#it's a bunch of pictures of hillary and it looked so good that i left them up

[bllsbailey]

HOT TAKES: The Picture That Says Everything About Why the Biden Team Is in Such Chaos

The Biden team has spoken out — rightly — against the use of TikTok and the danger that it can potentially pose. 

Joe Biden is now saying he will sign a bill to ban TikTok if the bill passes.

They say that they are trying to discourage people from using it, but then in the next breath, they turn around and use it all over the place, while trying to push Biden's campaign among young people. So much for their principles. It's more hypocritical "rules for thee" from them. Do they not think people will look at that and wonder about the inconsistency?

 But I have to say that a post by one of their TikTok content creators was quite the look into the operations of the Biden team. 

Lauren Kapp, who does TikTok videos for both the Biden campaign and the DNC, posted two pictures side by side on X, with the caption "responding rapidly from Biden HQ." This is quite something. 

Kapp limited the replies on her account, which showed she didn't want to hear what people had to say in response. That's not exactly a good way to take the pulse of the electorate. It's dumb because people comment anyway with quote tweets. So it doesn't do much, and it just makes you look cowardly. People certainly had plenty to say about this post. 

The first point so many made was how the folks on the right looked just like everyone imagined the Biden HQs rapid response team would look -- like a bunch of NYU theater kids, as one person on X put it.  

That explains so much about why we are in the mess we are now.  The picture appears to be them checking out the State of the Union and/or its aftermath. What was hilarious was while the talking points on the left are that Biden hit a "home run," none of them look happy at all with what is going on. Kapp also clearly has no idea what that picture looks like. It looks like the picture of the Hillary people who cried in 2016, some on X observed. This is the adults back in charge? 

Then the other hilarious thing that people pointed out to the Biden person is that the picture on the left did not show "Biden HQs"; it was the famous picture of Osama bin Laden being taken out in a raid, a raid ordered by Barack Obama—who you can see in the picture— and it was a raid that Biden opposed. So much for "rapid response." 

Do his people not even know that? Why would they post that picture, of all pictures, with that caption? They're either clueless or believe everyone else is. And do they really think posting on TikTok is the equivalent of hunting down and killing bin Laden? They needed a "war room" to get Biden through a speech and post on TikTok? These folks have a delusional view of themselves. 

I wrote earlier about how Biden, even in an interview that ran on Saturday, claimed America made a mistake in its effort to go after bin Laden, in going into Ukraine, which he then corrected to Afghanistan and Iraq (which was still wrong). Biden still can't get it right, even after decades. Neither he nor his team seem to know what's what. 

People had thoughts. 

You would've scolded us for misgendering Bin Laden. https://t.co/Zb6mHMA5aF— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) March 8, 2024

The lack of self awareness and optics is just breathtaking here https://t.co/gYhSxhbDYp— Hood of Judgement (@BozOzler) March 8, 2024

READ MORE:

Biden Confusion: Blanks Out, Says Went Into Ukraine to Get Bin Laden, Explains 'Come to Jesus' Mic Moment

[montanabohemian]

ugh. i have to clean my apartment before tomorrow because there might be an inspection. i mean there is, but for only 20% of the units. (it's some official HUD thing supposedly.) but they don't know which apartments are going to be chosen until tomorrow. and like. they told us this last week. do you think i cleaned my apartment then? no. i did not.

so now i have a couple hours to get it to look less like an episode of hoarders.

at least i cleaned my bathrooms. and did my laundry.

[snlhostharry]

try try again

harry x reader

2.2k words 

summary: harry wants to propose, but life keeps getting in the way 

a/n: first off... I suck at titles... why am I like this.... second off this is my secret santa gift for @jambrosemc ! happy holidays em! hope you like this, you are a super talented writer I just binged all your pieces and I am obsessed. and thank you to @peeterparkr for hosting 

The first time he tries is after the first concert he does for Fine Line. 

Fine Line at the Forum is a success in all the ways that matter, and Harry is so happy coming off the stage that he almost forgets about his plan to propose all together. When you barge into his dressing room after the show is over, smiling and ecstatic for him he suddenly sees the ring box on the counter and rushes to shove it in his pocket before you can see it. 

“That was insane, love,” You say wrapping him into a hug. “I think they really liked it.” 

He gives you a cheeky smile, “You think?” You roll your eyes in response, “What gave it away?” He asks, “The frantic screaming or the bra’s that were thrown onto the stage?” 

“You should’ve kept a couple,” You tease, “They could’ve been my size.” 

He laughs, “If you want one that bad I will buy it for you.” 

“I’m holding you to that,” You say, taking a seat on top of the counter. He runs a hand through his hair, knowing that this would be the perfect moment to just get down on one knee. He can see himself doing it, simply bending down and saying the words he’s wanted to say for what feels like forever. “You okay?” You ask him, seeing the look on his face and supposing that he’s thinking about something that happened during the concert. “You did a great job out there, seriously. Everyone really loved it H, the album is spectacular.” 

He shakes himself back into the moment, “I know, I know.” He says, and it comes off a little sharper than he means it too, he’s just very much in his own head about this whole thing now. What felt like it would be the perfect moment now feels wrong, like doing it now would cheapen the entire thing. He sighs, “Sorry,” He says, planting himself down on the floor dramatically, “Thank you.” 

“We don’t have to go out if you don’t want to,” You tell him, guessing that he’s just tired from a long night. “Let’s get takeout and go home, or go home and get takeout whichever order.” 

He smiles, “You ate before the show.” 

“That was like three hours ago, and it was a snack, I always planned on eating again, and you were too nervous to eat before the show.” 

He hugs his knees to his chest, “Watching you eat an entire kids meal in under five minutes actually helped with the nerves.” 

You shrug, “What can I say? I have my moments.” 

He stands and presses a kiss to your forehead as you swing your legs over the side of the counter. “You have a lot of moments, I love you.” 

“Love you too,” You wait a second before asking, “So home then?” 

He thinks about it for a minute, “Yeah.” 

“When you call in the food order make sure you put it under my name,” You tell him and he collects his things from the room, “People are beginning to get suspicious when I go into the restaurant to pick up an order for Harry.” 

He nods, and gently grabs your hand as the two of you leave. Maybe he’s not going to do it tonight, but he’s more resolved to actually pop the question than ever. He’s just so in love with you that he wants the whole thing to be perfect, and for some reason he has it all in his head that it needs to be a story that the two of you can tell in the future, something meaningful, he just has absolutely no idea what that is. 

The second planned attempt is a lot more off the cuff. 

You insist on throwing him a birthday party at the house, saying something about wanting to one up your sister who threw a very tasteful christmas party that the two of you went to. Not that your sister was invited seeing as the party was in London, but you knew that there would be enough pictures that she would see that you’re just as good as she is. Harry doesn’t understand it at all, but he decides that he doesn't even want to know how a rivalry like that can develop and leaves it alone. 

Objectively, you throw a very nice party. Of course Harry makes it a point to tell you this as often as possible without seeming overly invested in it, because he loves you and he wants you to be proud of your own work just like you want him to be proud of his. It’s hard for him to leave your side at all because he loves to see you talk to his friends and family and seem so happy to do it. You fit right in with everyone and he’s so grateful for that, and it’s as he’s standing there watching you talk to people that it hits him that this could be his moment. 

Not in front of everyone because that would be so much more pressure than he needs, but he thinks that after when everyone has finally left the house that he could catch you in the middle of cleaning or something and gently ask you to marry him. He decides that tonight, that’s the plan and he spends the rest of the night just thinking about that. It really is a great party, full of all his favorite things and people, it’s one of those nights where he feels like he loves you so much that his heart might just burst out of his chest. 

When finally every last guest has left the house, and things are a bit messy, he can’t seem to find you anywhere. He locks the door behind him, and starts walking through the house calling your name. He checks upstairs, in the kitchen, in all the bathrooms, and nothing. Until finally he walks into the living room and finds you sound asleep on the couch, snoring loudly enough that he’s surprised he didn’t hear it while he was looking. He looks at you and just smiles, suddenly completely fine with the fact that another plan has been ruined. He simply picks you up and takes you to bed, well aware he’s going to have to move onto plan C if he ever wants to get this done. 

The next time he tries, you end up surprising him. 

Plan C is a nice candlelight dinner at the house, which Harry tried to cook but ended up burning so eventually he relented and ordered food before putting it all together. Of all the plans he had come up with thus far, this one seemed the most foolproof. Everything was already planned: he knew you were going to come home from work at a certain time, he knew that there wouldn't be any distractions, and he had psyched himself up enough that he wasn’t just going to forget about the whole thing like he did the first time.

When the entire table is set up and the ring is in his pocket, he sits waiting for you to come home. He thinks about getting up to change some of the place settings just a little, but when he does he hears the clicking sound of your key in the door and sits back in his seat. After you walk into the house and set your stuff down in the entryway, Harry hears the sound of your shoes on the floor as you excitedly run into the kitchen. When you make it to where he can see you, he sees that you have a megawatt smile on your face and a large box in your hands. 

“I have a surprise,” You say, keeping a firm hold of the box. 

“I suppose it’s in that box,” He says, leaning over the chair so that he can see. 

You roll your eyes but keep smiling, “Yeah, obviously.” 

“Do you want me to guess?”

“God no,” You say, “That would take way too long. Basically I was at work today, and Mark has been producing this piece about a no kill animal shelter for a new segment about everyday heroes or whatever which is gross because puff pieces but when the woman came in to do the interview she brought in all these cats, no dogs for some reason, but anyway so we were all playing with the cats because our job is stressful and cats, and then she was like ‘you guys seem so good with these cats, they are looking for homes and-” 

He looks at you with a wide eyed expression, “You didn’t.” 

You ceremoniously walk over to the table, open the box and pull a small orange cat into your arms, “You bet your ass I did.” You gently pet the cat, which mews quietly from your arms, “She does not have a name mostly because I couldn’t think of any.” 

“We talked about pets like a week ago, briefly.” 

You give a guilty smile, “Yeah but I felt like I really needed this cat. I live here now, we live here, and I finally feel like I’m settled-” You sit down at the table and sigh, “I think I might be nesting, which is kind of gross but I don't know. I love you, and I love being here and I finally feel stable enough to get a freaking cat so that’s the explanation I have.” 

He can’t stop himself from breaking into a smile, even though he knows his plans have been thwarted again. (He thinks later, after the moment has already passed that he very well could’ve done it right then and there after you’d given a whole speech about the two of you being stable). He shakes his head after looking at you making funny faces at the cat like it’s a child, “Okay hand her over.” 

You hand her over and say, “I will not accept any names that have to go with the fact that she’s a ginger, because that’s just lame.” 

“Well seeing as those were my only ideas-”

You sigh, “We will think of something, just not now because you got dinner and I’m starving.” 

“What’s she going to eat?”

“I got food and a bowl, and a bunch more things being delivered within the next week or two.” 

“Did you go out and buy a box just for the dramatic reveal?”

“Yes, I did and it was totally worth it.” 

The cat’s name ends up being Hillary, after you discover an affinity for pet names that are usually person names. Something about the way you’ll end up talking about Hillary in polite conversation and someone will have to ask you who that is makes you want to choose it overall. Even though Harry is not sure about the sudden change at first, he soon becomes best friends with Hillary, and you often find the two of them cuddled up together on the couch. She likes to listen to him play music just as much as you do as it turns out. 

Harry is still trying to think of a way to propose. So much time has passed since he bought the ring, and the first time that he planned to pop the question that he wonders if he’ll ever find the right time to do it or if you’ll just end up asking him one day because it’s all gone too far. One afternoon when the two of you are relishing a rare shared day off, he watches you cook lunch in the kitchen and decides that now is the time to do it. No more excuses, no more surprises, just him and you and the question on the tip of his tongue for too long. 

When you put all of the food on plates, and set them out on the counter he walks over and just looks at you. It weirds you out at first so you ask, “What? Is there something on my face?” 

He gets down on one knee and you still are very confused about what he’s doing. You open your mouth to ask him, but the realization suddenly hits you and you cover your mouth with your hands. 

“y/n,” He says, “I have been waiting to ask you this for what feels like forever. And everytime that the plan fell through you somehow managed to make me want to marry you even more. I love you so much, I love everything about you, how excited you get about your work, how much you love Hillary and how supportive you are whenever I do anything. I love our life here, and I want to be with you forever. Will you marry me?” 

You don’t say anything for a second, still shocked, “Yes of course.” He stands and kisses you, slipping the ring onto your finger. “I was wondering when you would ask me.” 

“You knew?”

“I saw it that night after the forum,” You say, “I figured you got nervous.” 

“And you just let me flounder here for almost six months?” 

“Yes,” You smile, “I figured you wanted to do it on your own terms.” 

“Next time just call me out love, because I sat on this for too long.” 

[pretendrocketships]

Planez

About: Shawn’s the pilot. You’re a flight attendant. Do the math. (SMUT)

A/N: THIS REQUEST WAS HOT. I kinda wanna do more with this but I know nothing about planes lmaooo. If y’all want and if I can figure out google, I’m down. Feedback and asks are welcome anytime! Enjoy! (3K)

Song: Planez by Jeremih ft. J Cole

--

“Boys,” you scolded, causing both giggling men to turn and look at you. “Is someone going to make the announcement, or shall I?” 

“Nose goes,” the copilot said while sneaking around you to head to the bathroom. You glared at Shawn as he shot you his famous smile and grabbed the microphone.

“Alright ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. On behalf of the entire crew and I, we’d like to welcome you to Memphis. We’re looking at a clear sky and ninety-three degrees out. Thank you so much for choosing to fly with us, and we hope to see you again!” You rolled your eyes at his fake chipper voice. He put the hand-held device on the dashboard and turned fully to look at you. “Happy?” 

“You know it would be a lot easier for you to do your job if you just did yours,” you informed him, rolling your eyes at his antics. 

“And it would be a lot easier for me to do my job if your skirt weren’t so tight.” You felt your cheeks blazing with heat at his comments and wandering eyes. You flustered while pulling your skirt down the best you could. “Not helping,” he said, cocking his head to the side, “said tight, love, not short, but I do love the view.” 

“Maybe if you focused this hard on your job,” you snapped, folding your arms over your chest. A soft moan left the back of his throat. 

“You act like I’m not just staring at your tits right now.” 

“You’re ridiculous!” Your black heels stomped against the floor in disbelief. He laughed and stood up to join you against the wall, his hot breath fanning over your cheeks. 

“What’s gotten you so worked up? Usually, you’re on my ass but today you just can’t get enough of me huh?” You went to answer until he raised his eyebrows in realization. “Wait, wait I remember. Your tinder date last night,” he recalled smugly, “Couldn’t get it up and couldn’t get you off,” he shook his head, “what a shame.” Your jaw dropped. He chuckled at the complete look of shock on your face. “It was a long flight and Cristina has a big mouth. You should know this by now.” You groaned and closed your eyes. 

“Bring up my sex life again, and I will end you, Mendes,” you threatened. 

“And I’ll return the favor,” he whispered messing with the scarf tied around your neck, “since none of your dates seem to be able to finish you off.” The glint in his eyes made you want to punch him and fuck him in the copilot’s seat. The tension between you two was obvious to the entire crew and to each other. Shawn’s teasing touches and flirty comments wouldn’t be so constant if you didn’t make it a point to let the biggest in-flight gossip know about all your failed attempts at love and dating. The entire airline had money on the bet of who would cave first. 

“Shawn if you don’t—“ 

“Hi.” Both of you snapped your heads towards a little boy in the doorway, staring up at Shawn with bright eyes and a wide smile. 

“I can’t imagine how horny you are right now,” he whispered into your ear, “but I have to take care of something right now, so keep it in your pants, yeah?” He chuckled to himself, completely ignoring your scowl before attending to the little kid. “Hi buddy! What‘s up?” He crouched to the kid’s level and gave his best smile. 

“W-well,” the boys stuttered, “I wanna drive planes, and you drive planes, so I-I wanted to say you did a really good job driving us here!” Shawn’s grin spread from ear to ear as he hugged the boy. 

“Thanks, bud. Wanna come check out the pit?” The kid nods excitedly when Shawn picks him up and plops him down in the seat. You’ve seen this routine plenty of time, and something about seeing him with kids, especially after him being so dirty, had you squeezing your thighs together. The boy’s eyes are blown as he admires all the flips and switches littering the dashboard. He reaches his chubby hand out before withdrawing it. 

“Touch?” he simply questioned. Shawn laughed and ruffled his hair.

“Go for it,” He has a field day flipping switched and messing with the radio. Watching Shawn teach him about controls and flying did something to you that you can’t put your finger on. Maybe it was because it was such a sharp contrast from what was coming out of his mouth just moments before. Shawn showed him all around and indulged in making airplane noises as he pretended to fly the huge aircraft.

“Oh god, there you are!” An older woman ran into the plane, visibly relieved to find her seemingly lost son. “What did I tell you about running off like that!”

“But mommy! Look, I’m driving the plane!” You saw her shoulders relax, realizing her son was fine. She shot you both a sheepish smile. 

“I’m sorry about this. Tommy, c’mon let's go.”

“But mom!” You laughed to yourself as the little boy pouted, and Shawn joined him, both of them folding their hands in prayer begging the mom to let him stay. She laughed at their antics. 

“No, Tom, we gotta go. Let’s take a picture to show Grandma, then let’s go and leave these nice people alone.” 

“Gotta look for the picture right?” Shawn quickly fished around to find a miniature set of wings that matched his own. 

“Cool!” Shawn grabbed you and pulled you into his side. 

“Smile, bud!”

“1,2..” as she said three, Shawn grabbed your ass with a firm squeeze. You gasped but covered it up with a cough. 

“Say thank you.”

“Thank you! Bye-bye!” He exclaimed and walked out happily, examining his shiny, new pin. Shawn waited until they were completely out of earshot to give his attention back to you, smirking while pressing you against the wall.

“So, wanna see my cockpit?” 

You scoffed at his antics. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” 

“Well, you know I don’t like leaving until everyone is gone, and it seems like something’s keeping you on board,” he said smugly. 

“What makes you think I even want to fuck you, Shawn?” 

“Well,” he started, “none of the last,” he paused to think, “three of your tinder dates haven’t made you cum.” He doesn’t even give you the chance to protest. “Am I wrong?” You hit him on the chest, but before you could retract he grabbed your hand. He dragged your hand down his body. “Tell me when to stop,” he murmured. He moves your hand from his biceps to his chest. He kept piercing eye contact. You felt him move his hand down his chest and down resting at his abs. He pulled you by the neck and pressed a soft kiss under your ear. “I said,” his voice was hard and loud against your ear, “Tell. Me. When. To. Stop.” You had no excuse because he made sure you heard every word. 

“I heard you,” you whispered. He slowly moved your hand to cup him. 

“Fuck,” he groaned softly when he felt you squeeze him. 

“What do you think Hillary would say about this?”  He grunted at the mention of your boss. 

“You’re getting a handful of my beautiful cock, and you’re thinking of a middle-aged woman right now?” 

“Shut up would you?” He cocked his head to the side. 

“What? Want me to put my mouth to better use?” 

“You’re spending so much time talking, I’m wondering if you even know how?” You challenged. He picked you up and dropped you in the pilot’s seat. He crawled on top of you, holding intense eye contact. 

“See, honey, the thing is, I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me to fuck you without having to say it. But, you’re going to have to say it if you want to finally figure out what an orgasm feels like.” You squinted at him, thinking about how you’d play this. You got up off his lap and kept his gaze, and you shimmied out of your panties. You say back on top of him, moving just enough to broadcast a wet print on his pants. You took his hat off of his head and placed it on yours. 

“Your move, Mendes.” He wasted no time. He surged up to capture your lips in a kiss. 

“How many times do you think I could make you cum before the cleaning staff comes? I’m thinking three,” he pondered aloud. You rolled your eyes as if his confidence didn’t turn you on.

“Get to work.” 

“Kinda turns me on when you get all bossy.” As soon as the words left his mouth he bunched your skirt up around your waist. “The times I’ve dreamed about doing this.” He moved his hands to your blouse and ripped it open, loose buttons pooling on the ground around you.

“Shawn! What the fuck? This isn’t a porno,” you scolded him, already thinking of where to find another shirt before your next flight. 

“It can be if you let me work.” Before he even finished his thought, his lips were mouthing at your clothed clit. Hearing your moans only made him work harder, feeling himself getting turned the more you tugged at his curls. 

Like the tease he was, he immediately moved away from your clit to leave marks along your inner thighs before pulling away. “No, no fuck this, you have to take this off.” You took your sweet time shaking your ass and putting on a show. When it was finally off, he yanked you down on top of him. “Thanks for my chair back.” He smacked your ass. “Now hop on, love.” You shot him a look. 

“Weren’t you being cute and sweet like just a minute ago?” 

“Reserved for kids and kids alone, but you can be my baby if you want.” You wanted to fuck the smugness out of him. Literally. You ran out of comebacks, so you just sank down on top of him and soaked in the feeling of his hips sputtering up and him finally being silent for once. You could’ve sworn you felt his dick twitch inside of you. Your hips rolled back and forth over him. The sound of your wet pussy and your thighs smacking against him were the only sounds to be heard in the plane.

“You know? I quite like quiet Shawn.” It was your turn to tease. He was memorizing the feeling of having you wrapped around him. He was comparing to what he imagined, and the real thing didn’t even come close. Your knees were planted by his side and your hips were moving on a mission, chasing a high you hadn’t felt in weeks. “Am I making you feel good, baby?” you teased. His grip on your waist was deadly tight. All he could do is bask in the feeling. He let you roll your hips into him. “So good for me,” you praised in breathy moans. You forced your eyes open to see his face scrunched up in pleasure. Part of the turn-on was being able to tease him without a single comeback, Shawn being too wrapped up in pleasure to respond. That was until his hat fell off your head brought him back to reality. He stopped you to flip you over. 

“I’m about to fuck that smirk off your face.” He grabs your hips and slams you back onto him. You swear you feel the plane shaking. He switched his pace from hard and fast to slow and exploring. The way he swirled his hips made the hair on your skin stand up. His hips were snapping then swirling. After your last guy didn’t even know that the g-spot was real, your head was spinning. “Feel good to finally be getting fucked right? Fuck, you feel amazing, (Y/N).” His moans sound delicious right in your ear. He slowed down only to reach his hand down and play with your clit. “God, do you look good.” Your eyes rolled to the back of your head. 

“Fuck me!” Your whimper was pathetic and he was living for it. “Right there! Fuck, please Shawn,” you instructed in a broken moan as he hit the perfect spots at the perfect speed.  

“Right there huh?” he mocked, “could’ve had this dick so long ago but you never wanted to ask and now you’re begging.” He was laughing to himself but his focus was on how his cock was just slipping out of you. He makes a mental note to tease you about how wet he got you on your flight to New York. The sounds of your juices pooling around him at his change of pace were filthy. He wished he were recording. This middle and pointer finger found their way to your clit, rubbing in messy circles.  

“S-shawn please,” you cried out, the constant drilling made your head spin. 

“Please what? Please make you cum all over my cock? Please fuck me til I can’t walk? Please bury your face in my sweet peach?” He moaned before he could even finish his comeback. “Might have to do that last one.” The lack of attention had your orgasm coming embarrassingly quickly, and he knew it. “That you fluttering around me?” He laughed and made sure every snap of his hips assaulted your g spot in the most delicious way. “That quick, hun?” Your skin was warm. Too warm. Every single word did nothing but made your clit throb more. You couldn’t even find the words to warn him before you were squeezing the cum out of him, cumming harder than you’ve ever had.

“Fuckkkkk,” you whined out weakly as you felt tingles all over your body.

“Christ! Fuck baby, just like that.” He never slowed down, chasing his high at the expense of your oversensitivity. You started squirming, trying to slow the attack on your g spot. He finally stilled, only to release streams of cum inside of you. You were still catching your breath when he pulled out and dropped to his knees, the thud forcing you to open your eyes.

“S-shawn, what are you--” He laughed. 

“You thought I was done before I even got a taste?” The moan you let out was absolutely pathetic, and Shawn felt his cock fattening up already. He licked a thick stripe over your opening. You locked your thighs around his head as soon as you felt his tongue prod at the mixture of both your releases. Your hands were tugging relentlessly on his curls, causing him to moan into you. The vibrations made your hips flicker up. He pulled back to look at the mess he made, admiring his work.“Little (Y/N) getting turned on by me licking the cum out of her,” he tisked. “Never told me you were so naughty,” he whispered into you. 

“Less talking, more--” He winked and dove back into you, sucking the remark right out of you. His tongue was dancing inside you, licking you clean. He was exploring every inch of you and making a map to commit to memory for the next time you let him fuck you senseless because he knew there would be a next time. He licked over spots that made your legs tighten around him more. When he felt your hips itching to move, he threw his arm over you and inserted three fingers inside your greedy hole. You lurched forward, gasping for air. 

“Fucking shit!” You felt him grin against your clit. The ego trip you were going to have to deal with was nothing in comparison to how good you felt right now. 

“You’re throbbing for me love,” he declared as he moved his arm from your stomach, moving to slap at your clit. “Feel that good?” his tone was almost questioning himself if he could really be that good. 

“Yes! Yes oh my god, please don’t stop,” you begged. 

“Sounding like I’m the best you’ve ever had.” He was doubling down on his effort, his fingers inside of you and against your clit were flying. You didn’t even have time to appreciate his biceps bulging as he used all his focus and strength to bring you a mind-shattering orgasm. 

“Fuck, you are.” Good thing your eyes were shut or else you would’ve seen his head get big.

“I want that in writing,” he mumbled before going back to sucking on your clit, loving seeing your back float off the chair because of how good it is. You opened your mouth to try and warn him this time, let him know you couldn’t last much longer feeling this good. “You’re close aren’t you? I feel you fluttering around me. About to cum, (Y/N)? About to cum all over my fingers for me? Such a good girl letting me fuck you you right here where anyone could walk in and see.” He knew you were close. He felt it. “Let me have it, (Y/N). Fuck, I can’t wait to taste. Let me have a taste, honey.” Somewhere, in the midst of it all, he had you cumming, seeing stars. Your eyes were shut so tightly, you saw white flashes dancing behind your eyelids as he ripped your orgasm from you. You were thrashing around, trying to run away from the pleasure and savor the feeling at the same time. 

“S-s-sha-wn.” Your cries for him were broken and useless. Once the wave of pleasure started, there was nothing you could do but ride it out. Shawn was shushing you softly and caressing your thighs to soothe you and bring you down. His soft actions lasted until you finally blinked your eyes open to stare at him lazily. 

“Cleaners still aren’t here love. Are you forgetting I said three orgasms?”

--

WE LOVE FEEDBACK IN THIS HOUSE

[donnerpartyofone]

A few years ago there was this moment where I got a ton of anonymous messages from some far right asshole about the usual shit--Hillary, the corrosive force of immigration, inherently evil ethnic and religious groups, etc. The messages were weird in that most of them seemed to be copied and pasted out of the middle of some article somewhere, but there was never a source mentioned, and there was never enough information for me to get the whole picture even if I really cared about all this "proof" that black and brown people should be kicked out of Sweden or whatever the point was supposed to be. Some of the messages were actually written by the sender, and they all sounded pretty stereotypically crazy: rude, vague, delirious references to conspiracies, pedophilia, brainwashing, etc on the left, or really just orbiting around Clinton. (This is totally tangential, but to this day I'm convinced that all these reactionary nutbags just want to fuck Hillary Clinton, I mean the enduring, overheated obsession with her has extended so far beyond the the sphere of her electoral campaign or any threat of her achieving greater power that there has to be a reason these freaks keep bringing her up, bringing up the fevered vision of a woman dominating them along with the entire country, a compelling reason, perhaps a BIOLOGICAL reason) I'm still embarrassed about this, but I engaged with this person, posting their inane drivel to try to vivisect it, to explain why it was so stupid and ineffectual. I wasn't that worried about giving them a platform, since the messaging was so primitive and hard to understand if you weren't already on his side, but that was exactly my point: When you make yourself sound like an escaped lunatic in a doomsday sandwich board sign, who is supposed to take anything you say seriously? How could it have any effect besides undermining whatever you're trying to support? That effect, and the strengthening of convictions held by lefties like me, who would naturally like to be as opposite of your raving inarticulate ass as possible? And besides all that, my blog had a pretty apolitical appearance at the time, so why was anon assuming I was this passionate Clinton shill? I mean, fuck him and his bigoted garbage, OF COURSE, but I couldn't figure out how he had targeted me personally for this treatment.

The point that I wish I had gotten then was, it didn't matter. It might have been the result of one of those things you hear about from time to time, about how supposedly a bunch of mean jerks from 4chan (or whatever the current iteration is) are going to conduct a "raid" on Tumblr, like they're going to seek and destroy liberal snowflakes and precious cinnamon rolls with their, uh...incredible verbal prowess I guess. Surely the point was just to get me all riled up so someone could say that they pwned me, although I don't know what the reward of this pwning was supposed to be besides the "made you look!" thrill of tricking me into talking to or about them. I'll never understand the perspective of the kind of person who thinks that you "win" something when someone blocks you online, as if blocking isn't just a way of saying "You are literally worthless." It's interesting how that line of troll thinking works, it seems to suggest something like, "Ah, you should have KNOWN that I was nothing but an insignificant piece of shit with nothing to say, but you treated me like I was worth talking to, so therefore I WIN!" I strongly suspect that all of troll culture (I mean, not LEGIT trolls who bait you with patently stupid decoy ideas, but these little garbage people who bait you with their real actual opinions) is predicated on an urge to masochism, that this kind of person is always a spineless perverted weakling who craves insults and punishment, who feels in their very bones that they deserve the worst, who is at all times secretly drooling to slurp on the delicious bootheel of Hillary Clinton, long after her rally balloons have been found deflated and dangling from the network of powerlines crisscrossing the Real America...

But that reminds me of another self-loathing lunatic of my acquaintance, my ex-boyfriend. Yes, really, but I swear to god this is going somewhere. He was an intelligent guy, a lit major who had graduated with honors from a reputable liberal arts school, an editor at a respected arts & culture publishing house who fancied himself a progressive thinker who stood up for the freedoms of others--and who, I slowly found out, used his enthusiasm for Obama and The Daily Show to mask the noxious brew of casual racism and virulent misogyny that made up his fuel for living. When we were dating, I thought that we had problems, and I thought dealing with problems was a normal part of adult relationships; I thought the opposite of constantly struggling for peace, honesty, and respect was "expecting life to be like a fairy tale", which I certainly did not want to be accused of. So I didn't get what was going on when he would choose some arbitrary trigger for an abusive episode, and I would try, and fail, to resolve whatever was bothering him. I bought in to the idea that we were both intelligent people with respect for one another's intelligence, and that it was possible for us to get at the heart of any trouble through calm and rational discussion. He often gave me plenty of breadcrumbs to follow, indicating that there were REASONS that he was angry with me, which led me to believe I could fix everything by clearing up misunderstandings, since I had never conspired to do anything to him but try to love him. (Although sometimes he wouldn't even tell me what I had supposedly done, intoning "You're a clever girl, you'll figure it out" in a sneering Joan Crawfordesque voice--I should have known then that he didn't need or even want a good reason to attack me) But, his debate style, if I can call it that, involved screaming, changing the subject, repeating whatever I said back to me in a "r*tard voice", impugning my character (or that of my family and friends) in ways that had nothing to do with the argument, and other tactics that ensured that his opportunity to hurt and terrorize me lasted for hours or days. I missed the fact that for him, the fight wasn't a resolvable interruption of our relationship, it was the entire point of the relationship.

The most brilliant thing he'd ever done--though I don't want to call it that, since this has more to do with base instincts than brains--was to use my intelligence against me. If I had placed more importance on my own feelings than I did on "being fair" and "making sense" of our conflicts, then I would have escaped before I had to develop this whole behavioral theory that I am delivering to you now. By producing "reasons" for his anger, he made me think there was a debate to be had, and that the person with the superior logic would win out. I was convinced that would be me, since I knew the Truth, and he was just confused by his inner demons (drugs and alcohol, his shitty friends who "made him" do bad things, his supposed trauma from the last relationship he deliberately destroyed, his inferior parents who made him look bad by being "visionless ant people", and whatever other excuses he surfaced whenever it benefited him to play the tragically injured good guy). What I know now is, all abuse is the same, and it doesn't need or want to justify itself. Its only aim is the free reign of violence. It has no interest in truth or justice of even the most deformed variety. Its goal is to give unfiltered vent to all forms of hatred. The fact that it disguises itself with a mask of rationality, made up of straw men, false equivalences, dubiously construed "facts" arranged into artificial patterns, and other distractingly logical-looking tactics, does not mean that what is inside operates on, or is vulnerable to, actual logic. It's all just id monster shit. Do not interact.

[disillusioned41]

In the United States, every season is campaign season. Four months after America last went to the polls, Democrats are still refining their autopsies of the 2020 race and already governing with an eye toward the 2022 midterms. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Republicans are trying to figure out just how firm Donald Trump’s grip on their party really is — and debating whether that grip should be stronger or weaker.

To gain some insight into these matters, Intelligencer turned to our favorite socialist proponent of ruthlessly poll-driven campaigning, David Shor. A veteran of the 2012 Obama campaign, Shor is currently head of data science at OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit. We spoke with him last week about how his analysis of the 2020 election has changed since November, what Democrats need to do to keep Congress after 2022, and why he thinks the Trump era was great for the Republican Party (in strictly electoral terms).

What are the most important things you’ve learned about the 2020 election between the last time we spoke and today?

What’s changed since November is that we now have individual-level vote-history data in a bunch of states. And we also have a lot more precinct-level data. And people have had more time to run surveys. So the picture has gotten clearer.

One high-level takeaway is that the 2020 electorate had a very similar partisan composition to the 2016 electorate. When the polls turned out to be wrong — and Trump turned out to be much stronger than they predicted — a lot of people concluded that turnout models must have been off: Trump must have inspired higher Republican turnout than expected. But that looks wrong. It really seems like the electorate was slightly more Democratic than it had been in 2016, largely due to demographic change (because there’s such a large partisan gap between younger and older voters, every four years the electorate gets something like 0.4 percent more Democratic just through generational churn). So Trump didn’t exceed expectations by inspiring higher-than-anticipated Republican turnout. He exceeded them mostly through persuasion. A lot of voters changed their minds between 2016 and 2020.

At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent. The jury is still out on Asian Americans. We’re waiting on data from California before we say anything. But there’s evidence that there was something like a 5 percent decline in Asian American support for Democrats, likely with a lot of variance among subgroups. There were really big declines in Vietnamese areas, for example. Anyway, one implication of these shifts is that education polarization went up and racial polarization went down.

In other words, a voter’s level of educational attainment — whether they had a college degree — became more predictive of which party they voted for in 2020 than it had been in 2016, while a voter’s racial identity became less predictive?

Yeah. White voters as a whole trended toward the Democratic Party, and nonwhite voters trended away from us. So we’re now somewhere between 2004 and 2008 in terms of racial polarization. Which is interesting. I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s GOP to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012. But that’s what happened.

Does the available data give us any insight into why? Do you have any sense what was behind the large rightward shift among Hispanic voters?

One important thing to know about the decline in Hispanic support for Democrats is that it was pretty broad. This isn’t just about Cubans in South Florida. It happened in New York and California and Arizona and Texas. Really, we saw large drops all over the country. But it was notably larger in some places than others. In the precinct-level data, one of the things that jumps out is that places where a lot of voters have Venezuelan or Colombian ancestry saw much larger swings to the GOP than basically anywhere else in the country. The Colombian and Venezuelan shifts were huge.

One of my favorite examples is Doral, which is a predominantly Venezuelan and Colombian neighborhood in South Florida. One precinct in that neighborhood went for Hillary Clinton by 40 points in 2016 and for Trump by ten points in 2020. One thing that makes Colombia and Venezuela different from much of Latin America is that socialism as a brand has a very specific, very high salience meaning in those countries. It’s associated with FARC paramilitaries in Colombia and the experience with President Maduro in Venezuela. So I think one natural inference is that the increased salience of socialism in 2020 — with the rise of AOC and the prominence of anti-socialist messaging from the GOP — had something to do with the shift among those groups.

As for the story with Hispanics overall, one thing that really comes out very clearly in survey data that we’ve done is that it really comes down to ideology. So when you look at self-reported ideology — just asking people, “Do you identify as liberal, moderate, or conservative” — you find that there aren’t very big racial divides. Roughly the same proportion of African American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative. But white voters are polarized on ideology, while nonwhite voters haven’t been. Something like 80 percent of white conservatives vote for Republicans. But historically, Democrats have won nonwhite conservatives, often by very large margins. What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.

And so this leads to a question of why. Why did nonwhite voters start sorting more by ideology? And that’s a hard thing to know. But my organization, and our partner organizations, have done extensive post-election surveys of 2020 voters. And we looked specifically at those voters who switched from supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald Trump in 2020 to see whether anything distinguishes this subgroup in terms of their policy opinions. What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

Are these problems with Democratic positioning or with “disinformation”? Obviously, Joe Biden didn’t campaign on police abolition and worker control of the means of production. So there was a disconnect between the reality of the party’s platform and how it was perceived. Closing that gap, through a “Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab,” appears to be a focus of Democrats’ postelection efforts to fix their problem with Hispanic voters. Does that make sense as a path forward?

I’d say this: The decline that we saw was very large. Nine percent or so nationwide, up to 14 or 15 percent in Florida. Roughly one in ten Hispanic voters switched their vote from Clinton to Trump. That is beyond the margin of what can plausibly be changed by investing more in Spanish media. And I don’t think a shift that large can be plausibly attributed to what was said in WhatsApp groups or not buying enough in YouTube ads. I think the problem is more fundamental.

Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party. There’s a narrative on the left that the Democrats’ growing reliance on college-educated whites is pulling the party to the right (Matt Karp had an essay on this recently). But I think that’s wrong. Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones. We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate. So as Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.

When you say that white liberals are to the left of the typical Black Democrat on racial issues, how much does that depend on the definition of a racial issue? For example, one policy fight that often pits the interests of white liberal Democrats against those of the Black working class is housing and school integration. There are a lot of highly educated, white, liberal areas — full of “Black Lives Matter” lawn signs — which nevertheless oppose affordable-housing projects or school-redistricting plans that would bring less wealthy, less white students to their kids’ classrooms. The white liberals who oppose efforts to end de facto segregation may know the enlightened answer to abstract questions about the nature of racial inequality, but I’m not sure that puts them to the left of nonwhite voters on racial issues, properly defined.

Yeah, no, absolutely. White liberals do give more progressive responses across a wide battery of traditional racial resentment questions like, “Do you believe that the reason why African Americans can’t get ahead is due to discrimination or due to other factors?” But I think it’s important to put “racial resentment” in quotes whenever you talk about it. I’m not claiming that white liberals are somehow less racist than people of color, to the extent that question even makes sense. And I do think if you asked about affirmative action and inclusionary zoning, rather than these more abstract questions that political scientists use for measuring racial resentment, you could find a different breakdown.

But I think the split on those abstract questions captures something real. In liberal circles, racism has been defined in highly ideological terms. And this theoretical perspective on what racism means and the nature of racial inequality have become a big part of the group identity of college-educated Democrats, white and nonwhite. But it’s not necessarily how most nonwhite, working-class people understand racism.

How do they differ?

I don’t think I can answer that comprehensively. But if you look at the concrete questions, white liberals are to the left of Hispanic Democrats, but also of Black Democrats, on defunding the police and those ideological questions about the source of racial inequity.

Regardless, even if a majority of nonwhite people agreed with liberals on all of these issues, the fundamental problem is that Democrats have been relying on the support of roughly 90 percent of Black voters and 70 percent of Hispanic voters. So if Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins. Because these issues are strongly correlated with ideology. And Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.

Don’t these ideological self-descriptions carry similar definitional problems as “racial resentment”? Most voters may not identify as liberals. But judging from opinion polls, most voters do reject the lion’s share of the conservative movement’s governing priorities. In Congress, a “conservative” is typically a lawmaker who supports tax cuts for the rich and funding cuts for Medicaid, while opposing a higher minimum wage and another round of stimulus checks. Those are all extremely unpopular positions.

Absolutely.

It seems important then to get clarity on what these ideological labels do and don’t mean. If taken at face value, the data looks pretty ominous for Democrats: They’ve built a coalition premised on overwhelming support from these nonwhite groups, but that support was rooted in historically contingent social conditions — not substantive agreement — and now those conditions are eroding, clearing the way for an emerging “conservative” majority. On the other hand, if you look at the polling of the biggest policy debates in Congress over the past eight years, you might conclude that there’s a natural liberal majority in this country and that the GOP is the party whose coalition is an “unnatural” agglomeration of groups held together by accidents of history.

I agree with everything you said. I do think that liberals sometimes take the ambiguities of ideology too far. A lot of progressives insist that ideological self-identification means nothing. And we know that isn’t true. One of the big patterns of the last 40 years is that ideological self-description has become increasingly correlated with partisanship and increasingly correlated to views on issues.

But there is still a large universe of policy questions — mostly economic but not exclusively — where a large majority of the public agrees with us. A $15 minimum wage polls above 60 percent; that couldn’t happen without a lot of “moderates” and “conservatives” supporting the policy. What I take from that is: Ideological polarization is a dead end. If we divide the electorate on self-described ideology, we lose — both because there are more conservatives than liberals and because conservatives are structurally overrepresented in the House, Senate, and Electoral College. So the way we get around that is by talking a lot about progressive goals that are not ideologically polarizing, goals that we share with self-described conservatives and moderates. Even among nonwhite voters, those tend to be economic issues. In test after test that we’ve done with Hispanic voters, talking about immigration commonly sparks backlash: Asking voters whether they lean toward Biden and Trump, and then emphasizing the Democratic position on immigration, often caused Biden’s share of support among Latino respondents to decline. Meanwhile, Democratic messaging about investing in schools and jobs tended to move Latino voters away from Trump.

Is that primarily a function of the fact that the marginal Hispanic voter — the one who’s least attached to the Democratic Party — is to the right of the typical Hispanic voter? Like, it isn’t the case that a majority of Hispanic voters respond negatively to immigration messaging, is it?

No. I mean, Hispanic voters are more liberal on immigration than white voters. But I think that, for one thing, the extent to which Hispanic voters have liberal views on immigration is exaggerated. If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support. Pew’s done a lot of polling on immigration reform, and if you ask things like, “Should we deport the undocumented population, should we give them a path to permanent residency, or should we give them a path to citizenship?” citizenship only gets a little over 50 percent support among Hispanic voters. So I think liberals really essentialize Hispanic voters and project views about immigration onto them that the data just doesn’t support.

Now, how we should campaign and what we should do once in office are different questions. Our immigration system is a humanitarian crisis, and we should do something about that. But the point of public communication should be to win votes. And the way that you do that is to not trigger ideological polarization.

What’s your (way too early) assessment of Democrats’ odds of retaining Congress after the midterm? What do they need to achieve, in statistical terms, to pull that off? And then, from a substantive point of view, are there things that they can do in office to make hitting those marks easier?

As a baseline, midterms are usually very bad for the party in power. In the past 70 years, the incumbent party has gained seats in the House and Senate maybe once or twice. The last one was in 2002. The regularity of how bad midterm environments are for the president’s party is one of the most striking findings in political science. Generally speaking, over the last 30 to 40 years, the party that controls the presidency gets about 47 percent of the vote nationwide. Add in the fact that the House already has a fairly substantial pro-Republican bias — the median House seat is something like three points to the right of the country overall — it means that in the base scenario, Democrats are headed for near-certain doom. If we replicate the GOP’s post-9/11, 2002 midterm performance, we have a chance. If we replicate the second-best presidential-party midterm from the past 40 years, we lose.

The good news is that there’s a strong case for thinking this time might be different. I’m not a macroeconomist, but it seems like Joe Biden might preside over a post-corona economic boom. Already, Biden’s approval rating is very strong. The best predictor of how a midterm is going to shake out is how popular the president is. So, for now, everything looks about as good as you could hope for.

But we have no margin for error. If we conduct ourselves the way we did after 2008, we’re definitely going to lose. And due to the way that our electoral system works, we really could be locked out of power for a very long time, just like we were after 2010. So that means the need for messaging discipline is stronger than ever. But keeping the national conversation focused around popular economic issues probably won’t be enough. Since the maps in the House of Representatives are so biased against us, if we don’t pass a redistricting reform, our chance of keeping the House is very low. And then the Senate is even more biased against us than the House. So, it’s also very important that we add as many states as we can. Currently, even if we have an exceptionally good midterm, the most likely outcome is that we lose one or two Senate seats. And then, going into 2024, we have something like seven or eight Democrats who are in states that are more Republican than the country overall. Basically, we have this small window right now to pass redistricting reform and create states. And if we don’t use this window, we will almost certainly lose control of the federal government and not be in a position to pass laws again potentially for a decade. In terms of putting numbers on things, I think that if we implemented D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood and passed redistricting reform, that would roughly triple our chance of holding the House in 2022 and roughly the same in the Senate. The fact that it’s possible to triple those odds is a testament to how bleak the baseline case is. So we need to pass those reforms and we need Biden to remain popular. If his approval rating is below 50 by the end of the year, we’re probably fucked.

Is there a tension between those two imperatives? In the past, I’ve heard you talk a lot about “thermostatic” public opinion — how voters tend to move right when Democrats are in power, and left when Republicans are in power, and generally display a bias toward the status quo and against policy change. Could adding multiple states to the Union, and changing the way that we go about allocating House representation — specifically in a manner that diminishes the influence of white, rural voters — spur thermostatic backlash? And if so, could maintaining Biden’s current approval, and implementing the reforms necessary for Democrats to stay competitive at the congressional level, present an irresolvable dilemma?

I can’t claim to know exactly what the electoral effects would be of doing these things. But all of the polling I’ve seen suggests that things like HR 1 and adding states are above water. They’re not as popular as a lot of economic issues, but they’re above 50 percent. Electoral backlash doesn’t typically come from doing things that poll at 53 or 54 percent. It comes from doing things that poll at 30 or 40 percent. And so I think that the downside of this stuff is low. I think the level of voter interest in procedural issues is low. If we lived in a world where voters punished politicians for playing procedural hardball, we would have a lot fewer Republicans in office.

And actually, in some ways, pursuing procedural reforms that don’t concern voters much — but which do get the other party all worked up — could be electorally beneficial. If you can get the other party to talk about something that voters don’t care about, that’s good. People don’t always think about media attention as a fixed quantity. But it is. To the extent that the coronavirus impacted the 2020 election, I think one positive political effect it had for Democrats was that whenever the media was talking about the coronavirus, they weren’t talking about Hunter Biden or immigration. And I think that kind of blocked Republicans from creating and inserting wedge issues. If Republicans decide to make 2022 into a referendum on independent redistricting, that will eat up space that could have otherwise gone to effective attacks. We should dare them to do it.

We talked a lot about the rightward drift of Hispanic voters in 2020. But the other big change was a leftward shift among college-educated whites. Understanding the cause of that shift seems pretty important. If these college-educated voters were primarily rejecting Donald Trump, Democrats might not be able to count on their support in 2022 and beyond.

Yeah, it’s a great question. Let’s start with numbers: In 2016, non-college-educated whites swung roughly 10 percent against the Democratic Party. And then, in 2018, roughly 30 percent of those Obama-Trump voters ended up supporting Democrats down ballot. In 2020, only 10 percent of Obama-Trump voters came home for Biden.

So I think what this shows: There is a long-term trend of increasing education polarization here and in every other country in the West. But the fact that education polarization declined significantly in 2018 — when Trump wasn’t on the ballot — and picked up again in 2020 suggests that Trump is personally responsible for a significant portion of America’s education polarization. I think that there’s a really strong case that this transition was specifically about Donald Trump.

A lot of people theorized that we first alienated Obama-Trump voters during the fight over comprehensive immigration reform and that their rightward movement was already apparent in 2014. But if you actually look at panel data, it seems really clear that these people didn’t start identifying as Republicans until Trump won the GOP nomination. I think there’s a very strong empirical argument that Donald Trump was the main driver of the polarization we’ve seen since 2016. He just personally embodies this large cultural divide between cosmopolitan college-educated voters and a large portion of non-college-educated voters. Those divides take a lot of different forms: attitudes toward race, attitudes toward gender, opinions on what kinds of things you’re allowed to say, or how you should conduct yourself. And you know, as Trump became the nominee, and as the media made politics the Donald Trump Show for the last four years, that led to increasing political polarization on attitudes toward Donald Trump specifically. I think the reason why we saw less education-based voting in 2018 is that Trump was a smaller part of the media environment than he had been in 2016 or would be in 2020.

Looking ahead to 2022, and just thinking about the next four years, the big question is how much is Donald Trump going to shape media coverage of the Republican Party or the Republican Party’s own branding? And I don’t know the answer to that question. If Trump fades out of the spotlight, I’d expect some level of education depolarization, particularly if Democrats show ideological discipline.

That speaks to a question I’ve been mulling for a while. During the 2016 campaign, Vox developed this concept of “the Trump Tax,” which was a measure of the electoral penalty that Republicans were paying for picking the most unpopular nominee in polling history. Basically, it took a “fundamentals” model of how one would expect a Republican presidential candidate to perform, given economic conditions and other background factors, and then measured how much lower Trump’s support was than that. And yet, while Trump remained historically unpopular in office, he also helped the GOP increase its structural advantages at every level of government. So I’ve long wondered: Was Donald Trump’s unpopularity with the general public more detrimental to the Republican Party than his gift for deepening education polarization was valuable?

So, in 2016, Hillary Clinton got 51.1 percent of the two-party vote. Obama got 52 percent in 2012. In just about any other country, retaining 51.1 percent support would have been enough to keep power. But in this country, between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.

Imagine Hillary Clinton had run against Marco Rubio in 2016. Rubio is a less toxic figure to the public as a whole, so let’s say he performed as a generic Republican would have been expected to, and Hillary Clinton’s share of the two-party vote fell to 49.6 percent. If she had maintained Obama’s coalition — if her 49.6 percent had the same ratio of college-to-non-college-educated voters as Obama had in 2012 — she would have won that election. And then, if you look at the implications that would have had down-ballot, especially in the Senate, Republicans would have been a lot worse off with a narrow majority coalition — that had a Romney-esque split between college and non-college voters — than they were with the Trump coalition.

So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.

The question is: Can they get all of the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts? And I don’t know the answer to that question. But when I look at the 2020 election, I see that we ran against the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president — and we ran literally the most popular figure in our party whose last name is not Obama — and we only narrowly won the Electoral College. If Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, then Donald Trump would have won reelection with just 48 percent of the two-party vote. We can’t control what Trump or Republicans do. But we can add states, we can ban partisan redistricting, and we can elevate issues that appeal to both college-educated liberals and a lot of working-class “conservatives.” If we don’t, things could get very bleak, very fast.

[canchewread]

Editor’s Note: after a sad and frustrating month, I’m back on the horse and hoping to resume regular writing again for roughly the next three and a half weeks before I program in a week off for the seasonal holidays.

In the time I was away, or rather writing only sporadically, I did have the occasion to power through roughly ten or so of the books in my Library, and as such I figured it might be worthwhile to cover some “book review” type posts in our regular “Quickshot Quotations” pieces for the next little while. Obviously the goal here is to produce shorter quotes and more focused reviews as opposed to the more traditional “lengthy quote plus review plus essay” format I typically write here on Can’t You Read. Although this is in no way ideal, the simple truth is that I read a lot more books than I could reasonably write a full-length essay about and as such this gives me a chance to cover a broader spectrum of the works in my Library over time.

Today’s post goes out to regular readers who have been teasing me on social media for refusing to review books I don’t like here on Can’t You Read; you’re in for a special treat because this edition of “Quickshot Quotations” finally features a book I’m unable to recommend without so many caveats as to call into question its value even for antifascist scholars - David Neiwert’s “Alt-America: the Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.”

In complete fairness, I should start by pointing out that I don’t think Alt-America is a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, and indeed there are some things about Neiwert’s magnum opus expose of American reactionary movements that cast a fresh light on the disastrous election of Donald Trump and the ongoing fallout from that event in our society.

Although Neiwert is hardly an engaging writer, his style is fairly accessible and comparable to the everyday journalism you’ll find in ostensibly “liberal” corporate media like say, The New Republic, or the US edition of The Guardian. Furthermore, the material presented in Alt-America is thoroughly researched and Neiwert’s two decades worth of tracking the reactionary right affords him some keen insights about seemingly divergent elements of the preexisting right wing revanchist movements that would coalesce around Downmarket Mussolini and improbably (or perhaps not so improbably) propel Trump to victory over Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. In particular, the author’s examination of the (recently resurgent) decades-old American militia movement is the type of far-reaching analysis that has been otherwise so lacking in the mainstream liberal conception of anti-fascism and the Trump moment.

Unfortunately however, it is precisely this “mainstream liberal conception of anti-fascism” that seemingly blinds Neiwert to the true nature of the problem and ultimately makes it impossible for me to recommend Alt-America to readers who are not already familiar with the class dynamics, market forces and crisis of confidence in our institutions, that is driving the rise of so-called “right wing populism.”

In Niewert’s telling of the tale behind the Klepto Kaiser’s ascendance to the Oval Office, the devil in the details is not “economic stagnation in the northern Midwest, but... a far-right racist movement had been growing since the early 90s, which both enabled Trump’s victory and has been legitimized by it.” Tracing a line from the reactionary American militia movements of the 1990′s, through the (largely Astroturfed) fusion of the “black helicopter” right and pro-banking conservatives under the auspices of the Tea Party and finally to the “basket full of deplorables” who form what is commonly known as “Trumpism”, the author paints a compelling picture of an irresponsible media driven by untested technology, a crass opportunistic Republican Party happy to trade in conspiracy theories for votes and good old fashioned white supremacy, working together to put Donald Trump over Clinton and into the White House.

There is even some merit in these arguments. After all, Neiwert is probably correct in defining Trump’s presidency as both a logical byproduct of and an accelerant for a preexisting, uniquely American brand of fascism. Furthermore, the author is hardly the only expert to argue that U.S. media played a crucial (and tragic) role in electing Downmarket Mussolini. Finally, while it may be absurd to say that all Trump supporters are white supremacists, it’s also utterly impossible to deny that none of them had a problem voting for one.

The problem of course is that Donald Trump didn’t magically draw a bunch of voting nazis out of the woodwork to overwhelm an innocent and unsuspecting Democratic Party at the ballot box. In fact, if you look at the raw numbers it’s pretty clear that Trump’s final share of the vote looks an awful lot like Mitt Romney’s doomed 2012 run against incumbent Democrat president Barack Obama, with a moderate increase for overall population growth in the United States. By contrast, Hillary Clinton (who still won the popular vote) finished with slightly fewer votes than Obama did in 2012 - which, when you factor in the same population growth that put Trump above Romney, clearly indicates that the problem wasn’t fascists coming out to vote, but some combination of Democratic Party voters staying home and the American Electoral College system.

About Clinton’s inability to turn out voters and disastrous campaign, Neiwert has little to say; choosing to focus on the Alt-Right’s ability to weaponize social media through conspiracy theories instead of attempting to square the circle found in the argument that Midwestern racism prevented registered Democrats who voted for Obama, from casting a ballot in favor of a 69 year old white multi-millionaire whose husband had already been elected president, twice. Nor does the author have much to offer on the subject of the devastation wrought by neofeudalism in the very states Clinton lost due to low turnout, or the profound distrust American society has developed in its mainstream media, or the Democratic Party’s wholesale abandonment of the labor class in favor of the numerically smaller “professional managerial class” that now dominates most of the party’s rank and file concerns.

In other words, while Neiwert has a lot to offer on the subject of how Republican voters could easily reconcile themselves with an unhinged fascist like Trump, he has very little to offer (besides platitudes about “talking to Trump voters more”) on the subject of how the liberal mainstream consensus has contributed to their own demise by alienating (presumably) non-fascist, Democrat voters. For all of its positive qualities, Alt America never quite gets down to accepting that healthy societies don’t elect fascists and that the crumbling edifice of our openly corrupt institutions had as much to do with the election of a con artist like Trump, as America’s longstanding love affair with conspiracy theories and white supremacy. In the end you’re left with a book that tries to explain American fascism without discussing class tensions and in doing so, provides an excellent examination of the “what” but not the “why” behind the political ascendance of the reactionary US right and their chosen avatar, Donald Trump.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

. Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

[kelleyish]

Happy Wednesday Tumblr. Let’s do some bullets today

Yesterday was Super Tuesday for the primaries, in which Texas participates. I voted early last week. I didn’t really have strong feelings about any particular person, as I plan to vote for whoever gets the nomination for Democrat candidate in November. I ended up going with Warren, and she didn’t do well at all, something like 1% of the vote. I voted for Sanders in the primary four years ago, and then of course voted for Hillary that November. This time I just wasn’t super hype about Sanders for whatever reason, so I decided to vote with my vagina.

(Not literally, that’d be pretty unsanitary) 

I tend to do that in general, and vote for women wherever possible in the local elections. 

Today it looks like Biden just squeaked out the win here in Texas. I’m not super thrilled with Biden either, and he’s got some problematic shit in his record, but you best believe if he gets the nom I’ll be voting for him over the pussygrabbing cheeto.

Yesterday I had my first official “physical” from a general practitioner, mainly so I could get him to refill my heartburn medication so I can get it for free with my insurance instead of having to pay money for the over the counter version. 

I used to have yearly exams my gyno of course, although now that I’m not being held hostage needing birth control refills I haven’t been to see her in three or four years. I know I should, but it’s not like I’m in any danger of STDs at the moment and I’ve never tested positive for HPV, so I’ve just been letting it slide. 

Anyway, there wasn’t a whole lot to the physical. He listed to my heart and arteries in my neck, which in retrospect did not necessitate me taking off my bra. I had a paper gown deal but it’s not like he gave me a breast exam so I’m not sure why that was necessary.

So the nurse said undress from the waist up, and then she made a comment about putting my shoes under the chair, I guess so the doc wouldn’t trip on them when he came in?

She left the room and I was like, if I have to undress from the waist up, why do I have to take off my shoes? So I opened the door again and asked her just that, and she was like I think he wants to look at the bottom of your feet?

He did not look at my feet

He also looked in my ears, felt my neck a bunch, and went over my blood test results. Those were pretty good for my age and signifiant oveweightness. My blood sugar was perfect at 84, so I’m still avoiding diabetes for now, yay! My cholesterol was 208, which is just over the recommended level of 200. The good and bad ratios could use a little work, but my triglycerides were fantastic, which is apparently a side effect of low carb eating.

He didn’t mention my blood pressure reading, but I have noticed a general trend that I’m usually in the 140s over upper 80s these days. I used to have excellent blood pressure but I guess weight and age must be starting to catch up. I’m hoping I can get that down lower with more weight loss, especially now that I may have blood vessel weakness in my DNA.

So I told myself I was going to jump back into super healthy living but I didn’t go to the gym like I’d planned and I just ate a Starbucks chocolate croissant. I don’t know what it’s going to take to jumpstart my motivation again. 

Maybe I need to ask out another dude who is inappropriately too hot and young for me, spend a week working out like crazy, and then when he doesn’t call I’ll just go ahead and feel occasional stabs of embarrassment every few days for the rest of my goddamn life.

Here’s a picture of me from last night. The light was kind of interesting outside, and I’d put on a little makeup that day, so it was prime selfie time, apparently. 

I’m wearing an apron because I was getting ready to make dinner. 

This is outside the front door of my parents house. Inside the house on the wall behind me you can see the remnants of some of our old photography business. We had a huge wall covered with large framed bridal and engagement portraits and pictures form weddings. 

A couple years ago I started helping my dad rearrange the wall. We took down a lot of the bridals but left up a few that we liked the most. Yeah, they’re pictures of virtual strangers but it’s also our art, too. 

It also features a picture of me and Chip from our wedding, and the bridals we did for my little sister. This is about half the wall, and the rest is blank because we never got around to filling up the other half. It’s on the todo list.

We had a client once come in for photography services, and made a comment about how many daughters my dad must have. Even though he was there to procure photography services from us, he somehow thought all the pictures on the wall of brides must be family, otherwise why would they be on the wall of our house?

That shirt is my current favorite shirt. It’s green and the pattern on it is very slimming. At least i think it is.

Here’s what I made for dinner last night. https://recipechampions.com/recipe/keto-bacon-cheeseburger-burrito/ 

It was pretty good, but my goodness was it fatty and high calorie. It kept me full the rest of the night, I will say that. You have to work fast with the cheese tortilla, it gets hard really quick and makes it hard to fold the burrito.

The underwire came poking out the end of one of the channels in my bra. It took me several weeks to get around to fixing it. I sewed it up finally a couple days ago, and today it is poking through again.

I’ve done a couple transcription jobs for cooking competition shows lately. Specifically it’s these talking head interviews that they later splice bits into the footage of them actually doing the cooking and whatnot. I’m not sure why they are bothering to do a transcript of raw footage like this, when only a fraction of it will make it into the final cut of the program. It seems like it would be more cost effective to wait until the episode is finished and then have a caption person do the whole thing. Who knows, maybe that’s not even the purpose of these. I’ll take their money either way, I guess.

Because of the way they splice the footage in they want the talking heads to be present tense, and people have a really hard time with this sometimes. This is taking place after the competition is over, so they’re saying things like “I went over and grabbed the flour and started making my crepe batter,” and so the director has to keep stopping them and making them say, “I walk over and get the flour and start making my batter.”

The end. Time to leave Starbucks now.

[vnderoos]

3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 21, 22, 42, 51 :)

you asked so many, aw, i feel really excited to answer these!!

also i am so sorry to everyone who has to scroll past this, because i have no clue how to do the keep reading thing on mobile.

3. what is your favorite thing to write?

i like to write one-shots the absolute most! when i write i tend to get super distracted or unmotivated after a while, so i usually stick to one-parters. sometimes if i want to write something longer, i do go a bit excessive with the word count but i kind of like that. i do love a good series, though. i have one in mind but who knows if i’ll ever get around to it.

4. fluff or angst?

fluff, definitely. i’m a sucker for cheesy, sweet, romantic, goofball fics, they just warm my little heart.

5. how would you describe your style?

if i had to choose one word, i think it would be descriptive? i’m more detail-oriented than anything so i try to focus on the look of things, the feelings, the gestures, just the whole aesthetic of it. i feel like i can write stronger descriptions than dialogue.

7. do you listen to music to help you write?

it depends! i have my go-to playlist. it’s mostly instrumental because when it’s words, i tend to focus on the singing instead of my writing, but it’s just a bit of background noise to help me set the tone. if i’m really concentrating though, i can’t listen to music because it throws off my rhythm.

8. what’s the biggest “challenge” for you as a writer?

i think the biggest challenge for me is moving the plot along without having to cram in a bunch of boring, filler scenes. like i said earlier, i really like to go all out for detail, so setting the scenery is fine, but advancing the plotline and getting the story where i need it to go is difficult for me. i also find it hard to write scenes with more than two characters, but i’m working on that!

10. can you give us a sneak peek on your current wip?

yes, but i won’t give you ANY context!

“y/n moved away from peter, but once she found a cozy home for their present, she retreated back to his side. he accepted her return graciously, his hand finding its place on the small of her back once more, and they started towards the usher. "for some reason, i’ve got a feeling that tonight's gonna end badly," he voiced.

“it looks like it’s too late to back out now,” she pointed out, taking in the sight of all the neatly-placed chairs and the rolled-out aisle. there was a giant, wooden pergola stretched over the seating area, with thousands of fairy lights spiraled around the rafters, and plenty of people were already seated, all catching up with each other or taking about the couple-to-be no doubt. “but if we’re gonna crash and burn, we might as well stay for cake,” she continued.”

12. what’s your favorite thing that you ever wrote?

if we’re talking imagines, i’d have to say either 2:00 am (peter parker) or fight club (isaac lahey).

they are wildly different stories but i love them.

21. what’s your favorite au trope?

i love this question, dear god. it’s a tie between two. i really love the college!au where one of the main characters is a sports player. it just reminds me of she’s the man or the cinderella story with hillary duff and i adore that. i also really love the neighbor!au where the characters live in neighboring apartments and they have sweet little interactions, i’m getting all mushy just thinking of them. these are borderline cliché but i love them all the same haha

22. a fanfiction cliché you can’t help but love?

enemies to lovers, oh my GOD. that is my all time favorite cliché, it’s just so timeless. you really can’t go wrong. or the fake-dating. or when they go someplace and there’s only one bed.

has anyone else seen that meme with the boy playing careless whisper on the saxophone and the caption is something like “when you’re reading a fanfic and the characters get to a hotel, but there’s only one room left and it only has one bed”? absolutely kills me.

42. what is your weakness as a writer?

i want to put in too much detail. i want to paint the picture so clearly that a lot of times i can make things confusing or not leave anything up to the imagination and it defeats the purpose. i also am not the best with dialogue, because i’m not good with conversations in general, so it translates into my writing. i think that’s part of the reason why i try to be so descriptive, is because i’m trying to compensate in a way.

51. least favorite trope?

i think my least favorite trope would have to be when character a only realizes that they love character b when b’s not in their life anymore. i still love this trope, of course, because i love all the tropes, but this one isn’t on the top of my list for sure.

thank you so much for asking all of these, anon, i enjoyed this!! i’m very happy someone actually sent stuff. :)

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

May 16, 2021

My weekly rundown of things I am up to. Topics include density and mass transit, telecommunications and travel, saving San Francisco, and Bill Clinton.

Density and Mass Transit

A basic question: what level of population density is required for mass transit to be viable? Of course, there are many factors other than density that come into play, but density is a good starting point.

This 1994 estimate by Holtzclaw is frequently cited. He finds that municipal buses are economically viable is there are at least 30 people per hectare in the vicinity of the bus line. The thresholds are 35 pa/ha for light rail and 50 pa/ha for metro service. There are quite a few other studies, like this one from the Kinder Institute, Guerra and Cervero, the Twin Cities Metro Council, and a few others. They all give roughly the same results, though some of them, like the Twin Cities on BRT, get close to 100 pa/ha.

By way of comparison, the average population-weighted density in the US (weighting by population is a mathematical operation that basically refers to what most people see, rather than the naive population/area calculation) is about 21 pa/ha, and if single family family homes are built with the median lot size for the US, the overall density is about 14 pa/ha.

The above estimates are not hard and fast figures, but some rules of thumb that are given for transit viability. A lot depends on the precise definition of “viability”, which I am keeping vague for now, and at what range the given population density figures should hold (typically 1/4 miles to a full mile).

But the bottom line is that most of the US is not dense enough for mass transit to be a good investment. Not only are density figures too low, but it is my understanding that the long-term trend has been downward. Either urban populations would have to grow considerably, and/or cities would have to contract, to change the picture. Demographic trends make the former look especially unlikely. Another hope for mass transit is that reforms in the construction process could lower costs and thus the density threshold for viability, which isn’t too outlandish given that construction costs in the US tend to be much higher than the rest of the world.

Transit advocates often attack the problem from the opposite direction. They argue that building transit will cause denser development to occur, so it makes sense to build now even where thresholds are not met. It sounds good in theory, but transit in and of itself doesn’t appear to raise density.

Do telecommunications lead to more travel?

A good question. One could make plausible arguments either way, and indeed there are results that show that telecommunications could be a substitute for travel. But on balance they are complements, meaning that as IT technology advances, we are likely to travel more, not less, as a result. Telecommuting in particular does tend to reduce travel, even though there is a rebound in non-work travel, it is not enough to make up for the decrease in work travel. But for IT in general, more travel is to be expected.

This general topic has been well studied, but I don’t think is as well known among urbanists as it should be. For a reader on the subject, I would recommend this 2009 paper by Patricia Mokhtarian. It is a good survey of how IT and travel relate to each other, with some coverage of more general subjects of the rebound effect. Both theoretical results and on-the-ground facts of the past 12 years have only reinforced the general conclusions.

I don’t see anything on the horizon that is likely to change this basic fact.

Saving San Francisco

The always-good Palladium Magazine has a new article, this one by Lea Degen, on the imperative of building a political movement to solve San Francisco’s problems and how to do so. She argues that SF, as a capitol of the US tech industry, is an important test case of national significance. There is a lot of interest here worth reading. She focuses on two problems in particular: the high cost of living and high crime.

She makes reference to Alexei Yurchak’s concept of hypernormalization in how the city’s problems are perceived, in that is is clear to almost all observers that there are problems, but no one can conceive of a workable alternative. The term was coined to describe the dysfunction of the Brezhnev Era of the Soviet Union and is also the name and theme of a recent Adam Curtis film.

When I lived in San Francisco from 2016-18, I had gotten involved with the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement, whose primary goal is to deregulate zoning rules and improve housing affordability, hoping that it could be the kind of reform movement that Lea advocates. For a variety of reasons, it can’t, and now the YIMBY movement does some marginal good but acts as one of a great many other Democratic interest groups in the Bay Area, a crowded space if there ever was one.

In the 1960s and 70s, there was CHECC (CHoose an Effective City Council) in Seattle. That movement was primarily a youth-driven movement, formed from an alliance of reform-minded Democrats and Republicans to turn out long-time, ineffective incumbents in city hall. It was largely successful. It would be hard to replicate the bipartisan nature of the movement in today’s much more polarized environment. Indeed, in San Francisco and elsewhere, fear of the other party is one of the tricks incumbents use to stay in power. But I do think that an effective reformist movement could not be anchored in Democratic politics, or else it would fall into the same culture war gutters as most other movements do.

It is tempting to see the solution as packing up and leaving. Moving to Austin or Miami seems to be the trendy thing now. From an individual level, I can’t argue with the logic here. I left too, because I was fed up and after getting married had no reason to stay. But the city itself and its problems are not going to go away.

Bill Clinton

I got a book on Bill Clinton recently entitled Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President by Patrick Maney.

The book is not part of the University Press of Kansas’s Presidents series, though it is by the same publisher and seems to be formatted the same way. I’ve read two chapters so far: the first on Clinton’s pre-1992 life, and the second on the cabinet, staff, and work style. It looks like the next seven chapters are about events of the administration, followed by an epilogue on the post-presidency. I’m also a bit confused because the previous link has a date of April 2021, while the book itself is copyrighted 2016.

Anyway, the series is quite good, so I am excited to get a book that is at least closely related to it. There are a bunch of things to say so far, but I’ll keep comments limited.

Shortly before Clinton became head of the Democratic Leadership Council, they did a post-mortem of the 1980, 1984, and 1988 elections. They found three myths that contributed to Democratic failures during that time: the myth of liberal fundamentalism (that victory follows adherence to party orthodoxy), the myth of mobilization (that victory is a matter of getting nonvoters to vote, rather than finding a more appealing message), and the myth of the Congressional bastion (that strength in Congress and other down-ticket races means that the message is sound). The latter point is particular prescient in light of the 1994 midterms.

The DLC may be gone, but the contest between moderates and progressives continues. After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, there was again some hand-wringing among Democrats about whether they are out of touch. That lasted for about three days before the pussy hats came out. It is not clear which faction is coming out ahead in the Biden administration, but clearly the progressives have momentum now.

I’m enjoying the book and will probably say much more about it later, especially when I’m done. George W. Bush will be available later this year too.

[clintonrodhamhillary]

Happy New Year!

🎈🎉🎈🎉🎈

Thanks to all my followers for being here! It’s been great to be part of this fandom and I think we all agree that every picture, gif, video, audio, quote, discussion, fic, helped us cope with the loss and get through it. I love being a part of it and even though I haven’t been around much lately opening Tumblr and seeing a lot of Hillary always makes me happy. I wish I would have had more time these past weeks and months but life has been busy as I’ve been taking my PhD to the finish line and there’s only so much hours in a day to do things. I neglected the appearance master list but I’m going to get on that soon and finish adding all her November and December appearances so we got everything in one place. Anyway, thanks for all the lovely posts and serious and fun/silly discussions. Wish I could have participated more, especially lately.

I guess it’s been a weird year, things could have been so much different with Hillary in the White House. Part of me feels relieved for her because of all the time she can spend with Bill, Chelsea, the grandkids, her friends, and the rest of her family; also her zero fucks left attitude has been awesome to see. However, as we all do, I also feel like this was her time and she was supposed to win. She was supposed to be the first female president; it’s her who deserved it, and her who still deserves it. Whatever will happen in 2020, I think for many of us it will be a bitter feeling if another woman wins the presidency and I don’t really want to think about that yet. I hope people will remember that it was Hillary who paved the way.

Reflecting back on the year, I also realized that besides the huge disappointment and the horrible inauguration, things ended up so much better than we expected in the end. The book came out and I know it helped me personally deal with it all better. All the appearances and a happy and healthy looking Hillary, who yes will still hurt (and will probably never stop hurting) really helped as well. A whole bunch of us got to see her in some way of another with all the appearances which has been great too. On that note, thanks for joining me in seeing her in London @gefiltefishwhereareweonthis and @vodkastinger!! Another thing which has been awesome to see is the political awakening of so many, especially women, Hillary’s excitement about that says so much about who she is and what she cares about and stands for. Sometimes I wonder if the same would have happened if she hadn’t lost, maybe that’s the one purpose this presidency will have: shaking people up and waking them up. It doesn’t help with the feeling that it should have been her but it is also a good thing which makes it a little better.

Anyway, this got way longer than I meant it to be!

Happy New Year to everyone! Hope 2018 will bring lots of good things for all of you! Onward!

[servinglemonade]

A.D. Revealed: My Thoughts On The PLL Finale

BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FROM THE PRETTY LITTLE LIARS SERIES FINALE

No more secrets, no more lies, no more creepy texts. Pretty Little Liars is officially over. I thought the finale was far from perfect, but they were a bunch of parts that I did enjoy. Here are my thoughts on the PLL series finale. 

The Beginning

What was this?! Lucas randomly tap dancing and Jenna riding a horse?! It was so weird. I just didn’t get the relevance of it.

The Intro

Sad times seeing it for the last time. But I loved that the coffin was open this time and they all did the ‘shh’! 

1-year time-jump

What was the point of this time jump? So when the game ended the girls just went on with their lives not knowing who tortured them? 

Emison babies

Okay, so Emily’s the mother of these babies right? Then why are they blond and white? Also, twins. How many twins does this show need? 

Rosewood High

Ali was discussing Ezra’s book in class, omg. I thought that was a bit weird. Also, why are we waisting time on this new clique Addison has created. They should be giving us some answers. On a side note, Jenna is a teacher, wow. Do have to give her some points for that remark she gave Addison about smelling a bitch, that was a good one!

The Lost Woods Resort

What’s up with this show making creepy places into nice hotels? Anyway, this was so boring. Just waisted time. Although when ‘A.D.’ turned around and you saw Melissa, I knew that was a mask. No way they would reveal it so early in the episode and in this way. When the mask was taken off and it revealed Mona I just knew something was up. I thought that she might be working with A.D. or something. Why she was exactly doing it is still not very clear to me. Did she just want to know who it was to help the girls? If you know please share it with me. What I did like about this part was seeing everyone together at the table and around the campfire!

Spencer visits Mary

I thought this was fishy. Spencer just mentioned she and her mom were getting along really good, why would she be visiting Mary in jail? Or maybe it wasn’t Spencer that you just saw?! (wink, wink)

Rehearsal Dinner from Ezra & Aria

First, why are the girls STILL treating Mona like crap? Honestly, I felt so bad for her. Secondly, THE MOMS! This was one of the best parts of the finale to be honest. They were so drunk. What I really hated was that they didn’t say how they got out of the basement. That was a let down. I did love how drunk they were at the end that Spencer had to drive them home. (also Ella calling shotgun was hillarious)

Mona Knocking Spencer Out

THIS WAS ICONIC! She slapped her so hard. Also how she said: “deja vu, bitch!” I loved that! It was exactly how Mona slapped Spencer when she figured she was A back in season 2. Janel Parrish is one of the best actresses in this show!

A.D. is revealed

The moment we were all waiting for. I love how they revealed A.D. Once it ‘looked’ like Spencer was looking in a mirror, I just knew that it wasn’t a mirror and she really does have a twin. It was so good! So Spencer has a twin, Alex Drake, and she’s A.D. Although I wasn’t shocked, because I just saw it coming. But it was a very good reveal!

The Backstory of A.D.

Once I heard that British accent, I knew that she had to be connected to Wren somehow. Then we find out that Wren just randomly meets her in a bar? Then Wren makes sure Cece/Charlotte meets Spencer’s twin, Alex Drake. They have a very strong bond together and Charlotte tells Alex that Spencer is a toxic person. So when Charlotte was killed, Alex needed to know who did it. She wanted to avenge Charlotte’s dead which is why she created the game. To figure out who did it (I have no idea what the puzzle pieces and the picture had to do with all of this). But when the game ended Alex wanted Spencer’s life, she wanted everything she had, including her friends and Toby. I honestly thought this was such a cliché. Like they couldn’t have thought of a better reason? 

We also see all the times Alex was pretending to be Spencer, including the infamous airport scene. Alex was also the one who kissed Toby and hooked up with him twice. This is where I start getting confused. Toby has been with Spencer for so many years and he didn’t realise it wasn’t Spencer?! How did the liars who have known each other for so long not realise it wasn’t their bff?! 

What was the point of impregnating Alison with Emily’s eggs? What did Alex gain from that? Also, Wren’s the dad? Was he aware of this? Was he working with Alex? Did he give his sperm to Alex even when he didn’t want to? I have so many questions.

Wren shoots A.D.

We all saw Wren with a gun in the promo. I felt let down by this, I really thought he was going to kill someone. Turns out Alex really wanted to be Spencer so she made Wren shoot her in the same spot Spencer was shot, so they’d look exactly alike. How crazy is that?

Not as crazy as what we found out next. Wren is dead. Alex killed him and turned his ashes into..... A DIAMOND. Wren is now a diamond. I have no words #WrenDeservedBetter

Mary and Spencer have lunch

Mary shares some information with Spencer while eating lunch together. Of course, Spencer is still locked up, but that’s not the point. 

So we learn that Mary SOLD Alex when she was born. Alex was adopted by a wealthy British family, but after a few years, she was put into a orphanage.

How is it possible that Mary never told Spencer that she has a twin sister. Even if Mary didn’t know where she was or even alive, that’s something you should mention. 

Ezra is missing?!

So the girls were being all dramatic thinking Ezra doesn’t want to marry Aria anymore. Come on y’all. After everything you have been through, you really don’t think something else happened? Seriously Ezra saying he is not coming to his own wedding through text is not believable. He has a masters in American Literature. He probably would have written Aria a letter on that typewriter of his.

So then we see Ezra is locked up in, what he called it, a DIY dungeon. So where Alex is keeping Spencer as well. I liked the DIY dungeon line, it was better that the fact that he can handle a dead body in a trunk because he has a Masters degree in American Literature. #OhEzra

The Horse and Jenna

So after an hour of practically no sensation, besides the A.D. reveal, and 5 minutes of actual answers. Alex goes to the stables. Why? No idea. But the horse she is with is the same horse from the beginning of the episode. The horse seemed comfortable around Spencer. So when Alex walks towards it, the horse goes crazy. Toby sees it and looks confused, just like me this entire finale.

Then Jenna walks to what she thinks is Spencer. Suddenly Jenna asks ‘Spencer’ if she is wearing a new perfume, she replies by saying she smells like horses, because of the stables. But Jenna doesn’t buy it and calls Toby to tell him that Spencer isn’t Spencer. 

So........ Jenna (of all people) and a HORSE figure out that Spencer isn’t Spencer before her long-time (ex) boyfriend, her parents and HER BEST FRIENDS?! What is this ridiculousness?

The Liars Figure It Out

So while the liars are still trying to figure out what happend to Ezra (really?), Toby comes in. He hands Aria the book that Spencer gave him before he left Rosewood with Yvonne and he says: “Look, there are no notes in this book. Spencer always made notes in this.” Everyone looks confused, including me. He then adds that it was weird that Spencer kissed him when he left as well. Toby then immediately comes to the conclusion that Spencer must have a twin. The liars come to the same conclusion and they go to save Spencer.

So you’re telling me that they figured out that Spencer has a twin and that she is A.D. in like 1 minute. They didn’t even know their dead friend was alive for like 2/3 years. What is this mess?

Toby To The Rescue

So then the Liars, Caleb, Toby and Mona find Spencer, Alex and Ezra. So of course, the classic who is who? For Toby to figure out who really is Spencer he asked a question about her favorite poem in the book she gave him. Although the real Spencer didn’t even know that he had that book, because it was Alex who gave it to Toby, Spencer knew the answer. 

Then Mona called the cops (obviously) and Alex was arrested. 

I just felt it was so rushed, everything was so last-minute.

Ezria Wedding

When that phone went off, I was like, no please not a text message from B please. Turns out it was just I. Marlene King, the creator of the show. I did like that cameo.

Final Scene with the Liars

I loved this. It was perfect. Hanna is happily married to Caleb and they are expecting a baby! Spencer and Toby are FINALLY together again #bless. Emily and Ali are getting married. And Aria well, she is happy I guess. #NoEzriaForMe. 

Ali’s line was so emotional. I was feeling all the feels.

Queen Mona is the winner of the game, this episode and the entire show

So we see Mona in Paris selling dolls?! Genius! Then her boyfriend (I assumed after that kiss) walks in and I realized that he looked a lot like the cop that arrested Alex and Mary. She then walks in a corridor which gave me major Dollhouse vibes and I wasn’t far off. Because Mona is keeping Mary and Alex as her own dolls! She beat A.D. in the most Mona way possible and I’m so here for it! 

The Last Scene

As soon as I heard that thunder I was like: “Oh no, Addison is probably missing.” And yes, she was. It was exactly like the pilot and I was not here for this. They should not have done that.

That was it, y’all. That was the PLL series finale. It was far from perfect, but there were still parts I enjoyed.

In my opinion, the whole A.D. reveal would have been better if Alex had been around from the beginning. If they (the writers) made her a part of the night that Ali disappeared and was the one that was controlling Mona and CeCe as A, that she was the mastermind behind everything, I would have loved that and considered that the perfect ending. They had the time to it to be honest. It was a 2 hour finale after all. They just wasted a lot of time on stuff that I wasn’t truly interested in. I wanted to see more of the mystery, because that is what made me love PLL so much. But you can’t please everybody. 

A special shout-out to Troian Bellisario, Janel Parrish and Sasha Pieterse who have been the best actresses in this show. Especially Troian in this finale, she deserves all the awards! 

Last but least I just want to say thank you to everyone who has been involved in this show for an amazing 7 year journey! I will consider this show one of my favorites forever. 

Goodbye Rosewood, it’s been one hell of a ride.

XO

Yenai

[blueraith]

I was watching some Wonder Woman Reviews a While Ago

And something stuck with me. This was after the movie had just come out, and I was still riding that high. I wanted to see if everyone else thought WW was as awesome as I did.

They did. Which they were right to because anyone who can’t agree that, objectively, WW is a great movie needs to have their eye balls audited by the Good Taste Committee (TM).

But there was one review I watched that left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve waited a long time to rant about this because I didn’t want to be in a frothing rage over the issue. There’s this Youtube channel, and I don’t have the desire nor the motivation to go looking for them again, whose main thing is movie reviews. They’re quite popular, so I imagine looking them up wouldn’t be hard. I just don’t want to contribute to their view count. Anyway, they’re two dudes, both white, in their thirties. One’s a bit on the heavier side, shaved haircut and he talks in this monotone, deadpan voice as he delivers quips and the like. I can’t remember what the other guy looks like. Meh, perhaps my vague description isn’t enough to look them up. Oh well.

Anyway, I remember that they enjoyed the movie too. That’s not the problem. My problem with their video was the huge joke they made out of women who enjoy the fact that there’s finally a female superhero on the big screen that girls and women can look to.

Oh, they had a field day with that. As if the very concept was utterly ridiculous and pathetic. I seem to remember them specifically stating that anyone who thought of Wonder Woman like that, and was over the age of seven, was pathetic. And then they proceeded to list a bunch of real life women who are amazing in their own right for us to really look up to. Names like Hillary Clinton and Harriet Tubman were dropped.

And they completely missed the point. I despise this argument. It’s almost always led by men who are so completely and utterly threatened by the fact that women have finally gotten strong, fictional characters for them to look up to. Because, these characters aren’t real, right? Why choose them to be their heroes when you have so many real life examples to choose from????

My god, can you be any more tone deaf and stupid?

Because who the fuck said we had to choose one or the other? Why can’t we have both real life heroes and fictional ones? Can Hillary Clinton block bullets with her fucking arm bracers? No? I didn’t think so.

Because it’s a fantasy. Boys and men have an innumerable amount of choice they can pick from when it comes to this. Who is the female equivalent of Superman? Who shares the same media staying power and notoriety? Oh, that’s right, there isn’t a single fucking one. Repeat this with Batman, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, and all the other fucking male superheroes that are out there. And yeah, there are female versions of these heroes, but not a single of of them have the same kind of recognition or note that their male counterparts do.

Wonder Woman does not suffer from this phenomenon. She is the hero. She’s the definitive version.

The same could have been said about Star Wars before Rey. The movies had not a single female Jedi in them that were notable. Most of the female Jedi were background, cameo appearances, that, if you didn’t know the lore, you had no idea who the fuck they were. And guys were in a shit fit over Rey too.

‘Why does everything have to have a girl in it now?’

I hate this question. It’s asked by men who have absolutely no self-awareness. I love video games. I grew up with Halo and Star Wars and a ton of RPGs. Those were my favorites. The RPGs. Because almost all of them gave you the option to play as a woman. So many games I grew up with had men in the starring role. And I always wondered, ‘Why does everything have to have men in it?’

Because that’s the reality. Everything had men in it. At least in the stuff that I enjoyed. If it wasn’t specifically marketed towards women themselves, a white man was going to be the star. Because, apparently, men can’t stand to see anything other than that leading their stories. And it’s ridiculous. That is what’s pathetic. I’ve seen guys actually argue that they can’t ‘connect’ or ‘relate’ to a woman character if they are forced to play as her in a video game. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I’ve been forced to relate to male characters for at least ten years before this boom of female driven stories in games has come to light. It’s so unabashedly sexist that it boggles the mind. It’s a fucking double standard that they refuse to see, address, or admit is even happening.

So to see these two reviewers go on and on for at least three minutes about how women are silly to see Wonder Woman as a personal hero, it just makes me pissed, to be honest. It pisses me off that these guys can unflinchingly write this joke, undoubtedly rehearse it, sit down and perform it for the camera, edit the video, and then Google a bunch of pictures of real life women to edit into this video on top of that, and then release it on their channel; as if, as if, they each don’t have both real life heroes or a favorite superhero to look up to. It’s like they were personally offended that women now have the same experiences that they do on a daily basis.

An off hand comment is just that. You can’t sit there and deliberately make a rehearsed joke on camera for several minutes, and not force me to think you’re misogynistic assholes. Because god, I hate guys who act like women even getting this, the first successful female superhero movie, and enjoying it, have stolen something from them. That’s it, fire Batman. Wonder Woman has taken his place. We can’t have both. That would be entirely too logical, reasonable, and sane to do. Gotta have one or the other.

Jesus. And you know what? Each of the women they listed as ‘real’ heroes? They had to fight and claw their way to their respective fame. Because men are almost always first. Women are almost always fighting for the same recognition and fame that men enjoy. Hillary Clinton probably wouldn’t be where she is today if Bill hadn’t been president first. Harriet Tubman’s fame wouldn’t exist if slavery, driven almost entirely by white men, wasn’t a thing. The same principle here. Wonder Woman wouldn’t have been such a massive hit if the men running Hollywood hadn’t been so afraid to finally put her in a movie. (Thanks to Catwoman and Electra, may those movies burn in hell.)

So, if anything, the reason why this new trend of women getting their representation that they should have gotten all along is such a huge thing? It’s because we were denied it. Actively. For decades. Men have only to blame themselves for not knowing how to share. For freaking out when Star Wars gets a competent, girl Jedi. For Wonder Woman smashing box office expectations and getting news stories. If not for sexism, these things wouldn’t even be an issue.

Fuck those two reviewers.

[airoasis]

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/were-building-a-dystopia-just-to-make-people-click-on-ads-zeynep-tufekci-2/

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

So when folks voice fears of synthetic intelligence, very commonly, they invoke photographs of humanoid robots run amok. You recognize? Terminator? You realize, that possibly some thing to recollect, but that is a distant threat. Or, we be troubled about digital surveillance with metaphors from the prior. "1984," George Orwell’s "1984," it’s hitting the bestseller lists again. It’s a high-quality e-book, nevertheless it’s no longer the proper dystopia for the 21st century. What we ought to fear most is just not what synthetic intelligence will do to us on its possess, but how the humans in energy will use synthetic intelligence to control us and to control us in novel, sometimes hidden, delicate and unexpected methods. So much of the technological know-how that threatens our freedom and our dignity in the close-term future is being developed by way of organizations within the business of taking pictures and promoting our data and our attention to advertisers and others: facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent.Now, artificial intelligence has began bolstering their trade as well. And it is going to look like synthetic intelligence is just the next thing after online ads. It can be no longer. It can be a soar in category. It is a whole specific world, and it has great expertise. It would speed up our figuring out of many areas of gain knowledge of and study. However to paraphrase a noted Hollywood philosopher, "With prodigious capabilities comes prodigious hazard." Now let’s appear at a normal fact of our digital lives, online advertisements. Right? We variety of dismiss them. They seem crude, ineffective. We have all had the experience of being adopted on the net via an advert established on whatever we searched or learn. , you look up a pair of boots and for per week, those boots are following you around all over you go. Even after you succumb and purchase them, they’re still following you around. We’re style of inured to that type of normal, affordable manipulation. We roll our eyes and we think, "you know what? These matters don’t work." besides, on-line, the digital applied sciences aren’t simply ads.Now, to fully grasp that, let’s believe of a physical world illustration. You understand how, at the checkout counters at supermarkets, close the cashier, there is candy and gum on the eye degree of children? That’s designed to make them whine at their father and mother simply as the mom and dad are about to kind of verify out. Now, that’s a persuasion structure. It can be not best, but it type of works. That’s why you see it in each grocery store. Now, in the physical world, such persuasion architectures are kind of limited, considering you could only put so many matters by using the cashier. Proper? And the candy and gum, it can be the same for every body, despite the fact that it on the whole works only for people who have whiny little people beside them. Within the bodily world, we live with those barriers.In the digital world, though, persuasion architectures may also be constructed on the scale of billions and they are able to goal, infer, understand and be deployed at participants one after the other by way of identifying your weaknesses, and they can be despatched to everybody’s cellphone private display, so it can be no longer obvious to us. And that’s special. And that is simply one of the crucial basic things that artificial intelligence can do. Now, let’s take an illustration. Let’s consider you want to sell aircraft tickets to Vegas. Right? So in the historic world, you might believe of some demographics to target headquartered on experience and what you can guess. You might attempt to advertise to, oh, men between the a long time of 25 and 35, or humans who have a excessive limit on their credit card, or retired couples. Correct? That’s what you could do in the past. With significant knowledge and computing device studying, that’s now not how it works anymore. To be able to think that, consider of all of the data that fb has on you: every status update you ever typed, each Messenger dialog, every position you logged in from, all of your graphics that you just uploaded there. Should you begin typing something and alter your intellect and delete it, facebook continues those and analyzes them, too.More and more, it tries to compare you with your offline data. It also purchases a number of data from knowledge brokers. It might be the whole thing out of your financial files to a just right chunk of your searching history. Right? In the united states, such knowledge is usually accrued, collated and bought. In Europe, they have got tougher ideas. So what happens then is, through churning by way of all that information, these machine-finding out algorithms — that is why they’re known as studying algorithms — they learn to realise the characteristics of persons who bought tickets to Vegas before. Once they learn this from present knowledge, additionally they be trained find out how to observe this to new folks. So if they’re provided with a brand new character, they are able to classify whether or not that individual is probably going to buy a ticket to Vegas or now not.Pleasant. You are thinking, an present to purchase tickets to Vegas. I will be able to ignore that. However the crisis isn’t that. The challenge is, we not particularly have an understanding of how these difficult algorithms work. We don’t recognize how they are doing this categorization. It is gigantic matrices, enormous quantities of rows and columns, possibly hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, and now not the programmers and not someone who appears at it, even supposing you may have the entire data, knows anymore how exactly it is running any further than you’ll understand what I was thinking correct now if you happen to have been shown a cross element of my brain. It can be like we’re now not programming anymore, we’re developing intelligence that we do not real understand. And these things most effective work if there’s an big quantity of knowledge, so in addition they inspire deep surveillance on all people so that the computer learning algorithms can work. That’s why facebook wants to acquire the entire data it may well about you. The algorithms work higher. So let’s push that Vegas illustration a little. What if the process that we don’t comprehend used to be identifying up that it can be less complicated to promote Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic section.Such folks are likely to come to be overspenders, compulsive gamblers. They would do this, and you’d don’t have any clue that’s what they have been deciding upon up on. I gave this instance to a bunch of pc scientists as soon as and afterwards, one in all them came as much as me. He was once afflicted and he stated, "that is why i couldn’t submit it." I was like, "could not post what?" He had tried to see whether which you can indeed determine the onset of mania from social media posts earlier than scientific symptoms, and it had worked, and it had labored very good, and he had no notion the way it worked or what it used to be deciding on up on.Now, the concern is not solved if he would not publish it, considering that there are already businesses which are establishing this type of technological know-how, and a variety of the stuff is just off the shelf. This isn’t very tricky anymore. Do you ever go on YouTube meaning to watch one video and an hour later you could have watched 27? You understand how YouTube has this column on the correct that says, "Up next" and it autoplays something? It is an algorithm picking what it thinks that you probably involved in and probably no longer to find for your possess. It’s no longer a human editor. It is what algorithms do. It picks up on what you’ve got watched and what folks like you will have watched, and infers that that ought to be what you are interested in, what you need more of, and simply shows you extra.It sounds like a benign and priceless feature, besides when it’s not. So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a student the motion assisting him. I learn social actions, so I was studying it, too. After which I wanted to write something about one in every of his rallies, so I watched it a couple of times on YouTube. YouTube began recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more severe and autoplayed that one, too. If you happen to watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.Well, you probably thinking, that is politics, nevertheless it’s now not. This isn’t about politics. That is simply the algorithm identifying human behavior. I as soon as watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube endorsed and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you are by no means hardcore sufficient for YouTube. (Laughter) So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I believe is occurring. The algorithm has figured out that if that you can entice people into thinking you can show them some thing more hardcore, they’re extra likely to keep on the site looking at video after video taking place that rabbit hole at the same time Google serves them advertisements. Now, with nobody minding the ethics of the shop, these web sites can profile persons who are Jew haters, who believe that Jews are parasites and who’ve such explicit anti-Semitic content, and mean you can goal them with advertisements.They can additionally mobilize algorithms to seek out for you look-alike audiences, humans who would not have such express anti-Semitic content material on their profile but who the algorithm detects may be susceptible to such messages, and lets you goal them with advertisements, too. Now, this will sound like an incredible example, however that is actual. ProPublica investigated this and observed that you may indeed do that on fb, and facebook helpfully furnished up suggestions on increase that audience. BuzzFeed tried it for Google, and very quickly they located, yep, you can do it on Google, too. And it wasn’t even luxurious. The ProPublica reporter spent about 30 dollars to goal this category. So final year, Donald Trump’s social media manager disclosed that they were using facebook darkish posts to demobilize persons, to not persuade them, but to convince them not to vote at all. And to do that, they unique exceptionally, for example, African-American men in key cities like Philadelphia, and i’ll read exactly what he said.I am quoting. They had been using "nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls in order that simplest the persons we wish to see it see it. We modeled this. It will dramatically impact her potential to turn these persons out." What’s in those darkish posts? We don’t have any inspiration. Facebook won’t tell us. So facebook additionally algorithmically arranges the posts that your buddies placed on facebook, or the pages you comply with. It doesn’t exhibit you the whole lot chronologically. It places the order in the way in which that the algorithm thinks will entice you to remain on the website longer. Now, so this has a number of penalties. You’ll be thinking somebody is snubbing you on facebook. The algorithm may on no account be showing your put up to them. The algorithm is prioritizing some of them and burying the others.Experiments show that what the algorithm picks to exhibit you can have an impact on your feelings. However that’s now not all. It additionally impacts political habits. So in 2010, within the midterm elections, facebook did an test on sixty one million people in the us that was once disclosed after the very fact. So some people had been shown, "at present is election day," the less complicated one, and a few folks have been proven the one with that tiny tweak with these little thumbnails of your pals who clicked on "I voted." this straightforward tweak. Adequate? So the graphics were the one change, and that submit proven simply as soon as became out an extra 340,000 voters in that election, in keeping with this research as validated by means of the voter rolls. A fluke? No. On the grounds that in 2012, they repeated the identical test. And that point, that civic message proven just once became out another 270,000 voters. For reference, the 2016 US presidential election used to be decided by means of about a hundred,000 votes. Now, facebook might also very with ease infer what your politics are, even if you will have not ever disclosed them on the website online. Right? These algorithms can do this relatively effortlessly.What if a platform with that type of energy decides to prove supporters of 1 candidate over the other? How would we even learn about it? Now, we started from someplace seemingly innocuous — online provides following us round — and we have landed someplace else. As a public and as residents, we now not understand if we’re seeing the equal knowledge or what someone else is seeing, and without a original foundation of understanding, little by little, public debate is becoming unimaginable, and we’re just on the opening levels of this. These algorithms can particularly with no trouble infer things like your men and women’s ethnicity, devout and affairs of state, persona traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and genders, just from facebook likes. These algorithms can establish protesters even supposing their faces are in part hid. These algorithms is also capable to observe humans’s sexual orientation simply from their courting profile pix. Now, these are probabilistic guesses, so they’re not going to be 100 percentage right, but i don’t see the robust resisting the temptation to make use of these technologies simply due to the fact there are some false positives, a good way to of path create a whole different layer of problems.Suppose what a state can do with the enormous quantity of information it has on its citizens. China is already making use of face detection technological know-how to identify and arrest men and women. And here is the tragedy: we’re constructing this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism only to get individuals to click on on commercials. And this is not going to be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This is not "1984." Now, if authoritarianism is utilizing overt worry to terrorize us, we are going to all be scared, however we are going to comprehend it, we are going to hate it and we’ll withstand it. But when the people in power are utilizing these algorithms to quietly watch us, to guage us and to nudge us, to predict and determine the troublemakers and the rebels, to install persuasion architectures at scale and to govern members separately utilizing their private, man or woman weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they are doing it at scale by way of our private screens so that we do not even understand what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s net and we won’t even understand we’re in it. So facebook’s market capitalization is drawing near half of one trillion greenbacks. It’s when you consider that it works high-quality as a persuasion architecture.However the constitution of that structure is the equal whether or not you are promoting shoes or whether you’re selling politics. The algorithms have no idea the difference. The identical algorithms set loose upon us to make us more pliable for ads are also organizing our political, private and social know-how flows, and that’s what’s got to change. Now, don’t get me mistaken, we use digital platforms given that they provide us with quality value. I exploit fb to hold in touch with associates and household world wide. I’ve written about how significant social media is for social movements. I have studied how these applied sciences can be utilized to circumvent censorship world wide. But it surely’s not that the individuals who run, you recognize, fb or Google are maliciously and deliberately looking to make the country or the arena more polarized and motivate extremism. I learn the numerous well-intentioned statements that these men and women put out.Nevertheless it’s no longer the intent or the statements individuals in technology make that topic, it’s the constructions and trade units they are building. And that’s the core of the concern. Both facebook is a enormous con of half of one thousand billion bucks and advertisements don’t work on the web site, it does not work as a persuasion architecture, or its power of have an impact on is of quality quandary. It can be both one or the other. It’s similar for Google, too. So what will we do? This needs to alter. Now, I cannot offer a simple recipe, on the grounds that we ought to restructure the entire approach our digital science operates. Everything from the way in which technological know-how is developed to the way the incentives, economic and in any other case, are built into the approach. We need to face and check out to deal with the dearth of transparency created by the proprietary algorithms, the structural task of machine learning’s opacity, all this indiscriminate information that’s being collected about us.We’ve a tremendous venture in front of us. We have got to mobilize our technological know-how, our creativity and sure, our politics so that we are able to build synthetic intelligence that helps us in our human targets however that can also be confined by means of our human values. And i appreciate this won’t be easy. We would no longer even with ease agree on what those terms mean. But when we take seriously how these techniques that we rely on for so much operate, i do not see how we will put off this dialog anymore. These structures are organizing how we perform they usually’re controlling what we will and we can not do.And many of these ad-financed systems, they boast that they may be free. On this context, it means that we’re the product that’s being offered. We need a digital economic system the place our information and our attention will not be on the market to the highest-bidding authoritarian or demagogue. (Applause) so to go back to that Hollywood paraphrase, we do want the prodigious competencies of man-made intelligence and digital technological know-how to blossom, but for that, we have got to face this prodigious risk, open-eyed and now. Thanks. (Applause) .

[batterymonster2021]

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/were-building-a-dystopia-just-to-make-people-click-on-ads-zeynep-tufekci-2/

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

So when folks voice fears of synthetic intelligence, very commonly, they invoke photographs of humanoid robots run amok. You recognize? Terminator? You realize, that possibly some thing to recollect, but that is a distant threat. Or, we be troubled about digital surveillance with metaphors from the prior. "1984," George Orwell’s "1984," it’s hitting the bestseller lists again. It’s a high-quality e-book, nevertheless it’s no longer the proper dystopia for the 21st century. What we ought to fear most is just not what synthetic intelligence will do to us on its possess, but how the humans in energy will use synthetic intelligence to control us and to control us in novel, sometimes hidden, delicate and unexpected methods. So much of the technological know-how that threatens our freedom and our dignity in the close-term future is being developed by way of organizations within the business of taking pictures and promoting our data and our attention to advertisers and others: facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent.Now, artificial intelligence has began bolstering their trade as well. And it is going to look like synthetic intelligence is just the next thing after online ads. It can be no longer. It can be a soar in category. It is a whole specific world, and it has great expertise. It would speed up our figuring out of many areas of gain knowledge of and study. However to paraphrase a noted Hollywood philosopher, "With prodigious capabilities comes prodigious hazard." Now let’s appear at a normal fact of our digital lives, online advertisements. Right? We variety of dismiss them. They seem crude, ineffective. We have all had the experience of being adopted on the net via an advert established on whatever we searched or learn. , you look up a pair of boots and for per week, those boots are following you around all over you go. Even after you succumb and purchase them, they’re still following you around. We’re style of inured to that type of normal, affordable manipulation. We roll our eyes and we think, "you know what? These matters don’t work." besides, on-line, the digital applied sciences aren’t simply ads.Now, to fully grasp that, let’s believe of a physical world illustration. You understand how, at the checkout counters at supermarkets, close the cashier, there is candy and gum on the eye degree of children? That’s designed to make them whine at their father and mother simply as the mom and dad are about to kind of verify out. Now, that’s a persuasion structure. It can be not best, but it type of works. That’s why you see it in each grocery store. Now, in the physical world, such persuasion architectures are kind of limited, considering you could only put so many matters by using the cashier. Proper? And the candy and gum, it can be the same for every body, despite the fact that it on the whole works only for people who have whiny little people beside them. Within the bodily world, we live with those barriers.In the digital world, though, persuasion architectures may also be constructed on the scale of billions and they are able to goal, infer, understand and be deployed at participants one after the other by way of identifying your weaknesses, and they can be despatched to everybody’s cellphone private display, so it can be no longer obvious to us. And that’s special. And that is simply one of the crucial basic things that artificial intelligence can do. Now, let’s take an illustration. Let’s consider you want to sell aircraft tickets to Vegas. Right? So in the historic world, you might believe of some demographics to target headquartered on experience and what you can guess. You might attempt to advertise to, oh, men between the a long time of 25 and 35, or humans who have a excessive limit on their credit card, or retired couples. Correct? That’s what you could do in the past. With significant knowledge and computing device studying, that’s now not how it works anymore. To be able to think that, consider of all of the data that fb has on you: every status update you ever typed, each Messenger dialog, every position you logged in from, all of your graphics that you just uploaded there. Should you begin typing something and alter your intellect and delete it, facebook continues those and analyzes them, too.More and more, it tries to compare you with your offline data. It also purchases a number of data from knowledge brokers. It might be the whole thing out of your financial files to a just right chunk of your searching history. Right? In the united states, such knowledge is usually accrued, collated and bought. In Europe, they have got tougher ideas. So what happens then is, through churning by way of all that information, these machine-finding out algorithms — that is why they’re known as studying algorithms — they learn to realise the characteristics of persons who bought tickets to Vegas before. Once they learn this from present knowledge, additionally they be trained find out how to observe this to new folks. So if they’re provided with a brand new character, they are able to classify whether or not that individual is probably going to buy a ticket to Vegas or now not.Pleasant. You are thinking, an present to purchase tickets to Vegas. I will be able to ignore that. However the crisis isn’t that. The challenge is, we not particularly have an understanding of how these difficult algorithms work. We don’t recognize how they are doing this categorization. It is gigantic matrices, enormous quantities of rows and columns, possibly hundreds of thousands of rows and columns, and now not the programmers and not someone who appears at it, even supposing you may have the entire data, knows anymore how exactly it is running any further than you’ll understand what I was thinking correct now if you happen to have been shown a cross element of my brain. It can be like we’re now not programming anymore, we’re developing intelligence that we do not real understand. And these things most effective work if there’s an big quantity of knowledge, so in addition they inspire deep surveillance on all people so that the computer learning algorithms can work. That’s why facebook wants to acquire the entire data it may well about you. The algorithms work higher. So let’s push that Vegas illustration a little. What if the process that we don’t comprehend used to be identifying up that it can be less complicated to promote Vegas tickets to people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic section.Such folks are likely to come to be overspenders, compulsive gamblers. They would do this, and you’d don’t have any clue that’s what they have been deciding upon up on. I gave this instance to a bunch of pc scientists as soon as and afterwards, one in all them came as much as me. He was once afflicted and he stated, "that is why i couldn’t submit it." I was like, "could not post what?" He had tried to see whether which you can indeed determine the onset of mania from social media posts earlier than scientific symptoms, and it had worked, and it had labored very good, and he had no notion the way it worked or what it used to be deciding on up on.Now, the concern is not solved if he would not publish it, considering that there are already businesses which are establishing this type of technological know-how, and a variety of the stuff is just off the shelf. This isn’t very tricky anymore. Do you ever go on YouTube meaning to watch one video and an hour later you could have watched 27? You understand how YouTube has this column on the correct that says, "Up next" and it autoplays something? It is an algorithm picking what it thinks that you probably involved in and probably no longer to find for your possess. It’s no longer a human editor. It is what algorithms do. It picks up on what you’ve got watched and what folks like you will have watched, and infers that that ought to be what you are interested in, what you need more of, and simply shows you extra.It sounds like a benign and priceless feature, besides when it’s not. So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a student the motion assisting him. I learn social actions, so I was studying it, too. After which I wanted to write something about one in every of his rallies, so I watched it a couple of times on YouTube. YouTube began recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more severe and autoplayed that one, too. If you happen to watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.Well, you probably thinking, that is politics, nevertheless it’s now not. This isn’t about politics. That is simply the algorithm identifying human behavior. I as soon as watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube endorsed and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you are by no means hardcore sufficient for YouTube. (Laughter) So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I believe is occurring. The algorithm has figured out that if that you can entice people into thinking you can show them some thing more hardcore, they’re extra likely to keep on the site looking at video after video taking place that rabbit hole at the same time Google serves them advertisements. Now, with nobody minding the ethics of the shop, these web sites can profile persons who are Jew haters, who believe that Jews are parasites and who’ve such explicit anti-Semitic content, and mean you can goal them with advertisements.They can additionally mobilize algorithms to seek out for you look-alike audiences, humans who would not have such express anti-Semitic content material on their profile but who the algorithm detects may be susceptible to such messages, and lets you goal them with advertisements, too. Now, this will sound like an incredible example, however that is actual. ProPublica investigated this and observed that you may indeed do that on fb, and facebook helpfully furnished up suggestions on increase that audience. BuzzFeed tried it for Google, and very quickly they located, yep, you can do it on Google, too. And it wasn’t even luxurious. The ProPublica reporter spent about 30 dollars to goal this category. So final year, Donald Trump’s social media manager disclosed that they were using facebook darkish posts to demobilize persons, to not persuade them, but to convince them not to vote at all. And to do that, they unique exceptionally, for example, African-American men in key cities like Philadelphia, and i’ll read exactly what he said.I am quoting. They had been using "nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls in order that simplest the persons we wish to see it see it. We modeled this. It will dramatically impact her potential to turn these persons out." What’s in those darkish posts? We don’t have any inspiration. Facebook won’t tell us. So facebook additionally algorithmically arranges the posts that your buddies placed on facebook, or the pages you comply with. It doesn’t exhibit you the whole lot chronologically. It places the order in the way in which that the algorithm thinks will entice you to remain on the website longer. Now, so this has a number of penalties. You’ll be thinking somebody is snubbing you on facebook. The algorithm may on no account be showing your put up to them. The algorithm is prioritizing some of them and burying the others.Experiments show that what the algorithm picks to exhibit you can have an impact on your feelings. However that’s now not all. It additionally impacts political habits. So in 2010, within the midterm elections, facebook did an test on sixty one million people in the us that was once disclosed after the very fact. So some people had been shown, "at present is election day," the less complicated one, and a few folks have been proven the one with that tiny tweak with these little thumbnails of your pals who clicked on "I voted." this straightforward tweak. Adequate? So the graphics were the one change, and that submit proven simply as soon as became out an extra 340,000 voters in that election, in keeping with this research as validated by means of the voter rolls. A fluke? No. On the grounds that in 2012, they repeated the identical test. And that point, that civic message proven just once became out another 270,000 voters. For reference, the 2016 US presidential election used to be decided by means of about a hundred,000 votes. Now, facebook might also very with ease infer what your politics are, even if you will have not ever disclosed them on the website online. Right? These algorithms can do this relatively effortlessly.What if a platform with that type of energy decides to prove supporters of 1 candidate over the other? How would we even learn about it? Now, we started from someplace seemingly innocuous — online provides following us round — and we have landed someplace else. As a public and as residents, we now not understand if we’re seeing the equal knowledge or what someone else is seeing, and without a original foundation of understanding, little by little, public debate is becoming unimaginable, and we’re just on the opening levels of this. These algorithms can particularly with no trouble infer things like your men and women’s ethnicity, devout and affairs of state, persona traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and genders, just from facebook likes. These algorithms can establish protesters even supposing their faces are in part hid. These algorithms is also capable to observe humans’s sexual orientation simply from their courting profile pix. Now, these are probabilistic guesses, so they’re not going to be 100 percentage right, but i don’t see the robust resisting the temptation to make use of these technologies simply due to the fact there are some false positives, a good way to of path create a whole different layer of problems.Suppose what a state can do with the enormous quantity of information it has on its citizens. China is already making use of face detection technological know-how to identify and arrest men and women. And here is the tragedy: we’re constructing this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism only to get individuals to click on on commercials. And this is not going to be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This is not "1984." Now, if authoritarianism is utilizing overt worry to terrorize us, we are going to all be scared, however we are going to comprehend it, we are going to hate it and we’ll withstand it. But when the people in power are utilizing these algorithms to quietly watch us, to guage us and to nudge us, to predict and determine the troublemakers and the rebels, to install persuasion architectures at scale and to govern members separately utilizing their private, man or woman weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they are doing it at scale by way of our private screens so that we do not even understand what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s net and we won’t even understand we’re in it. So facebook’s market capitalization is drawing near half of one trillion greenbacks. It’s when you consider that it works high-quality as a persuasion architecture.However the constitution of that structure is the equal whether or not you are promoting shoes or whether you’re selling politics. The algorithms have no idea the difference. The identical algorithms set loose upon us to make us more pliable for ads are also organizing our political, private and social know-how flows, and that’s what’s got to change. Now, don’t get me mistaken, we use digital platforms given that they provide us with quality value. I exploit fb to hold in touch with associates and household world wide. I’ve written about how significant social media is for social movements. I have studied how these applied sciences can be utilized to circumvent censorship world wide. But it surely’s not that the individuals who run, you recognize, fb or Google are maliciously and deliberately looking to make the country or the arena more polarized and motivate extremism. I learn the numerous well-intentioned statements that these men and women put out.Nevertheless it’s no longer the intent or the statements individuals in technology make that topic, it’s the constructions and trade units they are building. And that’s the core of the concern. Both facebook is a enormous con of half of one thousand billion bucks and advertisements don’t work on the web site, it does not work as a persuasion architecture, or its power of have an impact on is of quality quandary. It can be both one or the other. It’s similar for Google, too. So what will we do? This needs to alter. Now, I cannot offer a simple recipe, on the grounds that we ought to restructure the entire approach our digital science operates. Everything from the way in which technological know-how is developed to the way the incentives, economic and in any other case, are built into the approach. We need to face and check out to deal with the dearth of transparency created by the proprietary algorithms, the structural task of machine learning’s opacity, all this indiscriminate information that’s being collected about us.We’ve a tremendous venture in front of us. We have got to mobilize our technological know-how, our creativity and sure, our politics so that we are able to build synthetic intelligence that helps us in our human targets however that can also be confined by means of our human values. And i appreciate this won’t be easy. We would no longer even with ease agree on what those terms mean. But when we take seriously how these techniques that we rely on for so much operate, i do not see how we will put off this dialog anymore. These structures are organizing how we perform they usually’re controlling what we will and we can not do.And many of these ad-financed systems, they boast that they may be free. On this context, it means that we’re the product that’s being offered. We need a digital economic system the place our information and our attention will not be on the market to the highest-bidding authoritarian or demagogue. (Applause) so to go back to that Hollywood paraphrase, we do want the prodigious competencies of man-made intelligence and digital technological know-how to blossom, but for that, we have got to face this prodigious risk, open-eyed and now. Thanks. (Applause) .

[my-insanity-is-irrelevant]

The same to you - all of them 🎃

200: My crush’s name is: Ryan, Eli, Claire, several others I cant name for complicated reasons 

199: I was born in: 1997/a hospital 

198: I am really: Intense weather in my calmness or excitement 

197: My cellphone company is: T-Mobile

196: My eye color is: Light green

195: My shoe size is: 9 1/2 wide (i usually have to do like a 11 for high heals)

194: My ring size is: ??????? probably big I have chubby fingers

193: My height is: 5′ 6″

192: I am allergic to: nothing unless you count idiocy 

191: My 1st car was: A blue 2007 Ford Focus and I LOVED her

190: My 1st job was: A server for Cheddar’s Casual Cafe 

189: Last book you read: How to Ruin Everything by George Watsky 10/10

188: My bed is: A king with lots o’ pillows and blankets and is very comfy

187: My pet: 2 cats, 5 kittens, 6 dogs, 2 snakes, 1 bearded dragon, 1 leopard gecko, 4 turtles, 1 bullfrog tadpole, and bunches of fish

186: My best friend: is a boy i met a month ago because i have intimacy issues

185: My favorite shampoo is: Dead Sea’s Argon oil shampoo is so good to my poor dry curls

184: Xbox or ps3: I use an Xbox to watch Netflix but I don’t play video games

183: Piggy banks are: Cute decorations but go unused

182: In my pockets: $2, some lint, a rubber band, and something weird i took out of my dog’s mouth earlier

181: On my calendar: I have nothing written in it but it has cool pictures of bears

180: Marriage is: Cool because of the financial benefits but other than that unnecessary to prove one’s love. I want a wedding though because I want a pretty dress

179: Spongebob can: Make me hate my life a 3am

178: My mom: Died of breast cancer and smoked a lot of pot

177: The last three songs I bought were? I can’t remember ever paying for music but the last three i listened to are: Cherry Wine by Hozier, Strong As An Oak by Watsky, and San Cristobal by Mal Blum

176: Last YouTube video watched: A slam poem by Neil Hilborn called Liminality

175: How many cousins do you have? I have no clue? At least 10 on each side, but i’m sure there’s way more than that

174: Do you have any siblings? 2 older brothers, 2 older sisters, ans one younger sister 

173: Are your parents divorced? They were never married

172: Are you taller than your mom? Nope! She was like 5′10′

171: Do you play an instrument? I can play hot cross buns on the recorder and thats the best i can do

170: What did you do yesterday? I slept and ate beef jerky[ I Believe In ]169: Love at first sight: No, but i do believe in lust and infatuation at first site. I think  love takes time to grow.

168: Luck: Yes like, as in karma

167: Fate: Catch me in the right mood and i do

166: Yourself: NOOOOOPE

165: Aliens: Yes

164: Heaven: No

163: Hell: Yes, it’s called Texas

162: God: Naaaaah

161: Horoscopes: I think they’re accurate generalizations

160: Soul mates: Yeah but not like the traditional; kind of way, i think we have lots of people we’re meant to be with in various ways

159: Ghosts: Yes and No i go back and forth

158: Gay Marriage: 100%

157: War:0%

156: Orbs: Idk what this is talking about but sure, ill root for them

155: Magic: No, Im a science gal[ This or That ]154: Hugs or Kisses: Hugs

153: Drunk or High: High, drinking gives me a tummy ache

152: Phone or Online: Online

151: Red heads or Black haired: Red heads

150: Blondes or Brunettes: Brunettes

149: Hot or cold: Cold

148: Summer or winter: Winter

147: Autumn or Spring: Autumn

146: Chocolate or vanilla: Vanilla

145: Night or Day: Night

144: Oranges or Apples: Apples

143: Curly or Straight hair: Curly

142: McDonalds or Burger King: Mcdonald’s

141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: White Chocolate is the key to my heart

140: Mac or PC: PC

139: Flip flops or high heels: HIgh heels even though i cant walk in them

138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: Sweet and poor

137: Coke or Pepsi: Coke

136: Hillary or Obama: Obama

135: Burried or cremated: Cremated, the idea of rotting creeps me out

134: Singing or Dancing: Dancing but im bad at both

133: Coach or Chanel: Idgaf

132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: ??????

131: Small town or Big city: Big city

130: Wal-Mart or Target: Wal-Mart

129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: I hate Adam Sandler

128: Manicure or Pedicure: Manicure

127: East Coast or West Coast: West Coast

126: Your Birthday or Christmas: Christmas all the waaaaaay

125: Chocolate or Flowers: Flowers, preferably potted

124: Disney or Six Flags: Disney i’m scared of roller coasters

123: Yankees or Red Sox: I dont sports[ Here’s What I Think About ]122: War: Its stupid and bad and i hate violence 

121: George W. Bush: Okay, looook, i dig his paintings, okay???

120: Gay Marriage: gimme that shit i want that shit

119: The presidential election: I could be down for violence against trump

118: Abortion: everyone should have safe access to abortions, they save lives

117: MySpace: I never had one? Does it still exist? I may make one for fun? 

116: Reality TV: i dont ever watch it, i avoid it like the plauge

115: Parents: Mine were grade A shit

114: Back stabbers: What goes around comes around

113: Ebay: I use Amazon

112: Facebook: Its filled with my racist family, i avoid it 

111: Work: I watch my niece and nephew (twins) and i love it

110: My Neighbors: I don’t interact with them ever

109: Gas Prices: why so expensive pls give me break

108: Designer Clothes: catch me in wal-mart clothes i bough 4 years ago

107: College: I want but cant afford halp

106: Sports: no

105: My family: I love them but they fkn annoy the shit out of me with their political views

104: The future: stop.[ Last time I ]103: Hugged someone: My niece yesterday

102: Last time you ate: I am eating a bowl of mac n’ cheese right now

101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: I saw my sister’s in-laws last week and i loooooove them! I made slime with the kids

100: Cried in front of someone: When i found out my ex was cheating on me like two months ago

99: Went to a movie theater: Went on a date with a cute boi like a month ago and w saw Baby Driver it was so good

98: Took a vacation: The only vacation ive ever took in my life was with my ex and his family to Florida last summer

97: Swam in a pool: Less than a week ago

96: Changed a diaper: Yesterday, i change them for a living

95: Got my nails done:last summer

94: Went to a wedding: My oldest sister got married last week!

93: Broke a bone: when i was like 3????

92: Got a peircing: two weeks ago i got my nipples done

91: Broke the law: this morning when i got high

90: Texted: Im texting cute bbs  right now[ MISC ]89: Who makes you laugh the most: My boi Ryan who is a fkn idiot i love him

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: I already left home and only miss having someone else cook and clean because my roomates are hopeless

87: The last movie I saw: The Last Five Years

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: When i can move far north and start a loving and respectful communist sex cult

85: The thing im not looking forward to: Getting up for work at 5 in the morning

84: People call me: lame

83: The most difficult thing to do is: exist

82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: i sure haven’t i’m Safe

81: My zodiac sign is: Libra

80: The first person i talked to today was: Ryan

79: First time you had a crush: i liked a boy named Antonio in second grade

78: The one person who i can’t hide things from: no one? 

77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: Ryan last night when we said a stupid Ricks and Morty quote at the same time

76: Right now I am talking to: my cat Beatrice 

75: What are you going to do when you grow up: probably cry a lot

74: I have/will get a job: working with kids!

73: Tomorrow: I will be very tired

72: Today: I am very tired

71: Next Summer: I will be very hot

70: Next Weekend: Im going to tie ppl up with rope

69: I have these pets: see 187

68: The worst sound in the world: A baby crying because they’re hurt or sad

67: The person that makes me cry the most is: my ex inbox me for his url so you can tell him hes a meanie

66: People that make you happy: My nieces and nephews and also my bff

65: Last time I cried: last night because the damn dog was so cute

64: My friends are: amazing and deserve the world

63: My computer is: slow and bad but i still love her

62: My School: was down the road from a prison, which my mom was in years ago

61: My Car: is old and smells like my mom’s cigarettes 

60: I lose all respect for people who: are racist, homophobic, sexist, trans-phobic, Islamophobic, anti-semetic, ect. 

59: The movie I cried at was: the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy

58: Your hair color is: Auburn

57: TV shows you watch: Game of Thrones, Criminal Minds, Sense 8

56: Favorite web site: tumblr.com

55: Your dream vacation: stargazing in Alaska 

54: The worst pain I was ever in was: when i fucked up my siatic nerve in a car wreck in January 

53: How do you like your steak cooked: medium-well

52: My room is: cold and messy and covered in kittens

51: My favorite celebrity is: Harry Styles

50: Where would you like to be: on a beach in Iceland with a person playing a ukulele 

49: Do you want children: Only if i have more than one long term partner living with me 

48: Ever been in love: Yes 

47: Who’s your best friend: see 186 its Ryan

46: More guy friends or girl friends: no

45: One thing that makes you feel great is: when my cat comes to me and just lays where shes barely touching me 

44: One person that you wish you could see right now: My best friend from high school who committed suicide 

43: Do you have a 5 year plan: no

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: no

41: Have you pre-named your children: I want to name my kid Coraline but id also like to do something not defined by a single gender?

40: Last person I got mad at: My sister because she left the dogs inside all day while i was at work even though shes a stay at home mom and so the poor things had accidents and no one was happy

39: I would like to move to: Canada

38: I wish I was a professional: mom[ My Favorites ]37: Candy: white chocolate truffles 

36: Vehicle: vintage beatles 

35: President: Alexander Hamilton

34: State visited: Florida

33: Cellphone provider: ?????

32: Athlete: ?????

31: Actor: Nat Wolf

30: Actress: Maise willams

29: Singer: Radical Face/Hozier

28: Band: Bad Books

27: Clothing store: Wal-mart

26: Grocery store: Joe-V’s Smart Shop

25: TV show: Game of Thrones

24: Movie: Swiss Army Man

23: Website: see 56

22: Animal:  Monitors 

21: Theme park: i dont do theme parks

20: Holiday: Halloween

19: Sport to watch: does Yuri on Ice count?

18: Sport to play: no

17: Magazine: i don’t read magazines but i heard Teen Vogue is doing wonders

16: Book: The Kite Runner

15: Day of the week: Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe

14: Beach: wherever i was in Florida 

13: Concert attended: Warped Tour 2015 there was a band called Onwards ect. it was so good

12: Thing to cook: homemade flour tortillas 

11: Food: Cheese enchiladas

10: Restaurant: This cute little place named Marianne’s thats down the road from my house she makes the best tamales 

9: Radio station: 94.5 The Buzz

8: Yankee candle scent: Clean Linen 

7: Perfume: i dont

6: Flower: Lilies 

5: Color: pink

4: Talk show host: Steve Harvey

3: Comedian: John Mulaney

2: Dog breed: Pit Bulls

1: Did you answer all these truthfully? 100%