would introduce its own risks, of course. A user who was tricked into overriding the TPM might expose themselves to malicious software, which could harm that user, as well as attacking other computers on the user’s network and the other users whose data were on the compromised computer’s drive.

But an override would also provide serious benefits: it would rule out the monopolistic abuse of a TPM to force users to run malicious code that the manufacturer insisted on — code that prevented the user from doing things that benefited the user, even if it harmed the manufacturer’s shareholders. For example, with owner override, Microsoft couldn’t force you to use its official MS Office programs rather than third-party compatible programs like Apple’s iWork or Google Docs or LibreOffice.

Owner override also completely changed the calculus for another, even more dangerous part of Trusted Computing: remote attestation.

Remote Attestation is a way for third parties to request a reliable, cryptographically secured assurances about which operating system and programs your computer is running. In Remote Attestation, the TPM in your computer observes every stage of your computer’s boot, gathers information about all the programs you’re running, and cryptographically signs them, using the signing keys the manufacturer installed during fabrication.

You can send this “attestation” to other people on the internet. If they trust that your computer’s TPM is truly secure, then they know that you have sent them a true picture of your computer’s working (the actual protocol is a little more complicated and involves the remote party sending you a random number to cryptographically hash with the attestation, to prevent out-of-date attestations).

Now, this is also potentially beneficial. If you want to make sure that your technologically unsophisticated friend is running an uncompromised computer before you transmit sensitive data to it, you can ask them for an attestation that will tell you whether they’ve been infected with malware.

But it’s also potentially very sinister. Your government can require all the computers in its borders to send a daily attestation to confirm that you’re still running the mandatory spyware. Your abusive spouse — or abusive boss — can do the same for their own disciplinary technologies. Such a tool could prevent you from connecting to a service using a VPN, and make it impossible to use Tor Browser to protect your privacy when interacting with someone who wishes you harm.

The thing is, it’s completely normal and good for computers to lie to other computers on behalf of their owners. Like, if your IoT ebike’s manufacturer goes out of business and all their bikes get bricked because they can no longer talk to their servers, you can run an app that tricks the bike into thinking that it’s still talking to the mothership:

https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/15/alternative-app-can-unlock-vanmoof-bikes-popular-amid-bankruptcy-fears

Or if you’re connecting to a webserver that tries to track you by fingerprinting you based on your computer’s RAM, screen size, fonts, etc, you can order your browser to send random data about this stuff:

https://jshelter.org/fingerprinting/

Or if you’re connecting to a site that wants to track you and nonconsensually cram ads into your eyeballs, you can run an adblocker that doesn’t show you the ads, but tells the site that it did:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Owner override leaves some of the beneficial uses of remote attestation intact. If you’re asking a friend to remotely confirm that your computer is secure, you’re not going to use an override to send them bad data about about your computer’s configuration.

And owner override also sweeps all of the malicious uses of remote attestation off the board. With owner override, you can tell any lie about your computer to a webserver, a site, your boss, your abusive spouse, or your government, and they can’t spot the lie.

But owner override also eliminates some beneficial uses of remote attestation. For example, owner override rules out remote attestation as a way for strangers to play multiplayer video games while confirming that none of them are using cheat programs (like aimhack). It also means that you can’t use remote attestation to verify the configuration of a cloud server you’re renting in order to assure yourself that it’s not stealing your data or serving malware to your users.

This is a tradeoff, and it’s a tradeoff that’s similar to lots of other tradeoffs we make online, between the freedom to do something good and the freedom to do something bad. Participating anonymously, contributing to free software, distributing penetration testing tools, or providing a speech platform that’s open to the public all represent the same tradeoff.

We have lots of experience with making the tradeoff in favor of restrictions rather than freedom: powerful bad actors are happy to attach their names to their cruel speech and incitement to violence. Their victims are silenced for fear of that retaliation.

When we tell security researchers they can’t disclose defects in software without the manufacturer’s permission, the manufacturers use this as a club to silence their critics, not as a way to ensure orderly updates.

When we let corporations decide who is allowed to speak, they act with a mixture of carelessness and self-interest, becoming off-the-books deputies of authoritarian regimes and corrupt, powerful elites.

Alas, we made the wrong tradeoff with Trusted Computing. For the past twenty years, Trusted Computing has been creeping into our devices, albeit in somewhat denatured form. The original vision of acid-filled secondary processors has been replaced with less exotic (and expensive) alternatives, like “secure enclaves.” With a secure enclave, the manufacturer saves on the expense of installing a whole second computer, and instead, they draw a notional rectangle around a region of your computer’s main chip and try really hard to make sure that it can only perform a very constrained set of tasks.

This gives us the worst of all worlds. When secure enclaves are compromised, we not only lose the benefit of cryptographic certainty, knowing for sure that our computers are only booting up trusted, unalterted versions of the OS, but those compromised enclaves run malicious software that is essentially impossible to detect or remove:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

But while Trusted Computing has wormed its way into boot-restrictions — preventing you from jailbreaking your computer so it will run the OS and apps of your choosing — there’s been very little work on remote attestation…until now.

Web Environment Integrity is Google’s proposal to integrate remote attestation into everyday web-browsing. The idea is to allow web-servers to verify what OS, extensions, browser, and add-ons your computer is using before the server will communicate with you:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md

Even by the thin standards of the remote attestation imaginaries, there are precious few beneficial uses for this. The googlers behind the proposal have a couple of laughable suggestions, like, maybe if ad-supported sites can comprehensively refuse to serve ad-blocking browsers, they will invest the extra profits in making things you like. Or: letting websites block scriptable browsers will make it harder for bad people to auto-post fake reviews and comments, giving users more assurances about the products they buy.

But foundationally, WEI is about compelling you to disclose true facts about yourself to people who you want to keep those facts from. It is a Real Names Policy for your browser. Google wants to add a new capability to the internet: the ability of people who have the power to force you to tell them things to know for sure that you’re not lying.

The fact that the authors assume this will be beneficial is just another “falsehood programmers believe”: there is no good reason to hide the truth from other people. Squint a little and we’re back to McNealy’s “Privacy is dead, get over it.” Or Schmidt’s “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

And like those men, the programmers behind this harebrained scheme don’t imagine that it will ever apply to them. As Chris Palmer — who worked on Chromium — points out, this is not compatible with normal developer tools or debuggers, which are “incalculably valuable and not really negotiable”:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/Ux5h_kGO22g/m/5Lt5cnkLCwAJ

This proposal is still obscure in the mainstream, but in tech circles, it has precipitated a flood of righteous fury:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/

As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff — the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

All of which leads to the question: what now? What should be done about WEI and remote attestation?

Let me start by saying: I don’t think it should be illegal for programmers to design and release these tools. Code is speech, and we can’t understand how this stuff works if we can’t study it.

But programmers shouldn’t deploy it in production code, in the same way that programmers should be allowed to make pen-testing tools, but shouldn’t use them to attack production systems and harm their users. Programmers who do this should be criticized and excluded from the society of their ethical, user-respecting peers.

Corporations that use remote attestation should face legal restrictions: privacy law should prevent the use of remote attestation to compel the production of true facts about users or the exclusion of users who refuse to produce those facts. Unfair competition law should prevent companies from using remote attestation to block interoperability or tie their products to related products and services.

Finally, we must withdraw the laws that prevent users and programmers from overriding TPMs, secure enclaves and remote attestations. You should have the right to study and modify your computer to produce false attestations, or run any code of your choosing. Felony contempt of business model is an outrage. We should alter or strike down DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other laws (like contract law’s “tortious interference”) that stand between you and “sole and despotic dominion” over your own computer. All of that applies not just to users who want to reconfigure their own computers, but also toolsmiths who want to help them do so, by offering information, code, products or services to jailbreak and alter your devices.

Tech giants will squeal at this, insisting that they serve your interests when they prevent rivals from opening up their products. After all, those rivals might be bad guys who want to hurt you. That’s 100% true. What is likewise true is that no tech giant will defend you from its own bad impulses, and if you can’t alter your device, you are powerless to stop them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Companies should be stopped from harming you, but the right place to decide whether a business is doing something nefarious isn’t in the boardroom of that company’s chief competitor: it’s in the halls of democratically accountable governments:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

So how do we get there? Well, that’s another matter. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I lay out a detailed program, describing which policies will disenshittify the internet, and how to get those policies:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

Predictably, there are challenges getting this kind of book out into the world via our concentrated tech sector. Amazon refuses to carry the audio edition on its monopoly audiobook platform, Audible, unless it is locked to Amazon forever with mandatory DRM. That’s left me self-financing my own DRM-free audio edition, which is currently available for pre-order via this Kickstarter:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

[Image ID: An anatomical drawing of a flayed human head; it has been altered to give it a wide-stretched mouth revealing a gadget nestled in the back of the figure's throat, connected by a probe whose two coiled wires stretch to an old fashioned electronic box. The head's eyes have been replaced by the red, menacing eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Behind the head is a code waterfall effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis' 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[cyarsk5230]

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nbcnews

The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president has triggered a surge of social media posts and internet search interest in South Korea’s fringe feminist "4B" movement, which calls on women to refrain from dating, having sex with men, having kids and marrying men.

Over 200,000 people looked up the “4B movement” on Google on Wednesday, making it one of the top trending topics on the online search engine. Across TikTok, dozens of American women disappointed by election results have posted videos stating their intention to participate in their own version of the 4B trend.

The 4B movement, which began in South Korea 2018 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, has become a way for some women to protest misogyny, gender discrimination and violence against women, according to Meera Choi, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at Yale University.

Now, American women disillusioned with the government and Trump’s win say boycotting men and having children while their reproductive rights are dwindling could be one way to channel their anger and hopelessness.

Read more at the link in bio.

[mlleclaudine]

Au procès de Christophe Ruggia, Adèle Haenel veut « rendre justice à l’enfant que personne n’a protégée »

by Sophie Boutboul - Mediapart, December 10, 2024

On Monday, the first day of the director's trial for sexual assault of a minor against the actress, the latter explained that she was speaking «to shatter the isolation of children» who are victims of pedophiles.  [Ruggia] continued to deny the facts.

«Adèle, we believe you», «victims, we believe you», shouted the forty or so people on the steps of the Paris courthouse, present to support actress Adèle Haenel, who filed a complaint against director Christophe Ruggia five years ago, after testifying in Mediapart.

Contrast this with the silence of the courtroom, where for two days Christophe Ruggia has been on trial for sexual assaults on a minor, committed in Paris between September 1, 2001 and February 10, 2004, with the aggravating circumstance of having been a person in authority over the victim.  Adèle Haenel was between 12 and 14 years old at the time.  According to the examining magistrate, these assaults took place on a «weekly» basis.  Christophe Ruggia does not deny these meetings.  He denies what took place.

Many of the actress's friends and family came to support her, including director Céline Sciamma in the front row.  For over an hour, presiding judge Gilles Fonrouge summarized the main points of the investigation, while Adèle Haenel took notes, seated in the front row of the civil parties' bench, looking straight ahead and often in the direction of Christophe Ruggia, who was fully turned toward the judge, motionless.

At the end of the hourlong summary of the case, the judge, at the request of the civil parties, screened seven clips from the film Les Diables, in which Adèle Haenel as a child is seen undressed or naked most of the time, in moments of caressing and kissing between herself and the actor Vincent Rottiers, who play a supposedly abandoned brother and sister but in fact turn out to have no blood ties.

On the stand for over three hours, slightly stooped in his black jacket, Christophe Ruggia sometimes digressed, often answering by avoiding the point of the court's questions.  He continued to deny all [allegations of] sexual assault.  According to him, Adèle Haenel wanted to «launch #MeToo in France» and «it landed» on him.

The presiding judge attempted to understand the context.  He questioned [Ruggia] about the relationship between his characters played by Adèle Haenel and Vincent Rottiers, «a relationship that could be perceived as incestuous at the start, which he has very young children enacting».

«Overwhelmingly sensual»

The filmmaker conceded that it «doesn't seem impossible to him that Adèle Haenel might have imagined» that he was in love with her, given that he was «fascinated» by her and «loved the actress».  The judge asked: «When you write to her that your love is absolutely sincere, how is a very young woman to interpret that if it coincides with actual tactile physical closeness?»  Once again, the director's response was a little evasive, arguing that it was a matter of expressing his «love that was too much to bear», as he put it.  Despite his writings at the time, he insisted that he was never «in love» with the young actress.

Referring to Adèle Haenel's mother, who may have found the relationship between a 36-year-old man and a 12-year-old child «disturbing», the judge asked Ruggia if he had «considered the accuracy» of her attitude.  The director repeatedly replied in the negative.  The judge finally concluded: «We’re not going to make any progress on this issue.»  The same goes for the sexualization of Adèle Haenel, which he continued to deny, despite his words describing her as «overwhelmingly sensual» and his Google search for «Adèle Haenel hot» in 2011.

To explain why he denied the facts, he told the court that, in his opinion, the actress lied based on the version she gave to the police:

«Why is this young woman lying?» asked one of the assessors.

- Because between the time of the Mediapart article and the suit, she figured that she had to go further, she hadn't planned to go to court at first...

- Why would she want to hurt you so much? asked the assessor.

- I think she's been radicalized with #MeToo [...]  Look at her trajectory over the last five years, it started with me, then it was the César awards with Roman Polanski, then her support for Adama Traoré, then her involvement with Révolution Permanente, her attacks on cinema as a whole and on ministers...» he concluded.

Regarding the context of the revelations, the judge recalled that, according to Ruggia, there had been «no influence» in his relationship with Adèle Haenel, but that, according to him, «an influence would instead be exerted» by Céline Sciamma, the actress's former partner.  «However, said the judge, since the end of that relationship, they have remained close and good friends, whereas yours led to a brutal and definitive break-up.  Do you still maintain the notion of influence?»  Christophe Ruggia replied, «That's my interpretation, and I do indeed think she's still under Céline Sciamma's sway.»  Laughter erupted in the courtroom.  The judge called the spectators to order for the «dignity of the proceedings».

At times, Ruggia seemed to half-heartedly acknowledge certain things: «I wasn't aware at the time that she was traumatized by the film, I realized that the fact that we saw each other often was too much for her.»

Asked about the «boundaries» he didn't set, notably in a scene that only he remembers - he describes her «licking his ear» in front of her parents, and his blowing in her ear in response - he again avoided answering. «What should an adult's response be to a child licking your ear?» asked the assessor.  «It's something that couldn't happen these days», he replied. «Who set the boundaries at that moment?  Let's imagine this scene had existed, which everyone but you denies.  Who set the boundaries?» insisted the assessor, without getting a clear answer.

A rally in support of the actress

«We support her, we believe her, we see her.  It's important to show the justice system that we're united, given the tiny number of suits that aren’t dismissed», says Cami, 25, holding a small sign reading «Adèle, you are not alone».  She was one of around forty people who came to support Adèle Haenel on the courthouse steps on Monday, December 9.  The young woman mentions that she herself filed a suit for rape of a minor four years ago, and that she still hasn't heard anything.

Arnaud Gallais, co-founder of the Mouv'Enfants association and former member of la Commission indépendante sur l’inceste et les violences sexuelles faites aux enfants (Ciivise) [the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence against Children], points out: «When 97% of men assault 81% of young female victims, you can see that for the most part, it's men who rape children.  These are the statistics of impunity, for permission to rape and re-offend, so being here today is also political.»

Vanina, 54, who works in the film industry and wears a «Support Ciivise, I believe in you, I protect you» sticker on her coat, said it was «important for Adèle Haenel to know that we are grateful for her»: «I don't expect much from this trial, but there’s always hope.  As a child of incest myself, my suit was dismissed.»  Colombe, a visual artist, hopes that this trial will not be «another violation» for the actress.

Prosecutor Camille Poch referred again to the «semantic field of sex» that he uses when talking about Adèle Haenel or in his Google searches.  In this context, he noted: «When [Bertrand] Bonello's film was released, if you searched it in Google, it would bring up “Adèle Haenel hot”, so I clicked on it [...]  Yes, she's sensual, that's the heart of the film, she's going to show her body.  Yes, Adèle Haenel had an overwhelming sensuality, which she still has today», he even dared to say.

«He destroyed everything»

Around 7pm, Adèle Haenel was called to the stand.  She approached with a firm, determined step, and delivered testimony that alternated between emotion and anger, pleading for the protection of the child she used to be, and for all child victims of pedophiles.

She would be questioned for a long time about her choice to speak in a press article and not to take her case to court first.  «At the time I spoke in 2019, there were so many dismissals, I'm not telling you anything you don’t already know, I didn't want to add violence to violence.»

Speaking about the film Les Diables, she recounted the «confusion Christophe Ruggia fostered between the love of acting and the love for himself, a shifting of reality»: «There was no longer any demarcation for intimacy, for sexuality, and I found myself being directed to touch myself like in the film [...]  Mr. Ruggia became the main adult in my life, I had a normal life, friends, a brother, and he destroyed everything.»

Asked by the judge about the impact these assaults have had on her, she described how «devastating» it has been, particularly with respect to «disparagement and self-hatred».  She talks about her «depression», the work she has done on herself since 2016.  «These days, things are getting better.»

The judge then asked her again about not referring her case to court. The actress replied simply: «The truth is, I didn't even think about it, I thought the courts would never be interested in my story, what I’d been through in those years, nobody cared about what happened to me.» 

The assessor then asked her about the Saturdays during which she described the assaults, Saturdays on which he bought her snacks: Cadbury Finger blanc cookies and Orangina, her «favorite».

«Can you explain why a 12-year-old child would keep going back?» the judge asked the actress.

- It's horrible, I thought I owed it to him, that it was my fault.  When he drove me home, he told me that the others wouldn't understand, he made the situation seem normal, and I felt obliged to go [...]  I felt indebted to him.»

Adèle Haenel then talked about her response to the assaults that she is denouncing.  She described in detail, speaking more and more rapidly, about what she remembers: «In his living room, it's a half-normalized conversation, thanks to a joke or a laugh, for example, he would come and sit down right next to me, and “you’re too funny my little whale, my baby girl”, I tighen up, I'm on the sofa, I get tense, my body tenses up, he goes on, interjecting a few words as if it were normal, his hand partly on my thigh, “ah là là your top is really cute”, sliding his hand part of the way under my collar, I'm so tense, I curl up as much as possible in the corner of the sofa...  If he thinks I'm resisting too much, he'll stop for a moment, look at me like, “what the hell?” and starts again.»

Adèle Haenel responded to his saying that none of these things ever happened: «He’s a big liar, you’re a big liar, Mr. Ruggia», she said, turning to him.

The actress also told the court about the moment when she said to stop.  «I got up from the sofa, went over to the window and said “this has gone too far, this has to stop”, he was still next to the imprint of my body on the sofa, I said it again, then he brought me back, [...] he was trying to use his film [a project in progress - ed. note] as a reason to keep me because he said I couldn't do that to him.»

Asked by one of her lawyers, M Michelin, about the preparation of the film and the sex scenes in particular, Adèle Haenel explained: «That child should have been protected, it was possible to do so.  I don't think I said much, no one tried very hard to break the silence.»

As her testimony went on, her words became louder, more raw: «Today, I'm an adult, but back then, I was a child.  He says: “You're the one who jumped on my lap, you're the one who touched yourself.”  But who was the adult?  Who was supposed to set boundaries?  I felt disgusting and it was never his fault, all these nasty people around me and he's the nice guy who gave me Cadbury Finger blanc cookies!  I'm sorry I'm getting upset, we're talking about at least a hundred Saturdays... »

As Adèle Haenel spoke, she went back over the details of the assaults and apologized to the court at times: «I'm so sorry, it's stressful to talk about this, he says my statements have changed but no, I’ve always tried to tell it as best I could with the words I had, the shame I had.»

At one point, she returned to one of the court's first questions, namely whether she had thought about the consequences for Christophe Ruggia when she spoke out in Mediapart.  «All I did was protect him when I was a kid, I didn't even think that I had the right to defend myself, that it wasn't okay to be touched like that [...]  There was a total inversion of the meaning of things.  This guy, he pretends there was an equality with a 12- and 13-year-old child, he’s never stopped sexualizing me, saying “she jumped on me, she looked at me with pornographic eyes”, is that even real?  It disgusts me, I'm sorry to get upset but frankly...»

In response to Ruggia's defense that she wants revenge, Adèle Haenel stated: «I'm not driven by revenge, I want justice for this child whom no one protected, who got through it all on her own.»

Her lawyer Yann Le Bras referred to the «rather unusual judicial treatment» his client received, for example a twelve-hour police hearing. «Totally unusual» said the actress, who continued: «I spoke out thinking of the children, thinking about all those who are told “don’t destroy the family” [...]  I spoke out hoping to ease a little of the isolation of all these children, because I've lived this isolation, and I know how it made me want to die.  It's the most important thing I've done in my life, trying to shatter the isolation of children in my situation.»

Adèle Haenel talked about her «shame» and the fact that at first she found it hard to put into words what had happened to her.  To Véronique Ruggia, Christophe Ruggia's sister, who will be heard on Tuesday December 10, she explained that she spoke «half-heartedly»: «I always used the term “second base” with her, I was in a very raw emotional state, so I scratched my head until it bled, and I've never stopped since.  I've always tried to take care of the people I talk to...»

At the end of her testimony, Adèle Haenel explained that when she received the order to refer her case to the correctional court - a document written by the examining magistrate to support her decision to go to trial - she felt very emotional: «Seeing it in black and white, the “consistency” of my words, the “massive psychological repercussions”, wow, it had an effect on me, this recognition, so much isolation around it, I'm proud to have managed to hold it together throughout this process and life that have been so painful.»

[Please don’t repost this anywhere, in part or in whole.  Feel free to reblog, or at least cite your source and provide a link back here.  Asking permission would be nice in an ideal world, but I’m a realist – I know far too well how easy it is to appropriate stuff on Tumblr.  I would be the first to admit that my translations are not perfect – there are some words and phrases that simply do not drop neatly into an equivalent in English, and I constantly fix typos and make changes or corrections in older posts – but they do take a lot of work and time.  Thanks for understanding. - C.]

h/t to @thexfridax for the article! Thank you, Ros!

[turquoisedata]

There's a new episode of Tortoise describing Scarlett Pavlovich's lawsuit against NG.

You can listen at their website for free (and just for the record, all their episodes have always been freely available on their website and Spotify and I believe apple podcasts, despite the constant early reports that their podcast and therefore the allegations were paywalled).

It's good to hear Scarlett and Caroline talk. As the victims who were reliant on him for housing they have always felt particularly vulnerable.

Interesting to hear Rachel Johnson do another episode though given that Jon Ronson published an interview with her on Substack on 31 January in which she said:

It looks like he’s been canceled, and how do I not feel kind of responsible for that? I've got to say, I’m uncomfortable with #metooing people. Is that all right to say? I don't believe in cancel culture. We all do bad stuff and we all do good stuff and he's done good stuff and he's done bad stuff and he is now regarded as an evil monster. I think the women who accuse him would say he hurt them, but that’s a female-male dynamic that unfortunately happens to be incredibly common.

Ok Rachel.

31 Jan: i feel responsible for him being cancelled 😭

18 Feb: anyway let me tell you all about the lawsuit Scarlett is bringing against him!! 🙃

Also: given the way Edendale Strategies are attempting to drown out the allegations online, I find it EXTREMELY interesting that Jon Ronson is the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed which, as described by Wikipedia:

".... includes a long section about how people can "hide" their negative Google Search results via legal and creative IT mechanics."

I first heard of this tactic years ago in an episode of Reply All (on apple podcasts) in which the hosts interviewed Jon Ronson and the woman he engineered SEO for.

Anyone else feel like the juxtaposition is interesting? Just me???

(link to reply all edited because Spotify are twats)

[thelittlevoiceinthebackofmyhead]

Let's start with a bang: Neil Gaiman.

We all know what happened. In case you don't, just know that he's been accused by about 5 women (that I know of) of abuse in various different degrees.

Just so you know I don't think he's totally innocent... BUT there are a few things that just don't make sense and my head is driving me nuts. Probably I've read too many detective novels and my brain tries to solve things as if it is some kind of a game.

If you can handle some level-headed cold-facts-kinda-conversation (with all the needed trigger warnings that this case requires) you may proceed to read. If not, well... keep on scrolling, why bother?

To be fair the only testimony that tickles my brain the wrong way is Scarlett's. It both fits and doesn't fit his (alleged) MO. And I would like to tell you why without any of you thinking that I'm trying to discredit her testimony because "you support a rapist bla, bla, bla"

The first thing that got me in the Vulture article, if I'm not wrong... I have read too much about this... is that one of the other women said that Gaiman doesn't use lube. Either because he doesn't like it, he likes to feel the pain of his partner, he's allergic... whatever... she made it clear that he doesn't use it, and this was the one that "dated him" so there was a level of comfort between them (AKA it was an established and repeated pattern during their time together).

And then comes Scarlett and talks about the kitchen episode where (allegedly) Gaiman used a stick of butter as lube when she said that she wouldn't do it "like that" (sans lube). Why would he be accomodating to her? What does he care? According to Scarlett's own testimony, Gaiman saw her as a slave and used and abused her whenever and however he wanted. She has the strongest and crudest testimony yet... and this detail just doesn't fit. If he had (has?) such desdain for her... he would've just done it without butter anyway.

Another thing related to this that just jumped into my brain one day because that's they way it works is that during the aftermath of the MeToo movement the story of how during the filming of The Last Tango in Paris the actress Maria Schneider wasn't properly told about a rape scene involving butter broke out and was all over the media.

With this in the back of my head... there is a possibility, even if it is a slim one... that said episode with Gaiman either didn't happened like that or didn't happened at all.

If I had to play Devil's advocate: we all know that she had some level of mental issues, reason why Palmer "took her in" offering her friendship and unpaid work. After whatever happened with Gaiman, she said that she googled "Neil Gaiman MeToo" so the possibility of her stumbling with this news at some point, reading it and somehow including it in her testimony is quite high. If it was intentional or not is not my call to decide. But it is possible.

Another thing that got my attention was that both Scarlett and Caroline brought up Gaiman's son. Caroline says that he wanted her to give him a handjob while the kid was sleeping. Plausible, many men are gross like that.

Scarlett also brings up Gaiman's son and makes him witness of 2 obscene scenes. Most likely she told Palmer about it... so why wasn't it brought up on the divorce?

It is also said on Vulture that Gaiman "bleed her (Palmer) dry" on the trial for their divorce. We know that Scarlett told probably everything to Palmer... why hasn't she used that ammo to win their child's custody and divorce? No judge on this planet would leave a child live with someone like that. It is the kind of golden piece of info that any lawyer prays for specially in a case like this.

And yes you can say "hey, it's absolutely terrible to weaponize something like that" and yes, it is... but lawyers aren't nice people*, especially if they try to win. They will use something like that to drag him to the floor. (*it is a general rule, don't take it personal. Some lawyers are honest but it is a reality that one has to be very willing to cut some throats -not literally, I hope- and stab some backs to become a "sucessful lawyer")

One could argue that given that Palmer didn't backed up Scarlett's testimony, that could be the reason why she chose not to use such a vital piece of information on her own gain. And this raises the question of what kind of mother preffers her child to live with an alleged sex-offender than with her? Even if Palmer is a disaster, my guess is that she cares for her kid on her own way... the custody battle is happening. Even if Gaiman found a way to buy the judge or something, had she made this information public would've been enough to secure the custody (and if you allow me to be cynic: to secure Child Support as well).

I do know that those on toxic and abusive relationships do bow down their heads and let the abuser run scots free... but more often than not, the break happens when children are on the line. Gaiman could have all the power and might in the marriage but a propper momma-bear would burn the world down to the ground to get their children back.

I don't want to flat out say that she's a bad mother but it is rather curious that she chose to protect Gaiman instead of her child considering that, at this point if we believe Vulture, he ruined her life. If there was any kind of deal like "keep quiet and I'll give you X" she wouldn't admit that she's broke because of the divorce and living back with her parents (even if it wasn't her who said it to the press but someone who knows her). She's getting nothing out of her "loyalty" to him, not even the divorce (by the way why is it taking so long? isn't it of common agreement?). There is something fishy in there and most likely both have a lot to lose... but... once again... Gaiman already lost his reputation, his support system, his career and power (as limited as it is in the real world) he doesn't have anything else to lose... why isn't he coming foward if there's anything shady on that divorce? Why aren't they using this scandal as the perfect excuse to finish the marriage at once? Even as a PR stunt or something. It is... interesting.

As I said, I don't believe that he is completely innocent. He is, after all, a successful and powerful (in some circles, not as many as the fandom believes) man, of course he'll reap the fruits of it. In which world do you live to think otherwise? HOWEVER those women that spoke about it had some sort of relationship with him first either as fans or fan-adjacent, student, friends (?) that lived on the same state and it is clear that between their first encounter and the first move there was something (a talk, a friendship, companionship). But Scarlett is like "I went to the house, the kid wasn't there and he offered me to take a bath and then he joined me"... just like that? Just out of the blue he was like "hey, go take a bath in my back yard".

Considering that in the other cases he at the very least had a long talk before kissing a girl... Scarlett's scenario feels like a perv on a coat flashing girls on the park. It is very odd and really stupid (if real) on his part. He knows and was able to cover his tracks before... why changing methods now? Why with a stranger that just stepped foot on his house?

I find it hard to believe that the main reason he went to conventions or was in touch with his fans was to prey on young women as some sort of thirsty vampire. That... benefit... was a by-product of his work. He did liked to be worshipped, that's for certain. If that is what you want to believe, go ahead... the result is the same, all of those women had to trust him first because otherwise the "Neil is a creep. He came onto me like a hawk" was going to be all over the Internet and he didn't wanted that. So why would he be so crude all the sudden? It doesn't make sense.

If he is a voracious predator... that behaviour would've been present from the get-go and everything seems to point out the opposite: he would "choose" a girl and eventually get her close enough to try something (you could call it "grooming" but I don't think its quite there yet, but whatever). He got rejected a few times and called the day, as said by two of the women that came foward. That aspect that was present in the last, I don't know, 20-40 years wouldn't just disappear overnight. Is both his way of doing things and self-preservation instinct. Why throwing it all away? Was Palmer's alleged prohibition to touch her so provocative? Was Scarlett so irresistable? What the hell happened?

The sudden spike in violence and humilliation is also kinda weird. Granted, maybe there are other women under NDAs that could confirm his practices and how he moved from "basic" BDSM to something heavier but unless they feel like talking, we will never know.

The other women do bring up the Master-Servant kink, maybe some force display... but never to that level (the urine and fecal matter hasn't been brought up by anyone else, as far as I know). And... just look at the guy... does he look like he'd be strong enough or have enough stamina to make a woman pass out? I mean... if drugs were involved I could believe it but if there were drugs involved someone would've said it already (and it also would've helped Palmer's divorce). He's in his 60s! Fair enough that being 60 now is not the same that being 60 in the 1800s, but is being 60 doesn't equate being in your peak performance either. I don't know how many young men can make a woman faint during a brutal sex encounter but my guess is that not that many either (again, unless drugs are involved one way or another). Maybe Scarlett is just too frail? That's a possibility... the only one that could explain all this.

To close my doubts on Scarlett's testimony... the trial for 7 million doesn't make sense either. I could understand if that is the owed amount for all of her work + some compensation for the years that passed but I don't think that any kind of money can "repair" what was done to her.

I know, it is a personal opinion... the same one I had when I was little and all the Michael Jackson trials started to take shape. If I or my family were ever put in that place... we would be after blood and no amount of money would shut us up.

Granted, situations are different, needs are different too... but whenever any kind of sex allegation could be solved through money instead of jail time... alarms go off in my brain.

It could be that is the only way to "punish him" due to his status (I hardly think so, given that many celebrities got jail time even if it was for a brief period of time -compared with any of us mortals-), maybe is the only way she has to bring spotlight into this... we don't really know the mechanics at play here.

The trial (if there is any) could be dismissed due to the location. I read the motion presented by Gaiman's lawyers and I can't believe that Scarlett's lawyers said that USA was better than New Zeland because Scarlett is in Scotland now and flying back to NZ was about $200 more expensive than flying to USA. Gaiman's lawyers do have a point there, she could've done everything in England or even Scotland if she didn't trusted NZ's law system. The facts didn't happen in USA, it would take a lot of organization to summon the witnesses and prepare Zoom calls or receive videos with testimonies, not even the police department from USA has anything to do with it. Most likely USA will refuse to host it. Had it been the fan-turned-into-lover who did travelled with him around USA -I think- and has the whole UTI episode, the one that started the trial... USA would've stepped up. Alas, it wasn't her.

The NDA thing: I know that going after Caroline for breaking the NDA is, for a lot of you, an admission of guilt or an attempt to shut her up and yes, after all he did greenlit it to his lawyers (unless there's some kind of Representation through a Power of Attorney thing going on)... but again, it sounds A LOT to a lawyer's strategy "we'll go after her because she violated the small print we've put there definetly not on purpose in case this ever happened".

I say... we don't really know what does the NDA says in its totallity (I guess it is not just a single sheet of paper with "I promise not to speak about our sex life ever"). It is most likely about 15 or 20 pages with different things that can't be disclosed at all... and maybe the part she broke is for talking about his daily routine, the disposition of the house or even mentioning his son. We really don't know.

Now the reason why they are going after her could be revenge, could be to shut her up, could be kind of a reminder that she accepted it got the money and ignored it later (basically broke a contract). It'll be interesting to see if they (Gaiman and lawyers) are willing to disclose the NDA in order to prove how she broke it... and why aren't they going after Scarlett as well? She also mentioned signing an NDA and she made it clear that she got the money before signing it (unlike Caroline who got the money afterwards, and after a negotiation). That's curious as well... because they could go after both... why just Caroline? She's not the first one to come foward and definetly not the one starting the trial. Maybe because Scarlett has too much focus on her and it will feel like retaliation? Was this Gaiman's idea or his lawyers?

If you are still here, not fuming or asking for my head on a platter...

On and all... I know that this shocked many of you. I usually expect that people I like to have at least one fatal flaw. It's easier seeing it like that... everybody has a shitty side because we are all humans and by definition, we are not perfect.

I do believe that Gaiman took advantage of a lot of girls and women throughout his career. Has all of it been build under dubious consent? It depends on each one, if any of them ever felt "I can't tell him 'No' because he's my hero" then yes... if they willingly participated on it because it was him of all men and that made them feel special, then no.

He's probably very selfish when in a relationship and this can also depend on each partner and even the situation they were in at the time. People's feelings and perceptions change as years go by and there's nothing we can do about it.

Maybe he is a good-enough manipulator (no, I'm not looking at all fan interactions as him trying to sleep with anyone) that can convince women to do things they're not entirely OK with and this allowed him to keep on doing it for decades and that makes it all more difficult because... then everybody will blame both parties: on him for being like that, on them for trusting him.

I still struggle to call him "rapist" because the episodes told us just what happened not all the context needed to fully picture the situation (and as I said even if he manipulated those women into allowing him to do as he wanted, the dubious consent is a bitch that clouds everything because "she did say yes and that's what matters to the law") so it all boils down to he said/she said that will never get resolved unless one of the parties had recorded the encounter.

What about Scarlett? Well, as I said she is the odd one out and that makes me suspicious... had all of them described the same treatment from A to Z it would've been easier for me to believe it 100%. I do believe that something happened... but there is a chance that her story is 50-50 either because her memories are a little off or because she needed the story to blow up and there was only one way to do it.

There is no way we will ever get the full truth, only they know it.

There is no irrefutable proof on one side or the other to prove anyone's guilt or innocence (at least of what we know so far, is not like either will disclose it to the Media first instead of the Court, that'd be really stupid).

A part of the truth will come to the light eventually. It could take a few years or even his death for someone to give a full statement about anything. It always happens like that.

I'll keep on reading and seeing how everything moves foward with an open mind.

And just in case it needs to be said...

TERFS AREN'T FUCKING ALLOWED.

[akkpipitphattana]

That post you made about hoping there was an intimacy coordinator on the THK set actually made me wonder if those are even a thing in Thailand (simply because I don't recall intimacy coordinators ever being mentioned in any bts content for the shows I've watched). I also say that because idk how long they've been common in the west either. In fact, the first time I ever learned of their existence was a few years ago when I watched bts videos for a western show I was into. Before that I just assumed the actors either followed the script (as in, the intimate scenes were already written in great detail in the script, enough so for the actors to go off of that) or just went with the flow/improved (in cases where the writers/director trusted them to understand the characters enough to do a great job with it). 💀 But I definitely agree with you that there should be an intimacy coordinator on THK at least for the kinky scenes because that's a lot to be asking of your actors to do on their own, even if the script is detailed. 🙃 However, as I said, I wonder if they even utilise intimacy coordinators in Thailand, as I feel they're more a (recent-ish) western thing.

okay, i actually didn't have an exact answer for when intimacy coordination became more of a thing in the west, either, cause i actually only became more aware of it a couple years ago when they were using one at my college for spring awakening (if you know ANYTHING about that musical, you know it needs a fucking intimacy coordinator), but! according to my googling, intimacy coordination actually became more of a thing after the #metoo movement back in 2017, so it's actually only really been a thing in the west for less than 10 years, and even then it's not an industry standard unfortunately.

that being said, i figure it's not as much of a thing in thailand from what i have seen because in addition to just now doing a little googling and seeing a thai director very recently mentioning he thinks he's one of the first to use one in thailand, i've heard a concerning amount of actors talk about how they've improvised intimate scenes (fk and freenbecky in their respective first time couch scenes in only friends and gap come to mind). and sure, it could be like a fanservice thing, but also given how common it actually is for directors to tell actors to just wing it when it comes to intimate scenes, i wouldn't be shocked if they really are just telling these actors to go for it. which is personally very conflicting to me because i've been educated on intimacy coordination and even worked with an intimacy coordinator myself for a show i was in, so i know how important that is to do for your actors first hand... but at the same time man do i love that sandray couch scene! though, arguably, it could have been even better if they had had an intimacy coordinator, cause it's not like actors aren't allowed to give suggestions in those incidents, so fk could have still had some involvement in how the scene went, y'know?

that being said, though, i did speculate back when our skyy 2 was airing that they used an intimacy coordinator for the eclipse episodes because in the kiss at the beginning of ep2, you can see khaotung tapping against first's neck, which i interpreted as him tapping out the beats, and you can find that post here. also, i don't remember what show it was from (bed friend maybe?) because i didn't watch it myself, but i had a friend point out that the intimate scenes looked almost choreographed - which is a good indicator that they were likely using an intimacy coordinator, since intimacy coordination at its core its very much choreography, a lot of the time it's broken down into beats in order to time things out and make the actors more comfortable. that's all speculation, though, cause i don't know for sure whether an intimacy coordinator was used for either of those

however, like you said, with scenes like the ones we're gonna see in the heart killers there absolutely needs to be an intimacy coordinator for stuff like that. honestly, i'd argue that there should be regardless of what kind of sex is happening on screen - if your characters are having sex, there should be an intimacy coordinator - but i understand that it's not an industry standard even in the west where it's more common and a lot of directors don't recognize how important it is. and for certain things, i recognize a director is likely to give more detailed instructions to help the actors feel more comfortable, but it's always just better to have someone that does that sort of thing professionally to step in and help - especially because again, the actors and the director are allowed to communicate their ideas for how they want the scene to play out. the intimacy coordinator is there to ensure everyone is comfortable and basically that no one gets traumatized. and i will preface this with the fact that i love jojo, i do, however the fact that he let fk just improvise the couch scene does not give me high hopes for the way the bdsm scenes were handled on set. and i mean, obviously we know that fk are close and have a lot of love and trust for one another, they have a history of these kinds of scenes already, and likely does help when it comes to their comfortability and whatnot. however, it's still like. a whole other thing to be putting nipple clamps on your best friend and tying him down for a camera, yknow?

regardless, i am excited for those scenes, i just do hope we get some bts stuff that confirms they did use an intimacy coordinator yknow sjdkfsd

[loving-elvis]

Okay...I saw this comment on a YT video and just had to share this with you.

"When I was in college in Waco, Texas circa 2006/2007, I saw a documentary on the local access channel about this very subject, but it also interviewed some of the other women who had sex with Elvis when they were adolescents. This was while he was stationed in Ft. Hood which was less than an hour's drive from Waco. In that documentary, it's reported that Elvis rejected a then 18 year old Natalie Wood because, in his words, she was "too old for him." He was 21 then. The house in Waco he used for these nefarious deeds now operates as a bed and breakfast that markets itself as an "Elvis slept here" type of tourist attraction where they obviously gloss over this for obvious reasons. I have scoured the internet and YT trying to find this documentary, but I think Elvis' estate probably bought up the doc and buried it because it detailed things like how Elvis preferred 14 year old girls and they were instructed by his Memphis Mafia before meeting Elvis to make sure they wore white cotton panties. I STG I'm not making this up. I saw this with my own two eyes and my jaw dropped."

Just...what? I've never even heard of this. And if this "documentary" existed, why didn't it start popping up when the MeToo movement rose to prominence? Surely if this happened, the girls would have no reason not to speak up. I tried Googling, but of course I found absolutely nothing.

What do you make of this?

Well, first of all, the house where he stayed while stationed in Waco is still there. It's currently a bed and breakfast that you can rent, which is very cool and I hope to be able to stay there one day. There's footage of him and Anita there, actually, which is pretty neat. Just Google the Elvis House and you'll find it 🙂

As for the rest of your comment, Elvis and Natalie Wood met back in 1956. It's well documented.

However, the reasoning for their breakup is often attributed to Gladys, who didn't approve of Natalie, and Natalie herself was more than aware of that fact.

The rest of it is nothing more than hearsay and rumor, like a lot of things that seem to surround Elvis lately, unfortunately. I don't look too deeply in such things, and I never recommend any fan, new or old, to do so either.

[thetaoofzoe]

Okay...I saw this comment on a YT video about Elvis and just had to share this with you because it stunned me.

"When I was in college in Waco, Texas circa 2006/2007, I saw a documentary on the local access channel about this very subject, but it also interviewed some of the other women who had sex with Elvis when they were adolescents. This was while he was stationed in Ft. Hood which was less than an hour's drive from Waco. In that documentary, it's reported that Elvis rejected a then 18 year old Natalie Wood because, in his words, she was "too old for him." He was 21 then. The house in Waco he used for these nefarious deeds now operates as a bed and breakfast that markets itself as an "Elvis slept here" type of tourist attraction where they obviously gloss over this for obvious reasons. I have scoured the internet and YT trying to find this documentary, but I think Elvis' estate probably bought up the doc and buried it because it detailed things like how Elvis preferred 14 year old girls and they were instructed by his Memphis Mafia before meeting Elvis to make sure they wore white cotton panties. I STG I'm not making this up. I saw this with my own two eyes and my jaw dropped."

Just...what? I've never even heard of this. I know the Natalie Wood thing is absolutely false too. And if this "documentary" existed, why didn't it start popping up when the MeToo movement rose to prominence? Surely if this happened, the girls would have no reason not to speak up. I tried Googling to find this "documentary", but of course I found absolutely nothing.

What do you make of this? I'm just baffled by it.

I saw this exact question on reddit this morning. Was that you who posted it? Honestly, take everything you see, read, hear about Elvis with a huge grain of salt and do your research. Can you find the same story being told by more than one person? Is their account about the event the same, but with that person's own perspective? Then you're most likely treading on something that could be true. To an extent. People can and do say anything about him because he can't defend himself or explain his point of view.

[pumpumdemsugah]

Isn't Moira Donegan the woman that made the insane metoo Google doc of creepy men that anyone could add to, which ended up genuinely destroying the career and lives of several men who were added to it despite it becoming clear that they'd been maliciously targeted? Not surprised that she'd be blind to reasons why young men might be drawn to masculinist figures. The article she commented on was actually very good!

Idk who you're referring to. It's probably something I reblogged and I didn't take in the name. I'm really bad with names but I'll take your word for it

[pebblysand]

Why was Ginny raped. It ruined it for me

I try and ignore it and actually kept on reading.

I like their family life looking forward to the next chapter.

you said you would hopefully be updating by the first weekend of June

you know what anon? this is gonna fall on you and i'm sorry. i suppose you caught me on a bad day.

but let me say this: i've fucking had it with DMs like these. the "why was ginny raped. it ruined it for me" kind.

it's been Three Years. Three Fucking Years. this plotline is announced, trigger-warned and flagged everywhere. in the tags. in the general A/N. in the A/N of that chapter in particular.

that is notwithstanding the dozens of tumblr posts i've written about this, which are mostly all linked in my pinned post. notwithstanding, either, my continued presence over multiple discords where i regularly answer questions about this. that is also notwithstanding that five minutes of googling will pull up a gazillion of reddit posts, going on and on about how "awful" and/or difficult a read this fic is, or how bad and Not Canon it is, or how unfortunate the plotline is, or whatever else someone in the hinny fandom has decided i've done wrong. at this point, i do not Fucking Understand how i'm still getting these anons. how did you not know this was what you were getting into? does the writer of Manacled still get these??

for the love of god, there's a million sweet, domestic!fluff hinny fics out there. there's also a million angsty-but-not-too-much or angsty-but-as-a-romantic-trope hinny fics out there. Go 👏🏼 Read 👏🏼 Something 👏🏼 Else! 👏🏼 this isn't the happy-ever-after domestic life vibe you want! i've never sold it as such! Leave Me Alone!!!! 🤣😅

also, babes, you're not even going to like next chapter. because as also previously announced, next chapter deals with the #MeToo movement, where obviously ginny's experiences will be discussed, and where once again, i will inevitably be getting these people in my DMs. like: why was ginny raped? because rape is a weapon of war. because violence against women is a weapon of war. because this fic has chosen to depict that.

i got so many DMs and anons like these in the early days of castles that it almost convinced me the fic was so hard to read, it was absolutely unbearable, and thus unreadable. i understand that this type of story is uncommon in the hinny sphere, and i understand the idea that ginny might have been assaulted is shocking and surprising to a lot of people, but i also think we need to all take a deep breath and recognise that castles is By Far not the most shocking or surprising thing to have ever hit the internet. it's a good story. it's a reasonable story. it's a story written with empathy and care, and respect for this journey.

yet, there was a period of time where these messages got so bad i wouldn't even dare mention it by name on discord or anywhere outside of my tumblr because i was so afraid of the very thought of it would trigger people. all that talk made me feel like a bloody criminal for ever daring to write this, daring to think this was even a possibility. but you know what, actually? these things happen in Every 👏🏼 Fucking 👏🏼 Armed 👏🏼 Conflict! the fact that ginny got assaulted is, actually, statistically, not that surprising. and maybe, if we talked more about it, and read more about it, it fucking wouldn't be as common. if we didn't put our heads in the sand because it's not fun entertainment to think about.

and, to be clear: i'm not forcing anyone to read castles. if the contents are triggering for you (or if you simply don't like stories that deal with SA, or if you simply don't like my writing, or Literally Any Other Reason), then by all means, don't read it! but don't come and tell me the SA plot "ruined" it for you when you've been forewarned all other that this was what the fic was about and there's millions of other fics for you to read out there. angst has a right to exist in the hinny fandom. controversial discussions of war have a right to exist in the hinny fandom. you don't have to like them, you don't have to read them, but don't blame people for writing them.

and this anon angers me even more cause you rage-baited me into responding right away even though i have dozens of super kind and nice DMs and anons pending, which i've put on pause these past few weeks to focus on writing. you're wasting everyone's time here. and, also, don't come and tell me "english is not my first language", it's not my first language either, and yet i'd never have sent this anon to anyone, even in my wildest dreams.

as for the update, i'm late, i know. i'm working on it.

love,

p

[moonlightpur]

So I found this article the other day about the documentary that was made about Till's allegations and here's certain things I would like to comment based on this (I translated it through Google Translate):

The fact that Till's lawyers tried to prevent one of the statements from coming out in the documentary isn't a good sign for me personally,it seems for me that they're trying to silence whatever negative statements come out against Till (but again,are we surprised tho?)

The fact that one of Till's lawyers basically denies all of the allegations,yet he says if he wasn't representing Till,he would be morally criticising the recruitment system,which is such a weird thing to say,but I kinda get this point,since he was hired by Till and his job is to basically defend him.

There was a statement by a public prosecutor in Berlin (Sebastian Büchner) that declared in the documentary: "There are high hurdles regarding the burden of proof when it comes to sex crimes. Due to the media focus on the case, the hurdles became even higher." What I basically take by this is that the case continues to be very complicated. And he also adds to his statement by saying something I completely share: "Just because it is not relevant under criminal law does not mean that it is not morally-ethically or socially relevant." In other words,the way I interpret this,is that,Till perhaps has gotten away with it this time,but that doesn't mean he is innocent!

There's also a statement by a lawyer named Simone Kämpfer, former state prosecutor and now lawyer for clients in #MeToo cases,and she states that many people think when a case is closed,it's equal to a person being innocent (which is not true),and that the distinguishing between criminal acts and morally/ethically problematic things is very difficult.

Cynthia (the women who brings out her experience with Till,and whose statement was trying to be stopped by Till's lawyers) claims that the recruitment system is much more complex,and that she believes Lindemann is not innocent at all.

And to end this,Anna Yakina (who has been related to Till's team in the past) states that Till's recruitment system is pretty much a cult.

If you wanna read Cynthia's statement,go click on the link I provided since I'm not really including it here. I feel like Rammstein is in tremendous trouble if all of this is proven right,cause,after all,for a lot of people,Till represents Rammstein (sadly).

[unmatto]

ci sono dei modi di dire entrati nella terminologia comune del linguaggio giornalistico che mi creano un profondo senso di fastidio. il primo che mi viene in mente è l’uso di 007 per indicare i servizi segreti. mi è bastato fare una veloce ricerca su google per trovare un esempio imbarazzante risalente a sole 18 ore fa. cito testualmente il titolo del Fatto Quotidiano: “lo scandalo MeToo travolge anche la Cia: 007 condannati per violenze sulle colleghe”. a parte il fatto che CIA è un acronimo e andrebbe scritto con le lettere maiuscole, 007 è un personaggio di fantasia, il doppio zero è un codice che indica la sua licenza di uccidere. vorrei inventare degli esempi ma la mia mente non è così creativa (“gli indiana jones ritrovano un reperto che si credeva perduto”?). la lista dei termini che mi infastidiscono potrebbe essere infinita. capisco che alcune siano terminologie entrate ormai nell’uso comune, però la loro esistenza nel mondo del giornalismo è soltanto colpa di un ricerca maldestra di trovare un linguaggio veloce che sia diretto per i lettori, che sono per lo più svogliati. se sia nato prima l’uno o l’altro non ci è dato saperlo. comunque, sono due gli ultimi esempi che mi hanno spinto alla bestemmia in questi giorni. il primo è “bomba d’acqua”, traduzione pure sbagliata del termine inglese cloudburst. trovo la parola italiana nubifragio molto più bella di bomba d’acqua, sinceramente. il secondo non è un termine usato spesso come 007 o bomba d’acqua ma si collega alla svogliatezza di un certo giornalismo italiano, quel giornalismo che utilizza un concetto noto nella cultura popolare anziché ideare un titolo che sia sì comunicativo ma di buon senso. stamattina repubblica scrive: “premio nobel. il dilemma: superstar o “famolo strano”.” tutto ciò mi snerva in modo esagerato, lo ammetto.

[whitehotharlots]

Free Kareem

Kareem Hunt was probably the shittiest MeToo incident of the sports world. It happened over 4 years ago, which is an eternity by the standards of the today’s discourse, so let me recap what happened:

In February of 2018, two of Hunt’s friends went to a club while he stayed behind with his girlfriend in their hotel suite. The friends returned around 3 AM, and they had two very drunk and underage girls with them. Hunt did the correct thing: he told the girls to leave and had them escorted out of his suite.

The girls refused to leave. They stood outside Hunt’s suite for a half hour, screaming, failing, and pounding on the door. We know for certain this happened, because it was all captured on a security camera (full footage of this does exist, I’ve seen it, but Google has a way of burying primary evidence that contradicts popular narratives).

After approximately 20 minutes of screaming, Hunt’s girlfriend comes out of the suite to tell the girls to leave. This only intensifies the screaming and flailing. After a minute or so, one of the girls can be seen shoving Hunt’s girlfriend, who maintains her composure and goes back into the suite.

A few more minutes pass. The girls continue to pound and scream. Hunt himself comes out of the suite. He gestures toward the exit. The girls keep screaming. The same one who shoved his girlfriend now shoves Hunt. Again, he points toward the exit. The girl shoves him again, and he shoves her back, knocking her to the ground.

At this point, all but the most brain-damaged of feminists would agree that Hunt has done nothing wrong. But then he crosses a line: he raises his leg, hesitates, and gives the girl a kick, as if to accentuate that she needed to get her ass up and out of his hallway.

Now, yes, he should not have done the kick. Fine. But if you watch full video, it’s clear that he did not kick with anywhere near full force. It was more of a gesture than anything else. And, well, if an NFL running back were to kick a small woman with anything close full strength, that woman would not be able to get up and walk away.

I hold the retrograde opinions that men should be afforded some degree of dignity, and that random white women are not legally or morally entitled to enter the dwellings of black celebrities without permission. If I were the one to adjudicate this incident, I would have told the girl to go fuck herself. There’s really nothing Hunt could have done in this situation that would have escaped scrutiny. It was clear that the girl was unhinged and fully aware that she could manipulate MeToo discourse to force the black man to bend to her will: “Kareem Hunt Caught With Underage Girls Drunk in His Hotel Room” is also a bad headline, after all.

But, no, the headlines that were printed did not mention the girls’ intrusion, their initiation of physical contact with both Hunt and his girlfriend, or their statements to hotel staff about planning to exaggerate their claims so as to ruin Hunt’s career. 

9 months later, when TMZ released a very selectively edited expert of the footage, the headline read KC CHIEFS RUNNING BACK KAREEM HUNT BRUTALIZES AND KICKS WOMAN IN HOTEL VIDEO. At this point, his goose was cooked. The Chiefs threw him under the bus with alacrity, saying they weren’t going to bother digging into the specifics of the incident because they had already been contacted and Hunt (very, very understandably and justifiably) lied and said he never left the hotel room. This technicality was enough to end his tenure on the team. He was consigned to the living hell of the Cleveland Browns organization, and suspended for the first half of the following season. 

The average career in the NFL lasts just over three seasons. Running backs play the most physically taxing position in all of professional sports. The loss of a half season of pay is a massive, massive fine. But, still, that wasn’t good enough. The Root (a black-focused, Gawker-affiliated website that would have the exact same editorial content if it were owned by the KKK) ran the following headline “Cleveland Browns Sign Kareem Hunt Despite Video of Him Assaulting Woman. Kaepernick Still Banned for Kneeling.” From Vice we got “Kareem Hunt and a Sports World that Ignores Domestic Violence Victims:” a headline confirming the girls’ entitlement to a space in Hunt’s living area, regardless of not being invited and also being repeatedly told to leave. From Yahoo Sports “NFL should leave you feeling sick after recent revelations involving Kareem Hunt, Reuben Foster,” comparing Hunt to a man who appears to have actually committed domestic violence on multiple occasions. When Hunt was eventually signed by the Browns--which, again, is a punishment in and of itself--the President of the National Organization of Women used the occasion to claim that “women do not matter to the NFL,” and once more repeated the bizarre claim that he had committed “intimate partner violence” by shoving and kicking a stranger who had shoved him first. 

This, dear reader, is Intersectionality as it actually exists. It is not liberation. It is not leftist. It does not even provide protection to the groups who supposedly fall under its purview. The only goal of this wretched political movement is to divorce a person’s actions from the judgments of outsiders, to establish a hierarchy of NGO-defined victimhood statuses and provide hack journalists with a simple and unchallenagable means of sorting out the good guys from the bad guys. 

It’s not justice. It’s not an improvement over old systems. It’s a new way of being broken. It is, in short, the entirety of the modern American left.