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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys · 2 years

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Hi Eleanor, I have been following your amazing explanations of the UK politics (so good, thank you so much for them) but somewhere in the buffoonery I lost the thread and now I can't tell one evil vizier from another. They all look the same! I can only accurately distinguish Michael Fabricant (for obvious reasons).

All this to ask, how can I tell Liz Truss apart from Nadine Dorries or Rees-Mogg? I know the latter is a man, but I'm after the clown vibes. What is her clown wig, so to speak? Thanks so much!

Apologies this took so long, it's been a busy few weeks, but yes, happy to oblige! Here is:

Elanor's Guide to Liz Truss

Under a cut for length, and it only goes up to her appointment as PM, not everything that's come since. Key points: she u-turns on literally everything, and her one (1) personality trait is maths.

26 July 1975 Liz Truss is born in Oxford to parents she’d later describe as “to the left of Labour”, though is presumably not yet a source of colossal disappointment. She is a bland and underwhelming child whose crowning achievement from this time is that she goes to a comprehensive school.

She will later boast about this.

1996 Truss graduates from Merton College, Oxford with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Economics! What a useful thing for a future PM to hold.

While at university, she begins her first foray into a political career! She's president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats - as a Lib Dem, she supports the legalisation of cannabis and, famously, the abolition of the monarchy. What sound principles to hold dearly and stand by. Good for her! Such integrity. It's good to have convictions. Hope the monarchy thing doesn't come back to bite her.

Slightly later in 1996 Truss produces the first performance of her signature move: U-Turn.

She joins the Tory Party. And starts working for Shell.

1998 Time to get elected! Truss stands in an election for Greenwich London Borough Council. Loses.

2000 Truss leaves Shell, and starts working for Cable & Wireless (the first competitor to BT).

She also gets married this year! There’s lovely. Her husband is even more bland and underwhelming than her, so presumably this made her feel special and important by comparison. Still, true love is heartening. Let's wish them a long and stable marriage.

2001 Hello naughty children, it's General Election time! Truss stands as a Tory in a Labour safe seat. Loses.

2002 Truss stands in an election for Greenwich London Borough Council again. Loses.

2004-2005 Concerned that she is incapable of winning anything, Tory MP Mark Field is appointed by the Tory Party as Truss’s mentor. Field and Truss are both married, but his allure as a sexually aggressive misogynist who grabs female protestors in chokeholds proves too much for Liz and her beige milquetoast husband, so they have an affair anyway.

It doesn't last long because Tories are very bad at hiding affairs, but Liz's husband lacks the interest to kick her out. Instead she introduces him to her fun new kink of being a collared sub and he duly obeys. From this point onwards, she literally wears a day collar necklace at all times.

This fact possibly explains the penchant for u-turns and general lack of spine. Subs should not be PMs.

2005 Truss leaves Cable & Wireless. It is unclear if they notice her leaving.

5 May 2005 General Election! Truss stands in a marginal seat (that is, not a safe seat for any party), thus giving her the best chance of winning. Loses.

April 2006

With David Cameron as the new Tory leader (several years away from the 2015 pig-fucking scandal), a committee sets out to deliver his promise to transform the party. They create an “A list” of between 100 and 150 parliamentary candidates to prioritise in winnable seats. In a bid to make the Tory party look more diverse and less like a Dulux Shades of White catalogue, many are POC and more than half of these are women – and one of these is Liz Truss.

This is probably just as well. Currently, her glittering political career consists of four failed elections, zero principles and a grubby sex scandal. You can only get away with the latter two once you've been elected, after all.

4 May 2006 Truss stands in an election for Greenwich London Borough Council again, now with the backing of the party's top brass to campaign for her. Wins!

January 2008 Having lost her first four elections, Truss is promptly given Responsibility and becomes deputy director of Reform. Reform’s a think tank – a research institute that performs research and advocacy on public policy. With Reform, Truss produced several major reports, advocating for:

more rigorous academic standards in schools because she loves maths;

a greater focus on tackling serious and organised crime;

urgent action to deal with Britain's falling competitiveness.

October 2009 Liz Truss easily wins a vote of the Conservative Association to represent the party for South West Norfolk at the next General Election. Huzzah! Gosh, it's so easy to win elections when David Cameron gives them to you.

Drama though! Some members of the association are against this, because Truss failed to disclose her affair with Mark Field. This is very funny, because every Tory MP is an adulterer. Mind, Mark Field is proper gross, so it is an unusually terrible indication of personal taste.

They vote on this issue – 132 support Truss, versus 37 against. Success! Gosh, it's so easy to win elections when David Cameron gives them to you.

6 April 2010 General Election announced. A scheduled one! So exciting for the British public.

6 May 2010 Truss chooses not to seek re-election to Greenwich London Borough Council, because she’s an MP now and is above such petty concerns. She works hard, specifically for:

retention of an RAF base in her constituency;

transforming a chunk of A11 into a dual carriageway;

shouting down a proposal to sell off forests;

preventing a waste incinerator being built at King’s Lynn.

October 2011 Truss remembers that part of her degree is in Economics, which means she knows about money and maffs. She founds the Free Enterprise Group with the support of over 40 other Tory MPs. Gosh! She's so popular! Her goal is to challenge the idea that Britain's economic decline is inevitable, by trying to develop an entrepreneurial and meritocratic culture.

(Loosely translated this means she loves free markets and hates employment laws.)

4 September 2012

Truss becomes Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Education.

Now at this point, education is a huge thing for her. She wants to make maths compulsory for everyone in full-time education, rather than just to GCSE. She believes comprehensive schools encourage easy, low-value subjects to boost results (noting that comp pupils were six times as likely to take media studies as private school kids), whereas private schools never do anything to artificially boost results to please fee-paying parents.

To prove her point she goes on telly, gets asked a maths question by a news reader, barely manages to answer it, and then refuses to take any more maths questions.

13 September 2012 Truss’s Free Enterprise Group publishes a book. Hooray! Let's see what it has to say.

Here’s a quote: "Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor."

Yuck. Gross. How unpopular.

Truss claims that that bit was written by Dominic Raab, later Deputy PM to Boris Johnson. Raab counter-claims that the authors take “collective responsibility” for everything in the book.

January 2013 Truss is named Road Safety Parliamentarian of the Month by road safety charity Brake, for campaigning for design improvements to road junctions in her constituency and presumably for Doing Good Looking when she crosses roads.

Truss also outlines plans to reform childcare in England, to widen the availability of childcare and increase staff pay and qualifications. Interestingly, charities and businesses really like these reforms – Labour and trade unions do not. I wonder why?

The least popular aspect of this is to allow each carer to be 'allowed more children'. This aspect is blocked by the bold and heroic Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

February 2014 Truss leads a fact-finding mission to Shanghai to find out how they achieve the best maths results in the world for their children. She is certain it's probably something to do with comprehensive schools.

15 July 2014 Cabinet reshuffle! Truss appointed Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Unlike her predecessor, Truss declares that she fully believes in climate change! Huzzah! What a step up. Thank goodness we now have someone with principles who will stand by their convictions.

(She is mysteriously silent on her past employment with Shell.)

November 2014 Truss launches a 10-year strategy to try to reverse falling bee populations, including by reviving traditional meadows. Double huzzah! Thank goodness she loves bees.

July 2015 Truss approves the temporary lifting of an EU ban on two bee-toxic neonicotinoid pesticides, enabling their use on about 5% of England's oil seed rape crop to ward off the cabbage stem flea beetle. These pesticides were shown in 2012 to harm bees by damaging their ability to navigate home, and are a leading theorised cause of colony collapse disease. Fuck the bees I guess.

Truss also cuts taxpayer subsidies for solar panels on agricultural land. Fuck the environment I guess.

Classic Liz.

24 June 2016 HELLO NAUGHTY CHILDREN IT'S BREXIT TIME

And Liz Truss is pro-Remain:

“I don't want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe, or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade. Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces.”

A year later, she’ll say, “I believed there would be massive economic problems but those haven't come to pass and I've also seen the opportunities.”

She is mysteriously silent on what those opportunities actually are.

14 July 2016 Theresa May’s Prime Minister now, and Truss is appointed:

Secretary of State for Justice; and

Lord Chancellor.

She’s the first woman to hold either position, even though the Lord Chancellor office has existed for a thousand years. Gosh! So illustrious! So that must be a popular choice.

Minister of State for Justice Lord Faulks immediately resigns from the government in disgust at Truss’s justice role.

He doesn’t think Truss will have the clout to stand up to the PM on behalf of the judges, because she's a whimpering sub wearing her collar to work. Truss says Faulks didn’t contact her before going public with his criticism, and that she’s literally never met or spoken to him, and she's very hurt because he's very mean, and she's excellent at defending judges who rule against the government, you'll all see.

November 2016 Truss is criticised by former Attorney General Dominic Grieve and the Criminal Bar Association for being a bit shit at defending judges who ruled against the government.

Former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that she IS shit, that's true, but for balance let's all remember that her predecessors Chris Grayling and Michael Gove were ALSO shit.

He calls on Truss to be sacked. This call is ignored.

To establish that she is Good At Justice and make daddy call her a good girl, Truss announces a £1.3 billion investment programme in the prison service and the recruitment of 2,500 additional prison officers! Huzzah! This sounds good!

Unfortunately the Tory coalition government had already actually cut considerably more than that, so this is actually still a cut overall.

11 June 2017 Following the general election, Truss becomes Chief Secretary to the Treasury, a move widely seen as a demotion for being Shit At Justice (daddy did not think she was a good girl). Still, she has an economics degree (sort of)! And loves maths! What an ideal position. How does she get on?

Civil servants describe her tenure as “exhausting” because of her punishing work schedule and her obsession with posing maths questions to officials at random.

CRINGE ALERT: Truss really gets into Twitter and Instagram. Uh oh.

June 2018 Truss gives a speech about the importance of libertarianism and low taxes. Hope that doesn't come back to bite her.

2019 Truss declares that she could replace Theresa May as leader.

In her defence, anyone COULD replace Theresa May as leader. What a horrible woman. What an awful Prime Minister. God, at least it can't get any worse, right?

Right?

In the end, Liz doesn’t stand, however. Instead, she chooses to endorse Boris Johnson.

24 July 2019 She advises Johnson on economic policy during his leadership campaign because she has an Economics degree (sort of) and likes maths, but weirdly isn’t given a finance role once he becomes Prime Minister. How strange. Perhaps he does not know that she likes maths? Perhaps she was too subtle?

She’s instead promoted to Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade. That's okay though. You have to do sums to trade with money, she'll probably be good at that.

10 September 2019 Amber Rudd resigns as Minister for Women and Equalities. Truss gets that job on top of her own, because nothing says Women's Equality like piling extra jobs onto a woman. I hope this workload doesn't affect her job with Trade.

Days later, Truss “inadvertently” (her words) allows unlawful arms sales to Saudi Arabia, an accident any of us could make I'm sure. She apologises to a Commons committee. Opposition MPs reckon she should resign, what with having dramatically broken the law and all. Oddly, this does not happen. Does Boris Johnson not care about the law? :(

Still, I'm sure she's learned her lesson about being careful with arms exports to Saudi Arabia.

7 July 2020 Truss lifts a year-long ban on exporting arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia. She says (I’m paraphrasing) “I just reckon it’ll probably be fine.”

August 2020

Truss holds meetings with the Institute of Economic Affairs. These meetings are later removed from the public record, re-categorised as "personal discussions". Which all seems nice and normal and not at all suspicious and also totally a thing we're all comfortable with Tory Trade Ministers with histories of exporting arms to Saudi Arabia doing.

September 2020 Truss settles a trade agreement between the UK and Japan. On the one hand, this is legit the first major trade deal signed by the UK after Brexit, so that’s a big deal! Yay! A triumph for maths!

On the other hand, most of it’s copied and pasted from the existing EU deal with Japan, which almost makes you wonder what was the fucking point.

In any case, Truss follows suit with Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. She is very good at keyboard shortcuts.

December 2020 Truss finds time among all her copying and pasting and sums to give a speech on equality policy, which is good, given that she's also an Equalities Minister. She reckons the UK focuses too heavily on "fashionable" race, sexuality, and gender issues. She reveals the government and civil service will no longer be receiving unconscious bias training. Thank goodness she fucking bothered.

15 September 2021 Cabinet reshuffle! Johnson promotes Truss to Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs after she's nice about his tie.

3 October 2021 Tory conference, and Truss harps on about identity politics and cancel culture and does some transphobic dog-whistling. I’m not passing on the quotes.

Truss supported gay marriage, and has never voted against LGBTQ+ rights in specific votes, but she HAS moved to limit trans rights. She’s against gender self-ID. When accused of transphobia, she stresses how much she loves queer people because she supported gay marriage. When pressed on the trans issue, she (I'm paraphrasing) shares the "I can't see that I'm blind" meme and leaves.

November 2021 Truss and her Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid announce a new deal aimed at stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

December 2021 Lord Frost resigns as the British Government's chief negotiator with the EU. Truss replaces him. A big deal! International diplomacy! Good job no major international diplomatic incidents requiring experienced diplomats are coming up!

Truss meets her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Stockholm, and urges Russia to seek peace in Ukraine.

27 January 2022 An unknown journalist for the Mirror, Pippa Crerar, reveals that the Tories held a Christmas party when everyone else was in lockdown. Uh oh. Hope that doesn't get out of hand. Best behaviour, everyone.

Truss goes to Australia. Instead of taking a normal plane, she uses £500,000 of public money on a private jet.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who’s involved with the China Development Bank, accuses Truss of making "demented" comments about Chinese military aggression in the Pacific. He says, “Britain suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation.”

The diplomacy is Going Well.

30 January 2022 Truss claims that "we are supplying and offering extra support into our Baltic allies across the Black Sea, as well as supplying the Ukrainians with defensive weapons."

Russian diplomat Maria Zakharova makes fun of her on Facebook, because the Baltic states are located around the Baltic Sea and not the Black Sea, which is 700 miles away.

The diplomacy is Going Well.

31 January 2022 Truss tests positive for covid. She cancels her trip to Ukraine.

6 February 2022 China backs Argentina’s claim over the Falkland Islands. Truss claims that "China must respect the Falklands' sovereignty … [as] part of the British family".

The diplomacy is Going Well.

10 February 2022 Truss again meets Lavrov, in the context of a build-up of Russian troops near the Russia–Ukraine border. Lavrov describes the discussion as "turning out like the conversation of a mute and a deaf person".

He asks Truss if she recognises Russia's sovereignty over the two Russian provinces containing troops. Truss mistakenly assumes these must be areas of Ukraine, and replies that "the UK will never recognise Russian sovereignty over these regions."

THE DIPLOMACY IS GOING WELL.

27 February 2022 Three days after Russian's invasion of Ukraine, Truss is asked in an interview whether she’d support British volunteers joining the newly formed International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.

She replies: "Absolutely, if that is what they want to do."

Which is admirable, I guess, but, um … would be a criminal offence, according to the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870.

The Russian military are placed on high nuclear alert, and Russian officials say this is in response to Truss's comments! But they might be lying about that I suppose.

10 July 2022

That Christmas party got out of hand.

Truss says she’ll run in the Conservative Party leadership election to replace Boris Johnson. She pledges to cut taxes on day one if elected, and that she would take "immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living". Thank goodness she has principles and understands the cost of living crisis.

16 July 2022 Liz Truss is one of 7 MPs revealed to have put Amazon Prime on their expenses.

20 July 2022 Truss and Rishi Sunak are chosen by Conservative Party MPs to be put forward to the membership for the final vote. Truss finishes second in the final MPs ballot, 113 votes to Sunak's 137.

25 July 2022 In a BBC debate, Truss claims she’s going to be big on environmental issues.

And then reveals she plans to scrap a lot of environmental legislation to help businesses.

11 August 2022 Format change! Let’s watch the days tick by through the lens of news headlines.

BBC headline: Liz Truss defends energy firms saying profit is not evil (14 August 2022)

Guardian headline: Liz Truss’s economic plan is ruinous nonsense with no reference to reality (27 August 2022)

Mirror headline: 'Greedy' Liz Truss has claimed nearly £5k in expenses for energy in last 5 years (2 September 2022)

Open Democracy headline: Fears over cost of living ‘solutions’ proposed by Truss-backed think tanks: MP says Truss would be a ‘puppet’ for right-wing groups that have already generated a dozen of her policies (3 September 2022)

Times headline: Truss eyes bonfire of workers’ rights to boost economy

Polls show that the more Tory voters see Liz Truss, the less they like her.

Unfortunate.

5 September 2022

Liz Truss gives an interview with Tory client journalist Laura Kuenssberg. Following the interview, comedian Joe Lycett, who was literally one of the planned guests and whose job is to be a satirist, claims to love Liz Truss, and effusively praises the interview. Even Truss realises that nobody would say these words in earnest.

A BBC insider says: “Team Truss was incandescent afterwards. She agreed to give a significant interview after blowing out Nick Robinson.”

Presumably she did not understand what the role of a satirist in a political interview is.

That said, in the membership vote, 57.4% of voting Party members selected Truss, making her the new leader. Of all leaders chosen in the 21st century, Truss managed the lowest support of MPs at final ballot, and of membership.

Independent headline: Liz Truss’s energy plans will be disastrous for our bills and the planet - Truss will oversee the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from UK families to oil and gas executives she used to work for

Polling data suggests that the Conservatives have fallen 4.5 points in the polls in light of Truss’s leadership, while Keir Starmer’s Labour has jumped up 3 points. Yikes! Hope that doesn't get worse.

Current polling would translate to only 147 Tory seats, compared with 414 Labour seats. For context, Tony Blair’s infamous 1997 landslide victory won 418 seats for Labour (and 178 seats for the Tories).

6 September 2022 Liz Truss is appointed Prime Minister.

Immediately, UK currency plummets. And she hasn't even announced her new mini-budget yet.

Hope that doesn't get worse!

#politik #asks

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thefandomlesbian · 6 months

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So no pressure at all not to answer if you don’t want to. Just if you do know…

*could* House still have his leg amputated? Would it help?

Initial disclaimer: I am not a doctor and I don't claim to be, any misconceptions are my own!

So we know that amputation was originally on the table in 1999/2000 when House initially had his infarction and then brought back into the limelight in 2011 when he committed bathtub butchery. But outside of those two acute incidents, could he have an amputation in the interim?

It's sort of a multipronged question because amputations, particularly above knee amputations (AKA) are pretty involved, risky surgeries. There's a lot of significant vasculature in the thigh that can be difficult to control. The femur in the thigh is the strongest bone in the human body, breaking a healthy adult femur is the equivalent of cracking concrete. Contrary to what House says when he claims surgeons are going to err on the side of "caution" and take his leg to protect themselves from complications, there are a lot of risks involved in taking a ~70 lb limb from the body. Patients after an AKA are 4x more likely to suffer a cardiac event. It's not just about preserving function if at all possible (though that is a concern). AKA is lower risk than, say, allowing a necrotic muscle to continue to rot inside the body, but if a healthy person with a mobility device walks into a surgeon's office and says, "I would like to have my leg amputated because of chronic pain," many surgeons are resoundingly going to say no.

That is especially complicated by House having had an infarction, a blood clot. Muscular infarctions are rare and almost exclusively happen in diabetics, so for House to have had one as a nondiabetic man in his late 30s/early 40s, he probably has something unusual going on in his blood to cause atypical clotting factors. He should be taking bloodthinners to prevent another infarction from occurring. By definition, that makes him a higher risk patient for any surgeon--he comes off the bloodthinners for surgery, putting him at risk for another infarction, or he doesn't and he's now at risk for hemorrhage.

Add to the equation that House is American in the world run by insurance--no insurance company is going to approve an amputation in a guy who's walking with a cane. Some would probably try to slide it by as a cosmetic/elective surgery to escape any financial responsibility, so he'd be looking at around $50,000 out the gate for surgery alone.

But the question will it help? is one that... really can't be answered. Again, contrary to what the canon displays, phantom limb pain is seldom easily fixed and can become chronic, plus the physiology is extremely poorly understood, so it's much more difficult to treat than standard acute or chronic pain. There's a pretty good chance that, with time and healing after amputation, House would have a fairly normal, pain-free existence, given he'll always be disabled and he'll face the struggles of using a prosthetic/walker/crutches/whatever mobility aid he chooses. There's also a chance that he could continue to live in chronic pain, now less treatable, while healing a surgical incision and learning how to walk again. It could fall either way. (And potential complications, ie a second infarction, cardiac event, no limitations, there's a lot to work with.)

All of that said--this is just in terms of my experience and limited knowledge. I think amputee!House is something that should be explored more often in fandom, from all sides of the equation (1999, 2011, favorable outcomes, unfavorable outcomes). It's worth mentioning that within the scope of the House MD universe, House does believe that he would be a happier person in less pain if he had had his leg amputated.

In terms of fanworks, anything goes! (I mean I literally wrote a soliloquy on how/why Wilson's cancer is considered terminal while simultaneously writing my WilsonLives!AU, so it's safe to say we should all be comfortable hurling realism in the toilet for the sake of Fix It FanFiction.) There are no rules, medicine as we know it doesn't exist, you can do Whatever You Want for the sake of the narrative.

#spencer speaks #house md #hate crimes md #hatecrimes md #gregory house #hugh laurie

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atl0sss · 8 months

Text

I was on Twitter yesterday, and I saw someone talking about #qBBH wanting the old #qForever back. Unfortunately, this qForever no longer exists. I really hope that people inside the island start to notice who our president is now. It's sad to see, but q!Forever died when he saw Richas's shirt on the bed.

He was literally driven crazy. Honestly q!Forever started to die during the election arc. With all the distrust they began to place upon him, seeing his best friends moving away from him, seeing Richas moving away from him after he became president. Everyone was leaving, and then his son was literally gone. He spent hours and hours waiting for him to come back. When q!Forever needed someone to actually ask if he was okay, the only ones who did were q!Tubbo (Because he didn't have an egg to look for) and q!Pac (Because they are family.)

And man, watching him freak out was really something Intense, you know? He started looking madly for Pomme and Dapper, clinging to the hope that they were still there, that he still had something to protect, but, he hadn't. And the only thing that kept this man sane was having something to protect. Q!Forever has always been like this. That's why he built the N.I.N.H.O. and it was for this same reason that when he invaded pomme's room to look for her and the "voices" started to complain, he said "There's no reason to protect N.I.N.H.O. anymore, the eggs are gone." And everything he did over the months, all the paranoia and overprotection towards Richas were in vain. The promise which he did for Chayene and Talulah in the last night was useless . He began to slowly succumb to madness. He knew that q!Aypierre was lying to him. And the only thing on his mind was to kill him. He hid in Richas's room and begged q!PAC to appear. And told him that.

I decided to subtitle this conversation, because it's really interesting. Q! forever tells Pac everything he's feeling at the moment, this was the last time he spoke openly about his feelings. He talks about the 2000 mines, about the voices in his head He talks about wanting to kill q!Pierre when he realizes he's lying. It's hard to control his impulses now that he no longer has Richas. Unlike q!Cell, q!F never went to therapy, lol. The voices in his head are out of control, searching for something.that makes them feel relief. When you meet q! Forever long enough, you realize that these laughs he makes aren't his normal laughs. He's always laughing and smiling, but this here My friends, it is a demonstration of a mad man.

(Tumblr won't let me upload more than one video, so I'll leave the link to my Twitter post here, so you can see the entire conversation: https://twitter.com/Atl0sss_/status/1709774361408741873?t=bhD9XtHh0a29yCqREP5KfQ&s=19 )

This was one of the few moments where he said things without any filter. About the desire for death and revenge that he has, without caring if it was correct to direct that towards q!Ayp. He just wanted Take out the anger. So he has these daydreams, and talks about it with q!PAC, Because he's the only one who Q!F knows will listen. And he listens, and plays with q!F, makes jokes and deals with the matter calmly, which makes the president calm down.

But unfortunately that wasn't enough. After that, q!Ever is alone again, he isolates himself in the presidential room. And he waits. (It's very interesting how cc!Forever leaves the character positioned, so that we can see the days passing inside Minecraft. )

and days pass, and he waits. He doesn't sleep, he stays awake, just talking to the "voices" and waiting. At some point, he starts listening to the clock, over and over again. He tries to blow up the clock in the room, but it's not enough. The clock is inside his head.

This man literally went crazy from waiting so long. Do you understand this?

And he says this, which was definitely one of the things that marked me the most in this whole arc of the disappearance of the eggs:

"Everything that has moved my character so far, What made us do things, and His entire universe revolves around the son he loves so much, circles around Richardlyson. I won't be able to ignore the fact that Richarlyson disappeared to play with capybaras, or anything. [...]"

Anyway. This man will then meet with the cucurucho. They talk, Q!Forever threatens to blow up the entire island, tells Cucurucho to try to kill him, tries to blow up the federation office and finds the live promising to blow up the entire island the other day. And then he builds a TNT plane to blow up the island, and chases Cucurucho with a chainsaw (both things are canon) What do I mean by all this? I want to say that, since the moment that Richarlyson disappeared, that q!Forever no longer exists. The man who Built N.I.N.H.O, the man who was close to q!Bad, started dying during the elections and ended his life when his son left. But, in the end, was he ever real? That man existed because of Richas. That personality was completely shaped so that Richarlyson would be safe.

His paranoia, his way of relating to other islanders, his candidacy and presidency, everything was ALWAYS for Richas. Who is he without his son? If the eggs die, what will happen to q!Forever? Q!Forever president and QForever island are the same person. But, Q!Forever without Richas and!Forever with Richas are completely different people. Whether he is president or not. He had power once and continues to insist on being honest. But without Richas, how long will he maintain this pose? How long will he accept being disrespected if he has nothing left to protect? He is trying to protect the people, without anyone better for the inhabitants, but they are not Richas. And at some point, he will give up.

#qsmp #qsmp forever #badboyhalo #qforever #foreverplayerg

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deadpresidents · 1 year

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I disagree with your post about republicans only winning more votes in one presidential election since the 90s. Obv. Bush won twice and Trump won so your biased math doesn't work.

(For those who missed it, this message is referring to this answer to a reader's question from a few days ago.)

Please understand that you are disagreeing with a concrete, objective FACT. It's not an opinion. It's not some biased, misleading sleight of hand to make liberals look amazing. It's a straight-up, historical fact.

Yes, in the time period that we were discussing (since 1990), Republican candidates have won three Presidential elections (2000, 2004, and 2016). But in the eight Presidential elections that took place during that period, the Republican candidate has won more total votes than the Democratic candidate only once -- George W. Bush in 2004. The other two Republican victories -- Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 -- were won through the Electoral College. In both of those elections, they received less popular votes than their opponents. So, again, in those eight Presidential elections since 1990, the Democratic candidate has received more total votes every single time other than 2004. More individual voters cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. That doesn't mean that I'm suggesting the Republicans who won via the Electoral College weren't elected President. The Electoral College is the Constitutional process used to elect Presidents, so of course they were elected.

There's nothing controversial here. It is a fact. You can disagree with a fact, but it just means you're wrong and come across as a complete ass. You can easily find this information anywhere that lists the results of the popular vote in Presidential elections.

Again, it's not a conspiracy to brainwash people with some crazy liberal propaganda. It's what happened. Nobody is trying to trick you. Nobody even has to try to trick you. All we have to do is explain what literally happened in real-life and you find a way to trick yourself. At one point, I probably would have found this type of cluelessness amusing, but we now understand that people like you are just the tip of an iceberg of stupidity and it's getting more and more difficult to steer clear of the stupidness and smoothly sail through non-stupid waters. I'm sure you'd have a hard time understanding this, but it's frustrating for those of us who really don't want to get any of your stupid on us.

#Facts have a funny way of smashing through those icebergs of stupidity #And they remain facts #Because facts are non-negotiable #Politics #Presidential Elections #Electoral College #Popular Vote

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hammercarexplosion · 20 days

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unfollowed yesterday for the electoral stuff, until i realized 30 seconds later how funny it actualyy is. pls keep telling people to vote 3rd party <3

This is such a confusing ask. I'm literally just urging people to stop being mindless democrats? What is comic about that? What's funny about urging people to seek information and make up their own minds?

Learning about the Green Party was one of my first forays into leftism, and looking up 3rd parties that existed throughout American history who fought for abolition and socialism and free love led me to the works of Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, John Brown and eventually got me reading Marx and others.

I've clearly stated about 1000 times that I don't think electoralism will save us: that belief died in me before I reached voting age. All some people need to spark their leftist journey is the permission to try something besides being a Democrat. Additionally, not voting doesn't show your political bent, but voting 3rd party is recorded history. Seeing that Eugene Debs got 6% of the vote in 1912 inspired me because there were people back then who believed close to what I believe, who shared a similar vision of a better society: Do you think there's no power in a kid today looking back to 2000 and seeing that at least 2,882,955 people from across the country voted for an ecologically minded candidate?

Have you never lived in a conservative area? Can you not understand how such things can be freeing and validating for a 12 year old anarchist who is completely isolated and even picked on because they're not violently racist in their political opinions? I fucking lived that. I got beat up after civics class in junior high because I admitted that my parents voted for John Kerry when polled by the teacher for an in class discussion about the electoral college. Like fuck... do you realize that people have other experiences and live rich lives and that perhaps winning a presidential election isn't the be-all-end-all of someone's political support of something? You have to know like-minded people to organize, and the Democrats prey on that with socdems and other centrist efforts posing as leftist organizing. At least the Greens and Peace and Freedom and PSL will give these folks a taste of organizing and put them in contact with others who want ecological solutions and leftist politics.

We can use all the tools at our disposal, actually. If these people are going to vote anyway and they are really fed up with Biden, the should make it 100% clear by selecting a candidate whose policy they support. I happen to live like 2 mins walk from my polling place, so I make a point to vote whenever there's any election because I'm privileged in that access. I am going to be recorded at bare minimum as a socalist because there's some kid out there who picked up On Anarchism and was so inspired but they're surrounded on all sides by MAGAs red and blue and they feel trapped and alone and hopeless. When they look up past elections on Wikipedia or wherever, there will be a number that shows them they aren't alone, just isolated. That number will show them there are people who will fight with them for a future that is better, they have only to find them.

Hope comes in many packages. Journies start in a trillion different places.

#asks #puppygirlcock

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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The Persuaders (how minds really change)

I have always been interested in how people change their minds. I think it started with my Dad’s story — he was a conservative, religious Jew until he was 18, then he had an argument with a union activist on a picket line, and within a year had renounced his faith and become a lifelong revolutionary communist.

My dad was and is an arguer, as am I. He was raised on vigorous debate, and when he lost to someone who had arguments he couldn’t refute, he returned to the picket line, day after day, to continue the debate to learn, and ultimately to change — forever.

I, too, had an experience like this: as a baby writer, I was raised on the idea that the more copyright there was, the better I — and other creative workers — would do. Then I found myself traveling to conferences in the early 2000s with Fred von Lohmann and Cindy Cohn.

We argued about copyright the entire way across first the Pacific and then the Atlantic, and then through the streets of London and Hong Kong, for literally days on end. Within a couple of months, I had resigned from the company I cofounded and joined EFF.

I had the pleasure of discussing this with Ed Snowden when we appeared together at the NYPL in 2017.

http://media.nypl.org/audio/2017_5_3_Edward_Snowden_AUDIO.mp3

Snowden had the mother of all conversions. He started out as a gung-ho CIA and NSA operative who came from a multigenerational military family and was only prevented from joining the Special Forces when he broke both his legs during basic training.

Years later, Snowden committed the most significant act of whistleblowing in US intelligence history, risking a firing squad and ending up in seemingly permanent exile. His mind changed…a lot. He describes that process in detail in his superb 2019 memoir “Permanent Record”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/24/permanent-record-edward-snowden-and-the-making-of-a-whistleblower/

Snowden — like me, like my dad — realized that a foundational tenet of his life that he’d taken as axiomatic was actually resting on a shaky foundation. He realized that the NSA had no loyalty to the Constitution and that its leaders would brazenly lie to Congress to cover up their lawbreaking:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/leaks-from-edward-snowden-focus-attention-on-nsa-director-keith-alexander/2013/07/15/04c0eaa8-ed6c-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_story.html

In Snowden’s memoir, we get a look at the slow erosion of his certainty, the hollow it left behind, and the new ideas that rushed into that void. It’s an account of a slow, profound, deep change. It’s a change I could recognize from my own history.

After the 2016 election, a lot of people got interested in how peoples’ minds changed. It seemed that a lot of people had had their minds changed for the worse, as they fell into cultlike panics over imaginary sex rings operating out of nonexistent pizza parlor basements and equally imaginary “migration crises.”

A lot of people in my circles — progressive, technologically informed — embraced a theory of persuasion that struck me as nearly as outlandish as the beliefs it sought to explain. They said that the tech giants’ algorithms had been weaponized by evil billionaires and Steve Bannon to convert otherwise reasonable people into foaming, terrified conspiratorialists.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for the claims of Big Tech brainwashing was pretty thin. Exhibit A was always the boasts of the ad-tech sector, who routinely promised shareholders and prospective customers for advertising services that they were really good at advertising.

They claimed that their “Big Data” troves, combined with their secret algorithms, could convince anyone of anything. The thing is, critics of these companies started from the correct observation that Big Tech lied all the time. These companies lied about which data they gathered, how they processed it, whether they paid taxes, how their treated their workers…all of it.

And yet, advocates for Big Tech’s mind control rays claimed that the only time Big Tech wasn’t lying was when it was boasting to customers and investors about how totally awesome its products were. They treated these marketing materials as presumptively truthful, even though they built atop a crumbling foundation of psych research that was a mix of unreplicable junk and long-deprecated ideas like behaviorism.

This despite the fact that there were so many other, simpler explanations — for example, perhaps you believe a false claim at the top of Google’s search results because Google a) is generally trustworthy; and b) has a monopoly over search so you don’t have a customary second source that would reveal its lapses.

I found the story that Google and Facebook built a mind-control ray to sell your nephew fidget-spinners and then Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle into a QAnon so obviously wrong that I ended up writing a short book about it, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”:

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In the years since that book’s publication, I’ve only grown more dismayed at the number of smart people who want to locate the problem with conspiratorialism and rage in “dopamine loops” and other supposed Big Tech brainwashing methods.

This is doubly harmful, first, because it ignores the actual source of Big Tech’s power to harm us — monopoly — and actually makes things worse by demanding that Big Tech get bigger in order to police its users:

https://doctorow.medium.com/unspeakable-8c7bbd4974bc

But second, because when we focus on the means by which scared and vulnerable people encounter conspiratorial beliefs, we don’t focus on why so many people — including people we love and have lost — are so scared and vulnerable.

As Anna Merlan writes in her indispensable 2019 book on conspiratorialism, “Republic of Lies,” conspiratorialism sits at the juncture of real trauma and real systemic failures — people who’ve been hurt by systems stop believing in them and grasp for alternative theories to explain the world around them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

If we focus on preventing Big Tech from seeding vulnerable people with bad ideas, rather than asking why the bad ideas take root — or how better ideas can compete — then we deprioritize making a better, fairer world.

When I heard that Anand Giridharadas was releasing a book about how persuasion works, I was excited — and a little worried. Giridharadas’s 2019 book “Winners Take All” was an incredible, important, scathing takedown of elite philanthropy as a means to launder the reputations of plutocrats who gain their fortunes by creating the harms they claim their giving will save us from:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

This idea is well-crystallized in Douglas Rushkoff’s new book “Survival of the Richest,” where he calls it The Mindset: “I must make enough money to outrun the damage I’m doing by making so much money”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

(Incidentally, you can catch Rushkoff, Rebecca Giblin and me tomorrow at the Ottawa Writers Festival!)

https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2022-in-person-events/surviving-apocalyptic-economics

Having enjoyed Giridharadas’s previous book immensely, I was worried that he might have fallen into the trap of blaming the rise in conspiratorialism, “polarization” and other swift-moving currents of belief on Big Tech mind-control.

I needn’t have worried. “The Persuaders” is a fantastic, energizing and exciting book about what it means to really change peoples’ minds — how, on an individual, institutional and societal scale, new ideas take hold; and what can and should be done about the proliferation of conspiracies and hate:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/669716/the-persuaders-by-anand-giridharadas/

The book is structured as a series of case studies of remarkable “persuaders” — people who are doing hard work to change minds at every level. It opens with social justice organizers who are wrestling with the impatience of their peers with potential supporters who haven’t mastered nuanced language and with movement struggles over the ways to understand identity and class.

What does it mean for Black organizers to get involved in the Women’s March on Washington, when its early days were marred by tone-deaf and race-blind gaffes? Will involvement legitimize the idea that gender solidarity can exist without racial justice? Or will it bring new allies to a movement that sees gender and race as separate, vital issues that can’t be addressed on their own?

Though the context of the Trump election is recent, these questions aren’t new — organizers like Loretta Ross have been wrestling with questions of principle, solidarity, and effectiveness since the 1970s. In his profile of Ross, Giridharadas describes Ross’s “circles of influence” theory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T11YuEE9omQ

In this theory, a political actor divides others into “90 percenters, 75 percenters, 50 percenters, 24 percenters and 0 percenters,” based on the amount of ideological overlap they share.

For Ross a 90 percenter agrees “capitalism is problematic; racism, homophobia, transphobia and anti-immigration bias are bad.” Within these groups, the emphasis should be on the 90% agreement, not the 10% divergence. There’s no pressing need to turn 90 percenters into 100 percenters.

Next are 75 percenters, “people who share a good portion of your worldview, but not totally.” For Ross, the Girl Scouts aren’t with her on abortion rights, but they’re committed to the rights of girls and women. There’s no need to turn 75 percenters into 90 percenters — “there’s enough common ground to work on.” With 75 percenter coalitions, “you have to accept large islands of disagreement in a sea of assent.”

Next, 50 percenters, “people who share values,” but the politics derived from those values are opposite to your own. Ross’s parents are religious conservatives, but they share her values of “hard work, taking care of one another and how you ought to treat people.” With these people, the mission is to look for openings — such as when Ross connected with her father over the need for health-care reform after he fell ill and was neglected by the VA.

Then are 25 percenters, “people diametrically opposite from you,” who “don’t share a vision, a basic worldview, or fundamental values…[who] use the exact same words to mean completely different things.” As Ross says, “When I talk about patriotism and wearing a mask to keep my neighbors safe, they talk about liberty or their freedom to go get a haircut.”

There isn’t enough common ground there for easy coalition, but if there’s a project that requires support from your 25 percenters, you have to appeal to their sense of themselves as “good people.” When you’re “calling in” a racist, say, you try to get them to understand that “if you want to be a good person, you’ve got to do good things.” Remember that 25 percenters are motivated by “fear of immigrants, fear of queers, fear of this, fear of that.” You have to take their fears seriously for them to be able to listen to you. “If you dismiss their fears, they don’t listen.”

Finally come the 0 percenters, those with no common ground who must be “overpowered and overwhelmed,” not persuaded. The simple term for those people is “fascists.”

Ross’s framework really struck me and explained so much about the kinds of activist coalitions I’ve worked in for decades on digital human rights — coalitions that have mostly consisted of 75 percenters, some 50 percenters and even the odd 25 percenter. It’s a framework I knew immediately that I’d be returning to in my own work.

Giridharadas also profiles two important political figures: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, finding in them a study in contrasts that is revealing and important. Sanders has spent decades refusal to make politics personal; AOC has mixed personal biography with her critiques to make them relatable. Both approaches have persuaded millions of people, and each has changed through their political careers.

This leap from organizers to national politicians sets up the second half of the book, which discusses “messaging,” and steers clear of the pitfalls of this subject — the fast-talking ad exec’s idea that “messaging” is about bypassing people’s critical faculties, rather than engaging them.

Instead, Giridharadas presents the theories of Anat Shenker-Osorio, who works both within parties and within movements seeking to influence parties to craft messages that actually change people’s minds by convincing, not by trickery.

But just because Shenker-Osorio is interested in “convincing,” it doesn’t mean that she wants to argue with you. Her work focuses on formulas (in the best sense possible) for winning over the minds (and hearts) of persuadable people.

Her theory of change starts with that idea of “persuadability.” She rejects the idea that people in the “center” want a bit of each — rather, she says they should be viewed as undecided. If you can’t choose between a pizza and a burger, you’re unlikely to be happy with a pizzaburger. The persuader’s job is to move you to their pole, not to muddle their position into undifferentiated slurry.

To reach the “persuadables,” Shenker-Osorio says we must “animate the base to persuade the middle.” Promising (and delivering) the policies your most ardent supporters want is going to get them to mobilize, and that mobilization will send them out to convince others.

Moderates are best understood as floating around in thinly held, easily shifted beliefs. She calls these “good point” people — you tell them talking about race is necessary for political progress and they say good point! You tell them talking about race only highlights differences and makes things worse and they say good point! Good point, and also, good point!

To reach these people, you must “toggle them into the most progressive understanding they can have of the world, which is latent within them, and keeping that up, up, top of mind, so that is their default.” To get there, you need “the base to keep on repeating the set of messages that will activate those progressive narratives that already exist in people.”

Another pillar of Shenker-Osorio’s tactics is to deliberately alienate the opposition. This is something the right understands in its bones: they talk about Jewish Space Lasers and Great Replacement and we repeat it — “Can you believe the awful thing they just said?” Every time you repeat it, you bring attention to it, and some of that attention comes from people for whom it sounds just fine.

That’s a tactic the left can and should use. Rather than hiding behind milquetoast pronouncements, we can use “good riddance” statements that are meant to turn off our 0 percenters, like “a greedy few rigged the game in their favor, now too many jobs don’t pay enough for our needs, let alone enable their wants.”

One of my favorite parts of Shenker-Osorio’s doctrine (one I suppose I should learn to embrace myself) is to stop leading with problems. My inbox is full of fundraising emails from Democrats with screaming phrases like “HAS EVERYONE GIVEN UP?!?!” and “PLEADING with you to reverse this…” As Shenker-Osorio says, the core message is “This is a new crisis. This is terrible. It’s very horrible.”

This does work on people who are already convinced, to a point. But it doesn’t grow the bases. And by making people more and more fearful, you also make them more conservative. The opposition to the left isn’t the right, Shenker-Osorio says, “it’s cynicism.”

To get out the vote and mobilize a movement, you can’t promise to “reduce harm,” you have to promise to “create good.” MLK said “I have a dream” and not “I have a multi-bulleted list of policy proposals.”

Shenker-Osorio wants us to say what we’re for, not just what we’re against. Not “abolish ICE” but “create a fair immigration policy that respects all families.” She says “it’s a Republican wet dream that they have us constantly talking about everything that we oppose” because “it gives them more airtime” and “it scares the shit out of people.”

So don’t lead with the terror of the climate emergency — lead with “ensuring clean, safe air to breathe and water to drink.” Lead with “paying people enough to provide for their families,” not “fighting low wages and poor working conditions.” Instead of “the lack of paid leave,” go with “helping people be there for those they love.”

Shenker-Osorio proposes a taxonomy of “right issues,” “left issues” and contestable issues, and says that we shouldn’t frame our cause in right wing terms. When they say “We’ll cut taxes and it’s good for the economy” and we counter with “We’ll raise wages and increase consumption, which is better for the economy,” we’re still talking about the economy, and the right owns that issue (she says) (I’m not sure I agree!). When the left leads with the economy, they invite voters to prioritize the economy and yet somehow choose the party that is least associated with it. Instead, the left should talk about “people’s economic well-being,” an issue the right is weak on.

Thus: promote Medicare for All as good for all our health, not better for the national economy. Even if M4A is cheaper (and it is, much!), if you frame the goal of health policy as “efficiency” then you let your opposition sell policies that are bad for health but good for costs. Forget Obama’s “bend the cost-curve down” and go for “No matter what you look like or where you come from, when someone you love is ill or injured, you want them to get the very best care without going bankrupt.”

When Trump tries to steal an election and we call him a “strong man,” we admit that he’s “strong.” There are people who want a leader who’s “brash” and “gets stuff done.” Instead, call him “a weak loser, a bumbling idiot who is trying to steal the election” that he lost. The repeated message should weaken Trump in the eyes of his base, not strengthen him.

One contestable issue that Shenker-Osorio wants to see the left claim is “freedom” — an idea that every kind of American consistently rates as one of the highest (if not the highest) virtue. Letting the right claim freedom was a huge tactical blunder and it’s not too late to wrestle it back. The freedom to vote, reproductive freedom, freedom from police violence.

She proposes a three-stage process for constructing a message:

i. A shared value: “No matter what we look like, where we come from, or what’s in our wallets, most of us believe that people who work for living ought to earn a living.”

ii. A problem: “But today, a wealthy and powerful few try to divide us from each other so that we’ll look the other way while they pick our pockets and hand the spoils to their corporate cronies.”

iii. A solution: “By coming together, we can rewrite the rules so that the wealthiest few pay what they owe and all of us have what we need for generations to come.”

Giridharadas calls this “a callout sandwich” — “a generous heap of callout between two thick slices of call in.”

There’s persuadables, and then there’s persuadables. Giridharadas profiles Diane Benscoter, an ex-cult member who has some experience helping to “deprogram” people who’ve been lost to cults, and who has taken on an interest in the origins of cultlike beliefs. For Benscoter, it’s not enough to talk about a generalized psychological vulnerability that we all share, nor is it enough to focus on the Svengali powers of charismatic leaders.

Instead, like Merlan, Bescoter delves into the particular life circumstances of people who fall into cults that make them susceptible to cultlike beliefs — and what kinds of discussions and interventions can create the seeds of doubt that will eventually lead them — like her — to leave the cult behind. She advocates for training therapists and counselors to recognize the warning signs of cultlike beliefs.

More ambitious still are the plans of John Cook, who created a taxonomy of the ways in which conspiratorialists make suckers out of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#denialism

Cook believes that if you teach people these tactics early (as he is trying to do, through fun classroom games) that they will be “vaccinated” against these tactics later in life. We may get our backs up when someone tries to convince us that our cherished ideas are wrong, but we also hate being played for fools.

The book ends with a chapter on “deep canvassing,” a technique that has door-knockers spend half an hour with each subject, even ones who say they agree with them, as a means of not just changing people’s minds but motivating them to action.

Deep canvassing is a fascinating subject. The first blockbuster study on it had to be retracted when it was revealed as an academic fraud, but the debunkers who discovered the fraud ran the experiment again and found the evidence supported the technique — in other words, there was no reason for the fraud.

Following Arizona canvassers — many of them undocumented immigrants — as they seek to mobilize voters to call Kyrsten Sinema and get her to vote for a replacement to DACA is a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall glimpse of how minds can change in realtime, and how they can’t.

By bookending his book with activists trying to find common ground with the wider public, Giridharadas offers evidence-based hope that it’s possible to make a difference, to win the day without losing your soul. As we barrel towards an uncertain midterms, books like “The Persuaders” present a roadmap for building coalitions, taking power, and changing the world.

[Image ID: The cover of the Knopf edition of 'The Persuaders.']

#pluralistic

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revelinginthedarkrooms · 2 years

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Saying this once and on this blog because the topic is literally the most relevant here—

If you think even for a SECOND that censorship of AO3 won’t include openly queer spaces, you’re so fucking wrong it hurts.

Does nobody remember the Purges of the early-to-late 2000’s? Does nobody remember the FanFiction.net Purge? The Tumblr Porn Ban? Fanfic history is about to repeat itself if we don’t step up to try and stop it.

Censorship of any kind will not end with just the issue that it claims to fix. It will encompass everything in the name of “dear heavens, won’t someone please think of the children!”

That’s not to say I don’t think removing any content is bad - there are circumstances that allow for content removal simply because it’s too gross or too disturbing for the general public’s eye. But you need to understand that they will not stop once it’s gone.

There are already ways to report the nasty shit and get it taken off the site. There are already ways you can avoid it if you feel very strongly about it or if it’s a triggering subject. As an sa and sh survivor myself there are certain topics that I always have filtered just for my own mental health. And guess what? It works. I’ve never come across something poorly tagged that triggers relapses. AO3’s tagging system works.

It won’t just be the problematic elements such as cp or graphic guro. It will spread to queer fic, stories of trans discovery, even of someone just living their life in a fur suit because they find enjoyment out of it! Your niches will not be safe! Nobody will be!

Maybe I’m just jaded and upset because I was old enough to remember - and experience - the bans. I remember how devastating it was to self-expressive works of art, to people just writing smut because they want to.

Do you honestly want the site you love to be so censored the fucking CCP looks like a paradigm of freedom of expression? Do you honestly not care that hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people’s work, majorly non-problematic, will be affected?

If you’re about to bemoan the fact that this sounds super melodramatic and that I’m ‘overreacting’, then fine. Good for you. But the issue can not be overstated. We are heading in a truly dark direction of fandom history that unfortunately holds echoes of what we’ve gone through before. And the fact that some are defending TG’s desires? Even knowing she’s a bad faith actor who doesn’t give a shit about fandom culture? Makes me want to throw up.

Anybody about to accuse me of being a pedophile just because I don’t support breaking something that’s already designed - and proven - to work for those who want to use it is very welcome to just block me. I am not a pedophile for wanting a (legally sound) smut-safe space. I’ve seen y’all throwing that around like a frisbee at a picnic, and let me just say as an actual abuse survivor I think you’re full of shit and you need to get off the internet.

Do the right thing. Do what you can to stop Tiffany G from being elected.

Rant over. I’m fucking exhausted.

#ao3 #censorship #tiffany g #ao3 culture #ao3 censorship #fandom problems #she speaks #otw elections #purity culture

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dietraumerei · 2 months

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Weekly Writing and Reading Update

Hello, I scheduled something fairly social and intensive for BOTH yesterday and today and let me tell you I am never doing that again. (I am very grateful that I was doing naturalist classes with a friend both days and she absolutely understood when I had to bounce early today.)

50/50 on if I fake sick and take tomorrow off, it was a wonderful weekend but I just feel....deeply unrested :/

ANYWAY

Writing

Evening/Morning Well this was an unexpected surprise! There's not a whole lot there in this AU, but I think for fun, sexy one-offs, I'll enjoy it. This story was pure joy to write.

Like a Garden In The Spring I just have to close out a scene and I think I'll be done the next chapter

Swords and Ploughshares; Signs and Sigils UGH, I hate how blocked I am on this, but I think it's clearing, and hopefully I'll figure out what happens next? I really love and miss this AU, and should devote some proper time to it.

Also I still have my lil home-made prompt generator and it's very easy to think of ideas, harder to write them, especially as short(er) one-offs, lol.

Reading

I finished Means of Ascent, the second of Caro's LBJ biographies. It's pretty thrilling -- I literally stayed up late one night to, uh, learn exactly how Johnson stole an election -- but is also the weakest of the books. Some of this is because it's Johnson's wilderness years which are him at his absolute worst (and he was an astonishingly horrible person), and some is because Caro does a very weird thing where he utterly lionizes LBJ's senate race opponent Coke Stevenson who did admittedly have a very romantic Old West/Old Texas past but ALSO, VERY NOTABLY was virulently racist and an avowed segregationist, but you don't learn this until the afterword. It's a very weird choice to leave all of that out, and it's not really how we do historiography anymore. That said, I did get through this in record time, as it's also the shortest of the books at only 506 pages and I'm genuinely looking forward to Master of the Senate, where Johnson finally has enough power to do interesting things with it. Also that final book is gonna be like 2000 pages long, good god.

#weekly update

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birdsthatsingaftermidnight · 2 years

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The Current UK Prime Minister is a Shitweasel and the Next One Could Well Be Worse OR I've Noticed A Trend About The Five Most Recent People Allegedly Running The Country

Every PM we've had since the turn of the millennium is in competition to be the Worst Prime Minister of the 21st Century.

Let's take a look.

Tony Blair (1997–2007) - Illegal war in Iraq.

Gordon Brown (2007–10) - There are genuinely only two things I can remember him doing. As Chancellor under Tony Blair, he announced that there was an end to the "boom and bust" economy and that things would remain gloriously boom in that department forever more. Then, as Prime Minister, the country went into the deepest recession it's experienced since the Second World War. The second thing was he lost the election in 2010.

David Cameron (2010–16 ) - But don't worry! Here's David! He gave the country a referendum on whether or not to leave the EU and didn't have any plan whatsoever as to what to do should the Leave vote win, and so quit instead of dealing with it.

Theresa May (2016–19) - decided to trigger the two year deadline to get everything sorted for leaving the EU without having anything whatsoever planned for how to do this and no agreement inside her own party on how to do it, never mind in the rest of the House. In order to get some sort of upper-hand over Boris, she held a snap election to prove she had the support of the country and destroyed her party's healthy majority instead! Basically, she's like me when I had to write an essay. I knew the deadline was approaching but I didn't actually do any work until the week it was due. Only instead of giving herself seven days to write a 2000 word essay based on book study, seminars and lecture notes, it was leaving the EU without any sort of agreement in place because the opposition wouldn't vote for anything she put forward and she no longer commanded a healthy majority so it really mattered if any Tories voted no.

Boris Johnson (2019– ) - I don't have enough to time to list everything. I have to sleep at some point. Basically, Boris thinks Boris is a charismatic, popular head of state who just needs everyone to stop harping on about how he literally broke the law and got caught and fined for it and literally lies to parliament whenever he gets into a sticky situation and assumes everyone will believe him. When they don't believe him because of all the evidence proving what he did is abundant, resoundingly clear, and pretty much watertight, he seems to think that because he's said sorry to the House we should just forgive him and let him get on with being the charismatic, popular head of state he could truly be if only people would stop saying things like "How could you give a government job to a person you'd been warned was a sexual predator" and "sorry, could you explain one more time how you thought it was a work meeting when there was cake, wine, and people singing happy birthday?" and even "So the guy was caught breaking the rules about How To Be An MP Without Taking Bribes and you literally tried to change those rules so you wouldn't have to fire him?"

The rats are deserting the sinking ship Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Health both resigned today, but it's okay. He's gone and appointed a person who once claimed over £5,000 in expenses - paid for, as the say, by the British tax payers - in order to pay the electricity bill for his stables. Sure, it was in 2013, but if you can't tell that your stable block's electricity bill is on the same bill as your house's bill because you never thought "Ooh, that looks like quite a large number for the electricity needs of a second home that I need to use so I can attend parliament and thus can claim expenses on" which has its own damn stable block my god you can't buy a house in London without several wealthy relatives dying and leaving you all their wealth and his second home has a stable block and we're paying to subsidise this sort of thing then honestly, is he the sort of chap we want in charge of the treasury just as we're barrelling head long into a recession? I would argue not.

Boris Johnson has never, since being in the public eye, broken up with a partner. Even the wife undergoing cancer treatment that he was cheating on with his current wife had to deal with both that and actually being the one to point out that the relationship wasn't working. Apparently he also feels the same way about his job. He will never break up with being Prime Minister. Let's hope the Tory party actually gets rid of him as their leader, because it's either that or waiting for the next election and hoping like hell that the country has come to its senses and will vote them out. I'm not hopeful, because everyone on this list but Gordon Brown has actually won an election. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

I despair.

#UK politics #Boris Johnson #our prime minister is the worst #and that really is saying something #politics #despair

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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Oh look, it's exactly what I was saying in my Bush v. Gore explainer post that went pseudo-viral and got a lot of people Big Mad at me in the notes for pointing out, even in briefest passing, that Nader took votes away from Gore and in an election as close as 2000, that probably cost him the presidency. According to my independent math, Gore would have netted approximately 18.9k extra votes in Florida in a Nader-less election, so 20k fits almost exactly in that ballpark.

By the way, the guy who liked that tweet/posted the original question, Michael Beschloss, is an acclaimed and prolific presidential historian. Which means that we are on the same wavelength here as people who study history professionally and draw similar conclusions from it, and also that this news of "former Republicans and Democrats forming a 'centrist' third party!" has both of us facepalming, groaning, and wondering if people really never learn anything. Also, this so-called Shiny New Centrist Party literally has... no policies....? Just a stupid slogan?? ("How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward.") As if they're hoping (they are hoping) that you'll notice it makes, uh, no fucking sense.

Milquetoast Moderation!!! is generally bad as a political strategy anyway, since a) it pleases nobody, especially in a hyper-polarized environment, and b) acting like the far left and the far right are equally dangerous extremists, who should both be equally shunned, is an absolutely idiotic claim that casts serious doubt on whether these clowns want to do anything aside from continue to suck votes away from Democratic candidates. In a political environment where one party has gone full masks-off fascist death cult and won't even commit to protecting BIRTH CONTROL, not to even mention that they don't want to provide veterans with health benefits no matter how much they claim to love the military, anyone who looks at that, looks at the Democrats, and screams THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME, ONLY WE HAVE THE CENTRIST ANSWER!! should not be given the time of day.

There are far left elements in society, and as I have posted about, they're the usually terminally online types who have stupid ideas on Twitter and discourage civic engagement in others. Yes, those people are dangerous, but that is not at all what is at issue here or what these New Centrist Third Party-ers (oh Andrew Yang, you perpetual disappointment) are reacting to. If you actually think the current institutional Democratic party is too far left and this is bad, then you want to maintain the system pretty much exactly as it is, while slapping on a nice coat of "socially tolerant!" paint to attract a few ex-Republicans who have finally hit their limit with the crazymaking Christofascists and think the most important thing about politics is that it should be "nice!" and "respectable!" Who cares if we actually fix anything; gotta make sure the kids on the playground are being civil!

Anyway, as ever when it comes to so-called Moral Third Party Alternatives in the current American political system, this is a profoundly stupid idea, could split the anti-authoritarian vote in 2024 and thus elect said authoritarian (as Beschloss also worried about), and literally... offers... no strategic plan. On top of its false equivalence (Republicans want to destroy democracy, Democrats explain their pronouns and what they are wearing to blind and visually impaired people, EQUALLY BAD DON'T VOTE FOR EITHER!), it reinforces the media "bothsiderism" that is already destroying the country and any accurate coverage of Biden's presidency, legitimizes right-wing and Online Leftist propaganda alike, and deliberately undermines the only actual organised political faction (the Democratic Party) that is currently keeping outright fascism in the USA at bay. Don't fall for it.

#hilary for ts #politics for ts #history #american history

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scarlethyena · 9 months

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Fuck it, it's September 11th so it's time to make a rambly post talking about the history surrounding the twin towers getting blown up. I'll start by saying that I don't feel the same connection to the event that some others do, mostly because I have no memory of it. I was born in 2000, so I was technically alive for the event, and my mom tells me that I was in the living room with her when she first saw the announcements on tv, but I would've just turned 1 so I have no memory of the event itself whatsoever. But even if not for that, the events surrounding it and the way it has been used to justify American jingoism far outweighs the tragedy itself. This isn't me trying to play "suffering olympics" or whatever, it goes without saying that it was a tragic loss of life, but it didn't happen in a vacuum and is, in fact, deeply entwined with American imperialism.

That's actually one thing that gets me about the whole "9/11 was an inside job" thing. I don't believe that's true, but only because I haven't seen any evidence of it. That theory is actually plausible simply because the US government once planned something similar with Operation Northwoods. Basically it was a proposed plan by the CIA back in the 1960s, where they planned to blow up a US embassy then blame it on the Cubans, at which point they would have a justification to invade the country. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is documented information! Look up the name of the operation right now, you'll get all kinds of results giving more details. And while they dropped that plan, it goes to show that the US is 100% willing to kill its own people in order to fabricate a justification for war. I just don't think this was the case for 9/11 in particular.

Regardless of all the conspiracy theories people have come up with, one thing that is undeniable is that the 9/11 attacks were a direct consequence of American imperialism. Many of the people involved in the attacks had, in some way, previously worked with the US government. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example, the CIA poured money and weapons into the Mujaheddin fighters on account of the fact that they were fighting communists (if you want guns and a pay check from Uncle Sam, that's literally the only thing you have to do). Osama bin Laden himself was involved in this conflict too, despite later becoming the government's public enemy #1. To give some other examples, Saudi Arabia wouldn't even exist if not for western support. Pakistan, another longtime ally in the region, occupies an area originally considered part of India, up until the partition of the country that had been orchestrated by Britain. Looking at the whole, what we call "Islamic terrorism" is something that had the full backing of the US, up until said terrorists started going against western interests. People often ask "but what about the terrorists?!" when people advocate for the US pulling out of West Asia but ironically, the US is the whole reason these groups even exist. On top of CIA backing, American intervention has led to nothing but destabilization and ruin, which does nothing but perpetuate the rise of such groups trying to fill the power vacuum in the wake of the chaos. I'm often reminded of what Malcolm X said regarding the Kennedy assassination. "The chickens are coming home to roost".

There is something almost poetic about September 11th also being the anniversary of the CIA-backed coup in Chile, which ousted the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. Americans mourn their own, while remaining ignorant or uncaring about the things their government had done on that very same day just a few decades prior.

#scarletposts #fuck the usa #marxism leninism #anti imperialism #anti america #deaths of innocents used to justify the deaths of even more innocents #imperialism is a vicious cycle #history #long post

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deadpresidents · 1 year

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Did you ever work on any other political campaigns besides Obama?

The first campaign I ever worked on was as a volunteer on Gray Davis's 1998 (successful!) campaign for Governor of California. I was young and had all the time in the world, so I volunteered tons of hours that year. I got into it to support the Davis campaign and most of my time was spent doing stuff for it, but I did end up doing various things throughout the 1998 campaign cycle for the California Democratic Party local headquarters and Michela Alioto's campaign for California Secretary of State, too.

The 2000 election was the first Presidential election I was ever eligible to vote in, so I was really excited to get involved since I had always been so interested in the Presidency. Most of you guys are probably too young to have any idea who I'm talking about, but I was a big supporter of Bill Bradley, who was the progressive alternative to the frontrunner, Vice President Al Gore. For those of you who don't know, Bradley served in the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, but earlier in his life he was a Hall of Fame basketball player in college and the NBA. I thought he was going to take the world by storm, upset Al Gore, beat George W. Bush, and lead us into the new millennium. I remember being so thrilled because I was "invited" to volunteer at a fundraiser for Bradley at the house of Geoff Petrie, another former NBA All-Star who was running the Sacramento Kings at the time. But I didn't end up going -- I'm not even sure if it ended up taking place -- because Al Gore literally swept every single Democratic primary and Bradley was out of the race by Super Tuesday.

In 2002, I volunteered again for Governor Davis's (also successful!) re-election campaign and also spent a lot of time working on behalf of a local school bond measure because my real job at the time was at an elementary school that was going to be directly benefited by the measure. But I was also 22 years old at the time, so I volunteered less and was going out and being a menace to society most nights much more frequently.

I didn't do much of anything during the 2004 election cycle. As much as I was hoping to see someone defeat President Bush that year, I just couldn't get excited for any of the Democratic candidates. I was indifferent to John Kerry, and I think I started off supporting General Wesley Clark before switching to Howard Dean. I started to get a little more into things once things started looking interesting for Howard Dean, but his campaign fell apart for one of the dumbest reasons we've ever basically disqualified a candidate for. After that, we were left with John Kerry, who was still uninspiring and unfortunately decided to pick Husband-of-the-Century John Edwards as his running mate. It was a rough election cycle -- and, the craziest thing is that John Kerry still almost won!

And, of course, I was all-in for Obama in 2008 and went to work for his campaign just a few days after he made his formal announcement.

(I recognize that your question could have been answered with a simple yes or no, so sorry if that was more information than you required.)

#Politics #Elections #Campaigns #Political Campaigns #1998 Election #2000 Election #2002 Election #2004 Election

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beevean · 2 years

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Sadly the reason I don't like The Geek Critique too much is that even when very aware of old 90s and 2000s fandom views, his own bias rooted in similar nostalgia still exudes in his opinions.

"Hey, look at all these comments in 1994 that note CD being convoluted, with 3K being a far better game"

Proceeds to act like it's the second best Classic game, despite having far worse issues than Adv 2's level design, and time travel being garbage

Same with the bias to and against Jam and 06 respectively

-Jam he's erroneously wrong on why it was made. It wasn't a love letter to unionize American and Japan canon, it was bluntly stated by Naka to be cuz Japan literally didn't know what Sonic was given absence on the Saturn, and Sonic in general not having good footing at all on Saturn. The other issue is the PC ports of CD and 3K already did that, by translating manual lore unlike Genesis release, so he accidentally discredited them, AND accidentally discredited Adventure in further unifying canon. It was just gushing praise for what is literally a game collection that barely swayed western views, instead reinforcing the shock when Sonic got green eyes because no one paid attention to his character design evolving after 1993

-06 similarly, negative biases against it fully, almost no positive mentioned. It was a 40 min rant on how Sonic's reputation died, when ironically as his notes on the fandom showed, the elitist mindset was already toxifying Sonic's rep before

He also completely missed on why fans and casuals jumped ship; the fanbase was 300% way too into a console rivalry that stopped being promoted after 1995. They also had the incorrect interpretation of Sonic being a sole lonewolf "bad dude". Noticeably Sonic 2 sold way less than 1 (7.55 vs 22.22 mil units) due to this and console packs, despite being a better game. The addition of Tails dissented them from the ad slam campaign for the public, and for those that stayed, then got lumped into Satam nostalgia as 3Ks release was split and delayed, and CD was on hard to obtain hardware. With 32x being a failure, and Saturn era not having much, these fans soon became elitist and rabid to Nintendo's successes, hung on to Sonic 1 and 2 very heavily, then also became rabid to themselves when some Weebs wanted to act superior in having exclusive stuff

Jam's compilation didn't help. They just got a compilation of stuff they already played to death, bar 3K

When Adventure came out, it did several things

-The casual public and fans not caring for Sonic 1994-1997 at all now are suddenly alienated to design, despite changing since 1993

-Satam and Archie fans now forced to accept that 1991-1993 US canon no longer mattered

-Weebs now no longer had exclusive access to unique stuff since canon was unified, localization differences aside

And finally, fans NOW had to give a cent to the game's story and character personalities

And so we ended with even more turmoil, which skyrocketed when Sega discontinued being hardware

So seeing Sonic on this killed many of the 90s/early 2000 crowd, and seeing Advance take cues from Adventure 1/2 hurt their """purist""" garbage opinions. Sprite comics dominated the web, elitist forums like Retro and Sonic Cult, even modding became elitist retro havens with this mindset

Heroes they glossed over it being made to appease them and attract newcomers, as they already made up their mind to hating new none 2D

Shadow was made to appease the gunho crowd, and failed

TCG is so very naive on how his own nostalgia affects his views, even the thumbnails progressively got more clickbaity and biased.

The fanbase ultimately will never recover, especially when Sonictubers just villify nostalgia bias, or blatant misinfo if it sounds convenient/coddles said nostalgia. Sadly no one can call him out; he's too big

TLDR: I find him mid and waddling in nostalgia

Anyway, how's your day?

I'm still processing the elections, thanks for asking 👍

It's undeniable that TGC is biased, that much is true, and he has all the hallmarks of an Adventure fan - his most recent Rush video basically starts with him complaining about the state of the franchise in 2005 lol. I can't think of a Sonic reviewer, or hell any reviewer in general, that is 100% fair and impartial. I judge how they come across with their bias :P for example, J has straight up admitted that he was one of the most influencial Youtubers in smearing the Meta era and its stories, and I can't stand Garrulous and his perpetually cynical tone as if he's forced to talk about Sonic at gunpoint, while I appreciate TGC and Implant Games for explaining themselves well and at least trying to motivate their opinions. (although apparently IG made a mess with his SA2 video, shame)

Admittedly I haven't watched all of his reviews, I skipped Heroes because I like the game enough and I skipped '06 because what else can you say about that one? And I didn't even know that he made a video about Jam lmao. Your explanation is very informative, thank you :)

I agree with your last paragraph. I think Adventure fans forgot how it was back in the 2000s when the "adults" were Classic fans and the Adventure fans were the kiddies with cringe tastes that didn't understand what Sonic was all about. So now they grew up, and it's their turn to make fun of the kiddies who like the Meta Era and don't understand what Sonic was all about. I'm tired of this "back in my day" attitude because it feels so myopic.

#sonic the hedgehog #long post

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