#campaign: the great purge

[six-improbable-things]

Let me tell you, there is no feeling like having your dnd character go through one of the worst days of their life during a session. (/pos)

[olderthannetfic]

hi, as someone who is tragically gen Z and only ever read AO3, can I ask: what was so great about LiveJournal? Like, I know that there were fics posted there (and I've even read about the "purge", so I get why it isn't used anymore) and that it was sort of a forum-type thing. But what I don't understand, wouldn't Tumblr fill in the latter function? How was that site any different? I see a lot of people reminiscing about it and I'm confused

--

A big factor in LJ's greatness is timing and nostalgia.

It was genuinely great, but it wasn't quite as great as all of the Lo, shall the Golden Age ne'er come again? posts suggest.

LJ arrived at a pivotal time in the development of the internet both in terms of technical stuff and how many people had access. Many fans who are now in their thirties to fifties first discovered fandom through LJ and many were at a time in their lives when they were feeling energetic and up to making lots of new friends—and to figuring out how to make a site work for them.

I got on LJ in 2002 when it required invites. Fandom arrived in droves in 2003, first via coordinated campaigns to get invites to key people and then when LJ opened up free account creation to everyone. Back then, LJ's features sucked. It was impossible to search properly, among other things. At its height (2005-7, let's say), there was a reasonable site search, and fans had developed all sorts of community resources for finding each other.

People often remember this phase but not the early days of suckitude.

This development parallels how Tumblr used to not have that private chat feature and how a lot of fuckyeah[whatever] type tumblrs have helped curate the site and make it much more usable for fans. Fandom draining away from LJ after strikethrough also parallels people draining away from Tumblr after the purge.

There are people who talk about Tumblr the way my cohort talks about LJ...

And to the shock of no one, they are people who came of age on Tumblr, who found fandom via Tumblr, who were on Tumblr during pivotal times in their lives and ones when they had energy to make friends and figure out how a site worked.

Those same Tumblrites are now making all the same geriatric-sounding posts we LJers do about how other sites lack the required features to be good for fandom while missing that 90% of tumblr's "features" at its height (2012-2016, let's say) were actually fan-created and were basically the same as any fandom newsletter or links page or all the versions of this kind of personal curation stretching back to long before the internet existed.

What life phase you hit a site at matters.

--

With all of that said, no, LJ was not a forum. It was a blogging site with threaded comments.

The key point to understand is that conversation was always happening in a specific person's space. Unlike on a true forum, people were in the comments on a particular post in a journal owned by another fan. (On a forum, there's the first post in a thread, but it's still more of a communal space with less of a hierarchy.)

Overall, the LJ format can have a feeling a bit like you're over at someone's house for tea. There's more of a sense of intimacy and also behaving yourself in front of community members.

Tumblr being obscure and impossible to find anything in does give it some of the same vibe relative to Twitter, but it's still part of modern social media that tries to shove every rando into the face of every other rando.

But it wasn't just vibes: LJ also had robust privacy features where you could lock a post to this or that group of friends. You could moderate your comments section properly. Tumblr has far fewer controls to force people to behave or leave on a technical level.

--

The biggest thing many people miss about LJ is the threaded comments. At least by late LJ and on Dreamwidth, you can expand and collapse threads, making it far easier to deal with a massive comments section. But more than that, things are properly threaded with multiple levels of hierarchy that are all easily visible in the same place.

On Tumblr, it used to be extremely difficult to find all of the actual commentary on a post. Nowadays, it's far easier, but you still have to scroll chronologically, and multiple versions of a post with a long chain of commentary may be much more divorced from each other than what would happen in a LJ comments section.

--

But could we use Tumblr pretty much how we used LJ?

We could.

I do.

--

The key things that people tend to miss about LJ, aside from the younger and more excited version of themselves or the friends they've lost since then, are:

Heavily text-based

It may sound odd on the modern internet, but there are a lot of people whose brains don't like or handle an image-heavy site well. They were everywhere in SF book fandom. They were everywhere on the early internet. Today, they're hanging out on Dreamwidth and still going to their SF cons. They're usually not on Tumblr.

You could follow the discussion

Threaded comments help, but a lot of it is about having some place you can check for updates. It wasn't actually that easy to follow big LJ discussions unless you were subscribed to comments and reading along as things were happening instead of coming along after the entire mass of comments had been left.

The tone of the discussion is intellectual and one's enemies are "idiots", not "problematic"

All this requires is a penchant for longwindedness and an itchy blocking finger to remove anyone slinging ad hominems from the comments section.

On tumblr, it's as simple as conversations happening in the replies on a popular account and that person not tolerating suibaiting and threats.

(And make no mistake, a lot of LJ discussion was in the comments on popular accounts, not spread equally between everyone's.)

It does require that multiple people like that tone and want to engage in that way, but lots of people do want to.

--

These days, I interact with tumblr by checking my askbox and reading my activity page. The vast, vast majority of my posts are ones where I'm the OP, so if I block someone, they're booted from the discussion entirely.

For me... yeah, Tumblr functions almost exactly like LJ.

Also like LJ, while I'm hosting the conversation, if you hang around, you'll see the same people again and again in the comments. They may or may not also host that kind of conversation in their space, and there's a larger pool of lurkers who have some notion of which people count as regulars. Other people are watching from the shadows, enjoying or deriding the takes of the usual crowd.

People presumably do like reading my lengthy commentary or they wouldn't be here, but my tumblr wouldn't be popular like this without a healthy pool of other people who chime in regularly. It's not just that there are more people: it's that you see the same people over time. There's a bit more sense of place and community than on some parts of the internet.

--

So, in my opinion, the failure to just recreate LJ fandom on Tumblr was a skill issue.

Threaded comments were great, but LJ culture came from mailing lists, and mailing lists had the same issue as tumblr with the diverging threads.

We solved that back then by clipping out only the parts we wanted to respond to (you'd write "snip" around the quotation to show it was incomplete). We solved the smaller LJ issue by linking to other posts we were referencing and doing discussion link roundups. We solve it on tumblr by, again, linking to what we're talking about and even quoting multiple reblog chains in our own reblog of just one chain.

--

Tumblr's technical features and even general crap-ness aren't really the problem. 90s and early 00s sites regularly went down for periods of time unthinkable today.

The missing piece is people.

When one is in an active fandom with others who curate or with friends who let one know what's up, a site with imperfect features is easy to figure out and retrofit for fandom's needs. When one already feels out of touch and is between fannish passions—or at least fannish passions anyone else cares about—seeing the potential in a new site is hard.

--

Threaded comments are different and better.

LJ's built-in way to see everyone's blog in your own style was better. The automatic timestamps and the ease of seeing a paginated archive of an entire blog was better than tumblr's endless scroll and lack of clear date labeling. But some of that can be fixed with xkit or knowing your way around tumblr well.

A lot of it is nostalgia for the lj era and a refusal to take the time to figure out how to use tumblr in an oldschool internet way.

--

So by all means, people, weigh in about what made LJ great or how the culture felt at the time...

But if I see one more god damn response going "You can't have a conversation on tumblr!" in reply to my tumblr, which contains nothing but conversation, I am coming for you.

[lisafication]

For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules  — even less of them read it,  and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

How are you maintaining consistency? Have you managed to define racism to the point that moderator judgment no longer enters the equation? And to be clear, you cannot allow moderator judgment to be a significant decision maker at this scale, or you will end with absurd results.

How are you handling staff mental health? Some reading on the matter, to save me a lengthy and unrelated explanation of some of the steps involved in ensuring mental health for commercial-scale content moderators.

How are you handling your failures? No moderation in the world has ever succeeded in a 100% accuracy rate, what are you doing about that?

Using report-based discovery, how are you preventing 'report brigading', such as the theories surrounding Critics United mentioned above? It is a natural human response to take into account the amount and severity of feedback. While SV moderators are well trained on the matter, the rare times something is receiving enough reports to potentially be classified as a 'brigade' on that scale will nearly always be escalated to administration, something completely infeasible at (you're learning to hate this word, I'm sure) scale.

How are you communicating expectations to your user base? If you're relying on a flag-based system, your users' understanding of the rules is a critical facet of your moderation system — how have you managed to make them legible to a layman while still managing to somehow 'truly' define racism?

How are you managing over one thousand moderators? Like even beyond all the concerns with consistency, how are you keeping track of that many moving parts as a volunteer organisation without dozens or even hundreds of professional managers? I've ignored the scaling administrative burden up until now, but it has to be addressed in reality.

What are you doing to sweep through your archives? SV is more-or-less on-top of 'old' works as far as rule-breaking goes, with the occasional forgotten tidbit popping up every 18 months or so — and that's what we're extrapolating from. These thousand-plus moderators are mostly going to be addressing current or near-current content, are you going to spin up that many again to comb through the 32 billion words already posted?

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation:  the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all,  if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court  it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

[mariacallous]

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could Western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the peoples of the world to accept “the sovereignty of Islam” or face “carnage, displacement and terror” if they refuse.  You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country.  They will turn a blind eye in Palestine, as we shall see, but not in New York or Chicago.

Finally, no left organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition that Hamas embraces with such sinister gusto, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious about politics. It “fellow travels” with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of “fellow travelling,” with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on Westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always “how far would they go”? As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed

W.H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a “successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off”. But as communism happened in backward Russia “a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment”, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

You see the same pattern of lies and indulgence in the case of Hamas. Journalists  have produced a multitude of examples of fellow travelling since 7 October but let one meeting of the Oakland City Council in the Bay area of San Francisco speak for them all.

A council member wanted the council to pass a motion that condemned the killings and hostage-taking by Hamas, who, in case we forget, prompted the war that has devastated Gaza, by massacring Israeli civilians. The motion got nowhere

According to one speaker Hamas did not massacre anyone, a modern variant of Holocaust denial that is becoming endemic. “There have not been beheadings of babies and rapings,” a woman said at the meeting. “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.”  Another woman said that calling Hamas a terrorist organization is “ridiculous, racist and plays into the genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.” Hamas was the “armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance” , said a third who clearly had no knowledge of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

“To condemn Hamas was very anti-Arab racist” cried a fourth. The meeting returned to modern Holocaust denial as a new speaker said the Israeli Defence Forces had murdered their own people and it was “bald propaganda” to suggest otherwise. A man intervened to shout that “to hear them complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wifebeater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back”.  

Anyone who contradicted him was a “white supremacist.”

Of course they were.

Now if theocrats were to establish an Islamist tyranny in the Bay area, I am sure every single speaker would scream their heads off, as Auden predicted. They can turn into fellow travellers as there is no more of a prospect of theocracy threatening them than there was of communism threatening readers of the left-wing press in the UK and US in the 1930s.

A serious left would have plenty to complain about. Consider the Israeli position after the breakdown of the ceasefire. The Israeli state is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a catastrophe of a prime minister, who left his people exposed to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. His war aims are contradictory: you cannot both wipe out Hamas and free the hostages.

Worst of all, the Israeli defence forces are to move to the southern Gaza strip where two million Palestinians are crammed. Just war doctrine holds that a military action must have a reasonable chance of success if the suffering is to be permitted. How, reasonably, can the Israeli army expect to find guerilla fighters hiding in a terrified population?  According to leaks in the Israeli media, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of state, was warning the Israeli government that, “You can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way you did in the north. There are two million Palestinians there.” But he was ignored.  A radical movement worth having would surely be putting pressure on the Biden administration to force Israel to listen to its concerns.

The radical movement we have will not engage in practical politics because compromise is anathema to it. Any honest account of the war would have to admit that Israel has the right to defend itself against attack. It is just that the military position it finds itself in now may well make its war aims impossible and therefore immoral.

You can see why practical politics has no appeal. Where is the violent satisfaction in sober analysis,  the drama in compromise? Where is the Manichean distinction between the absolute good of the Palestinians and the pure evil of Israel?  

Meanwhile, ever since the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, you have been able to say that Jewish settler sites on the West Bank were placed there deliberately to make a peace settlement impossible, and ensure that Israel controlled all the territory from “the river to the sea” forever.

A serious left might try to revive a two-state solution by building an international consensus that the settlements must go. Once again, however, that is too tame an aim. For the fellow traveller watching Palestine from a safe distance, satisfaction comes only by embracing Hamas’s call for the destruction of Israel. Some progressives try to dress up the urge to destroy by pretending that Jews and Palestinians will go on to live together in some happy-clappy, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. But most must know they are advocating a war to the death. What makes their position so disreputable is that, if they thought about it calmly, they would know it would be a war that only Israel could win. It is the Israelis who have the nuclear weapons, after all.

The worst of the global left is dilettantish. It advocates a maximalist position which has a minimal chance of success - just for the thrill of it. David Caute, a historian of fellow travelling with Stalin and communism said that the endorsement of communism by fellow travelling intellectuals in the West “deepened the despair” of Soviet intellectuals. “In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind”.

The 2020s are not the 1930s. I am sure that, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, my sole concern would be the removal of Israeli forces that threatened me and my family. I would either not care about demonstrations in the West or I would receive some comfort from the knowledge that people all over the world were protesting on my behalf.

Nevertheless, a kind of betrayal is still at work. By inflaming and amplifying the worst elements in Palestine the global left is giving comfort to the worst elements in Israel, which are equally determined to make a compromise impossible.

The New Statesman made that point well when it ran a piece by Celeste Marcus.   She came from the Zionist far right, and was taught doctrines that dehumanised Palestinians. She grew up and grew away from the prejudices of her childhood and became a liberal. But after she moved into her new world, she “recognised immediately that progressive leftists feel about Israelis the way radical Zionists feel about Palestinians: these are not real people.”

The result is that for all its power on the streets and in academia the global left is almost an irrelevance.

“To influence Israel,” she writes, “one must be willing to recognise it. Since leftist leaders cannot bother to do this, they cannot be of real use to Palestinians. This is a betrayal of their own cause.”

The dilettantism of fellow travelling always ends in betrayal and denial for the reason Auden gave: terror is always more tolerable when it happens far, far away.

[kp777]

By Brett Wilkins

Common Dreams

July 5, 2024

"Trump is now desperately trying to run from his deep ties to Project 2025... MAGA extremists' radical wish list for a second Trump term," President Joe Biden's campaign said.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday attempted to distance himself from a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right takeover of the federal government, prompting derision from observers who underscored close ties between the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee and the blueprint's authors.

Trump took to his Truth social media platform to claim the knows "nothing about Project 2025," a sweeping initiative spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation to boost the power of the presidency and purge career federal civil servants, who would be replaced with Trump loyalists.

"I have no idea who is behind it," Trump added, a claim that numerous observers quickly countered.

In an email entitled, "Donald Trump & Project 2025: One and the Same," Democratic President Joe Biden's reelection campaign said that "Trump is now desperately trying to run from his deep ties to Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation's 900-page deeply unpopular manifesto drafted by former Trump officials that offers Americans a preview of MAGA extremists' radical wish list for a second Trump term."

"Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump's second term that should scare the hell out of the American people," Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. "Project 2025 staff and leadership routinely tout their connections to Trump's team, and are the same people leading the [Republican National Committee policy platform, Trump's debate prep, campaign, and inner circle."

"Trump's Supreme Court and Project 2025 have designed the playbook for Trump to achieve his dream of being a dictator on day one, with unchecked, imperial power," Moussa added. "Allowing a self-absorbed convicted felon that kind of power would be devastating for our democracy and middle-class families. This November, voters must stop Trump from turning the Oval Office into his throne room."

As CNN detailed Friday:

Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, and the group's roadmap for the next administration includes contributions from others who have worked for the former president, including his former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. John McEntee, Trump's former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and one of his closest aides while in office, is also a senior adviser for the project.

Mother Jones Washington, D.C. bureau chief David Corn said: "This is B.S. Christian nationalist Russell Vought, who is one of the Trump allies in charge of the GOP platform effort, is a coordinator of Project 2025. Trump is gaslighting once again."

Others noted that Trump's own Make America Great Again, Inc. super PAC is running ads highlighting Project 2025.

Critics have called Project 2025 a "blueprint for autocracy"—an assessment bolstered by last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling bestowing the president with what experts described as king-like powers, which Trump's advisers have reportedly vowed to exploit if he wins November's election.

The Associated Press reported last month that a right-wing group allied with the presumptive GOP nominee was drafting a list of federal employees who are disloyal or insufficiently dutiful to Trump, an undertaking compared with the McCarthyite anti-communist crusade during the second Red Scare in the 1950s.

Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation, raised eyebrows earlier this week after he said that the coming right-wing "revolution" will "remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," which some observers took as a thinly veiled threat of violence.

In his Friday Truth post, Trump said that he disagrees with some of Project 2025's agenda and that "some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

"Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them," he reiterated.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan responded to Trump's claim in a social media post saying, "What's revealing about Donald Trump loudly disavowing Project 2025 and falsely denying any knowledge of it is that clearly he knows how damaging it can be to his election bid."

"So why on earth did neither Biden nor the CNN moderators bring it up at the debate last week?" he asked.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Daniel Ben-Ami

A man goes into a store to buy a can of Pepsi. The proceeds of the sale go through a chain of cash-thumbing, financial intermediaries. Eventually the money is handed over to someone to pay for the manufacture of a missile. The missile is fitted on to a combat aircraft, which closes in on its target. Eventually the missile locks on to a (presumably) Palestinian child. As it explodes, the word ‘boycott’ flashes up on screen.

This video, distributed on X by Palestine Online, is just one of countless anti-Israel clips on social media. But it bears closer examination as it helps to illustrate the nature of contemporary anti-Semitism. Here, as in many other cases today, Jews are not overtly identified. There is not even an explicit mention of Israel. Instead, the video assumes the target viewer will recognise the not-so-subtle anti-Semitic pointers, such as references to financial speculation and the age-old ‘blood libel’ of child murder. Not identifying Jews directly also gives some degree of deniability to anyone who wants to claim they are not anti-Semitic.

That’s not to downplay the existence of overt anti-Semitism. This has increased dramatically since 7 October. In the past few days alone, an Orthodox Jewish man has been stabbed in Zurich while another was beaten outside a Paris synagogue. But a great deal of Jew hatred still tends to take a disguised form.

Its most common manifestation, as the ‘boycott’ Pepsi video indicates, is an animus towards Israel. An animus that long predates its current war with Hamas. In the warped view of anti-Israel activists, Israel is the epitome of evil. It is said to be manipulating finance for its own ends and slaughtering children. Supposedly, it is a ‘genocidal’, ‘apartheid’ state – morally charged terms that tend not to be applied to other nations.

Seeing Israel as evil incarnate, today’s anti-Israel activists target its every manifestation. They try to cancel Israeli dance companies in New York. They demand Israel’s expulsion from the Eurovision song contest. And they attempt to banish it from the Olympics and the football World Cup. In short, they seek to erase Israel from the world. That is the true meaning of today’s boycott campaigns. To purge the world of any Israeli presence. To eradicate any signs of Israeli culture.

[sgiandubh]

T is the weakest link, find out the truth about his “real” life and we will have answers to so many of our questions.

Dear Weakest Link Anon,

I couldn't agree more, based on my own (and other like minded people's) research. We knew Mordor's national sport is Compulsive Lying, but the contrast between cold, hard, real facts and the absurd narrative that is never questioned across the street is still shocking.

I explained many times already the reasons that prevent me from publishing and commenting my findings. I can only encourage you to make a simple research on public business databases. It's all on screen, of course...or, in this case, it's all on those websites. Costs are low.

His real life has nothing glamorous about it.

And yes, I know the main argument peddled by the Idiot Twins all day long, every day God makes: a legal document is FACT, TRUTH and an undisputable sign of marital bliss.

These people mentally live in a grotto (calm down, it's about Plato, here). So, according to them, the following legal document MUST come from a legit democratic country, right?

Right?

This is a quote from Stalin's Constitution, ratified by the Eighth Congress of Soviets of the USSR in December 1936, just after the First Moscow Trial of the Party's dissident groups.

By 1937, the Great Purge was building up momentum. The privacy of millions was violated, while many (so many) were tortured, tried in haste and disposed of. Millions of letters were opened, their content scrutinized. The madness temporarily stopped in earnest only with the outbreak of WWII. 1.2 million people were killed in the process.

At the very same moment, other millions of people firmly, even sincerely, believed it was all for the best, FACT, TRUTH and the only possible way reality should look like.

Like in Stalin's Soviet Union, critical examination and contextualization seem to be forbidden in the Land of the Soviets Best Fans Ever. Any questioning or unorthodox behavior is met with kindness: 'the mental ward' is the last trend. It immediately made me think about the fact that in the same Soviet Union, after the war, dissidents were not labeled as political criminals, but as 'psychiatric ward patients'.

The easiest, cheapest and most effective way of ostracizing. And one of the main reasons C's Oscar promo campaign was a resounding flop.

Meanwhile, tax debts, failed projects and flimsy whereabouts seem to tell the pertinent story for your ask, Anon.

[zykamiliah-temporal]

nah bro the thing is gwaine saw merlin as the brave man that was more noble than any highborn. And also the best friend he could ever had. Whether he knew about the magic or not it's up for debate and. in some way that's also how elyan and percival and leon and arthur saw merlin too. and no wonder! the purge and uther's campaign against magic created a great prejudice against magical beings. how could someone as good as merlin be a sorcerer when sorcery is evil? if he knew any sorcery it would be like what gaius knows, so he's able to identify dark magic and do something about it.

and gaius knew about merlin's magic but was always telling him how to use it, to hide it from anyone and to ONLY use to protect arthur, the king or camelot.

and freya new the boy that was born with magic, but it was cut too short so she didn't get to know the man well

and arthur himself knew the man the friend but never the sorcerer that carried the weight of destiny in his shoulders

and then there's lancelot. who knew everything about merlin. the boy the man the warlock the greatest sorcerer who's ever walked the earth

and they took him from merlin

[qqueenofhades]

Dare you to, on the second-last day of Pride Month, write a big effortpost about all the people that Pride Month either moved to the Find Out stage or proceedings or flat-out assassinated. A necessary part of this post would be bemoaning that Pride Month missed Kissinger or some other monster. The reason would be to dare the universe to render your effortpost out of date by sniping someone just before the end of the month, after you post. Please, I beg of you, goad the universe into taking out one or two more than it intended!

Oh, I will do that right now for free!

JUNE 2023: Great month for justice, bad month for assholes!

Pat Robertson, notorious conservative Christian activist and long-time hate preacher: dies on June 8

Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, conducted a decades-long campaign of mail bombings and domestic terrorism in the name of protesting technology: dies on June 10

Silvio Berlusconi, notorious far-right ex-Italian PM and general fantastically corrupt shitheel: dies on June 12

Stockton Rush, billionaire libertarian businessman who actively ignored 1000 safety warnings about his crappy product and fired a whistleblower for saying so, notably got himself and 4 other people killed on June 18 and joins the hallowed Wikipedia list of inventors killed by their own invention

Honorable-not-quite-June-but-close mention: James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior and a rabid anti-environmentalist, died on May 27

John Eastman: conservative lawyer who actively advised and encouraged Trump to stage a coup: facing disbarment hearings in California

Oh yeah, that guy Trump: on June 8, was charged with 31 federal criminal counts under the Espionage Act, relating to his crimes with classified documents; 37 charges overall, which takes his felony haul to 71 (and counting);

Vladimir Putin: is not gonna have a fun time over the next few days over the fallout from the Wagner mercenary rebellion;

Andrew Tate, flagrant misogynist asshole: officially charged with rape and human trafficking in Romania;

Ron DeSantis: lost literally THREE different lawsuits over his terrible anti-LGBTQ laws; collapsed in the polls and his campaign is allegedly "close to being over" because he's so bad at it;

State of Arkansas: likewise had its attempted ban on gender-affirming care for minors permanently struck down

Marjorie Taylor Greene: the crazy House Freedom Caucus doesn't like her anymore, apparently, and wants to "purge" its members, including her (lolololol)

Man, that's all well and good, but it's really a shame that Pride Month 2023: This Time It's Personal didn't put a cherry on top by offing Henry Kissinger, or like, Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito (or both, both, both is good)

Come on, Pride Month 2023.

What are you, a PUSSY?

[bonefall]

How did Bluestar lose her nine lives? I’ve always been curious about the time period between BP and TPB but the books of that time just…aren’t good

I think it's unfortunate they never did anything interesting (PLAGUE) in that time period, because I think (VIOLENCE) it would have made a great setting for prequel books. In BB I think it's one of the most interesting periods of history, because soo much is being set up in that time.

In BB we call that this timeslot the Late Campaign Era and the Early Broken Era.

I'll share the rough "sketch" in my head for how Bluesy loses her 9 lives in BB, BUT you have to promise to take it with a grain of salt because only the last few are plot relevant.

Wrecklessness I feel like there's a phrase for this in Clanmew; leaders tend to lose their first lives to a lack of caution. The power boost makes you feel invincible. It was something ridiculous, like fighting a hawk.

Saving Thistleclaw from a car She TOLD him not to run onto the road, he was about to die EXACTLY like Snowfur and she saved his dumb ass. He was uncharacteristically quiet for a few months after this, but it didn't last.

Large Predator At some point, Darkkit and Cricketkit wandered off and Bluestar joined the patrol to find them. She had to tangle with a large predator, and medical treatment got delayed long enough that infection set in. She died, but StarClan purged the infection and she was able to recover. I like the idea that treatment got delayed because there was a sudden blizzard and she pulled the kits into the (now empty because she killed that animal) predator's den to stay warm.

Sunningrocks She got launched off the rocks and tossed in the river. UNRESTRAINED SUMMER FUN

Plague It was in style at the time. All the girlies were getting matching buboes.

Retrieving Barley Junior and Violet Junior from BloodClan This was after Lizardstripe had died, but it was the last time she ever met up with her Forget-Me-Nots. It was a last hurrah. I do sometimes consider shuffling this to be BEFORE the Plague death though, to a time when Lizzy would be alive.

Rats or Equivalent I'm open to changing this death to something else as long as it still happens in TPB, since it's the narrative introduction to how leader lives work.

Greencough Like canon, don't see a need to change it.

The Gorge Iconic death. A swan dive right into the hearts and minds of every blown-away 10-year-old who read the scene.

BB!Bluestar was 13-ish when she died, and assumed power when she was about 6. Brokenstar took power in ShadowClan a couple years after she did, ending the Chivalric Period.

[stone-stars]

Illuminate me on music!, I'm not good at it but I like hearing people talking things I don't know. So idk, start anywhere I wanna learn. Gimme music faces from emily's work

lol there's SO many places i could start. first, let me say that i get so in the weeds with this. you don't need to be me. however, murph and emily are really deliberate with their music placement so even if you don't go super deep, you can start to notice patterns, especially with the super frequently used songs.

when it comes to frequent songs, alli operationslipperypuppet also did a very helpful "hey how concerned should you be" breakdown of some common songs, which i'll link here. i would say if you want to start paying attention, some easy ones to check out and start listening for are the purge, unknown tome, kingshammer, valiant ol' cobb, mee maw's burden, a fate refused, the campaign themes, twinkling lights of galaderon, and a friend for life. all of these are available on spotify, with the exception of kingshammer, and have very consistent uses. (the bahumia theme isn't by emily, but is on spotify). if you want to hear kingshammer, a good use of it is around 50 minutes into c1e80, during hardwon's flashback (ad free, so you might have to go later for ads)

another thing to note is certain songs get very specific meanings when applied to given characters. mee maw's burden and unknown tome are used incredibly consistently throughout bev sr's hell arc. twinkling lights of galaderon and a bastard no more/hardwon takes the wheel (both names have been used) are used throughout hardwon's.

emily also tends to write a lot of location-based music. a lot of cities have their own themes and their own instrumentation. a great example of this is the tsunaire interlude from c3, which has a very unique sound. also for example, the crick tends to have a lot of similar instrumentation. if you listen through the crick album on spotify, you can start to hear it. there's a lot of strings/piano, drums, and a lot of notes are drawn out in a very specific way.

it's very consistent. there are also like 200+ songs written for this podcast at this point, and so knowing every one of them is insane. but if you start to be like "i've heard this song before, where did i hear it" chances are it's in a moment that connects thematically. i can go into a lot more detail about any of this, this kinda became a "hey here's how to start tracking naddpod music" post more than anything and not really about the themes/uses of songs, but! yeah!

some fun little bonus notes of songs that are only used a few times but that i am insane about the repetition of:

a song called "torn apart" is used when moonshine opens the rift to the feywild during the tarrasque fight, and also when the world is breaking apart after the thiala fight and the boobs heal it

"i just want to know you're taken care of" is the song that is played when moonshine tells paw paw to write up her will. it's also played when lydia tells her that she deserves to be heard by her friends and she should tell them about her plans in hell. it's also used in c3 when callie tells foster that she's sorry for not giving him love.

"a memory" is introduced in episode 100 as thiala shows everyone the failed past adventurers and the "wheel of sorrow". it has recently been used in c3 for both references to the boobs and to melora's adventuring party (melora/telaine/aryox)

there is a specific royalty free (i think) choral song that plays when gemma appears at the party, when gemma dies, when jaina almost kills hardwon, and then later when hardwon dies at scarlet montgomery's hands. do with this what you will.

this isn't about a reuse but the song that plays in ep 70 when moonshine and lucanus are talking is called "a miracle child" and i need more people to know that.

i am insane about "a glittering reunion" (from melora and telaine's in 97) on so many levels. telaine is the piano. melora is the strings. i need to lay down.

[six-improbable-things]

some blorbo sheets with my dnd ocs...

(blank template under the cut. I don't know where it was originally posted, but if someone has the source link / credit for OP, let me know.)

[racefortheironthrone]

Warhammer Gaslamp: Peoples of the Old World

(For Introduction, see here; for Imperial Society, see here; for Geopolitics, see here.)

While the Old World of 2725 IC is dominated by the nations of Men, the non-human species of the world are by no means vanished - although all have seen enormous amounts of change over the last two hundred years.

Although they still maintain their traditional alliance with the Empire of Man, the Dawi of the Old World suffered badly from their pyrrhic victories in the Skaven and Greenskin Wars, to the point where they have begun a slow, inexorable demographic decline - not helped by increasing assimilation into the Empire. Increasingly, the Dawi have begun to coalesce around the master plan of the Great Reckoning, an effort to avenge every single Grudge in the Dammaz Kron in one fell swoop through the creation of an army of 100,000 Slayers. When the last of the Grudges has been satisfied, the sages of Dwarfkind believe that the Ancestor Gods will return and restore their people to their former glory.

Proving that it is truly an ill wind that blows no one any good, the shift in the Aethyr mentioned earlier had a profound influence on the Asur. With the increase in the concentration of Aethyric energy around, Asur born since 2594 have universally developed psykic abilities seemingly independent of their access to the Winds of Khaos, such that the younger generation now primarily speak mind-to-mind, can move themselves and objects with a thought, and much more that was once the exclusive ability of magi. Among many of the Asur, this is seen as a sign of the gods' continual favor, but these new abilities will need to be pressed into service sooner rather than later, as the blessed isle of Ulthuan is gradually sliding beneath the waves....

While their territories in Laurelorn have shrunken dramatically, the territories of the Asrai in Athel Loren remain quite strong in Bretonnia thanks in no small part to their political influence on Forest Law in L'Ancien Régime. As part of an increased level of caution (or paranoia), the Spellsingers embarked in a campaign of educating the entirety of their population in how to magically transport themselves between the remaining forests of the Old World and the spiritual dimension of Underhill, where magic remains strong and the verdant world untouched by hands of men, and to use the Glamour to move undetected in the human world.

[From the 9th Edition Imperial Encyclopedia]: Halflings (noun). A malevolent subspecies of mutant, destroyed in the Great Gene-Purge of 2614.

Life for the Vampire Counts has become increasingly more dangerous and complex. Driven from their seat of power in a vicious war that left much of Sylvania a faintly glowing wasteland of bomb craters and barbed wire, the survivors live on the run from the Imperial Plasmic Survey and the Schwarzmänner, although some vampires and thralls alike can manage to stay one step ahead via falsified blood samples and living in masquerade in the teeming throngs of urban society. Many of the surviving vampires have developed wealthy clients from among the nobility and the haut bourgeoisie, who are willing to risk the attentions of the state in exchange for infusions that extend their lifespans by decades. At the same time, the Vampire Counts are learning how to play politics by Imperial rules...

The Old World has changed, but the Greenskins have not. Although banished beyond the World's Edge Mountains, they still practice their traditional ways of WAAAGH! and generally making a mess of things. However, they have adapted to the age of gunpowder by trading with the Ogres of the East for the 'splody stuff, from the Orkish love of really big shootas and the Goblin fascination with bombs. The Greenskins might wear top hats and call their warleaders Nobz now, but they are still the mad, anarchic bastards who refuse to die.

Despite their defeat in the wars with the dwarfs and the mysterious explosion that engulfed Skavenblight in 2573 IC, the Underempire of the Skaven has adapted to their new circumstances in new and strange ways. While increasing urbanization has allowed the Skaven to spread through the sewers and subway systems of the Empire, they face new competition from the "Untervolk" and the increasingly impressive efforts of the human Technomancers. So instead the Skaven have allied with the Slaaneshi to sell warpstone dust drugs to the stupid stupid man-things, using the financial proceeds and the insidious long-term effects of warpstone dust to weaken humanity from within.

[brownald]

I am new to Warhammer but I’m having a lot of fun playing dolls with the Primarchs so here’s a fic I wrote with one of my favorites and one I think is ok!

Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines stomped through the balls of the XIIIth legion’s flagship. Entering the bridge, the light of distant stars reflected in his cerulean eyes. He looked to his bodyguards, two Astartes warriors born from his gene-seed. One stood to his left, another to his right. Their dark blue armor and unmoving stature likened them to brass statues, guarding a man who needed no protection.

“Leave me.” Guilliman said, his voice rumbling with a deep baritone. “I must speak with the Great Khan in peace.” He spoke to neither man before him, but they both heeded his words.

“Yes, Lord Guilliman.” The one to his right nodded. He and his comrade departed the room, boltguns at the ready.

Guilliman sighed, and snapped an unarmored finger. A shimmering blue image of Jagathai Khan appeared before him. The Primarch of the White Scars offered a short bow to his genetic equal; Guilliman returned the gesture. They stared at each other for a moment, neither willing to speak the first word.

Eventually, the Khan coughed. “Care to tell me the meaning of this?” His rough, gravelly voice was muffled from the communicator’s static, but he remained audible so long as the Warp Currents allowed it.

“Of course,” Guilliman blinked. “I’m sure you’re aware of my Legion’s campaign against the Ork Waaagh on Traitis IV?”

Jagathai offered a short nod in response.

“Then I’m sure you’ve heard of the siege forced upon my men in the planet’s capital city.” Guilliman continued, his face unreadable. “Three months we have fought against the greenskin tide, and there is no hope of a reprieve from the Ork horde.”

“I know this,” The Khan interrupted. “This is an issue beyond the concern of my sons, as well as that of mine. You ask for aid?”

“Yes.” Guilliman spoke without a trace of fear in his voice, merely duty.

The Khan furrowed his brow, anger creeping into his voice. “Why? The Imperial fists lie only star systems away, and the consultation of a siege is something Dorn drools at the mouth for. He would drop everything to join your men. Why request our aid, brother?”

“Because, Jagathai, I am not asking for a consultation of the Ultramarines’ siege warfare tactics. I come to you asking for aid in alleviating the stress upon my warriors.”

The Khan raised an eyebrow, perplexed.

“You are the closest Legion to Traitis IV that has the expertise I require. We need Astartes that specialize in hit and run tactics. The Raven Guard are licking their wounds on Terra, and the Warmaster’s duties lie elsewhere. Thus, my request comes to you.”

“You almost make it sound like you have a plan.” Jagathai muttered sarcastically.

“I do.” Guilliman let himself smile. “Would you care to hear it?”

The Khan paused for a moment in pensive silence, considering the offer. “Very well.” He said at last.

Guilliman nodded. “By my calculations, a detachment of your fleet would reach Traitis IV in two day’s time. That gives me the time I need to tell my men of the news. You arrive on Traitis IV, and provoke the Orks into following you into a confrontation. Once they begin to follow you, the White Scars disengage. Then, as they attempt to regroup, continue biting at their heels. My men will join you, fully rested and prepared to exterminate. Then, a combined force of Ultramarines and White Scars purge the threat these Xenos pose once and for all.”

The Great Khan seemed to let a smile creep across his lips. “I’m not appalled by the idea.”

Guilliman blinked. “That is all I ask, brother.”

“A question.”

“Yes?”

The Khan drew a breath. “How much time would your men require in rest? White Scars pride themselves on speed, not stalling.”

“The entire campaign would take 4 days.” Guilliman explained. “The first day is when the White Scars make planetfall and engage the Ork Waaagh. They fight as long as they desire, so long as the Ork attention is properly drawn away from my Ultramarine forces. You disengage at will, and the Orks will follow. That is the first day.”

“Continue.” Jagathai’s voice was dripping with interest.

“The second day is one for my men to rest. Reload their weapons, bury the dead, repair our vehicles. Your men’s only duty will be to strike at the heels of the Orks, keep them fighting, busy, and away from the city. I care not how you do it, only that it is done. I trust you can do that?”

The Khan nodded, eyes widened in childlike excitement.

“Good. The next day is one of planning and logistics.” The Khan cocked his head as Guilliman drew a breath. “Fret not, that job goes to me. Your job is to listen and go where I feel it most important. My men set out, and you drive the Orks towards a position we deem strategically viable. My men arrive at the same time, and come the stroke of midnight we attack. We leave nothing left. That is the result of our final day.”

Jagathai Khan chuckled, a deep throaty laugh that reverberated across the room as if he was in the room with Guilliman.

“You like it?” Roboute asked, already knowing the answer.

“I love it!” Jagathai smiled. “Just one final question.”

Guilliman nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Promise me I reserve the right to bring home the Ork Warboss’s head on a pike.”

“I would not dare take that away from you.”

“Wonderful. I will be there with my fleet in two day’s time.”

“Two days? You are certain you will arrive that quickly?”

The Khan shook his head. “If we are not giving your men their reprieve in two day’s time, you’d might as well have called Mortarion and his sentient walls for aid.” He laughed loudly to himself; Guilliman forced himself to laugh along with him.

Jagathai waved. “See you soon, brother.” With that, the flickering image that had depicted him disappeared with a light gasp, leaving Roboute Guilliman alone in the room once again.

He exhaled, and the weight of the galaxy became apparent on his shoulders once again.

[beardedmrbean]

Memorials to victims of Stalinist repression in Russia are disappearing or being vandalised amid increasing attempts to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator.

For the past nine years, more than 700 plaques have been put up in Russia and elsewhere, commemorating the final residences of people who died in Stalin's purges in the 1930s.

Since May, however, dozens have disappeared in several Russian cities, according to Oksana Matievskaya, who is part of the plaque project Posledniy Adres (last address).

Police are not investigating the issue and Ms Matievskaya believes this is no coincidence.

"The memory of the Soviet terror challenges the concept of the state always being right and is, therefore, inconvenient for the Russian authorities. Especially following the invasion of Ukraine," she said.

Millions of people described as "enemies of the people" were sent to Soviet labour camps, known as the Gulag, and 750,000 were summarily murdered during Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s.

Other memorials are also being targeted.

At least 18 monuments to victims of repression as well as foreign soldiers who fought in World War Two have been reported stolen or vandalised since February 2022. Most are dedicated to Polish nationals.

In October, a brick memorial to a prominent Polish priest was torn down and destroyed in the city of Vladimir.

A concrete cross erected in Komi republic, in memory of Polish prisoners, was also found demolished. Police attributed its destruction to bad weather and declined to initiate criminal proceedings, local media said.

Soviet authorities executed hundreds of thousands of Poles after 1939. In 1940, 1.7 million were deported to Gulag camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Alexandra Polivanova of civil rights group Memorial believes the damage was ordered or carried out by authorities because Moscow wants the Soviet Union to be perceived as a powerhouse rather than an oppressive state.

She suggests the government doesn't want Russians to know the truth about their tragic past, especially now that Russian soldiers have been accused of war crimes in Ukraine.

"The authorities try to erase the memory of the crimes of that empire to cover up or justify the crimes of this one."

This is taking place alongside a resurgence in Stalin's popularity.

In July, a survey by independent pollster the Levada Centre suggested that 63% of Russians had a favourable attitude towards the Soviet leader - his highest approval rating in 13 years.

The explanation behind his rising popularity is not certain but Russian propaganda justifying the war with Ukraine has also glorified its Soviet past.

And unlike memorials to his victims, those to Stalin have increased in number.

An investigative channel on social media site Telegram called "We can explain" says there are 110 Stalin statues in Russia - 95 erected during President Vladimir Putin's rule and at least four during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Some Russians want even more. In August the private Russkiy Vityaz (Russian Knight) Foundation inaugurated an 8m-high statue of Stalin in the town of Velikiye Luki, and is collecting money for more.

Its website argues these monuments are crucial given that Russia is fighting "a real Patriotic war". The "Great Patriotic War" is how Russians describe the 1941-1945 war between the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Kremlin regularly compares Russia's invasion of Ukraine to World War Two.

Russkiy Vityaz, which is said to have been founded by the Russian Special Forces Veterans Association, has declined to comment on the reasons for its campaign.

[ladyelizabethraven]

Hogwarts Legacy Ideas posted on Reddit & my shower thoughts that can be used as interesting writing prompts:

Ominis' blindness was not seen as an imperfection by his family. Rather, for them, it was seen as a sign that Ominis was the perfect heir of Slytherin to open the Chamber of Secrets and purge the school of mudbloods. His blindness meant that he would be immune to the Basilisk's petrification gaze. And they spend the rest of Ominis' school years pressuring him to do it.

Sebastian would fit well in Gryffindor. And to see a Gryffindor be allured to the promises of the Dark Arts to cure his sister is peak drama.

Ominis, despite accepting his fate that he would be sorted into Slytherin, has no love for the house and chosen to mingle with the other houses instead. That is why he became best friends with Sebastian and Anne.

Sebastian's parents were actually Squibs but were still active in the wizarding world as magical researchers thanks to Solomon.

Speaking of Solomon, he would not actively try to kill the MC immediately. Rather, his behaviour would depend on the past decisions MC had made regarding the Dark Arts, whether MC had encouraged Sebastian to pursue the Dark Side, or if MC had sided with Ominis during the arguments. (IDK, I just wanted him to become more morally complex so people would at least hesitate at that final scene of the quest)

There is a connection between Solomon getting fired from being an Auror and Aesop Sharp's accident that's got his partner killed. (?)

Sebastian and Anne were considered to be muggle born since they came from non magical parents (IIRC Squibs were not actually registered and often ostracised in the magical community).

Seb and Anne were often discriminated against by the pure blood supremacists (Including the headmaster) in the school behind Ominis' back. That is why Seb, who was naturally adventurous, was considered as a delinquent trouble maker.

Anne, before she was cursed, has set up a support group for muggle born students and was actively fighting against the subtle bullying and discrimination happening in Hogwarts.

Anne's curse came from Marvolo Gaunt (who was threatening Ominis into opening the Chamber of Secrets). It was secretly approved by Headmaster Black since he hated the formation of the support group.

Amit may have the most stable in the group of main cast, but his conflict comes from measuring up to his family (who had done great feats in their school years).

His conflict would also be in the form of not wanting to fight vs consider fighting to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of the past from those who try to Bury it.

Professor Fig would be the if the MC's primary antagonist. But he would not be the "mwahahaha" villain but rather the "man who flew too close to the sun and got his wings burned off" kind of a tragic hero.

Blinded by grief and guilt over his wife's death, Fig decided to seek the powers of the Ancient Magic to bring his wife back to life. But he also wanted to use the MC to take revenge on Ranrok and the goblins for killing his wife.

The Keepers were the BBEG of the story because they want to monopolise the use of the Ancient Magic through Isidora. It's because they think that the Ancient Magic was too powerful to be used by the younger generation. They don't want her to act on her own accord and use the magic as they see fit. When Isidora rebelled, they killed her and tarnished her name as the most evil witch ever lived and basically launched a smear campaign on her. But when they found out that they could not use the Ancient Magic on their own, the Keepers decided to seal it away, preparing it for the next person who would be able to use and sense the Ancient Magic, and probably possess that person.

While Isidora's motives are still the same, it would be like the old argument in the HP fandom on "Whether Hermionie was right in meddling her parents' mind without their knowledge or consent even though it was said to be for their own safety". (CAN also be an alternate BBEG).

MC's quest now involves learning the truth and deciding on how to use the Ancient Magic.

Hogwarts legacy story will be more about the students (MC, Sebastian, Ominis, Natsai, Poppy, Amit) choosing what "destiny" has laid out for them vs forging their own path and make their own story

The friends MC has made along the way appears in the final repository run to support the MC. I know the professors appearing there was epic, but it's just to show the strength of the bonds you've made in this journey.