#'what is this--the gestapo?'

[fictionadventurer]

August: Day 26

Adventures and Accomplishments

Nothing to report.

[theabstruseone]

With the announcement of the new movie starring Michelle Yeoh, it seems I have to go on my Section 31 rant again.

Section 31 was only done well in Deep Space Nine because the writers of Deep Space Nine understood that SECTION 31 ARE THE BAD GUYS.

They were used as a foil for the grey morality of the show as a warning of "This is where you will go if you continue on this path". Section 31 was the logical endpoint of the show's themes of sacrificing your ethics, morality, and principles in a pragmatic "the ends justify the means" mentality in order to defend those ethics, morals, and principles.

Because you CAN'T.

If you compromise your ethics, morals, and principles in an attempt to defend those very same things, what exactly are you defending? Things you yourself tossed aside when they became inconvenient.

All three (yes, there were only three) episodes of DS9 centering on Section 31 featured Bashir resolving the conflict of that episode WITHOUT compromising his integrity as a citizen of the Federation and a Starfleet officer.

Up to and including preventing Section 31 from committing genocide. Yeah, remember that? When Section 31 infected Odo with a degenerative virus so that he would spread it to the Great Link and kill all of the Changelings? Then specifically stonewalled Bashir when he attempted to find a cure?

Section 31 is not just a tool for telling happy funtime spy stories in Star Trek. That organization is called Starfleet Intelligence and was already around long before DS9. Section 31 is an unauthorized unelected black ops group that functions outside any chain of command or authority that can place any checks on their use and abuse of power. You know, just like EVERY OTHER evil Starfleet officer in every other episode where some Admiral goes off the deep end and starts doing shady shit the Enterprise then has to stop.

Section 31 are the bad guys. They are not antiheroes. They are not just the darker side of Starfleet. They are not the people who must do the evil things that have to be done. They are just evil. Period.

[usauthoritarianism]

This is a Chicago Jump Out Squad

In DC this sort of thing is normal too.

People need to understand. I have spent my adult life in driving distance between the urban centers where this slave catcher ass policing style is the reality, and the prison(s) where massive prisoner populations are rented out to governments and corporations for literal pennies to the inmates.

-and this article is from 2014

[radarsteddybear]

I wish more fandom wikis cited their sources better :/

[madlori]

I see posts going "Okay, I'll vote for Kamala, I GUESS IF I HAVE TO" and "omg if that's the best we can do I suppose I'll support it" and I'm like...

What do you people fucking WANT?

Let's run down how she's rated politically by some organizations that we vibe with, kay?

ACLU = 93% on civil liberties

AFL-CIO = 100% on trade unions

Human Rights Campaign = 100% on queer rights

League of Conservation Voters = 91% on environmentalism

NARAL = 100% on reproductive rights

NRA Fund = 7% on gun rights (we LIKE a low score on this one)

NEA = 100% on education

Planned Parenthoos = 100% on reproductive rights

In addition, GovTrack (which is a nonpartisan tracker) places her in the MOST politically left-leaning categories of Senators. So we've got a very liberal, woman of color who's spent her career trying to mitigate draconian tough-on-crime laws to benefit the accused and keep black people out of prison and decrease recidivism and that's somehow...just barely tolerable.

So I ask again...what is that you're dissatisfied with? Is it Palestine? as recently as March she was calling for a ceasefire and demanding aid to Gaza. Keep in mind she's pretty constrained as to what's possible to do in this situation.

Is it just that she was a prosecutor? That is an important job that needs to be done and we WANT people doing it who aren't rah-rah tough-on-crime Gestapo types, which she is not. We need prosecutors who are addressing the root causes of crime and looking for ways to help people escape the cycle, which she has done to the point that she was often called SOFT on crime.

So what is your objection here? Is it that her politics aren't 100% aligned with a bunch of Tumblr socialists? I got news for you...we Tumblr socialists DO NOT REPRESENT THE ELECTORATE. If such a candidate existed, they would not win.

Democrats struggle sometimes because our tent is large. Republicans just want you if you're a straight white man and preferably rich. There's room for a lot more types in the lefty side, but sadly that means a lot of room also for dissention among the ranks. This is how they get us. Let's not let them, huh? Just a suggestion.

[socialistexan]

It's about damn time these fuckers learned that they don't get just parade around in their faux gestapo getups without someone showing them what's what.

It's amazing how quickly these wannabe tough guy fascists turn into sniveling snowflakes as soon as they are met with even a little resistance.

"I thought I could come in and harass queers and threaten to kill them in peace!"

You really thought people were going to just let you come in and spout your hateful nonsense without any backlash? The audacity! That's a lifetime of unchecked privilege at play. I'm sometimes afraid to even leave my house while existing as a trans woman, and you thought you could just gamet away with this?

Talk shit, get hit.

[stelashe]

If you ask me to be normal I'd be the freakiest version of me in front of the children on purpose

[columboposting]

OK not to Foxpost on main but as much as I appreciate the trope of the coruscant guard being like woefully underfunded and undersupported by the senate because they’re “not front line troops” and therefore “don’t need things like bacta or rations etc” and like I get where you’re coming from, but like…. they may not be on the front line but they are the most significant and final line of defense for the capital of the republic and more specifically the senate, who — and I cannot stress this enough — are the people who decide whether or not the coruscant guard gets money. The corries do the work of cops AND the secret service, and maybe throw in the national guard — imagine if the united states defunded the cops (seriously, imagine…), specifically all the cops that work in DC, AND the secret service because oh they’re purely concerned with domestic affairs and the security of the most essential elements of our republic, they don’t need resources. You’re talking about fucking upside down banana world and certainly not about the political priorities of a fading republic succumbing to nationalism, militarism, and fascism.

If I were a late era galactic senator, I would have funding the coruscant guard as my top fucking priority. I’d be signing off on building fucking cop city overtop of coruscant’s last nature reserve, i’d be giving them experimental bazookas and tanks and shit up the wazoo. Twelve types of alien police dog and two models from Space Boston Dynamics. Horses. Fox keeps trying to find a weapon they won’t finance for him and it’s not working, at this point he’s considering asking for a lightsaber just to see what happens. I’m not saying the coruscant guard should live in the lap of luxury or anything but they should probably have ample if not excessive access to the military resources they need to do their jobs — medical supplies, armaments, armor, etc. Because if politicians are one thing, that thing is interested above all in their own security, and the coruscant guard is literally their personal protective army, why would they not want their personal protective army to be well funded. “I’m chancellor palpatine and I’m going to deprive my slave gestapo of medical supplies so that their limbs fall off when they try to murder my enemies” come on man be serious.

[lizardsfromspace]

"Elon Musk didn't make a Nazi salute, it was a Terran salute from Star Trek" is the most inane explanation for why something Isn't A Nazi Thing ever bc like

What Terran salute lol. Is that an iconic part of the franchise now. Are we supposed to pretend it's on the level of the live long and prosper gesture or whatever bc it obviously is not. There is a Star Trek salute so famous it has its own emoji and curiously it is not this one, which no one talked about until MAGA frantically glommed onto it

Why. Why would you do that in that context

The Terran salute is a Nazi salute. It just is. The original episode outright compares them to the Gestapo. "But the Terrans are Roman" I'm excited for you to see what the Roman salute inspired!

Also he obviously wasn't. Nazis are interpreting it as a Nazi salute so nothing else matters. This is so stupid

[nostalgia-tblr]

See, I always thought those trials with the judges aren't actually real trials in that basically nobody would ever be able to defend themselves from accusations of a crime they didn't even know existed before they were dragged out of their lives by the TVA and asked to explain themselves. I feel like they only go through that process so they can pretend there's any actual 'justice' involved here, and so that the TVA's employees can tell themselves what's happening here is fair.

Every time we see them bring someone in the TVA have already 'reset' (ie destroyed) their branching home timeline, so where exactly would any successful defendants be returned to? Didn't they just kill anyone else in that branch when they erased it? (Oh, but that's fine, those deaths are really the fault of the person we're putting on trial, who is pretty much guaranteed to be found guilty and pruned themselves at the end of it!)

I think Loki's defence of "but the Avengers did it first" is probably very unusual for them in that he can actually think of a defence for what he's being charged with - most people they bring in haven't been involved in a weird time-travel incident, they've just done something they weren't "supposed" to do that nobody ever told them not to do. They have no context for any of this, if there is a way for someone to convince the judge they did nothing wrong or that there were extenuating circumstances, what chance do they even have of working out what that could possibly be?

What I mean is, Loki's defence is indeed a reasonable one, but this is not a trial where a reasonable defence is either expected to be offered or likely to be accepted, so it was never going to work no matter how well he made the point. You'll notice that there's no advocate for the defence, or any real explanation of what's going on here for the defendants. Nobody is ever expected to actually defend themselves successfully here, it's all (probably) just for show, and being arrested by the TVA is itself the proof that you broke the rules, so any logical flaws or potential misapplications of their remit are just going to be ignored anyway.

Loki argues before the T.V.A. that he is innocent of wrongdoing. He has committed no crime against the Sacred Timeline, and the people who actually created this branch are the Avengers. They're the ones that should be standing here in shackles, not him.

Ravonna retorts that the Time Heist was sanctioned as an event that was meant to occur, but Loki's escape was not. And that. Is a huge can of worms that just gets uglier the deeper you look into it.

The problem is that Loki's right. Like. 100% right. There is no possible way to spin this time variance as being his fault. The Avengers were the ones who screwed up and delivered the Tesseract to his foot. Ravonna says they were supposed to do that, but what possible version of events could result in the Tesseract being given to Loki and then not result in Loki escaping?

You could take it to mean they weren't supposed to screw up there. They were meant to take the Tesseract and go, without that extra journey to 1970. But then that puts this variance back to being their fault, doesn't it?

You could also bring up that the Avengers' Time Heist is "sanctioned" in the sense that they pruned the branches as soon as they were done. It was established in Endgame that by returning the Infinity Gems to the exact moment in time that they were removed, no variant timelines were ever created.

But Loki's from one of those pruned timelines. So once you go down that rabbit hole, you realize that this show can't actually exist because 2012 Loki escaping with the Tesseract was unwritten at the end of Endgame. Loki literally cannot be here.

Ultimately, the reason Loki's here is because He Who Remains is playing a long con without regard for whether or not he's committed any wrong. But that still doesn't really explain why he's here, because Ravonna and the officers who carried out his arrest are completely ignorant to HWR's true intentions and goals. His arrest still had to make sense according to their logic for apprehending time criminals.

And it just. It doesn't, and it calls into serious question their entire methodology for identifying time criminals. Which might be deliberate, given their nefarious nature? I honestly don't know. This is the kind of nagging contradiction that you can never be too sure if it's an incredibly subtle writing choice or a plot hole.

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

I have gotten so many messages from folks who see what's happening to Jews right now, how literally any statement from us that isn't straight up "death to Israel!" "tear it down!" "river to the sea!" etc. - no matter how tempered in other ways or critical of the Israeli government it is - anything even mildly supportive of the terrorism victims/their families in their grief and/or Israelis deserving to live is getting dog piled to an absurd degree. And yes, that primarily targets Jews (because we're the ones primarily speaking on it) but it definitely is also hitting anyone not Jewish who says this as well. Immediately, overnight, the left has made any position that respects everyone's human rights and allows Jews room to grieve our murdered and missing family and friends without telling us they deserved to die in terrible ways completely radioactive. Like literally even the most milquetoaste statement attracts numerous hysterical commentators. And because it's so toxic, people are afraid to speak up.

And I've now heard from a lot of gentiles that they had no idea how deep the rot of leftist antisemitism went, how they've been seeing this unfold with horror, and are afraid to speak up.

Here's what I'll say: those messages give me a lot of strength, because they help me remember that I'm not insane, that this is horrendous, and we are seeing in real time exactly who would have helped the Gestapo find us if they were sufficiently convinced that this is "decolonization." That yes, the backlash really *is* that bad. I hear that affirmation and I appreciate it, and I understand your fear, because it was mine too. I myself strongly considered at the beginning not saying anything about this until I could do so without being harassed. (I decided against that because I am physically incapable of shutting up when it pertains to my people, but I understand the sentiment.)

Here's the thing: this is never going to end - those people who take seriously the question "are Jews people?" are going to be the vocal minority unless and until we all speak out. Jews are 2% of the US population and 0.2% of the world's population - there are literally more self-identified Nazis in America than there are Jews. I would honestly be surprised if there weren't more horseshoe theory leftists in the world than Jews also.

That being the case, we really do need our allies to speak up with us. I think if we all spoke up at once, it might be enough to break the silence-taken-as-agreement and shame everyone but the avowed antisemites (rather than the thoughtless and opportunistic ones) back into keeping their antisemitism under wraps. Which does have the effect of bringing the mob under control. Jews have faced a ton of mob violence in the form of pogroms throughout our history and backlash to Jewish victimhood. (Tl;dr - "How dare you make me consider how I might have benefited from or been complicit in hurting Jews? This is actually the fault of the Jews." is a disturbingly common thought process.) (You may also be wondering what I mean by "opportunistic;" I can explain in another post if people are interested.)

I know it's scary. I am well aware that you might lose friends from this. I personally decided that if those "friends" valued Jewish lives so little, they were never my friends to begin with, but it's different for non-Jews. They may genuinely be your friends. I'm not demanding you do this for me or my community, but I am asking you to consider what your line is for your friends. And if you are able to talk to them, to ask them what makes this group different from all other groups in terms of deserving compassion and human rights, it may just help us to quiet the mob.

And, if nothing else, just privately reminding those of us who are speaking about it that we are grounded in reality and compassion helps combat the mass gaslighting going on.

[girlactionfigure]

Josette Molland -- who was one of only a handful of surviving members of the French Resistance who fought against Nazis during WWII when she passed away at the age of 100 -- was one of the Mighty Girl role models who died in 2024. In 1943, Molland was a 20-year-old art student in Lyon, France when she joined the Resistance. She specialized in creating counterfeit rubber stamps which were used to make false identity papers for Jewish refugees and Allied airmen who were being smuggled across the border into Switzerland by the famed Dutch-Paris underground network.

The success of network's efforts attracted the attention of the local Gestapo, including its infamous leader, "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie, who sought to obliterate it. Molland was one of many Resistance members arrested; she was tortured and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. She was then transferred to Holleischen, a forced-labor camp in the present-day Czech Republic, and remained there in horrendous conditions until its liberation in May, 1945. Molland, who is pictured here post-war in the clothing she wore as a camp inmate, later reflected on her experience there, writing: “What I lived in the camps, I can’t even describe it. Unimaginable. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t understand. Every day we thought would be our last.”

After the war, Molland sought to educate the next generation about the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust by speaking in schools. To help make the unimaginable experience more real to youth she created a series of 15 paintings in a folk-art style depicting her life in the concentration camps. She wrote stark descriptions of each, among them: "‘At the Dentist' - 'Naked, so nothing could be hidden in clothing. He’s looking for gold (used during that period). He pulls out the crowns, with the tooth. Here the bucket is full of gold.” and "‘She Had Just Cut Down a Tree’ - 'She collapsed with fatigue. The ‘Aufseherin’ (guard) finished her off with a bullet to the back of the head.'"

When Molland died in February, “La Marseillaise” and the “Chant des Partisans,” the anthem of the French Resistance, were sung at her funeral. When the heroic fighter was laid to rest, she was buried with full military honors in Nice.

A Mighty Girl

[open-sketchbook]

... okay that post going around about the wind rises is fucking killing me. no, the movie doesn't go to nazi germany to admire nazi engineering. the movie goes to nazi germany, portrayed as a nightmare where the gestapo chases people through the streets, a nightmare the myopic main characters are blind to because they get distracted by the shiny planes.

there, they admire the work of hugo junkers, who their company made a deal with eight years prior. the man who will, a year later, lose his airplane business because he refused to build warplanes for the nazis, who takes the principled stand that Jiro fails to. who sees the same visions Jiro does and has the courage to say no.

the film is not fucking subtle about how germany and japan are both lurching toward a monumentally monstrous and stupid thing, a thing that Jiro just kind of ignores because he's infatuated with his art, with his planes. this is, you know, the central theme of the movie, which sees the man neglect his dying wife to draft more blueprints?!?

no, the movie does not look at the screen and go "this is a bad thing" because its not a movie for fucking four year olds, but if you think the movie ending with a character standing in a nightmare hellscape of all his broken dreams, his wife dead and country in ruins, going "yeah but we built a nice airplane" isn't a statement about that fucking guy, you've very much missed the point.

and look, the wind rises is not even, really, about history. the film is a metaphor for what it feels like to dedicate yourself to making art under capitalism. it's about how Miyazaki feels about his legacy. it's about dedicating yourself to your craft at the eve of destruction (be it World War Two or climate change driven by capitalist consumption) and knowing that the beautiful thing you are making is contributing to it. it's about the nightmare of knowing you can't control your art after you release it, disgust knowing what you make will be used to advance causes you despise.

its a complex and raw movie, a meditation on despair and pain and pride. there's conversations to be had about how responsible it is as a film, but you are not having that conversation because you are incapable of anything more that the barest surface read.

[countryclubkeith]

KEITH HELP HEATHER IS TRYING TO CRUCIFY ME

- @hannah-evanss

Uhhh, what

who even are you-

Totally not cool, but it’s Heather. Just go ask her girlfriend to save you?

But like totally tell her that Courtney is gonna be way worse to her lipstick gestapo if she does?

[ OOC : Keith need to pays more attention to people around him than to his golf scores ;-; ]

[junglejim4322]

Crazy when people defend idf soldiers because of mandatory service like would you also have become gestapo if it was mandatory. What on earth

[deadwooddross]

PLEASE tell us your Opinions

oh noooo, aagh ooogh twist my aaarm Now excuse me while i ramble on about Wicked, ahem, Okay so really my musical opinions arent even bad mostly, it's very cute and catchy and popu-UUlar, and is kind of like....a nice little fan fiction compared to. the book. the two are Very different My main thoughts are: 1. Fiyero. Poor sweet Fiyero. Who keeps selecting these mayonnaise men when one of the first things ever described about him is the fact he has dark skin. Like...hello....he's from the desert/savanna region with nomads and elephants.... 2. Fiyero again, why GOD are we doing the same ancient "ohhh a boy between the giiirls, he like her not meee" schtick when it should actually be Glinda and Fiyero playing tug of war with Elphaba, if anything. They're both in love with her, this is textual, there is precedent for this. She's also very very focused on other things and keeps trying to wriggle out of affections tender touch even though she wants it so bad, you see. the big scaredy baby. 3.I actually like that the madam Morrible thing is a Little more...subtle. In the book its VERY in your face, but I like baby elphie being keen to injustice while also having a more vulnerable side that can be personally manipulated. All the more reason for her to be even more bitter and defensive about it Later 4.Nessarose...now this one i understand may have some caveats for the stage, but I don't really like that they put Nessa in a wheelchair. Spoilers if you haven't read it, but in the book she was born with no arms. Which I think is a unique choice, though I do have some criticisms on how it was handled in the book too. I'm curious if the new one about Elphie's childhood will go into it, but the thing about being born armless is that humans are VERY adaptable, and if anything fancy slippers would be something of a hindrance for someone who relies a lot on their feet. Nessa being sort of herded into functioning a certain way that forces her to be extremely reliant on everyone around her though...that'd still be interesting. Slippers of a well-meaning sort that only further lock her into a very specific expectation of existence, oh my 5. Accepting the the musical for what it is, my god it loses a lot of the fact that elphaba is a radical anti-fascist struggling against the wizard gestapo, and that's not even slightly an exaggeration dfhjdfhj. So in summary! I dont mind that it's a happier retelling, but I think it cuts out a little too much of what I like about the book to fully appreciate it. AND it makes Fiyero annoying to me, which is a shame because I like him in the book