#demographic. im going to care more about things they didnt want me to and care less about things they did

[cescalr]

For the ship asks! If we're talking Avatar, what about Mei and Zuko?

I'll be honest, I'm not fond of it. I don't really like mei in the first place - apathy never sits well with me, and she never actually changed her mind? Mei at the start is mei at the end. She didn't think what the fire nation was doing was wrong, and she only sided against Azula to stay with Zuko, which would be sweet if she... actually liked him? And I don't think she does? She was happy with Zuko during his time back at the fire nation when he was acting the part of Ozai's favoured son, and its just... eeh. They give me bad vibes, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if she threw a knife at him properly one of these days.

Plus, Mei doesn't have much of a character outside Zuko. I'd rather shew her development than her stagnation, and keeping her with Zuko keeps her the same. In the end, mostly, me*ko just bores me, which is the nail in the coffin for any ship. At least if I hated it I'd feel something, yk? I prefer meilee or even meizula and... really any other zuko ship (aside from aang >-< yike) over meiko, but... I wouldn't, like, absolutely hate it if a good fic had meiko in it, you know? I just don't like them in canon. Much like I've said before, I'm willing to give things their fair shot. It's just that Mei herself is a hard sell for me as a focal character. It's not even that she's a 'bad' person - I read Azula and Jet-centric fics, and even memorably one Ozai centred fic (time travel, it was interesting start but still a wip though so going to see where it leads) - it's more that I just don't know what to do with her. She's kind of a meh girlfriend and kind of a whatever person, to me.

In comparison, Zuko is literally The redemption arc guy. He's the character people want to replicate the success of. Zuko is such a person that he's iconic and Mei is kinda... there. For the record, I didn't even know she existed until I watched the show. Zukka and Zutara and Zuko's character arc were well known to me, but Mei was not. I ended up only liking zukka platonically, not minding and sometimes supporting zutara, shipping jetko for the angst and the parallelism, even giving some really au zuko stuff like that one toph arranged marriage series or his leadership/friendship/family dynamics with his crew a go, jin/zuko, song/zuko - loads of things! On the other hand, Mei didn't have much going for her in my estimation to begin with, and her portrayal by competing ship fans probably didn't help. There was one where she tried to kill him after the war ended, lmao. That was silly. But still. Bias is easy to build, even without meaning to.

So, would I say I like meiko? No. Would I say I hate it? Depends on the portrayal. Much like ronmione, I don't think it would take a lot of tweaking to make her abusive, specifically also without being OOC, which worries me. So I just don't poke that sleeping dragon and hang out in the other ship spaces.

In the end, I think they just didn't understand each other on a fundamental level. (Also important; Zuko never seemed to know what to do with her, the things shed like or appreciate, and never seemed to take her own expressions - mild as they were - of affection as well as one would expect were he actually in love with her, which is itself important to note, though of course also just my own interpretation of what we were given; a lot of their scenes were cut off at some of the most important parts, which doesnt quite sit right with me.) And I need something to dig my teeth into that just wasn't present for their relationship, except in ways I couldn't interpret positively. A shame, but oh well. We can't all like everything :).

[anxiously-sidequesting]

[Ambrose (derogatory)] anon here (rofl I'm glad you liked that)

I think it's also up to interpretation a bit how old YW is. I mean it's assumed (because of the target demographic) they're like elementary/middle school age ofc. But at Merle's age anything under 50 could be 'young' imo (and they have to call them something, so 🤷).

Do I think YW is in their mid-40s? Probably not lol but they could at least be a young adult (unless there's some canon confirmation I'm forgetting. Which I totally could be XD)

Are there some more capable adults he could get to help? Probably. But that actually leads me to another Thought which is the book of secrets. Clearly it says something about YW being destined to save the spiral yada yada so maybe by default Ambrose trusts and relies on them even when they're not the best equipped - but maybe that's literally WHY the book of secrets says that, because it knows he's gonna put all his eggs in one basket and not bother to get support from anyone else. So it ends up that. Yeah. YW is the one who goes through all this. Thanks for the trauma bro /j

Anyway I do like the idea of the protagonist jumping in and wanting to be the hero (and also being ready to throw down with anybody) because I feel like it fits with the generally helpful but also somewhat chaotic and morally dubious image they've cultivated over their journey. If Ambrose seemed less like he didn't give a fuck (not just about YW but all death students, etc) it'd be a much better dynamic

but we were robbed

(here's hoping some fic writer revamps his character to the wise and supportive headmaster the students deserve)

FIRST OFF YAY IM GLAD I DIDNT SCARE YOU OFF

And that's definitely a good point with how the Wizard's age comes into play! I think the most heinous thing that stands out about canon is that the Wizard is assumed to be a child - probably because the game is geared towards younger kids and most of the fandom by that time WERE young kids, AND the Wizard was essentially supposed to be YOU or an insert that represented you. Also even canon, up until arc 2 or 3, even comments on how young the Wizard is constantly. So it's the fact that an adult person is taking advantage of and using a CHILD and putting them in dangerous situations. For the greater good? Yeah!!! But that's still a little kid. That's the part that kinda stands out when it comes to Ambrose's treatment of the Wizard. A child has no autonomy in a situation when pitted against an adult, a child doesn't know any better to realize what's happening, the child isn't mature enough to have the words or know the actions to stand up for themselves. Combined with the fact that the child is in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar stranger telling them to do things, the child is the completely vulnerable party in this scenario.

If the Wizard was a young adult by the time they were recruited by Ambrose, most of that would be gone. There would still be a power imbalance (Ambrose being the Headmaster and unofficial mentor of the Wizard, who has power and influence over the City guard vs. the Wizard who is just an apprentice with no societal standing or knowledge of the aspiral yet) but AT LEAST an adult would (hopefully) be better equipped to handle themselves. An adult would most likely recognize what's really going on, what the situation is, and is able to rationalize and plan accordingly.

AND YEAH GOOD QUESTION ABOUT THE OTHER CAPABLE ADULTS because yes. Yes there are. There are infinite other choices Ambrose could have chosen before the Young Wizard. At least, for a lot of other issues that don't include saving the Spiral. Like you said Ambrose likes putting all his eggs in a basket and if he can kill multiple birds with one stone, he will. Since the Wizard is already here and the BOS said they were the chosen savior, there's no need to worry about the Other Guys!

Although imo the only way this eager Wizard AU could work in Ambrose's favor if he was like, actually shown to care about the Young Wizard's wellbeing despite his inability to help. It wouldn't be enough for Ambrose to just sit back and do nothing even in his old age when The Wizard is still essentially in danger (despite being eager to put themselves in that position in the first place), I would actually have to see Ambrose take whatever action he could in order for this dynamic to feel more equal and wholesome. Does Ambrose send other companions to help the Wizard out? Does Ambrose sit the Wizard down and gently explain although he appreciates the help, he expects the Wizard to be careful? Does Ambrose use his position of power to help take the load off the Wizard's shoulders every now and then? Does Ambrose take time out of his day to simply have tea with the Wizard and check in on them outside of any Spiral business?

Even if Ambrose was too old to do things himself, he still could do other things to make sure the Wizard was safe, especially if the Wizard was exhibiting some self-destructive behavior. It isn't enough that he's just too old; taking actions to ensure the Wizard's safety and little acts of service that ensures the Wizard KNOWS that they are cared for and loved - THAT'S my ideal Ambrose and Wizard relationship. A bond that feels true and a relationship that's equal where it's less "old man uses child" and "two partners who are in this together". The last part of your ask PERFECTLY captures this that Ambrose needs to SHOW his love and care and protection for the Wizard, not just to say it every once in a while. This is a genius ask and a genius AU you've come up with anon

[menalez]

The thing about that hyperdemona is that she actually comes from a privileged background from her country. A lot of christians from kerala(her state, which is also mine) were from upper caste backgrounds and were casteist feudal lords like their upper caste hindu counterparts. She also admitted to some of her ancestors owning slaves back in the day here,

https://www.tumblr.com/hyperdemona/732628331223302145/do-you-come-from-any-kind-of-noble-family-just?source=share

A lot of kerala christians are very islamophobic and support the BJP,

https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/chrisanghis-rise-christian-right-kerala-170777

It was revolting how she kept trying to defend her racism by citing her father being an immigrant worker in UAE. Trust me, most people from privileged backgrounds like hers who migrate to Gulf countries from kerala are very different from the lower caste and exploited Indian labourers. These NRIs(a term for non residential Indians) usually work white-collar jobs and are one of the richest demographics in kerala.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/nris-and-jewellers-top-keralas-rich-list/articleshow/42655846.cms

That she mixes the experiences of these privileged sections with those of poor, lower caste Indians who actually suffer from racism and discrimination is just further proof of her bigotry. And she really don't care for these exploited workers either, she just want to use them to one-up the middle eastern women who called out her racism. She loves using the experiences of underprivileged people from our country to paint herself as a victim when she never suffered from any of that.

yeah bahrain also has a lot of migrant workers and there absolutely is at least two groups of south asians in the country, the people who work in awful exploitative jobs like construction, domestic work, kitchen work, delivery drivers, etc and then the people who work more prestigious & valued work such as engineers, doctors, even teachers (the latter aren't valued as much but certainly have it a lot better than the people in the first group). of course, in general people are racist regardless but when they realise you're a south asian from a more educated and respected background, the racism is more toned down compared to how they treat domestic & construction workers for example. i grew up being perceived as south asian & ppl still assume im south asian in bahrain and people have directed all sorts of racism at me. even other south asians were racist to me bc i was darker-skinned than my south asian teachers who would look down on me. its a real problem, for sure, regardless of class. but class does make a difference. the way people will be overtly racist about "bengali workers" (from my experience bangladeshis & sri lankans are the ones dehumanised the most, it might also be bc a good number of pakistanis and indians in bahrain can be quite upper class) is quite shocking tbh, like i cant even put into words how vile they can be.

im not going to assume anything about her beliefs based on her being a christian from kerala, i didnt see her expressing the stuff you mentioned ppl of her background often believing in and i think assuming she does believe that falls into stereotyping anyways but. her saying her family had slaves until the mid-1800s is pretty wild to me, especially saying they enslaved a whole caste of people in her area... and yeah i think based on that, her father probably is not one of the people who faced exploitation akin to slavery in UAE, the type of exploitation that has claimed the lives of up to tens of thousands of south asians in the gulf per year.

i do want to emphasise again tho that i think even more well-off south asians can face racism in the gulf, in general people in the gulf are quite racist and ive had to grow up facing that directed at me a lot. quite colourist and classist too. but my light-skinned, south asian, well-off friends have generally not faced that kind of prejudice so.. i do think the racism is several factors combined and if you have a certain background as a south asian in the gulf, you can have it a lot better than for example black/part-black arabs & dark-skinned people of colour, or even filipinos & indonesians, in the gulf will. and certainly worlds better than what a lot of south asians in the gulf experience.

south asians in the gulf do not have one shared experience ultimately. but i think many will notice the contempt people have for south asians, even if they don't face that contempt directly and have privileges protecting them from that level of racism.

all that said.... palestinians are in a different region and have literally nothing to do with that stuff. palestinians get treated like shit in the gulf too. it makes no sense to say racist shit about palestinians and then justify it by saying its ok bc arabs in UAE are racist to south asians, it really doesn't. it doesnt make sense to justify being racist by pointing to arabs also being racist, but like, using it against palestinians is nonsensical.

[timegears-moved]

☕️ mmmm pokemon games specifically (not including spinoffs)

sorry this is late im terrible with actually answering asks. ill do this generation by generation. also this ended up very long because i have a lot of thoughts about pkmn.

gen one: okay so right off the bat im gonna say that i have a massive soft spot for gen one, considering blue was the first game i ever played. i do have a degree of nostalgia towards it which is why i can never be truly be harsh on these games. i know they're a mess of glitches and mechanics that make no fucking sense (seriously FUCK psychic types and everything they stand for) but it has a certain charm to it.

but even as a "kanto apologist" (which damien calls me) i can absolutely agree that the pandering is fucking abysmal. they're trying cater to a demographic who hasn't cared about pokemon in years and aren't going to pick up a new game just because charizard is in it. by doing this it feels like they're alienating the people who actually care, like "yeah ur support is nice but we want the genwunners to like us more than anything.

also on the topic of pandering is that their pandering is so half-assed too. all of this gen one content and not one shred of love for my boys victreebel or cloyster? bro i hate it here.

gen two: i dont really have that much to say here tbh. i have no fond memories of it at all considering i only played through gold once right before hgss came out. i can say that i appreciate all of the bullshit from gen one that it fixed but i have issues with johto as a region that ill elaborate on when i talk about the remakes.

gen three: honestly i never cared much for this gen. i played it quite a bit growing up but it's always been whatever for me. a lot of it just feels kind of.....bland for me. i really don't know what to say because it leaves me feeling conflicted. there's nothing bad about these games that sticks out like a sore thumb but they just don't do it for me, ya know?

i do appreciate frlg for shedding a much better light on kanto though.

gen four: okay so i'll fully admit that the sinnoh games are my childhood faves and are still my faves now but im not letting nostalgia completely cloud my judgement on this.

honestly? i think pokemon peaked with platinum. dp had their problems for sure and some of those still carried over to platinum but the scale in which platinum told its story feels so much grander than any pokemon game that came before or after it. i absolute adore the sinnoh mythos and i only want dp remakes just so it can get expanded upon, i could care less about any actually gameplay from it. ive said this before but you cannot make the god of pokemon and not do anything with it.

as for hgss, i have very mixed feelings about this one but not in the same way gen 3 made me feel because i do have genuine problems here. ive talked before about them but i just cannot stress how bad the level and pokemon distributions are. how the fuck can you make brand new pokemon for your johto region and not put them in fucking johto?

like these games are fine ig. i never cared about the walking pokemon mechanic but it literally feels like people only praise this game as the best because of that one thing that has no bearing on the actual game itself. you can like these games all you want, i still enjoy parts of them myself, but calling them the best is a huge reach.

gen five: right off the bat im gonna say that i do love the gen five games so nobody thinks im being overly critical or anything. i love the aesthetic of these games, i ADORE the pokemon here and they're some of the most fun pokemon games to play through. it's the story and characters (with the exception of n i will absolutely give credit where it is die there) that throw me for a loop.

i feel like whenever i praise the story or characters im just following the crowd here. i don't know if im just very stupid (i definitely am very stupid) or what but none of it felt as powerful as people claim it is for me personally. maybe i should just pay more attention but i honestly don't know. im definitely not saying theyre bad or anything i just in all hobestly dont get the (very sudden) hype.

uhhh i can't say much about bw2 because i haven't beaten it since it came out but i remember liking hugh and it made iris a champion so i remember them being good on those two things alone.

gen six: hohohohoho here we go. tbh i don't even know what i can say about xy that hasn't already been said. like gen one might be a huge mess looking back on it but at least it had character. xy introduced a few pokemon that i really liked and some amazing shiny hunting methods that should definitely return but that's the most i can say in terms of praise.

i dont think pokemon has ever gotten this boring before, and that's speaking as someone who clocked over 300 hours into my x save file. nothing has life (which in hindsight is ironic considering xerneas is the god of life) and i hate the way mega evolution was handled so much. i really don't know what else to say because everyone has already said what i want to but i think this has been pokemon's lowest point so far.

oras once again made hoenn complicated for me. they made hoenn somewhat interesting for me in a way that didnt capture me in the originals. i don't think they're stellar but ive seen people call these the worst ones and....why. i get that the originals are special to a lot of people and that they feel like oras did them injustice but honestly i would oras over the originals because they're just more fun for me.

gen seven: it made popplio. 10/10.

okay so i can understand why the very slow start and unskippable long cutscenes threw a lot of people off but i just don't understand so much of the hate it around other things. again i see people proclaiming it as the worst and you can see it as that from a gameplay element, but the story fucking slapped ass and i don't think amybody can or should deny that. maybe i just feel very passionately about them because they're very personal for me in helping me through a rough time in my life but i just also dont see why everybody is so mad at these games sometimes.

the fact that sm mean so much to me makes usum's entire existence hurt so much more. like wow i love abuse apologism: the game thank you sooooo much gamefreak! /s

aside from ultra wormhole jumping, my baby dusk lycanroc and the new ultra beasts i dont care for anything new usum brought. it feels like it back peddled so much by completely ruining lillie's character by attempting to make lusamine likable when the damage from the first games was already done. i hate usum they're the only pokemon games i can state that i hate. i don't know how you can take sm's well-done albeit flawed blueprints, take out everything that was good and only leave stuff that either doesn't matter or is actively harmful.

also let's go pikachu and eevee exist too idrc

gen eight: ive already spoken my piece on swsh but im gonna be more clear here. i dont think swsh is inherently bad and i can still have fun with them. i dont think the issue here lies with the cut pokedex. i could honestly care less about that and i always figured we would get to this point. the issue lies with nintendo and tpci pushing for yearly releases, forcing the devs to make yearly subpar games. i can think of so many ways they can remedy this situation: taking longer times between releases, hiring more staff at gamefreak or even splitting developments for different projects between multiple different studios. i hope that the reported low moral at gamefreak at swsh's releases is enough of a wake up call for change but that could just be me being optimistic.

i am SO sorry this ended up as long as it is but i have a lot of opinions and not enpugh willpower to keep my mouth shut

[dvp95]

quiet on widow’s peak (3)

pairing: dan howell/phil lester, pj liguori/sophie newton/chris kendall rating: teen & up tags: paranormal investigator, youtuber phil lester, dan howell is not a youtuber, online friendship, slow burn, strangers to lovers, nonbinary character, trans character, background poly, phil does some buzzfeed unsolved shit and dan is a fan word count: 3.1k (this chapter), 9.5k (total) summary: Phil’s got a list of paranormal experiences a mile long that he likes to share with the world. Abandoned buildings, cemeteries, and ghost stories have always called his name, and a particular fan of his has a really, really good ghost story.

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

Interviews used to be Phil's least favourite part of this job. The research was always captivating, the filming was always fun, the editing was always challenging, but talking? To people? About things? Absolutely not.

He still doesn't love doing it, but he's long past the point of begging Martyn or Ian to pretend to be him on the phone.

The curtains in Phil's room are open for once, letting natural light in so he doesn't look as dark on the Skype screen. His eyes keep drifting to himself, distracting him as he tries to fix his hair or laments not getting out of his pyjamas. This is his fourth interview of the day, and he's starting to hate the process with a renewed fervour.

"Okay, thank you," he says, clicking out of the screen record window. "Can I message you here if I have any further questions, or would you prefer this to be your final statement?"

"Oh, um," the girl says, her eyes round with some kind of emotion that Phil can't be bothered to parse. "No, no, that's... that's all I saw. I don't have anything else. But you can still... message me, if you like."

Ah. Phil makes a face that he hopes reads as apologetic and not panicked. "No, I - sorry. Gay. Just interested in your ghost."

"Oh!" she says again, looking more puzzled than Phil thinks she has any right to after a forty minute conversation where he mostly just asked her clarifying questions that she kept dodging. She tucks some of her long hair behind her ear and shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just - you haven't said that online."

Phil isn't very good at knowing when people are lying to him, but now he's definitely suspicious of the half-assed testimony he'd gotten from this girl. He sighs. "Okay, you know who I am, then?"

"I mean, I looked you up when you messaged me about a video and all," she says. "Wanted to know if you were a creep or, like, legit."

Okay, that's fair enough. Phil supposes that if he were a girl in uni and a stranger asked to video chat, he'd also do a little digging first. He still doesn't quite believe her story, though - most of it matches what she'd written on Facebook, word for word, and she didn't go into detail on anything she claimed happened.

"Right, of course," says Phil, feeling awkward and exposed.

Her eyes are wide and blue and she can see into his room, into his life, and she's giving him this look like she thinks she knows something about him. He hates this feeling.

"That a secret, then?" she asks.

"No," Phil says. "It's just not relevant to my job. I don't have a lot of ghouls asking me out."

She doesn't laugh. Phil is getting more and more uncomfortable by the second, and he's wondering if it's worth it to hang up on a potential lead - no matter how dubious her claims - when she says, "Well, alright. I won't tell anyone anyway."

"Thanks," Phil says automatically. He doesn't particularly care if she does or not, but he does want this call to end as soon as possible. "And thanks for your time. Message me if you think of anything else you forgot to mention about the Wilkins place or if you know of someone who's seen something."

Before she can even respond, Phil hits end on the call and groans, resting his forehead on his thumbs for a moment.

Unsurprisingly, this is giving him a migraine. It doesn't take much to make the twinge of a headache turn to insistent throbbing, because Phil's body hates him and overreacts to everything.

Phil takes a couple of deep breaths before he comes out of hiding. He attaches the final screen recording to the email he's already got open and ready to send to Martyn. After a moment's thought, he CCs PJ and Sophie in and adds, Nobody sounds credible except the second person to me, so... it's not looking good lol, before hitting send.

He takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes for a moment. Interviews are still draining for him, especially when they don't go as planned, and Phil's starting to get the impression that there's nothing to even find at the Wilkins place.

But. Phil pauses, considers his options. He hasn't interviewed everyone, has he.

Before he can talk himself out of it, Phil shoves his glasses unceremoniously back onto his face and opens Tumblr. Winnie hasn't said anything to him so far today, so Phil feels only a little like he's bothering them when he shoots off a quick, Hey! I just finished interviewing the sources you gave me and most of them aren't very promising. Would you consider letting me ask you some questions to round out the video?

me?????, Winnie replies almost immediately. i didnt even see anything?? like im happy to answer questions but idk how much use ill b in an INTERVIEW

I know! And you don't have to lmao so don't feel pressured or anything but you know so much more about the place than they do. Everyone claimed that they didn't know other people were having paranormal experiences.

oh bullshit, Winnie says. Phil is surprised into a huff of laughter.

There's a part of Phil, fuelled by anxiety and uncertainty, that worries Winnie is just pulling an elaborate joke on him. That part of him feels a little more at ease every time he actually talks to Winnie. They just seem... genuine. And maybe Martyn would disagree, would blame Phil's desperation to see the best in people, but there's a reason Phil doesn't tell Martyn everything.

Before Phil can agree with Winnie's colourful derision, his laptop beeps again. i look like an ogre rn but i can voice chat if you rly think itll help

It would!!, Phil assures them. The tender spot behind his eyes twinges again, serving as a reminder. Can I call in like an hour? I've got a headache from the screen lol

sure i really have nothing else going on today

--

So it's later in the day, late afternoon light still streaking through Phil's window, when Phil sits back down at his computer and adds the Skype username Winnie gave him. His head still hurts a bit, but it isn't all-consuming now that he's had another coffee and some painkillers. The padded headphones feel good to put over his ears, blocking out most of the typical noises from such a full house and a busy street, and Phil just sits in the blissful quiet for a moment before he sends a voice call request.

It gets picked up almost immediately, and Phil presses a smile into his palm before he says, "Hi! Can you hear me alright?"

There's a beat. Phil waits, in case Skype is lagging as usual, but he's opening his mouth to repeat himself by the time he gets a response.

"Yeah," says Winnie. "I can hear you."

Phil isn't really proud of himself for being surprised by Winnie's voice. It's just. He knows his viewer demographics, okay, and he has a rough grasp on Tumblr demographics, and the name - alright. It isn't his proudest moment, is his point, because he's expecting a much higher pitch for absolutely no good reason.

In addition to that, his brain automatically tries to classify Winnie's voice as very obviously masculine, and Phil has to push back against that.

"I can hear you, too," Phil says cheerfully, not allowing his anxieties to spill over into the conversation.

"That's good, probably," Winnie says. There's another beat of silence, and then a huff that might be laughter or a sigh comes through Phil's headphones. "Sorry, I - I'm not trying to be fucking weird, this is just surreal."

"Is it?" Phil hums. "But I haven't even asked you about ghosts yet."

A snort - definitely laughter, this time - follows, and Phil is so glad that he's able to put Winnie at ease even if his brain is betraying him. "That's true. I guess it's gotta get weirder from here."

"That's kind of, like, the subtitle of my whole channel," says Phil. After a moment, he frowns. "Subtitle? No. What's the thing, on the poster -"

"Tagline," says Winnie. They sound so amused and warm and, okay, they've got a nice voice. That's not gendered. Phil can think that. "You're thinking of a tagline, you buffoon."

"Tagline," Phil echoes gratefully.

"Don't you," Winnie starts, then stops abruptly. They don't finish the sentence, but Phil can kind of guess what they were going to say. There's the sound of some rustling, like Winnie is getting comfortable, before they change tacks. "Again, I didn't see any of this alleged ghostly activity with my own eyes, but I know the hot goss."

Phil opens the recording program out of habit, nodding even though Winnie can't see him. "That's still really useful at this point," he says encouragingly. He clicks a couple of buttons. "And, yes, I do have an English degree. Thank you for not asking."

Winnie laughs, the sound of it filling Phil's headphones and making it feel like they're in the room with him. It's warm, like everything else about their voice, and absolutely contagious.

"I didn't want you to think I was, like, a big stalker," Winnie says, and Phil can hear the grin in their voice.

"Eh, I know you watch my videos," says Phil. "So I figure you know some stuff about me. You probably know that I'm going to ask this, too, but - is it okay if I record our conversation? I don't need to include it in the video if you don't want me to, but it's still useful for me if I don't so I can, like, actually remember the things you told me."

"Yeah, sure," Winnie agrees easily. They hesitate, for a moment, and Phil waits for whatever the caveat will be. "Uh, can I still swear?"

The question surprises Phil into laughing. "Yeah, you're fine. I can bleep them out."

"Then I am all for it. Ask me the ghost questions, ghost man."

Phil presses record and glances down at his notebook, where he's scrawled some disjointed questions alongside his usual doodling. "Uh, okay. Yes. I am totally a professional."

"If you say so, mate," says Winnie.

"Hush. Okay." Phil finally gets his brain back on track and taps his pen against a question near the end of his list. "So, Winnie, you did all this research into the Wilkins place on your own downtime, but you mentioned that you've been hearing murmurs about it for a while, right?"

"Not that long, actually, I've only been hearing about it since term started," Winnie says, and Phil is struck by how comfortable they suddenly are now that there's a guideline. Or, maybe, now that there's a non-Phil audience. "Which I thought was pretty weird, since I'd been there a couple times since I moved here, and it's a spooky fucking place but nothing to write home about."

That's more or less exactly how Phil feels about the situation, except that he doesn't remember the Wilkins place to be scary at all. Maybe it's gotten worse in the years since, or maybe he's just got a higher threshold for empty, decrepit homes than Winnie does. Either way, he's not sure if he should be relieved or suspicious that their thoughts on it mirror his own so well. He starts a spiral in the corner of his page as he considers the answer.

"So, you never got the impression that it was haunted before?"

"I - can I be perfectly honest?" Winnie asks, and then doesn't wait for a response. "I don't get the impression that it's haunted now. I dunno if people are just making shit up or if they're doing too many drugs, but we all know that ghosts don't actually exist."

Phil snorts. He does have a fairly large number of skeptics who watch his videos to argue in the comments about logical explanations for his findings or to just enjoy watching him fail so much, but he hadn't really expected that from someone who sent him a sourced essay on the topic of ghosts.

He's recording right now, so he's not about to give away the fact that, yeah, he kind of does agree with Winnie on this one. Instead, he keeps his tone neutral and says, "You don't believe in ghosts."

"I don't believe in most things that can't be explained by science," Winnie says, so matter-of-fact that Phil has to smile.

"I don't really believe in science," Phil says, mild.

A beat. "Excuse me?"

"I said I don't believe in science," Phil repeats, doubling down on the joke so he can hear that incredulous pitch of Winnie's nice voice again. "I mean, isn't it all just as made-up as anything else? People just tell us stuff exists and we have to believe them?"

"We believe them," Winnie says slowly, "because it's a fact."

"How do I know that?" Phil asks. He knows how off track he's already gotten, and he decides to cut this part out before he sends the file to Martyn or his friends.

"Because you can. See it. With your eyes." The genuine bewilderment in Winnie's voice is very funny. "Like. What the fuck, Phil. If someone drops an apple and it hits the ground and they're like, 'oh that's gravity', how are you supposed to say, 'uh, no it ain't'?"

Phil leans back in his chair a bit, his spiral turning into an apple. "Because, what if that's just what the apple wanted to do? It's not like we know any of this for sure, Winnie."

"You're fucking with me," Winnie says, but they don't sound very certain.

"I am," Phil admits happily. "Do you remember the first incident that kicked off the Wilkins place rumours?"

"You," Winnie says, and then cackles. They lean away from their mic as they do, but the sound of it still makes Phil feel some secondhand giddiness. He wonders if their laugh has a volume limit, or if it's just going to keep getting louder the funnier Phil is. He is so tempted to put that to the test. "Fuck. You little fucker."

Phil hides his own giggle in the palm of his hand and clears his throat, trying to get back into the professional mindset he'd forced himself to be in for the four earlier interviews.

"Do you need me to repeat the question?" Phil asks. He can't resist teasing, just a bit.

"No, fuck off," Winnie chuckles. They take a deep breath and let it out on a hum, low and thoughtful. "So, there was this shindig during fresher's, which I obviously didn't go to because I'm not a fresher and I'm too old to go to shindigs, but people were talking about how the house was making weird noises. A girl I know - I linked you to her Reddit post - said she saw someone just standing outside the window watching them, but, like, is that really a supernatural occurrence in Rusholme?"

"It's not. And she hit on me as well, so I'm not sure her judgement is trustworthy."

"Sounds like her. Sorry. Anyway, nobody really thought 'ghosts' as much as they thought 'rats in the walls and a pervert on the street', but then - this one didn't get spoken about online. I don't even know how valid it is."

"Word of mouth is how most ghost stories get passed," says Phil. "I'm not going to hold you to citations on rumours."

Winnie huffs a laugh. It's soft, quiet, and Phil almost wishes he could say something ridiculous to make them cackle again. Unfortunately, he has a job to do.

"Fair enough. Well, some idiots spent the night there to see if anything weird would happen," Winnie says, and Phil feels a bit attacked, "and three separate dudes had sleep paralysis."

Phil hums and jots some messy notes down. "In the same night?"

"At the same time," Winnie corrects him. "The other idiots were trying to wake them up for a long time, apparently. They're convinced that the guys who fell asleep were just pulling a prank on them, and maybe they were, but that's when the ball really got rolling."

Out of everything Phil has heard today, this is the most compelling story so far. Maybe that's a good indicator of the Manchester students being full of it - maybe there truly is nothing to find in the Wilkins place - but it piques Phil's interest anyway.

"For someone who only believes in cold, hard science, you're good at telling ghost stories," Phil says.

"Thanks," Winnie says, sounding pleased with themselves. "Learned from the best."

Phil is suddenly very, very glad that this isn't a video call, because he can't stop himself from smiling like an idiot. "Oh, is that what they're calling me?"

Another cackle. Phil doesn't remember the last time he made someone laugh so much without tripping over his own clown feet.

"I never said I was talking about you."

"Uh huh."

"Oh, shut up," says Winnie, and Phil can still hear the laughter in their voice. "Don't you have a bunch of questions to ask or something?"

Phil does. He has a whole list of questions that he should be following. He chews on his pen and looks at the doodle-covered list of things he's meant to ask Winnie. His head still hurts - maybe the extra caffeine didn't help after all - and all he really wants to do is take a nap.

"Yeah," Phil says, reluctant. "I've just got, like, a migraine. Can I call you back another time? This was a really great start."

"Oh, yeah, sure," says Winnie. They've dropped their voice down to something soft, like they're worried that they'll make Phil's headache worse.

"I'm actually going up to check the place out this weekend." Phil isn't sure what makes him say that. He meets up with sources in person, sometimes, but usually only if they've seen something with their own eyes. He just feels comfortable talking to Winnie, far more than he'd felt talking to the other students he'd interviewed today.

Phil doesn't actually extend the invitation, and Winnie either doesn't pick up the hint or doesn't care to.

"That'll be good," they say, still soft. "Get some rest, Phil, you can call me back when your brain stops trying to drill a hole through your temple."

After Phil says goodbye and hangs up, he sits at his desk for a long moment. It feels too quiet, all of a sudden, his padded headphones blocking out all the ambient noise around him. It's good for his head, but Phil is still weirdly disappointed.

[anti-marxistcult]

SJW’s “Diversity” dogma and Tokenism comments

same with me

YES!!! THANK YOU!!!

good point

same, entertainment is for escapism, not propaganda but this is what happens when ideologues control any business

Pretty much.

muthafucken TRUTH ^

they do because 1) it is their “selling-pitch” and to guilt/shame you into watching/liking it and 2) it is so if you dare criticize it they use the women/POC/GLBT card on you and call you names to smear you and deflect attention away from the criticism that it is a shitty poorly constructed film, game, series, comic, etc they use “diversity” to protect their mediocre propaganda from negative reaction, backlash, criticism

yup, that is why feminism is a sham, by looking at the people in the movement, their mentality and hatred of femininity and healthy women, it is no wonder feminists indulge in fandoms to bash classical feminine characters and project themselves into male characters by stripping them of their masculinity and making them go against their original identity by screwing other male straight characters. Feminism is for self loathing fugly women who are anti femininity and anti masculinity in their natural forms.

exactly, they know they have to get them while they are young, the younger he better because they are at their most vulnerable and impressionable. it is very much like a cult, they’d groom their children too.

True, it is feminism that makes women turn against themselves and each other. it conditions them to hate their femininity, hate being healthy and attractive. It is these land whale types that attack classic and traditional femininity and want to make women more butch and masculine because they think that since masculinity is men’s strength then women should emulate it, when in truth femininity is women’s strength, but feminism views femininity as a weakness, thus they emasculate men to weaken them in society’s eye and promote women to be masculine under the dumb belief it is supposed to give women some magical strength that men possess, lol or in other words: ‘cock envy’. This leads to both men and women being unhealthy, depressed, miserable, they develop self-image issues, and instead of taking responsibility for their lifestyle and their gullibility for buying into feminism and anti-gender norms dogma, they blame attractive people or the air brushed celebrities and models (friendly reminder sex sells for a reason, human beings generally prefer attractive healthy partners, people that a obese is a turn off - unless you have a fetish for it). another fact is women are prone to jealousy, envy, (I’m a woman, I know, and every other women with an honest bone in her body knows it is true too) again it leads back to human nature and our hard wired competitive streak. Majority of society’s problems, men and women, where personal issues and self-image and all that are concerned stem from the backwards ideology of feminism attacking our natural behavior because feminism and its flawed theories attack gender norms for its own interest, not for the majority of people’s interests. it causes more problems than it fixes, the only people that benefit are the ones that are devout followers of that dogma...except they aren’t really because they’re still jealous and resentful to those that are not conforming to their ideology. this is why they are now pushing it onto younger people more than before.

yup, sad but true, this is what happens when they are exposed to conditioning through media for decades and pass it down to the next gen and peer pressure them to hate the natural norms of women, her femininity and nature. feminism is communism in a skirt and marxism in drag. feminists are their own oppressors.

well that is one way of putting it. a channel I watched explained that too with a remarkable collection of articles, studies and polls and surveys and all that stuff and not to mention just observing that behavior by living and experiencing the real world, which these snowflakes dont do, they live on the internet in their safe bubble echo chambers believing the opposite about human nature and then get triggered and shocked and outraged when it doesnt mirror their fantasy expectations

personally I like watching attractive and healthy women, I can identify better with a person of any race, gender, sexuality, creed, etc that takes care of their health and appearance, not an unhealthy smelly thing that makes me feel sick :\ the agenda to promote ugliness and force acceptance of it is truly sad and gross

that is a great point actually, it is why the activists first hijacked online fandoms when the internet began because it was the perfect platform to shove their politics down teens and apolitical people’s throats and peer pressure them by calling dissenters all the usual buzzwords if they didnt re-”interpret” characters to virtue signal and appease the oppression stack.

yeah that is true, that is the women’s jealousy showing itself (and in some cases their control-freak tendencies), tumblr showcases their hypocrisy too with the double standards of sexual objectification

omg ... I have found my soul mate !!! ;D

Yeah and that is racist and sexist, once again SJWs are the thing they claim to hate. Personality and who you are matters, not what you are. for the people that think their entire being revolves around their race, gender and sexuality - that is pretty pathetic, that means they havent discovered themselves outside a group. One is supposed to let go of the ‘group’ after highschool. I think because millennials were given social media while they were still in highschool is why they havent grown up, they use it as an emotional crutch. Naturally a dependent person is going to feel helpless and confused because they arent thinking and evolving outside their surface traits that they cling to and use as victim cards. identity politics is cancer.

yeah... -__- yeah they eat themselves, this is a move of virtue signaling to gain more minority followers, they really are bigoted to think minorities want to be used as their fucking pawns in their self serving agenda

truth. the best a girl can hope for is a best friend and a sister. rumors, gossip and backstabbing is huge problem among girls/women, it is the result of being emotionally driven, lol 

because feminist/sjws double standards and jealousy, and their dogma of “not please the male gaze” lol it is not up to them to tell people what to do and dress and be attracted to, but they do because they and their ideology is totalitarian

yup and they get their activists running rampant on damage control to ridicule people who point this out, who do they think they are fooling?? their strategy and co-ordinated efforts to brainwash the youth is fucking blatant at that point, we get students reporting the ideological bias bs they endure in the classrooms 

thats why i find the romantic comedies of the past 20 years unbearable lol

there is nothing wrong with liking characters that all fall into one demographic due to great writing. I like characters for their journey+personalities+quality, gender and race is just the wrapping paper they come in. Badly written characters are the types that only focus on their race, gender, sexuality and nothing else, which are boring tokens and unrelatable on personal level. that why im resentful to fanfic writers that change characters recognizable identity traits (race, gender, sexuality), they prove they cant create a character and have no respect for established characters, even though those traits are what i called the “wrapping paper” it is still their image and a part of them. people that change canon characters are the bigots for changing them in the first place and would be the first to screech if a minority character was changed to be a different demographic. hypocrisy is the SJW game.

exactly, they build it up first, gain the following and support and devotion and then flip the switch. Jim Jones did the same thing. He gained his following by enticing a church, and then after filling them up with joy and hope and hoax miracles to convince them he was legit he then threw the bible onto the floor and said “did lightening strike me down?” and then began pushing his own marxist twisted beliefs and because the followers had been duped to sell their homes to donate to the Jim Jones church and live with the rest of the followers, (note it is easier to create a cult when they are isolated and exposed to the dogma all the time, like modern days ppl are hooked up to social media 24/7) it made it harder for them to just walk away. This is what these zealots do, they lure you in and once they have you they make you feel obligated and dependent on it and then switch the dogma an further poison your mind to reality. it is sick but they use this trick so often it is not hard to spot it, and it is always by the same brand of ideologues using the same methods.

[systemfaker]

so i guess if someone wants people writing a 10 paragraph essay about why they dont like endeavor, i have some time before i gotta go to work. i wanna play stardew valley so im kinda rushing it tho lol. its not 10 paragraphs (because i wanna play stardew valley) but it does have more points than just saying “hes an abuser” (even though thats a valid reason to dislike him and pretending it isnt is kind of shitty)

his main motivation in the series is a fucking popularity contest. as we can absolutely see from the in universe popularity polls, the amount of incidents resolved isnt the only thing deciding what a heros ranking is. endeavor is mad that he cant get ahead of all might, who is more popular than him. the only thing driving him is a desire to be the number one hero. it isnt a desire to be a good hero, or save as many people as possible, or provide for his family. hes mad that theres someone who he perceives as better than him. he cant stand that he isnt the one in the spotlight, then when he gets that spotlight, hes upset that he didnt get it the way he wanted it

despite wanting to win a popularity contest hes a fucking dick to his fans. to the point where a fan is shocked and dismayed that he isnt a dick. in universe, its stated that most of his fans are young men. gotta say thats not a good demographic because uhhhhhh yall ever interact with men aged Teenager to Adult? this coming from a (trans) man, but men are kind of violent garbage

my guy almost throws a tantrum because he isnt the center of attention in the mission to rescue bakugou. like... he gets mad that all might, a more skilled hero, gets to go in and try and get him, while endeavor has to stand outside and do an also important job, which is making sure nobody runs away. to me this shows as just more proof that he doesnt actually care about being a good hero, but instead just wants the fame and attention

he literally fucking bought a woman to have kids with her because of her quirk. we STAN a misogynist king! as everyone knows theres only one gender, male, because women are property :)

he views his children as tools, not people. he only wants kids so he can have one with the perfect genes too become a great hero that can prove.. i guess that his cum is stronger than all mights? he has 4 kids because the first 3 arent good enough for him, and he basically ignores those 3 kids. and the 4th kid doesnt really get off easy either

he fucking punches a kid until they literally throw up. this is implied to be a pretty regular occurrence from the time shouto is 5 years old and onwards. i dont like guys who punch kids even if its supposed to be training or whatever

he completely ignores shoutos wishes to have nothing to do with him. like.. if hes actually growing as a character and recognizing that hes done some Bad Shit, youd think hed respect the wishes of the people hes hurt, but nah. hes continued inserting himself in his life because to him it matters more that he absolve himself of guilt and feel like hes doing good at being a dad, rather than causing the least amount of damage he can to someone hes already hurt bad

i got bored here and i already had stardew valley open so im done im gonna go play stardew valley, yall want some uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh melons?

[uninterestiing]

lmao okay so i read simon vs the homosapian agender years ago and was... underwhelmed. like, there was some plot stuff i didnt care for, but mostly i didnt think the prose was written well. that said, it was years ago. i might feel differently if i re-read it, who knows, i barely remember what happens in it now. anyway.

what i REALLY dont get tho is how this film, which is a cheesy teen comedy, is getting more shit for being “problematic” when everyone basically let call me by your name, you know, the one that romanticizes pedophelia, go by unchallenged. even when it won oscars & shit.

this is an important film, because it is what determines how and whether gay films are targeted at children/teens, and what kind of budgets they get for the next few years, if not the next decade.

if you don’t understand the difference: every gay film you’ve seen, even as a teen, Was Not Targeted At You. they were indie, adult, etc. they were probably dark. if they werent, they CERTAINLY were not mainstream (films like moonlight or brokeback mountain were not expected to be as acclaimed as they were, & they were definitely not box office breakers). or they were garbage (fuckin GBF). they did not get advertiserd on billboards. the did not have big studio budgets. and personally, this is the first time i wont have to drive an hour to go to an independent cinema to see a queer film, like i did for moonlight and countless others.

and i get it! there are better books to adapt! books you prefer! books written by queer authors! and they deserve movies too! but you know what? They Will Not Get Them If This Movie Flops.

plus, for all those ppl like me who are desperate for gay ppl in films not About their sexuality, the film/book industry treats YA as a genre, not a demographic. so. this is actually a huge step towards getting the blockbuster astronaut/pirate/wizard gays you want.

also, ive seen the film being accused of being a “white gay” thing before anyones even seen it. i cant really argue one way or another on its supposed racism, im white, im not american, its not my decision. however: the main mystery of the plot is who Blue actually is, and im super grateful that the advertising hasnt undercut the film by giving it away (im looking at you, MJ in spiderman: homecoming). but he’s not white. and id also just in general suggest watching a film BEFORE u decided its ideologies. trailers can be misleading, sometimes intentionally.

plus from watching the trailer, the plot i disliked from the book seems to have been minimised or taken out of this film entirely so. theres that too.

....anyway, it could totally end up to be a “problematic” movie anyway, or just crap, but can we at least not jump the gun on it???

yeah

idk why im here defending the adaptation of a book i didnt think was particularly good but i just wanted to get my thoughts out. im not actually interested in a discussion.

tl;dr this movie is important to the industry and landscape of gay filmmaking regardless of whether is actually good or not

[patriotsnet]

Do Republicans Or Democrats Give More To Charity

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/do-republicans-or-democrats-give-more-to-charity/

Do Republicans Or Democrats Give More To Charity

The Relationship Between Generosity And Political Affiliation And Gender

Who LIES More- Republicans or Democrats?

Most people tip their hair stylists, while only 27% tip their hotel housekeeper.

+1.63%

Tipping can be a social and cultural maelstrom. And social media doesnt always help.

A National Basketball Association player who has a $30 million contract drew internet ire last week after leaving a $13.97 tip on a $487.13 bill. Andre Roberson of the Oklahoma City Thunder made headlines for the paltry tip, and the strong reaction shows just how emotional the question of tipping can be.

But it wasnt quite as clear-cut as it seemed. Roberson released a statement on Twitter TWTR, +1.63%  saying he was misrepresented, saying he bought one bottle of liquor for $487 at a bar, around five times the retail price and rounded it out to $500. Roberson said he also had a $100 tab on shots for which he left a $200 tip. I thought hed be grateful for the $200 tip, he wrote of the barman who served him.

Meanwhile, some restaurants have banned tipping while Uber is finally encouraging riders to open their wallets to drivers who go the extra mile.

See more:Meet the most generous tipper in America

Some of the findings seemed to play out in real life when three supporters of President Donald Trump left a $450 tip for a Washington, D.C. waitress in January, though they were from Texas, not the relatively more generous northeast.

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Also read: Is this the worst tipper in America?

Statistics On Us Generosity

In this section youll find charts and graphs laying out the most important numbers in American philanthropy. They document how much we give, how that has changed over time, what areas we give to, and what mechanisms we use to donate. There are figures here on where charities get their money, how many people offer volunteer labor, the demographic factors that influence generosity , and how various states and cities differ. The top foundations and donor-advised funds are ranked by their giving. We present surprising information on overseas aid, and statistics on how the U.S. compares to other countries when it comes to donating to charity.

Beto Orourke Other Democrats See The Downside Of Releasing Tax Returns

CHARLOTTESVILLE About 24 hours after presidential hopeful Beto ORourke released his tax returns from the past decade, a University of Virginia student asked him why he didnt donate more money to charities.

ORourke, a former congressman from El Paso, and his wife reported in their 2017 tax return that they donated $1,166 which was one-third of 1 percent of their $370,412 of income that year. ORourke told reporters on Wednesday that, over the years, he and his wife have donated thousands of dollars more that they did not itemize because it wasnt important for us to take the deduction. The campaign has yet to provide updated numbers.

Ive served in public office since 2005. I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state and, now, of my country, ORourke said in responding to the student on Tuesday night. Im doing everything that I can right now, spending this time with you not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything that weve got.

ORourke is not the only Democratic candidate who has had personal finances questioned at a time when many voters are frustrated by the ever-growing economic divide in the country. One by one, Democratic candidates have released their tax returns something that President Trump has refused to do in an attempt at transparency.

Also Check: How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

Charitable Giving By State: Are Republicans More Generous Than Democrats Or Just More Religious

It turns out that the old Bushism about compassionate conservatism may not be a myth after all. In a new analysis of Internal Revenue Service tax records, the Chronicle of Philanthropy on Monday ranked U.S. cities and states by how much money their residents give to charity. The bottom line? People in red states are more generous with their green. 

The study, which compared IRS data from 2012 with data from 2006, showed that the 17 most generous states — as measured by the percentage of their income they donated to charity — voted for Mitt Romney in the last presidential election. The seven states at the bottom of the list, meanwhile, voted for Barack Obama.

Exactly why is a bit of a mystery. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the data only showed how much money people gave away, not which types of organizations they gave to. But generally speaking, she said its fair to assume that political ideology aligns to some extent with ideas about charitable giving.

Not to be too simplistic about it, but if you believe that government should take care of basic social services, then youre going to go that way, Palmer told International Business Times. If you think charities should take care of things, and not government, then youre probably going to give more generously to charity.

Got a news tip? . Follow me on Twitter .

Volunteering In The Us

This data comes from detailed time logs that statisticians ask householders to keep. In less strict definitions like phone surveys, more like 45 percent of the U.S. population say they volunteered some time to a charitable cause within the last year.

Current estimates of the dollar value of volunteered time range from $179 billion per year to more than twice that, depending on how you count.Volunteering is closely associated with donating cash as well. One  Harris study showed that Americans who volunteered gave 11 times as much money to charity in a year as those who did not volunteer.

An interesting pattern emerges if one studies giving by income level. As incomes rise, more and more of the people in that bracket make gifts to charity. The sizes of their gifts tend to rise as well. However: if you look at average donations as a fraction of funds available, they tend to level off at around 2-3 percent of income.

Religious faith is a central influence on giving. Religious people are much more likely than the non-religious to donate to charitable causesincluding secular causesand they give much more.

Among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike, almost exactly half of the group averaged $100-$999 in annual charitable donations at the time of this 2005 poll. There was virtually no difference among the parties in the size of that moderate-giving group, so those results were not included in the graph to the left.

Also Check: What Did Republicans Gain From The Compromise Of 1877

How Political Ideology Influences Charitable Giving

Many issues seem to divide Democrats and Republicans, and new research has found one more: philanthropy.

Red counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican, tend to report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated blue counties, according to a new study on giving, although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes.

But as red or blue counties become more politically competitive, charitable giving tends to fall.

Theres something about the like-mindedness where perhaps the comfort level rises, said one of the authors of the study, Robert K. Christensen, associate professor at the George W. Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics at Brigham Young University. They feel safe redistributing their wealth voluntarily. It also matters for compulsory giving.

The study was conducted by four research professors who set out to explore how political differences affect charitable giving. It was published on Oct. 20 in the academic journal Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. The other authors were Laurie E. Paarlberg of Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis, Rebecca Nesbit of the University of Georgia and Richard M. Clerkin of North Carolina State University.

Dr. Christensen said the team had analyzed more than 3,000 counties, but it did not reveal the county-by-county breakdowns. Its hard to pull those counties out because of the control variables, he said.

Charitable Giving Does Not Match Government Aid

Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.

The evidence shows that private philanthropy cant compensate for the loss of government provision, Dr. Nesbit said. Its not equal. What government can put into these things is so much more than what we see through private philanthropy.

On the other hand, private philanthropy can do many things better than government aid, as in being responsive to a need and willing to fail without political fallout.

The studys authors make the case for a combination approach.

Theyre complementary means of redistribution of wealth rather than substitutions for each other, Dr. Christensen said. We cant put all of our eggs in one basket.

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Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals

Second, a much larger body of research has long demonstrated that, all things being equal, conservatives tend to be happier overall than their liberal neighbors are. This is truer for social conservatives than for fiscal conservatives, and the more conservative a conservative is, the happier he or she seems to be. Thats not nothing.

A massive study published earlier this year, involving five different data samples from 16 Western countries spanning more than four decades, adds more meat to this topic. These scholars from the University of Southern California found, as they put it, In sum, conservatives reported greater meaning in life and greater life satisfaction than liberals.

Of course, both qualities are much deeper and richer than happiness itself. This was the robust and consistent finding in the 16 distinct countries examined. It was generally truer for social conservatives than their fiscal brethren, and the greater-meaning-in-life slope spiked upward among individuals who were very conservative.

These scholars explain in their academic parlance that this was true for conservatives at all reporting periods . This is a significant finding. Conservatives experience greater meaning in life across their lives generally, but also daily and at most given moments throughout the day. The researchers conclude these findings are robust and that there is some unique aspect of political conservativism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life.

Conservatives Are Satisfied With Their Family Lives

Do NFL Teams Give More to Republicans or Democrats?

New research released by the Institute for Family Studies demonstrates that conservatives tend to be much more completely satisfied with their family lives compared to their liberal friends and neighbors. Forty-one percent of both liberals and moderates report being completely satisfied with their family lives, while 52 percent of conservatives do.

Conservatives are also vastly more likely than liberals to believe marriage is essential in creating and maintaining strong families. They are also much more likely to actually be married, 62 versus 39 percent, thus benefiting from all the ways marriage improves overall well-being and contentment, personal happiness, economic security, long-term employment, longevity, better physical and mental health, and more.

These scholars explain that regardless of other basic life characteristics such as family income, marital status, age, educational attainment, race/ethnicity, and church attendance, being a conservative increases the odds of being completely satisfied with family life by 23 percent, a considerable positive impact given the centrality of these other life factors. Married men and women who believe marriage is needed to create strong families have 67 percent greater odds of being completely content with their own family life than married couples who do not believe this.

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Poorer Conservatives More Generous Than Wealthy Liberals New Study

Respected non-government sector newspaper The Philanthropy Chronicle collated the itemized charity deductions on the tax returns of hundreds of millions of Americans between 2006 and 2012, the latest year available. While only about a third of all givers write off their charity expenses, the sums included about 80 percent of all donations in the country.

The Extreme Views Of The Donor Class

The main finding of the research is that the policy views of elite donors are more extreme than the views of partisan voters at large. They also vary widely by party.

If you look at Republican donors, explains Malhotra, they have much more extreme views than ordinary Republicans on economic issues, such as taxation, the redistribution of wealth, and spending on social programs. For example, a good number of Republican voters want universal health care, but very few Republican donors want that. On the other hand, Republican donors and voters have very similar views on social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. They are not out of line in that arena.

Malhotra and Broockman found a similar pattern among Democratic donors and partisans, but in a mirror image. Democratic donors are, if anything, a little more liberal on economic issues than Democratic partisans, says Malhotra. But their social views are much more liberal than partisans, especially when you look at issues like the death penalty.

Don’t Miss: Who Won More Democrats Or Republicans

Who Gives More To Charity Democrats Or Republicans

About Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison

The ongoing calls for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to issue additional years of his tax returns havent ceased.

Romney has faced criticism for his reasoning that doing so would violate his religious freedom because it would reveal exactly how much money he has tithed to his Mormon church. Democrats continue to press the issue, but should they be so vocal about taking a look at charitable contributions?

According to philanthropy.com, a website that tracks charitable giving state-by-state, Utah tops the list of giving, with residents donating 10.2 percent of their discretionary income to charities. Utah is a solidly red state and went for John McCain 62 percent to 24 percent in 2008 and it has a large Mormon contingent.

Blue state New Hampshire is bringing up the rear with residents of the The Granite State donating only 2.5 percent of their discretionary income to philanthropic organizations. But if you tweak the numbers to remove donations to religious charities the giving evens out some.

Republican Donate More To Charity Than Democrats

8 comments:

Anonymoussaid…

Just this weekend, in an ongoing election year discussion with my sister, I stated my experience is and has been when Democrats see others money or wealth, they want it and/or want to tell them what to do with it… I was also informed that others are not like me. Yours being the very first site I checked regarding this subject, I would like to thank you for the confirmation that this happens elsewhere, just not in my “little” world. Bellyburke

Anonymoussaid…

Thanks, I try to leave informative bits of information that are skipped over in the drive by soundbites and stereotype attacks that are out there. Sorry I have’t posted more lately.To go beyond that, I think that Republicans- particularly religious republicans give a lot more than Democrats because we beleive we have a moral duty to give to charity. Democrats seem to want to government to control the “giving” even though that actually corrupts the ‘charity’ aspects of the gift when you ‘have to do it’ or the IRS will come knocking.

Read Also: Who Controls The Senate Republicans Or Democrats

Giving Under Different Governments

A change in government didnt seem to change peoples donations of money to charities, but there did seem to be an increase in time given to volunteering when the Coalition and Conservative governments were in power.

The exception to this came from the Greens. When Labour were in power from 1997-2010, Green Party supporters gave 182% more of their income to charity than Labour supporters did although this fell to 85% under the Coalition, and fell again when the Conservatives went into government on their own in 2015.

In terms of volunteering, under a Labour government, Green supporters gave no more of their time than did Labour supporters. After 2015, Greens increased their volunteering time by 56%.

Do Your Political Views Make You Charitable

24 Jul, 2019

Professor Sarah Brown,Professor Karl Taylor

A new working paper asks whether people on the left or right give more to charity

Student volunteers at the University of Essex

In 2017, people in the UK gave over £10 billion to charity, and ONS figures suggest that unpaid labour in the form of volunteering is worth over £20 billion.

But what motivates us to give our money or time? Theres existing research which shows that we give in order to feel good, or to look good to others, but we wanted to look at another motivation: our political leanings.

Also Check: Should Republicans Vote In Democratic Primary

Data Sources: Irs Forms 990

The Form 990 is a document that nonprofit organizations file with the IRS annually. We leverage finance and accountability data from it to form Encompass ratings. .

  Impact & Results

This score estimates the actual impact a nonprofit has on the lives of those it serves, and determines whether it is making good use of donor resources to achieve that impact.

Impact & Results Score

Leftist Media And Academia Tell The Public The Opposite

12/29/10 – Stossel, Republicans donate much more than Democrats

Some liberals might argue that religious, conservative republicans are happier simply because they are mentally ill; they are disassociated with reality and just dont know any better. They claim this is even demonstrated in scientific research. In fact, one articles first line in reporting this research was quite blunt: Anyone whos wanted to dismiss Republican politics as straightforwardly mean now has some data to back them up. Lands sakes.

Some research did appear to show this, and it got a great deal of press. Retraction Watch, however, tells us it had some serious mistakes in its calculations, and an erratum was published by the American Journal of Political Science. In fact, Retraction Watch reports, The descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. The data shows a strong correlation between liberalism and psychoticism, not conservatism. This correction was not widely reported for some curious reason.

Finally, if you had to guess who are more generous with their money and volunteering their time to help those in need, would you guess Democrats or Republicans? Of course, its Democrats. Republicans only care for themselves and their own pocketbook. In fact, dont they want to actually punish the poor for not working hard enough? Well, you would be right if stereotypes were the arbiter of truth. But what does objective research tell us?

Recommended Reading: What News Channel Do Republicans Watch

Percentage Of Us Donations Going Tovarious Causes

Nonprofits have grown faster than government and faster than the business sector over the last generation, even during boom periods.

The figures charted here actually underestimate the fraction of American manpower that goes into charitable workbecause they show only paid employment, while volunteers carry out a large share of the labor poured into these groups. Various calculations of the cash value of donated labor suggest that at least an additional 50 percent of output by charities takes place invisibly because it is produced by volunteers. Youll find more statistics on American volunteering in Graphs 8 and 9.

Charitable activity is becoming a bigger and bigger part of Americas total economy. For perspective, consider that annual U.S. defense spending totals 4.5 percent of GDP. The nonprofit sector surpassed the vaunted military-industrial complex in economic scope way back in 1993.

Real Rise In Us Giving

After adjusting for inflation, charitable giving by Americans was close to seven times as big in 2016 as it was 62 years earlier.

Of course, one reason total giving went up is because the U.S. population almost doubled. But if we recalculate inflation-adjusted charitable giving on a per capita basis, we see that has also soared: by 3½ times. Charitable causes are very lucky to have a remarkably expansive American economy behind them, and a standard of living that refuses to stagnate.

What if we calculate charitable giving as a proportion of all national production ? The math reveals that over the last 60 years, donations as a proportion of our total annual output increasedbut only very slightly. For most of the last lifetime, giving has hovered right around 2 percent of our total national treasure.

Two percent of GDP is a huge sum, particularly in comparison to other countries . But it’s interesting that even as we have become a much wealthier people in the post-WWII era, the fraction we give away hasn’t risen. There seems to be something stubborn about that 2 percent rate.

Keep in mind too that religious charities tend to have less access to supplemental funds than other nonprofits. Hospitals and colleges charge users fees to supplement their donated income; other nonprofits sell goods; many museums charge admission; some charities receive government grants. Churches and religious charities, however, operate mostly on their donated funds depicted in this graph.

Recommended Reading: What Cities Are Run By Republicans

What Elite Donors Want

Big-money donors, both Democrat and Republican, not only have more political influence than the average voter, they also have more extreme beliefs.

The outsize political influence of elite donors, whose views tend to be more extreme than that of mainstream voters, partly explains why political polarization is on the rise. | Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez

In November 2012, newly elected Democratic members of the United States Congress got about a week to savor their victories. Then, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee advised them to start hitting the phones for 3-4 hours per day. Who were they supposed to be calling? Mainly, elite donors the fewer than 1% of Americans who give candidates more than $200 in any given election cycle.

It isnt news that politicians court elite donors or that elite donors have greater political access and influence than the typical voter. But, as Stanford Graduate School of Business political economist Neil Malhotra points out in an article recently published in Public Opinion Quarterly, we know remarkably little about what they actually want from government.

This is a particularly relevant issue during the current, seemingly endless, election cycle, in which the battle for control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government is unusually contentious and fraught with implications for the future of the nation.

Do Democrats Hate Charity

Another round of COVID-19 relief from Congress is on life support but not dead, as centrist Democrats have begun to pressure Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toward compromise. That would mean finding some middle ground between the $3 trillion House HEROES Act, with its bailout for profligate blue-state governments, and the Republican $500 billion skinny bill. If serious negotiations do ensue, there is one provision on which Senate Republicans should not budge: a strong new form of tax relief for individual charitable giving. Its a provision both important in its own right and revealing of a larger philosophical difference between the parties when it comes to charity.

The latest skinny Senate bill would specifically have expanded the so-called above-the-line tax deduction included in the original CARES Act, which authorized a $300 deduction even for those who do not itemize their tax returns. The Senate bill proposed to double that amount for 2020 taxpayers, to $600 for individuals and $1,200 for those filing a joint return. The House bill included no such provision, or even an extension of a less-generous version included in the first COVID-19 relief bill.

The above-the-line deduction proposed by Republicans provides an incentive for all taxpayers, not just the wealthy, to give to charity.  

This piece originally appeared at the Washington Examiner

______________________

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Are In The Us House

[statetalks]

Do Republicans Or Democrats Give More To Charity

The Relationship Between Generosity And Political Affiliation And Gender

Who LIES More- Republicans or Democrats?

Most people tip their hair stylists, while only 27% tip their hotel housekeeper.

+1.63%

Tipping can be a social and cultural maelstrom. And social media doesnt always help.

A National Basketball Association player who has a $30 million contract drew internet ire last week after leaving a $13.97 tip on a $487.13 bill. Andre Roberson of the Oklahoma City Thunder made headlines for the paltry tip, and the strong reaction shows just how emotional the question of tipping can be.

But it wasnt quite as clear-cut as it seemed. Roberson released a statement on Twitter TWTR, +1.63%  saying he was misrepresented, saying he bought one bottle of liquor for $487 at a bar, around five times the retail price and rounded it out to $500. Roberson said he also had a $100 tab on shots for which he left a $200 tip. I thought hed be grateful for the $200 tip, he wrote of the barman who served him.

Meanwhile, some restaurants have banned tipping while Uber is finally encouraging riders to open their wallets to drivers who go the extra mile.

See more:Meet the most generous tipper in America

Some of the findings seemed to play out in real life when three supporters of President Donald Trump left a $450 tip for a Washington, D.C. waitress in January, though they were from Texas, not the relatively more generous northeast.

Dont miss:How much to tip everyone

Also read: Is this the worst tipper in America?

Statistics On Us Generosity

In this section youll find charts and graphs laying out the most important numbers in American philanthropy. They document how much we give, how that has changed over time, what areas we give to, and what mechanisms we use to donate. There are figures here on where charities get their money, how many people offer volunteer labor, the demographic factors that influence generosity , and how various states and cities differ. The top foundations and donor-advised funds are ranked by their giving. We present surprising information on overseas aid, and statistics on how the U.S. compares to other countries when it comes to donating to charity.

Beto Orourke Other Democrats See The Downside Of Releasing Tax Returns

CHARLOTTESVILLE About 24 hours after presidential hopeful Beto ORourke released his tax returns from the past decade, a University of Virginia student asked him why he didnt donate more money to charities.

ORourke, a former congressman from El Paso, and his wife reported in their 2017 tax return that they donated $1,166 which was one-third of 1 percent of their $370,412 of income that year. ORourke told reporters on Wednesday that, over the years, he and his wife have donated thousands of dollars more that they did not itemize because it wasnt important for us to take the deduction. The campaign has yet to provide updated numbers.

Ive served in public office since 2005. I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state and, now, of my country, ORourke said in responding to the student on Tuesday night. Im doing everything that I can right now, spending this time with you not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything that weve got.

ORourke is not the only Democratic candidate who has had personal finances questioned at a time when many voters are frustrated by the ever-growing economic divide in the country. One by one, Democratic candidates have released their tax returns something that President Trump has refused to do in an attempt at transparency.

Also Check: How Many Presidents Have The Republicans Tried To Impeach

Charitable Giving By State: Are Republicans More Generous Than Democrats Or Just More Religious

It turns out that the old Bushism about compassionate conservatism may not be a myth after all. In a new analysis of Internal Revenue Service tax records, the Chronicle of Philanthropy on Monday ranked U.S. cities and states by how much money their residents give to charity. The bottom line? People in red states are more generous with their green. 

The study, which compared IRS data from 2012 with data from 2006, showed that the 17 most generous states — as measured by the percentage of their income they donated to charity — voted for Mitt Romney in the last presidential election. The seven states at the bottom of the list, meanwhile, voted for Barack Obama.

Exactly why is a bit of a mystery. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the data only showed how much money people gave away, not which types of organizations they gave to. But generally speaking, she said its fair to assume that political ideology aligns to some extent with ideas about charitable giving.

Not to be too simplistic about it, but if you believe that government should take care of basic social services, then youre going to go that way, Palmer told International Business Times. If you think charities should take care of things, and not government, then youre probably going to give more generously to charity.

Got a news tip? . Follow me on Twitter .

Volunteering In The Us

This data comes from detailed time logs that statisticians ask householders to keep. In less strict definitions like phone surveys, more like 45 percent of the U.S. population say they volunteered some time to a charitable cause within the last year.

Current estimates of the dollar value of volunteered time range from $179 billion per year to more than twice that, depending on how you count.Volunteering is closely associated with donating cash as well. One  Harris study showed that Americans who volunteered gave 11 times as much money to charity in a year as those who did not volunteer.

An interesting pattern emerges if one studies giving by income level. As incomes rise, more and more of the people in that bracket make gifts to charity. The sizes of their gifts tend to rise as well. However: if you look at average donations as a fraction of funds available, they tend to level off at around 2-3 percent of income.

Religious faith is a central influence on giving. Religious people are much more likely than the non-religious to donate to charitable causesincluding secular causesand they give much more.

Among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike, almost exactly half of the group averaged $100-$999 in annual charitable donations at the time of this 2005 poll. There was virtually no difference among the parties in the size of that moderate-giving group, so those results were not included in the graph to the left.

Also Check: What Did Republicans Gain From The Compromise Of 1877

How Political Ideology Influences Charitable Giving

Many issues seem to divide Democrats and Republicans, and new research has found one more: philanthropy.

Red counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican, tend to report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated blue counties, according to a new study on giving, although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes.

But as red or blue counties become more politically competitive, charitable giving tends to fall.

Theres something about the like-mindedness where perhaps the comfort level rises, said one of the authors of the study, Robert K. Christensen, associate professor at the George W. Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics at Brigham Young University. They feel safe redistributing their wealth voluntarily. It also matters for compulsory giving.

The study was conducted by four research professors who set out to explore how political differences affect charitable giving. It was published on Oct. 20 in the academic journal Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. The other authors were Laurie E. Paarlberg of Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis, Rebecca Nesbit of the University of Georgia and Richard M. Clerkin of North Carolina State University.

Dr. Christensen said the team had analyzed more than 3,000 counties, but it did not reveal the county-by-county breakdowns. Its hard to pull those counties out because of the control variables, he said.

Charitable Giving Does Not Match Government Aid

Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.

The evidence shows that private philanthropy cant compensate for the loss of government provision, Dr. Nesbit said. Its not equal. What government can put into these things is so much more than what we see through private philanthropy.

On the other hand, private philanthropy can do many things better than government aid, as in being responsive to a need and willing to fail without political fallout.

The studys authors make the case for a combination approach.

Theyre complementary means of redistribution of wealth rather than substitutions for each other, Dr. Christensen said. We cant put all of our eggs in one basket.

You May Like: Who Are The Republicans On The Ballot

Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals

Second, a much larger body of research has long demonstrated that, all things being equal, conservatives tend to be happier overall than their liberal neighbors are. This is truer for social conservatives than for fiscal conservatives, and the more conservative a conservative is, the happier he or she seems to be. Thats not nothing.

A massive study published earlier this year, involving five different data samples from 16 Western countries spanning more than four decades, adds more meat to this topic. These scholars from the University of Southern California found, as they put it, In sum, conservatives reported greater meaning in life and greater life satisfaction than liberals.

Of course, both qualities are much deeper and richer than happiness itself. This was the robust and consistent finding in the 16 distinct countries examined. It was generally truer for social conservatives than their fiscal brethren, and the greater-meaning-in-life slope spiked upward among individuals who were very conservative.

These scholars explain in their academic parlance that this was true for conservatives at all reporting periods . This is a significant finding. Conservatives experience greater meaning in life across their lives generally, but also daily and at most given moments throughout the day. The researchers conclude these findings are robust and that there is some unique aspect of political conservativism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life.

Conservatives Are Satisfied With Their Family Lives

Do NFL Teams Give More to Republicans or Democrats?

New research released by the Institute for Family Studies demonstrates that conservatives tend to be much more completely satisfied with their family lives compared to their liberal friends and neighbors. Forty-one percent of both liberals and moderates report being completely satisfied with their family lives, while 52 percent of conservatives do.

Conservatives are also vastly more likely than liberals to believe marriage is essential in creating and maintaining strong families. They are also much more likely to actually be married, 62 versus 39 percent, thus benefiting from all the ways marriage improves overall well-being and contentment, personal happiness, economic security, long-term employment, longevity, better physical and mental health, and more.

These scholars explain that regardless of other basic life characteristics such as family income, marital status, age, educational attainment, race/ethnicity, and church attendance, being a conservative increases the odds of being completely satisfied with family life by 23 percent, a considerable positive impact given the centrality of these other life factors. Married men and women who believe marriage is needed to create strong families have 67 percent greater odds of being completely content with their own family life than married couples who do not believe this.

You May Like: Who Are The 10 Republicans Who Voted For Impeachment

Poorer Conservatives More Generous Than Wealthy Liberals New Study

Respected non-government sector newspaper The Philanthropy Chronicle collated the itemized charity deductions on the tax returns of hundreds of millions of Americans between 2006 and 2012, the latest year available. While only about a third of all givers write off their charity expenses, the sums included about 80 percent of all donations in the country.

The Extreme Views Of The Donor Class

The main finding of the research is that the policy views of elite donors are more extreme than the views of partisan voters at large. They also vary widely by party.

If you look at Republican donors, explains Malhotra, they have much more extreme views than ordinary Republicans on economic issues, such as taxation, the redistribution of wealth, and spending on social programs. For example, a good number of Republican voters want universal health care, but very few Republican donors want that. On the other hand, Republican donors and voters have very similar views on social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. They are not out of line in that arena.

Malhotra and Broockman found a similar pattern among Democratic donors and partisans, but in a mirror image. Democratic donors are, if anything, a little more liberal on economic issues than Democratic partisans, says Malhotra. But their social views are much more liberal than partisans, especially when you look at issues like the death penalty.

Don’t Miss: Who Won More Democrats Or Republicans

Who Gives More To Charity Democrats Or Republicans

About Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison

The ongoing calls for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to issue additional years of his tax returns havent ceased.

Romney has faced criticism for his reasoning that doing so would violate his religious freedom because it would reveal exactly how much money he has tithed to his Mormon church. Democrats continue to press the issue, but should they be so vocal about taking a look at charitable contributions?

According to philanthropy.com, a website that tracks charitable giving state-by-state, Utah tops the list of giving, with residents donating 10.2 percent of their discretionary income to charities. Utah is a solidly red state and went for John McCain 62 percent to 24 percent in 2008 and it has a large Mormon contingent.

Blue state New Hampshire is bringing up the rear with residents of the The Granite State donating only 2.5 percent of their discretionary income to philanthropic organizations. But if you tweak the numbers to remove donations to religious charities the giving evens out some.

Republican Donate More To Charity Than Democrats

8 comments:

Anonymoussaid…

Just this weekend, in an ongoing election year discussion with my sister, I stated my experience is and has been when Democrats see others money or wealth, they want it and/or want to tell them what to do with it… I was also informed that others are not like me. Yours being the very first site I checked regarding this subject, I would like to thank you for the confirmation that this happens elsewhere, just not in my “little” world. Bellyburke

Anonymoussaid…

Thanks, I try to leave informative bits of information that are skipped over in the drive by soundbites and stereotype attacks that are out there. Sorry I have’t posted more lately.To go beyond that, I think that Republicans- particularly religious republicans give a lot more than Democrats because we beleive we have a moral duty to give to charity. Democrats seem to want to government to control the “giving” even though that actually corrupts the ‘charity’ aspects of the gift when you ‘have to do it’ or the IRS will come knocking.

Read Also: Who Controls The Senate Republicans Or Democrats

Giving Under Different Governments

A change in government didnt seem to change peoples donations of money to charities, but there did seem to be an increase in time given to volunteering when the Coalition and Conservative governments were in power.

The exception to this came from the Greens. When Labour were in power from 1997-2010, Green Party supporters gave 182% more of their income to charity than Labour supporters did although this fell to 85% under the Coalition, and fell again when the Conservatives went into government on their own in 2015.

In terms of volunteering, under a Labour government, Green supporters gave no more of their time than did Labour supporters. After 2015, Greens increased their volunteering time by 56%.

Do Your Political Views Make You Charitable

24 Jul, 2019

Professor Sarah Brown,Professor Karl Taylor

A new working paper asks whether people on the left or right give more to charity

Student volunteers at the University of Essex

In 2017, people in the UK gave over £10 billion to charity, and ONS figures suggest that unpaid labour in the form of volunteering is worth over £20 billion.

But what motivates us to give our money or time? Theres existing research which shows that we give in order to feel good, or to look good to others, but we wanted to look at another motivation: our political leanings.

Also Check: Should Republicans Vote In Democratic Primary

Data Sources: Irs Forms 990

The Form 990 is a document that nonprofit organizations file with the IRS annually. We leverage finance and accountability data from it to form Encompass ratings. .

  Impact & Results

This score estimates the actual impact a nonprofit has on the lives of those it serves, and determines whether it is making good use of donor resources to achieve that impact.

Impact & Results Score

Leftist Media And Academia Tell The Public The Opposite

12/29/10 – Stossel, Republicans donate much more than Democrats

Some liberals might argue that religious, conservative republicans are happier simply because they are mentally ill; they are disassociated with reality and just dont know any better. They claim this is even demonstrated in scientific research. In fact, one articles first line in reporting this research was quite blunt: Anyone whos wanted to dismiss Republican politics as straightforwardly mean now has some data to back them up. Lands sakes.

Some research did appear to show this, and it got a great deal of press. Retraction Watch, however, tells us it had some serious mistakes in its calculations, and an erratum was published by the American Journal of Political Science. In fact, Retraction Watch reports, The descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. The data shows a strong correlation between liberalism and psychoticism, not conservatism. This correction was not widely reported for some curious reason.

Finally, if you had to guess who are more generous with their money and volunteering their time to help those in need, would you guess Democrats or Republicans? Of course, its Democrats. Republicans only care for themselves and their own pocketbook. In fact, dont they want to actually punish the poor for not working hard enough? Well, you would be right if stereotypes were the arbiter of truth. But what does objective research tell us?

Recommended Reading: What News Channel Do Republicans Watch

Percentage Of Us Donations Going Tovarious Causes

Nonprofits have grown faster than government and faster than the business sector over the last generation, even during boom periods.

The figures charted here actually underestimate the fraction of American manpower that goes into charitable workbecause they show only paid employment, while volunteers carry out a large share of the labor poured into these groups. Various calculations of the cash value of donated labor suggest that at least an additional 50 percent of output by charities takes place invisibly because it is produced by volunteers. Youll find more statistics on American volunteering in Graphs 8 and 9.

Charitable activity is becoming a bigger and bigger part of Americas total economy. For perspective, consider that annual U.S. defense spending totals 4.5 percent of GDP. The nonprofit sector surpassed the vaunted military-industrial complex in economic scope way back in 1993.

Real Rise In Us Giving

After adjusting for inflation, charitable giving by Americans was close to seven times as big in 2016 as it was 62 years earlier.

Of course, one reason total giving went up is because the U.S. population almost doubled. But if we recalculate inflation-adjusted charitable giving on a per capita basis, we see that has also soared: by 3½ times. Charitable causes are very lucky to have a remarkably expansive American economy behind them, and a standard of living that refuses to stagnate.

What if we calculate charitable giving as a proportion of all national production ? The math reveals that over the last 60 years, donations as a proportion of our total annual output increasedbut only very slightly. For most of the last lifetime, giving has hovered right around 2 percent of our total national treasure.

Two percent of GDP is a huge sum, particularly in comparison to other countries . But it’s interesting that even as we have become a much wealthier people in the post-WWII era, the fraction we give away hasn’t risen. There seems to be something stubborn about that 2 percent rate.

Keep in mind too that religious charities tend to have less access to supplemental funds than other nonprofits. Hospitals and colleges charge users fees to supplement their donated income; other nonprofits sell goods; many museums charge admission; some charities receive government grants. Churches and religious charities, however, operate mostly on their donated funds depicted in this graph.

Recommended Reading: What Cities Are Run By Republicans

What Elite Donors Want

Big-money donors, both Democrat and Republican, not only have more political influence than the average voter, they also have more extreme beliefs.

The outsize political influence of elite donors, whose views tend to be more extreme than that of mainstream voters, partly explains why political polarization is on the rise. | Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez

In November 2012, newly elected Democratic members of the United States Congress got about a week to savor their victories. Then, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee advised them to start hitting the phones for 3-4 hours per day. Who were they supposed to be calling? Mainly, elite donors the fewer than 1% of Americans who give candidates more than $200 in any given election cycle.

It isnt news that politicians court elite donors or that elite donors have greater political access and influence than the typical voter. But, as Stanford Graduate School of Business political economist Neil Malhotra points out in an article recently published in Public Opinion Quarterly, we know remarkably little about what they actually want from government.

This is a particularly relevant issue during the current, seemingly endless, election cycle, in which the battle for control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government is unusually contentious and fraught with implications for the future of the nation.

Do Democrats Hate Charity

Another round of COVID-19 relief from Congress is on life support but not dead, as centrist Democrats have begun to pressure Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toward compromise. That would mean finding some middle ground between the $3 trillion House HEROES Act, with its bailout for profligate blue-state governments, and the Republican $500 billion skinny bill. If serious negotiations do ensue, there is one provision on which Senate Republicans should not budge: a strong new form of tax relief for individual charitable giving. Its a provision both important in its own right and revealing of a larger philosophical difference between the parties when it comes to charity.

The latest skinny Senate bill would specifically have expanded the so-called above-the-line tax deduction included in the original CARES Act, which authorized a $300 deduction even for those who do not itemize their tax returns. The Senate bill proposed to double that amount for 2020 taxpayers, to $600 for individuals and $1,200 for those filing a joint return. The House bill included no such provision, or even an extension of a less-generous version included in the first COVID-19 relief bill.

The above-the-line deduction proposed by Republicans provides an incentive for all taxpayers, not just the wealthy, to give to charity.  

This piece originally appeared at the Washington Examiner

______________________

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Are In The Us House

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/do-republicans-or-democrats-give-more-to-charity/

[sncs2021]

1) finding data mindmap

im thinking of finding individual experiences from social media using my own personal instagram because i already have followers who fit my demographic of genz people of colour, especially in south auckland. using their experiences i could produce specific mediums from that when it comes to the summative part. for now i think i will use general ones i can find in my research

2)visual meanings

colours i want to use should be vibrant and distinctive because i think it gives off a conversational and welcoming tone. so im thinking the rainbows colours, going a bit basic but direct enough. the illustrations i want to use should be colourful so im thinking towards artist inspirations that produce artwork like that. someone i have in mind on the top of my head is tess-smith roberts.

3) what should i even target for a topic within casual racism?

from doing my visual meaning mindmap i kinda just froze and thought "what even is my meaning for this campaign?" so i just wrote up some impacts of casual racism i could think of from the top of my head. one significant one is mental health/self esteem. when people say certain things, especially racist, it puts poc down, giving them a mindset that have to cater to a mostly White work/lifestyle environment, pushing away their own cultural backgrounds and appreciation. eventually overall mental health can be affected. in many ways, this boosts up/caters to capitalism, by contributing to making products that people really don’t need but they’ll find any way to convince you that your life depends on it. an example i have in mind and have personally seen and experienced is internalised hate for my own race and skin tone. i would see white people being treated better and basically glorified and wondered "why wasnt i born like them"/ "i want to be white", etc. things like that was unhealthily encouraged a lot in the indian communities here, fiji, and especially india. like i mentioned earlier, mindsets and low self esteem created by the media and general white privileges, capitalism takes advantage of that. in india theres a product called "Fair & Lovely", which is targeted to young girls and women that have darker skin tones. this product is a body cream that is meant to "lighten" and "enhance" your skin, hence making you "prettier" and more appealing to the beauty standard that we unconsciously follow, to be a white passing person. it is so messed up that even to this day, women are taught to hate their skin tone. something i saw the other day was when a POC bleaches her skin it is considered self hate, but when a white woman tans her skin, its just a normal “sElf CaRe” kind of thing you do during summer. notice, that whenever a POC does something it always follows up with criticism and backlash, but if a white person does the same thing or similar its “liberating” or “the best thing ever”. it really bothers me that we’ve all basically given into “white is right” in so many ways.

4) "NZ isn't racist?!l

when it comes to the demographic, in regards to nz, there's often arguments about whether our country is racist. as a poc i know for sure, that there is. there has been many Loudly shown racism, that is often pushed as side by the ignorants but there's so many subtle acts of racism, which brings us to casual racism. lack of education on poc, especially the indigenous people, the maori, leads to racist whites thinking they own the land they have stolen and have unnecessary amounts of disrespect for POC. the education system is a significant 'culprit' for this, because from personal experience, we barely touched on history of Maori and moreso on American history, which thinking now, why does it matter so much? we hardly know about the land we are in and we're just given work on a president who has nothing to do with nz. i remember learning about the treaty of waitangi, and thinking it was a happy agreement between the settlers and the indigenous people. i recently found that some of the maori, didnt want to sign and some were even forced. so it wasnt as pretty and happy as it seemed. things like this makes me question how some people don't understand the importance of the voices of POC and systemic racism, in all its forms.

[zigsexual]

omg queen give me all your wisdom about interviews and post interview shit i got a few lined up

omg yes bich!!!!!! deadass my fave shit to talk about because the education system (at least in the usa) really doesn’t teach anything about this kind of stuff and its like…… the MOST IMPORTANT thing for u to know in order to succeed!!!! sigh

so for those of u who missed my rage post last night b/c i deleted it lmao,,, i work in recruitment for a fortune 500 company (well 200 if u wanna be more specific!!! gotta run with my street cred) and i am here to DISPEL dumbass tumblr career advice so here we go:

your resume is your most valuable selling point. getting the interview is like 80% of the hard work, so u need to have something STELLAR that helps u get that foot in the door. i’ve looked through so much resume bullshit and from my personal experience, this article and this article have good recommendations for sprucing it up, and here is a great list of verbs to use

a lot of resume info out there contradicts itself, probably even those two articles i just shared, so go with what feels good to you

just, never fuckin use an “objective” section lmao we know ur objective is a job it’s a waste of space

have a linkedin!!!!!!! you don’t have to post on it (actually u probs shouldn’t post, it’s just weird to us like this aint FB ok) but make sure its updated and current to your resume so there’s a frame of reference if people want to go deeper into your background/skills later

so for the actual interview: bring a lil notepad in case u need to take notes, dress nice but don’t look like a punk bitch just try to match their dress code, go to the bathroom before u get there (idk i hate when people make me take them to the bathroom first thing, its weird for everyone involved), get there early but don’t actually go inside until maybe 10 to 5 minutes before the start time (we aren’t gonna pick u up until the start time b/c schedules are tight so u just end up waiting there looking dumb) and beforehand make sure u have prepared answers/examples for common questions – see below

behavioral questions: interviewers love this shit, consult this list and WRITE DOWN an example for each one. im serious, each one. use this format (i love the muse in case u didnt notice lol) or remember the STAR acronym: Situation, Task, Action, Results. regardless it’s GREAT practice for u and gets u in a good frame of mind to answer these types of questions.

greatest weakness: fuck this question, it’s really amateur but some people still ask it. don’t do the “a weakness that is really a strength!!!” bullshit b/c we see thru it. pick a real weakness that’s not too much of a roadblock, then talk about how u work to overcome it and use examples. interviewers shit themselves over examples.

tell me about yourself: thismeans your professional self, not your personal self. Talk through yourresume/job experiences, your educational background, your interest in theindustry/position, etc. no one cares if u like dogs. we all fuckin like dogs ok               

ALSO!!!!! do not tell them EEA information (age, marital status, etc.)that makes u look like an idiot and now u have voluntarily discloseddemographics about yourself that might result in discrimination,,, this is thebiggest eye roll for me it makes u look very juvenile and inexperienced

you really should ask questions at the end, butdon’t make them up for bullshit points. i have actually seen people lose a jobb/c they just….. didn’t ask anyone any questions lmao. some positions it’s like,we WANT to know that ur curious!!!!! like are u not wondering what software weuse, what management tactics we use, how the work/life balance is managed,etc.???? come up with some legit questions u have about the position or thecompany ahead of time, or this is also a time to use ur lil notebook wherehopefully u have been recording questions that come up in ur mind throughoutthe interview

ok WHEW!!! that’s all for now sis im tired,, it’s saturdayand i don’t want to think about my job anymore lol. but u guys are myhomies so if u ever really have more questions about this stuff, im happy tohelp!!! spread the love heauxs, get those jobs and that yung money cash money

[rqs902]

.

LOL MTY AS MA ZHENNAN IM CRYING HAHAHHAHAHA the rap with the hat covering his face and the running around im ded. i appreciate da xi and rainbow’s silliness too but i think mty was just so extra and was so out of his normal sleepy looking state LOL

im just laughing at how much tyler is laughing at everything LOL

aw just seeing tyler’s outfit makes me think that yingge and ruiyang have had a big influence on him haha yingge really looking out for him like an older brother by arranging to have cake to celebrate tyler’s birthday 

L O L liao juntao is comforting szb by telling him to not mind the haters bc he shouldnt care about them, he doesnt even know who they are. and then the next second being like “你就說你愛不愛你哥哥” and being like “HE NEVER SAYS ITTTTT” SMH HAHHAHAHA hes the dorkiest older bro that you can rely on to give you encouragement when you’re down but also will no doubt embarrass you beyond belief in public 

hm :\ i see they tried to address the zhang yang issue concisely. i mean, i guess its better than them completely ignoring the fact that there was an issue. but it seems like they painted it as zhang yang having anger / emotional control issues and they were about to force him to leave but xiao zhi and yang runze begged them and zhang yang felt regret and sad so they let him stay. and he has since started to open up about his feelings more. this feels like such a sterilized retelling of what happened, i still dont really feel like we can actually understand what happened. but from xiao zhi, yrz, and zhang yang’s weibo posts they all insist that theyre being treated well by the show and not to worry, bc zhang yang’s got his feelings sorted out soooo idk but i wouldnt be surprised if that was something they had to do to get tencent to let zhang yang stay on the show tho

surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly considering his younger age and personality, yrz’s post is the most direct and he basically just simplified it down to them having worked hard on their composition but the tencent crew told them to change it and zhang yang got frustrated and angry. it got recorded and leaked and blown up so much that zhang yang felt really bad about it afterwards. 

we’ll probably never really understand everything that happened, but i guess all we can do is be grateful that tencent forgave him (bc he probs does not want a career of being blacklisted by tencent... seems like career suicide) even if there was or was not fault on both sides. im really hoping he feels alright. especially bc their group is doing so well on the show, its a good opportunity for them to gain more fans. 

it is so hard to keep track of these kids’ demographic info bc its not on the show’s wikipedia page or anything so i struggle to keep track without a collated place to look up info, but if i remember correctly i believe yrz is like 18? zhang yang was born in like 97? and xiao zhi 95? (could be wrong) but if that’s true, xiao zhi is like 25..... can we talk about this real quick? bc it must be a lot for someone like yrz being 18 to be going through all this, but it also must be real difficult for xiao zhi, can you imagine? trying to be the oldest bro, trying to keep them together, comforting and encouraging, responsible and depended on, and can you imagine the amount of 包容 he must have? and the fact that he didnt even want to be with zhang yang at first but has grown to appreciate him so much and the fact that hes the least popular one out of their trio, but is also the one keeping their whole team grounded? wild. i mean all that considered, i think im starting to be a xiao zhi fan. and a big part of it is the way he performs on stage, so free and with such enjoyment, but honestly this whole thing is a part of it too. 

lol xu yang telling xiao huang straight up “are you really happy? you said you dont get much screentime and now you’ve been separated from xiao li” -- BIG OOF. too real. omg that directness just hits you like a ton of bricks. rip

man i wish xiao huang and xiao li could reunite but also xiao li getting zero screentime when they flash to hyt’s group right after? sad. 

o i heard about yyg leaving the show but i didnt realize it was because he has an injury o gosh i hope he’s okay...... i thought he would’ve left bc he wanted to, but this feels more like hes being forced to, like he has no choice and he didnt actually want to leave his friends :( i was in disbelief that he’d just leave his friends, so i guess this makes sense, its just more sad. 

tbh watching the elims so far, i only cried when yyg was talking about how he couldn’t feel his legs but he still didnt want to leave his friends behind. even when the kids who are leaving were announced, it didnt leave as big of an impact, but maybe its because of the way they announce them all at once. the reshuffling... i feel like its true that things havent been easy for qiang ge, but i also feel like he mightve said he wanted to reshuffle bc it would make jym look less like the bad guy if two of them brought it up instead of jym alone. i guess it kinda makes zk look sad as a result though. 

for one thing, these kids are pretty lucky at least the show doesnt force them to be or stay together. the judges made a suggestion and they were allowed to say no. 

i feel like hyt is just picking kids based on their personalities and i cant say thats a bad thing, but it is interesting that everyone else on his team is gonna sing besides himself then lol 

ljt’s team picking jym? i feel like theyll have a lot of emotions, but maybe if they all respect ljt enough itll work out 

i can see xy being with wx’s team. xiao zhi saying wsh isnt his first choice but he’ll do it for his team to be happy, im a bit concerned, esp bc tbh wsh isnt gonna help them get more votes but i guess theyre not thinking about that. xiao zhi was the only one who didnt even walk over to get wsh, even tho he was the only one that was supposed to, as f-man. we’ll see how this goes... but again he didnt want to pick zhang yang at first and apparently thats worked out well so 

hmm qiang ge’s hesitation being labeled as a sign of lack of confidence, well hes been unconfident that people want his instrument for this whole show, but now he’s also scared that he’s going to be forcing people together against their will. the whole thing between wjy and muji... literally wjy tries to appear like he doesnt care, but muji obviously cares a lot. and the fact that they literally asked muji in front of wjy if he’d be ok with working with wjy, of course muji’s gonna say its fine bc what kind of terrible person would he be if he said no to wjy’s face? ugh obviously theres something going on but qiang ge seems like hes optimistic that he can be the go-between and fix whatever there is, but thats a lot to ask for from a child his age. and then mty also? qiang ge wiping his tears for him was touching but also telling of their relationship dynamic. qiang ge is really signing up for a lot... seems a bit idealistic, but hes popular so hopefully he’ll be okay. LOL wjy awkwardly asking muji if he’ll be okay and muji saying it will and qiang ge running to get in between them. oh man. we didnt get to see it that much but if i remember correctly, wjy just tries to do too much and muji is like no stop and then struggles to get wjy to listen. 

oh rip i feel like the kids who were leftover were some of my favorite kids.......... like da xi and rainbow and even ruiyang and tyler and samhar, i was looking out for them :( im just amazed they eliminated people who have made such a unique stylistic impact on the show. but i guess they werent popular enough. also sad that yyg probably feels guilty that his leaving meant his teammates got eliminated but they also feel guilty that he stayed behind for as long as he did even though he was suffering. 

hm not gonna lie this ep was not as emotional as the snzm elims for me, and i do feel like its prob in part bc im still more invested in snzm and the kids there, but also in part just the way the elims were structured, its not as big of an emotional impact for me. announcing the kids who got eliminated at first all at once, and then the rest are just the rest left behind after the kids choose teams again. its a bit rough bc you know they have to take the instruments into consideration too, not just friendships, which i think made the saving segment of snzm so emotional. it was raw friendship and they struggled so hard to choose, and it was framed as “saving” versus here its just reshuffling. it doesnt hit you as hard that those who dont get chosen are leaving until they start walking away. its interestingly different. its discouraging that kids i liked a lot were eliminated, but theres still a few left that i care about so ill keep watching for now...

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey you, during the course of this season i Have seen more and more people leave the fandom or grow disinterested in spn, and im confused why that it. I get why maybe s12 wouldnt be a fave season but if I look at the wank and bads of the previous ones (destiel fiasco in/out the show s9, charlies death Dean cruelty to Cas in s10, Dean/baby love interest s11) s12 didnt really do much that would drive people away en masse I feel? Yet it seems like more people left it :(

Heya! :D

Idk, maybe it was that more vocal people drifted off? I always feel like people’s attention spans are usually only a few years or so. I mean, I feel like I’ve been in the fandom a Long Time and I’ve only been here since the end of season 9, so really this is only my 3rd hiatus, and coming up to 4th year watching with fandom, on a 12 year show I’ve been watching for nearly 10 years, for the most part as a moderately casual viewer… I think I clock up about 5 years major interest and then drift, based on me vs several other things like how invested I was in LotR or Harry Potter or Animorphs, or whatever (to go back in time to my pre-teen interests :P) and it’s not a bad thing and I still love 2 of those franchises and have engagement in them but back to being a casual fan (if “religiously watches LotR at Christmas” is casual allowing for cultural/social stuff, but I’m not composing Legolas/Aragon smut in my teenage journal in secret code any more :P) 

Anyway the season 8 bubble of fandom could be deflating about now - that’s long enough for people to feel they’ve given the show their full attention and it’s still going so it’s getting tiring. That’s the major feeling I get - people are exhausted and we had a baby boomer fandom around season 8 so that ~generation~ of fans is now reaching the natural end of its attention span in a very human natural way. But there’s a ton of new or newer fans who are still enjoying the heck out of it, and the fandom’s still huge and full of people with a commitment to the show or ships. And some people don’t work like that and are loyal from start to finish or commit to TV shows fully to see them to their end. I would dump a show I was getting bored of but come back to watch the end later in a big marathon to find out what happened, but Supernatural hasn’t given me a reason to get totally un-invested until that time… I suspect a lot of people will watch the entire show ONE DAY but don’t want to do fandom and give it all their leisure time any more either.

[under a cut for meandering rambling]

But yeah I think you’ve named some pretty big mass exodus moments (I would like to clarify “Dean/baby” is “Dean/Amara-as-an-infant” right? Because Dean/Baby totally was a thing in 11x04 and it was GLORIOUS :P) and I feel like I DID lose people from my dash all through the time I’ve been watching. Heck, I hit up fandom right after 9x18, and started following people, and that was the JIB of “we don’t play it that way” so I immediately was following several abandoned blogs and I’d barely even started to get to know the landscape :P I feel like people HAVE been jumping ship the entire time and I remember most of those instances as sadly clearing several favourite people off my dash or turning them into different fandom blogs that I eventually unfollowed out of confusion… 

I don’t know, I think people leave when they want to leave because as long as you like the core of a thing and it holds your interest, you can forgive or ignore or scowl at but hold out for better the bad bits and problematic parts. I’m sort of weary of them killing all the women and PoC but I’m still at the stage where I identify it sucks, but I still care too much about the main characters that I’m sort of stuck on this ride with them. 

(I have 2x21 paused on the screen next to me right as Sam meets all the special children, aka introducing Lily the lesbian who dies horribly as a disposable red shirt to show how awful this situation is, and Jake, a black guy whose power is being super strong and to fall to Azazel’s manipulation, kill Sam, and then get killed with extreme overkill by Sam. In the same season he set the cops on Gordon, also a black man who was really aggro and cruel, but in the next season becomes a monster and Sam kills him also one of the most brutal kills he has up there with Jake. Basically, the show’s always had some issues and if we carried on watching all the way to season 12, well, apply self-reflection, but at this point if you’ve been watching as long as I have, you just kind of accept the show sucks at certain things, and for ME personally it’s not kicking off the sort of weariness that others felt about Billie and Alicia and Eileen being killed off this season)

… I don’t really have a point, expect about the demographics of fandom during season 8 getting to the end of their interest now. I don’t think EVERYONE who did will leave, and we’re getting fresh blood all the time, but I think that’s just part of the nature of being in fandom. I don’t think season 12 is particularly bad from my experience, although some pretty high profile bloggers have gotten exhausted - again, they’ve been maintaining blogs and producing content since single digit seasons so they’ve contributed a LOT to the fandom and there’s a fatigue about contribution as well… 

That’s partially why I meta and gif and write fic and occasionally make random shitposts… I don’t want to burn out because any one of those things on its own can get pretty boring, even writing fic. Or especially, idk, as a writer I tend to bounce around projects, so this is keeping me weirdly focused on writing my original fiction on one side of my brain and fan fic on the other and it seems to be a better way of splitting my attention… But I digress. :P 

I know how to manage my own brain to some degree but I have a lot of time to contemplate and self-reflect on why I’m in fandom and what I get out of it, and mostly I just conclude I’m bored and house-bound and I’ve found a few tried and tested things that get me some positive attention in a non-weird rat with a pleasure button way like people running hate blogs or something… But I know my own head and that I can get bored of stuff so I marathon a lot of other shows and think about other things than fandom stuff as much as possible and just let this be the gutter my brain drains into when my attention span is too shot to hell to do anything else and I just want to slump over a keyboard and do the easiest activity I know bar playing Animal Crossing for hours. 

Other people with busier lives and actual jobs and energy and limbs that don’t just randomly stop working when they do anything for more than 5 minutes and so on might not be casual fans but they make a certain space in their life for fandom and get out of it what they need but it’s a high quality demand thing so if their carefully allocated me-time isn’t rewarding them like it should it’s totally their right to go find another OTP to amuse themselves with a fandom producing stuff they want to see and a media source that’s giving them what they want immediately and in a way they don’t have to “look for scraps” as some people were saying about Destiel in season 9, 10 and 11 while things were thinner on the ground.

And as one of the too-much-free-time fandom contributors, I’ve got an enormous luxury to stick out things people who don’t have time for being jerked around or over-analysing to find what they want to see have… Although I’ll try and pass on my thoughts for the people with less time to think them to try and help them enjoy themselves as much as possible :P Anyway I think a whole range of reasons happen that people might get fatigued of the show especially as lives change and people blogging enthusiastically one day might get a job or a new relationship or a dog or SOMETHING and just not spend quite so much time online and then discover they don’t NEED to spend so much time on fandom, and drift naturally… Then try and find some reason on the show they’ve stopped watching, but often it’s just that things look worse after time away when the spark has started to fade because it’s not being nurtured in the same way any more. 

And 12 years is a LONG ASS TIME to be invested in something, so I think in general the fatigue or changing interests is all over the place and we might see it more and more as people drift… People who might watch it all as a catch up one day maybe a year or two after the show ends, but just don’t have the patience to stay in fandom and put in that energy over and over and over. 

Also the show is in a really weird place where it has some of the best writers it’s ever had in Berens and the newbie writers, and Dabb’s doing some fascinating things with the plot, but Buckleming are the executors of the story, in several interpretations of that phrase :P And there are people who skip MotW and find them unimportant or would judge the season on the plot, not the heart of the story… It’s a pretty precarious place, quality-wise. I think season 11 and 12 are a proper like, silver age revival of the MotW (with Nancy Won and Robbie giving last season a massive boost) where I think those episodes are really innovative and interesting, and the writers are being allowed a lot of freedom to play on THOSE canvases, but while the character development and *reasons* for the story have been fascinating and important, obviously 5 of the plot episodes this latest season were Buckleming and crucial to watch to know wtf was going on, even though the writers of those episodes seem to have such a terrible problem with hating the audience (literally, it’s in their scripts and off-screen comments), the genre, second drafts, common human decency towards characters and understanding why they’re important, pacing, you name it… :P So the show literally has 2 faces these days and depending on which one you see when you think of season 12, probably defines how you feel about the show as a whole and all that. I treat the plot episodes these days as a necessary evil between episodes written by people who actually like the show and care about it and its characters (see also: my non-stop sobbing about 12x22 since it aired)… But seeing the other face can really cast a cloud over the show and I’ve seen it make people wonder why the other writers even try. (I mean Perez did an incredible salvage job on Crowley in 12x15 only for it to immediately get yanked away again the next time BL wrote him and I think only they really got to play with him for the rest of the season, meaning all that work to make it seem important and thematically relevant that Perez had set up in 12x12 and messed with in 12x15 ended up being for nothing and Dabb had no time to do anything deep with Crowley, because 12x13 turns out to be the big Crowley & Rowena farewell episode, except for how it flubbed the entire premise of Grand Send Off Episode a la 7x10 or something despite all the ingredients being there…)

I am just rambling now so… Gonna hit post. Hope this makes sense :P This is just my interpretation of how people are feeling/how fandom as an entity seems to work, so it’s pretty subjective and others might feel very differently especially people who have been in negative echo chambers while I’ve built myself a reasonably positive one plus SENSIBLE and CONSTRUCTIVE wanky criticism that doesn’t go off the deep end :P

[uncrownedkings]

So...

ive been seeing a lot of rather cringy lgbt+-related rant videos and posts on tumblr. these kinds of thing has been going on for a while now. i think maybe its just totally inappropriate timing what with all the trump dilemma that made ppl become more triggered than usual, but its come to the point where i have to go out of my way to make both a rant and a psa out of this post.  or maybe ive been following the wrong ppl.

anyways, those cringy rant vids/posts. they are usually white teenage girls who go on and on about how someone called them “miss” when “excuse me????” *cough cough* “ACTUALLY, im genderfluid.” 

ok. howbout YOU excuse me. bc frankly, you look like a “miss”, so thats why i called you “miss”. i mean like i wont call you a bitch until you look like a female dog. OH MY!!!! im sorry!!! youre genderfluid. my bad. correction: a genderfluid dog. so yeah, dont you act all triggered just bc someone assumed your gender identity incorrectly. how could i tell when you have your boobs falling out of your shirt?? you dont exactly announce your gender to the world, do you??? its only fair that i would assume so. empathize with the ppl who arent exposed to the different lgbt spectrums. dont rant about it. TAKE ACTION and take the initiative to point out their mistake. youre genderfluid, fine with me. that is my mistake, sorry for being ignorant and not noticing. pls correct me. its simple as that. why dont you have the nerve to correct them when someone mistook your gender, but you have it in you to go to fucking tumblr to rant about it? the mistake isnt gonna fix itself when you do so. it only gets fixed when you point it out to the person who made that mistake. what is your purpose here???? are you trying to get sympathy or attention?? bc youre not getting any from me. i dont care and im sick of it. if you want someone who does, go tell your mother. 

yall lgbt ppl assumed this “dont assume” policy for yourselves. im willing to follow, but there will ofc be ppl out there who are not aware. dont blame them. from the moment any child is born, they are subjected to this hetero-normative view of how a person is identified as.  they are programmed from a young age that there is an order in which a person follows. if youre not female, youre male. there seems to be no other option. being lgbt creates the opportunity to be someone else. not all ppl are exposed to this. those who do take advantage of it. 

im part of the lgbt community myself (as i am bi), but im embarrassed for what some of you have done to demean the value of the lgbt community. its like how ppl seem to always be hating on feminists all over again, bc of some ppl taking it too far and dont fully understand what it means. just bc you dont conform to the norms of society when it comes to sexual orientation doesnt mean you get any special favour. my friends, even the gay ones, have been joking around about how “omg youre cant do _____ just bc im gay like thats not ok.” but i find the truth in what they joke around about. ppl from the lgbt seem to always be finding excuses to be offended when someone comments on their sexuality. 

take it from my experiences. i live near two schools, so there are lots of kids in my neighborhood. the school im going to is a very multicultural public school that has a lot of brown and asian kids (my squad), and the other school is a prestigious private school specializing in art that is predominantly white. both schools are very close, so we know the ins and outs of each other. admittedly, i have lots of friends from both of the schools: lgbt friends, non-lgbt friends, and friends who jokes/pretend that they are lgbt. my point is: i know this kid from the private school. there was a rumour that he is gay. i confronted to him and bluntly asked him if he is actually gay. he started yelling at me defensively, saying “do you have a problem??? you cant just hate me bc im gay.” I DID NOT DO ANYTHING. i didnt speak to him again. on the other hand, theres this muslim trangendered boy in my school. hes quite famous due to his gender identity. when i met him for the first time, i asked him if he is transgender. he was cool about it and just simply said “yeah. im pretty famous in this school arent i?” he didnt get offended. he didnt act defensively. we were off with a very good start. since our school are more multicultural than the private school, a lot of us coming from eastern countries. eastern countries are more conservative and they dont take kindly to “different” ppl. he worked hard to be who he wants to be, and he is confident with himself and his gender. 

not totally unrelated to this, but im a friend of a girl who goes to the private school. nice kid, very cute, great at dance. she usually dresses in pretty dresses and skirts. but one day, she came in with jeans, sweater, and short boyish hair. everyone was surprised. then she told everyone she is genderfluid. there were a lot of genderfluid ppl in the private school, not so much in my school. when i asked her how she knew, she said why not??

it seems like there is a trend on being lgbt+, especially in this demographic (white, female, teen). as soon as its openly accepted, ppl will conform to become a part of this new thing. even after joining tumblr and seeing all these new lgbt+ categories makes me question myself. i tried to fit myself into this label, and i feel that this is what is happening. before it is accepted in western countries, the idea was very hush hush. now that everyone is beginning to accept it, suddenly everyone is lgbt. not like “oh im closeted bc lgbt is not accepted and now im out bc its accepted.” no, its like “oh this lgbt thing is pretty new! lets see which category i THINK i fit in the best and squeeze myself into this label.” im sorry, if youre an actual lgbt veteran and you have been fighting all your life for acceptance and equal rights. but there are ppl who are trying to conform to this lgbt+ “thing” bc it seems like everyone is out as well. there are even some ppl who would go out of there way to make a point that they ARE indeed lgbt+. you cant just wake up one morning and decide that youre suddenly asexual, or pansexual (when you havent even had a sexual relationship) or genderfluid. its not fair to those who have worked so hard. but then again, im in no position to tell you who you are. you are the controller of your life. but dont act all defensive and go crying to your followers just bc someone makes a comment on your sexuality/gender but  youre not confident/sure enough about it to forget and forgive. if this is truly who you are, then TAKE ACTION. you dont need to prove to me that you are lgbt, just simply embrace it by expressing it. BELIEVE IN WHO YOU ARE. and dont be ashamed. you cant stop someone from assuming when you yourself dont accept that fact. who cares what others think.

ok so. after all that longass rant with the telling of my whole fucking life story, half-assed motivational quotes, and some rather rude use of language, the moral of the story is: i dont have a problem with your gender identification or sexual orientation, im actually fine with it. but i do have a problem with people using that as an excuse to act all disgusted and horrified and lash out on social media when someone may or may not have intentionally “offended” them. if its actually offensive, fine, you are free to make a point about it and shove it up their asses. but when someone asks you if youre gay, you DONT FUCKING GIVE THEM YOUR ATTITUDE. saying yes is enough. its up to their discretion to either shrug and move on (which i would do bc i dont care about your sexuality) or they can punch you in the face like a fucking trump supporter that they are. it is only when they punch you that you fight back. DONT FIGHT WHEN THERE IS NO REASON TO FIGHT AT ALL. 

i know that there will be ppl who would be displeased with me. nvm, i dont think there would be that much ppl reading it in the first place. oh well. just trying to make a point. im not sorry that i made this post on this particular topic, but im sorry for the incredibly coarse/rude language. i have said offensive things that is borne from my frustration. if there are ppl out there who sees mistruths or ignorance in my post, you are welcome to enlighten me. my views arent rigid and im not exactly knowledgeable in this topic, so i am willing to change them if your point is valid.  but ill only be accepting replies with point, proof, and analysis. also, you are welcome to block/unfollow me as well, but tbh, i wont be posting these kinds of thing again anytime soon. ill just be back to the cute, unassuming anime blog that silently supports the lgbt+ community and strongly opposes trump. thank you for your time, and have a nice day.

[pitz182]

Is AA Too Religious for Generation Z?

Are today’s mutual-aid recovery groups ready to satisfy Generation-next?“More than any other generation before them, Gen Z does not assert a religious identity. They might be drawn to things spiritual, but with a vastly different starting point from previous generations, many of whom received a basic education on the Bible and Christianity. And it shows: The percentage of Gen Z that identifies as atheist is double that of the U.S. adult population.”Released early this year, Barna Group’s Generation-Z Report (Americans born between 1999 and 2015) surveyed over 2,000 13 to 18-year-olds. The oldest of this generation turn 20 in 2019.According to AA’s most recent triennial membership survey, 1% of AA is under 21—that’s about 20,000 sober teenagers in AA rooms right now. What’s my personal affinity with this demographic? It’s two-fold: I have two millennial children and one 18-year-old stepson; secondly, while I am a grey-haired Baby Boomer, I was a teen at my first 12-step meeting. My 20th birthday was 1980, three months shy of my fourth anniversary clean and sober.I was a second-generation AA member and—like Barna’s youth focus group—my worldview seemed incompatible with the old fogies of 12-step rooms. My mother mused about finding god’s will for her from meditation or her daily horoscope. She was such a Virgo, you know. Horoscopes, higher powers, legends of Sasquatch, these were all fictional symbols as far as I was concerned. Reasonable people didn’t take such constructs literally, did they?Bob K, like me, is a second-generation AA. He’s currently between historical book projects; Key Players in AA History will soon have a prequel. Bob’s follow-up research will produce a book about pre-AA addiction and treatment. At age 40, Bob made it into AA as a result of his dad 12-stepping him. He also was uncomfortable with the emphasis on "God." “When I was a month sober, it was ‘God-this, God saved me’ and I was going to put my resignation in. I didn’t think I could stand it in AA any longer. I went to the internet of the day—which back then was the library—and I looked for non-religious alternatives to AA. They had them in California but nothing in Ontario Canada. So it was AA or nothing. If I tried to brave it alone, I’d be drunk; I knew it.”Today, Bob enjoys the likeminded company at his Secular AA home group, Whitby Freethinkers, which meets in the local suburban library just East of Toronto. If I were confronting addiction/recovery as a teen today, I wonder if I would go to AA or NA? If AA was once “the last house on the block,” today it’s one house in a subdivision of mutual-aid choices. Today, newcomers have access to Refuge Recovery, SMART Recovery, Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), or Medically Assisted Treatment, none of which existed in the 1970s.On Practically Sane, therapist Jeffrey Munn states: “I like to take a practical approach … I’m not a fan of the ‘fluff’ and flowery language that is often associated with the world of psychology and self-help.” Jeffrey came into the rooms at 20, stayed sober for 2 ½ years, relapsed, came back and is now 13 years clean and sober.“I was mandated to three 12-step meetings per week to stay in the program I was in. Since I was young I have been agnostic. I wanted to find a higher power that was common sense-based, but in the rooms I felt pulled towards a more dogmatic spiritual idea of higher power. Back then, I needed to come up with my own conception of what was happening on a psychological level." Recently, Jeffrey wrote and published Staying Sober Without God: the Practical 12 Steps to Long Term Recovery from Alcoholism and Addiction.“I looked at SMART Recovery,” Jeffrey tells The Fix. “I looked at Moderation Management, too—that one struck me as being an organized resentment against AA—I wasn’t feeling it. When it comes down to social support and a practical plan of action, it’s hard to beat 12-step programs. What I try to teach is: if you don’t buy into any kind of a supernatural higher power, navigate the 12-step world, filtering the god-stuff out, working the program in your own way; there is lots that really works.”Barna reports, “Nearly half of teens, on par with Millennials, say, ‘I need factual evidence to support my beliefs.’” Jeffrey hopes Staying Sober Without God—which joins a growing secular 12-step recovery offering—offers the rational narrative today’s youth crave. Barna calls today’s youth “the first truly post-Christian generation [in America].”Certified Master Addiction Counselor David B. Bohl of Milwaukee understands the value of other-oriented care. David tells The Fix: “As head of a 20-bed coed dual-diagnosis treatment center, emerging adults, 18 to 25 years old, came into our care. I wouldn’t say that they universally shrugged off the 12-step approach but almost universally, in reaction to our volunteers, alumni, and traditional AA community, younger clients didn’t want what the volunteers and alumni had. And I wouldn’t say it was the religiosity always. Sometimes it was an age-thing or life approach. So, our recovery management function became that much more important in terms of building individualized treatment that suits everyone.“In the USA, 75% of all residential treatment centers identify as 12-step facilitators,” David tells us. “In the simplest form, our job is to introduce people to the language and the concept of the 12 steps and then to introduce the clients to support groups or people in support groups when they are discharged from acute care.Where trauma is involved—religious trauma in particular—traditional AA language and rituals trigger that shame they feel from negative formal religion experiences.”Let’s put this overbearing religion caution to a real-life test: Suwaida F was the second oldest of 11 children to Somalian refugee parents who fled to Canada in the 1980s.“In Kindergarten I didn’t have to wear a hijab; my parents weren’t super religious. I went to an Islamic school in grade one. It was normal for teachers to have belts with them, they would hit you; child abuse was normalized. They didn’t really teach us that much math, science, history. The Islamic teachers weren’t that educated. My parents took me out and put me in public school. Then, some of my mom’s Somalian-Canadian friends started moving their kids to Egypt. My friends would stay in Egypt two years, finish the Qur’an and the girls came back wearing burqas and head-scarves. Some Muslim friends would come to school in their hijab, take them off and put them back on when they went home. We called them The Transformers.My parents really wanted us to learn the Qur’an; I don’t speak Arabic, so it was difficult. And I never believed it. I asked my mom and dad, ‘How do you know that this stuff is real?’ They got frustrated and mad and said, ‘Don’t ever ask that question again.’ I knew it wasn’t real. Mom got more and more religious. Pictures of her at age 19 -- she wore no head-scarf when she was my age. My mom expected me to be religious and I rebelled. I had to leave home.”Suwaida misses her sisters. She feels unwelcome in the family home unless she is dressed in the Islamic custom and that wouldn’t be true to herself. Away from home, Suwaida found the welcoming community she craved in the booze and cocaine culture.“It wasn’t a matter of having no money; I had no sense of hope. People at work didn’t know I was hopped from shelter to shelter at night. One winter I was told, ‘Suwaida, you’ve been restricted from every youth shelter in the city of Toronto.’” As addiction progressed, Suwaida recalls an ever-descending patterns of compromises, bad relationships and regrets.“Today, it’s like I still never unpack my suitcase; I’m always ready to go.” During a stay at St. Joe’s detox, Suwaida went to her first NA meeting.“At 7 PM, a woman spoke. I made it clear that I thought it was stupid; I wouldn’t share. At the end, everyone was holding hands to pray and I said, ‘I’m not holding any of your hands.’ I didn’t go back. When I was discharged, I went drinking at the bar with my suitcase, not knowing where I was going to stay that night.My second meeting I consider my first, because I chose it. I thought I should go to AA. I googled atheist or freethinker AA to avoid a repeat of my NA experience. I found Beyond Belief Agnostics and Freethinkers Group on the University of Toronto campus. I went there last February. For a while, I had wine in my travel-mug, and I didn’t say anything. In August I felt like the woman beside me knew I was drinking, and I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’ So, my next meeting, I went sober. I’ve been clean and sober ever since.”Despite the child-violence of Islamic school and rejection from her family, Suwaida isn’t anti-theist. “I do believe in God or in something. I feel like I’m always looking for signs. I don’t believe in a god in the sky but to say there’s nothing beyond all this doesn’t make any sense to me. Sometimes the freakiest things happen. Maybe it’s because I’m a storyteller, I try to make a story out of everything; you think of someone, then they phone you, is that random?I feel a part-of in secular or mainstream AA meetings. My self-talk still sounds like, ‘Don’t share Suwaida, you have nothing to add.’ Maybe it comes from not being able to express myself when I was growing up. I have no sense of self. I guess I have something special to offer but I don’t know how to articulate it. It’s hard; I have limited self-confidence.”“Give them their voice; listen to them,” is Kevin Schaefer’s approach. He co-hosts the podcast Don’t Die Wisconsin. He’s also a recovery coach.“I’ve been in Recovery 29+ years. I’m a substance abuse counselor and I got into addiction treatment through sober living. When I started working in a Suboxone clinic, I came to realize that AA can’t solve everything. I always come from a harm reduction standpoint: meth, cocaine, benzos; I ask, ‘Can you just smoke pot?’ and we start building the trust there.Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) is geared towards this generation. Most kids coming through my door know a lot about MAT, more so than people in AA with the biases and stigma that they bring. Kids sometimes know more than the front-line social workers. Their friends are on MAT, that’s how they gather their information (not to say their information is all correct). But a lot of therapists don’t understand medication. Medication can be a ticket to survival out on the streets.”The Fix asked Kevin his opinion on the best suited mutual-aid group for this generation.“Most of the generation you’re talking about walks in with anxiety and defiantly won’t do groups.” We talked about the role of online video/voice or text meetings for a tech-native generation. “Yes—where appropriate. Women especially, because from what I’ve seen, most females have suffered from trauma. I have heard women who prefer online recovery; that make sense to me. I’ve been to InTheRooms.com; as professionals we have a duty to know what’s out there. And there are some crazies online.If someone has an Eastern philosophy bent, I’ll send them to Refuge Recovery; I’ve been there. If I can, I’ll set them up with somebody that I know can help them. And let’s not forget that some youth, if Christianity is your thing, Celebrate Recovery is amazing — talk about a community that wraps themselves around the substance user. There are movie nights, food, all kinds of extracurricular activities. The SMART Recovery Movement? Excellent. SMART momentum is building in Milwaukee. They are goal-oriented and the person gets supported whether they’re on Suboxone or, in one case I know, micro-dosing with LSD for depression; they’ll be supported either way. My goal with youth is: ‘Try to get to one meeting this month; start slow.’ Don’t set the bar too high and if they enjoy it, then great.The 12-step meeting I go to, it’s a men’s meeting. There are people there on medication and they don’t get blow-back. I wish more of AA was like this. When I came in, almost 30 years ago now, I saw all the God-stuff on the walls and I thought, ‘Nah, this isn’t going to work’ but thank G… (laughs), thank the Group of Drunks who said, ‘You don’t have to believe in that.’ The range in my meeting is broad—Eastern philosophy, Native American practices, Yoga, I was invited to Transcendental Meditation meetings at members’ houses. I was fortunate to fall into this group. You know, the first book my sponsor gave me was The Tao of Physics—not The Big Book—it was this 70’s book with Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, correlated to physics and contemporary science.”So, as to the question that kicked this off, some mutual aid meetings are ready to meet the taste of a new generation; results may vary. Who’s heard: “If you haven’t met anyone you don’t like in AA, you haven’t gone to enough meetings”?The reverse is true, also. If the peer-to-peer meetings I’ve sampled seem too narrow or dogmatic, maybe my search for just the right fit isn’t over. And if I don’t want a face-to-face meeting, there’s always Kevin’s podcast, virtual communities like The Fix, or I can order one of Bob or David or Jeffrey’s books if that’s more to my taste.