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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

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bi-writes · 7 months

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so idk where i got this idea but mercenary!ghost x fem!reader because he's scary and mean and dangerous but then he sees some girl's ass in light blue denim.

notes about reader: as always, i tend to write readers described as curvy because im curvy and we deserve attention from 6'4 beefcakes who are soft only for us. reader is a civilian.

mercenary!ghost (part 1/?)

cw: mature language and content, suggestive language and content, dark!ghost, mentions of ghost's past canon trauma (domestic abuse + violence), mw3 spoilers, violence and gore + mentions of murder and extortion, mentions of reader + domestic abuse, protective!simon, size kink (reader is described as much smaller than simon, easily manhandled by him), pet names (luv, bunny + rabbit, puppy, angel face), reader learns she has a dark side and she likes it, nsfw thoughts about reader, suggestive touching (fem!receiving)

the sound of the burner phone pings on the desk in front of him. when he picks it up, he narrows his eyes as he reads the message displayed across the screen.

DEPOSITED.

when he opens his laptop, his eyes scan over the balance on an offshore account, and he relaxes when he sees the hefty balance climb just a little higher. he closes the device once he's satisfied with what he sees; and like always, he tastes the warmth of that satisfaction. it's a nice high, but it won't last, and then he'll need to feed the gaping hole that lives in him.

it remains hungry. he has never been able to close it--it has only ever gotten wider, ripped at the seams and torn at the edges every time another body close to him drops.

the high is poison. but even if it kills him, no one will miss him. so he picks up the handgun that lays haphazard on the bed, and he tucks it into the back of his jeans.

he passes by the mirror as he fits a dark denim jacket over his shoulders. he stares back at himself, a recognizable beast of a man staring right back. he pulls his hoodie up over him, and in the shadow of it, all he can see are his dark eyes, pale skin peeking through the eyeblack that has lightened up with the wear of it throughout the day.

he craves something strong and warm tonight. he itches for something soft, too, something that makes him forget the red on his ledger, even if for only a few hours.

there is nothing quite strong enough to wipe that kind of stain away. he is nothing if not a reaper, and he buries bodies with the same tenacity that he had when he wore his country's flag on his chest. this time, however, he does not take orders--he names his price.

he thinks something is wrong with him. some used to say that it was his courage that brought him back from the dead--that his heart is too strong, his will to live too much, and that is how he continues to open his eyes and live another day. but he doesn't agree with this thought, because he doesn't really think he feels anything at all.

he doesn't feel human. he doesn't feel alive. the only thing that makes him feel any sort of vulnerability is how red his own blood is when he bleeds. when his scars heal jagged and crooked, it is because there is something underneath the skin. but he feels nothing inside--no remorse, no guilt, he is not sorry.

he does not check to see if those men are innocent. he does not care about the names that end up on his list. he doesn't ask questions. and he thinks something is wrong with him because he sleeps at night just fine now; the nightmares have gone. he is alone, and it is peaceful.

there are no voices. there is only silence. and there is something wrong with him.

the pub is quiet. it is a weekday, and the only patrons are here after a long day's work, and they all look into the depths of their half-empty glasses hoping to find relief there. there is none, but they will finish their glasses hoping it might be dissolved in the alcohol.

he asks for two fingers of bourbon. it stings when it goes down, but then it settles warm. he is poured another two fingers of it, but before he can pick it up, someone else grips the glass and tips it back to swallow it down.

the glass hits the wood of the counter with an echoing thud, and you cough out a fuck as you settle into the seat beside him. you run a trembling hand over your face, and he notices immediately the red of your knuckles and the splitting of the skin there. they are fresh; the bruising is still new, and the blood is just barely beginning run down the back of your hand.

he leans over the bar, swiping the whole bottle of bourbon, and he silently pours more into the glass, hitting it towards you before picking up a new glass and filling it generously.

"who's the lucky bastard?" he asks, and your eyes flick to the cuts on the back of your hand before going back to the dark swirling colors of the drink.

"i'm sure he'll be coming in here any second to introduce himself."

the pub doors slam open, and there is a man coming in, chest heaving, dark hair falling over his forehead in sweaty curls that do nothing to hide the clear bruise on his face the split of his lip. his eyes move over the room before they settle on you, and his boots fall heavy as he makes his way over.

ghost sees his intentions clear immediately. the way his hand twitches at his side, the angry glare, the uncontrollable urge to hurt and to take and to control coming off of him like steam.

he has seen this kind of man before. this man was the one that kept him up at night as a child. this man was the one that scared his mum, that drove his brother to chase vices, that tore apart a house that should've been filled with something warm and sticky and kind into one marred with teeth, rotten and putrid and forgotten.

his hand goes for the back of your neck, and you close your eyes and tense in the anticipation, but it never comes. a strong hand grips his outstretched one, and the man cries out as ghost twists it behind his back and uses his other hand to slam his face into the wood of the bar, trapping him there.

the bartender does not even flinch, just continues to wipe down glasses. the patrons continue to stare into the abyss of their sorrow.

you jump a little, your head snapping to the side where the man squirms and sputters, his face going pale from the paw of a hand gripping him by the back of the neck and shoving his face into the counter. if he pushes any harder, you wonder if it'd splinter and fray, dig into the bones of his bruised cheek.

"this man botherin' ya, yeah?"

your eyes finally flick up. you do not know what you expect, but it isn't this. you can only see his eyes; they scare you. you do not lie because you aren't entirely sure how far his kindness will go.

"yes," you whisper, and when the man tries to spit at you, a rough gloved hand grips his curls and positions his head against the edge of the counter, forcing his mouth open until the top row of his teeth bite the wood.

"y'keep talkin' to her, n'it'll be the last time you talk, hear that, mate? y'talk to me, n'me only."

you swallow hard, and the man trembles. a strong boot hits the back of his knees, and then he's crumbling to the ground, his jaw straining as the counter is still forced against his mouth. hot, pained tears come down his face, and then he addresses you.

"what did he do?"

"bad first date," is all you can manage to sputter. he grips the man by the scruff of his neck before pulling him off to speak, tilting his head to the side as he observes the begging man on his knees.

"y'try to put your hands on'er?"

"i-it wasn't...like that! i-it was just a mis...a misunderstanding, please! please--please tell him--!"

"don't like fuckin' liars either," is the only warning given before his mouth is forced to bite the counter, and then a sharp elbow comes down on his head. you jump in surprise at the suddenness of it all, and you close your eyes when you hear the crunch of teeth being broken. his scream is enough to rattle the pub, but when you look around, it's as if nothing at all has happened. it is quiet, and all the bartender does is shake their head.

when you open your eyes, he's crawling on his hands and knees out of the pub, and what he leaves behind is a mess of blood and teeth and fluid that are splattered against the floor at your feet. you shake as you look up at him, stiff in your seat and soft tears coming down your face.

he towers over you. you have to tilt your head back between your shoulders to look at him face-to-face. you cannot see his face; he hides it behind dark fabric, but his eyes talk loud. they are dark, and they are dull, and you realize as you stare up at him that he is not phased in the slightest by what he had just done. in fact, he steps into your space, and the squelch of blood under his boot doesn't seem to bother him. he wears black, and you wonder, momentarily, if he wears such a color to hide the red hiding between the threads of the fabric. the red he can't wash away.

"let me look at ya, little rabbit."

you flinch when he knocks your knees apart, spreading them to make space for the width of him. he reaches up with one gloved hand and grips your chin, tilting your head to either side to see if you are hurt anywhere but your hand. when he is satisfied with his observations, he cups the expanse of your throat, smoothing those big fingers along the pulsing vein there and feeling the way you swallow.

so alive. so soft. a pretty little bunny, dropped into his waiting hands.

his eyes fall, and he takes you in. wide hips that take up the seat you're sitting in, hugged so nicely by light blue denim jeans. they curve over the swell of your ass, and he wonders how much of it would fit in his palm--he thinks about how it might feel to spread them apart and taste the succulent sweetness that he knows exists between your thighs and how your mouth might look slack jawed and wide open for him.

you look like a good girl, even with bloody knuckles.

then he follows the line of your shirt. it's a simple t-shirt tucked into your jeans, but the neckline gives a nice peek of you and the curve of your tits--they sit so nicely there, all perky, and ghost thinks they look lonely. they would be better off in his mouth or squeezing his cock between them or pebbling between his dirty gloved fingers.

filthy. disgusting. he is scarred all over, and you look so soft and sweet, with those tender puppy eyes and the way your lips tremble, and he bets you kiss all soft and slippery. he bets your cunt is tight and with enough coaxing, he could make you drench his skin with something decadent and slick, with whatever drools into your panties. he imagines it is there now, even as you tremble and shake and plead with your eyes for him to let go of your throat.

but ghost is not a good man. he does not feel; he is not a man at all. he is a beast in the shape of one, disguised, and he brings misery to everything he touches. he knows he will do it to you, too--touching pretty girls, he leaves them with burns. they are not the same after they are with him, and he wants to feel bad about it, he wants to feel something, but he does not. he feels nothing.

"you olright, luv?"

you nod frantically, putting a hand over his wrist that holds you, and he almost laughs. your hand is so much smaller than his own. if he squeezes his hand just a little harder, he figures it would not take much to break what lies beneath it. he leans in, and you gulp when your thighs trap his hips. he is warm, a furnace that burns, but you relax when the side of his mask nuzzles against your face.

he is a dog, and he is fond of you.

you should run. you should hit him like you hit your wretched date, and you should run, far, away from him, swear off men for good and never allow one in your space again lest they be as beastly as this. you should run while you can, but you are a bunny not yet in his trap, and you still have time to escape.

but then both of your eyes open at the same time, and his eyes meet your own, and then--oh.

the cage snaps shut. it rattles around you. it is small and confined, but you don't realize what it is yet because you can still breathe, and it is still warm, and you are still soft and alive and here.

your face softens, and his eyes flicker down to your lips as you lick them. maybe he was right. liars are bad. men like the one you were with before were scum. you had been with men like that before, you had seen the destruction they brought to those they thought they loved. when they wrought fear and made others bleed, they never got in trouble. no one cared to do to them what they deserved because they silenced their lambs and slaughtered the light out of them.

it is biblical--an eye for an eye. if they take from you, why can't you take from them?

it is brutish men like this one that do what others are too timid to. your thighs close around his hips, and you feel something digging into your leg, something metal and heavy tucked into his jeans. a weapon, but you imagine it is a mercy because you have an inkling that what he does with his hands is so much worse. bullets are clean and fast; his hands are not.

johnny would tell him to let you go. he does, over his shoulder, spitting at him to leave, to let you slip through his fingers and find your way out, to open the cage.

the wee lass--look at 'er angel face. let 'er go--not meant for this, LT. she scares. 's in 'er eyes. won't last.

but he does not feel. he is not human. there is something wrong with him, he knows it, but he doesn't care. he will ruin you, and he should feel bad, but he can't, he doesn't. and then there it is--your eyes are flickering low, eyeing the mask, and you are wondering how much effort it would take to push it up and lick into his mouth, taste him, suck the warmth of the bourbon from his mouth and replace it with your own.

he will kill again. the cage is shut, it is locked, and he is watching the bunny in its cage, watching as it becomes aware of its surroundings, takes in what is new. but just like he figures, just like he knows, this little bunny has no idea what this cage is. she has no idea she is even in one.

fuck what johnny says. if johnny was like him, if he was not skin and bone but steel and reptile, he would not have died. he would have come back. he would have moved his head, shaken the blood off, and gotten back up, but he didn't, and he's not here, and he's not real--so fuck what he thinks, fuck what he says, fuck him because he left me, and i'm all alone, and if i don't devour and eat and tear apart, i will wither away because i am not me, i am something else--

he smiles under the mask. you notice it, the slight movement there, and you smile, too, suddenly. his hand falls, and the back of his knuckles graze over the swell of your breast, down your stomach, and then he's gripping your waist. that hand slips behind you, and you brace yourself with both hands on his chest as he cups one side of your ass. possessive and suffocating--you think maybe you should run again, but you don't want to.

you want something more. you want something a little rough, something a little sharp. you want something to tell you that a little blood is good sometimes. that answering blood with a little more blood was exactly how it should be. that we don't have to be docile, to back down. you want to be told that it's okay to bite.

there is something wrong with you.

#simon ghost riley #simon riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #ghost mw2 #ghost cod #ghost call of duty #ghost mwii #ghost x reader #cod #call of duty #simon riley smut #simon ghost riley smut #dark!ghost #dark!simon riley #dark!simon

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secretmellowblog · 1 year

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On the subject of the Titanic ‘submersible’ that was lost in the deep with all its wealthy tourists— it’s so insane/eerie in hindsight to read this article from the Smithsonian that interviews the CEO Stockton Rush long before the disaster.

Despite the Smithsonian supposedly being an organization that cares about science and truth, and the fact that there were SO MANY obvious red flags from the beginning and so many people criticizing the company…..the article is a puff piece uncritically glorifying the CEO’s obviously terrible submersible project. It compares him in glowing terms to Elon Musk. It is an article about how private ventures like those of Stockton Rush and Elon Musk can and should be the future of the world.

We’ve obviously learned now that there were whistleblowers at the company who were warning for a long time that Stockton Rush’s submersible was unsafe— only to be fired and then sued. It makes sense the submersible was so unsafe, because the CEO in this interview is open about how he has no background in underwater engineering and is annoyed by quote “regulations that needlessly prioritize passenger safety.”

Soon after, the private [submersible] market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

The fact that Stockton Rush (who was piloting the submarine when the disaster happened) is on record complaining about the evils of regulations that prioritize people’s safety, and the Smithsonian uncritically regurgitated that rhetoric in their glowing puff piece about how rich tycoons like Elon Musk and Stockton Rush are going to save the world is just…..in hindsight of how everything ended it’s just so much horrible black comedy? It’s like a satire about the dangers of uncritically worshipping the rich.

It is mentioned in the article that Rush chose to make his submersible in a different shape, and with a different (cheaper) material than is usually used for submersibles. The article frames this as a result of daring innovation, and not of negligence/ignorance. This passage in particular, which in context is supposed to portray Rush’s critics as joyless naysayers who were proven wrong by the noble tycoon, is pretty foreboding in hindsight:

Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.”

And then!!

The exact problem that happened to Titan this weekend, happened on Titan’s very first test voyage to the Titanic! The experimental carbon fiber hull had an issue and it caused communications to break down!

The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”

Both Rush and the article writer treat this as a fun quirky story, instead of a serious safety failure and red flag with his experimental macgyvered regulation-flaunting submersible.

Other highlights from the article include:

Stockton rush saying that if 3/4 of the planet is water, why haven’t we monetized it?

Stockton saying we will “colonize the ocean long before we colonize space”

Lots of weird pro colonialism stuff in general??? This article loves colonialism and thinks it’s cool

Rush saying he plans for this to eventually help find more underwater resources for the US to exploit and profit from

Elon musk comparisons. The article writer does not mention that Elon Musk’s rockets explode and therefore it would be a bad idea to get in one of them, because that would imply it’s a bad idea to get into the submersible

Stockton rush seeing himself as Captain Kirk

The article writer comparing the tourists who plan to join Rush to Englishmen who went on colonialist journeys to Africa as if that’s like, a good thing. So much pro colonialism stuff in this article

So many sentences about Stockton Rush being handsome when he literally just looks like some guy

The article beginning with an editor’s note from years later disclaiming that the extraordinary submersible they’re advertising in this article is uh. It’s now uhhhh

But yeah it really does just bring home how so many organizations that supposedly care about scientific truth or journalistic integrity are willing to uncritically platform propaganda for wealthy CEOS. It’s frustrating how easily people fall for the fake myths that careless wealthy people invent for themselves, and even more frustrating that supposedly respectable institutions will platform irresponsible lies that end up getting people killed.

Rush is such an obvious and simple example of this, and his negligence is “only” killing five people including himself. But to me it feels like a cautionary tale to bear in mind when it comes to uncritical puff piece media coverage of similar “daring tycoon innovations” by people like Bezos or Musk.

#titanic #oceangate #titanic submersible #sorry this is just so fascinating to me #it’s like a parody or piece of satire #if it were in a novel it would feel like the symbolism was too obvious and on the nose

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