#margin lever

[goshyesvintageads]

Royal McBee Corp, 1959

[malcolmschmitz]

The Insider and Outsider Detectives

So there's a lot of discourse about detectives floating around, ever since 2020 shifted a lot of people's Views on the police. Everyone likes a good mystery story, but no one seems to know what to make of a detective protagonist- especially if they're a cop. And everyone who cares about this kind of thing likes to argue over whether detective stories hold up the existing order or subvert it. Are they inherently copaganda? Are they subversive commentary on the uselessness of the police?

I think they can be both. And I think there's a framework we can use to look at individual detectives, and their stories, that illuminates the space between "a show like LAPD straight-up exists to make the cops look good" and "Boy Detective is a gender to me, actually".

So. You can sort most detectives in fiction into two boxes, based on their role in society: the Insider Detective and the Outsider Detective.

The Insider Detective is a part of the society they're investigating in, and has access to at least some of the levers of power in that society. They can throw money at their problems, or call in reinforcements, and if they contact the authorities, those authorities will take them seriously. Even the people they're investigating usually treat them with respect. They're a nice normal person in a nice normal world, thank you very much; they're not particularly eccentric. You could describe them as "sensible". And crime is a threat to that normal world. It's an intrusion that they have to fight off. An Insider Detective solving a crime is restoring the way things ought to be.

Some clear-cut examples of Insider Detectives are the Hardy Boys (and their father Fenton), Soichiro "Light's Dad" Yagami, or Father Brown. Many police procedural detectives are Insider Detectives, though not all.

The Outsider Detective, in contrast, is not a part of the society they're investigating in. They're often a marginalized person- they're neurodivergent, or elderly, or foreign, or a woman in a historical setting, or a child. They don't have access to any of the levers of power in their world- the authorities may not believe them (and might harass them), the people they're investigating think they're a joke (and can often wave them off), and they're unlikely to have access to things like "a forensics lab". The Outsider Detective is not respectable, and not welcome here- and yet they persist and solve the crime anyway. A lot of the time, when an Outsider Detective solves a crime, it's less "restoring the world to its rightful state" and more "exposing the rot in the normal world, and forcing it to change."

Some clear-cut examples of Outsider Detectives are Dirk Gently, Philip Marlowe, Sammy Keyes, or Mello from Death Note.

Now, here's the catch: these aren't immutable categories, and they are almost never clear-cut. The same detective can be an Insider Detective in one setting and an Outsider Detective in another. A good writer will know this, and will balance the two to say something about power and society.

Tumblr's second-favourite detective Benoit Blanc is a great example of this. Theoretically, Mr. Blanc should be an Insider Detective- he's a world-famous detective, he collaborates with the police, he's odd but respectable. But because of the circumstances he's in- investigating the ultra-rich, who live in their own horrid little bubbles- he comes off as the Outsider Detective, exposing the rot and helping everyone get what they deserve. And that's deliberate. There is no world where a nice, slightly eccentric, mildly fruity, fairly privileged guy like Benoit Blanc should be an outsider. But the turbo-rich live in such an insular world, full of so much contempt for anyone who isn't Them, that even Benoit Blanc gets left out in the cold. It's a scathing political statement, if you think about it.

But even a writer who isn't trying to Say Something About The World will still often veer between making their detective an Insider Detective and an Outsider Detective, because you can tell different kinds of stories within those frameworks. Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote is a really good example of this-- she's a respectable older lady, whose runaway success as a mystery novelist gives her access to some social cachet. Key word: some.

Within her hometown of Cabot Cove, Fletcher is an Insider Detective. She's good friends with the local sheriff, she's incredibly familiar with the town's social dynamics, she can call in a favour from basically anyone... but she's still a little old lady. The second she leaves town, she might run into someone who likes her books... but she's just as likely to run into a police officer who thinks she's crazy or a perp who thinks she's an easy target. She has the incredibly tenuous social power that belongs to a little old lady that everyone likes- and when that's gone, she's incredibly vulnerable.

This is also why a lot of Sherlock Holmes adaptations tend to be so... divisive. Holmes is all things to all people, and depending on which stories you choose to focus on, you can get a very different detective. If you focus on the stories where Holmes collaborates with the police, on the stories with that very special kind of Victorian racism, or the stories where Holmes is fighting Moriarty, you've got an Insider Detective. If you focus on the stories where Holmes is consulting for a Nice Young Lady, on the stories where Holmes' neurodivergence is most prominent, or on his addictions, you've got an Outsider Detective.

Finally, a lot of buddy detective stories have an Insider Detective and an Outsider Detective sharing the spotlight. Think Scully and Mulder, or Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. This lets the writer play with both pieces of the thematic puzzle at the same time, without sacrificing the consistency of their detective's character.

Back to my original point: if you like detective fiction, you probably like one kind of story better than the other. I know I personally really prefer Outsider Detective Stories to Insider Detective Stories- and while I can enjoy a good Insider Detective (I'd argue that Brother Cadfael, my beloved, is one most of the time), I seek out detectives who don't quite fit into the world they live in more often than not.

And if that's the vibe you're looking for... you're not going to run into a lot of police stories. It's absolutely possible to make a story where a cop (or, even better, an FBI agent) is an Outsider Detective-- Nick Angel from Hot Fuzz was originally going to be one of my 'clear-cut examples' until I remembered that he is, in fact, legally a cop! But a cop who's an Outsider Detective is going to be spending a lot of time butting heads with local law enforcement, to the point where he doesn't particularly feel like one. He's probably going to get fired at some point, and even if his badge gets reinstated, he's going to struggle with his place in the world. And a lot of Outsider Detective stories where the detective is a cop or an FBI agent are intensely political, and not in a conservative way- they have Things To Say about small towns, clannishness, and the injustice that can happen when a Pillar Of The Community does something wrong and everyone looks the other way. (Think Twin Peaks or The Wicker Man.)

Does this mean Insider Detective Stories are Bad Copaganda and Outsider Detective Stories are Good Revolutionary Stories? No. If you take one thing away from this post, please make it that these categories are morally neutral. There are Outsider Detective stories about cops who are Outsiders because they really, really want an excuse to shoot people. There are Insider Detective stories about little old people who are trying to keep misapplied justice from hurting the kids in their community. Neither of these types of stories are good or bad on their own. They're different kinds of storytelling framework and they serve different purposes.

But, if you find yourself really gravitating to certain kinds of mysteries and really put off by other kinds, and you're trying to express why, this might be a framework that's useful for you. If your gender is Boy Detective, but you absolutely loathe cop stories? This might be why.

(PS: @anim-ttrpgs was posting about their game Eureka again, and that got me to make this post- thank them if you're happy to finally see it. Eureka is designed as an Outsider Detective simulator, and so the rules actively forbid you from playing as a cop- they're trying to make it so that you have limited resources and have to rely on your own competence. It's a fantastic looking game and I can't recommend it enough.)

(PPS: I'm probably going to come back to this once I finish Psycho-Pass with my partner, because they said I'd probably have Thoughts.)

(PPPS: Encyclopedia Brown is an Insider Detective, and that's why no one likes him. This is my most controversial detective take.)

[reasonsforhope]

"For the first time in almost 60 years, a state has formally overturned a so-called “right to work” law, clearing the way for workers to organize new union locals, collectively bargain, and make their voices heard at election time.

This week, Michigan finalized the process of eliminating a decade-old “right to work” law, which began with the shift in control of the state legislature from anti-union Republicans to pro-union Democrats following the 2022 election. “This moment has been decades in the making,” declared Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber. “By standing up and taking their power back, at the ballot box and in the workplace, workers have made it clear Michigan is and always will be the beating heart of the modern American labor movement.”

[Note: The article doesn't actually explain it, so anyway, "right to work" laws are powerful and deceptively named pieces of anti-union legislation. What right to work laws do is ban "union shops," or companies where every worker that benefits from a union is required to pay dues to the union. Right-to-work laws really undermine the leverage and especially the funding of unions, by letting non-union members receive most of the benefits of a union without helping sustain them. Sources: x, x, x, x]

In addition to formally scrapping the anti-labor law on Tuesday [February 13, 2024], Michigan also restored prevailing-wage protections for construction workers, expanded collective bargaining rights for public school employees, and restored organizing rights for graduate student research assistants at the state’s public colleges and universities. But even amid all of these wins for labor, it was the overturning of the “right to work” law that caught the attention of unions nationwide...

Now, the tide has begun to turn—beginning in a state with a rich labor history. And that’s got the attention of union activists and working-class people nationwide...

At a time when the labor movement is showing renewed vigor—and notching a string of high-profile victories, including last year’s successful strike by the United Auto Workers union against the Big Three carmakers, the historic UPS contract victory by the Teamsters, the SAG-AFTRA strike win in a struggle over abuses of AI technology in particular and the future of work in general, and the explosion of grassroots union organizing at workplaces across the country—the overturning of Michigan’s “right to work” law and the implementation of a sweeping pro-union agenda provides tangible evidence of how much has changed in recent years for workers and their unions...

By the mid-2010s, 27 states had “right to work” laws on the books.

But then, as a new generation of workers embraced “Fight for 15” organizing to raise wages, and campaigns to sign up workers at Starbucks and Amazon began to take off, the corporate-sponsored crusade to enact “right to work” measures stalled. New Hampshire’s legislature blocked a proposed “right to work” law in 2017 (and again in 2021), despite the fact that the measure was promoted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu. And in 2018, Missouri voters rejected a “right to work” referendum by a 67-33 margin.

Preventing anti-union legislation from being enacted and implemented is one thing, however. Actually overturning an existing law is something else altogether.

But that’s what happened in Michigan after 2022 voting saw the reelection of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a labor ally, and—thanks to the overturning of gerrymandered legislative district maps that had favored the GOP—the election of Democratic majorities in the state House and state Senate. For the first time in four decades, the Democrats controlled all the major levers of power in Michigan, and they used them to implement a sweeping pro-labor agenda. That was a significant shift for Michigan, to be sure. But it was also an indication of what could be done in other states across the Great Lakes region, and nationwide.

“Michigan Democrats took full control of the state government for the first time in 40 years. They used that power to repeal the state’s ‘right to work’ law,” explained a delighted former US secretary of labor Robert Reich, who added, “This is why we have to show up for our state and local elections.”"

-via The Nation, February 16, 2024

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Gun Witch I

AKA "Letters tries to write a Western." Shoutout to @inbabylontheywept, who saw the first draft of this bad boy. Part 1 of ???, so stay tuned!

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that they are singular tools. They are skeleton keys that can only ever open a single kind of lock. They are hammers that, in the moment before they have completed their swing, transmute whatever lies at that swing's endpoint into a nail. They are levers by which the universe acts upon itself, levers that can only produce a single kind of reaction, a single kind of product. 

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that they can only do harm, the greatest harm, that singularly final harm that renders everything before it paltry. Temporary. They are tools which can only escalate a conflict; even the clearing of leather is an act that signals a terrible trajectory, a course that will not yield to even the soundest of rhetoric. 

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that many people still think of them as tools for preventing violence, for halting bloodshed. They think that you can use a gun to posture, to intimidate. The issue there, of course, is that an implied threat can only live in Schrodinger’s box for so long before people start itching to open it. The issue there, of course, is that a gun is no passive participant to a scene like that: nothing wants to see implication become action more than the gun.

Marigold’s first words in this broke down, backwater, dead-on-its-feet town were the single greatest kindness she was still capable of showing. 

“I have held a gun from the cradle: if any of you feel as though violence against me might get you anything worth getting, disregard those feelings as swiftly as you are able. I am a Gun Witch, and I have yet to find myself out-drawn.”

Her second words, uttered after a long pause in that silent, waiting bar, were far simpler.

“Barkeep,” she said. “What’s the closest thing you can make to a Mule?”

She had tucked herself into a corner booth–its occupants had swiftly vacated as they calculated her trajectory–with a drink that might’ve been able to call a Mule its distant ancestor. It had something like vodka, and something that might’ve been near ginger in some cabinet somewhere, and it had some sort of citrus. It certainly wasn’t good. Marigold didn’t really care. 

She sipped from the glass she had been given in slow, methodical pulls, a careful eye turned inward to watch for the first signs of creeping dull. She hoped desperately that this place would listen to her, would recognize the old and familiar violence in her voice, would mind their own fucking business and keep to their own fucking drinks. She had spent a long time out in the sands between towns and was more than happy to avail herself of the drink, the marginally cooler air, the sounds of people. The piano player wasn’t even half bad–she didn’t recognize the melody, and the keys were horribly out of tune, but they played with an easy smile and practiced hands, and it was remarkably easy to imagine that things were normal. 

She didn’t look up from her drink when they walked in. Four of them, rough looking, shabby dusters and boots that hadn’t seen polish in an age. She didn’t look up as the bar started to hush. She didn’t look up as the piano player started to falter, fingers stuttering over the ivories. She kept her head down, hat brought low over her eyes, and she thought, No, go! Go out! Go away! None of you have to do this! You can all still live! Go! She was half finished with her Mule (this startled her–she should’ve drained it all by now. How long had she been here?), watching the last few bits of ice slowly melt into the remainder when those four rough looking young men decided they wanted to die.

“Hey! You!” He was a little on the scrawny side, with a voice still figuring out its range. The four of them had started walking towards her table, and as they passed through the bar other patrons started to flee out into the evening. “You the one who announced herself earlier today?” The other three fanned out behind him, and Marigold guessed he was their leader. They were all around the same height, with a slightly malnourished edge to them; the one who fanned out to the right could’ve been a downright intimidating fellow with a few more years of good eating in him. 

Marigold didn’t say anything. Didn’t really look up from her glass, either. The ice had melted all the way. If anyone had been looking at her glass they’d have seen the condensation on it, thicker than it should’ve been in that air-conditioned room. Nobody was, though. At her silence he stepped up a little closer, his voice a little sharper.

“You deaf, woman? You hear what I asked you? Cause if you make me repeat myself, I swear to G-”

“You should watch yourself, throwing around names like that.” Marigold’s voice came out in a slow, scarred exhalation, the first crackling arms of some great inferno. “We should all be so thankful that He isn’t here.”

“Oh, so she can speak! And she can do it in riddles, can she?”

“Riddles? Lord have mercy if you think I’ve woven a riddle for you. See, if I had spoken to you in riddles,” she said, and now she tipped her head up just a fraction, “They might’ve frightened some sense into you four, and you’d have all gone scampering away.” The glass was running with sweat now, water soaking into the wood beneath it. “No. I’ve spoken plain, boy.”

The boy bristled at that, his eyes darkening. They were a deep, dirty green, and Marigold thought they must’ve been brilliant in the right light. He took another step forward and twitched his duster to the side: the plain, worn, poorly-kept handle of a revolver glinted meanly in the lamplight. The bar was empty by now, the piano player and the barkeep having fled together. The other three followed his lead, twitching aside ratty coats to reveal rattier looking holsters, housing guns that had clearly never known the touch of oil nor rag.

“Who you callin’ boy, eh? You? Some vagabond from out in the desert? Some crazy old bitch–” one of his posse, the bigger one to his right, flinched– “who thinks she’s hot shit?”

Marigold took one long, slow breath. The liquid in the glass was simmering  now, ever so slightly, the beginnings of a boil. She leaned back in her booth, and she tilted her head, and she fixed the four thugs before her with eyes that had seen the creation of countless ghosts. She had not looked at a mirror in a long time, but she knew what they were seeing: deep set, slightly bloodshot, dull yellow irises and coal black pupils peering out from a face lined by age and heat in equal measures. She watched all four of them look to the right side of her face, watched their leader try to wrench his eyes from the horrid river of scar tissue that ran from her right eye down below her collar. He didn’t do a very good job. She didn’t fault him for it. She knew that it was knotted and angry, and that when you looked at it for too long you could see a dull glow like embers beneath the skin. Her hat was still low over eyes, but she tilted her head back so they could get a good, long look at her. Then she spoke, and that inferno was starting to come closer now, and she said:

“I have already given you the greatest kindness I could when I warned you all earlier today, so I will give you the second greatest kindness I can: leave. All of you. Hide those shoddy things at your hips, and go out into the street, and see if you can’t correct the courses of your lives.” The one on the left of the pack finally looked down at the glass and started, for its contents were bubbling and hissing against Marigold’s naked palm. He looked back at her when she said, “I am Marigold Velfor; I am a Gun Witch; I do not particularly want to kill any of you. You can all still turn around.”

“You know…I ain’t never killed a Witch before, Marigold,” the boy in front hissed, and her heart sank at the naked violence on his face, “But I’ve always wondered what it must be l-”

In one liquid smooth motion, before the boy had finished his empty threat, Marigold drew her six shooter and put a single holy bullet directly between his eyes. It exited out the back of his head in a spatter of bone and brain and flew perfectly into the shoulder of the fellow behind him, where it lodged itself. Before their leader’s ghost had even figured out it needed to get the hell out of dodge, Marigold had pulled the hammer back with a terrible click and calmly fired again at the gentleman on the far left–this one took him in the heart, carving through skin and muscle and bone and organ like so many pieces of paper laid before a train. By the time this had resolved itself the boy was a corpse on the ground, and the man to his left was a corpse rapidly approaching the ground, and the man behind them both was a not-quite-corpse collapsed into a table, and Marigold’s cannon was pointed serenely at the man on the right. This had happened in seconds. This last man’s hand had managed to grab the handle of his piece but, seeing the smoking barrel now leveled at his head, had stopped. Marigold thanked the Lord for this, and said to him:

“The first and third are dead: the second will live, as long as you get him to a halfway decent doctor in the next couple of minutes. Neither of you will live if you draw. Do you understand?” He nodded, mutely, eyes never leaving the gun. “Good. I’m going to stand up now, and I’m going to find someone to pay for the damages I’ve left here, and then I’m going to leave. Before I do that, though, you’re going to take your friend, and you’re both going to go outside, and you’re going to tell whoever’s out there that anyone who draws on me will die. Ok?” He nodded again, and at a gesture from Marigold he set out to comply. As the bar door clanged shut behind their wild exit she sagged a little in her seat. Her cannon was displeased: it whispered that she still had four rounds in the chamber, that she could probably take this whole Podunk town before they got a shot off. She ignored it, pushed forward the hammer, slid the thing home in the holster on her hip. The Mule on the table was at a low simmer now; Marigold didn't flinch as she drained the thing in one pull on her way out.

[strangelittlestories]

The true insult was not that the wizard sealed me away in a book. It wasn't even the particular book in which I ended up trapped (though that was a blow).

No, it was that I ended up imprisoned in the *marginalia*.

I didn't even have the text of the damned tome to keep me company. That wouldn't have been so bad, as it was at least entertaining. Oh sure, as histories of magic go, it was wildly inaccurate, but at least it had a few fun spells and the occasional spicy bit!

The notes in the margins had a few spicy bits too, in fairness, but it was all insipid love notes between magelings only just out of adolescence. Nothing to sink your teeth into. And those flowery echoes of library romance were the highlight, trust me. You should have seen the inane magical theories and half-completed theories that were scribbled on the edges! It was like a drunk spider had dipped its toes in ink and tap-danced across the secrets that underpinned the cosmos.

Even if I could have cast any of those incantations in my reduced chickenstratch state, I would have blown myself up and made a hole in the world to boot. Then I'd have been gone and a new cadre of my siblings would have squiggled through the gap. It doesn't bear thinking about.

And what did I even do to deserve this, really?

Is it such a crime to want to exist in a world that's real? Is it that bad to hitch a ride on a particularly esoteric philosophical concept into existence? Is it ‘evil’ to live a life in a place where *causality* and *object permanence* are a thing? Is it wicked to build a secret cult that worships the ground you wriggle on and amasses you wealth and power?

Oh, it's probably that last one, isn't it?

Look. I didn't decide how your world works. Is it my fault that gold and clout and secrets are the best levers to move your societies? You built them, not me.

“Um,” said the student wizard, quite perturbed by the rant that had appeared in the margins of the book, “All I asked is if you could help me with my questing homework?”

Oh. Yeah. Sorry. It's been a while since I had anyone worth talking to, you know?

But yeah. I can most certainly help with that. Questing? Psssh. Easy. You want hard, try keeping a secret society of power-hungry warlocks in check. You want help on a mission, absolutely within my wheelhouse.

After all, I've been quested *against* loads of times. I think I've got a really good handle on it now.

“Wow. Great!” If the young magician was perturbed by the book's words, it was swallowed by the sheer relief of avoiding an ‘F’. “Let's get started!”

Heck yeah. This'll be interesting, kid. I've never tried to *save* a world before. I'm absolutely hype. You're gonna get an ‘A’ for sure. ‘A minus’ minimum.

“That'd be really handy. I'm, uh, kinda flunking out right now. The other students don't think I'm a very good wizard.”

Hey. Don't listen to those losers. My siblings used to say I wasn't a very good demon, but what do those losers know? Here I am in a material existence - about to go on a quest, no less - while they're all still slumming it in the primeval void.

We'll show them, kid. We'll show them all.

“Yeah.” Something burned softly in the young mage's eyes. “We'll show them.”

---

Enjoy my writing? Please consider supporting my latest creative endeavour, Poor Life Choices. Currently crowdfunding for a run at the Edinburgh Fringe!

https://igg.me/at/poorlifechoices/x#/

[centrally-unplanned]

The Swing Won't Save You

The "mainstream" account of the election results is one I generally endorse. Elections are thermostatic in the sense that they bounce around an equilibrium - these days the incumbent has a disadvantage, being blamed for the problems but not credited for the successes. Democrats lost because of things like the 2021-2023 inflation spike, or the immigration surge, and the next administration will be blamed for whatever problems the cycle of history throws upon us on top of the consequences of their own actions. That is just How It Be, and it isn't something internal reform can change.

This account is probably true, but this does not lead to some of the conclusions one is hoping it will. I see many taking this as a sort of dismal c'est la vie, assuming that you can just ride it out and win next time, then do good when you do. That therefore there really isn't any need to change all that much in the Dem party structure.

The miss here is that there are fundamental inequalities in the two parties. We just went through, quite handily, the most progressive democratic administration in decades. One that was maximally committed to the idea of "FDR reborn". And it did some good stuff! But I don't really think it lived up to the name, not even close. The democratic "win" - which occurred at the peak of the Covid Crisis in an era of nigh-unprecedented discontent against an incumbent president who was deeply unpopular - delivered a razor thin margin in the House and a literal tiebreaker Senate, itself only after a series of special elections.

The Biden administration spent its political capital on macroeconomic stabilization, one authentic Dem priority in the IRA bill, and then otherwise spent much of its time on a series of rearguard actions and failed attempts to appease coalition partners like unions (who broke away from Dems in record numbers in 2024). Bad policy ideas like student debt relief were themselves undone by the courts. They had four years to prosecute Trump for a blatantly obvious mountain of crimes, and could not get a single one of them across the finish line. And meanwhile, due to awful polling numbers, they felt forced to pursue a number of policies they didn't even really agree with to stave off future defeat. Which they, of course, did somewhat badly, for many reasons but "not really believing in them" is certainly a factor.

Meanwhile surveying the Republican Party's incoming administration, I of course cannot say what they will do with their probable quadfecta, so this is speculative. But through the dice of death they handily control the courts. More importantly, they play the dice to control the courts - we already have discourse on getting the two oldest Republican jurors in the SC to retire. Republican plans include debates around say abolishing the NLRB as unconstitutional, or mass scale deportations, and more you have certainly heard of. They will not do all of them, of course not. But "winning a court case to dismantle a regulatory capacity" is far, far easier than passing a congressional bill to reinstate it. You are not "un-deporting" anybody. The entire Republican agenda is structurally easier to pursue - tearing down is just easier than building up.

And meanwhile, the levers of power are themselves biased. The Supreme Court, of course, but more importantly the Senate, which has an awful map for the Dems. Even when you give Dems their best case scenarios where they win every competitive upcoming election, you are talking 52-48 seats up through ~2032. Meanwhile, the Republican ceiling is 60-40, and is not likely to dip out of the majority.

No one can predict the future of course - I just don't think this scenario and reality is getting the proper attention. A "swing" model where Dems win in 2028 at the same margins they won in say 2020, and then it swings back and so on, is a defeat for Democrats. Republicans will likely achieve X% of their agenda over the next two years, solidify court control, and then Dems will achieve X/2% or worse and otherwise play defense on their turn. It almost certainly isn't the apocalypse, it most likely is not the end of democracy - if you don't wanna care about politics, you don't have to, go live your life. But if you are trying to win at politics, if that is your goal - which for a political party it should be - this just ain't it.

The debate I see is over whether or not this election should be a "wake-up call" for Dems. Which is the wrong question, to me - the Biden administration should be a wake up call for Dems. Even if Harris squeaked out a win, it is a defeat to the party that they found themselves running a decaying man with sub-40 approval ratings for President, or found themselves taking a former senator in the top 1% of the leftwing voting record and running her as a centrist. It should be shameful that they took literally years to act on a "border crisis" that once they did act they found themselves perfectly capable of addressing, not because they authentically believed in increasing immigration and wanted to spend capital on that agenda (which they did not do), but because they were scared of the blowback that happened anyway. It is beyond the pale that Trump is not in jail because they think "politicizing the judicial branch" is somehow not their literal jobs as political actors. It is embarrassing that solidly blue Democratic cities are hemorrhaging population to purple and red states because the Democratic party is failing to govern them.

And I know, I am in the grand, august, tiresome tradition of using an election to repeat the same shit I always say. I have been on this beat since at least 2019. But it being tiresome doesn't mean it's wrong. It might not be right! Maybe Republicans will truly collapse into squabbling infighting and get nothing much done beyond tax cuts, their truest love. I don't know. But I think the odds matrix here is pretty ruthless - the opportunities to be a better party barely have downsides. They implement bad policy half the time even when they win! There is a fundamental disconnect between "what do we want to achieve as a party" and "how are we going to achieve that", a strategy void that infighting, paralysis, and special interest spoils-grabbing fills.

I am less confident on the solution for all this - at minimum we don't even have all the post-election data, that will take time. But the problem such solutions should be solving is that the Dems have been losing for 8 years. "Thermostatic swing in 2028" is not going to change that.

[evillinuxuser]

Dear American leftist.

So you want to make the world better. Please here me out.

You recognize that your parties are ultimately just capitalist racists/sexists/lgbt-phobes and capitalist collaborators/copagandists/war criminals. You want to tear this system to the ground (understandably), just have a revolution and build a new one, a democratic-socialist utopia.

That's not gonna happen yet.

Most Americans want to make the world better. But they will not agree with you on the means or even the end goal.

And you *can't have a revolution* without widespread support (or at least most people not being outright hostile to your end goal - the dirty word socialism). Your current representative system is going to remain for some time still. Your president will have power and they will have the largest and most dangerous power over minorities and marginalized people.

It is important who gets to wield this power.

It is important who gets to appoint the next Supreme Court justices. Even if Democrats don't really care about abortion rights and are just using it as a talking point - their appontees consistently rule in favor of women. This applies equally to race and LGBT issues, and to the legislative and executive branches.

On Palestine and lesser evils

I feel like the most important or one of the most important reasons for leftists who do not vote is the situation in Gaza and independence for Palestine and the lack of action on part of the Dems.

I will not actually talk policy here because even if you think both will do equally bad things for Palestine, you just cannot reason that this means both parties are equal or equally bad. Let me draw you a table (tumblr doesn't have tables?):

How the fuck is there no lesser evil here?

If you do not vote for Dems for the sake of your conscience, you are either a coward who is too immature to make hard decisions or you plain *do not care* for LGBT people, women, PoC, or immigrants.

(Footnote: Dems wont solve your existing racism problems. But people will suffer due to government inaction rather than government WANTING them to suffer and actively using its resources to create more suffering)

You're the guy in the trolley problem NOT pulling the lever to save four lives. Sure, it would be PREFERRABLE if there were no PEOPLE TIED TO THE TRACKS. But they are right now and the state of being tied to a track is called marginalization.

Voting third party does not help.

Your system is rigged against you to allow only two parties.

See this video for explanation.

By not voting, or voting third party, you are saving no one (except your own conscience, selfishly). Vote and then do some more actually useful stuff.

How the fuck does voting impact your ability to organize politically in other ways? Do you think low voter turnout will somehow convince both Reps and Dems that actually, they're both illegitimate and willing to give way to a new system now? Obviously not?!

So you want to make the world better. This is not what US elections are for. They are for slowing down the world getting worse. Thanks for reading all of that. Sincerely, and in a deep worry tumblr user evillinuxuser (Not an American)

[thydungeongal]

what are your thoughts on Pathfinder?

Not exactly a fan of 1e. It felt like it improved marginally on 3e's design in places while doubling down on some of the worst design ideas that popped up during D&D 3e's run and also has some of the worst proliferation of excessive variants of classes to the point it ends up diluting the point of classes.

2e I like though. Classes have distinct identities, character creation is a nice minigame with lots of levers to pull, it is systemic in all the right ways without being too complex. Hell yeah!

[sigmaleph]

Standard trolley problem set up, five people down one track, one person in the other, you can push a lever to divert the trolley down the one-person track. But, also, since runaway trolleys are such a recurring problem, you finally convinced railway management to install an emergency button that will safely get the trolley to stop. However, because of space issues, the button and the lever are quite far apart. You are currently in front of the lever. You can run towards the button, but you're not sure you'll make it in time before the trolley hits the five people. You can take a split second to push the lever now, which will mean you're marginally less likely to reach the button in time (but only by a tiny amount) or you can rush towards the button immediately without pushing the lever

[mightyflamethrower]

The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream.

For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority favorability ratings, e) mostly had a failed first 100 days, or f) all of the above.

Some of us thought these diagnoses and prognoses were absurd. How in mediis rebus, during a radical counterrevolution never quite seen before, could anyone issue such bleak predictions? Would these same observers have said the U.S. was doomed to lose World War II after the bleak first five months of mostly failure in the Pacific, or North Africa, after the utter U.S. army disaster at the Kasserine Pass?

When the Biden administration compiled two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the supposedly classic definition of a recession—most of these same pundits assured us that the data was meaningless and irrelevant. The same left-wing media throng insisted Biden was in his cognitive prime until hours before he abdicated from the ticket under pressure. They swore to us that Robert Mueller’s “walls were closing in” on Donald Trump, who would legitimately go to jail, buried by 93 lawfare indictments.

As for their polls showing that Trump was all but through after three months in office, almost all of them were not just off in the 2016 presidential race, but again in 2020. And given the chronic temptation to warp polls to create Democratic momentum and fundraising, they rigged their polls yet again in 2024—even when they knew in disgrace that they were ruining their brand. A former Harris campaign official just admitted that internal polls never showed Harris ahead—even as the majority of polls predicted her victory.

So why would anyone believe any of these people? Take the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll assured us that 45 percent of the public gave Trump an F for his first 100 days, with only 42 percent expressing approval of his job so far.

But this is the same bunch that also assured us in its final authoritative 2024 election poll, on the very eve before the voting, that Kamala Harris would win the race by 4 points—a lead proverbially “outside the margin of error.” (The next day, she lost the popular vote by 1.5 percent or 2,284,952 votes and the Electoral College by 312-226). The public broadcasting polling partnership was off 5.5 points, perhaps suggesting that it wished to aid the Harris campaign more than either adhering to professional and ethical norms or fearing to lose what little was left of its reputation.

As soon as the Washington Post and the New York Times issued their dismal Trump bias polls, observers quickly pointed out they had, by intent, vastly underpolled those who voted for Trump in 2024. In contrast, the polls with the best 2024 records had Trump’s 100-day approval ratings near even or positive: Rasmussen was 50-49%, and the joint national surveys by Insider Advantage and Trafalgar Group had Trump up at 100 days, 46-44%.

As far as the supposed economic and stock meltdown, the March and April monthly economic reports showed that job growth was not only impressive but well above market expectations, with special emphasis on permanent rather than part-time jobs, even as the number of federal workers went down.

News of massive, multi-trillion-dollar investments and relocations to the U.S. continues. Far from having all the pressure levers in the tariff standoffs, China is starting to realize that the U.S. market is still the center of the world, while its own autocratic party dictatorship—again contrary to pundits’ warnings—is far more vulnerable to rising popular dissent than is a constitutional republic like the U.S.

Inflation in March and April either did not increase or, in fact, declined. Corporate profits were solid. Energy costs went down. Now that we have actually passed Trump’s first 100 days, where is the crashed stock market that supposedly signaled the recession on our doorstep?

The Standard & Poor 500 is back at the level of March 10, roughly where it was before the hysteria—and 12 percent up from a year ago. By May 2, both the Dow and S&P indices showed the longest continued gains in over 20 years. The Dow is now about where it was in September and October before the election—at levels that had not so long ago made investors giddy.

The media-academy nexus is also in hysterics over Trump’s threats of suspending federal funding to higher education unless it makes reforms consistent with Supreme Court decisions and Department of Education guidelines.

Many of us have warned campuses that it would be wiser to compromise, given the public would soon learn of what they had been doing for decades—and would be unpleasantly surprised. After all, private, multibillion-dollar endowed elite campuses took billions of dollars in easy federal money—despite endemic anti-Semitism, flagrant flaunting of U.S. civil rights laws and court decisions by continuing to use racial and gender biases, lucrative but unsavory financial partnerships with illiberal regimes of the Middle East and communist China, spiraling annual tuition costs exceeding the annual rate of inflation, 40-60 percent surcharges and overhead gouging of federal grants, and nonexistence of First Amendment protections for visiting speakers and lecturers, and on and on.

No matter. As soon as Harvard vowed that it would rally its elite brethren campuses against the administration, news predictably began to leak about the culpability and exposure of the real Harvard. Why did it only now and so suddenly rush to end its sister-campus relationship with the terrorist-supporting Birzeit University on the West Bank, or why now replace directors of its radical Center for Middle Eastern Studies program—in a fashion it never had previously dared even after the massacres of October 7?

Then, news of a joint China-Harvard program abroad suddenly surfaced. Allegedly, Harvard had aided members of what some have called a Chinese “paramilitary organization,” despite that group previously being sanctioned for its role in the Chinese state violence conducted against the Uyghurs—a fact that apparently did not surface publicly or perhaps even particularly bother any of the usually hypersensitive and quick-to-demonstrate Harvard students and faculty.

Shortly thereafter, a comprehensive Harvard in-house anti-Semitism report surfaced, documenting in detail the routine harassment of and threats to Harvard Jewish students. In truth, even if it wished to, Harvard now could not control its out-of-control and institutionalized anti-Semitism. It is a bane that Harvard has systematically ignored. It permeates the entire campus and is deeply embedded in the university’s Middle East Studies DEI architecture and recruitment of illiberal foreign students from dictatorial regimes.

The Harvard Law Review (currently being investigated by the Department of Education’s civil rights division) just bestowed a $65,000 fellowship to law student Ibrahim Bhramar. What did Bhramar do to earn such Harvard lucre?

Apparently, he was rewarded either for or despite attacking a Harvard Business School Jewish student during one of the recent anti-Israel campus protests, racking up misdemeanor criminal charges in the process. The prosecutor had noted that Bhramar had conducted “a hands-on assault and battery…and actual interpersonal violence” against the student. Rewarding an anti-Semitic attacker with $65,000 says it all. In 2024, hundreds of Harvard students and faculty disrupted their own graduation, commencing with walkouts and shouts of “free Palestine.”

In sum, despite the Harvard hysteria, it quietly knows what it has been doing, what the stakes are should it lose $2-9 billion in ongoing taxpayer support, and why it would not like full disclosure to the public of both its many excesses and lapses. So, if it is smart, Harvard will likely quietly seek a compromise with the Trump administration.

Finally, we are watching a full Democratic/left-wing meltdown.

Its puerile anti-Trump antics have gone from the clownish to the obscene and violent.

What is the point of disrupting a presidential congressional address by screaming and cane shaking, or of a silly 25-hour pseudo-filibuster? Who believes that smutty sh*t and f*ck congressional videos, or foul-mouthed threats to Trump and Elon Musk (e.g., “dipsh*t,” a**hole”) will win over Independents?

What is the strategic logic behind Democratic governors and senators threatening to cause havoc at Republican officials’ town halls, or to ignite “mass protests” and “disruptions,” so that “Republicans cannot know a moment of peace”?

Does anyone believe that yet a third impeachment of Trump will ensure a Democratic midterm victory?

Or is the correct left-wing playbook to champion a motley array of assassins, spousal abusers, and gang members? Is it wiser then to either laud or ignore attacks on Tesla dealers, owners, and chargers, or wink and nod at blatantly anti-Semitic demonstrations and protests?

Is there anything taboo for the hysterical left?

Yes—it cannot offer the country a simple “Democratic Contract for America”—listing its own solutions to the nation’s existential crises.

There is not a single Democratic blueprint of how to address a $2 trillion budget deficit, $3 billion in daily interest payments, $37 trillion of national debt, or a $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit.

There is no post-Biden corrective agenda to deal with his legacy of 12 million recent illegal aliens, added to the existing 20 million current unlawful immigrants.

Not a single Democratic senator, representative, or party official has put forth any plan to end the Biden-era conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Nor will they even discuss the challenge of biological males wrecking women’s sporting events, institutionalized campus anti-Semitism, or unlawful race-based chauvinism.

On all these matters, the Democrats and their leftist supporters have offered no counter-proposals, no alternate agendas, and no unique solutions to the nation’s problems—other than boring, profanity-ridden venom and tired performance-art buffoonery.

Reliance on warped polls, untrustworthy and biased reporting, and media sensationalism will not help such poverty of thought and character.

Obscene, hysterical, and clueless is no way to appeal to Americans, Democrats.

[thatstormygeek]

The casual cruelty with which Columbia administrators rushed to do the bidding of their reactionary masters in Congress provides a quick lesson in who actually is the elite, and who is not. The students at the fancy college, it turns out, do not in fact run the fancy college. The university doesn’t treat them as bosses, and barely even as stakeholders. Instead, it treats them as subjects to be disciplined—and in disciplining them, it has a wide range of tools. Students are a kind of indentured employee; they are dependent on the university for housing, for health insurance, for the next steps in their career and life plans. If the university decides they are not sufficiently docile, it is trivially easy for the university to destroy their lives. Everyone pretty much knows that young people have few resources and few levers of influence. We’re all aware that even supposedly rich kids don’t actually have control of their parent’s bank accounts and can be cut loose with nothing on a whim. We all know that young people have few connections and little influence compared to Congresspeople, administrators, and angry donors. And it is because people know that college students have little power that they become enraged when college students attempt to organize or demand some say in institutional or (god forbid) national policies.

Young people are “elites” not because they actually have power, but because the spectacle of them asserting autonomy in any way is at odds with the way things are supposed to be. They are pretentious for the same reason that women or LGBT people or Black people are considered pretentious elites when they contradict their supposed betters. When the right people have power; that’s natural; when the wrong people, marginalized people, have power—that’s an unbearable imposition. It's easy to make light of college student activism, and to insinuate that people attending a swanky university can’t really have anything to protest about. But young people engage in activism for the same reason other marginalized people engage in activism; they have firsthand experience of inequality and injustice, and because they are treated unequally, they don’t have a lot of other ways to demand accountability or change. The vitriol directed at young people is not because young people are powerful; it’s because they aren’t, and so their assertions of autonomy are seen as a threat to established hierarchies.

[queersatanic]

The issue is not that the United States of America needs a "better president"; the issue is that the conservative project for more than 40 years has made it such that anybody conservatives elect will achieve roughly the same policy goals regardless.

Despite the emotional reaction, no presidential election loss is actually especially damaging to conservatives because they have captured the federal courts, the state legislatures and governorships, gerrymandered the districts, and created dual power structures outside of government including media, mutual aid, and entertainment e.g. there is absolutely no leftist equivalent to the suburban evangelical church in terms of organizing. All of this is in addition to their power and class solidarity as capitalists backed up by ideologically reactionary police forces, an all-volunteer military, and right-wing militias heavily overlapping the other two.

Donald Trump has more power as president than Joe Biden because any politician has more power to do conservative things when so many levers of power are already controlled by conservatives.

Conservativism requires doing all of this because right-wing ideas are extraordinarily unpopular, and the right is willing to exercise power to make it so that popular will is irrelevant. That's the whole point of what they do everywhere.

Imagine a reverse world where ideologically New Deal Democrats routinely lost the popular vote for presidency but still regularly won the elections, cities had extra the representation compared to rural populations and kept throwing likely Republican voters off the ballot, and the Supreme Court stacked with leftists ruled something like landlording was illegal, union membership was mandatory, or healthcare was a guaranteed right. It's inconceivable that conservatives would go along with it or keep telling people, "This is why it's more important than ever to VOTE."

One last non-hypothetical example: Richard Nixon didn't sign the EPA into law because the drunken bigot had a soft spot in his heart for the environment. He did it because the law came across his desk with unanimous support from the Senate and 95 percent support from the House, and both of those only supported it in those margins because people demanded something be done.

Nixon was horrible, and he had plenty of agency to act terribly within his sphere of power, but he was made to do something he didn't want to do because of the tireless work of many, many people over decades, and very little of that work was in the field of electoralism.

[terraterrafunki]

Hey… It’s Doni/Nurigru again I just heard recently about this new drama that is happening and I’m just curious if you’re going to be Okay and holy shit what is happening

But yeah, I hope you’re doing Okay and I hope some the stuff will stop soon

But for now, I hope you and people who are involved with the situation are Okay

(by the way, can you pls recap what happened?)

Doni/Nurigru-

Okay so I was involved marginally only because I was harassed by the person being mocked here

So simon-the-star is a user who likes to beg for free art of his Sprunki OC. he did this to me a few months ago, going through the motions of guilt tripping, then getting aggressive, then making threats with no follow through. I ended up just blocking him and his alts

To my knowledge he is apparently 11 and too young to be on tumblr. Despite this he has harassed countless people, fetish farmed, tried to send his followers to mob people who didn't give him free art, and even deactivated his tumblr, just to make an identical one with the same username so he'd no longer be blocked by everyone.

It's pretty clear that he's a very disturbed individual who SHOULD NOT be on tumblr especially unsupervised given his appalling behavior.

Now as far as I was involved i had my one encounter that was highlighted and notified everyone that he secretly just re-made his tumblrs after deactivating and that was it (I also made a short parody fanfic but that was meant to be a harmless jab)

Today I get tagged by someone who has been tagging this blog basically any time Simon does something stupid to... actually I don't know why I kept getting tagged, probably to spread the word?

Except this time it was because one person, who is far more involved in pressing Simon-the-Star's buttons than the one who tagged me, drew hate art of Simon's sona being LYNCHED. (Link is the definition of the word, not the image). It depicts the artist pulling a lever which causes Simon's humanized sona to be hung. They're also bloodied. This is WAY too extreme for what this dude is doing for a number of reasons, mainly historical ones for what this is depicting. Though namely that lynching is tied heavily to racial descrimination.

It's gotten to the point where I can't tolerate what's being done by neither the victims nor Simon-the-star so I had to put my foot down and just outright say "This is wrong, you aren't helping him nor anyone else by doing this" and block everyone involved.

As someone who got suicidal hate art of my OCs as a teenager for "being an annoying mary sue" on Deviantart this hit home as something that I could not in good faith let continue, nor be a part of.

The best way to help simon is to get his tumblrs terminated so he can stop being fed into the cycle of being an underage "lolcow" because clearly this is not helping. Which means reporting his blogs for being too young to use tumblr, and BLOCKING AND LEAVING HIM BE.

Yes it made sense to blow a whistle on his behavior at the start because he had harassed so many people it was worth pointing out, though now some of the victims have taken this SO far they've done a 180 and become just as bad if not worse for publicizing his torment for everyone to point and laugh at. Not to mention using art to wish death upon him, WHICH YEAH THAT'S WHAT DRAWING SOMEONE BEING LYNCHED IS.

Long story short, Someone on tumblr is underaged and an art request pest, but victims took it too far by drawing them being violently hung and I finally put my foot down, said my peace, and am wiping my hands clean of the situation.

Yes, it sucks he's on here it sucks he's not getting help, but stalking every little thing he does, publicly admonishing him every day, and making violent hate art is fucking worse and does nothing to help anyone.

Do better

-Terra

[infamousbrad]

Apparently Black Lives Don't Matter to Progressives Any More, Either

There's a thing that most non-St. Louisans (and quite a few St. Louisans) missed about the Ferguson Uprising: every middle aged or elderly black politician or pastor in the greater St. Louis area, except for one, sided with the police. Here, Black Lives Matter was a movement of young black democratic socialists who had trained in activism by the remnants of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

And I'm told that in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, that mixed-race democratic socialist alliance saw an opportunity, a common cause they could use to reach out to the embittered middle aged and elderly white feminist remnants of the H. Clinton campaign. Leaders from those factions agreed to meet and hammered out the rules of engagement for a new, enlarged progressive caucus.

Because the feminists have a long, long history of being betrayed by the Democratic Party, they insisted that rule one be that in any competition within the party for a position, if the last two candidates were an equally qualified man and a woman, the whole coalition would endorse the woman. And because black voters have a long history of being betrayed by white progressives, they also all agreed that if it came down to two equally qualified women, one white and one black, the whole caucus would endorse the black woman.

That's how the progressives built a St. Louis alliance that swept the old right-wing Democrats from the majority of the levers of power in the city and the surrounding suburbs, electing, among others, a black woman mayor and a black woman treasurer in the city.

Both of whom just lost, by wide margins, to liberal white women with no significantly better qualifications.

And I know that there was more going on than race, but not enough more to explain the huge margins without concluding that the black/female/progressive alliance is dead. Progressivism is now a whites-only movement in St. Louis again, so kiss any future wins bye-bye.

Because after this betrayal, it's safe to say that the elderly black conservative Democrats from the same 5-6 families who've run the north side since 1964 will take over the north side again, will go back to allying with upper-middle-class white conservative Democrats and once again take over the city. I know Cara Spencer's a reliable progressive, but she'll be the last progressive winner in this town for a generation.

I could be wrong. But I'm pretty certain.

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

nick, 3 4 and 26

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character

That he’s blonde. Like. I. The evidence is marginal but it’s undeniably there. The whole Nordic thing (tom—blonde—including jordan—blonde—and nick………..in his little ‘nordic’ thing while almost excluding daisy—brunette!!!!—is technically. Evidence). I simply choose to ignore it. There are enough fucking blondes in tgg. Tom, Jordan, George, Ewing…

4. Where put Nick different media

I already answered this but on another front I think Tobey Maguire being in Babylon could make for a silly “Nick got Jay’s money and went fucking insane out in California by the late 20s” bit

26. Something Nick did that I can’t get over

WHERE TO FUCKING BEGIN

The whole garden scene pisses me off.

“He’s too good looking” “he can’t help that :3c”

“Will it bore you? Please god tell me if it will bore you” “it won’t bore me”

‘I was about to ask to see the rubies’

Him groaning down in the elevator with mckee’s hand on the lever

I feel like im giving him too much credit. Especially using so much from the princeton draft. It’s just too good

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation:

A poll conducted in the 48 hours that followed Election Day earlier this month found that voters who were undecided during the race before making up their minds in the final weeks of the campaign voted for Donald Trump by a 52-38 margin. And the survey points to the importance of trans rights issues in these voters’ decision-making. Of the swing voters who voted for Trump, 83% said that they believe Kamala Harris supported “using taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison,” according to the survey conducted by Blueprint. This is not a position that she campaigned on and is, in fact, a description of rights already accorded to people in federal custody under the Eighth Amendment, rights that were in place during Trump’s first term.

Among swing voters who voted for Harris, only 40% believed that Harris supported that policy. A large majority – 77% – of swing voters who voted for Trump believed that Harris supported “allowing children under 18 to transition genders without informing their parents,” which is never something Harris said she supported. Only 29% of swing voters who voted for Harris believed the same thing. Other Republican lies were also believed by large swathes of swing voters who voted for Trump. 82% believed that Harris wanted to ban gas-powered vehicles by the year 2035, which is not true, and 76% believed that Harris wanted to allow abortion up until the day of birth, which is also not true. 67% believe that Harris wanted to give Black people reparations for slavery, 74% said they believed Harris would ban fracking (something she faced criticism for explicitly opposing), and 73% said that she would force everyone onto a single-payer health care system.

According to a post-election poll from Blueprint, among swing voters that picked Donald Trump, 83% cited trans issues as the reason they pulled the lever for him.