#political t-shirts liberal

[batshit-auspol]

So a bit of background first for our international followers: Clive Palmer is one of Australia's many mining billionaires who like to meddle in our country's politics, and as such he is utterly despised by all of Australia.

Picture for context:

He is most commonly known online by the title "Fatty McFuckhead", (problematic as it may be) because he tried to sue a youtuber for $500,000 for calling him that - and he lost. So the name stuck.

Up until his most recent foray into parliament, the legally certified Fuckhead was best known for his batshit business ventures, such as attempting to build "The Titanic 2" (failed) and trying to build a dinosaur theme park (also failed, but at least nobody got eaten by a T-Rex in this one).

For a very long time Clive played the role of sugar daddy to Australia's largest conservative party, the ironically named Liberal Party, until they had a falling out in 2012 after Clive claimed there was too much money influencing politics (lol), at which point he started his own party, days after saying he totally quit and wasn't fired and he only left because he didn't want to be a distraction.

His initial run at parliament was actually kinda successful, with Palmer's group winning 4 seats, plus a member from the "Motoring Enthusiasts Party" joined them too after accidentally getting elected and not knowing what the fuck to do.

Despite this initial success however, Palmer's party (which ran on basically no platform other than "I'm rich") hit an iceberg (titanic 2 achieved) and seven elected state and federal politicians quit within the first year.

By the time the next federal election rolled around, only one Palmer party candidate was still running for re-election. The most successful of this group - Jaquie Lambie - quit to sit as an independant and is still in parliament today.

Here she is with a painting of herself strangling Clive (she sells signed copies of this)

And here the senator is posting about liking sausage:

Anyway, we're getting to the point: which is the yellow posters. By the 2016 election, just two years after forming, the party was in complete freefall. It won just 0.01% of the vote at their second election, and it was announced shortly after that Clive was quitting politics and the party was being shut down. Australia breathed a sigh of relief.

It was, of course, short lived.

Clive, in desperate need of attention, restarted the party for the 2019 election, fielding candidates in every seat and spending $60 million in advertising in an attempt to win votes.

Every single candidate lost.

It was in this campaign however that Australia really started to fall out of love with Palmer, because most of that $60 million went towards putting up the world's least compelling marketing billboards on almost every single free space in the country.

For a good six months this was basically the only thing you would see in Australia if you went outside:

Clearly Graphic design is his passion. And yes, the genius did just straight up try and copy Trump's homework while changing a few words, hoping nobody would notice.

Very quickly these all got vandalised and it seemed the ad companies didn't care enough to replace them.

We could go on posting examples, there are thousands, but the best is definitely the one Ikea put up shortly after Clive lost the election:

In 2022, Clive's party contested the election AGAIN, this time also opting to send millions on spam text messages to every person in Australia begging for people to vote for him, as well as buying almost every youtube ad for a year, at the cost of $100 million.

He won a whopping one seat.

During this election Clive ran on an anti-lockdown, anti-vax platform with the slogan "freedom, freedom, freedom". That message, however, was slightly undermined when his goons, dressed in 'Freedom!' shirts, made national news for trying to beat up a protester who turned up at a rally dressed as an annoying text message, shouting "pay your workers" at Clive.

As if that wasn't bad enough, at another rally Clive knocked himself unconscious while trying to jump up on stage, and then a few weeks later was rushed to hospital with covid, while his anti-vax ads were still in regular rotation on TV, at which point it was also leaked to the press that Palmer had been alledgedly trying to buy Hitler's car.

Utterly humiliated, the party deregistered again shortly after the election.

Can't wait until he runs again in 2025.

Anyway, on the other "Clive tweeting Miss Kobayashi's Dragon" thing, we have no idea what that means but here's a screencap:

[zvaigzdelasas]

[The Economist is Private UK Media]

Making someone do porridge (or “eat rice and beans”, to use the Korean expression) for expressing their political views is [...] not generally associated with [South Korea]. Yet Lee Yoon-seop, a South Korean poet, is currently languishing in prison for just this. The 68-year-old was sentenced to 14 months in November for threatening South Korea’s “existence and security”. His crime? Writing a poem in praise of the North.

The law used to prosecute Mr Lee, the National Security Act (nsa), is designed to protect South Korea from spies and traitors. But it also bans South Koreans from visiting or making contact with the North, reading or watching North Korean media or saying anything good about Kim Jong Un’s [...] regime. Though South Korea replaced its former military dictatorship with a democracy in 1987, such restrictions on free speech show that some of the generals’ autocratic tendencies endure.[...]

The NSA was modelled on a law designed to quash pro-independence activities during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Since 2003 there have on average been more than 60 NSA prosecutions a year, often for pretty clear espionage cases. A businessman and an army officer were arrested for allegedly selling military secrets to North Korea. Soldiers in the South have been prosecuted under the act for endangering morale by distributing pro-North propaganda.

But the NSA is too often used to prosecute satirists and raid the homes and offices of leftists. Some cases have been ridiculous. Kim Myeong-soo, a PhD student, received six months in prison and a two-year suspended sentence for selling books on North Korea that were widely available in public libraries. A South Korean woman was given a two-year sentence, suspended for four years, for owning recordings of 14 North Korean songs.

This is not Mr Lee’s first offence. But the claim that the sexagenarian posed a threat to South Korea is absurd. His ode was published on a North Korean website. Access to such sites is banned by the NSA and forbidden from a South Korean IP address. [...] It consists of a list of South Korean problems that Mr Kim, in the poet’s view, would instantly solve given the chance.

Mr Lee’s real offence appears to have been believing his own nonsense. By contrast, police decided not to investigate a man under the draconian law for selling shirts with a smiling Mr Kim and the slogan “Walk a flowery path, comrade”. That was OK, officials said, because he was selling them to make a buck.

Worse, the issue points to a broader authoritarian tendency in the South. Its president, Yoon Suk-yeol, often demonises his political opponents by calling them “anti-state forces”, a phrase lifted directly from the NSA. Unfavourable press coverage is routinely labelled “fake news” and the offices of offending outlets have been raided. The administration and its allies have sued more press outfits for defamation—which in South Korea can be a crime even when the offending words are manifestly true—in Mr Yoon’s first 18 months in office than any of its three predecessors did in total.

Yet even a more liberal government would be unlikely to remove the NSA’s illiberal clauses. No administration has made a serious attempt to address it in 20 years. There is no significant political support for scrapping the law [...]. The current administration at least flirted with allowing South Koreans access to North Korean media, but recently abandoned the idea. [...]

Mr Yoon talks often about South Korea’s democratic values. They are at the heart of his pitch for the country to be a strategic link between East and West, developed and developing countries. For that reason alone he should take them more seriously. South Korea is undoubtedly a democracy, but not a terribly liberal one so long as it locks up old men for their dotty opinions. Reforming the NSA would be a better rebuttal to the sentiment Mr Lee expressed than banning it.

22 Jan 24

[teddynivvy]

☀︎ before the sun. chapter 2.

pairing: jschlatt x she/her reader. 1.6k words.

warnings: mention of reader's body insecurity.

a/n: chapter 2 babeyyyy. i hope you enjoy this one even tho it kinda just feels like filler but... who wouldn't wanna spend a day with schlatt in the sun hehe <3

summary: you and schlatt spend the day by the pool.

When you wake up the next morning, the sun is already filtering through the windows to illuminate your hotel room. The soft, pale yellow light met your barely-open eyes as you shut them closed again immediately, burying your face into the pillow, and letting out a groan. The bedside clock read 8:23am, much too early to be awake on vacation. 

Checking your phone, there were two texts from your parents on the screen.

Gone golfing, be home this aft!

Have fun at the pool!

Placing your phone back face down, you let your hands come under your pillow, falling into a deep slumber once again.

A few hours later, you awoke to a much brighter, hotter sun streaming through the windows and onto your sleeping body. You pulled back the sheets and rubbed your face, now noticing it was 11:00, which was much more tolerable. Remembering your parents had already gone out for the day, likely with Schlatt’s, you made your way to the bathroom. Your face looked significantly better than yesterday - the linen sheets and comfy mattress had done you well, lessening the bags under your eyes and making you feel worlds better than you had in recent history.

You pulled on the swimsuit you’d purchased yesterday over your body and looked at yourself in the mirror. It was so easy to pick out the flaws, as this was the most revealing you’d looked in public in a long time, pulling at the fabric to cover your skin to no avail.

“It looks nice on you. You really have nothing to be insecure about.”

Schlatt’s words rang in your brain as you straightened up, smiling to yourself in the mirror. After years of feeling inadequate with your ex, it was kind of liberating to feel sexy in something. 

You pulled a t-shirt over your swimsuit and grabbed your beach bag, stuffing a bath towel and some sunscreen in. You opened the door, locking it behind you, and letting out a little yelp when you turned around to see a figure there.

“Oh, hey, (Y/N).”

“Schlatt, hey,” you caught your breath with a hand on your chest. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” he laughed. “You going to the pool?”

“Yeah, was gonna probably go get some breakfast first, what about you?”

“Me too, you wanna go together?”

You felt your cheeks warm. Why were you blushing?

“Yeah… yeah. Let’s go.”

🏖️

You and Schlatt made polite small talk all the way to the breakfast bistro, before he pulled out your chair for you to sit. Your beach bag sat on the floor below as you looked across the table at him, where he was already flipping through the menu. His long fingers caught your attention, thick and dextrous, making you lose your breath a little.

“You ok?”

“Y-yeah, just no idea what to get,” you covered for yourself, pulling the menu out. “Will you make fun of me for getting pancakes?”

“You’re on vacation!” He laughed, looking at you almost incredulously. “There literally isn’t a better time to get pancakes.”

You both ordered coffees and pancakes when the waiter came around, after Schlatt had declared your mention of them making him want some too.

“So, what are you up to today?” You asked, after taking a sip of water from the glass in front of you. 

“Probably just relaxing by the pool, did your parents tell you that they went out?”

You nodded.

“Yeah, guess you’re stuck with me today.”

You cringed at yourself immediately after saying that, looking up to find Schlatt meeting your eyes. The waiter came by to drop off your food and coffee. A smirk played at his lips as his gaze fell down to his food, cutting into the stack and placing a piece in his mouth, strawberry and whipped cream at the corner of his lip.

“Fine by me.”

🏖️

By the time you made it to the pool, the hot sun was beating down on you, and you were ready to jump right in. The water was so inviting, a deep blue colour as you pulled off your t-shirt and shorts, putting them on the clean, white beach chair.

You pulled out the bottle of sunscreen from your bag, squirting some out to put on your arms. You handed it over to him wordlessly, as he took it from you, fingertips lightly brushing.

He took some in his hands, coating his arms and face. A white stripe appeared along his nose, just underneath his sunglasses.

You stifle a laugh.

“Do you mean to have it all on your nose like that?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “I burn easily, alright? I don’t get out much.”

You find yourself in a fit of giggles as he laughs with you, turning away slightly to hide his blush blooming across his cheeks at the sound of your laugh.

“Can you get my back?”

You’re turned away from him, straps of your swimsuit pushed down your shoulders. His breath hitches in his throat, your supple skin in the light, straps draped across you and daring to be pulled down, and off. He almost forgets to answer.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.”

He rubs a bit of the sunscreen in his hands, before pushing it along the plane of your back and shoulders. He slightly kneads into your shoulder blades and neck, deft fingers, over the backs of your arms and just slightly under the corseted bow, tied at the mid-back of your suit.

He’s trying so hard not to look at the way your body curves, your face pointed down so he can access the back of your neck. Soft skin, to kiss, or bite, or…

“All good?”

You grabbed the bottle of sunscreen from him, thanking him with a nod, before tossing it back onto the chair. Stepping towards the pool, you sat on the curved side, dipping your toe in.

“Nice?” Schlatt asked, putting his own feet in the water. He wasn’t looking out onto the gentle waves of the pool though, his gaze was right on you, seemingly not able to tear his eyes away. He pushed his fluffy hair back and adjusted his sunglasses, as you leaned back on your hands. The long line of your body was apparent, as you splashed your feet in the cold water. You could’ve sworn you saw Schlatt take a small gulp as he quickly averted his eyes.

You pushed your body into the water and began to swim around, dipping your head under to get your hair and face wet. Surfacing, you pushed it off your face, turning to face Schlatt, where he sat motionless.

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“I kinda… hate swimming,” he laughed. “I realize how ironic that is.”

You stepped over to him, letting the water droplets glisten off the skin in the sunlight. “Oh, c’mon. This isn’t real swimming. I won’t make you do laps or anything.”

He shook his head.

“C’mon…” you laughed, reaching out to grab his hands that were sitting in his lap. They were rough, but soft at the same time, and you relished the feeling of holding them.

“Just one dip. That’s it. Then we can sit in the sun all day.”

You couldn’t tell if the sunburn was already blooming across his cheeks, or if he was blushing. You were hoping he was blushing.

Realizing you were still holding his hands, you let them go. “Fine. You can sit on the edge of the pool like a loser all day.” Your smile stretched across your face as Schlatt gasped, fake-offended at your roast. 

You swam away, surfacing just to see Schlatt pulling off his t-shirt. Broad shoulders and back, strong arms and freckles peppering him all over. You were staring - you knew it too, as he threw his t-shirt over the pool chair and slid into the bright blue water. You watched as he dipped his head under, shaking his head to get rid of the excess water and pushing it back on his head. 

If you weren’t staring before, you definitely were now.

“Happy?”

You blushed furiously, finally averting your gaze.

“Yes. Thank you.”

🏖️

The sun stayed out all day as you and Schlatt sat by the pool, soaking it up. You mostly had your headphones in, or made small talk, and you swore you saw Schlatt fall asleep in his beach chair at least once, even if he swears he didn’t. 

“I was just resting my eyes!”

Your parents were planning to have dinner at the country club where they had been golfing, which left you and Schlatt to fend for yourselves. You landed at a small restaurant on the property, where you shared plates of pasta and glasses of wine under the deep red-orange sun, feeling like you were finally truly enjoying yourself on this vacation.

Sitting at the table with empty plates, Schlatt yawned. 

“Tired?” You asked, downing the last sip of your wine.

“Yeah. Woke up super early this morning, and the sun makes me sleepy.”

You smiled, nodding along as to agree with his sentiment.

“Probably just gonna go back to my room.”

You pushed out your chair, as did he, walking along the path back towards your rooms. You had spent the entire day together, with not much else to say, you pulled out your room key and pushed open your door.

“I had fun today,” Schlatt laughed, and you felt your heart skip a beat. Schlatt did not seem like the type to talk about his feelings much, let alone express when he had a good time.

“Me too. Hope you get a better sleep tonight.”

“Yeah, me too. See you tomorrow.”

And with that, he disappeared inside his room, as did you. A soft sigh left your lips as you smiled, throwing down your beach bag and flopping onto the freshly made hotel bed.

Maybe this vacation wouldn’t suck so bad after all.

[poetry-protest-pornography]

Okay, since Pride is fast approaching, and all the Hot Takes about who should and shouldn't be allowed at Pride, and "family friendliness", and whatever have started. And we're in a time of unprecedented legal attempts to imprison, persecute, and kill us, I'm going to expand on my comments on a different post:

A whole lot of people willfully misinterpreting "kink at pride" as some kind of live sex show on a float, and not people in leather and masks and pasties and thigh-highs and walking just a step behind their partner.

Whole lot of people completely ignoring the place that the leather community, and kinksters have in the early days of the gay liberation movement. And we would be literally nowhere without trans people taking up the fight for all of us. Nowhere.

Whole lot of people putting their hands over their eyes and covering their ears to avoid having to see the mile high writing on the wall that says "you're next".

Respectability politics has never gotten us anywhere where we're safe. Anything other than a united front is going to get us all jailed and murdered with the state stamp of approval. So regardless of how you feel about how "normal" puppy play, or leather daddies are, guess what, they're part of your community, so bite your tongue and fucking kumbaya, because as far as other people are concerned you are no different than they are.

Shut the fuck up about "normal", because as far as the people making the laws are concerned, we're all an aberration and they want us all out of the fucking parade. Sit down and read some history; this isn't new, this isn't their first time making us illegal. Right now, they're targeting drag queens and transgender folks, and they are doing their best to turn their existence into criminal acts, so that they can be put to death. That's happening, right now, everywhere. And again, you, in your cute little subtle rainbow T-shirt and khakis? You're the same as those "dangerous queers" that are being legislated against. You're going next on the list.

Stop helping them sign our warrants because you're uncomfortable with some fucking leather straps; the cops will be happy to round you up, too, in your business casual queer attire, when they're done with the kinksters and the drag queens and our trans siblings. And then, we'll be without some of our loudest and most passionate voices in the fight, because you didn't like their god-damned outfits, or their fucking pronouns, and you let them be taken away for the sake of "normal".

Shut the fuck up.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ryan W. Briggs, Max Marin, and Ellie Rushing at Philadelphia Inquirer:

BETHEL PARK, Pa. — In the sea of caps and gowns, Thomas Matthew Crooks hardly stood out. Few people clapped when his name was called. A YouTube video of his graduation two years ago from Bethel Park High School shows a slender and bespectacled student receiving his diploma with a soft smile. But the class of 2022 awoke Sunday to learn that the 20-year-old Allegheny County man was notorious, the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a rally that left an ex-firefighter, Corey Comperatore, dead and two other attendees wounded. U.S. Secret Service counter-snipers killed Crooks moments after he opened fire on the Saturday night rally from a nearby rooftop. The FBI said Sunday they believed he acted alone. He had not been on the bureau’s radar.

Crooks’ actions shocked residents in his hometown, sparked countless conspiracy theories online, and prompted investigators to begin combing through every aspect of his life, looking for motive. The mystery has been fueled by a near-total absence of Crooks’ social media postings, political writings, or other digital fingerprints. Several former classmates appeared on national television Sunday, quickly casting Crooks as a stereotypical loner who was bullied heavily during his time at Bethel Park. One of them, Jason Kohler, told reporters Sunday that students tormented Crooks “almost every day” and that he often wore “hunting” outfits to class. “He was just an outcast,” Kohler said, “and you know how kids are nowadays.” Yet, two former students interviewed by The Inquirer disputed the characterization. They did not recall specific incidents of violence or other antagonism involving their now-infamous classmate in the community they described as generally tight-knit.

[...] The slight traces of public information Crooks left behind leave few clues about his political ideology. Federal campaign finance records show he made a $15 donation to progressive political action committee in 2021 after President Joe Biden’s election, but later registered as a Republican, according to Pennsylvania voter data. His father was a registered Libertarian, his mother a Democrat. Crooks’ body was found on the rooftop of an agricultural tool manufacturing plant a few hundred feet from the rally with an AR-style semiautomatic rifle — legally purchased by his father. The shooter was wearing a T-shirt promoting “The Demolition Ranch,” a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts. If Crooks maintained any personal social media presence, it went largely undetected on Sunday. Discord, an instant messaging platform mainly used by video gamers, released a statement acknowledging Crooks held a “rarely utilized” account that contained no information relevant to the shooting.

Sigafoos did not recall Crooks making political overtures in class, but rather as someone interested in how government works, and “not trying to insert his own beliefs into it.” Another former classmate did not share this view. Max R. Smith recalled taking an American history course with Crooks as a sophomore. He did recall Crooks making political statements — but they shed no light on his actions Saturday. “He definitely was conservative,” he said. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” Smith recalled a mock debate in which their history professor posed government policy questions and asked students to stand on one side of the classroom or the other to signal their support or opposition for a given proposal. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

The gunman who killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore and attempted the assassination of Donald Trump at Saturday night’s Butler, PA rally was not only a registered Republican but also a vehement conservative.

This should hopefully put an end to the right-wing’s nonsensical claim that a “violent leftist”/”Antifa” tried to kill Trump.

[flibbertygigget]

Everyone should have a union and go to union meetings, not only because it's your right to collectively bargain with the company you work for, but also because it will have you cooperating with the most chaotic collection of motherfuckers possible including

- old man whose only form of politics is caring about the union

- ultra-conservative in a DeSantis t-shirt who told my nb ass it was ok i was a liberal because "I guess queers have an actual reason to not be Republicans" (thanks bro? idk what that means but you seem fairly normal outside of the whole ultra-conservative thing)

- anarchist bro and communist bro fighting

- Diversity and Equity Lead soccer mom type

- guy who hits the weed vape in the middle of the meeting

- obviously overeducated guy from Africa whose degree didn't transfer over to the US

- old guy wearing a tie for some reason??? dude probably participated in strikes in the 80s when Reagan was breaking the unions and he's still willing to Get Mad with you about it

- more butch lesbians than you've seen outside of a very specific booth at Pride

[self-loving-vampire]

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.” The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over. “Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.” In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. ... Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Srinivasan defines the Blue political tribe as the liberal voters he implies are responsible for the city’s problems. Blues will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, said Balaji, unlike Republicans (“Reds”). “Reds should be welcomed there, and people should wear their tribal colors,” said Srinivasan, who compared his color-coded apartheid system to the Bloods vs. Crips gang rivalry. “No Blues should be welcomed there.” While the Blues would be excluded, they would not be forgotten. Srinivasan imagines public screenings of anti-Blue propaganda films: “In addition to celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses.… There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.” Balaji goes on—and on. The Grays will rename city streets after tech figures and erect public monuments to memorialize the alleged horrors of progressive Democratic governance. Corporate logos and signs will fill the skyline to signify Gray dominance of the city. “Ethnically cleanse,” he said at one point, summing up his idea for a city purged of Blues (this, he says, will prevent Blues from ethnically cleansing the Grays first). The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter. “Elon, in sort of classic Gray fashion ... captures Twitter and then, at one stroke, wipes out millions of Blues’ status by wiping out the Blue Checks,” he said. “Another stroke … [he] renames Twitter as X, showing that he has true control, and it’s his vehicle, and that the old regime isn’t going to be restored.”

To be expected from libertarians that they're more tolerant of conservatives, cops, and fascists than progressives.

[candycandy00]

plsss do shigaraki x short reader ?? like size kink stuff yk very high sorry shawty i love ur writing

Smut. 18+. Size kink.

You have a crush on your new boss. Just a minor one. Nothing important. But it does make the time pass quickly to know that you could run into him at any moment while dusting shelves or changing sheets. You’ve been working as a housekeeper at this villa for a few weeks now. Your quirk being rather useless in combat, you got shoved into whatever job was needed at the time. And right now, they need someone to clean the section of the villa that was given to the new leader of the group you belong to, newly dubbed the Paranormal Liberation Front.

Shigaraki Tomura was intimidating at first, even frightening. You hadn’t been on the streets that day when he fought, and defeated, Re-Destro. You have never seen him in action, but you’ve heard stories that made your blood run cold. Entire groups of people disintegrating at his touch. Buildings collapsing in seconds. Literal craters being formed in the ground. Who wouldn’t be terrified of this man?

The first night he came to his room, you didn’t even get a chance to introduce yourself before he closed the door. He didn’t reappear until the next evening, and you were shocked by how different he looked once out of the suit and coat, the creepy hand no longer on his face. He hobbled out of his room on crutches, wearing dark sweatpants and a long sleeve t-shirt. Aside from the injuries, he looked like a fairly normal twenty year old guy. You introduced yourself as the housekeeper and asked if he needed anything. Surprisingly, he was polite in his replies to you, though maybe a little dismissive.

Over the next few days, you observed him with great interest. He slept a lot the first few days, then started to move around more, occasionally going to the kitchen for snacks, rarely asking you to bring him anything. His friends came to see him often, and they could be a loud and rowdy bunch. You spotted him grinning a few times while talking to them, but when they were gone, he was quiet. To be honest, he seemed a bit lonely without them.

One day, out of the blue, he asked if there might be a gaming console of some kind at the villa. He was bored while waiting for his injuries to heal. You couldn’t find one there, so you brought one of your own from home. When you told him this, he seemed genuinely grateful. By the time you were watching him play games from a distance, you didn’t find him scary at all anymore.

Today he’s meeting with Re-Destro and the others, making plans of some sort that you’re not privy to. You’re in the hallway, dusting a tall book case. Being very short in stature, you have to pull a chair from the kitchen into the hall and climb onto it to reach the upper shelves. You’re lucky you were not expected to wear some sort of maid uniform. Instead, you wore casual clothes: denim shorts and a cropped t-shirt. You like being comfortable while you work.

The door at the end of the hall, leading to the foyer, opens. Shigaraki walks in, finally home from the meeting. His suit is more casual than the one he wore when he first took over as leader, and despite looking good in it, you stand by your opinion that he looks much nicer in his regular clothes.

As he approaches, you turn around in the chair and say, “Welcome back!”

He gives you a nod and a small wave as he starts to walk by you. You smile and return to dusting, but as you swivel back around to face the shelf, your foot slips on the shiny polished wood of the chair seat. You cry out in alarm as you fall, tumbling over the back of the chair and colliding with something soft yet firm. You feel your feet touching the ground and look up to see that Shigaraki has caught you in his arms.

You blush crimson and blurt out, “I’m so sorry! I should’ve been more careful!”

“It’s fine,” he says, though his voice is slightly strained. You remember then that he’s still badly injured, still recuperating. Before you can say anything more though, you feel the two of you falling toward the ground. You realize too late that Shigaraki had to drop his cane to catch you, and apparently that caused him to lose his balance.

The two of you hit the floor, Shigaraki on his back and you on top of him. Neither of you move for several seconds, as if you’re both waiting for the other person to say something first. Your face is pressed against his chest, and you can feel the soft, subtle thumping of his heartbeat. Finally, you raise up enough to look at his face. “Are you alright?” you ask. “I didn’t hurt you leg or reopen any wounds, did I?”

To your surprise, Shigaraki grins. “If a tiny girl like you can hurt me, I might as well give up.”

You blush again, suddenly very aware of the fact that the entire front of your body is fully in contact with his. One of your knees has slid over the side of his waist, your pelvic area shoved into his by the fall. To an observer who didn’t know the context, the two of you would look like lovers.

Carefully, so as not to aggravate his still-healing wounds, you move off him, inadvertently rubbing your crotch across his body. You’re both fully clothed, but the feel of it excites you. Your cheeks are still pink with embarrassment as you stand up and then hold out a hand to help him get to his feet.

When he stands up, you realize you’ve never stood this close to him before. Most of the times you’ve interacted with him, he’s been sitting down, or you’ve just walked by each other in the hall. But standing here, inches from him, you notice the height difference between you. Shigaraki isn’t the tallest guy around, but he’s practically a giant compared to you. Being short has provided plenty of challenges over your life time. You were picked on at school, you can never seem to reach things in the grocery store, and you still have to show ID to for every little thing, despite being in your twenties.

But now, staring up at Shigaraki, you kind of like being short. The size difference between you is kind of hot.

Shigaraki dusts off the suit he’s wearing and picks up his cane. He turns and starts to head to his room. Without really thinking, you reach out and grab the end of his jacket. “Wait!”

He turns and looks at you over his shoulder.

“Thank you for catching me!” you say.

He looks at you blankly for a few moments, then he says, “Wanna come to my room?”

You freeze. Did he just invite you to his room? Why? You’re practically nobody, an insignificant little speck in his world. You’re not naive. You know what he probably means by inviting you, where it will most likely lead. You hesitate, not because you don’t want to sleep with him, but because you worry about becoming emotionally attached. Then you remember that lonely look he sometimes gets when his friends have all left for the evening, and your hesitation is forgotten.

“I’d love to,” you finally answer him, and then the two of you walk down the hall together and into his room, shutting the door behind you.

You watch him pull off the pieces of his suit until only black pants and an unbuttoned white shirt remain. There are still bandages here and there, and his missing fingers made him struggle a bit with his buttons. He pauses and looks at you expectantly, so you pull your shirt over your head and your shorts down to your ankles before stepping out of them.

Shigaraki looks you up and down, and you feel a little shy. You’ve never been particularly self conscious about your body, but you’ve never had a guy this hot staring at it before. He slips off his shirt, revealing his toned body, scars and bandages somehow making him look even sexier. You strip off your underwear, then step over to him. He’s trying to unbutton his pants in a hurry, but his mangled hand is fumbling. You reach down and do it for him, looking him in the eyes as you nimbly unbutton and unzip his pants, letting them slide open and down his hips a few inches.

He sits down on the nearby bed. “You’re going to have to be on top,” he says.

Of course. With that injured leg, not to mention his other injuries, it would be hard for him to get into most other positions. You sit down on his lap, settling your weight on the thigh of his good leg. The fabric of his pants feels soft against your bare skin. You turn toward him and kiss his lips, then turn your back to him and scoot back so that your naked ass is pressing into his crotch. You can already feel a growing bulge beneath his boxers as you wiggle yourself against him. He reaches around with one hand and gropes your breast, then leans his face forward and nuzzles your neck.

You happen to glance up and notice the full length mirror across from you, displaying the whole carnal scene. You look so small, like a little girl in daddy’s lap. But you’re a fully grown woman, and you watch in the mirror as Shigaraki’s hand glides down your stomach and lands between your thighs. He gropes at the soft plump flesh there, coating his hand in your arousal. You open your legs wide for him, giving him an excellent view in the mirror, and he pinches your clit as your reward, making you moan and shudder in his lap.

He leans back slightly, giving you room to reach down and pull his cock from his boxers. It’s so big, so hard. You wonder if it will even fit inside you, given your small size. But you’ll be damned if you don’t try. Using the mirror to see what you’re doing, you raise up and then lower yourself onto his cock. You go slowly, carefully, at first. You don’t want to tear yourself open. Luckily, you’re soaking wet, which helps you get it halfway in. You take a deep breath, steeling yourself, then press down further and further until he’s all the way in.

You wince as he fills you all the way up and then some, stretching the delicate tissue. In the mirror, you can see a slight bulge in your lower stomach, the outline of his cock. Shigaraki see’s it too, and the image must turn him on, because it feels like he just got even harder. “Fuck, you’re tight,” he says against your ear.

His voice sends shivers down your spine. You raise up slightly and then drop back down, repeating the motion over and over so that you’re bouncing on his cock, your breasts shaking. The sheer size of him causes a dull, throbbing ache that hurts so good. By the time he reaches around again to vigorously rub your clit, you’re moaning loudly, shuddering under his touch, watching him watching you in the mirror.

You cum hard all over his cock, drenching his hand. All energy leaves your body, and you’re too exhausted to keep riding him, so he snakes his arms under yours and lifts you up slightly so that he can thrust upwards into you, going even deeper than he was before. Your small stature makes this too easy for him, and within minutes, he cums into your limp body.

Shigaraki falls backwards on the bed, and you fall back onto him, the two of you panting together. After a few moments, you roll over to face him, studying his expression. Will he tell you to get your clothes and get out? You’re not delusional enough to think this is the start of some epic romance, but you’d like to think the two of you could be friends.

When he says nothing, you roll off him and stand up. “I better get back to work,” you say awkwardly.

As you move away from the bed, you feel him take hold of your hand and gently pull you back. “Take the rest of the day off,” he says.

Your eyes widen. “Really? I don’t wanna get fired.”

He grins. “Trust me, you’re not getting fired.”

You grin back, then climb into bed beside him, deciding this is the best job ever.

[gooseprotocol]

Spice Girls interviewed by Kathy Acker in 1997 for the Guardian Weekend edition.

All Girls Together by Kathy Acker

The Spice Girls are the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker is an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in New York to swap notes – on boys, girls, politics. And what they really, really want.

Fifty-second street. West Side, New York City. Hell’s Kitchen – one of those areas into which no one would once have walked unless loaded. Guns or drugs or both. But now it has been gentrified: the beautiful people have won. A man in middle-aged-rocker uniform, tight black jeans and nondescript T-shirt, lets Nigel, the photographer, and me through the studio doorway then a chipmunk-sort-of-guy in shorts, with a Buddha tattooed on one of his arms, greets us warmly. This is Muff, the band’s publicity officer. We’re about to meet the Girls … They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a “real band”. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick.

There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as “attractive young things ... brought together by a manager with a marketing concept”. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a “manufactured band”. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue? However, an email from a Spice fan mentions that, even though he loves the girls, he detects a “couple of stereotypes surrounding women in the band’s general image. The brunette is the woman every man wants to date. Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, or to hire as your mistress-secretary. The blonde is the woman you take home to mother, whereas the redhead is the wild woman, the woman-with-lots-of-evil-powers.” So who are these Girls? And how political is their notorious “Girl Power”? Even though I have seen many of their videos and photos, as soon as I’m in front of these women, I am struck by how they look far more remarkable than I had expected, even though Mel C is trying not to look as lovely as she is. I had intended to say something else, but instead I find myself asking them: “If paradise existed, what would it look like?” Geri speaks first, and she is, I think, reprimanding me for being idealistic. “Money makes the world what it is today,” she says, almost before I have time to think about my sudden outburst, “a world infested with evil. All sorts of wars are going on at the moment. Everyone’s kind of bickering, wanting to better themselves because their next-door neighbour’s got a better lawn. That kind of thing.” “Greed,” Victoria adds. Mel C: “Instead of trying to be better than someone else, you have to try to better yourself.” In a few minutes, they are explaining to me that the Spice Girls is a type of paradise, Spice Girls is a lifestyle. “It’s community.” That’s Geri again. She and Mel B – one in a funky, antique Hawaiian shirt, the other in diaphanous yellow bell-bottoms and top – do most of the talking. Mel C, in her gym clothes, is the quietest. Geri: “We’re a community in which each one of us shines individually, without making any of the others feel insecure. We liberate each other. A community should be liberating. Nelson Mandela said that you know when someone is brilliant when having that person next to you makes you feel good.”

‘The Spicey life vibey thing’ ... The Spice Girls film the Euro 96 theme song video. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

“Not envious,” adds her cohort, Mel B. These are the two baddest Girls. At least on the surface. I suspect otherwise. “It inspires you.” Geri again. “That is what life’s about. People should be inspiring.” I can’t keep up with these Girls. My generation, spoon-fed Marx and Hegel, thought we could change the world by altering what was out there – the political and economic configurations, all that seemed to make history. Emotions and personal – especially sexual – relationships were for girls, because girls were unimportant. Feminism changed this landscape in England, the advent of Margaret Thatcher, sad to say, changed it more. The individual self became more important than the world. To my generation, this signals the rise of selfishness for the generation of the Spice Girls, self-consideration and self-analysis are political. When the Spices say, “We’re five completely separate people,” they’re talking politically. “Like when you’re in a relationship,” Mel B takes over, “and you’re in love, you feel you’re only you when you’re with that person, so when you leave that person, you think ‘I’m not me’. That’s so wrong. It’s downhill from then on, in yourself spiritually and in your whole environment. In this band, it’s different. Each of us is just the way we are, and each of us respects that.”

“As Melanie says,” adds Geri, “each of us wants to be her own person and, without snatching anyone else’s energy, bring something creative and new and individual to the group. We’re proof this is happening. When the Spice Girls first started as a unit, we respected the qualities we found in each other that we didn’t have in ourselves. It was like, ‘Wow! That’s the Spicey life vibey thing, isn’t it?’”

Geri turns even more paradoxical: “Normally, when you get fans of groups, they want to act like you, they copy what you’re wearing, for instance. Whereas our fans, they might have pigtails and they might wear sweatclothes, but they are so individual, it’s unbelievable. When you speak to them, they’ve got so much balls! It’s like we’ve collected a whole group of our people together! It’s really, really mad. I can remember someone coming up to us and going, ‘Do you know what? I’ve just finished with my boyfriend! And you’ve given me the incentive to go ‘Fuck this!’” At this, the Spices cheer. Giving up any hope of narrative continuity, I ask the girls if they want boys. “Some of us are in relationships.” Mel B. “I live with my boyfriend. For three years now, yeah.” I tell them that I’ve never been good at balancing sexual love and work. “Of course you can. It doesn’t make me a lesser person to be in a relationship makes me a better person. Because I can still go out and . . . flirting is natural.” I’m listening to Mel B, but all I can think, at the moment, is how beautiful she is. “I can stay out all night and come in when I want. Your whole life doesn’t have to change just because you’re with somebody else.”

What man could handle all this? ... The Spice Girls at the 1997 Cannes film festival. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images

“It depends on the individual,” says Geri. “I think whoever we would chose to be with should respect the way we are... and our job as well...” Mel B. “The way we are together. None of us would be interested in a man that wanted to dominate, wanted to pull you down, and wanted you to do what he wanted you to do.” I wonder what man could handle all this.

“If one of us was to go out with a dweeb of a man,” says Mel B, “he would probably feel threatened by the five of us. Because we do share things about our relationships, so it’s like a gang. Like a gang, but we’re not. We can have relationships, but they have to be on a completely different level.” Emma talks only about her mother, and Mel C is very quiet. What hides, I wonder, behind that face, which appears more delicate and intense than in her photos? Victoria, I learn later, is upset about an ex-boyfriend’s betrayal of her confidence – throughout our discussion she looks slightly upset. Several times she says that, above all, she wants privacy. Perhaps paradise is not as simple as it seems. I know that, to find out more about these Girls, I must change the subject, but instead, I just blurt out: “Let’s stop talking about boys!” “Yeah,” agree the Girls.

Do they think the Spice Girls will go on forever? And if not, what will they do after it ends? What do you really want to do? “We talked about that the other day, didn’t we?” Geri, sitting on the floor, turns around to the three girls sprawled on a black sofa. Emma, in a white from-the-Sixties dress, perches on a high chair. Their hair has been done, their faces powdered, and they’re ready for the photo.

Spice Girls: Say You’ll Be There - video

“I want to own restaurants,” Victoria takes the lead. She wears a skin-tight designer outfit, perfectly positioned Wonderbra and heels seemingly too high to walk on. Unlike the other girls, she never lets her mask break open.

“The entrepreneur,” remarks Mel B fondly. “Restaurants and art,” Victoria continues. “I’ve always liked art. Ever since I was...” She pauses. “And I’d like a nice big house, and to fill it with, you know...” “Sculptures!” Mel B. “Nude men.” That’s Mel C. All the girls are laughing. Victoria admits – and her emotions finally start to show – that’s she’s always fancied doing art. A few years ago, she and Geri were going to return to college, but they didn’t have the time. Now the others are teasing her about her shoes. I like these girls. I like being with them. “I don’t know what I want to do.” Mel C. The Spices who haven’t yet said anything are now talking. “At the moment I am completely into what I’m doing, and I find it hard to think, right now, what I want to do later on.” Mel B. “I want a big family, like the Waltons,” Emma admits. “I like taking care of people, I love kids.”

“You can look after mine.” Mel C.

Everyone’s saying something. Victoria wants to live with her sister, and maybe her brother Emma’s thinking of her mother. I’m beginning to realise how different from each other the Girls are. Mel C says she likes living alone, but wishes she were geographically closer to her family.

“Me and Geri,” pipes up Mel B, who’s rarely silent for more than a minute, “come from up north. It’s like living in a little community, isn’t it? And moving down into London, it’s like moving into the big wild world. I don’t even know my next-door neighbour, do you?”

“No,” answers Mel C. I like these girls. They’re home girls. “I’d be in a cult, or join a naturist camp or something, and just live there, like back in the Sixties in the hippy days,” Mel B is gesticulating, “where everything’s just One Love, everything’s free, and there are no set rules, where nobody judges you...” Geri tells me that she is a jack-of-all-trades. After speculating whether she might do her own TV show, or go into films, write a movie script, she announces that her model is Sylvester Stallone.

I think of Brigitte Nielsen. “I’ll tell you why.” He couldn’t get a part in Hollywood, she explains, so he wrote, directed and produced Rambo himself. “I just think that’s what it takes I always love it when the underdog comes through.”

The Girls have been in showbusiness for years. Emma started when she was three. All of the others were professional by the age of 17 or 18. I’m beginning to understand why these Girls have been picked, consciously or unconsciously, by their generation to represent that generation. Especially, but not only, the female sector. In a society still dominated by class and sexism, very few of those not born to rule, women especially, are able to make choices about their own work and lifestyle. Very few know freedom. None of the Spices, not even Victoria, was born privileged nor, as they themselves note, are they traditional beauties. Christine, a student of mine, watching them on Saturday Night Live, remarked to me: “They’re not even slick dancers or exceptional singers! They’re just the girl-next-door!”

And they are they’re just girls as more than one of them remarked to me, “We never really had a chance until this happened!” They’re the girls never heard from before this in England look, there are lots of them ones who’ve known Thatcherite, post-Thatcherite society and nothing else, and now, thanks to the glory and the strangeness of British rock-pop society, they’ve found a voice. Listen to the voices of those who didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, or even to Sussex or to art school...

Geri: “I didn’t really know that much, you know, history, but I knew about the suffragettes. They fought. It wasn’t that long ago. They died to get a vote. The women’s vote. Bloody ass-fucking mad, do you know what I mean? You remember that and you think, fucking hell. But to get back to what Victoria was saying about us, that we never got anywhere, you know, the underdog thing. This is why I feel so passionate. We’ve been told, time and time again, you’re not pretty enough, you’re too fat, you’re too thin...” All the Spice Girls are now roaring. “...You’re not tall enough, you’re not white, you’re not black. What I passionately feel is that it is so wrong to have to fit into a role or a mould in order to succeed. What I think is fan-fucking-tastic about us now is that we are not perfect and we have made a big success of ourselves. I’m swelling with pride.” But you are babes. They all protest. “We were all individually beaten down... Collectively, we’ve got something going,” says Geri. “Individually, I don’t think we’d be that great.”

“There’s a chemistry that runs through us and gives us... where I’m bad at something, Melanie’s good, or Geri’s good at something at which the rest of us are bad,” says Victoria. Look, I say, I’m feeling stranger and stranger about these politics based on individualism. There are lots of girls who have the same backgrounds as they do, right? “Right.”

So what is holding those girls down? Keeping them from doing what they really want to do? They start to discuss this. I can hardly make out who’s saying what in the ensuing commotion. I hear “society and conditioning”; another one, Emma perhaps, is talking about being in showbiz, receiving job rejection after job rejection she’s saying how strong you have to be to keep bouncing back. Geri mentions Freud, then states that parents’ beliefs often hold back a child, parents and then the child’s reception in her school. “When you go and see a careers officer,” ponders Mel C, “and you sit down and say, ‘I want to be a spaceman’, instead of responding ‘Go study astrophysics’, they go, ‘Yeah, but what do you really want to do?’ That is so wrong. I think there should be a class in – what do you call it? – self-motivation. Self-motivation classes, self-esteem classes.”

I still feel that a bit of economic realism is missing here, but I can’t get a word in edgewise. Not in all the girl excitement. These females are angry.

“I think it all goes back to everyone wanting to feel that they’re part of an ongoing society,” Geri tries to analyse. “The humdrum nine-to-five, you know what it’s like... What do you do when you leave school? You go and get a job to have money to pay off the mortgage, you get a flat and have a nice boyfriend, pay off your bills, you go to work with your briefcase and your suit, and that’s it. That’s people’s normal, everyday thing, isn’t it? And if you branch out from that, it’s... well, ‘What does she think she’s doing?’ It’s going against the grain a bit – which not many people do. It’s not even going against the grain it’s just clinging on to the bit you want to do and thinking I’m going to do it, who cares?” The Girls, including Geri, tell me that they’ve got an American philosophy, an American dream. “But me,” says Mel B, “before I was in the band, I thought I’d like to be a preacher. I still do. Something like that. They’ve actually got this place in London which is called Speaker’s Corner. You get up on your stand there you can speak about anything. I’d like to speak about people, the emotional or mental blocks people have, especially regarding other people, things like that. That’s what the tattoo on my stomach means, ‘Spirit, Heart and Mind’, because that’s what fuels me – communication fuels me. You learn about yourself, about other people and life in general, through communication.” She says that’s she’s been writing since she was 11, writing everything down, “why the world is this shape, what would happen if everyone on earth died...”

“Stoned questions...” murmurs another Spice. “I’d love to go back to the Sixties,” Emma says in her clear voice. “I’d love that. I wouldn’t wear headbands though.” What about some of the politics of the Sixties, I ask. Malcolm X? The fight against racism? “The other day I watched The Killing Fields.” Now Geri’s doing the talking. “That was in the Sixties, Vietnam. I think it’s very healthy that there’s an element of that today. Through the media today we can see people demonstrating for human rights. In Cambodia, on the other side of the world. I think it’s brilliant when you see people standing up, when they have a voice, it kicks the system, a little bit, into touch.”

Spice Girls: Spice up Your Life - video

But what about in England today? I mention that in the US, racism is still a big issue.

Mel B and Geri start talking about racism. Geri tells me that she’s learned about racial prejudice from Mel B, who says, “The thing I find really bizarre about America and England ... You say that the racism thing is worse in America, yet if you look at television here [in NYC], they’re really scrupulous about making sure, for instance, that they have a black family in an advert. On the adverts in England, you wouldn’t find that.” Suddenly all the Spices are talking among themselves. I can’t understand anything. Then we’re on the subject of Madonna, of people who have inspired us, and Geri starts speaking about Margaret Thatcher. Why she admires her. “But we won’t go down there!” “Don’t go down there!” advise the Girls.

“We won’t go down there, but...” and Geri, who never seems to listen to reason, begins. She says that when politicians discuss the economy, they’re just talking about shifting money from one spot to another, and someone always suffers. This is the same distrust of government that so many Americans, both on the right and left – and especially among lower and working-class people – are feeling and articulating.

Mel C says softly, “We talked about suffragettes and getting the vote to women, and all that. But a lot of women don’t vote a lot of our generation doesn’t vote. I don’t. I don’t feel I should because I don’t know anything about politics ...”

“That was what I was going to say,” adds Emma. They blame the lack of political education in schools. Whether they like or dislike Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, they distrust both the political industry and the related media. “Intellectual people chatting in bathrooms,” comments Mel B. “We are society,” exclaims Geri, “so really ...”

“... We should be running it,” Mel B finishes the statement.

“I’d like to run it for a day,” says Victoria, looking directly at me.

“But Victoria, who’s going to let you do such a job?” Geri reminds her. “The only way to go is growth,” says Mel B. “I think everyone’s turned a bit to the spiritual life.”

“You know,” interjects Victoria, “if you believe in evolution, we only use 20% of our brain ... if that. So it’s natural that we can evolve to the next level. We’ve got to, really.”

“Nowadays, people do sit down and ask themselves ‘Why am I doing this?’” Mel B continues. “They question themselves and what they’ve got around them. I know I do it, and you find your own little mission. And you fucking go for it. A lot more people are like that now.” Do they all feel like that? There’s a general quiet, then a “Yeah” all around me. I ask the Spices to describe themselves. For a moment, they’re lost for words. Victoria: “I love what I’m doing. I’m with my five best friends, and I’ve seen some great countries. I’m happy, I’m very happy. I care a lot about my family. Regarding my personality, I’m private. There are things for me to know and no one else to find out.” She hesitates. “I just accept the way I am. You have to make the most of it, make the best of yourself. I’m a bit of a fretter. If I’m going to do something, I want to do it properly. I want to do the best I can. I’m a perfectionist.”

Emma: “Me, I’m definitely a bit of a brat. I worry about what other people are feeling, that sort of thing.”

Geri: “I have quite an active mind. Quite eccentric, really. A conversationalist. I believe in fate in a big way, a very big way.” Mel B: “I’m always asking inward questions about things. I live off the vibes, I do, that people give me. If I don’t like someone then I won’t speak to them, even though something might be coming out of their mouth that I should listen to. I like to think I’m a bit of a free spirit. I don’t run by any rule book. I live on the edge a little bit. I always think, well, at least I’ll die happy today rather than worrying about it tomorrow.”

Mel C: “I’m very regimented. I really enjoy my own company, although I love being with other people.”

I’m watching the Spice Girls perform Wannabe on Saturday Night Live, but not seeing them. In my mind, I’m seeing England. When I returned there in July last year, lad culture was in full swing. Loaded was running what had once been a relatively intellectual magazine culture. Feminism, especially female intellectuals, had become extinct. “Where have all the women gone to?” I asked. Then came a twist named the Spice Girls. The Spices, though they deny it, are babes – the blonde, the redhead, the dark sultry fashion model – and they’re more. They both are and represent a voice that has too long been repressed. The voices, not really the voice, of young women and, just as important, of women not from the educated classes. It isn’t only the lads sitting behind babe culture, bless them, who think that babes or beautiful lower and lower-middle class girls are dumb. It’s also educated women who look down on girls like the Spice Girls, who think that because, for instance, girls like the Spice Girls take their clothes off, there can’t be anything “up there”.

The Spice Girls are having their cake and eating it. They have the popularity and the popular ear that an intellectual, certainly a female intellectual, almost never has in this society, and, what’s more, they have found themselves, perhaps by fluke, in the position of social and political articulation. It little matters now how the Spice Girls started – if they were a “manufactured band”.

What does this have to do with feminism? When I lived in England in the Eighties, a multitude of women, diverse and all intellectual, were continually heard from – people such as Michele Roberts, Jeanette Winterson, Sara Maitland, Jacqueline Rose, Melissa Benn. Is it also possible that the English feminism of the Eighties might have shared certain problems with the American feminism of the Seventies? English feminism, as I remember it back then, was anti-sex. And like their American counterparts, the English feminists were intellectuals, from the educated classes. There lurked the problem of elitism, and thus class.

I am speculating, but, perhaps due to Margaret Thatcher – though it is hard to attribute anything decent to her – a populist change has taken place in England. The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities. If any of this speculation is valid, then it is up to feminism to grow, to take on what the Spice Girls, and women like them, are saying, and to do what feminism has always done in England, to keep on transforming society as society is best transformed, with lightness and in joy.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Amy Coney Barrett may be poised to split conservatives on the Supreme Court

Justice Amy Coney Barrett talks with Justice Clarence Thomas during her ceremonial swearing-in to the Supreme Court in 2020. The two conservative justices now appear at odds over originalism. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

By Josh Gerstein

06/19/2024 07:00 AM EDT

A rift is emerging among the Supreme Court’s conservatives — and it could thwart the court’s recent march to expand gun rights.

On one side is the court’s oldest and most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. On the other is its youngest member, Amy Coney Barrett.

The question at the center of the spat may seem abstract: How should the court use “history and tradition” to decide modern-day legal issues? But the answer may determine how the court resolves some of the biggest cases set to be released in the coming days, particularly its latest foray into the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

If the court adheres to a strict history-centric approach, as Thomas favors, it will likely strike down a federal law denying firearms to people under domestic violence restraining orders.

But Barrett recently foreshadowed that she is distancing herself from that approach. If she breaks with Thomas in the gun case, known as United States v. Rahimi, and if she can persuade at least one other conservative justice to join her, they could align with the court’s three liberals to uphold the gun control law.

That outcome would avoid the certain political backlash that would result from a high court declaration that alleged domestic abusers have a constitutional right to carry a gun. Thomas, famous for his intransigence, might not care about such backlash, but the more pragmatically minded Barrett is surely aware of it.

“It does seem to me that there’s a fight going on, and Rahimi played an important role in provoking it,” said Reva Siegel, a professor at Yale Law School who is an expert on legal history.

The dispute over the historical approach — part of a legal philosophy known as originalism — also could have implications for Donald Trump’s pending bid to have the high court declare him immune from prosecution for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. The potential outcomes in that case, though, are less clear than in the gun case.

For the moment, the battle lines in this civil war among the court’s six conservatives remain somewhat murky. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch seem to be squarely in Thomas’ camp, while Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh are being cagey about where they stand.

“There is a very ongoing, current debate raging among the justices about how to interpret the Constitution across a range of cases and whether they need to adopt the same approach in all cases,” said University of California Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler.

Barrett skewers Thomas

The divide became evident last week as the court ruled on what was expected to be an amusing but not terribly significant case over a trademark application for crude anti-Trump T-shirts.

Despite the trivial subject matter, Barrett squared off with Thomas in such a confrontational manner that they seemed to be really fighting about something else.

Shirt mocking the size of Trump’s — ahem — hands cannot be trademarked, Supreme Court rules

By Josh Gerstein | June 13, 2024 01:58 PM

“I don’t think this is about T-shirts at all,” Tyler said.

Thomas wrote the majority opinion rejecting the trademark applicant’s claim. Barrett (and all the other justices) agreed with that bottom-line result. The quarrel came down to methodology.

In a concurring opinion, Barrett used unusually blunt terms to skewer Thomas’ history-based rationale for denying the trademark. She described his approach as “wrong twice over,” and she made clear that her gripes went far beyond this case alone.

“I feel like this is a really stark break,” said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department spokesperson during the Trump administration who’s now a prominent Supreme Court analyst.

Barrett complained in her 15-page concurrence that her conservative colleagues have become so enamored of history that they’re now employing it even when the record is ambiguous and the purpose of embracing a retrospective approach is unclear.

“The views of preceding generations can persuade, and, in the realm of stare decisis, even bind,” Barrett wrote, using the Latin term for the principle that courts should adhere to past rulings. “But tradition is not an end in itself — and I fear that the Court uses it that way here.”

Barrett, a Trump appointee, added what could be interpreted as a jab at the very premise of originalism, which has been a hallmark of the conservative legal movement for decades.

“It presents tradition itself as the constitutional argument. … Yet what is the theoretical justification for using tradition that way?” she wrote.

Barrett’s next critique amounts to fighting words among legal conservatives: She compared Thomas’ approach to the kind of amorphous, multi-pronged legal tests that conservatives frequently accuse liberal judges of concocting.

“Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests. But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test,” she asserted.

Barrett’s change of heart

The disagreement over history is notable because, just two years ago, Barrett appeared to be fully on board with the originalist approach that Thomas has long championed.

In 2022, the court used deep dives into the historical record to justify rulings that reverberated across the nation: the Dobbs decision overturning the federal constitutional right to abortion and the Bruen ruling invalidating some permitting laws for gun owners.

In Dobbs, five conservative justices (minus Roberts) relied on the lack of “historical support” for abortion rights. And in Bruen, in a landmark opinion written by Thomas, the court said gun control measures can be upheld only if analogous restrictions existed in early American history.

Barrett joined both those opinions in their entirety, but now she’s sending an unmistakable signal that there are limits to the utility of history in resolving today’s hard constitutional questions.

Supreme Court nixes ban on bump stocks for guns

By Josh Gerstein | June 14, 2024 11:03 AM

She’s hardly alone in voicing skepticism. The court’s use of history in Dobbs and Bruen set off a furious debate among legal scholars, historians and judicial gatherings about whether the justices got the history right — and about the overall wisdom of the effort. Even Saturday Night Live weighed in on the shortcomings of turning to the 17th and 18th centuries to resolve 21st century disputes over issues like abortion.

In her concurrence in the trademark case, Barrett joined in some of those critiques, accusing her fellow conservatives of taking too narrow a view of what sort of past regulation qualifies as relevant enough to justify a government practice in the present.

“In my view, the Court’s laser-like focus on the history of this single restriction misses the forest for the trees,” she added. “I see no reason to proceed based on pedigree rather than principle.”

A less demanding, more flexible historical test could lead the justices to uphold the gun restriction aimed at domestic abusers even in the absence of clear analogs from the founding era. But such flexibility would likely require Barrett and at least one other conservative to pivot away from the strict approach of Bruen. When the justices heard oral arguments last fall, some of the conservative justices seemed to be searching for a way to do just that.

Last week’s trademark case wasn’t the first time Barrett has unfurled the yellow caution flag as the court turned to history to resolve a case. Almost a year ago, in a case involving the admissibility of confessions by co-conspirators, Barrett again accused Thomas of making too much of a very limited historical record.

“The Court overclaims. That is unfortunate,” Barrett wrote in a solo concurrence, referring to Thomas’ majority opinion. “While history is often important and sometimes dispositive, we should be discriminating in its use. Otherwise, we risk undermining the force of historical arguments when they matter most,” she declared.

And in a speech last year at Catholic University, Barrett reiterated the point. “We have to be very, very careful in the way that we use history,” she said, adding that deploying historical evidence to advance a legal conclusion can be like “looking over a crowd and picking out your friends.”

What does this mean for Trump?

The impact of the Barrett-Thomas quarrel on Trump’s presidential immunity claim — arguably the biggest case of the court’s current term — is harder to predict. But with no explicit discussion of that immunity in the Constitution, both sides in the case have turned to history to advance their arguments.

Trump’s attorneys have noted that no sitting or former president had ever faced criminal charges before Trump.

Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith, who has charged Trump with conspiring to deprive Americans of their right to vote in the 2020 election, notes that the founders’ skepticism toward executive power drew from British kings running rampant over their subjects’ rights.

“It does seem to me that Justice Barrett is trying to lay down a marker of at least some limitation or clarity in terms of where she and the others on the court see ‘history and tradition’ moving in the future,” said Catholic University law professor Jennifer Mascott, who clerked for Thomas at the Supreme Court and Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge. “Justice Barrett is basically raising questions that could really shift and perhaps limit the impact of the way specific [historical] examples are used.”

Barrett’s step away from hard-core originalism comes in the wake of Trump giving a less-than-stellar review to his three Supreme Court nominees: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. It has contributed to grumbling from some conservatives that she isn’t proving to be as doctrinaire across the board as they’d have liked.

Sotomayor and Barrett stress Supreme Court camaraderie

By Josh Gerstein | February 23, 2024 07:02 PM

“You see justices after three or more years on the court coming into their own,” said Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS, a blog that publishes statistical analysis of the Supreme Court. “She’s developing a jurisprudence at this point that isn’t extremely parallel to any other justice’s. I’ve heard from a fair number of conservatives right now who are not thrilled with any of the Trump picks, that they’re not Alito or Thomas, and Barrett has been kind of soft on some of these issues.”

Where do Roberts and Kavanaugh stand?

Whether Barrett can succeed in pumping the brakes on the court’s use of history likely will depend on two other conservative justices: Roberts and Kavanaugh, both of whom, like Barrett, have occasionally been willing to break with the court’s right flank.

So far, those two justices have not publicly revealed where they stand in the current dispute. Notably, in the trademark case, they did not sign onto Barrett’s concurrence — but they also did not sign the portion of Thomas’ opinion that most directly responded to Barrett’s critiques.

Instead, they issued a terse, one-paragraph opinion that said Barrett “might well” be right, but the question she raised could be left for another case and another day.

Isgur, the former DOJ spokesperson turned Supreme Court analyst, said she reads the opinions to suggest that Roberts and Kavanaugh are closer to Barrett’s view on the utility of history than they are to the strict originalism of Thomas and Alito.

“The Kavanaugh/Roberts opinion is really just a shorter version of what she wrote,” said Isgur, who recently co-authored a POLITICO magazine article arguing that Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett have emerged at the center of a court that is better viewed as split 3-3-3, rather than 6-3.

Though Roberts and Kavanaugh did not join Barrett’s concurrence, the court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — each signed on to all or parts of it. (Kagan, the court’s leading dealmaker on the left, endorsed Barrett’s opinion in its entirety.)

It also appears to be the first opinion ever issued by the court in which four female justices all joined an opinion without any male justice also signing on. (The court never had as many as four women justices until Jackson, a nominee of President Joe Biden, was confirmed in 2022.)

That gender divide may be another clue that Barrett’s opinion presages her joining with the court’s liberals in the pending case about denying guns to domestic abusers.

“Rahimi is, in part, about gender,” Tyler said. “It’s about domestic violence.”

Filed under:

U.S. Supreme Court,

Clarence Thomas,

Legal,

Amy Coney Barrett

Playbook

The unofficial guide to official Washington, every morning and weekday afternoons.

[oohnotvery]

Throwing Good After Bad (Chapter 6)

Scully

Scully has to admit, the waterfall is beautiful. Tucked away into a wide, spacious clearing, the falls cascade down from a twenty-foot-tall cliff that towers over a calm, clear pool. Moss-slickened, time-softened stone borders the pool and Scully treads carefully across the rocks in her hiking boots as they cross to a dry area where they plan to relax for an hour.

She has to keep reminding herself that she’s supposed to be on vacation with her husband. Joe is proving better at keeping up the façade than she. He’s generous with his casual touches and liberal with his endearing smiles. Once or twice, he’s even called her honey. No one—not Ethan, not Daniel, not Jack nor any of the other suitors she’s ever had—has ever called her honey. The first time he says it, she catches Mulder smirking and knows that as soon as they’re alone, he's going to tease her about it.

Joe gives her a hand as she balances unsteadily on one foot then another, removing her shoes and socks. Beside her, Grace starts stripping off her pants and t-shirt, revealing a surprisingly skimpy bikini underneath. Scully isn’t stunned when Mulder’s eyes widen appreciatively at the sight, but Joe seems embarrassed by the girl’s skin and averts his eyes politely. In that moment, she decides she likes him.

“Let’s take a dip!” Grace shouts eagerly before taking a running leap into the pool. Lydia shrieks as water splashes up and hits her directly in the face. The spray is cool and crisp and Scully shivers. In her eyes, it’s a little too chilly for a swim. They’re in the Pacific Northwest, not southern Florida.

She starts to decline with a shake of her head—she doesn’t even have a bathing suit on underneath her clothes—when Joe tugs at her hand. She looks down at his hand and then up at his bright blue eyes. She’s struck, not for the first time, that he is undeniably handsome.

He leans forward slightly, as a husband might do when trying to secure a bit of privacy with his wife.

“Are you okay with a little PDA?” he asks quietly, his tone perfectly respectable. “Just for show?”

With a hard swallow, she studies his features, contemplating what he’s asking. Finding nothing but earnest, honest-to-goodness business in his eyes, she shrugs.

“Nothing too crazy,” she says primly.

He smiles warmly and shakes his head before removing his shirt in one fluid movement. “If you get uncomfortable, just say the word. Danielle.”

She flushes slightly under his gaze as he stands, bringing her with him. Mulder, who was previously distracted by a peanut butter sandwich, glances up at them in surprise.

“Where are you two going?” he asks quickly, his eyes flitting between their entwined hands and Joe’s bare, muscled chest.

Scully looks up to Joe for confirmation and he turns to her. “Care for a swim, babe?” he announces loudly.

Babe. Great. More fodder for Mulder’s mocking.

Scully hesitates. “I don’t have a bathing suit,” she says quietly, just loud enough for Joe to hear.

His lips twist. “Would you be comfortable in just your, ah, your . . .”

“My underwear?” she provides. She’s wearing a sports bra and panties, nothing too flashy or revealing, but the thought of baring these items to strangers—and Mulder—sets her spine rigid.

Joe shrugs and leans into her, touching his lips to her cheek as he whispers in her ear. “I figure we need to play around in the water. Make it seem like we’re really here for vacation.”

Eyes closing briefly, Scully considers her options, eventually settling on her reality. If they’re going to sell this thing, they probably do need to partake in the activities.

Nodding tightly, she turns away from the group and starts tugging at her clothes. Ignoring the faint blush rising to her cheeks and the goosebumps prickling her skin, she removes her shirt and pants.

When she turns back to the group, Mulder is staring at her in shock, his mouth open, a cracker halfway to his mouth. Lydia looks panicky, as if she’s wondering whether it’s her turn next to disrobe. Evan and Grace, however—both of whom are swimming in the pool—look excited.

“Come on in!” Grace shouts eagerly, gesturing for them to join.

Before she can decide just how exactly she wants to enter the pool, though, she feels two warm hands clasping around her waist. Her breath hitches in anticipation as Joe lifts her into a bridal carry, walks five steps to the edge, and tosses her into the pool. She shrieks as she hits the cold water and hears whoops and cheers coming from Grace and Evan as her body sinks beneath the surface. She’s coming up for air when Joe cannonballs into the pool, splashing her face anew. Sputtering for breath, she swipes the wet hair from her eyes and glances around the waterfall.

Mulder is still staring at her, his once-stunned expression now completely blank. For the first time in a very long time, she isn’t able to read his features and the idea of him being so closed off to her makes her uneasy. She’s about to swim up to the rocks and beg him and Lydia to join when she feels arms slink around her waist.

To her horror, she discovers that Joe has swum up behind her and is now holding her against him in the pool. His palms span the length of her bare torso and his lips dip down to rest along her naked shoulder.

“Too much,” she instantly whispers as their wet bodies collide under the surface. In her periphery, she sees Mulder standing and shucking his clothes, then feels the disruption of the water as he dives in.

“What did you say?” Joe asks, his lips brushing her ear.

She starts to turn in his arms to insist that it’s too much when Mulder’s hand shoots out and grips Joe’s arm in front of her.

She glances at Mulder and sees him staring at Joe, his expression carefully neutral. Beneath his eyes, though, she senses something murderous.

“This pool is rated PG, my friends,” Mulder jokes charmingly, but Scully feels the forceful way he yanks Joe’s hand off her belly. It is strikingly possessive and just a touch out of line, but it still sends a hot flare roaring through her body.

Murmuring an honest apology, Joe backs off, leaving space between their bodies, and Mulder withdraws his hand. His eyes flit to hers just momentarily, and in the split second their eyes meet, she knows what he’s thinking. Did he hurt you? Are you uncomfortable? Do you need to take a break?

With a very short shake of her head, she assures her partner that all is well. Behind them, Grace and Evan call for Lydia to join them, and soon, the pool is at bathing capacity.

For appearance’s sake, Scully stays close to Joe and is briefly surprised when quiet, seemingly shy Lydia drapes her arms around Mulder’s bare shoulders and hangs off him lazily. But she has to give them credit: they look for all the world like a couple on vacation. Briefly, she wonders how Mulder would react if she swam over to them and wrenched Lydia off his body.

The rest of the afternoon passes without much fanfare. Under Evan’s watchful gaze, it seems Grace is unwilling to share more details about the community. Even Mulder’s casual charm proves ineffective at getting more information.

The afternoon swim seems to have subdued everyone, because they hike down the ridge in near silence. They reach the campsite in half the time it took them to scale the mountain, and Evan bids them farewell with a promise to check in at sunset.

Scully excuses herself to shower as soon as they reach the cabins. She’s rummaging around in her suitcase for her brush when she sees it—Mulder and Joe just outside the cabin, their heads bent close together, Mulder’s hands waving dramatically as his mouth runs. Irritation courses through her at the sight of it. She can only imagine what Mulder is saying to Joe, and she drops the brush in favor of walking outside to check on the men.

She approaches quietly, instantly picking up on the tail end of their conversation.

“ . . . didn’t know you two were together,” Joe is saying.

Mulder sighs and shakes his head. “Yeah, just—just cool it, okay?”

Joe starts to nod and then seems to notice her in his peripheral, and he freezes. Sensing his change in demeanor, Mulder glances up and immediately looks embarrassed.

“What’s going on?” Scully asks carefully, studying both their hangdog appearances. She’s got a pretty good idea of what they were discussing.

Joe glances at Mulder. “Nothing, Dana. I’ll see you inside.”

He excuses himself quickly and jogs back to the cabin. Scully quirks an eyebrow at Mulder as she sidles up to him. Crossing her arms under her breasts, she lifts her eyes to his and smirks.

“Mulder, I don’t need you to go full-caveman on me just because a man touched me.”

He immediately bows his head, looking appropriately remorseful. When he glances back up at her, his eyes are solemn. “I know you can handle yourself, Scully.”

She nods. She knows him well enough not to expect a full-blown apology. “I was handling things back there at the pool, you know.”

He squints at the sun and shrugs, stuffing his hands in his pocket.

She reaches forward and squeezes his arm, insisting on his full attention. “Just remember, Mulder, we’re on assignment. It’s all part of the show. And, for the record, he asked.”

His eyebrows rise. “He asked if he could . . . touch you?”

“Yes.”

“And you said yes?”

She glowers at him. “Mulder, cut it out. I appreciate where your heart’s at, but I don’t need you to be so . . . possessive.”

He steps back, blinking. His expression is so full of shock that she might as well have slapped him.

“Mulder—”

“No,” he interrupts, holding up a hand. “No, you’re right. I, uh, I should have left you to it. Like I said, you can handle yourself.”

They stare at each other for a moment, and Scully can’t decide whether he’s being serious or not. Finally, she breaks his gaze and glances off towards the beach, where the sun is setting in a red-orange glow.

He follows her eyes and then nods towards the horizon. “Better get inside.”

She purses her lips and nods, unsure of what to say to bring the tension down. Finding nothing, she gestures idly towards his cabin.

“Sleep well,” she offers.

With a tight smile, he nods, turns, and walks away.

[universe-on-her-shoulders]

OK, so, uh, new idea of prompt!

The Spy Master (at a point before or after being trapped in the gold tooth in his timeline) arrives at a point in time when Fourteen has already settled down. His brain wrestles, once again, with a lot of conflicted feelings seeing the Doctor happy.

This was… delicious.

The Master lay back on his picnic blanket in the meadow, a pair of binoculars pressed to his face and trained on the villa across the valley as he idly reached for a strawberry and shoved it into his mouth. The sun was beating down on the rolling landscape, but he hardly noticed it as he remained laser-focused on his quarry, who was currently playing what appeared to be pétanque with a gentleman in a wheelchair, who seemed to be cheating, as the Doctor either failed to notice or chose not to.

The Doctor was wearing, quite improbably, a t-shirt. It looked utterly absurd to the Master, who was clad in his usual purple attire, irrespective of how warm it was; the heat was a mere inconvenience to him, but one that could be ignored easily enough. The Doctor was leaning into the heat, he gathered; he had teamed his t-shirt with shorts, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and even – the Master grimaced – flipflops, and the casual air of it all was bewilderingly excellent. He looked casual. He looked relaxed. He looked… well, the Master twiddled the dial on the binoculars, trying to make out the expression on his oldest friend’s face, but he was certain that he’d look bored. From this distance, he couldn’t see him thrumming with nervous energy, but he knew it to be the case; he knew the Doctor well enough to know that being stuck in the South of France with a boringly conventional family unit would be stultifying and dull, and that he must be itching to escape in the TARDIS.

Still, that was satisfying in and of itself; knowing that the Doctor was trapped here by the conventionality of politeness, unable to leave. He would suffer through years – perhaps even decades – of boredom, and the idea of that was so delightful that the Master couldn’t help but kicking his legs in glee. Death by mundanity. Death by drudgery. Death by human. It was so perfectly Doctorish that he laughed aloud. Only the Doctor could build himself a cage that wasn’t so much gilded as… well, rustically hand-woven, in keeping with some of the things he'd passed in the local village on the way here. Bless him and his affection for his pets; it really was in keeping with his entire personality to chain himself to them for the duration of their lifetime and then have both of his hearts broken when they inevitably keeled over and died. And perhaps, alright, the Master might already be concocting schemes to accelerate that happening, because playing with the Doctor’s pet humans and their silly little families was an excellent way to pass the time. He still thought fondly of Martha Jones, despite her ultimate defiance of him.

Settling back, he reached for the bottle of wine he’d liberated from a nearby vineyard. Might as well get comfortable.

[just-antithings]

(Big of a long one, sorry)

I just came across another one of those "if you put your Hogwarts houses in your bio you're a terf" posts, and in the tags one of the people was talking about how they had a Gryffindor tshirt that was their favourite thing to wear which they just threw away because they'd rather never have such a thing touch them again. Fair enough, what anyone is comfortable with in their personal life is none of my business. But it did remind me of something similar that happened with me.

I own a perfectly good Fantastic Beasts t-shirt. It's the kind that has a simple design and good enough material to last YEARS. I did, of course, buy it before I knew about all this JKR business. Then couple of years ago I was faced with the fact that I own some HP merch and the dilemma of whether or not I should throw it away. This surprisingly came down to a moment where I properly understood and defined my own politics to myself.

At the same time that I had some people in my circles insisting on these performative measures, I was also learning about fast fashion and the very real impacts of clothing trends on the environment. After reading up on it enough and seeing the gross appropriation of "thrifting", it became obvious that the solution is to "reduce" waste, to stop buying more clothes than you need, to stop throwing away perfectly good clothes, to stitch up clothing that needs mending instead of replacing it, etc. The best clothing for the environment is the one already in your closet. That idea. Was I going to make an exception in this case and throw away this t-shirt because someone might think me a class traitor for it, even though whether I keep it or discard it doesn't actually change the support JKR doe or doesn't have anymore? On the one hand it was just one tshirt and it would keep me safe from my peers in those liberal circles. On the other hand it made me feel shame like i had never felt before. It reminded me of every other performative thing I've done in the name of activism and how little it has amounted to. I'm the kind of person who still has my wardrobe from five years ago almost intact with very few changes. Wasteful consumption has a very real cost and I don't do that anymore, so when it came down to tossing that tshirt out it ended up meaning more than it should have. I kept the tshirt. It's still in great shape, it's gonna last many years more as well and save me that much more consumption waste.

What if i had given it away? Would some random person who hasn't ever heard of the JKR drama (consider: I'm not from the West) suddenly become a Terf by wearing it? Would it keep HP and JKR relevant because some person who hardly even knows HP is now wearing a second hand tshirt from someone? When I went to another trans friend's house, who has been there for the community every single day, who has worked hard at the ground levels to create safe spaces for queer people, who has advocated for trans rights in our country, and when i saw their HP merch, what kind of an asshole would I be to call them out on it or say that I suddenly don't trust them because they made a reference to some book we all read as kids? In that moment, sitting with that friend, I also realised how far removed our day-to-day lives actually are from what was considered activism in online spaces. The latter can be great when it's about spreading information and having discussions. But something that reeks that much of simply a performance? Idk, I don't think people talking about HP in their daily lives or wearing an old Gryffindor tshirt or reblogging a gif has as much power over the queer struggle as people here seem to think. It's getting a bit annoying how because I see more posts talking about HP just to tell people who are engaging with it to die than i see actual posts by people just talking about the book. I think the former are the ones actually keeping it more relevant than it is

.

[haggishlyhagging]

The issue of lesbianism really exploded on May 1, 1970, opening night of the second Congress to Unite Women, when forty lesbians pre-empted the scheduled proceedings to raise the issue of lesbianism. (The divisiveness over class and lesbianism prompted some women to dub this the "Congress to Divide Women.") The action was planned by a group that included Brown, Funk, Hoffman, Hart, and Bedoz. The following account of the "Lavender Menace" action appeared in the women's underground paper Rat:

“On May 1st, at 7:15 p.m. about 300 women were quietly sitting in the auditorium of intermediate school 70 waiting for the Congress to Unite Women to come to order. The lights went out, people heard running, laughter, a rebel yell here and there, and when those lights were turned back on, those same 300 women found themselves in the hands of the LAVENDER MENACE. . . . Seventeen of the Radical lesbians wore lavender t-shirts with LAVENDER MENACE stenciled across the front. These women were the first wave of the action and the ones who took over the auditorium.”

The other demonstrators were dispersed throughout the audience and were supposed to declare their support for the action and join the women on stage. Once on stage, they would reveal both their Lavender Menace t-shirts and their lesbianism. However, as Woodul explains, the demonstrators needn't have acted as "pigeons" in the audience for "as soon as the floor was taken, women by the droves began to come up on stage." For two hours the protestors held the floor as they talked about what it was like to be a lesbian in a heterosexist culture. The final assembly of the Congress adopted the set of resolutions advanced by "The Lavender Menace: Gay Liberation Front Women and Radical Lesbians." The resolutions read:

“1. Women's Liberation is a lesbian plot. 2. Whenever the label lesbian is used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied. 3. In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception. 4. All sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.”

One of the most important things to come out of the Congress action was the Radicalesbian position paper, "The Woman-Identified Woman," copies of which were distributed to women in the audience. Like the action, the paper was designed to assuage heterosexual feminists' fears about lesbianism. In fact, Jennifer Woodul contends that the "Menaces" decided to use the term "woman-identified" because they hoped it would prove less threatening to heterosexual women:

“I was there when the ideas for ‘Woman-Identified Woman’ were beginning to take shape. We were trying to figure out how to tell women about lesbianism without using the word, lesbian, because we found that at these conferences we kept freaking people out all the time. And I believe it was Cynthia [Funk] who came up with this term, ‘woman-identified.’ At least, that was the first time I had ever heard it. So what we were trying to do was make women realize that lesbians were not different from other women in any sort of strange way.”

To legitimize lesbianism, Radicalesbians had to persuade feminists that lesbianism was not simply a bedroom issue and that lesbians were not male-identified "bogeywomen" out to sexually exploit other women. They accomplished this by redefining lesbianism as a primarily political choice and by locating the discourse within the already established feminist framework of separatism. They criticized as “divisive and sexist” the tendency to characterize lesbianism "simply by sex." Moreover, they suggested that far from being male-identified, lesbians, by virtue of their distance from contaminating maleness, were actually more likely to be woman-identified than heterosexual women who were "dependent upon male culture for their [self]-definition:"

“Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. . . . Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors. As long as women's liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man. . . . This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.”

Although the paper's tone was not antagonistic—for instance, they avoided defining heterosexual women as collaborators—the assumption was that feminism required lesbianism:

“It is the primacy of women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution.”

"The Woman-Identified Woman" was not the earliest expression of lesbian-feminism. Both Rita Mae Brown and Martha Shelley had angrily denounced movement homophobia in the pages of Rat and Come Out, respectively. But what set "The Woman-Identified Woman" apart from these earlier pieces, what made it so significant, was that it redefined lesbianism as the quintessential act of political solidarity with other women. By defining lesbianism as a political choice rather than a sexual alternative, Radicalesbians disarmed heterosexual feminists. Of course, the knotty problem of sexuality remained. Even Radicalesbians had to admit that lesbianism involved sex:

“Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status.”

The introduction of sex troubled many heterosexual feminists who had found in the women's movement a welcome respite from sexuality. Ellen DuBois was just one of many heterosexual feminists who initially resented the intrusion of sexuality into the movement:

“I felt finally I had found a movement where I didn't have to worry about whether or not I was attractive or whether or not men liked me. . . . And just as I was beginning to feel here at last I could forget all of that, sex once again reared its ugly head.”

-Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump is facing criticism over alleged antisemitic propaganda in recent campaign materials—following a long history of incidents in which he has been accused of emulating or, in some cases, replicating imagery deployed by Nazis in the 1930s and '40s.

In a fundraising email sent to supporters Wednesday, the Trump campaign depicted President Joe Biden as being controlled by a puppet master portrayed as Democratic megadonor George Soros, a Jewish philanthropist and a frequent bogeyman of the right for his support of liberal causes and candidates. In addition, he has regularly been the subject of political opponents' conspiracy theories.

While Soros has long been criticized by conservatives for his policy positions, portrayals of him in conservative media and by politicians who oppose him have often evoked images of a sort of string puller behind the scenes who is orchestrating a liberal takeover of American society.

Those depictions also evoke conspiracy theories on the right that blame a Jewish cabal for orchestrating machinations in the political, financial and media sectors. Such tropes date back to antisemitic literature published in the early 20th century and proved influential in the rise of Germany's Nazi regime.

Some on social media said the Trump campaign's email closely resembled Nazi propaganda distributed throughout Europe, from its imagery to its caption saying that Soros was "a secret shadow president behind the curtain pulling the strings."

"Criticising Soros isn't antisemitic, but this is because he is represented in antisemitic terms," Alex Hearn, a writer for several Jewish publications, tweeted in response to the imagery. "It is the fantasy of the evil Jew secretly running the world by undermining countries. That is why it looks so similar to Nazi propaganda."

"Same Nazi symbolism, different time," Elad Nehorai, another writer, wrote on Twitter.

Newsweek has reached out to the Trump campaign via email for comment.

The recent fundraising email is not the first example of a Trump political campaign being accused of using antisemitic or Nazi tropes. In 2020, Facebook removed a targeted advertisement from the Trump campaign that included a red triangle once used to designate political prisoners in concentration camps. That same year, the Trump campaign used the "puppet master" trope in an advertisement featuring Senator Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, controlling Joe Biden.

And in July that year, Trump's campaign drew widespread controversy over a T-shirt, which was available on his website, that closely resembled Nazi iconography—a comparison a campaign official at the time dismissed as "moronic."

More recently, the Trump campaign gained national attention after a group purporting to be representatives of the antisemitic National Justice Party distributed flyers at a recent Trump campaign rally in South Carolina. The flyers called for a "2% ceiling on Jewish representation." (Newsweek could not independently verify the authenticity of the flyers.)

Wednesday's incident, critics said, was just another example of the Trump campaign perpetuating another harmful stereotype. It is the same iconography, the critics said, that helped fuel a surge in the number of reported antisemitic incidents in the later years of the Trump administration.

"We continue to see fundraising emails from the Trump campaign that feature language & imagery of George Soros controlling puppet strings and secret globalist cabals," the Anti-Defamation League told Newsweek in a statement on Thursday.

"This isn't just disturbing, it's indisputably dangerous and reprehensible," the statement continued. "Let's be clear, these are antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and are a gateway into hardcore antisemitic conspiracy theories."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only, what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out? Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects, if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts? That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.” -- Bertrand Russell

“Progress isn’t achieved by preachers or guardians of morality, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.” -- Stephen Fry

‘Wokeness’, the new catch all term thrown in the faces of “the liberals” to malign and undermine who they are.

In many ways it has become the same as ‘the patriarchy’, another ghoul in the closet, intangible and meaningless, used to simply fling mud at ‘the other’.

But what is it to be ‘woke’?

How has a term that was embraced by so many, worn as a badge of honour to signify social awareness, slowly become a term of ridicule, and a finger with which to point and laugh at others?

I must admit, I once considered myself ‘woke’, but have slowly grown to see how those like me, and around me, have become enamoured with a set of political ideas, that, well, really make little sense.

To be woke today, in my view, is the political prioritisation of looking good, over doing good.

It is to wear political opinions like fashion accessories; caring little about utility or objective truth, and more about seeming virtuous in front of your peers.

And so arrives a plethora of mugs, t shirts, and tote bags, that ram our self righteous political beliefs into the faces of others, with little care for what’s right.

Because, and I hate to say this – what’s right, is rarely what is popular.

And to be progressive, is not to blindly pick up the most en-vogue political ideas in front of you, and wave them above your head.

To be progressive is often to rock the boat and throw stones at popular convention, to lift up and advocate for evidence based truth, regardless of the personal cost.

To be a progressive is to lie down on a bed of nails, and endure what comes next, in support your beliefs.

To do what is hard, not what is easy, or popular, or what your friends do.

I no longer consider myself as ‘woke’, and have since joined the cynical crowd that stands opposite them.

Instead, I have done the work to understand the nuanced and often contradictory nature of social issues, to swallow my pride, and change my mind when I need to, and confront those around me when I must.

So what is woke to you?

--

Sources:

DV Murray Straus: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Years_of_Denying_the_Evidence_on_Gender_Symmetry_in_Partner_Violence_Implications_for_Prevention_and_Treatment

UNESCO Education: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/what-you-need-know-about-unescos-global-report-boys-disengagement-education

Stranger Violence: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/thenatureofviolentcrimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020

==

I still like Wilfred Reilly's definition:

the belief that (1) all of society is currently and intentionally structured to oppress, (2) all gaps in performance between large groups illustrate this, and (3) the solution is 'equity' - proportional representation w/o regard to performance.

But I would add to it that:

(4) these beliefs must be publicly and repeatedly declared as a primary personality trait.

You can't simply be "born again," you have to announce to the world that you were saved by Jesus Christ.

A simpler explanation would be: left-wing social illiberalism in denial of material reality. In a manner shockingly similar to right-wing religious illiberalism in denial of material reality.

“Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” -- Rob Henderson