#derailing the post

[goldensunset]

did you know? if you do your laundry you can get your clothes back

[pyaasa]

Cardi B saying “I will only vote for Kamala if she commits to a ceasefire in Gaza” shows that she has more political understanding than like 99% of you on here

“I meannn I DO support Palestinians but 👉🏽👈🏽 I’m going to vote for and uncritically support Kamala anyway and put zero pressure on her to stop the genocide ✌🏽”

Not only are you guys unbelievably callous, but you’re also just not smart. At the very least, withhold your support for Kamala UNTIL she commits to a ceasefire. Make your intentions to her clear that you will vote for her IF she withdraws support from Israel. By uncritically supporting her, by loudly voicing the fact across every social media platform that you’re going to vote for her, and even straight up saying with your whole chest that you’re putting your interests first before the Palestinians (seriously you guys have no shame. Like it is actually shocking to me how unbelievably cruel some of you are), and most especially by DONATING to her lmfaoo….you are letting her know, you are literally EXPLICITLY telling her, that the Palestinians are fair game. You are telling her she can kill as many Palestinians as she wants, drop as many bombs on the Middle East as she wants, and it’s ok because you will still vote for her anyway.

For the love of God, if you are in the USA, PLEASE try to understand the power of your vote. Your vote decides if someone in another part of the world dies. Please at least try to feel the gravity of that. Please at least TRY to put pressure on your politicians. This uncritical and loud support is the worst thing you can do. You are signing a death sentence for the people of Gaza with your actions.

[gammija]

nothing personal but this kind of comment rlly exemplifies to me a disconnect between canon and popular fanon jmart characterization because they almost literally had this conversation in canon - except, their lines are swapped!

jon, for all his scared grouchiness, is a secret romantic, while martin, for all his forced optimism, is at his core a pragmatist

[guiltiest-gear]

"Cis" man: "Gee, life sure is difficult, if only there was a better way to make it so life had more color and joy in it again..."

The reblogs:

[lucy-the-loser]

shoutout to disabled people who don’t have a diagnosis.

shoutout to disabled people who don’t seem to fit any one disorder and so they’re continually dismissed by doctors.

shoutout to disabled people who feel like they’re faking, who have some level of control over their symptoms, who don’t know if it’s real or not.

shoutout to disabled people who are in pain and don’t know why.

shoutout to disabled people who can’t tell if they’re in pain.

shoutout to disabled people who feel like a mystery.

[shelbybunny]

do you actually give a damn about transfems. do you care about us. our interests, even the ones that arent stereotypically applied to us? do you care about the unpalatable? the uninteresting? the masculine? even the ones you hate and abhor? do you think our suffering is unjust? would you listen to us? do you think we deserve love? would you listen to me? please listen to us. please.

[THIS POST IS SPECIFICALLY ABOUT TRANS WOMEN/TRANSFEMS PLEASE DONT DERAIL]

[midnight-soulless-system]

Sometimes being disabled means you can't go to college, can't get a job, have to live with your parents and that's ok. For a lot of us it means not being able to go outside most days, not being able to get up or move at all. It can mean needing someone to wash us or feed us or help us with the bathroom and that is ok. It doesn't mean that we're less than or that we aren't worth anything.

And it's valid for us to be mad about it. Even if we can overcome some of these things with accomodations we're allowed to be mad that we're in this situation, and wish that we weren't disabled because I sure as hell hate this shit.

[headpainmigraine]

I hate how, when legislation and technology become threats to the disabled community, especially the physically and severely disabled, abled people freak out about spillover happening to them.

And it's extra shitty that its usually other minorities who, as usual, don't so much as mention us

Elon's stupid brain chips were announced and the Internet went nuts with 'he's trying to cure autism and other neurodivergencies!'

Meanwhile, Musk's human guinea pigs were phtsically disabled people, paralysed people.

Trump was elected and I didn't hear a word about the fact that he legitimately thinks we should die.

And now the UK has green-lit euthanasia because a fragment of mostly abled people campaigned for it and I just saw a fucking post about 'oh no, they're going to start killing trans, Black and poor people now'

As though our government isn't actively targeting disabled people between this and their decimation of our benefits.

If you're on disability benefits, you can't have more than £6000 savings. Over that triggers them to look at your bank account and then start deducting a percentage of your benefits every £250

It's a good thing medical equipment is so cheap.

The only place I hear anything about disabled people is in disabled spaces, and for other minority communities who talk a big game about intersectionality, that's pretty fucking shit.

[laser-tripwires]

i am occasionally reminded that parker knows how to shoot/handle a gun competently in redemption s1e3 and it's like, eliot, mr. "i dont like guns", why are you teaching people this.

(i am aware parker has a handgun in s1e1 but i dont think the skills are transferable to shotguns and its never really established if she can actually hit anything and also i doubt archie would train her in it bc its not a gentleman thief skill and by the same logic i doubt parker would teach herself bc its not particularly thief-y)

anon, this ask was like an early christmas present for me. i love when people are "wrong" in interesting ways, or if not wrong then... take a different view to what i do. so, parker and guns. i can't believe i've never made a post about this.

(heads up, i've stolen vast swathes of this post from conversations i've had with both @ghostlyarchaeologist and @aardvaark. words are all mine but ideas are mutually borne, so thank you both for being sounding boards at various points in the past. everyone go follow heather and adrian cos they're better at this than i am.)

right, let's talk about the pilot, becuase parker can absolutely hit things with that. both eliot and nate know immediately that hardison isn't a real danger, but the second nate hears the safety beng turned off there he whirls around and matches her threat; that's what you do when you know someone's not making pointless bluffs.

also, boiling this back to it's utter basics, what's the main skillset you use in order to handle a pistol competently? hand-eye coordination. which is something we know for sure parker has in spades; she's a master pickpocket and she learns fast.

we need to remember, also, that parker's initial sense of morality is completely fucked. or... not morality, exactly, but sense of what does and doesn't count as wrong, what does or doesn't count as harm? because there's that scene in homecoming, right, where everyone's protesting the concept of eliot having to do the thing they hired him for, and parker weighs in with "i never hurt anyone." except... like, the FIRST thing we know about parker is that she blew up a house as a child. it's canonical that the parents survived, but parker also spent six months in juvie and has broken out of prison multiple times and lived on the street for god knows how long and stork job shows she can fight pretty well pre-leverage, too. i'll come back to all this in a minute.

her being a crack shot with a gun is... not really incongrous with who she was pre-leverage. archie describes her when he found her as "a danger to herself and to others" and like YEAH no i buy that. i buy that completely.

next up, what about things that aren't pistols? well.

that's a fucking sniper rifle.

that's a fucking sniper rifle.

that is, and i cannot stress this enough, a fucking sniper rifle.

so yeah, i'd say that those skills are transferrable. she can take out an armed gunman and tie him up with duct tape, without causing a scuffle, and re-aim the gun. with enough consistency that nate knows for sure she'll manage it in less than three seconds. sure, we can chalk some of that up to parker at this point having had four seasons of eliot here's-how-you-take-out-thugs-with-guns fight training, but... i think at this point it's pretty fair to say that (regardless of the provinance of her skills) parker's kinda a good shot, actually.

okay, let's revisit that point about morality, because there are kinda a bunch of really important touchstones here.

so, john rogers once said that "parker is the second most dangerous person on the team, and eliot would argue first most dangerous." she's the team member with the least qualms about hurting people, always, and that's a detail that tends to get brushed over.

she would have killed tara here. she makes that extremely clear. i can't listen to that "Bye, now." and not get shivers.

talking of shivers.... "I want to do the right thing."

because, look, parker's not eliot. she's not thawing ice all the way through, and yet we're shown again and again that, despite that, "She has the nuclear winter inside her." there will always be a part of her who's first instinct is to jump, to hide, to run, to kill, to not care because caring hurts. but there's also a part of her that is softer than any of the team, that is a child who'll never grow up and yet grew up too fast. she grew up beaten, bruised, neglected and starved yet she's something wonderful - but she knows she's broken, she knows they all call her crazy, and it hurts. she wants to do the right thing, make the right choice, but she hates that it'll never be her first instinct. and the thing is? that's okay. she went through hell and back and turned out someone strange and weird and at times unkind, but... the team like how she turned out. hardison likes how she turned out. and that's worth the world - she just needs to remember it and believe it and use HER skills instead of trying to be something she's not. that is what parker and eliot's conversation in the ice cave is about, if you strip it back to it's bare essentials. parker doesn't want to be normal, she just wants to be normal enough for her friends.

has parker ever killed someone? i don't know. i don't know if she even thinks like that, in such clear terms - as i already talked about, parker's definition of 'hurt' is not the same as anyone else's.

so let's talk about broken wing job for a second, because absolutely everyone overlooks the reason why parker does the job in the first place - "You brought a gun? To my bar?"

because. yeah.

"Those guys are gonna rob this store, right? Which is fine. I don’t mind robbers who aren’t robbing me, or my friends, or kids or… But they brought a gun to the party, and that changes all the rules."

this is season five. she investigates the theives because she's bored - but she only decides to stop them because they brought a gun. that's the kind of very specific morality you only get after being the good guy for a very long time, and i do think that hanging around eliot probably helped affect that a bit.

actually, fuck it, look at what else she says about this whole thing in the broken wing job.

"No cops. No cops. That will actually increase the chances of people getting hurt. [...] Seeing a uniform in the middle of stealing something could cause you to panic, make bad decisions..."

"These guys aren’t that good, which is actually another reason why we should do this, ‘cause sooner or later, they’re gonna make a mistake. Someone’s gonna get hurt."

so. yeah. on the one hand, this is weapons safety 101, for someone in parker's position. "[The Leverage crew] don't use guns because - when guns come out, people die. This attitude very much comes out from traditional American crime literature, and also from talking to our professional criminal friends. Guns are messy, when they show up things escalate, you take a longer, harder fall when doing a crime with a gun - professional criminals are pathologically averse to carrying weapons." i'm quoting john rogers here, because i can, but you'll hear similar in any training manual, and it's especially relevant to parker's actions both here and elsewhere in the show.

on the other hand, mix up all those statements and it definitely implies parker has fucked up badly in the past. again, i don't know if she's ever killed someone. but.

well, for funsies, let's look at the rest of JR's above statement about gun safety (i'm quoting from his blog on the gone fishin' job, in case you wanted to find the source): "You do not point a gun at anything or anyone you are not willing to kill. [...] I had that drilled into my head at an early age. A gun has two settings - holstered and murderous. 'Wounded' is an accidental condition. Eliot in particular is aware of this, and one of the many reasons he does not use a gun is because he is trying to, well, not kill people anymore. Hardison is magnificently awful with weaponry. Although Parker is probably a fine shot, she's trying to play nice by the new rules, and only brought a weapon to the meet in the pilot because she wanted to get paid."

and all that is, more than anything else, the core and crux of everything i'm saying here. factor in how broken parker is, how we know she's made mistakes in the past, throw in archie's "a danger - to herself and to others" line, think about the tara rooftop incident... there's a picture emerging here. it's not a nice one, but it's unpleasantly clear.

so. where does that leave us?

well, it at least leaves me extremely certain for a vast number of reasons that eliot didn't need to teach parker how to shoot a rigged game.

[mlm-blues]

MEN ARE SO???? PRETTY???????????? and im just supposed to be normal about it

[donnieisaprettyboy]

“me looking at the beautiful strong goddess big titty mommy trans woman-“ okay but are you kind and respectful to trans women you don’t personally find attractive? do you respect the identity of all trans women or just the ones you want to sexualize?

[whumperofworlds]

Give meeeeeee

Ladies in distress. Bound and gagged. Tortured. Hurt in general.

Ladies being whumped FTW!

Reblog if you have ladies being whumped! 👀

[borderlinereminders]

I love the post that says “forgive yourself for not knowing better”. And I think it’s a really great message.

But sometimes we did know better, and still messed up. And you know what? You still deserve your forgiveness.

It’s okay to forgive yourself for making mistakes, whether you knew better or not.

[sobredunia]

me when i solve an incredibly hard puzzle by defanating a musoleum and i swim in an ocean of blood for like 3 minutes to find an alien skull that does nothing

[astronomodome]

I know it probably matters to some viewers but to me it doesn’t matter if builds get spoiled on stream. Like I get why it might ruin the surprise but for me I watch hermits for CUB MET OBAMA?????????????

[goldnightshaade]

They’re talking about what they want to do after the war is over.

@foxquinweek Day 4