#and take critique of that nation personally as an attack on your identity

[glittertimes]

There’s absolutely something to be said about the military purposefully targeting high school students who are working class / students of color.

But I just saw an article about how the military is increasingly targeting Latinx students, and that absolutely has to do with Latinx folks’ lack of access to resources / higher education etc.

But I also think there’s something to be said about how common nationalism is in Latinx communities and how that makes us easier targets and prevents us from critiquing the military industrial complex / US nationalism in general.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Also, I would like to add that Malleus’s blatant disregard for the autonomy of others and fits of rage is DELIBERATE on his end. Being one of the top five mages in the entire world, I am sure that he KNOWS there is a large disparity between his power/social and the rest of the peers/subordinates etc. His sheer and utter confidence in his abilities to get what he wants and general disregard for others isn’t only an indicator of his awareness about this disparity, but is also a reflection of the abuses of his power AND social status as a whole.

In light of his age, imagine the amount of times he has repeated these mistakes despite others advice and criticisms against his choices. Only Ace has been able to overcome others general reverence and fear towards Malleus when it came to calling him out. He is not an innocent person who is ignorant about the ways of humanity verses faes, and is certainly not the innocent character the fandom (especially those who are infatuated by him) think he is.

[Referencing this post!]

***Standard disclaimer: In sharing my thoughts, I do not mean to disparage Malleus fans. Furthermore, me disliking him should not detract from your own enjoyment of the character. If you do not feel comfortable reading about this topic (ie critique of Malleus’s character), then I encourage you to scroll on and to not engage with this post.***

My thoughts below the cut!

I do feel that, to some degree, the disregard for others and inappropriate fits of rage come from blatant ignorance (since Malleus did have a very isolated and sheltered upbringing). However, it's also hard for me to believe that in his 178 years of living that he was NOT told countless times by those around him (mostly Lilia and his grandmother, Maleficia) to wield his power and social status more tactfully than how he has. Did he take none of those lessons to heart??? What about the 2-3 years he spent living among the non-fae at NRC? Nothing from then too?? Regarding self-awareness of his strength and social status, Malleus has made it clear on more than one occasion that he stands above others. Right from his first appearance in the main story (in book 2), it's implied he's well aware of his position--so much so that he deliberately hides his identity from Yuu. He also cannot propose to Eliza in Ghost Marriage because he is the crown prince of a nation. Time and time again, Malleus's status is mentioned and it plays into his importance as the sole heir to Briar Valley. He must also know he is powerful, given that he is one of the top 5 strongest mages in the world and can perform incredible feats (like reassembling a stage and walking through Vil's poisonous miasma in book 5) like they're nothing. His grandmother and Lilia tell him the Draconias are powerful and shouldn’t use their magic to harm, but to help those they rule over. Yet he seems to have surprisingly few qualms when turning these powers against people who are only at a fraction of his power (Rook, his dorm mates, everyone in the Scalding Sands trip group, Ortho, etc.) or have no magic at all (remember when he attacked those civilians in Terror is Trending and the other Diasomnia students had to restrain him?). Malleus may be emotional in these moments, but the fact remains that he's making the deliberate, intentional choice to wield his magic in this way. He has the ability to hold himself back (as we see him refrain from fighting Rook in Malleus's PE Uniform vignette, only because he knows Rook is baiting him), but the vast majority of the time he fails to do this. For someone who is acutely aware of his power, you'd think he would... I don't know, keep a better leash on it? And what about his identity? So Malleus is concerned about Sebek insulting Leona (the prince of another country) but he ISN'T concerned about how his own fits of anger poorly reflect on himself, who is the CROWN PRINCE of a country??? Please make that make sense... Why is Malleus so selective 💀

I'm actually quite shocked at how little Malleus's pride and arrogance is pointed out; it's usually Leona who gets those labels even though Malleus is also just as arrogant, prideful, and confident in his own powers. Most of the time, I feel like I see Malleus being called "innocent". Maybe his negative traits on display get overlooked because TWST tries so hard to present Malleus to us as someone we are supposed to like (especially with how often they use his overpoweredness or loneliness is used as a punchline for jokes). Our interactions with Malleus are also so few and so short, particularly early in the main story, that fan project their own ideas about what he's like onto him and that forms a certain “image” of him that may not be the same as how he actually is. Him being lonely makes it easy for fans to perceive him as desperate for company and even easier for fans insert themselves as his “special” friend or S/O to fill the void.

It's... quite ironic, really? Malleus says in Riddle's Suitor Suit vignettes that he is familiar with the concept of "noblesse oblige", which is the implied duty of the privileged and nobility to act gracefully towards those less privileged. Yet... he is sometimes overstepping "fae playfulness" or "teenage childishness/immaturity" and continuously creating situations which put people around him in danger (all of Endless Halloween Night, not holding back his attacks against the Magicam Monsters, all the times he let his temper get out of control, book 7 OB, etc.) When defending the extremes he took in book 7 by citing his status and his UM, Malleus has this to say, which is very telling of his lucidity: "Monitoring? Meddling? Heh, how silly. It's a king's duty to govern, is it not? I'm watching over you. To ensure no nightmares befall you in the fairy tales you now reside in... To ensure you have happy dreams that last forever!" It's implied that Malleus's grandma has told him since childhood that their line has powerful magic to protect their people's smiles--and here he is, overextending those words to people that aren't even his subjects, and twisting the meaning to justify his own brutal rule.

What I noticed is... Malleus is often so oriented on seeing the situation from his POV that he fails to consider those from any entity aside from himself. In Endless Halloween Night, he feels sorry for the ghosts who showed up late and were left out of the festivities because he can relate to them, so therefore he wants to make sure they are included. In book 7, Malleus fears his loved ones leaving and projects this fear onto everyone else so he feels right in being the one coming in to be their "hero" and grant them happy endings they never asked for. In his own Dorm Uniform vignettes, Malleus frames the circumstances as, "I wouldn't be mad if you did the same thing to me" instead of listening to his peers' complaints. He centers problems around himself (which admittedly is very frustrating to me), and this is how Malleus tries to understand and navigate the world. This gives me the impression that he has a very particular way of thinking and it's perhaps difficult for him to understand others, even with extensive pointers.

I truly believe Malleus is ignorant about humans and fae. That much matches up with what we know of his history. What I do NOT get is why he continues to remain ignorant when 1) he has spent a few years exposed to non-fae and their ways; even if this pales in comparison to the 175ish other years of his life, he should have some new basis for appropriate social interactions with other races, and 2) most of the major adult figures in his life are exposing to him he should consider others' perspectives and try to learn more about that which he is unfamiliar with. Malleus has so many opportunities to expand his horizons and get to know new people, but he seems to sit around and keep waiting for others take the initiative for him. But he could initiate too, so why doesn't he???? (He has shown he is capable of it, as he approaches Deuce to fix his virtual pet and chatting with Idia about the same pet in the main story; if not by himself, then Lilia can easily assist or invite him into activities such as the Silk City trip.) Even if Malleus fails to socialize in a way that's considered appropriate, at least that's something he can learn from and correct for next time... But why doesn’t he????????? If he did, it would sure help out with his inability to empathize with his peers and could even curb his temper (which would be seen as socially inappropriate). So why exactly does he seem to know so little and make so little effort to try and rectify this???? Why does he keep postulating that his word is above everyone else’s and then get upset when people don’t like him for this very alienating attitude? Aaaaah, it's a sad cycle to witness him devolve into again and again... 😭

P. S. Bless Ace for being the one character who still held it against Malleus for the fucked up “prank” he pulled in Endless Halloween Night (and then convincing everyone the misunderstanding was their faults for “attacking the ghosts first”).

[qqueenofhades]

Can you please explain why you like Warren more than Sanders? I was too young to vote in 2016 but I would've voted Bernie in that primary, and I plan to do so this year(I'll vote whoever the Democrat party chooses in the real election, I understand the dangers of not doing so). I don't know much about the differences in their policies except that Sanders is slightly more leftist and a relatively simple comparison between the two would help. And how big of a factor should his age play in my vote?

Thanks for asking!

I think the best place for you to start, if you want everything explained in depth on each issue far more eloquently than I can, is to simply read the Political positions of Bernie Sanders and Political positions of Elizabeth Warren pages on Wikipedia, which outline their positions on pretty much everything you could think of. The main difference in how people perceive them lies in the fact that Bernie has been a democratic socialist for his entire political career, while Warren became a Democrat in 1996, and is viewed by the hard left as still being too pro-capitalist and/or pro-military and/or too ethically suspect and/or untrustworthy and/or could change her mind and betray them again. For a certain subset of people for whom purity of ideology and/or the strength of conviction is only ever demonstrated by never changing your mind and only ever having held the right positions, the fact that Warren’s political positions have changed over time seems dangerous, and that she isn’t as purely “socialist” as Bernie means that she is, in their eyes, a lesser candidate. As I said in the earlier ask, we will never have an American president who is completely free from the toxic elements of American ideology. There are things that I don’t fully agree with Warren on, absolutely. But lashing into her as a secret spineless corporate shill who would completely betray the progressive movement if she was elected has nothing to do with reality, certainly nothing that reflects her actual rhetoric and voting record, and once again demonstrates the tendency of a certain subset of Bernie supporters to completely refuse anything less than their candidate no matter what, and that is… frustrating.

Let me be clear: Warren and Sanders are my top two choices. Policy-wise, they’re the only candidates proposing anything I want to actually see enacted. I completely support anyone who wants to vote for either of them in the primary, and indeed, I ended my last post by strongly urging the anon (and anyone else who identified ideologically with Bernie) to vote for him in the primaries. I myself get a cold shudder at the idea of having to vote for Biden or Buttigieg as the Democratic nominee (even if I don’t think it’ll happen). I don’t want to have to do it, which is why I keep urging progressives to turn out in droves and vote their conscience in the primaries: that way, we won’t even end up in a situation where we have to hold our nose and vote for a nominee we don’t really like, don’t support, and who will continue more ineffective centrist policies that don’t address the real problems in the country. If progressives vote in sufficient numbers, we will get a progressive nominee that we can actively vote for and feel good about, rather than one that we can barely stomach. If we sit home and only let the moderate/centrist white Democrats vote in the primary, that is the nominee that we will end up with. Gross. 

So in other words, I am not here to stoke the worrying and self-inflicted factionalism ongoing between Sanders and Warren supporters who have to outdo each other with My Ideology Is Better Than Your Ideology. That was exactly what I was critiquing in the earlier answer. I think both candidates align well with my values, I would vote for either one of them without qualms, and I think they are proposing policies that broadly target the major issues at hand. Destroying one to try to advance the other is unnecessary, counterproductive, and doing half the Trump/GOP machine’s work for them. It is a hollow moral victory in shouting echo chambers on the internet that has no real-world value and helps no one at all in the long run, except for feeling smug that you have The Most Pure Doctrine. Yay. Still not helping us get rid of Trump. So vote for whichever one you want in the primary, and then vote for whoever wins in the general. Like I said above, if progressives turn out in sufficient numbers, we won’t end up with a terrible candidate in the first place.

I like Warren because she has shown a consistent willingness to learn, grow, to take feedback and adjust her policies accordingly, to engage with community leaders, and, frankly, to demonstrate a more nuanced awareness of intersectionality and identity. Bernie has a tendency to struggle with differentiating class and race, dismisses “identity politics” and can confuse it with tokenism, and still holds the position that, essentially, socialism and economic justice will fix everything. Even the left-leaning The Guardian has found some grounds to criticize him on how he has handled this. I think that Warren is more aware on some levels as to how multiple factors inform an individual’s politics, not just economics and social class. But guess what: these are still minor quibbles and the kind of nitpicking that I get to do at primary stage! I’m still completely happy to vote for the man in a general election! Nothing that I say about Bernie here disqualifies him from my support if he’s the progressive candidate that comes out on top! And none of what I say below about Warren should be read as some sort of insidious attempt to prove that Bernie doesn’t hold these positions too/passive-aggressive slam on him, etc. etc. I’m simply explaining what I like about her particularly.

I like Warren because her plans are detailed, workable, based on extensive research, highlight multiple values that I have in common with her, and give practical recommendations as to how to implement them within the existing framework of the American political system (as well as, where needed, changing it radically). Her policy documents specifically highlight the African-American maternal mortality crisis, valuing the work and lives of women of color, protecting reproductive rights and access to care/abortion services, funding, respecting, and supporting Native Americans and indigenous people, supporting the LGBTQ community on many fronts, cancelling all student debt on day one of her presidency (as an academic with a lot of student debt, this is a big issue for me), confronting white nationalist terrorism, getting rid of the electoral college, regulating and breaking up market monopolies, taxing the shit out of billionaires, holding capitalism accountable, fighting global financial corruption and “dark money” in international politics, introducing immediate debt relief for Puerto Rico, overhauling immigration policy to make it more fair and welcoming, fighting for climate change especially as a racial justice issue, ending private prisons and federal defense budget bloat, recognizing that just throwing endless money at national security issues has not fixed them, drastically revising and ending a foreign policy currently based on endless money and endless wars, breaking up Wall Street economic monopolies and misbehaviour, transitioning to 100% clean energy and Medicare for All, reinvesting in public schools, and… I could go on, but you get the gist. She is a lawyer, professor, and senator with public and professional expertise in many relevant fields. She used to teach bankruptcy law and economic policy. She is smart and tough, but can break complicated concepts down and explain them clearly. She has earned the endorsement of black women’s groups and over 100 Latino leaders. And: yes. It’s time for us to have a female president. It just is. I feel strongly about it.

Warren was recently attacked for putting out a plan related to how the U.S. military could drastically reduce its wasteful carbon footprint and help combat climate change, as this was clearly proof that she was in fact just a lip-service progressive and didn’t want to, you know, apparently abolish it entirely and pretend it didn’t exist and personally tell everyone in the military what a bad person they were. I am not a fan of anything about the U.S. military-industrial complex. But if you don’t recognize that it’s largely composed of poor, working-class people of color and/or economically deprived people who have no other career option, that veterans are discarded instantly the moment they’re no use to the war and propaganda machine and that any politician is going to have to reckon with this, and that you can’t snap your fingers and make it go away, then that’s also not helping. Warren has also been attacked for not wanting to get rid of capitalism entirely, as if that is a remotely feasible or workable option in 21st-century America. She has voted for and suggested regulations and wealth taxes and major restructuring and everything else you can think of, she proposed and founded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and so on. But for some people, this still is Just Not Good Enough. Which…. fine. You don’t have to vote for her in the primary if she’s not ideologically the closest candidate to you. Once again, the point of the primary is to pick whichever candidate you like the most and to do everything to help them win, so you aren’t stuck with a bad choice when it comes time for the general. But acting like this is a huge and horrible disqualifier and that she’s an awful corporate hack who will just be terrible (her main crime not being Bernie/competing against him) has nothing to do with reality, and everything with having to win internet woke points and ideological militancy arguments. It’s not helpful. 

Since the earlier post went viral, I am now getting random hate or completely bizarre misinterpretations of my argument or whatever else, none of which I will answer and all of which will be deleted out of hand, because I am just not interested in trading insults about this and/or engaging in pointless arguments with people who have already made up their mind. But for some people, it’s apparently really threatening to say that if you only vote for the best ideology in the primaries and then quit in a snit fit before the general election, you’re not helping. You’re not doing anything useful. Everyone who was reblogging the post and agreeing with me was around my age or older; everyone who was reblogging it to slam me was usually a lot younger. And I’m glad that 21-year-olds feel that winning the ideology battle is more important than having a functional government, but: sorry. I’m old and I don’t have to listen to that, and I’m not going to. Perfect cannot be the enemy of good, or even better than what we’ve got now. And let’s be clear: anything would be better than what we have now. It would directly save lives and impact policies, and if you can’t admit that because you’re too hung up on how Elizabeth Warren might Be A Capitalist Pig Who Likes Billionaires, please, please get off the internet and go outside.

Would Warren, Sanders, or even Buttigieg or Biden lock immigrant children in cages and concentration camps at the border and commit deliberate slow-motion genocide by denial of care and access? No. Would they actively roll back Obama-era regulations protecting LGBTQ rights, the environment, climate change activism, and anything else you remotely identify as a progressive cause? No.  Would they start a needless war with Iran, build a border wall, stoke Nazis and white supremacists, pander to all the worst parts of American insularism and xenophobia, collude with Russia, lie about everything, destroy all regulations and policies that don’t benefit anyone but the rich, white, and male, fill their administration with convicted felons and homophobes and people who want to rob us blind, and be aggressively incompetent, unprepared, malicious,  stupid, angry, and dangerous to both the country and the world? No. So the various attempts to claim that there is “no real difference” between the presidency of a non-Sanders Democrat and Trump are… please, please sit down for a moment and think about what you’re saying. I realize this is, again, a hard position to hold when you depend completely on having The Right Ideology, and nuance, complexity, evolving positions, and willingness to be open to new ideas are not things that are valued in zealots on either the right or the left. I don’t know what fantasyland these people are living in, when they act like not voting for a non-Sanders Democrat against Trump would be a great moral victory or proof that they’re too good for the world that the rest of us have to live in, or think that the election into being about some magical chance to make the entire capitalist global military-industrial system vanish. It won’t. It won’t even if Sanders wins the presidency. Change only comes slowly and systematically.

This is once again, long. So to summarize:

1) If you want to understand the differences between Bernie and Warren from a place outside just what I say, go and read their policy summaries on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Look on their websites, compare their plans, do your own research, and don’t fall into the ideology-war trap just for the sake of looking better on internet arguments.

2) Vote for Bernie in the primary! Please! We want a progressive candidate who will make genuine change! We don’t want one who is just a moderate Republican but has to be a Democrat because moderate Republicans no longer exist!

3) I like Warren for many reasons and will be voting for her in the primary, but will vote for Bernie (or anyone else) who wins the primary and emerges as the nominee. I only wish that all Bernie supporters would give the reciprocal guarantee. There is a subset – again, not all – who are only loyal to him and nothing else, and who seem to feel that if they can’t have him, not voting is a better or more “moral” choice, even if the alternative is Trump.

4) For me, Bernie’s age is an issue. I can’t answer for what it might be for you, but he would turn 80 in the year he was sworn into office. He also did have a heart attack and would have a year of grueling campaigning to go.

5) Factionalism and ideology wars and loyalty to one person, rather than even trying to consider the lives and people that are at stake, that have already been lost, and that continue to suffer from Trumpism, is not helpful, not empathetic, and not more moral. You can sit and feel self-righteous all you want, good for you. People are dying. Refusing to make a change because it can’t be all the change, all at once, is not and will never be how this works.

Anyway. I hope that helped you. 

[beneaththetangles]

Mr. Gorbachev, Tearmoon Down This Wall!

I’ve always been plagued by endlessly recurring thoughts about how I’m a bad stupid sinful selfish lazy arrogant rude useless ugly fat disrespectful hardhearted unlovable disgusting et cetera person. The name for this phenomenon is shame, and for me and many others, it’s a result of having been abused. I previously discussed how I Refuse to Be Your Enemy!, vol. 1, contained a profound depiction of an abuse victim. That post has a fuller discussion of what shame is, but in brief, shame is a distorted worldview that says “I’m bad,” and tells me badness is endemic to my identity. Shame isn’t about doing bad things; it’s about believing oneself to be a fundamentally bad person. Well, a mere two days after I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! released, J-Novel Club published a second new series that intersects with the same topic. The hilarious and thought-provoking narrator of Tearmoon Empire, vol 1, proved surprisingly helpful in my struggles with shame.

The book opens with protagonist Mia Luna Tearmoon’s execution on the guillotine. Deposed crown princess of the eponymous empire, she clearly evokes the historical Marie Antoinette (even making a comment reminiscent of the spurious “Let them eat cake” line incorrectly attributed to the French queen). Likewise, her nation has experienced a series of tragedies plainly inspired by the real French Revolution. So when Mia mysteriously wakes up back at twelve years old, with full memories of everything she experienced in the revolution, it becomes apparent that the prologue is essentially setting up a tale of time-traveling Marie Antoinette trying to avert the French Revolution. It’s great and you should check it out.

There is much to appreciate about this book, and the unusually snarky narrator is one of Tearmoon Empire’s outstanding elements. It’s uncommon to find a story where the narrator is one of those seemingly omniscient outside observers not at all present within the story, yet has a distinct voice that practically makes the narrator a character in his own right anyway. The narrator’s sardonic opinions regarding the characters and events of the story provide a lot of levity. But for me, the narrator became much more than just a source of comedy.

For as long as I can remember, shame has been the inner narrator of my life, dispensing harsh and (in hindsight) unfair and even nonsensical commentary about myself. Seriously, if there’s a way to put oneself down, I’ve done it: I found fault with anything and everything I did. I blamed myself for things that weren’t even my responsibility. I dismissed the value of my successes and minimized whatever talents I might possess. Instead, I exaggerated my flaws. I treated real instances of failure as proof that my entire character was corrupt, rather than as individual mistakes. I worried that I was a hypocrite who accidentally deceived other people into thinking I’m a better person than I really was. If others said complimentary things about me, sometimes I assumed they were exaggerating. Other times, I decided they were sincerely mistaken due to not knowing the true me; obviously if they knew how wicked I really am, they wouldn’t say such nice things. I’d just ignore any evidence that didn’t fit my preconceptions about my own worthlessness. In my head, believing the teeniest little positive thing about myself equaled pride, so I stringently stifled any thoughts that I ever did anything good or had any good qualities. Sometimes, if circumstances forced it, I might internally concede that I committed a superficially good action, but then tell myself it didn’t count because I must have done it out of evil motives. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Unbeknownst to me, shame was leading me to lie to myself on a daily basis. Long before I knew what it was, or I understood that I’d been abused, or ever saw a psychologist, I was dealing with shame that came from the emotional abuse I experienced growing up. Even after learning that my pervasive sense of self-loathing had a name and that it comes from abuse, shame’s lies remained persuasive and constant. I did start to question these self-attacks, but the accusations continued to sound incredibly reasonable in my head. I didn’t really want to believe these cruel thoughts about myself, and knew that I had justification for doubting whether they were true. I also had learned that genuine guilt is tied to specific acts, so if I found myself feeling badly, but couldn’t identify anything I’d done wrong, chances were good that I was feeling shame and not guilt. However, I was also paranoid that I might use shame as an excuse to ignore my sins. “What if some of the self-judgment is true and I’m just using this business about shame and abuse to salve my conscience as I go on living wickedly?” I worried.

Enter the snarky narrator of Tearmoon Empire. The narrator is scathingly critical of Mia and those around her. If Mia does anything “good,” the narrator is quick to jump in and insist that it doesn’t count because Mia really had a selfish or stupid motive and the positive effect she had was a complete accident. If she manages to succeed at something to such a degree that even the narrator must grudgingly concede Mia was “good” in some sense, he quickly dismisses the whole incident as trivial, insignificant, hardly worth paying attention to. Her seemingly good deeds must never be construed as evidence of any virtue on Mia’s part. If characters around Mia witness her behavior and regard it in a positive light, the narrator denounces them as delusional fools who pathetically misunderstand her. They only think well of Mia as person, the narrator says, because they don’t know the truth about her. Does any of that remind you of something? Like, maybe something you read, oh, in the two paragraphs before this one?

The narration’s snide disparagement is certainly funny, but it also challenges readers to consider whether Mia is as bad as the narrator insists she is, as good as the other characters believe her to be, or perhaps something in between. As I read Tearmoon Empire, vol. 1, and pondered this question, I had a stunning epiphany. I don’t have an exact quote from when I made this realization, but it sounded something like this:

“There is an uncanny resemblance between the shame-fueled self-narration in my head and the comically derisive narrator of this light novel.”

It was eerie seeing how much this hypercritical light novel narrator’s attacks on the protagonist echoed the things I’d tell myself on an almost daily basis. Minimizing good things, dismissing positive perspectives from other people as ignorant accidents, suspecting wicked motives behind everything one does… The narrator’s tactics were all too familiar to me. However, there was one very important difference between my self-judging inner monologues and the narrator’s charges against Mia: I treated the former totally seriously, while I found the latter obviously ridiculous.

Though the narrator’s critiques of Mia occasionally contain an element of truth, much of the time it’s laughable how different the narrator’s scornful remarks are from what Mia explicitly says and does, or from the conclusions witnesses draw about Mia. The narrator’s snarky commentary is humorous in itself, and it gains a second level of humor as one starts comparing the narrator’s claims with how Mia actually acts and how other characters react to her. It’s literally unbelievable that Mia could really be the moronic evildoer that the narrator makes her out to be.  Keep in mind, not once does the narrator suggest Mia is trying to deceive people: according to him, she just bumbles around trying to be a jerk but inadvertently giving people delusions that she’s a good person. The longer the book goes on, the more silly it becomes how much over-the-top stupidity it would take for all the other characters to misinterpret the princess so thoroughly.

Thanks to Tearmoon Empire’s narrator, I could see numerous lies that I’d told myself placed in a different context that made it unmistakable how absurd and untrue they were. Cruel indictments that sounded plausible in my head became far less compelling when spoken by another voice about another person. Since reading this book a couple months ago, it’s been easier than ever for me to recognize when I’m starting to tell myself lies, and to fight back against that tendency. I’ve done so much better at telling shame to just shut up when it starts trying to spew more of its familiar falsehoods, instead of getting wrapped up in self-deception and spending hours mired in tearful self-recrimination. The gap between the narrator’s view of Mia versus the other characters view of her enabled me to see more clearly how wrong I’ve been for dismissing outside evidence of my worth and trusting only the philippics of my own thoughts. This wasn’t a light bulb switching on—this was a whole array of massive sports stadium lights flaring up all together and drowning me in their radiance. To put it another way, you could say that I found Tearmoon Empire to be a truly light novel in more ways than one.

I never would have guessed that I’d end up praising a light novel for helping me deal with psychological trauma, but life is full of surprises. “Now let me be clear,” I’m not claiming that reading a good book is sufficient to solve serious mental health issues. If you or those you love are struggling, seek professional help. It works! I’m certain that my years of prior psychological and psychiatric care were essential for helping me grow to the point where I could benefit from reading Tearmoon Empire. This book is only one step in a long journey that’s not over yet. But the fact remains that reading a Japanese novel about a time-traveling Marie Antoinette analogue was a life-changing experience that has helped me in dealing with the shame from my childhood emotional abuse. Thank you, Nozomu Mochitsuki, for writing this book, and thank you, J-Novel Club, for translating and publishing it. I’ll keep fighting not to let shame narrate my life anymore.

=====

Tearmoon Empire can be purchased through J-Novel Club or Amazon. We’ll be discussing volume one is our next Light Novel Club meeting, so please pick up a copy and join us then, on May 31st.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Really Though, Not All "Black" People Give a Fuck About "White" Dreads

“And these rhymes ain’t tight, they’re terrorish

And that girl’s not white, she’s anarchist

And we float like kites to get turbulence

Born with our throats slit

Self stitched

raised to aim over it

Soldier with no king

War with the war on me

I am more than this world lets me be"

- P.O.S “Weird Friends (We Don’t Even Live Here)"

Note: In this essay I use quotations around all idenitity categories and ideologies (for example “black” people or “white supremacy”) for the purpose of calling into question their assumed legitimacy as universal truths rather than fictitious constructs that benefit social control.

1. N.W.A (Nihilists With Attitudes)

Despite being biracial, my skin tone is socially recognized as “black” (or dark brown compared to some). Some of the music I listen to is found in, and stereotypically associated with, “black culture”. The combination of words I learned to use, inspired by my environmental upbringing, are stereotypically associated with living in “the hood”. Racialized tension and state violence follows me everywhere I go. When I walk into a store, my baggy black sweat pants and pullover black hoodie leads people to assume the worst; I have a criminal past with the potential to cause trouble. But check this out, I’m not “black”. This society assigned me this “black” identity at birth and with social pressure expects me to embrace it. But I refuse. The very concept of race has no biological or genetic validation. It is nothing more than a social construct used as a tool of oppression. The complexity of my individuality can not be represented by “black” identity nor “cultural blackness”. Identities are fixed, generalized representations of people and dictated by social norms, expectations and stereotypes. They are standardized by capitalism and industrial civilization and assumed to be universal and beyond questioning. When I walk into a store I get the stares, all based on the shared concern that I just might steal some shit. But to be honest, they’re probably right. I just might. Because the social placement of my assigned identity is located near the bottom which means my access to resources is limited. So illegalism is how I create access to resources without vote-begging for equality. Under capitalism, equality can not exist. And I gotta' survive, so I’m gonna' do what I gotta do. And that doesn’t mean pushin’ poison and enabling intoxication culture. The dope game is a trap set up by the state, so I just gotta' be more creative and determined.

The socially constructed groups (“black", “man") that society identifies me as are ones assigned to me at birth by a system that benefits from my identity categorization- a system I reject all together. This is the same system that constructs “black” as inferior to “white", “female” as inferior to “male”, “animal" as inferior to “human". I will not deny the very real experiences of sexism and racism that people face, nor the reality of institutionalized racism and sexism that wages poverty and war on those of us racialized and/or gendered as “inferior”. “White supremacy”, “male supremacy”, and this capitalist society as a whole needs to be destroyed. And I refuse to embrace any of its identity mechanisms of division as personal forms of resistance.

Instead, I embrace criminality against the laws of identity, as well as the agents of identity reinforcement responsible for normalizing the rigid boundaries of identity. I reject the liberal narrative that I, as a “black man”, deserve rights in this country equal to the “white man”. “Black man” doesn’t represent me, and I refuse to assimilate into those roles. I want to see them destroyed, as well as the logic that creates them. My existence embodies the negation of social assimilation and of the prison of identity-based representation, recognizing individuality without measure as the sincerest form of anarchy. “Black man” identity ain't got shit on me.

2. Keep Your “White” Dreads. Keep Fuckin’ Shit Up.

I don’t care about your culturally inspired dreads. And I don’t care about “white” people's dreads neither. I got better shit to do than chasin’ people around with a pair of scissors tryin' to give them a free haircut. And skin tone doesn’t necessitate conformity to any particular culture, let alone culture at all. As a matter of fact, fuck culture. I never had a say in being assigned this “black” culture that I am assumed to be represented by. Is knowing my African roots gonna save me from attacks by armed, “white supremacist” militias? Or the state? And it seems that children are often coerced into cultures at birth by people who assume they know what’s best for them. That, in and of itself, constitutes a form of hierarchical authority that can also burn in a fire with socially coerced identity and assigned roles.

Like race and gender, culture is also a social construct only maintained by those willing to validate it with their own subservience to it. And some folks are never permitted to know anything outside their culture - except maybe all the problems with other cultures. This sense of nationalism seems immune to critique from leftists and most anarchists. “White supremacy” and nationalism are widely called out and confronted but since when did “black supremacy” and nationalism become acceptable? Don’t get me wrong, “black supremacy” and “black power” are not backed up by the state, and came as a legitimate response to white power and supremacy.

But reproducing more identity-based supremacy is counter-productive and reformist..“Black power” limits itself to identity-based empowerment without confronting the foundation of assigned identity to begin with. And don’t act like “black nationalist” tendencies don’t exist within some anarchist circles. I'm side eyein' y’all wack-ass identity politicians who power play “white” anarchists with guilt. Y’all got them policing others- promoting the liberal, rights-based narrative of all “black” people as victims.

I ain't tryin' to waste time reforming shit. I ain't tryin' to embrace the establishment’s prescribed identity and then demand rights for it. I demand nothing from this system- I wanna' destroy everything that gives it validation, including the identity assigned to maintain its class binary. “Black nationalism” is not a solution to eliminating racism. It reinforces racism as a cultural and institutionalized system by validating the “white” and “black” racial and class binary. And if we tryin' to all get free, why embrace the same identities that were constructed to divide and stratify us? And how we gonna' take back and determine our lives if we still stuck in the shackles of internalized victimhood?

Those who maintain cultures on a traditional basis are in positions of power which constitutes a hierarchy between those who embrace that particular culture and those who refuse. I not only refuse “American culture” and all its social constructs and values, but all cultures that govern the mind. Cultures discourage freethinking and limitless exploration of one’s individual potential in life. Rather than allowing individuals to interact with the world and develop an opinion based on their own independent experiences, a preconceived narrative of life is imposed and justified as “truth” by those in positions of manipulative power. To exist, cultures rely on the subjugation of a group of people homogenized based on socially constructed roles and characteristics. I not only find cultures and their desire for control and domination personally undesirable, but I have learned that their power drops anchor in the mind of the subservient. Those who either don’t have the courage or accessible inspiration to think for themselves, or who actively promote culture and nationalism always turn to manipulation tactics like shaming and guilting others who refuse to assimilate. These cultural-based nationalist type groups do not reflect a universal truth or reality, nor do they represent all the people they claim to.

So hey “white” reader, “white dreads” are not culturally appropriating. No culture holds a monopoly on a hairstyle. Culture is a state of mind that can only manifest materially with rigid boundaries of essentialism which are protected by the laws of identity and those who enforce them. Are your dreads out of bounds with the laws of identity? Did the identity police come and charge you with disrespecting the laws of essentialism? Did you reject their self-appointed authority? Then you might be a criminal worth knowing. In the context of capitalism, if you tryin' to sell dreaded hair as a fashion commodity, that’s not culturally appropriating. But you still might get your windows smashed for being a fucking capitalist. Capitalism aside, if your dreadlocks are smelly, dried-sweat strands of tangled and/or matted hair, rock that shit. My dreads are too. Fuck conventional beauty standards, capitalism, and those who defend both.

3. Another Word for “White Ally” is Still “Coward”.

I don’t care if you identify as/call yourself a community-approved “white ally”. But I will assume that: 1. You are incapable of thinking for yourself. 2. You are a coward. 3. You will hesitate under fire when I ask you to hand me a molotov cocktail- fearful that you will be doing “the community” a disservice. Assuming you will be beside me in the streets or somewhere where tensions are high, I don’t want you to stand behind me and ask me what you should do. I don’t want to be your leader. Leadership- isn't that the hierarchical complex we are fighting against in the first place?

As my friend, will we hang out and have discussions freely or will you spend your time hesitating and stumbling over your words trying to keep your PC terminology in check for fear of offending me? If you say something fucked up, am I incapable of being considerate of the world you live in and calmly asking you to think about what you said? Will you police my other “white” friends with your expertise on anti-racism, in hopes of gaining my applause and approval? Will you police the boundaries of identity and reduce me to a mere “marginalized voice” incapable of taking space against white supremacy? If so, then you suffer from “white guilt” and are more of a conformist with some personal work of your own to do. I don’t want what liberal social justice warriors and some wack-ass anarchists call “allies”. I want accomplices. I am fine on my own, but I would enjoy the lawless company of those with ideas and strategies that aren't always my own, and with experiences and histories that differ from mine. Do you refuse societal submission and instead embrace life as daily attack on capitalist society and everything in between? Cool. I do too. Despite socially constructed categories and assigned identities, this is our bond. This is our affinity.

4. Gettin’ With the (Anti)-Program.

There is no use in making demands. It is pointless asking those in positions of power to stop their quest for control and domination. I can’t ask liberal POC organizations, academics, and social justice warriors to stop pretending they represent me and my interests. I don’t have time to spend hours explaining to them that not all people they identify as “black” can be “saved” by the church of social justice. Some people just want money and the power to dominate others just as any “white” bank owner or corporate executive. I can’t plead with them to stop invisibilizing my existence as an individual acting out of bounds with their political programs. I can’t vote beg leftists and anarcho-leftists into realizing their plan to “organize the masses” ultimately discourages a vitality of anarchy- individuality. I can’t change or reform their system that they operate within and attempt to dominate the political terrain with. I am anti-political in that all programs derived from politics are doomed to fail because they all have one thing in common- representation. None of these people represent me, my personality, nor the anarchistic actions of my individuality. I am anti-political in that my actions of revolt do not constitute a politicized occupation separate from my daily life. Anarchy is not my activist hobby. My individual existence is a nihilistic, transformative expropriation of a life that was never intended to be my own in the first place.

So if you are “white” and are reading this, you have already defied the police in your head who tells you to never read anything critical of “black” liberalism, identity in general, and allyship or culture. Just like when you walked away after being scolded about your dreads from a “black” activist, and under your breath mumbled “go fuck yourself." Or in the streets when they called you an “outside agitator” for trying to smash a bank window- and then you did it anyways. You do you. The liberals, anarcho-liberals included, will continue to attempt to police everyone with politically correct terminology that changes every year. They will continue to guilt you for having “white” skin. They will guilt you when you stand up and act out against the authority of their studies and academic jargon. They will continue to threaten you with call out statements, ostracizing, and maybe even physical violence as long as you refuse to psychologically submit to their program. To the “black” reader, nobody can represent the totality of your individualism because despite their assumptions of you, your intellect and experiences are not fixed into place. Your existence can not be confined to a mere social position on a ladder. Do you feel the shackles on your imagination while operating within the confinement of your assigned identity? Can your identity as a “black” person ever truly liberate you or does it secure you in place with an internalized sense of victimhood that comes with that racialized assignment? Do you feel coerced to surrender yourself to “black liberation” in fear of feeling alone and isolated? That fear is legit. And that fear is what keeps one submissive. This essay was written in hopes of inspiring the criminal in you. If you recognize the prisons that “community leaders” place our imaginations in, perhaps you will escape from the liberal confines of sign holding, endless meetings, chanting, and marching for “justice”.

Fear is their weapon for “organizing the masses” and discouraging individual determination. But that’s OK. I don’t need their masses or programs to know when and how to attack. Do you? And do all the other “black” people who feel they have to join these liberal or radical identity- based groups and organizations to remain loyal to “blackness” as a cultural identity? The shared experience of being “black” under capitalism is only limited to identity. Just 'cus people share the same institutionalized form(s) of oppression don’t automatically mean they share the same visions and objectives on how to destroy it. These are important differences that shouldn’t be flattened. While these groups continue their mind-numbing attempts to create a new system of race essentialism within the shell of the old, some of us are having fun destroying all the systems. My anarchy is an existential expansion of individuality beyond the limitations of racial (and gendered) social constructs. When they say “black and brown” unity against racism and fascism, some of us have been sayin’ every body against racism and fascism, as well as the fixed identities that makes them functional. Where chaos blooms with emancipation and the limitless potential that follows, individuality becomes a weapon of war against control and categorical confinement. While they scold you “white” people and chant “Cut Your Dreads!”, I am saying really though, not all “black” people give a fuck about “white” dreads. Stay ungovernable. See you in the streets when the night is lit by fire.

[the-desolated-quill]

Absent Friends - Watchmen blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t read this comic yet, you may want to before reading this review)

At Midnight, All The Agents managed to set the tone with its cynical and biting critique of superheroes, presenting them as being violent felons or worthless failures indulging in power fantasies. The second issue, Absent Friends, sinks its teeth even deeper as we take a look at the Comedian’s past via flashbacks whilst the other characters attend his funeral and pay their respects.

So lets talk about the Comedian.

Aside from the accusations of rape, the first issue didn’t go into too much detail about Edward Blake, other than that no one besides Rorschach seemed to like him very much. This issue goes into much more detail as we see the Comedian at four major points in his history.

The first flashback is that of the Minutemen back in 1940, where we see Eddie try to rape Sally Jupiter, the first Silk Spectre. It’s a very shocking and disturbing scene, not just because of the fact that he’s supposed to be a superhero, but also because of the sheer brutality of the attack. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons don’t hold back in depicting Comedian’s sickening behaviour, but they also don’t become too indulgent with it. They clearly take no pleasure from depicting this type of sexual violence and there is a legitimate artistic reason why it’s there. Prior to the flashback, we see the two Silk Spectres discuss the Comedian. Laurie is disgusted that Sally would have anything positive to say about Eddie after what he did, but what I find most interesting is a moment during the conversation where Sally shows Laurie a porno comic of her. This, to me, reveals what Moore and Gibbons are getting at here. Namely the role of women in superhero comics.

Female superheroes have always been something of a paradox. They need to be strong and independent, but not too strong and independent. We can’t have Wonder Woman upstaging Superman, now can we? Oh and of course they need to look sexy. Long hair flowing. Plenty of bare flesh showing. Tight leather outfits. High heels. Makeup. Never mind the fact that this getup is not remotely practical or appropriate to fight crime in. 

While this sexist attitude is slowly and thankfully fading away from modern comics, historically there has always been this kind of seediness to how women are presented in comics. They’re not there to empower women. They’re there to appeal to the male gaze. Sexy athletic women with massive boobs beating the shit out of baddies. They are, for lack of a better term, sex objects. Watchmen takes this to its extreme, presenting both Silk Spectres as being incredibly sexualised to the point where some characters, like the Comedian and the pornographer who made the comic, perceive them as being little more than sex objects. Not only that, but Sally and Laurie’s different perspectives on this sexualisation reflects the changing attitudes about women in comics at the time. Sally accepts the porno comics and the attempted rape as par for the course. The reality of being a woman. She even chose her costume herself in order to draw attention to herself in the hopes of jump-starting a modelling career. Laurie meanwhile didn’t choose the sexualised image that has been thrust onto her and is very vocal in her distaste toward how she’s perceived and how her mother is willing to brush it aside. People often have a tendency to write off Silk Spectre as being the weak link, but I don’t think that’s fair. There’s a lot going on with this character and in our current age of MeToo and social media empowering women to open up about their experiences, she’s a character that has become more and more relevant as time goes on.

The second flashback depicts Captain Metropolis trying to recruit the main characters into ‘the Crime Busters,’ only for the Comedian to ruin it with his nihilistic attitude. This mainly serves as a takedown of superhero crossovers like Justice League and the Avengers. Rorschach even comments on it, saying it feels more like a publicity stunt. It also serves as subtle foreshadowing for Ozymandias’ plan, but we’ll come to that in a future blog. But most importantly, it displays the Comedian’s changing attitude towards crime fighting. When he was with the Minutemen, he was happy to indulge in his own violent fantasies by beating up criminals, but now he’s become aware of how pointless it all is due to the Cold War. Capes and masks are useless against the nukes.

The next flashback depicts the Comedian and Doctor Manhattan fighting (and winning) the Vietnam War. This is probably my least favourite of the flashbacks and it’s because of Eddie killing a Vietnamese woman he had impregnated months earlier. Whereas the attempted rape of Sally felt thematically justified, the murder of a pregnant woman just felt like shock for the sake of shock and doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to reinforce the fact that the Comedian is a horrible human being. But it does raise an important issue. Superheroes and patriotism.

America has a few superheroes associated with it. Superman. Spider-Man. Captain America. But very rarely do comics explore the impact a superhero would have on a country’s political standing in the world. Having a superhuman associated with your country could tip the scales greatly in your favour, which is exactly what happens in Watchmen. Thanks to Doctor Manhattan and the Comedian, America is able to win the Vietnam War, turning it into the fifty first state. The United States is much more powerful than any country on Earth thanks to the likes of Manhattan, which is what has escalated the Cold War because the Russians are running scared of the threat America poses.

Morally speaking, any superhero who truly believes in justice and heroism should ideally be completely impartial. Siding with one country over another could seriously compromise the hero. But how, you might be tempted to ask. A superhero serving his country doesn’t sound so bad, right? Except there’s a world of difference between fighting for moral good and fighting for your country. This isn’t the same as stopping a mugger and giving an old lady her purse back. In war, good and evil isn’t so clearly defined. So by sending a superhero into a war zone, you’re effectively demonising a whole nation of people. Because the side with the hero must be good and the side fighting the hero must be bad, right? It imposes a black and white mentality onto a situation that is, to put it mildly, incredibly messy.

Another problem with having superheroes in the army (or any form of law enforcement) is that superheroes are a law unto themselves. They exist outside the chain of command. While, yes, the police and the military are both deeply flawed institutions, there are laws and safeguards that (in theory) prevent officers from abusing their power. Superheroes don’t have that. So with no one holding them to account, there’s nothing to stop them from going too far, as we see the Comedian do many times.

Which brings us to the fourth flashback. The police strike of 1977 where we see the Comedian and Nite Owl try to stop the riots and we hear about congress pushing through the Keene Act to outlaw superheroes.

Like Rorschach, the Comedian is also based on a Charlton Comics character. The Peacemaker. A militaristic superhero who believes heavily in pacifism and wishes to bring peace to the world.... through violence.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. But honestly, it feels like Moore and Gibbons are using the Comedian to take the piss out of Peacemaker. He’s a ‘superhero’ and yet we see him fire rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of people, murder a pregnant woman and try to rape someone. It’s as if they’re saying that it’s impossible to be both a hero and violent. We have a romanticised view of superheroes fighting crime, but where do we draw the line? Why is the rape of a woman unacceptable, but the beating of a criminal okay? Is it because the criminal is quote/unquote ‘evil?’ So are we saying that a criminal’s life is worthless the minute they break the law? If that’s the case, then the conversation has turned away from superheroes and toward fascism.

Many people describe the Comedian as a nihilist, which is true, but what a lot of people fail to recognise is that all the characters are technically nihilists. They all believe the world has no morality or meaning, but whereas the other characters of Watchmen impose their own personal morality onto the world, the Comedian does the opposite. He embraces the chaos and amorality of the world around him and uses his superhero identity to indulge in sex and violence. It’s what makes the smiley face logo so appropriate for the Comedian. Like the smiley face, superheroes are supposed to represent all that is good and just about this world. But just as the blood stain taints the smiley face, violence and corruption taints the image of the superhero.

The issue ends with Rorschach breaking into the cemetery to pay his respects and his final monologue I think perfectly sums up the despicable, but fascinating nature of the Comedian. In his journal, he tells the joke about Pagliacci, a clown whose act is recommended by a therapist as a cure for a patient’s depression. Except the patient in question is Pagliacci. 

What hope does America have when the superhero that’s meant to save them is just as corrupt and amoral as them?

[argyle-s]

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME CHAPTER 11/38

Rating: Mature

Read at Ao3

Start at the Beginning

Supergirl gets some hero time in preparation for her interview with Cat. Kara, Alex and J'onn work out their issues, and Susan gets a new job.

Thanks to @ifourmindbeso for her great work as a beta. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own.

Chapter 11 -  Shining Light, Show and Tell

“You look like hell,” Cat said as Kara sat her Sushi tray down on the coffee table.

“Thank you, Ms. Grant,” Kara said.  “It didn’t really sink in when the fifty people before you told me the same thing.”  Kara leaned over, picking up the edited copy for the afternoon update of the Tribune website.

“My, aren’t we just little miss sassy-pants today.”

Kara sighed.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I had a bad allergy attack last night and I’m still trying to shake it.”

“I didn’t realize you had allergies,” Cat said, and Kara was surprised at the level of concern in her voice.

“I didn’t either until fairly recently,” she said.

“It’s nothing here at CatCo, is it?” Cat asked.

“No.  It’s this stuff they use where my sister works,” Kara said, trying to wave off Cat’s concern.  She looked down at the copy and smiled.  “Supergirl’s Super Week?”

“Yes,” Cat said.  “I thought it was rather catchy.  For someone new at the Superhero thing, she’s doing an excellent job.”

Kara scanned the rest of the article and smiled when she found a number of small critiques.  “Not cutting her any slack, are you?”

“Well, why should I?  No one else will.  She’s going to have to be better than Superman, just to keep up.”

“Work twice as hard, to be thought of as half as good,” Kara said. “Just like any other woman.”

Cat smiled.  “Good to see you’ve been listening to me, Keira.”

“Always, Ms. Grant,” Kara said with a smile.

“So, how goes the quest for the interview with our Maid of Might?”

“Oh,” Kara said.  “About that…”

“Get a little too big for our britches, did we?”

Kara laughed.  “No. It’s just…  Well, I did talk to her, and she has a list of conditions. It’s short, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable, but she won’t do the interview unless you agree.”

Cat nodded as she sat aside the proof she’d been editing and picked up her lunch tray, walking over to her desk.  “Alright then, let’s hear them.”

“No questions about her day job.  How she pays her bills.  Where she lives.  No questions about her secret identity, or anything that could lead back to people who are close to her when she’s not wearing the suit.  Any questions regarding any relationship she might have with the government will be answered with a firm ‘no comment’.  You agree not to publish her secret identity if anything in the interview gives you a clue to who she is.”

“She wants me to agree not to publish her secret identity if I find it?” Cat asked as she took out her collection of chopsticks and went about selecting a pair.

Kara nodded.  “She was very clear that the restriction would only be in force if information in the interview revealed who she was.  She didn’t expect you to hold back if you found the information through an outside source, though she did ask if you could give her some warning if you do ever decide to go public with that so she could get certain people to safety.”

“Those seem reasonable,” Cat said.  “I do hope she understands that I will be reporting facts, not writing some little puff piece.”

Kara laughed.  “Ms. Grant, I think she would be disappointed if you did anything else.”

Cat narrowed her eyes.  “You seem to know an awful lot about her, Keira.”

“She was excited,” Kara said.  “I think she admires you, Ms. Grant.  I think she looks up to you.”

Kara wasn’t quite sure what to make of the look on Cat’s face, and she didn’t get very long to analyze it, before it was replaced with Cat’s usual mask.

“Well, of course she does,” Cat said.  “I’m me.”

“Yes,” Kara said, not able to keep the smile off her face.  “Yes, you are.  So, how does Thursday evening sound?”

“Hmm…  That will work.  Headlines to carry us through the weekend, and a big article for Monday.  Any idea where she wants to do the interview?”

“She said she’d come to you.”

Cat smiled.  “Well, then, I’ll look forward to it.”

Winn didn’t really like to think of himself as a small person. Metaphorically small.  Because physically, yeah, he was tiny, but that was beside the point.  He didn’t like to think of himself as the jealous type.  He knew he could be.  He knew, when he loved something, he was terrified of having it taken away, because so much in his life had been.  His mother. His father.

He also knew he had a terrible crush on Kara.  It was hopeless, because Kara told him she was gay the first time they’d really talked.  It was so casual, that he might have even missed it, if he hadn’t been so enamored of her that he was hanging on every word, but she’d mentioned the toughest part of adjusting wasn’t the new apartment or new job, it was that she’d just lost her girlfriend.  In a way, it was kind of a relief because he knew there was no chance, so he didn’t feel pressure to perform.  They were better friends because he could be more relaxed, more himself.  The crush was still sort of there, but it was dull, muted.  The kind of thing you never, ever act on.  And he’d never been jealous of Kara’s relationship with anyone.

Okay, maybe he’d been a little bit jealous when he found out she’d told Maggie about the Supergirl thing too, but that had been fleeting and momentary, because Maggie Sawyer was freaking awesome, and aside from a little ribbing over some of his costume designs, they’d actually become fast friends.  A lot of that was because Maggie had taken one look at the Alien Conspiracy Website he contributed to and dove in head first.  He’d listened to her rant for hours about all the details that were wrong, and learned more about the weird shit that happened in National City in one night than he had in all the years he’d live there.

But James Olsen was not Maggie Sawyer and Winn did not like the way he looked at Kara.  Not one little bit.  Because James Olsen looked at Kara like she belonged to him.  Which is why, when he found James standing in the alley where he was supposed to be meeting Kara, he had to bite his tongue to avoid saying something he’d probably regret.

“Hey,” James said, “what’s up?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Winn said, casting around for some reason he’d be in the alley.  “I… like to come out here to smoke.  Which I like to do in private.”

“Actually, I’m meeting someone out here, so…”

“Yeah, you can meet them inside the building.”

“No, uh, my friend likes to make an entrance.”

“So does his,” a voice said from behind them.  Winn smiled as he turned around to find Maggie walking down the alley towards them.  “Also, you’re outvoted.”  She lifted her hand, gesturing back towards the entrance to the alley with her thumb. “So, do us a favor, and take a walk.”

James looked back and forth between them, slightly panicked, and Winn couldn’t help feeling a little smug, right up until he heard the tell-tale swoosh of the cape.  He looked up, just in time to see Kara turn and drop down for a landing.

Winn looked over at James, expecting to see surprise, but he moment he saw the look on James’s face he knew, and he turned back to Kara.

“You told him?” Winn asked.

“You told them?” James asked at the exact same time.

“My cousin told James,” Kara said, “and we’ve had some words about that.” Then she looked at James.  “I told them, because they’re my friends and they deserve to know what that means.  They’re here because they’ve already proven themselves.”

Winn felt himself stand up just a little taller at that.  Something about the idea that someone like Kara respected him made him feel better about himself and a little less frightened of the shadow looming over him.

James held up his hands, a little defensively.

“Sorry,” he said.

Kara nodded.  “Okay, this thing is off to a good start.  The plane, the bank robbery, the fire, but right now, it’s important that I be seen out there, helping people.”

“Is this about your interview with Cat?” James asked.

Winn looked at James, then back at Kara.  “You’re giving Ms. Grant an interview?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Kara said.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Maggie asked.  Which Winn was happy about because it meant he didn’t have to.

“I know it seems a bit weird but right now, Supergirl needs as much public exposure and as much positive press exposure as she can get.  So yes, in a way, this is about my interview with Cat, but it’s also about convincing Astra that there are better ways to help this planet that what she’s planning.”

“Who’s Astra?” James asked, and Winn felt that smug feeling come back, because here was something he knew, something Kara had trusted him and Maggie with, that James didn’t know.

“Long story,” Kara said.  “I’ll fill you in later.  The point is, right now, I need to be out there, helping people, and to do that, I need your help.”

“I’m in,” all three of them said at once.

“Next time, can you stop a robbery at a salad bar,” Maggie said as she grabbed another slice of pizza and dropped down onto the couch.  “If I keep eating like this, I’m going to have to get bigger pants.”

Kara laughed as she put her feet up on the coffee table.  “Maggie, we both know you’re too butch not to have at least one pair of pants at home with some extra room in them.”

“Okay, I would like to say that I am not comfortable with the direction this conversation is heading,” Winn said.  He shifted a little closer to the table as he worked on unhooking the laptop from the police scanner.  “It’s a little too close to hearing things like that about my sister.”

“And I feel like I’m missing something,” James said.

Kara looked over her shoulder to here James was leaning against the counter, a bottle of water in his hand.  The last two days had been good.  It had taken a little time, but Maggie and Winn had both eventually warmed up to him, and Kara had started to settle into a relationship with him that didn’t revolve around pining or guilt.

She turned back to Maggie.  “You explain it,” she said.

“Oh, no, Danvers.  You told the joke, you gotta explain it.”

Kara thought about it for a moment, and decided right then and there she’d rather fight Darkseid, Doomsday and a dozen White Martians at once, than explain packing to James Olsen.

“Sorry, James,” she said.  “You’re gonna have to figure that one out on your own, or get Winn to explain it.”

“That will happen right around the heat death of the universe,” Winn said. “Sorry, James, you’ll have to figure out the mysteries of lesbian humor on your own.”

“Lesbian...  Oh,” James said.

Kara turned around again, and saw a look of shock on James’ face.  A small part of her wanted to jump up and do a victory dance, but there was another part that wanted to make sure to drive the point home.

“He didn’t know,” she said, turning back to Maggie.  “Maybe I should have gone with a flannel suit and a rainbow cape.”

Maggie snorted, choking a little on a bite of pizza before she managed to swallow it.  “I’d suggest a tattoo, but trust me, guys will completely ignore it.”

“Noted,” Kara said.  “Seriously, though, I want to thank you guys.  The last couple of days have been amazing, and I think the city is really starting to believe in Supergirl.”

“That’s all you,” Maggie said.

“She’s right,” James said.  “You’ve been amazing out there.”

“Especially with Fluffy,” Winn said.

Kara turned around and glared at him.  “It was a snake, Winn.”

Whatever Winn’s reply would have been was lost to the knock on the door. Kara looked through the door, and saw Alex standing there, looking like a kicked puppy.  The only thing about it that surprised her was that it had taken this long.

“Maggie, would you get the door?”

“Why me?” Maggie asked, suspicion dripping from her voice. “James and Winn are closer.  And you might want to change first.”

Kara smiled, “Because I’ve been waiting for this for months, and I’m pretty sure my sister knows I’m from Krypton.”

“You know, your obsession with pimping me out to your straight sister is a little disturbing.”

The knock came again, and James stood up.  “I’ll get it,” he said.

“I will melt your face if you open that door,” Kara said.  She gave Maggie a small push.  “Go.”

“Kara, I know you’re in there!” Alex shouted through the door.”

Maggie stood up.  “Fine,” she grumbled.  “But if she’s not hot, I’m kicking your ass.”

Kara watched as Maggie walked across the room, and it was all she could do to keep from bouncing excitedly on the couch, when Maggie unlocked the door and swung it open.  Alex looked up and stopped dead for just a moment, before her jaw dropped.  Kara wasn’t entirely sure she would have needed her super hearing to hear the small pop of Alex’s jaw when it happened.

“Um…” was all Alex could seem to get out, and Kara had to fight not to squeal at the look on her face.

“You must be Kara’s sister,” Maggie said.  “I’m Maggie.”

“Oh,” Alex said.  “Uh… Hi.”

The sound of Winn and Kara both bursting into laughter seemed to break the spell, and Alex looked past Maggie, into the apartment, and the vaguely punch-drunk expression shifted into pure, annoyed big sister the second Alex spotted Kara in the Supergirl uniform.

Maggie turned around, following Alex’s line of sight to care, and laughed.  “Oh, somebody’s in trouble.”

Ten minutes later, Winn, James and Maggie were gone, and Kara was in civvies, pouring both of them a cup of tea.

“Do you really think it’s a good idea to tell your friends who you are?” Alex asked.

“You know what,” Kara said, “after that stunt at the DEO two nights ago, I don’t think you get to question how *I* am handling this.”  She reached over and grabbed the sugar bowl, taking out three cubes and dropping them into her tea.

Alex winced.  “Okay, sorry. I didn’t come here to fight.  I came to apologize.  What happened at the DEO was a mistake.”

Kara nodded.  “Mine,” she said.  “I shouldn’t have told you about Jeremiah or I should have trusted you and J’onn with everything.  Fuck if I know what I’m doing.”

Alex flinched at the sound of Kara swearing.  “Why didn’t you?”

Kara sighed and looked down at her tea.  “I couldn’t,” she said.  “There are so many moving parts, so many dangers and threats and I absolutely could not take certain risks.  When we were setting this up, the entire plan, the entire strategy centered on preventing Myriad from ever being deployed.  In order to do that, I have to convince Astra to give it up.  The thing is, I didn’t know where Astra would be up until a week ago, and in order to preserve that knowledge, I had to make sure everything, or as much of it as possible, played out the exact same way as in the original timeline.”

“Original timeline?” Alex asked.  “Kara, are you saying you’re from the future?  Because that’s what it sounded like you were saying at the DEO and that’s what it sounds like you’re saying now.”

Kara took a drink of her tea, then looked up at Alex.  “Sort of,” she said.  “It’s complicated, and I’m not a Time Master, so…” she shrugged.

“Time Master?” Alex asked.

Kara reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose.  “I’m too sober to have this conversation,” she said. “Where’s J’onn?”

“Back at the DEO,” Alex said.  “He’s…  Vasquez quit. The moment you cleared the base’s radar envelope, she stormed into the training room and ripped into him.  Her girlfriend tried to defend him, and Susan told her, ‘You can pack your shit and get your ungrateful ass out of my apartment.’ Then she threw her badge in Hank’s face and just stormed out.”

“/.,rao, i dovrrosh/” Kara said, and reached into her pocket, digging out her phone.  “Konex.”

“Yes, Lady Kara,” the robot replied as it decloaked.

“Hack the DEO’s computer and pull the personnel record for Susan Vasquez, then add her to my phone as a contact.”

“Kara!  You can’t-“ Alex started.

“Done, Lady Kara,” Konex said, cutting Alex off.

“Thank you,” Kara replied, tapping the contacts icon on her screen and calling Susan.

“Hello,” Susan said.

“Hey, Susan, this is Kara.”

“Um…  Hello, ma’am,” Susan said.

“Anyone who quits their job for me gets to call me Kara,” she said, “especially if they toss their girlfriend out in the process.”

“You heard about that?”  Susan asked.

“Just now,” Kara said, “or I would have called sooner.”

“I appreciate that.  Um… Don’t take this the wrong way, but how did you get my number?”

“Probably not a conversation for an unsecure line, but I want to ask you a favor.”

There was an annoyed sigh on the other end of the line.  “What would that be, ma’am?”

“Go back to work,” Kara said.  “I’m going to go back eventually, once my sister and Hank have finished removing their heads from their asses and finished apologizing and maybe done a bit of groveling.  I could really use someone there I trust.”

“I…  I appreciate the compliment, Kara, but I’m not really sure I’d be welcome back and honestly, I’m not sure I want to go back.”

Kara nodded.  “Okay. I suppose that’s fair.  Tell you what.  I live in Hammersmith Tower, apartment 4-A.  Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah,” Susan said.  “I used to drop your sister off on nights when she was too beat up from training to drive herself home.  I only live about ten minutes away.”

“Cool.  Tell you what, I will phone in a pizza order at Antony’s.  You know it?”

“You have to ask?”

“Not really, but I wanted to be polite.  I’ll pay for it.  Swing by, listen to what I have to say.  If you don’t want to go back to your old job once I’m done, I’ll make a few calls.  I might not be able to find you anything in National City, but I know people in Gotham and in Gateway city who will let you name your price.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Susan said, but Kara could hear the gratitude in her voice.

“I feel like I do,” Kara said.  “And once I’ve explained why, you might too.  Antony’s will probably take their usual thirty minutes.  I’ll expect you in forty-five.  Fair warning though, Hank and my sister will be here.”

There was a moment of silence on the line, before Susan asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Kara?”

“No,” Kara said.  “But honestly, I don’t trust my judgement on a lot of things right now, which is why it’s necessary.  I just want you here because clearly, the three of us need some fucking adult supervision.”  The sound of bright, happy laughter came through the phone, and Kara couldn’t help but smile.

“See you soon,” Susan said, before the line went dead.

Kara looked over at Alex.  “Call J’onn. Tell him I said to get his green ass over here.  I’m going to order pizza.”

“I’d ask how you know my favorite kind of pizza,” J’onn said, looking down at the pie in front of him, “but I’d probably just get some cryptic bullshit and I’m not in the mood.”

“No more cryptic answers,” Kara said as she sat a bottle of root beer on the table for him.  “I think all of us have had enough secrets to last a lifetime.”  She sat handed Susan a bottle of coke.  “Sorry I don’t have the sugar sweetened kind but I wasn’t really expecting you.”

“That’s okay,” Susan said.  “I drink this stuff at work, anyway.”

Kara dropped into her chair next to Alex.  All four of them were sitting around Kara’s dinner table.  Alex looked nervous.  J’onn looked angry.  Susan looked nervous, angry, and a little like she felt out of place.

“So, here’s the deal.  I suck at keeping secrets.  Not as much as I used to, but I hate them.  I’ve only been keeping the secrets I have because there are lives at stake. Not a few lives, or a few dozen, or even a few million.  When I say lives are at stake, I mean there are literally hundreds of trillions of lives hanging in the balance, across dozens of universes.”

She watched both Alex and Susan flinch at that, but J’onn leaned back, looking at her and there was a considering look on his face.

“Susan, before I go any further, you deserve to be on the same footing here as Alex and… Hank.”

Susan gave a small nod.  “Okay.”

“I have knowledge of how a number of future events are going to play out, because I’ve already lived through the next eleven years.  I’m making an attempt to change the outcome of those events in order to prevent a series of disastrous outcomes for Earth and millions of other worlds.  Honestly, Susan, I hadn’t intended to read anyone other than Alex and Hank in on this, because I didn’t want to put the weight of this on anyone else’s shoulders. The thing is, I honestly think after what happened the other night, we need someone who’s going to be a *lot* more objective than any of the three of us will ever be capable of to yank the choke chain when we get out of line.  Since you are the person I trust the most at the DEO after Alex and Hank and since you’re apparently perfectly willing to call any of us when we have our heads up our asses, I think you should have the job.  But if you don’t want it or don’t think you can handle it, tell me now, and I will make those calls about alternate employment.”

Susan rolled her eyes.  “Hey, Susan, do you want a job babysitting the immature brats who are responsible for saving the universe?  You don’t have to take it, but if you don’t, they might be too busy having a hissy fit to stop the apocalypse.  No fucking pressure.”  She picked up her coke and twisted the top off, taking a swig before setting it back down. “Please tell me you have rum to go in this?”

Kara shook her head.  “I can’t get drunk, so the only thing I keep in the house is Alex’s Scotch and some beer and tequila for Maggie.”

“Think Maggie would mind if I stole one of her beers?” Susan asked.

Kara got up and walked over to the fridge, fishing out one of the Blue Moons from the back.  She carried it over to Susan, and used her thumb to pop the bottle cap off.  Susan took it and took a long pull from it before she sat the bottle on the table in front of her.

“I’m in,” she said.  “I may hate myself in the morning but I didn’t take the job at the DEO for the pay.”

Kara smiled, and turned to J’onn.

“I’ve been calling the tune for the better part of thirteen months, but I don��t want to dictate terms anymore.  No more spilling each other’s secrets.  If we do this, I need you to make the decision.  I need you to be all in.”

“Okay,” he said.  He slid back a bit, then stood up, looking down at Susan.  “Are you armed?”

Susan shook her head.  “No,” she said.  “I don’t have a civilian carry permit.”

“Well, at least I won’t get shot,” he said.  Then he shifted, gaining height, turning green.  “I am J’onn J’onzz.”

Kara rolled her eyes and muttered, “/:zhaolium zw rroskilahres :dhiviao/”

Susan picked up her beer and downed the rest of the bottle.

J’onn shifted back into his human form and sat back down.

“I feel like I forgot to do a presentation for class,” Alex said.

Kara laughed.

“So,” Susan said, looking at J’onn, “I take it you’re not from around here?”

“Mars,” J’onn said.  “I’m the last of my people.  We were slaughtered by the White Martians.  Monsters from the planet’s core.”

“Yeah,” Kara said.  “About that…”

J’onn looked over at her.  “What?”

“This all starts about twenty thousand years ago,” she said.  “The history is long, and I’m not going to go through all of it because most of it’s not terribly relevant, but twenty thousand years ago, Krypton, Mars and Tamaran were allies.  Together, the three worlds held dominion over a sphere of space almost fifty thousand light years across, and we were expanding.  At the time, Kryptonians had powers even under the light of a red sun.  Then the Guardians and their Green Lanterns came.  They broke the alliance, smashed our civilizations, and drove all three of us, Krypton, Mars and Tamaran back to pre-space flight technology.  They infected Kryptonians and Tamarans with a plague.  Kryptonians were left unable to fully process the less energetic light of Red Stars, while Tamarans were left unable to process anything less than ultraviolet light to fuel their powers.  Martians though, didn’t use light to power their abilities, so the Guardians split the race, dividing them into Green Martians, which were as they were before, and White Martians.”

“It took thousands of years of being trapped on our world, but Kryptonians eventually began to branch out, and spread through the galaxy again.  This time, not as conquerors or as empire builders, but as diplomats, scholars, and when necessary, as enforcers of the law. This was fine, except the Guardians noticed that Kryptonian physiology, already highly adaptive, was starting to overcome the plague.  Another four or five generations, and my people’s power would have been restored.”

“The Guardians wouldn’t allow that to happen.  Almost a century back, they contacted the Coluans of the Brainiac clan who Krypton had been employing for centuries as cybernetic administrators. They are beings who can exist within the cybernetic realm and mold it to their will, and who can also take physical form which is very nearly a match for a Kryptonian in yellow sunlight.  The Guardians hired them to murder Krypton, and to make it look like a suicide.”

“Minor changes here and there to mining plans, the introduction of slightly corrupted mining technology.  The core chain reaction was carefully planned and calculated.  My world was Murdered.

“At the same time, knowing that Earth was progressing rapidly and would likely reintroduce interstellar travel to Mars within a couple of centuries or so, the Guardians provoked the White Martians into a genocide of the Green Martians.

“The Tamarans, the least powerful of the three allies, have been kept tied up for centuries in never-ending civil wars, many provoked by the Guardians’ agents.

“The Guardians knew there might be a handful of survivors, but what they failed to take into account was how desperate some of us would be to save our planet and they certainly didn’t count on my Aunt Astra discovering a portion of the Anti-Life equation.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said, “the what?”

“The Anti-Life equation is a mathematical formula which robs all sentient life of the seven primal emotions.  Rage, greed, fear, will, hope, compassion and love.  Myriad is the anti-hope function.  Hope is a wellspring.  You cannot have will without hope.  Deprive a being of hope, and they become a mindless slave, devoid of any drive.  The Anti-Hope function is at the core of the Anti-life equation.  But Myriad can be broken, because it is just one of the seven functions.  If someone were to possess all seven, then they would have absolute control over all sentient life in the universe.”

“Your aunt has this?” Susan asked.

“Only part of it and without the other six functions, the Anti-Hope function is easily defeated.  Especially since it has to be constantly repeated into the minds of the victims to keep it fixed there.  Block the signal transmitting it, and you defeat Myriad, make people feel hope and you burn away Myriad’s ability to affect them.”

“The only way to protect against the full Anti-Life equation is to have its opposite, the life equation, permanently imprinted on your mind.”

“In the timeline that I’m from, J’onn died to protect my and Superman’s minds. He used his telepathic abilities to imprint us, but the strain of the effort killed him.  Fortunately, I still carry that protection, and I’ve since found a way to imprint Superman without requiring a Martian to do so.”

“Well, that’s certainly good news,” J’onn said.

“You have no idea,” Kara said.  “Thirteen years ago, I went on a blind date.  The guy ditched me after about fifteen minutes, but I heard that a flight to Geneva, the flight Alex was on, was having engine trouble.  I left the bar and barely managed to catch the plane. It was sloppy.  Otto Bender bridge was damaged and had to be closed for nearly three weeks while it was resurfaced and recertified for traffic.  An engine fell off and the debris crashed through the roof of a store, causing a fire that burned a strip mall to the ground, and it took them nearly a month to fish the plane out of the middle of National City Bay.  Two days later, the DEO shot me out of the sky, and I woke up locked in Kryptonite handcuffs, and found out Alex was a member of the DEO and met ‘Hank Henshaw’ for the first time.”

“I made mistakes,” Kara said, closing her eyes.  “So many mistakes.”  She started talking, telling them everything, from her first fight with Vartox, through the moment she woke up after carrying Fort Rozz into space. Somewhere around the Black Mercy, she felt Alex take her hand, squeezing it gently as the tears flowed down Kara’s face as she described the life slipping from Astra’s body.  Then there was Red Kryptonite, and Cadmus, and Non deploying Myriad, and her carrying Fort Rozz into space.  She’d barely covered a year of the future, and she could see the exhaustion on everyone’s face.

“Cadmus was bad,” she said, “but it was almost a distraction.  We spent all that time fighting it, fighting to protect the alien refugees, not knowing Fort Rozz was still the real danger.”

“What about dad?” Alex asked.

Kara shook her head.  “I…  I killed him.”  She ignored the soft gasp from Alex.  “Cadmus has done things to him, turned him into a cyborg, twisted his mind.  He showed up with a lump of Kryptonite embedded in his chest, and destroyed the CatCo building. He killed James and Cat.  Winn survived because he was working at the DEO as an agent by that point.  I tried Alex, I tried everything, but after he killed Eliza…  I knew he wouldn’t want to live like that, and when he started for you, I ended it.”

She took her hand out of Alex’s and picked up a napkin, wiping the tears off her face.  “I don’t think you ever forgave me,” she said.  “I know you tried, but I think it was just too much, and there wasn’t time. We’d barely finished burying the dead when the Guardians arrived.”  She shook her head.  “They got here while we were literally still putting out the fires from Cadmus.  We didn’t know they were here at first, but then the Third Army appeared, and everything just went straight to hell.”

“They decided that humans would be the basis for the Third Army.  It was like an infection.  One of them would touch a human, and the conversion would take seconds.  By the time it was over, nearly two thirds of the population was just gone.  India was empty, most of China, huge swaths of the rest of the world.  When we broke the power source of the Third Army, everyone who’d been converted just crumbled to dust.”

“That’s when Darkseid hit us,” she said.  “He’d been sitting out there, waiting at the edge of the Solar system. The fights were fast, hard, brutal. Alex and Maggie took down Granny Goodness, which… Be impressed.  She’s the one who killed Superman.”  Kara turned and looked at Alex.  “You didn’t make it though.  Either of you.”

She turned to Susan.  “You held the DEO longer than anyone thought possible.  They had to send Kalibak himself to break down the doors.”

“In the end, we lost.  Darkseid had found Fort Rozz and Myriad.  That had given him everything he needed to finish deriving the Anti-Life equation. Sara, Barry, and I, along with a dozen others, spent the next nine years doing everything we could to stop them, but in the end, we knew the only way to stop the war was to prevent the war from ever happening, and the only way to do that, was to prevent Myriad from ever being deployed.”

“Sara was the captain of a Time Ship called the Waverider.  The original Captain had died in the war.  We had a White Martian on our side.  It was enough.  They brought me back to last September, the night I moved into this apartment.  The Martian used a telepathic booster to allow her to tear my consciousness from my future self’s body and force it to merge with my younger self.”

“That’s… quite a story, Ms. Danvers,” J’onn said.

“You don’t believe it,” Kara said.

“You have to admit, it’s a lot to swallow,” J’onn said.

“It’s the part about the White Martian, isn’t it?” Kara asked.

“That and the part about the Guardians of the Universe.”

Kara nodded.

“What if I could provide you with proof?” Kara asked.

“That would be a good start,” J’onn said.

“Konex,” Kara said.

“Yes, Lady Kara,” the robot said as it decloaked.

“Contact Kolex.  I need the caskets.”

“Yes, Lady Kara.”

A moment later, there was a bright glow in the empty corner where Konex usually hovered when in stealth mode, and the robot drifted over and picked up a large featureless white case off the floor, and carried it over to the table, setting it down in the middle. Kara reached up and pressed her hand to the top, and the surface glowed briefly where she touched it, then the top split lengthwise down the case, and the upper half of the case folded down, half on each side of the bottom, revealing three smaller cases.  Each of them was hexagonal, with solid end caps connected by a translucent center section.  Inside each was what looked like an old-style lantern, and an ornately-carved signet ring. One of them was a deep, angry red, another was the bright, brilliant blue of the sky on a new day, and the last was a soft, warm violet that felt like safety and home.

J’onn, one moment, was sitting at the table, and the next he was standing five feet back from his chair, eyes fixed on the red case as if it might explode at any moment.

“What are you doing with that?” he asked.

Kara looked up at him.  “My best to never take it out of the case,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have it on this planet,” he said.

“I agree,” Kara said, “but we’ve both done things we aren’t proud of J’onn. That’s one of mine.”

“Um…" Susan said, “either of you care to fill in the unenlightened?”

Kara nodded.  “Sit down, J’onn.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he returned to his seat.

“The Green Lantern Corps is one of nine different factions that have similar abilities,” Kara said.  “Eight of those factions use rings as the focus for their powers.  The ninth uses a staff.  These are power rings and their power batteries.”

“The violet one is one of the Star Sapphire rings, created by the Zamarons and bears no connection to the Guardians of the Universe.  The Blue Lantern Rings were created by Ganthet and Sayd, who had broken away from the Guardians and lack the back doors and other traps built into the Green Lantern Rings.  The Red Rings were created by the demon Atrocitus, forged from pure rage and christened in blood.”

Kara took a deep breath, tearing her eyes away from the red case.  “There are seven base emotions common to all sentient life.  Anger, desire, fear, will, hope, compassion and love.  Each emotion is connected with a color.  Red for anger and rage, orange for desire or avarice, yellow for fear, green for willpower, blue for hope, indigo for compassion, and violet for love. Hope is the strongest of them all, but impossible to wield without will.  Red rage, and the violet light of love are the extreme ends of the spectrum. The further you move from the center, from green, the more the rings can influence the person who wields them.”

“I have these, because I can wield them.  Red, Blue, Violet.” She looked up, right at J’onn.  “If I put on one of these rings and I use the telepathic link to show you what I’ve seen, will you believe me?”

“And if I say no?”

Kara looks over at Alex.  “If I open the violet case, that ring will not even hesitate,” she says, before turning back to J’onn.  “That would be on your head.”

“Wait,” Alex said, “what do you mean?”

“The rings,” Kara said.  “They chose the person who best embodies the emotion they channel.  If I open that violet case, that ring will go straight for you.”

“Me?” Alex said.

Kara nodded.  “I have seen you on the edge of destruction, seen you fighting as you were literally torn apart and in all that, the one thing that never faltered was your love.” She reached up, putting her hands on the violet cask.  “But I wouldn’t wish that on you.”

“What do you mean?” Alex asked.

“The further you get from the center of the spectrum, the greater the influence the ring can have on you.  Love is a powerful emotion.  It can overwhelm you, consume you just as easily as rage, if you let it.”

“You’ve worn one?” Alex asked.

“A violet ring?  Yes.” Kara said.  “It was no more pleasant than the red ring.  Not for me.”

“No,” J’onn said.  “No. If you wear the ring, Kara, that’s enough.”

“Now wait a minute,” Alex said.  “If that thing hurts her-“

Kara reached over and put her hand on Alex’s.  “I’m not going to wear the violet ring,” she said.  Alex relaxed, and Kara reached up, touching the Blue Lantern Emblem on the blue case.  The top slid off, and the blue ring lifted up out of the case, hovering for a moment until Kara reached up and took it gently, sliding it on her finger.

“Kara Zor-El Danvers of Krypton and Earth,” a loud voice echoed through the room, “you have the ability to instill great hope.”

Blue light poured out of the ring, quickly covering Kara from the neck down. The outfit was not so different from her regular Supergirl costume.  The parts of the suit that were normally red were replaced with white, the yellow trim on the El coat of arms was black, the blue was brighter, more vivid, and the Blue Lantern emblem sat above and to the right of the El coat of arms.

Kara pointed the ring at the Blue Power Battery.

“In fearful day.  In raging night.  With strong hearts full, our souls ignite.  When all seems lost in the war of light, look to the stars, for hope burns bright.”

It was close to 2 AM by the time the rings and their power batteries were safely back at Sanctuary and Alex and Susan left.  J’onn lingered, still sitting at her table, holding a mug of coffee and staring into the black liquid as if it held the answers to all his questions. Kara walked from the door back over to the cupboard, and dug out a pack of Chocos from behind a box of vanilla wafers.

“You going to sit there all night?” she asked as she sat the cookies on the table and slid them over to him.

He sighed.  “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she replied.

He shook his head.  “No, it’s not.  I... I’ve gotten so used to mistrusting people, to having to hide who and what I am.  I hurt you after I promised Jeremiah-“

“J’onn,” Kara said, “it’s okay.”  She reached out and covered his wrist with her hand.  “You and Alex…  Look, I loved my father.  Zor-El was wonderful, he really was, and Jeremiah was too, but in the time I knew you in that other timeline, you were more of a father to me than either of them. Watching you die sent me to some really dark places.  Before that, I’d only killed six people.  None of them gave me a choice.  After you died, I walked into the armory and I put on that fucking ring and I let my rage out.  I lost it. I tore through entire divisions of Apokoliptians and Parademons and I didn’t leave anyone alive.  I did things, horrible, horrible things.  It was like the Red Kryptonite all over again, only I was stronger, more powerful, and I was able to direct my rage at the people I *wanted* to hurt.”

“I did it because it was easier to hold on to the rage than to live through the grief of losing another father.  I did it because I was afraid that if I let myself feel *that*, I would never come back from it.  Alex, before she died, she talked me into taking off the ring.  Talked me into letting one of the Blue Lanterns cleanse me of its power.  But even the blue ring couldn’t take away my anger, my fear, and my grief.”

“You have known Alex for two years.  You’re closer to her than you want to admit.   You already care about her like she’s your daughter.  But me, I deliberately held you at arm’s distance, refused to tell you things that could have helped.  I did this. I gave you reason not to trust me. I thought it was for the best, but I was wrong.”

“The thing I’m having a hard time with, is you knew about the bomb,” he said.

“I did, and I was scared.  What if I’d done enough to make them decide to use a larger bomb, to make them not care if it looked like an accident?  I was terrified.  But everything hinged on being able to make contact with Astra, with convincing her not to deploy Myriad.  And I knew I’d been able to catch the plane before.  It was a risk, but I honestly believed it was less of a risk than sending Alex out into the field on any given mission.  And Supergirl is important.  That she’s out there helping, doing good.  If Myriad does get deployed, Supergirl and the hope she will inspire are the surest ways to protect this world.”

J’onn sat his coffee down, and tore open the pack of Choco’s, eating one of the cookies slowly.  “I really got to live out in the open?”

“As much as you wanted too,” Kara said.  “Honestly, you mostly stuck to your human form, but you were out there with me, J’onn J’onzz, flying through the skies of National City helping people.” Kara smiled as she reached over and took one of the cookies.  “They called you ‘The Martian Manhunter’.”

J’onn smiled.  “I like that,” he said.

“I know.  I swear I never told Cat that though.”

He laughed.  “She does like naming Superheroes, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Kara said.  “I-“ she stopped when she felt a faint vibration in her pocket.  She reached down, and pulled out the spy beacon.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

J’onn nodded.  “Kara…”

“Yes?”

“Be safe.”

Translated from the Kryptonian

,rao, i dovrrosh

Literal: Rao's Shadow

Semantic: Oh, hell

:zhaolium zw rroskilahres :dhiviao

Literal: Fucker who habitually seeks glory

Semantic: Fucking Drama Queen

[logh-icebergs]

Episode 21: The Battle of Doria Starzone, and...

Spring 797/488. En route toward Heinessen, Yang’s fleet encounters Baghdash, a supposed deserter who is very obviously there to assassinate Yang—not before taking a nap, though, which gives Schenkopp the chance to lock him in deep sleep mode while Yang and co. make pretty quick work of the 11th fleet, which was sent to intercept them. Instead of the dishonor of surrender, the commander of the 11th fleet chooses to fight until all but a handful of his soldiers have been killed, and then commits suicide. Meanwhile on Heinessen, Admiral Greenhill’s whole “if I didn’t lead these young’uns bad things would happen” schtick proves rather pointless when, despite Greenhill urging restraint, the unit sent to break up a peaceful protest ends up inciting a riot that kills 20,000 people, including the organizer, Representative Jessica Edwards.

Julian and Yang

Close your mouth, Julian, a bug will fly in. Or possibly a bird or small spacecraft.

Julian said he would protect Yang back when he was first learning to shoot, and a real opportunity presents itself for the first time when Baghdash shows up on his mission to assassinate Yang. Schenkopp forestalls Baghdash’s plans in pretty undramatic (but hilarious) fashion, adjusting his tank bed to keep him asleep for the whole battle (hey, look at that worldbuilding about tank beds from episode 1 having actual plot payoff!); and when Baghdash wakes up to find the 11th fleet annihilated, he pragmatically offers his loyalty to Yang, who he now believes will be the ultimate victor.

Feel familiar? This is essentially the same scene as when Reinhard gave Ferner to Oberstein, recast with Alliance personnel.

Yang seems to feel he has a good read on Baghdash’s self-preservation instincts and has no qualms trusting him; he even temporarily bequeaths his own gun to Baghdash, since he himself never even carries it. 

This is a move Yang has pulled before, acquiring personal loyalty by putting perhaps undue amounts of trust in people—he did this with Schenkopp and the Rosen Ritter when he relied on them to infiltrate Iserlohn.

Baghdash “jokingly” points the gun at Yang before lowering it and saluting, which leads to this masterful piece of cinematography. 

My, they grow up so fast...

To appreciate the context of this scene, let’s back up and take a moment to peruse a photo album of the last year and a half of Julian’s life.

From making Yang tea and keeping house for him on Heinessen… (Episode 3, early 796)

...to trotting earnestly around after him in Thernusen… (Episode 10, mid 796)

...to getting to tag along to Iserlohn as an orderly… (Episode 16, late 796)

...to pledging to protect Yang if necessary… (Episode 17, early 797)

...to now. Mid 797, fifteen years old. Threatening to shoot a man for the crime of possibly contemplating killing someone Yang.

It’s impossible to talk about Julian without talking about his role in Yang’s life, because such a huge part of his own conception of his identity has to do with struggling to figure out exactly what that role is. We’ve seen his hero-worship manifest as copying Yang’s style and body language in the past, and he eagerly soaks up Yang’s lectures about battle tactics; but at the same time ever since his very first introduction it’s been clear that Julian’s own goals and skills are distinct from—even opposite—Yang’s: he enjoys cooking and cleaning while Yang is hopelessly lazy; he dreams of becoming a soldier while Yang dreams of escaping the military; he excels at physical combat while Yang apparently can’t hit the broad side of a barn.

These differences are part of why Julian sees himself as serving a purpose—he can do the various physical labor that doesn’t come naturally to Yang—but they’ve also introduced tension into their relationship starting way back in episode 3. 

After responding to Julian’s expressed wish to become a soldier by ranting about how much he dislikes both soldiers and the war, Yang tells a rather downcast Julian that they’ll continue the discussion some other time. The only person who’s happy in this shot is Gensui, smiling smugly in the corner. We see you Gensui. Stop laughing at the humans’ drama.

The point of this little Julian Retrospective isn’t to show a transformation from meek housekeeper into badass soldier; on the contrary, Julian’s ambitions to join the military have been a constant of his character from the beginning, and so has his instinct to rush to Yang’s defense physically.

Did you think I could pass up a chance to show my favorite moment from episode 10 again? I told you this gif never gets old. Hang in there Julian, your moment will come!

But while Yang’s overt disapproval of Julian’s chosen path creates some background tension between them, we’ve never actually seen Julian be anything but deferential and eager to please in his direct interactions with Yang.

Until now.

I’m obsessed with Yang’s change of expression here. He goes from an initial (rather impressed) “holy shit Julian means business” reaction to, when Baghdash appeals to him, a more solemn “oh yeah it’s probably my job here to make sure Julian doesn’t actually shoot the guy” face.

Getting over his initial surprise, Yang adopts extremely relaxed body language as if to intentionally counter Julian’s rigid, aggressive pose and diffuse the tension. But Julian is not having it. The key line here is his blunt contradiction of Yang: “Riyuu wa arimasu!”—“There *is* a reason!”—which, while still in polite speech, is delivered with authority and without any markers of humility or deference.

Julian is there to protect Yang from a threat as he perceives it, in his own way, even if that means going against Yang’s own view of the situation and preferred way to handle it. This moment emphasizes that while Julian would—perhaps literally—kill for Yang, he is not trying to fashion himself into a mini-Yang, or even to stuff himself in a box labeled “Yang’s ideal protégé.” His identity is deeply tied to Yang but not erased by him.

Of course, Julian may be the one pointing a gun, but the actual authority in the room still resides with Yang—as becomes clear when Yang finally, laughing, orders Julian to stand down and dismisses Baghdash.

The timing of Yang’s laugh, after several seconds of silently letting Julian stand there looking badass, makes it feel more like a calculated strategy to diffuse the situation than something spontaneous.

The verb form here is actually the causative, “Hito-goroshi wa sasetakunai yo.”—“I don’t want to make you murder anyone.”

Far from acting upset with Julian’s theatrics, Yang seems some combination of proud and just kind of tickled. But despite Yang’s smile and his explanation of why he’s not worried about Baghdash, Julian’s expression remains angry; he may have argued further, but they’re interrupted by news from Heinessen... 

Jessica

The rest of this episode is much less fun than watching Julian level guns at people. When 200,000 citizens gather in a stadium for a peaceful rally protesting the National Salvation Military Council’s takeover of their government, the council sees it as a challenge and sends a unit in to break it up and “restore order.” This leads to absolutely chilling scenes where the leader of that unit (whose name I neither know nor care about, fuck this guy) attempts to show that true power comes through violence by making an example of ten random people.

The question of whether there’s something inherently righteous about being willing to die for a cause is one that pervades the whole episode (and more broadly is one of the recurring themes of the show). I’ve talked before about how Yang is differentiated from many of the other Alliance commanders by his hatred of rhetoric about death being noble and honorable—in his tea speech in episode 6, for example, he motivates his soldiers to fight not for the glory of dying for a good cause but so that they can live to drink more good tea. This same contrast is again underlined by the speeches that Admiral Legrange and Yang give to their fleets before the battle in this episode.

Just like the asshole violently intimidating the crowd at the rally, this speech conflates courage with self-sacrifice, to the extent of willingly giving your life.

Also reinforced here is Yang’s belief in personal freedom and self-determination as the most important ideals, over allegiance to any particular nation or government. He’s not fighting against the military coup because the former Alliance government was so great, but because (as he told Schenkopp in episode 19) he sees the oppressive rule by force of the NSMC as worse.

It’s Jessica, the organizer of the rally, who delivers the most eloquent and impassioned critique of this equation of violence and death with righteousness; in response to the attacks against civilians she quickly steps forward to intervene:

This is a beautiful speech, but it has the effect of angering the asshole commander so much that he lashes out violently against her, which ultimately escalates into an all-out riot. It’s brutal and horrible to watch, and in the end over 20,000 people have been killed. Including Jessica. 

Obviously Jessica is right on the front lines of her own battle. I love this line, as she steps forward out of the crowd to confront the military force: her “koko ni imasu” echoes the accusations of “doko ni imasu?” (“where are you?”) she leveled at Trunicht in her speech in episode 3. Unlike Trunicht and the other politicians, she is right there.

One thing to note about Jessica’s death is that unlike her fiancé Lapp, she is not fridged—her death is very much about her, her own principles and resistance against the oppression being carried out in her society. And while she has a semi-romantic history with Yang, this riot is not a plot device to somehow change his plans or how he approaches fighting the military council. In fact after we see him first react to the news, he never brings it up again. Jessica’s story is about her fight, not someone else’s.

History

Which brings us back to Yang’s office, where Frederica has just interrupted Julian and Yang’s discussion of (argument about?) Baghdash to tell Yang about the riot and Jessica’s death.

Until this moment, the show’s narrator has confined himself to either telling us facts about dates, locations, number of casualties, etc., or making vague, general claims about the nature of war. What he tells us here is different: “They say Yang Wenli said not a single word.” This is neither a fact of public record nor general academic philosophizing. It’s specific personal information which we can see, since we’re watching the scene unfold behind the narration, that only one person other than Yang himself could know. Hmm.

Stray Tidbits

Schenkopp spilling coffee on his uniform in a (pretty transparent?) attempt to distract Baghdash from inquiring further about Frederica is a cute callback to his first introduction, in which he flings a pot of coffee all over a bunch of random assholes who were yelling at a waitress for defiling their uniforms.

I cannot overstate how hilarious I find Dusty’s signature strategy of fucking with enemy fleets by alternately retreating and advancing. It’s adorable, smart, and strangely erotic all at the same time. Dusty, you are the best, never change.

I love the worldbuilding of all the random battle jargon that flies by in the background of this fight. I'm gonna qualify any directions I give from now on with "relative to the standard galactic plane."

You know you wanted this reaction gif, and we are here to give the people what they want. As long as what they want is cute Julian gifs, at least.

[berniesrevolution]

I've been somewhat confused by some of your commentary in the wake of Ossoff's defeat in Georgia. This blog supported him pretty strongly before the race ended, but have since been very critical of his campaign; that resources spent on his should have rather been spent on other races like the one in Montana. What's your actual stance on Ossoff as a candidate?

Ossoff was an empty suit with ads that sounded like he was trying to sell an online college.

He didn’t want to define himself, so the right defined him. 

He didn’t say he was explicitly against Trump, He didn’t say what he was for in any wide-reaching public forum(a debate on a local station for a special election seat is not wide-reaching). He let people just think what they wanted about him, rather than making a stand for anything. 

If we are to learn anything, it is that we need a flexible platform for Democrats to run on in order to be elected.

- @theliberaltony

Ossoff campaign is also a good example to explain what “Identity Politics” beyond what people usually think.

Most people think identity politics is about race or gender but it can be about almost anything. In this case, it was about personality. By not having a substantive message Ossoff allowed the campaign to devolve into personality based identity politics and left him vulnerable to character assassinations.

A similar phenomenon is what caused Hillary Clinton’s favorable to sink so low. If you base your campaign on your “credentials and experience” it leaves open the possibility of people taking negative aspects of your experience and turning it against you.

Bernie and Jeremy Corbyn avoid this completely by avoiding the option of making their movements about them or their personality. When faced with character attacks they instantly pivot to their policy vision and how badly they want to implement it, thus their popularity remains strong.

“Bernie aren’t socialists anti-american?”

Bernie: “The billionaire class is ruining this country.”

“Corbyn why are you a terrorist sympathizer?”

Corbyn: “We should nationalize the railways.”

“Bernie you critiqued Obama once, do you hate blacks?”

Bernie: “Healthcare is a right of all people and we must pass Medicare-for-all!”

“Corbyn why are you destroying the Labour party?”

Corbyn: “The NHS must be defended and expanded. No more privatization!”

- @delendarius

[coolculturegram]

ARTIST WENDY RED STAR WANTS TO CHANGE HOW YOU THINK OF NATIVE AMERICAN ART

Wendy Red Star is a Native American multimedia artist who uses photography and juxtaposition to re-think notions of identity, culture, and history. Often evoking a sense of satire, her striking photographs combine elements of Crow culture with traditionally Western American symbolism, questioning the fluidness of perceptions and the shifting definitions of our cultures. Wendy’s subversive work and dedication to “pulling the veil back from history” place her in a unique position to create meaningful works that align with Cool Culture’s mission to help diversify art spaces.

What were your first introductions to the arts?

I had many introductions to the arts. Growing up, I was surrounded by the work of my uncle, Kevin Red Star. My grandmother Amy Bright Wings Red Star - she made mostly traditional pieces. I used to spend my days watching her – she had a very serious studio practice. All of these were entry points for me to experience the arts.

My background is diverse, my mother is Irish and my father’s side is Crow Indian. This background has really influenced what I create and how I navigate specific spaces.

I used think that to be an artist you had to be someone who could draw very well, but my experiences have since changed that. There were so many entry points for my exposure to the arts. It wasn’t until I was in college that I began taking a 3D design class and I realized art could be so much more. There are so many different ways to be an artist and practice your creativity.

With my background growing up Crow on the reservation, stepping out of my comfort zone into college and learning more about my cultural identity was challenging.

This is what I’m interested in – that weird gray area where cultures meet, peeling back the colonist lens and really diving into the truth of it. So much of native history isn’t spoken about or learned, I feel like as an artist I’m really straddling the grey zone. There’s so much that isn’t taught and the few things that are are usually presented through a colonial standard.

How has your experience as Native person impacted your art?

To be a Native Person, especially a native artist, sometimes you are forced into the role of an educator. My father used to play dumb when people used to ask him questions about being Native. He would play into the stereotypes to shake them up. I understood why he did it, but for me, I think my role as an artist is different. If I’m given the chance the educate others, I’ll do it.

The reality is that most people don’t think about indigenous people; they don’t know that they still live and exist. I try to have empathy for others. Their ignorance is learned; it’s pervasive. I’m happy to educate.

What is like to be a Native artist now and in this climate?

It’s an exciting time to be an artist because I’m really talking about history and how it impacts things today. It’s a good time to be creating because things are coming up to the surface now, history and realities that have been buried. The curtain is being pulled back in a way. I feel confident in the work that I’m doing, that I can make a real impact. So many people just don’t have the history and they don’t know it. I’m making work that reflects on my history and [the] knowledge that I have, but a lot of people still don’t get it.

I felt pressure in graduate school to conform into creating work that was more understandable to some people. I remember a professor coming around the room and commenting on people’s work and making critiques, and when he got to mine he said, “I have nothing to say about this work, maybe don’t make work about your identity.” That was hard for me. But I felt like the work that I was creating was necessary and still is necessary. The more artists who create work that focuses on these topics pushes them farther into the mainstream. And that’s needed.

What are your views on cultural appropriation, especially cultural appropriation of Native cultures?

The coming age of online Native activism did a lot of great things. There’s been a growing awareness of cultural heritage and about many Native issues. With cultural appropriation, I really want people to try to dig deeper, to really see and understand what cultural markers they are associating with a specific group of people. We have to dig deeper and really understand that there’s fluidness to much of the culture that we are experiencing today. We are so quick to say “this is our culture,” or “this is that culture,” then we need to dig deeper and really try to figure out the history of these things.

With cultural appropriation, and especially cultural appropriation in art, I just want to know where things came from – it’s always a lot more complicated and combined than we think. I remember doing research about the Dutch Prints popularized in Africa and learning how these colonial prints were renowned as African, and have become such a clear cultural marker today. There’s probably so much more re-appropriation than we realize. I think we need to keep asking ourselves where things came from – I find that really fascinating. I think that taking over another’s culture and erasing one’s identity is the problem.

How has being a parent impacted your work?

My [ten year old] daughter Beatrice is actually really involved in my work. We’ve started collaborating together, doing tours together at museums. We started really working together in 2014, [when she was 7]. I was working on a project and she was in the room, drawing over the extra copies of images I had created. I ended up incorporating around 20 of her drawings into the project. She’s seen me give tours, and she ended up asking me, “Can I do this with you?” She’s given tours for kids at The Denver Art Museum and she created an outfit from her own design for the tour– it’s been great for her to feel comfortable in museums and to have this experience.

As an artist, how do you feel about the recent threats to major arts funding like the National Endowment for the Arts?  

I’m very lucky to be sustaining myself purely on my art and through the use of grants. I think an attack like this really shows [how] important the arts really are, and it’s been amazing seeing how so many organizations and people are springing into action and defending the arts. I think we’ll be able to see this through.

All this just goes to show how important the arts are and have been throughout history – we can’t take it for granted, and we have to know that it’s the backbone of our society.

[hub-pub-bub]

Maybe you just want to write a book and get it into people’s hands, but there are more dangers out there than you might realize.

To set the stage, I’ll go back to a recent event: the Amélie Wen Zhao controversy. You could be forgiven for not having heard about it, given that it’s only a big deal if you closely follow the world of young adult novels, and in particular the young adult communities on Twitter and Tumblr. I’ll do my best to summarize what happened.

Zhao is a young woman, born in Beijing, raised in Paris, educated in New York City and currently living there. She scored a 6-figure book deal with Delacorte Press, the first book of which was to be Blood Heir. Some reviewers got advance review copies. Then, a couple of things happened: Twitter user @LegallyPaige posted a tweet (since deleted) accusing Zhao of taking screenshots of tweets made by people who disliked her or her book, and of stalking and possibly harassing critics; marketing descriptions of the book, as well as tweets by advance reviewers like Ellen Oh, suggested that the book was racially insensitive as it focuses on an indentured servitude system with parallels to American slavery. There were also accusations of anti-blackness based on the treatment of a character who was racially ambiguous, at best, as well as talk of plagiarism that, as far as anyone who has read the book can tell, are not really credible.

Again, if you don’t run in these circles this might all sound like a pretty minor controversy–a mild storm that Zhao could easily weather. But YA Twitter doesn’t work that way. It is a microcosm of Twitter as a whole, dominated by clout-chasing “influencers” and full of cliques who follow what their preferred influencers say. If a book is presumed to be problematic, or the author presumed to be bad, it is a small matter to organize mass review-bombing on Goodreads, Amazon, or anywhere else one can have a say. If you speak out on behalf of someone accused in this way, you are inviting legions of opposing followers to come after you. The old adage is true: the only way to win is not to play the game.

Zhao herself chose not to play the game, as well. She wrote a thoughtful apology letter in which she announced the cancellation (or at least postponement) of Blood Heir. I’m not here to take issue with that decision, as it is a highly personal one. My purpose is to critique these cycles more generally.

All cards on the table: I’m a white man. I consider myself anti-racist as well as a feminist. I recognize the vast structural oppression that exist essentially everywhere, as well as the specific history of anti-black racism in the US. I am always on the side of social justice, which is why I think it’s necessary to call out the excesses of such movements.

For perspective, of course, in this case nobody died, nobody lost their livelihood. Zhao’s publisher stands by her and she will likely publish other books, and possibly Blood Heir itself after some revisions. What happened to her isn’t censorship, nor even what I would consider abusive. It’s more unfortunate than anything else.

What is concerning to me is the tendency to manifest an online mob on an extremely thin basis, and that the people who have large enough followings to spark these controversies know the power they wield, and don’t seem to have much sense of responsibility about it. Consider that this particular incident was sparked by an essentially anonymous accusation of screenshotting–an activity which is petty, at worst–and spiraled into allegations of racism.

As a writer, I do think it is very important to be sensitive to the issues of the world around me. It is entirely possible, even likely, to fall into unintentional racism or sexism. The best of intentions do not necessarily lead to a piece of writing that is free from the biases and inequities of our world. It is important to write mindfully, and to be careful not to reproduce oppressive cultural messages. This can take many forms, though. Some people object to depictions of racism, violence against women, and other horrors in the first place. Even if the purpose of portraying them is to critique them and make clear how awful those things are, there are readers who would rather not encounter such material in the first place. It is an understandable position to not want to read something like that, as it can mean having to face bigotry in fiction that you get enough of in your daily life. People who don’t want to read books like that are absolutely welcome not to!

Where I take issue is the idea that because someone doesn’t like a particular book, no one should be allowed to read it–that it should be withdrawn altogether. The comparisons to historically ineffective book bans apply pretty well here. In addition, it just seems like a big waste of energy. In a country where Donald Trump is President and is actively enabling literal Nazis to march in the streets and kill people, spending a lot of energy attacking a book that may not have anything all that wrong with it seems totally absurd. Yes, people can care about more than one thing at a time–but time and energy are finite resources.

I used the phrase “manufactured outrage” in the title, and that was with good reason. I have been around long enough to know that most of the time, these controversies are not drummed up out of a genuine concern for people who have been harmed, but to raise one’s own profile, and to demonstrate power as an influencer. (Note that all you really need to be an “influencer” is a lot of social media followers!) The emergence of the “#MeToo” movement, which has achieved some real accomplishments in terms of dislodging sexual predators from positions of power, has also put wind in the sails of online controversy-seekers. Everyone wants to be first in line to “cancel” the next “problematic” public figure. A writer faced with such a backlash might be inclined to simply ride it out, and hope the furor dies down after a few days. It usually does, but there is another problem: media coverage.

Only 15% of Americans actually use Twitter, and an even smaller share of those use it regularly. It would not have much influence over public debate except for one thing: it is massively popular among journalists and freelance writers, almost all of whom have column space to fill. Going out and investigating is difficult and expensive; mining Twitter for the latest clickbait topic, by comparison, is easy and free. Thus, these relatively tiny kerfuffles (consisting of a few hundred or a few thousand people, at most) get elevated to the level of national or even international discourse. Dozens of articles get written about online scuffles involving handfuls of people, and you’d think there was a real crisis brewing. The reality is just that journalists and freelancers tend to be Extremely Online (to use the Twitter jargon) and know that drama pulls clicks. This is a big part of the “manufacturing” of the outrage. We’re generally not talking about mass movements, here. “#MeToo” is a mass movement. “#Cancel[WriterOfTheWeek]” isn’t.

Another part of the “manufacturing” is that these outrages often emerge from circles that are not just insincere, but actively malevolent. Imageboard site 4chan and *chan sites of similar formats have forums where the entire point is identifying targets and organizing social media outrage against them. They tap into social justice circles and plant whisper campaigns that a particular person is problematic in some severe way–maybe the target is a sexual predator, or plagiarized parts of their book. If this can get picked up by a prominent influencer, the mob does the rest. Likewise, infighting is fomented by inventing wedge issues, a couple recent examples being “Santa shouldn’t be a man” and “pedophiles belong in the LGBT+ umbrella.” Yes, those are real things stirred up by bad actors and I did not make them up.

The point of all this is that it can be easy and exciting to focus on drama, to be an active participant in fomenting it. It might even feel good to play a role in getting someone to pay penance for their perceived wrongdoing. But it’s hard to say that any of it makes the world a better place, or actually serves any of the causes social justice is meant to. In Zhao’s case, one would think that her identity as an immigrant, a woman, and a person of color would bless her with the benefit of the doubt–but those things are instead liabilities, as she is held to a much higher standard than, say, the middle-aged white men who churn out sexist drivel every year.

A common piece of writing advice is to simply ignore critics. Critics will always find something to hate–it is essentially their job. That’s still true, to a great extent. It is sometimes necessary to publicly respond to criticism, but the best way to handle that is to take the high road. Let people know that they are heard and you are taking their advice into consideration–and then, decide for yourself what that means, and how it should change your work, if at all.

If you write a book condemning injustice, and people attack you and say you aren’t condemning it correctly, odds are there’s not actually anything wrong with your book–just the people doing the attacking.

Post written by J. D. Huffman so direct all fanmail to him <3

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

More women are running for president than ever. But there’s no one way to do it. This is the second article in a series exploring the way that the female candidates in the 2020 race are navigating questions of identity, sexism and public critique.

As a child, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recalls being mesmerized by the jiggly arms of middle-aged women stuffing envelopes with political mailers. This is part of her stump speech — a thing you start to notice about Gillibrand is that she seems quite alive to the physicality of being a woman in the world. She talks about the haircuts she got that law firm bosses praised instead of her work, and the indignity of being underestimated by her first political opponent as “just another pretty face” (perhaps not coincidentally, also a humblebrag). In her 2014 book, she mentions her weight — and other people mentioning her weight — well over a dozen times.

Gillibrand might have thought that 2018’s “year of the woman” fervor would sweep along her presidential campaign. Her most high-profile political battles have been about the injustices — large and small — facing women. If voters know her, it’s likely for her fight with the Pentagon on military sexual assault (her reform bill was defeated in 2014) or for when she became “the senator from the state of #MeToo” when she was the first — though not the last — Democratic senator to call for Al Franken to resign.

Behind the crusading work for women is a pragmatic political career. Since her start in politics as an upstate New York congresswoman, Gillibrand evolved her position on guns and immigration. On the trail, Gillibrand talks a lot about how electable she is given the fact that she won 18 Trump-voting counties in her 2018 Senate campaign. But being electable in your home state in 2018 doesn’t necessarily mean you’re electable in a 2020 presidential primary. Gillibrand is currently polling at a dismal 0.5 percent average in polls. Something hasn’t clicked. It might be that Gillibrand’s attempt to mix her activist instincts with a moderate’s pragmatism is too odd a pairing for today’s Democratic Party.

***

New Hampshire’s highway medians were carpeted with purple lupine and clots of daisies when I caught Gillibrand on a swing through the state in mid-June. Six months into her campaign, she was still playing small venues like The Franklin Studio coffee shop in Franklin, New Hampshire. (Down the street was Granite State Hedgehogs, a purveyor of actual, factual hedgehogs.)

Mike and Pat Kane, retirees from northern Massachusetts, sat in the back of a small room filled with tchotchkes, waiting for Gillibrand to arrive. They hadn’t picked a candidate yet but were intrigued enough by Gillibrand to have made the drive from out of state. Pat described the couple as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative. “We’re not interested in the warriors,” Mike said, meaning Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

While she’s tried hard to make a splash in the overly crowded field, Gillibrand is still introducing herself to voters (her name recognition is in the middle of the pack among 2020 contenders). Gillibrand’s stump speech is heavy on biography, with quick homages to her politicking grandmother and her turkey-shooting mother before a mention of how foolish her 2008 congressional opponent was to launch attack ads on the pregnant mother of a toddler. (Later, Gillibrand told me that her strategy is to overcome media storylines by burrowing into the hearts and minds of as many early state voters as possible: “I have a chance to win them over regardless of what’s going on in the national narrative, so I can break through.”)

There isn’t really a mention of the #MeToo movement in Gillibrand’s stump speech, though she does cite Hillary Clinton’s “women’s rights are human rights” speech as the inspiration for the start of her political career. It’s a fraught reference masquerading as a banal one. In 2017, Gillibrand said Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency because of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. That, along with some of Gillibrand’s other outspoken statements during the height of the #MeToo movement, has in many ways backfired for her politically. Her Clinton comments raised the ire of both Clinton allies and party donors. One prominent Clinton adviser called Gillibrand a “hypocrite” for taking the “Clintons’ money, endorsements and seat,” a reference to the fact that Gillibrand was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2009 when she became secretary of state for President Obama.

Many traditional large-dollar donors in the party reacted adversely to Gillibrand’s Franken comments, and in an April campaign memo, her team acknowledged that her fundraising “was adversely impacted by certain establishment donors — and many online — who continue to punish Kirsten for standing up for her values and for women.” Gillibrand has continued to struggle with donations and only recently met the 65,000 individual donor threshold for the first debate. Inexperienced candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson both met the metric before Gillibrand.

Gillibrand’s “Brave Wins” slogan seems to reference her trailblazing on issues and her ability to weather harsh criticism (and to take on Trump). But in a primary that has increasingly become about “big idea” reimaginings of American institutions — the health care system, the Electoral College, consumer finance protections, college tuition and debt — she has gotten somewhat lost in the 24-person shuffle. While Gillibrand introduced a paid family leave act this year, it’s not one of the marquee issues of the primary campaign. Her most high-profile work is centered on concerns perceived as affecting women most — sexual harassment, sexual assault — but it’s fellow Democratic contender Sen. Kamala Harris who has most recently grabbed headlines for a plan that would place the burden of equal pay on companies rather than on under-compensated individuals (typically women). In some ways, the progressive drift of the party on issues of identity and gender leaves Gillibrand as part of a progressive pack rather than a leader on gender equality issues. Where Democratic candidates make the most splash seems to be on issues of the economy, often on capitalism itself. Gillibrand has adopted many of the new progressive ideas, but she hasn’t trailblazed on them.

Perhaps that’s why she’s tacking back to a posture of moderation. The bills that Gillibrand mentioned in New Hampshire aren’t necessarily flashy ones, but they have a specific audience in mind. “In the last Congress, I passed 18 bills with a Republican House, Senate and President signing them into law. Those are common-sense bills, like rural broadband, money for made-in-America manufacturing, money for small businesses — things that can actually make a difference in places like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,” she said.

Gillibrand had just finished her second event of the day at a bar in Plymouth and we sat across from each other at a high-top table. Earlier she had called herself “the most electable candidate” in the field and I asked Gillibrand whether she worried if the political environment had changed such that a liberal woman from New York is seen as too culturally far afield from swing voters in the Midwest. “Not at all. I think I’m perfect for those voters, in fact, because I’ve been representing those rural places in this climate for the past 10 years.”

When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.

“I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,” David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me. Her mistake, Paterson said, had been that she didn’t manage the ideological transition well in public. “You supervise your own evolution,” he said of politicians.

I was in New Hampshire on one of the last days of motorcycle week. Fairly or not, Trump has become associated with the biker community, at times hinting that they might serve as enforcers of a kind (for what and because of what is never clear). Heading to Gillibrand’s Plymouth bar event, I passed a “Live Free and Dine” sign and a gaggle of bikers. The roads were lousy with Harleys, too, which made the appearance of a white Audi with a Pod Save America “Friend of the Pod” bumper sticker on the road from Franklin to Plymouth all the more striking. Gillibrand’s proposed coalition is, if you are to believe her, Trump sympathizers and Democratic establishment liberals. Given the cultural and political divisions of America in 2019, it’s hard to imagine the two groups crossing into Gillibrand’s lane, whatever that lane is. As the senator might say with a pepped-up grin, “It’s so early.” She’s still hoping for her moment.

From ABC News:

[nickyschneiderus]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez parody accounts are all the rage on the right

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Of course, when the phrase first emerged in the 1700s, we didn’t have Twitter parody accounts.

By any measure, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has made an immediate and powerful impact on the American political scene. She has drawn the ire of the conservative media. She has sparred with Democratic politicians and media elites. As all true celebs must do, she appeared on a Twitch stream fundraiser for trans rights. And, oh yeah, she is working on policy.

In this day and age, it is difficult to point to one particular achievement that signals AOC has “arrived” in the pantheon of policial celebrity, but one way to tell that you’ve made it in 2019 is a rash of Twitter parody accounts using your picture as their avi.

Take, for instance, the emerging 2020 presidential field. There are a ton of Bernie Sanders parody accounts, thanks to his 2016 run. Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden all have their fair share. However, also-rans like Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, and John Hickenlooper have scarcely a parody account between them. No publicity is bad publicity, even terrible parodies.

Given Ocasio-Cortez meteoric rise to national prominence, it should come as no surprise that it takes little digging to find at least a dozen parody accounts that tweet regularly in the “voice” of AOC. Ocasio-Cortez parody accounts have become so prevalent that Twitter appears to have made a concerted effort to purge accounts that are being mistaken for AOC’s actual account by users. Two recent accounts were suspended yesterday by the social media giant.

The voice, as these conservative parodists would have it, is generally a conservative caricature of the left-wing lawmaker: communist, careless, and clueless.

You have @CortezOcasia, who uses their account to retweet other political parody accounts mocking liberal figures like Don Lemon and Nancy Pelosi. You’ve got the more straight-laced @RepOcasioNY14, who tries to make AOC seem even more left than she actually is by retweeting Cornell West videos and posting about doing socialism with Rihanna:

Nice work this election cycle @rihanna. We'll turn this place Socialist at all costs!! #workingman #struggles

— @Rep Ocasio-Cortez (@RepOcasioNY14) November 10, 2018

Then there’s @0casio2018 (that’s with a “zero” not an “O”) who imagines Ocasio-Cortez with a valley girl affect, adding “likes” and “umms” between airheaded comments and pie in the sky redistributive proclamations.

Lot's of talk about Trump like owning the gov't shutdown, how like arrogant, ugh! He's prez for 2 years and like thinks he OWNS gov't, I never like saw a receipt. I know he's rich, but I need like proof he owns the shutdown. #Ocasio2020 @BarrettBrief #socialismsaveslives

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@0casio2018) December 21, 2018

@2018_Ocasio doesn’t offer much actual parody, but rather uses the account to rehash the usual Fox News anti-socialist talking points: Venezuala, government overreach, and the rise of “PC culture.”

pic.twitter.com/4BURHBzfd2

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY14, PAC) (@2018_Ocasio) December 10, 2018

And of course, there’s @Crazy_AOC, who has amassed 12,000 followers with their wild-eyed AOC avi and non-stop shitposting of conservative memes.

Socialism. My precious. pic.twitter.com/M7Ye6HpnJC

— Crazy Ocasio-Cortez (@Crazy_AOC) January 21, 2019

pic.twitter.com/RntclnXVa2

— Crazy Ocasio-Cortez (@Crazy_AOC) January 21, 2019

pic.twitter.com/iav4STyald

— Crazy Ocasio-Cortez (@Crazy_AOC) January 15, 2019

For those not familiar with Twitter parody account culture, you might be asking yourself one key question: Why aren’t these accounts funny?

Unlike parody of accounts of fast food restaurants or meme hats, Twitter political parody accounts have other goals besides viral humor. On both sides of the aisle, many parody accounts are painfully unfunny. Instead, they offer an outlet for the user to anonymously complain about politics in opposition to their own. Not only does the user feel more comfortable posting under their parodic nome de plume, but like-minded users feel more comfortable sharing these posts, as evidence by their massive follower counts.

There are probably a number of reasons that an account named @PelosiLuvsDebt69 could garner orders of magnitude more followers than some random person tweeting political screeds as themselves. But the most obvious (next to mistaken identity) is that even if there are no jokes, the guise of parody makes the posts seem less angry.

It is also undeniable that satirical posts online have the power to sway this discourse. Jokes about AOC’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate on those who make over $10 million have morphed the discourse so much that many Trump supporters believe that she actually proposed a 70 percent tax rate on all income of all citizens.  

This betrays the real purpose of political parody accounts: it’s about ideology, not jokes.

Parody accounts prioritize politics over humor on the right and the left. Throughout the last two years, Democrats have gleefully spread tweets from accounts mocking President Donald Trump. Like their conservative counterparts, these are more about political point scoring than joke telling.

Nancy Pelosi is being controlled by the RADICAL LEFT who want to end family separation, pay federal workers and give people healthcare! I'm just waiting for permission to end the shutdown from my dominatrix Ann Coulter.

— Donald J. Drumpf (@RealDonalDrumpf) January 20, 2019

Generally, tweets from these accounts have more in common with an Aaron Sorkin “Have you no decency sir” monologue than a stand-up comedy set.

The tradition of political parody accounts being more about partisanship than punnery dates back well before Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the national stage. From @MexicanMitt to @InvisibleObama parody accounts have been a way for partisans to take shots at politicians for years.

Popular parody accounts of our current moment follow the same tack of fiery opinion rather than actual humor.

Trump era favorites like @RoguePotusStaff, @AltHomelandSec, and @HoarseWisperer have followed a similarly dry playbook and have been rewarded with similarly outsized follower counts. (Disclosure: The author has been blocked by @HoarseWisperer on Twitter).

If you want further proof that political parody accounts aren’t just about being funny, look at the people who run them. Non-political parody accounts are often thought of as an outlet or even a potential opportunity for professional comedians. The man behind @LosFelizDaycare is a professional comedy writer and the alter-ego of @Seinfeld2000 is a TV producer. By contrast, political Twitter parodists come from all walks of life, including airline copywriters and government bureaucrats. The goal often seems to be blowing off a little political steam than gaining writerly esteem.

All of this is also true of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez parody accounts. Though the form of the tweets varies from “dank” memes to tossed off one-liners to vitriolic Fox News links, the critiques are the same. An AOC parody account tends to take the same lines of political attack that you see on Fox News. They go after the freshman congresswoman for being too far to the left, too unrealistic, too young, and too female.

The accounts share the same distrust and distaste for socialism, progressivism, and the stereotypical hallmarks of the millennial generation. For these tweeters, AOC stands in for a generation of people looking for a free hand out who don’t yet comprehend the sophisticated machinations of the world around them. 

The Daily Dot interviewed @AlexandraOcasi6 and @aocpress (both user prefers to remain anonymous) about what motivates them to maintain their version of an AOC parody. Since this interview, @AlexandraOcasi6 has been suspended by Twitter, along with other AOC parody accounts including @Cortez4Prez2020. The Daily Dot reached out to Twitter for comment but has not heard back.

With their account, @AlexandraOcasi6 posted a mix of jokes and conservative criticism of the congresswoman. While more explicitly rightwing accounts like @Crazy_AOC often delve into racial and gendered memes, @AlexandraOcasi6 preferred to critique Ocasio-Cortez on policy. Their account often made jokes about Ocasio-Cortez’s tax policies, redistributive/socialist proposals, and mocked her opposition to Trump administration efforts to build a wall on the Mexcian border.

When @AlexandraOcasi6 did make a gendered joke, it was usually in the popular voice common to these accounts, which portrays AOC as a naive millennial, complete with “likes” and “umms.” The jokes were generally more about her age than her Latinx or female identity.

Like many Republicans (the user identifies as “pretty right of center”), @AlexandraOcasi6 dislikes the congresswoman’s policies because they find them unrealistic and believe that her young fan base has more energy than they do coherent politics, they told the Daily Dot:

“AOC is a fun character to parody because most of the things she says are super uninformed and would definitely qualify as gaffes if she didn’t have so much devotion from her fans.  It cracks me up how many insane things I’m able to publish that her followers totally agree with because they’ve already bought what she’s selling.”

Or, up until Twitter cracked down.

I shouldn't have used quotes because you will prove yourself in congress (as if you haven't already and not that you have too). You are absolutely right about the sexism. #meToo

— Peacockblue (@peacockblu) January 6, 2019

@AlexandraOcasi6 admits that they were motivated to create the account partially because they have a fondness for Ocasio-Cortez’s youthful energy. Their thoughts on AOC echo what a conservative might begrudgingly admit about Barack Obama or Beto O’Rourke:

“At the same time, she seems like a really genuine person so I find myself liking her at a certain level.  It’s a lot more fun satirizing someone who makes you smile than someone who makes your skin crawl because being mean-spirited just seems exhausting.”

However, the user behind @AlexandraOcasi6 doesn’t necessarily think that the prevalence of AOC parody accounts will lead to a political future beyond the House of Representatives:

“I think she’s so set on breaking things in Washington, that she’ll eventually make herself a ideological pariah with the Democratic caucus, which will prevent her from influencing anyone outside of her social media sphere.  She’s also deeply naive and I think she knows it. She’s still more of an activist than a legislator so I don’t see her becoming a pillar of our government any time soon.”

@AOCpress takes a similar tone with their account and has similar views on Ocasio-Cortez.

Their tweets paint a picture of AOC as ill-informed and naive, unfit for office and unschooled in political realities. The person behind @AOCpress is a parody account veteran, having run a parody account of Mike Pompeo until being suspended from Twitter. The Pompeo account was sometimes mistaken for the former CIA directors actual account, and was often retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and Anne Coulter.

PRESS RELEASE: I just drafted an executive order to remove the immoral fencing from around the White House.

— AOC Press (@AOCpress) January 13, 2019

These immigrants wouldn’t be undocumented if ICE didn’t steal their documents.

— AOC Press (@AOCpress) January 9, 2019

Like @AlexandraOcasio6, they shy away from gendered or racial jokes, but like to take on millennials and what they view as the extremity of PC culture.

PRESS RELEASE: AOC announces her decision to go pronoun-free. Please refer to AOC as “your honor.”

— AOC Press (@AOCpress) January 4, 2019

@AOCpress personally views Ocasio-Cortez and her fans as unintelligent. They told the Daily Dot, “I chose AOC because I think she’s dumb as hell and I can attribute any dumb things to her.”

The person behind @AOCpress also identifies as a conservative: “I am an ardent Trump supporter and have been since June 16, 2015.” Prior to starting their AOC account, they ran a Mike Pompeo parody account aimed at promoting the conservative EX-CIA chief.

Unlike @AlexandraOcasi6, @AOCpress sees Ocasio-Cortez as a serious political threat. “I believe AOC is a real threat and if the Country continues on this downward spiral I see a President AOC within the next 25 years.”

Only time will tell if @AlexandraOcasi6’s prediction will come true or if @AOCpress is right.

Will Ocasio-Cortez catapult to the kind of notoriety that leads to immortal parody accounts like @PimpBillClinton (234,000 followers, still tweeting)?

Parody account fame doesn’t necessarily mean enduring political fortunes, just ask @ShitToddAkinSays (RIP) or @TomCoburnsBeard.

While the future remains to be seen, one unassailable fact remains true in the age of politics and social media: if nobody’s parodying you, it’s probably because no one is listening.

from Ricky Schneiderus Curation https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-twitter-parodies/

[theconservativebrief]

By now, you’ve probably heard the story.

Last week, an actress and photographer, Rosey Blair, asked to switch seats with a woman on a plane from New York to Dallas so that she could sit next to her boyfriend. Blair proceeded to live-tweet as she observed the woman and her new seatmate chat and eventually start flirting, discussing their mutual love of working out and subtly touching elbows, all details captured and posted by Blair. Her thread went mega-viral, racking up 900,000 likes, getting picked up by national news outlets and earning Blair thousands of new followers.

Many initially thought the story was adorable, even if others found it creepy and intrusive. Then the incident took an even darker turn.

An online hunt began to find the identities of the couple, now identified by the hashtag #PlaneBae. The man, a former professional soccer player named Euan Holden, embraced the media circus, but the woman, uncomfortable with the newfound spotlight, hesitated. That didn’t stop the online mob from tracking her down. She began receiving crass, sexually explicit messages in the comments of her personal Instagram profile.

She deactivated her social media accounts and declined an invitation to go on the Today show. Blair and Holden appeared without her. No one asked her if she had any reservations or concerns about being made part of a viral story. All she did was board a plane and chat with her seatmate. Now she is a public figure, a hashtag, and a target. Millions of strangers on the internet want to know about her personal life.

The erosion of the division between public and private has been coming for a while now. Maybe it started with reality television and the dramatic storylines broadcast to millions about people just like you falling in love. (Though those people willingly signed up to become public figures.) Maybe it was already in the works before then: People have always turned other people’s lives into public spectacle regardless of their will.

When I was 22, I wrote my first paid article for a publication on the internet. My essay, written under my own name, was about what it was like to date with genital herpes. I expected maybe a few thousand people to read it on the Women’s Health website; it wasn’t even going in the physical magazine. At the time, I was an intern at a media company, less than a year out of college, and my only brush with fame was as a 13-year-old writer of moderately popular Harry Potter fanfiction.

The herpes article went viral. Not just “few thousand retweets” viral — I mean invitations to go on daytime television viral. Two days after my essay went up on Women’s Health, I was featured in a trending article on the Washington Post website. It was aggregated from there on Yahoo, Jezebel, and eventually even The Daily Mail, where an enterprising staffer tracked down my private Facebook profile and raided it for photographs to use in their article.

There I was, smiling brightly in a picture my mother had taken as my father blew out his birthday candles. Of course, they cropped my father out, leaving me grinning and alone as hundreds of Daily Mail readers wrote comments underneath attacking my character. This slut, this shameful whore. She should kill herself for having an STI.

The next year I would find myself at the center of a new controversy when Genius, a well-funded startup that mostly writes annotations on song lyrics, launched a new tool allowing their users to annotate any website, anywhere. I wrote a blog post detailing why I thought the product was unethical, as it ignored the consent of the website creator and let strangers essentially scrawl graffiti on our intellectual property. I was also concerned it would be yet another tool in the hands of abusers, stalkers, and harassment mobs to come after me on my personal blog; since going viral, I had spent a year receiving horrifying sexual emails from strangers.

Sam Biddle, writing for Gawker, found my case unconvincing. His argument boiled down to my status as a public figure. “It’s brave and noble of Dawson to publicly try to combat the stigma of STD infection,” he wrote. “But when she writes ‘we need more voices to challenge the single narrative of herpes,’ she’s already acknowledging her place in public—it’s right there in the ‘we.’ If you want to advocate for a cause in front of an audience (and judging by the fact that her website has a ‘Press’ section, I’m assuming she does), you have to take what comes with it. Dawson says she has a blog ‘to have total control of how I write and who interacts with me.’ If only this were possible! Unfortunately, this is a fantasy, and will always be so.”

Chelsea Hassler, writing for Slate, argued the contrary position: That as a blogger with a few articles published, I was not someone who rose to the level of a “public figure.” I was an individual, an amateur. She wrote, “There’s a substantive difference between critiquing the work of a professional journalist or blogger and critiquing the writing of an individual who is using her blog as an outlet to communicate with other likeminded people.”

People like me pose a challenge to traditional understandings of the public-private divide. I write about my personal life, and sometimes I get paid to do so. I have fewer than 20,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve had a handful of short stories published in anthologies by indie houses and my blog has steady traffic, but I don’t have a Wikipedia page. Would you consider me a public figure? At what point did I become one? Would it change your mind if I told you I’ve never wanted to be one?

I don’t think there is any such thing as a “private person” anymore. The vast majority of us constantly groom our internet presence, choosing the right filter on Instagram for our brunch and taking polls of our friends about our next Facebook profile picture.

We don’t think about this as a public act when we have only 400 connections on LinkedIn or 3,000 followers on Tumblr. No one imagines the Daily Mail write-up or the Jezebel headline. We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. Little kids dream of becoming famous YouTubers the same way I wanted to be a published author when I was 12.

But there are also those of us who don’t choose this. We keep our accounts locked, our Instagram profile set to “friends only.” Maybe we learned a lesson when a post took off and left the safe haven of our community, picked apart in a horrifying display of context collapse by strangers who we didn’t intend to speak to. Maybe we are hiding from something: a stalker, an abusive ex, our family members who don’t know our true queer identity. To some of us, privacy is vital.

A woman boarded a plane in New York and stepped off that plane in Dallas. She chatted with a stranger, showed him some family photos, brushed his elbow with her own. At no point did she agree to participate in the story Rosey Blair was telling. After the fact, when the hunt began and the woman took no part in encouraging it the way Holden did, Blair tweeted a video in which she drawled, “We don’t have the gal’s permish yet, not yet y’all, but I’m sure you guys are sneaky, you guys might…” And her followers did not disappoint.

When people called Blair out for this blatant invasion of privacy, she blocked them. Because she, apparently, wanted to control her own boundaries. Later she tweeted about wanting a job at BuzzFeed.

I don’t know what the woman on the plane is thinking or feeling. I don’t know if she’s afraid or angry or mildly amused but inconvenienced. But I know how it feels to see strangers scrawling obscenities on social media accounts and email inboxes you once considered safe, commenting alongside your friends and family members. I know the sour humiliation of knowing everyone in your life can see that strangers have written about you — your parents, your co-workers, your exes.

Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life.

There is no opting-in, no consent form, no opportunity to take it all back. It feels like you are drowning as everyone on the beach applauds your swimming prowess. What do you have to complain about? Why wouldn’t you want publicity?

It’s clear that to Blair, the violation of this woman’s privacy is less important than Blair’s growing platform and ambition. It is not a romantic comedy for the digital age. It is an act of dehumanization.

A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too. But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride. While Blair uploads gorgeous Instagram photos to celebrate her body on her birthday (I say this genuinely: You go, girl), the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created. As the content creator of this media circus, Blair is responsible for the behavior of its fans. When faced with the opportunity to discourage their privacy violations, she has done the opposite: “I’m sure you guys are sneaky.”

You become a public figure the instant that someone else decides you are worthy of interest, even if you are minding your damn business. Maybe you will tweet a joke. Maybe you will squint in a friend’s photograph. Maybe you will yodel in a Walmart. Or maybe you will board a plane.

This essay is adapted from a blog post that originally ran on Ella Dawson’s website.

Ella Dawson is a sex and culture critic whose writing has been published by ELLE, MTV, Women’s Health, and more. Find her at elladawson.com and on Twitter as @brosandprose.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Original Source -> The dark side of going viral

via The Conservative Brief

[party-hard-or-die]

In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections

MANGALORE, India — Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast.

Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr. Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.

Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.

Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked B.J.P. claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadists — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-B.J.P. videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping B.J.P. win.

“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.

In the run-up to the May 12 vote in the state — the results of which are set to be announced on Tuesday — the B.J.P. and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.

Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the B.J.P. because “this is not just an election. This is a war of faiths.”

Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.

Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.

The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate American voters in the 2016 presidential election.

WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.

Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.

Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political and governmental claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.

“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.

WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.

“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement, adding that it was stepping up education on its safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.

India’s Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the period since independence, has lost control of the central government and several key states but has held on to power in Karnataka. If the B.J.P. wins the state when votes are counted on Tuesday, it would give Mr. Modi’s party crucial momentum ahead of India’s 2019 national elections.

How much the WhatsApp barrage affected the final election results in Karnataka may never be clear. While WhatsApp has largely replaced text messages and email here, old-school campaign tactics such as rallies, television and newspaper coverage, door-to-door canvassing and outright vote-buying remain prevalent.

Neelanjan Sircar, who was in Karnataka last week studying electoral behavior for the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said the flood of WhatsApp messages probably did not change voters’ political views. But they did push emotional buttons and increase turnout in areas with strong caste or religious divisions.

“What it does do is get people out on the street,” Mr. Sircar said. State officials said voter turnout was 72 percent, the highest level since 1952.

Four years ago, during India’s national parliamentary elections that swept Mr. Modi to power, the primary digital tool was Facebook. But as smartphone use in India has exploded over the past year and a half, WhatsApp became the country’s default communication mode — and the preferred medium for distributing campaign messages.

In state elections in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017, for example, the B.J.P. created more than 6,000 WhatsApp groups to get its messages to every district and village. Its landslide victory there prompted the Congress party to mobilize its own WhatsApp army.

So when the time came to gear up for Karnataka’s state elections, the parties turned to the same WhatsApp playbook.

“WhatsApp works like a nuclear chain reaction,” said Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Congress party’s chief spokesman.

U.T. Khader, an incumbent member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, experienced the WhatsApp effect firsthand. Just before the election, Mr. Khader, a Muslim in the Congress party, was the target of what Mangalore police said was a disturbing new type of WhatsApp attack: a series of profane audio messages purporting to be an escalating exchange of threats between Hindus and Muslims over his candidacy.

In one recording, which was supposedly a phone call between two Hindu political activists, one voice harangued the other for putting a saffron-colored shawl, which the B.J.P. views as a Hindu symbol, around Mr. Khader.

“Why did you put a saffron shawl on Khader? Do you love your life or not?” the first voice said. “If I shove a knife into you, do you think Khader will come to your support?”

Later messages sounded like they came from Muslims threatening to kill the first voice in response. “Son of a prostitute, I’m warning you,” said one. “I’ll take you out.” The messages were sent to various WhatsApp groups, so they were heard by many voters.

Mr. Khader, who has represented the area for more than a decade and won with a large margin last time, said the alleged conversations were fake and recorded in a studio.

He said WhatsApp has a social responsibility to stop such hate speech, but he also believed the negative messages backfired, increasing the support he got from his constituents, half of whom are Muslim. And WhatsApp has been useful for his campaign in other ways.

“TV channels and newspapers largely tend to ignore me,” Mr. Khader said. “WhatsApp has helped me reach my supporters without the help of the mainstream media.”

Mr. Bhat, the college student and B.J.P. youth leader, said WhatsApp has been effective for him as well. After the polls closed on Saturday, he said the messages he shared with the 60 voters assigned to him had helped persuade 47 of them to vote for the B.J.P., including 13 who were previously uncommitted.

“I was successful in making them vote for B.J.P.,” he said.

Sudipto Mondal contributed reporting.

Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.

The post In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2wMFooq via Breaking News

[dani-qrt]

In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections

MANGALORE, India — Waving a giant saffron flag, Pranav Bhat last week joined a political rally for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s ruling party here in this sweltering port city on the southwest coast.

Milling on a vast field with his college buddies, Mr. Bhat, 18, cheered for Mr. Modi and his Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party, which was trying to wrest control of Karnataka state from the more secular Indian National Congress in legislative elections.

Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.

Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party. He sent them critiques of the state government, dark warnings about Hindus being murdered by Muslims — including a debunked B.J.P. claim that 23 activists were killed by jihadists — and jokes ridiculing Congress leaders. His own WhatsApp stream was full of election updates, pro-B.J.P. videos, and false news stories, including a fake poll purportedly commissioned by the BBC that predicted a sweeping B.J.P. win.

“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.

In the run-up to the May 12 vote in the state — the results of which are set to be announced on Tuesday — the B.J.P. and Congress parties claimed to have set up at least 50,000 WhatsApp groups between them to spread their messages. At the same time, many others — their identities are unknown — distributed videos, audio clips, posts and false articles designed specifically to rile up the area’s Hindu-Muslim fissures.

Right-wing Hindu groups employed WhatsApp to spread a grisly video that was described as an attack on a Hindu woman by a Muslim mob but was in fact a lynching in Guatemala. One audio recording on the service from an unknown sender urged all Muslims in the state to vote for the Congress party “for the safety of our women and children.” Another WhatsApp message exhorted Hindus to vote for the B.J.P. because “this is not just an election. This is a war of faiths.”

Like the rest of India, Karnataka is a Hindu majority state. A staple of electoral politics here is pitting Muslims against Hindus, and various Hindu castes against each other.

Ankit Lal, a top strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party, which fielded 28 candidates for Karnataka’s 224 legislative seats, said WhatsApp has become the most important tool in digital campaigning. “We wrestle on Twitter. The battle is on Facebook. The war is on WhatsApp,” he said.

The role that WhatsApp plays in influencing voters has received far less attention than that of its sister services, Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram have come under intense scrutiny in recent months for how Russian agents used them to manipulate American voters in the 2016 presidential election.

WhatsApp has largely escaped that notice because it is used more heavily outside the United States, with people in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia sending a total of 60 billion messages a day. And unlike Facebook and Instagram, where much of the activity is publicly visible online, WhatsApp’s messages are generally hidden because it began as a person-to-person communication tool.

Yet WhatsApp has several features that make it a potential tinderbox for misinformation and misuse. Users can remain anonymous, identified only by a phone number. Groups, which are capped at 256 members, are easy to set up by adding the phone numbers of contacts. People tend to belong to multiple groups, so they often get exposed to the same messages repeatedly. When messages are forwarded, there is no hint of where they originated. And everything is encrypted, making it impossible for law enforcement officials or even WhatsApp to view what’s being said without looking at the phone’s screen.

Govindraj Ethiraj, the founder of Boom and IndiaSpend, two sites that fact-check Indian political and governmental claims, called WhatsApp “insidious” for its role in spreading false information.

“You’re dealing with ghosts,” he said. Boom worked with Facebook during the Karnataka elections to flag fake news appearing on the social network.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has pledged to curb the abuse of Facebook and Instagram by people seeking to secretly influence elections. But he has said nothing about WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19 billion.

WhatsApp officials said they are concerned about misuse of the platform, whose terms of service forbid hate speech, threats of violence and false statements. A few weeks ago, its systems detected an attempt by someone in Karnataka to create dozens of groups very quickly using automation. After some people reported getting spam from these groups, the company blocked them all. WhatsApp declined to say who it suspected was behind the group creation.

“We’re working to give people more control over groups and are constantly evolving our tools to block automated content,” WhatsApp said in a statement, adding that it was stepping up education on its safety features and how to spot fake news and hoaxes.

India’s Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the period since independence, has lost control of the central government and several key states but has held on to power in Karnataka. If the B.J.P. wins the state when votes are counted on Tuesday, it would give Mr. Modi’s party crucial momentum ahead of India’s 2019 national elections.

How much the WhatsApp barrage affected the final election results in Karnataka may never be clear. While WhatsApp has largely replaced text messages and email here, old-school campaign tactics such as rallies, television and newspaper coverage, door-to-door canvassing and outright vote-buying remain prevalent.

Neelanjan Sircar, who was in Karnataka last week studying electoral behavior for the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said the flood of WhatsApp messages probably did not change voters’ political views. But they did push emotional buttons and increase turnout in areas with strong caste or religious divisions.

“What it does do is get people out on the street,” Mr. Sircar said. State officials said voter turnout was 72 percent, the highest level since 1952.

Four years ago, during India’s national parliamentary elections that swept Mr. Modi to power, the primary digital tool was Facebook. But as smartphone use in India has exploded over the past year and a half, WhatsApp became the country’s default communication mode — and the preferred medium for distributing campaign messages.

In state elections in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017, for example, the B.J.P. created more than 6,000 WhatsApp groups to get its messages to every district and village. Its landslide victory there prompted the Congress party to mobilize its own WhatsApp army.

So when the time came to gear up for Karnataka’s state elections, the parties turned to the same WhatsApp playbook.

“WhatsApp works like a nuclear chain reaction,” said Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Congress party’s chief spokesman.

U.T. Khader, an incumbent member of Karnataka’s legislative assembly, experienced the WhatsApp effect firsthand. Just before the election, Mr. Khader, a Muslim in the Congress party, was the target of what Mangalore police said was a disturbing new type of WhatsApp attack: a series of profane audio messages purporting to be an escalating exchange of threats between Hindus and Muslims over his candidacy.

In one recording, which was supposedly a phone call between two Hindu political activists, one voice harangued the other for putting a saffron-colored shawl, which the B.J.P. views as a Hindu symbol, around Mr. Khader.

“Why did you put a saffron shawl on Khader? Do you love your life or not?” the first voice said. “If I shove a knife into you, do you think Khader will come to your support?”

Later messages sounded like they came from Muslims threatening to kill the first voice in response. “Son of a prostitute, I’m warning you,” said one. “I’ll take you out.” The messages were sent to various WhatsApp groups, so they were heard by many voters.

Mr. Khader, who has represented the area for more than a decade and won with a large margin last time, said the alleged conversations were fake and recorded in a studio.

He said WhatsApp has a social responsibility to stop such hate speech, but he also believed the negative messages backfired, increasing the support he got from his constituents, half of whom are Muslim. And WhatsApp has been useful for his campaign in other ways.

“TV channels and newspapers largely tend to ignore me,” Mr. Khader said. “WhatsApp has helped me reach my supporters without the help of the mainstream media.”

Mr. Bhat, the college student and B.J.P. youth leader, said WhatsApp has been effective for him as well. After the polls closed on Saturday, he said the messages he shared with the 60 voters assigned to him had helped persuade 47 of them to vote for the B.J.P., including 13 who were previously uncommitted.

“I was successful in making them vote for B.J.P.,” he said.

Sudipto Mondal contributed reporting.

Follow Vindu Goel on Twitter: @vindugoel.

The post In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections appeared first on World The News.

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