#Better political campaigns with voice broadcasting

[voicebrodcasting]

Bulk Voice Calls for Elections

Fuel your political campaign with the power of your voice to connect with voters like never before. Maximize the reach of your political campaign with go2market's voice broadcasting service.

[go2market]

Strategic Use Of Bulk SMS And RCS SMS Service In Lok Sabha 2024 Political Campaigns

Start implementing Bulk SMS and RCS SMS Service in your political campaign strategy to get better reach for your political message and enhanced voter engagement. Make a strong voter communication strategy with go2market.

[trumpkara]

Chapter Six: The Grass isn't always Greener if you want it to be Blue

The campaign had been gaining momentum, and with increased visibility came increased scrutiny. Linkara had expected it. Running for president meant every aspect of his life would be under a microscope. But he was ready to face it all, this was nothing compared to piloting his spaceship and moving apartment while shipping out high quality episodes of Atop the Fourth Wall—until the moment he wasn't.

The day had been packed with events, culminating in a prime-time interview on one of the major news networks. Linkara had been prepping with Harvey and 90s Kid, going over potential questions and refining his answers. They knew this was a crucial opportunity to reach a broader audience.

The studio was buzzing with activity when Linkara arrived. Bright lights, bustling crew members, and the deafening hum of live broadcast energy filled the air. Linkara took a deep breath as he settled into his seat, adjusting his hat and magic gun. He was ready.

The anchor, a sharp-eyed woman named The Nostalgic Chick, greeted him with a professional smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Kind words were exchanged. Are you enjoying the campaign? Oh that's good! Nice weather today huh? Yes I imagine the hat helps a lot in the rain. No I havent heard of Frank Miller. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Batman? Uh-huh. Right. Okay.

Then it was time. As the cameras rolled, her demeanor shifted, becoming more assertive.

"Welcome, Linkara," she began, her tone cool and measured. "You’ve been making headlines with your unconventional campaign. But before we dive into your political platform, I’d like to address your past. Specifically, your history of angry comic book reviews. Some have described them as overly aggressive and unprofessional. Do you think that’s the kind of temperament we need in a president?"

Linkara’s smile faltered slightly. He had anticipated this question, but the sharpness in her tone caught him off guard. "Chick, I’ve always believed in being passionate about my work. My reviews were a way to express that passion and connect with my audience. They were never intended to be taken as a reflection of my character, but rather a critique of the material."

Chick leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. "But don’t you think that kind of behavior—yelling, mocking—could be seen as a lack of control? How can voters trust someone who has a history of losing their temper over something as trivial as a comic book?"

"W-Well, I-"

"And you're so unqualified! How do you propose to fix the unemployment chasm? Or the countrywide GONZO epidemic?"

Linkara felt a flush of irritation rise in him, his cheeks burning. He took a deep breath, trying to keep his composure. "Chick, those reviews were a form of entertainment, a way to engage with a community that shares my love for comics. It’s important to separate that from how I conduct myself in serious matters. My campaign is built on respect, integrity, respect and the belief in a better future. You know that."

Chick didn’t relent, his words bounced off her like flies on a window. "But isn’t it hypocritical to preach about respect and integrity when you’ve built a reputation on tearing things down? How do you reconcile that with your message?"

Linkara had never been good at maintaining his cool. He never suffered fools, even if they had something worthwhile to say.

"I..." He bit his lip. "I..."

"Oh no" said Alison Preggers.

"This is bad" Muttered Harvey. He knew Linkara. He knew him all too well.

The frustration boiled over, and before he could stop himself, Linkara leaned forward, his voice rising. "Enough! You’re taking something completely out of context! My reviews were about holding media accountable, about demanding better from the stories we consume. Yes, they were passionate, sometimes angry, hysterical at times, but they came from a place of wanting improvement! And if you can’t see the difference between entertainment and real-life values, then you’re missing the point entirely! YOU STUPID CANKER SORE OF A DISGRACE OF A REPORTER!"

The room went silent. The air crackled with tension. Chick stared at him, momentarily taken aback by his outburst. A small trail of drool tickled down the side of her mouth but she was too in shock to wipe. Linkara’s heart pounded in his chest, the reality of the situation crashing down on him. He had let his emotions get the best of him. Again.

Chick quickly regained her composure, her expression a mixture of triumph and professionalism. "Thank you for your honesty, Linkara. I think the voters will have a lot to consider after this." She smirk wryly, a veritable facet pouring out the corner of her mouth.

The interview wrapped up, and Linkara left the studio alone, his mind racing faster than what flash can do. He knew he had made a mistake. Harvey and 90s Kid were waiting for him outside, their faces reflecting a mix of concern and sympathy.

"That was rough kid," Harvey said, attempting to clap a hand on Linkara’s shoulder before he flinched away. "... B-but you handled it as best as you could."

Linkara sighed, rubbing his temples. "I lost my cool. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen."

90s Kid stepped forward, his expression firm. "It’s not the end of the world. Yes, it was a tough moment, but you spoke your truth dude. Now we need to focus on damage control and reminding people of who you really are. A radical bro!"

As he lay in bed that night, Linkara reflected on the day’s events. He felt a mix of regret and determination, knowing that his journey was far from over. The road ahead was still long and uncertain, but he was ready to face it, one step at a time. On step. At. A. Time.

[maurastierney]

My only issue with this post was laying responsibility on the Green voters for what “might have happened.” A few things here of note, in particular:

1) No party is owed your vote. If Labour want more seats, they need to appeal to those of us who left the party. When you disenfranchise your grassroots activists to appeal to transphobes and racists, you don’t deserve shit.

Their vote share went down? Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn in his own (safe) seat!? What a surprise!

2) A better result for the lefts would have been a hung parliament where labour are forced to work with other progressive voices. This is, again, the fault of FPTP

3) Tactical voting was not a Green initiative. It was an initiative primarily led by centrist broadcasters with no political aims beside “get the tories out.”

4) Also, as you have noted, it was indeed splitting the vote on the right, at times, that stopped the Tories getting in.

5) Greens have a policy of standing in every seat: as was voted by members at party conference. But they don’t focus their efforts on seats they can’t win. But they do receive a disproportionate amount of blame for “splitting the vote” where Labour do the exact same thing, only with campaigns and money behind their trying to unseat people like Jeremy Corbyn / de-selecting Faiza Shaheen.

6) There were also two Tory seats overturned by the Greens, completely unprecedented, unless, of course, you actually paid attention to what the Greens were doing: targeting seats where they had success at a local level and concentrating efforts on where they could actually win.

Hey US folks, I think maybe the lessons to learn from the UK election here are:

voting matters; this is the clearest transition of power in decades, and the Tories lost to Labour big time

the fascists will almost always turn out in record numbers when there's power on offer; 4 million of them did, in fact, and they now have a seat in parliament

splitting the vote is a bad idea; part of the reason this was such a big loss for the Tories is that so many people did vote Reform and even in a much more equitable not-two-party voting process, that still made a difference. (Folks also voted Green but due to luck and mathematics, that seems to have made less of a difference; this could have turned out very differently).

Labour has done a lot of appalling shit, just like the Democratic party, but they are not literal fascists like the Reform folks, and not assholes like the Tories.

[xexong]

The Role of Tech in Social Justice Movements - Amplifying Voices

In the wake of a tumultuous 2021, which saw the COVID-19 pandemic expose deep-rooted inequalities in societies worldwide and the exponential pace of technological change accelerate to new heights, social justice activism has gained renewed prominence. Movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have had profound impacts on society and inspired people to call for a more equitable world. But in recent years, social justice activists have also encountered new concerns about online misinformation and polarization.

As a result, addressing questions around the impact of technology on social justice movements has become an urgent concern. This is especially true for those who work in the field of civic technology—those who are building and deploying tools that enable people to make informed choices, advocate for their own interests, and participate in our democracy.

In this week’s issue of Built In, we explore the roles of technology in these movements by highlighting individuals and organizations doing innovative and exciting work to create a more equal and just society. In addition to our main feature, we’ve included a handful of resources that can help you better understand the current state of affairs in this space and take action.

Historically, the techogle.co success of protest movements has often depended on the ability to communicate effectively and amplify their voices. In this context, the rapid expansion of social media in recent years has strengthened these movements by empowering people to broadcast their experiences and connect with others who share their interests.

For example, the ACLU’s Mobile Justice app enables campaigners to document police misconduct in real time and share that information with a wide audience. And the invention of hashtags has allowed social media users to connect with enclaves that reflect their own cultural identities, from “Black Twitter” to #FeesMustFall.

At the same time, however, the proliferation of disinformation in online communities has accelerated racial and political polarization—a trend that can be seen in voter turnout and public opinion polls across the country. Consequently, there has been an increase in calls to strengthen digital regulation and limit the power of platform holders in order to protect the integrity of our democratic process and our safety as citizens.

In the face of this growing threat, the challenge for civic tech developers becomes one of ensuring that the internet continues to serve its most basic purpose: to empower and inform individuals to participate in our democracy. To this end, they must make sure that their tools aren’t being misused to undermine democracy and exacerbate existing inequalities.

To that end, companies technology website working in the civic technology space should be sure to consider the implications of their products on the communities they serve, and they should strive to be inclusive of underrepresented groups in their workforce. And they should encourage their employees to engage in meaningful discussion around these topics and support social justice movements that align with their core values.

[political-survey-application]

Use Voice Broadcasting in Rajasthan Elections to Create a Winning Strategy

In the ever-evolving landscape of political campaigns, technology has emerged as a game-changer. Gone are the days of traditional rallies and speeches as leaders now harness the power of technology to connect with voters on a personal level. One such technology making waves in the realm of politics is voice broadcasting. In this blog, we will explore the transformative impact of voice broadcasting services in Rajasthan elections and in modern political campaigns.

What is Voice Broadcasting and How Does it Work?

Voice broadcasting is a technology that allows leaders to record their message in their own voice and language and send it to thousands of people in a very short span of time.Our interactive voice broadcasting solution helps you to send your pre-recorded voice message to the masses. It's a powerful tool that enables political leaders to personally convey their message to a wide voter base quickly and effectively, adding a personal and human touch to their campaign outreach efforts.

Also, It is very flexible and effective, you can record and send messages in different regional languages. Just get your message recorded, upload it to our panel and choose the contact list you want to send the voice messages to. For example. If we talk about Rajasthan elections, where the voter demographic is predominantly regional and rural. Engaging them in their native language and voice is the most compelling way to establish a meaningful connection.

Why Political Parties Use Voice Broadcasting in their Political Campaign Strategy

Wider Reach: Voice broadcasting allows parties to reach a large and diverse audience quickly and efficiently. It's an effective way to disseminate campaign messages to a larger voter base. Leaders cannot connect with each voter personally, but they can address them and their issues in a sensitive way using the power of voice.

Better Voter Engagement: Voice messages are effective as they allow leaders to connect and engage with voters using their own voice, Voice adds a personal touch to the message, making it more relatable and authentic. This can foster trust and a stronger connection with voters.

Emotional Connection and Personal Touch: Voice broadcasting conveys emotions, tones, and nuances that written messages may lack. When leaders send voice messages in a regional language familiar to the voters, it not only establishes a relatable connection but also conveys a genuine concern for local issues. This personal touch reinforces the perception that the leader is one with the community and genuinely cares about their specific concerns.

Send Real-time updates: Voice broadcasting allows political parties and leaders to deliver real-time campaign updates, breaking news and event details to their supporters, volunteers and voters, ensuring they stay informed and actively engaged. Also, voice messages are more impactful and memorable for the regional voters.

Data Collection: Voice broadcasting serves as a valuable tool for parties to gather critical data regarding the diverse issues and concerns of voters. This data becomes helpful in optimizing voter outreach efforts and shaping campaign strategies in alignment with the priorities and needs of the electorate.

Cost-Effective: Voice broadcasting is a cost-effective method for mass communication compared to traditional media advertising. It helps parties increase the reach of their campaign message and connect with more target voters in a cost-effective way.

In Conclusion, we can say that implementing voice broadcasting into the political campaign strategy allows political parties and campaign teams to leverage technology to connect with voters on a more personal and impactful level. While saving a lot of cost and ground-level human efforts required to increase the reach of the campaign message in the diverse voter population ultimately increasing their chances of success in elections. If you’re looking for a Bulk Voice Call Service provider in India who has experience in managing large political campaigns. Go2market is the right choice for you, We have a dedicated team of campaign managers and election strategists. We make sure to follow all compliances and increase the reach and impact of your political campaign.

[themarketingmix]

The Dos and Don'ts of Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Social media draws customers in, asks for feedback, and encourages client loyalty. Extend your market reach to cover worldwide markets. Reduce marketing expenditures by doing market research. Income may increase via developing consumer networks and advertising.

The Dos:

Establish Your Goals: 

The need to establish your goals before beginning a social media marketing campaign. Do you want to raise brand awareness, encourage website traffic, generate leads, or improve sales?

Defining your objectives will help you create a focused strategy and measure your success effectively.

Know Your Audience: 

Understanding your target audience is essential for producing material that appeals to them. Conduct market research to determine your viewer's characteristics, passions, and problems.

Choose the Right Platforms:

Not all social media platforms are equal. You may choose the one appropriate for your business and your intended audience.

 For instance, LinkedIn can be a better option than Instagram to reach professionals and B2B customers. 

Consistency is Key: 

Consistency is vital in social media marketing. Regularly post high-quality content that reflects your brand's voice and values. Create a content calendar and schedule your posts in advance to ensure a consistent presence.

Engage and Interact:

Social media is a two-way street. Encourage engagement by responding to comments, messages and comments. Interact with your audience, ask questions, and encourage discussions. Building relationships and fostering a sense of community will help strengthen brand loyalty.

The Don'ts:

Over-Promote: 

While promoting your products or services is necessary, avoid overwhelming your audience with excessive self-promotion. Instead, focus on creating a healthy balance of promotional and valuable content. Share industry insights, tips, and entertaining content that genuinely adds value to your followers' lives.

Neglect Social Listening:

Social media is not just a platform for broadcasting; it's also an invaluable tool for listening. Monitor conversations about your brand, industry and competitors. Pay attention to feedback, reviews, and mentions. You may use this information to pinpoint problems and swiftly respond to client complaints.

Ignore Analytics: 

Social media management offer extensive analytics capabilities that give you the necessary information about the actions of your audience and the success of your campaigns. If you neglect these precautions, you risk leaving out important details that might help refine your approach.

Regularly review your metrics, track key performance indicators, and adjust your tactics accordingly.

Buy Followers or Engagement:

Building a genuine following takes time and effort, and buying followers or engagement is not a sustainable solution. These fake followers and engagement metrics will not translate into business results. Focus on growing an authentic audience by creating valuable content and engaging with your target audience.

Neglect Customer Service: 

Social media has become a popular channel for customer service inquiries. Neglecting these inquiries or not responding well can damage your brand's reputation. Be prompt, polite, and helpful in addressing customer queries and concerns. Show off your outstanding customer service abilities through social media.

In conclusion, social media marketing has the power to revamp tiny enterprises. You may make the most of social media's ability to connect with your target market, establish your brand, and promote company success by adhering to these dos and avoiding these don'ts. Remember, social media is about creating meaningful connections and providing value.

[grad603-kinetictype-izzymcbeth]

RESEARCH (Info): Chlöe Swarbrick MP for Auckland Central

ABOUT ME Chlöe is your Member of Parliament for Auckland Central. It’s the place she calls home, the community she belongs to and the city – and Hauraki Gulf islands! – she’s proud to represent. Auckland Central is the reason Chlöe first came to politics, with the closure of beloved heritage music venue the King’s Arms serving as a catalyst for her 2016 run for Mayor of Auckland. After a short campaign on a shoestring budget, Chlöe came in third place with almost 30,000 Aucklanders giving her their vote. They voted for her because she was talking to them, about their city and what mattered to them.

Her next step was clear. Chlöe stood as a candidate for the party whose values matched hers and was elected as a Green Party MP in 2017. As the youngest MP in Aotearoa for over 40 years, Chlöe showed people that politicians can look a little different, sound a little different, and do things a little differently. Chlöe wants to show all New Zealanders that our institutions are just made up of people making decisions, and that these decisions are often constrained by systems designed to give power and privilege to the few.

Chlöe works tirelessly for bold, transformational action on the issues for which she is the Green Party spokesperson. In the area of Drug Law Reform, Chlöe has consistently advocated for an evidence-based, harm-reduction approach which treats drug use as a health issue. She also worked across Parliament to pass the Election Access Fund Bill - originally drafted by Mojo Mathers, former Green MP and first deaf Member of Parliament - that creates a fund for candidates with disabilities to run in elections without barriers.

In 2020, Chlöe instigated the Student Accommodation Inquiry to expose and fix the problems with the deeply under-regulated sector, demonstrating her commitment to working with students and their representatives for a fairer and better system.

Chlöe is a strong, unwavering advocate for Auckland Central on the city streets, in discussions with decision-makers, and in the halls of power in Wellington.  MY MAHI As a Green, I'm focused on working for the bold, transformational action needed for our people and our planet. It's my privilege to work alongside our Green team in Parliament, and since 2020, to be the local MP for my home, the mighty Auckland Central.

I'm our Green spokesperson for Animal Welfare, Broadcasting, Digital Economy and Communications, Drug Law Reform, Economic Development, Mental Health, Revenue, Small Business, Tertiary Education, and Youth. I'm also a member of Parliament's Finance and Expenditure Select Committee.

Since entering Parliament in 2017, I've shown that I'm a strong, unwavering advocate for our communities, working collaboratively to amplify their voices and advocate for the solutions needed. Read about my work with local communities by visiting Auckland Central.

ACTIONS Reviving the St. James Pedestrianise Queen Street Funding for Festival Drug-Checking Services Supporting Students Through The Pandemic Auckland Central Vaccination Centre Albert Street Small Business Support Pop-up COVID-19 Testing Centre Advocacy to End Live Exports Calling for Greater Hauraki Gulf Protection Student Accommodation Inquiry Member's Bill to End Greyhound Racing Small Apartment Lending Election Access Fund Act ACC Fossil Fuel Divestment Backing Cannabis Law Reform Misuse of Drugs Act Reformed Mental Health and Addictions Wellbeing Group

[mojoflower]

WHY is fanfiction not the appropriate venue for your political or social battle?

We can all agree, I posit, that there are changes that need to be made in the world (racism, for example;  patriarchal inequalities;  rape culture;  capitalism;  plug in your personal cause here).

We can all ALSO agree, I think, that the way culture, media, etc. portray things influences a consumer on an unconscious level.

We can agree that, in real life, certain things are clearly bad:  abuse of others, non-consensual sex, systemic inequality, I can go on….

So.  Let me feel my way through this.  I, personally, feel like fanfiction (specifically on AO3, since that’s where I encounter it) is NOT an appropriate battleground for enforcing cultural change by:

Leaving comments about how someone’s work is (in your, the commenter’s, opinion) wrong, damaging, unfair, insensitive, etc.

Telling the writer they should change this or that.

Telling the writer they must add or delete tags.

Broadcasting your opinion of the writer’s egregiousness outside AO3 (twitter, for example, or here on tumblr).

Organizing a campaign of harassment against the author if they don’t change to suit your personal requirements.

First of all:

 Be the change you want to see.

Fanfiction, unlike any other media out there, is INDIVIDUAL.  It is one work, from one single person – voluntary and unpaid.  You yourself are one single person.  You can have as much influence as this writer.  Write the works you want to read, instead of demanding that the writer change to suit you.  This is how romance novels changed from non-con, non-condom-wearing, shudderingly unequal stories in the 70s and 80s to where they are now, for example.  New people started writing stories, and eventually established authors started changing, too (or dwindled away).

Remember that you know nothing about the author.

You don’t know their culture, their skin color, their age, their gender.  You don’t know their socioeconomic status or how much free time they have.  You don’t know their current mental or physical conditions.  You don’t know any of the things going on in their life.  AND.  You are not entitled to know these things.  When you lash out at an author for not doing research, for not editing, for… anything at all… you cannot assume that they’re not fourteen, not suicidal, not a native speaker, not disabled such that writing a single paragraph is a tremendous effort.  You don’t know they’re not in an abusive situation, or economic peril.  You do not have the right to tell them to change.  Whether you are asking them to change text, tone, tagging, ships, plot, you name it.  Anything.

Dead Dove:  Do Not Eat.

Don’t like, don’t read.  These are simple concepts, and the tagging system on AO3 helps you to avoid many triggers.  Simple common sense, once you're into a story that’s raising your hackles, will warn you away from the rest.  If you say, ‘no, this person can’t write that, it’s contributing to pain in the Real World’ then you are functioning as a censor.  I mean, at its most basic level, a censor is someone who strikes out passages in books or other media because it’s… immoral/bad/etc.  The problem is that morality is incredibly tailored to the group you’re in, and also incredibly fluid, shifting over time.  So… why do YOU get to be the censor and not the author?  What makes YOU the final word?  Seriously, think about it.

Fanfiction writers are the most vulnerable group you could target.

Which makes them easy prey, and possibly makes them the juiciest and most satisfying targets.  Address your anger to Hollywood or Simon & Schuster or Congress – and your voice will doubtless get lost in the shuffle.  Address it to an author on AO3 and you can deliver your blow personally, one on one, and witness the damage.  There is no professional buffer between your resentment and their reaction.

Who are fanfiction writers?  Overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly queer, often very young and inexperienced.  Wow.  What a rewarding group to start slapping around.  You wouldn't be the only one to think so.  Seriously.  Aim your anger at someone who is STRONGER than you.  Not someone who is (likely) weaker than you.  You’re kicking a kitten, while a lion lounges behind you.

Censoring someone’s thoughts is bad.

People should be allowed to THINK.  And they can think whatever they want.  Whether and where and how it should be expressed is another matter.  AO3 is a safe place for whatever weird-ass thoughts you have.  It is expressly written into their mission statement.  AO3 was SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED so that authors could have a place for their dead dove fics.

So.  Why is [your pet cause] okay on AO3 and not on a script in Hollywood?

AO3 requires membership before you can post anything, so it’s arguably private.  AO3 provides tools for readers to avoid works they might find triggering.  AO3 profits no one.  Follow the money, and there are your true culprits.  Not a housewife from Hoebokken.

Fanfiction writers make no money.  When they write, they are not lawmakers, filmmakers, teachers or preachers.  This is not their job.  They do not have a responsibility to the community, because they are vested with no power and no paycheck.  Please move your battlefield to one of these other venues.  Your fight will be harder, but it will also do a lot more good than traumatizing some naive  kid away from writing forever.

Fanfiction comprises an individual’s personal thoughts and personal works, written for their own enjoyment, shared only through AO3 to (presumably) like-minded readers.  Fanfics are a person’s fantasies and daydreams.  They might be an author’s therapeutic exercise.  Or someone trying to explore something new, whether it be cultures, ideas, sexualities or kinks.  Humans need a place where they can be wrong and make mistakes.  Think about that, I implore you.  If you are constantly pointing out someone’s errors, you may eventually either silence them forever, or instill in them permanent resentment.  This does not further your cause.

You have your personal cause.

I’ve seen a lot of them.  Incest is bad, you’re not allowed to write about it.  Pedophilia is bad, you’re not allowed to write about it.  Abusive relationships are bad, you’re not allowed to write about them.  Racism is bad, you’re not allowed to write about it.  Genderswap is transphobic, you’re not allowed to write about it.  A/B/O romanticizes damaging gender inequalities.  There are many.  If every single one of you got to stamp out your personal crusade, then fic would be scant on the ground and many people wouldn’t try to create anymore.  It’s stifling to creativity and terrifying to an author that they might slip up and be called out.  No one, as far as I know, likes to think of their fanfiction as something that will be turned in for a grade.

Your standards are your own.

What are the precise parameters of an abusive relationship?  Transphobia?  Racism?  Pedophilia?  Fetishism?  Where does dub-con become non-con?  No one is the mouthpiece for the whole world.  You are only the mouthpiece for yourself.

If you think to yourself that it’s not okay to tell someone they can’t write about, say, a gay relationship, but it IS okay to tell them they can’t write about a certain ship or dynamic (for Reasons), then maybe you should step back and check yourself and your entitlement to someone else’s endeavor.

In conclusion:

I’m not saying that racism doesn’t exist in fanfiction.  Or creepy sexual abuse, or glorification of harmful dynamics.  It certainly does.  I’m not trying to play semantics with you.

But when you see these things, when they bother you... back right out.

That’s it.  Just back out, ignore it and find a different fic.  (Or better yet, write your own!)  Shower the fics you approve of with love and comments about why you think they’re great.  Give them kudos and bookmarks and shout-outs on your blog.  Eventually, if your opinion is popular, authors who thought otherwise will realize that readership is looking for something different.  They’ll change or they won’t, but the body of work will change over time, and THAT is what you’re looking to accomplish.  Not to stamp out fanfiction altogether.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The future is symmetrical

When Mitch Kapor articulated the principle that “architecture is politics” at the founding of EFF, he was charging technologists with the moral duty to contemplate the kinds of social interactions their technological decisions would facilitate — and prohibit.

At question was nothing less than the character of the networked society. Would the vast, pluripotent, general purpose, interconnected network serve as a glorified video-on-demand service, the world’s greatest pornography distribution system, a giant high-tech mall?

Or could it be a public square, and if so, who would have the loudest voices in that square, who would be excluded from it, who will set its rules, and how will they be enforced?

As with its technical architecture, the political architecture of the net is a stack, encompassing everything from antitrust enforcement to spectrum allocation, protocol design to search-and-seizure laws, standards to top-level domain governance.

Among those many considerations is the absolutely vital question of service delivery itself. What kinds of wires or radio waves will carry your packets, who will own them, and how will they be configured?

For decades, a quiet war has been fought on this front, with two sides: the side that sees internet users as “mouse potatoes,” destined to passively absorb information feeds compiled by their betters; and the “netizen” side that envisions a truly participatory network design.

This deep division has been with us since the internet’s prehistory, at least since the fight over Usenet’s alt.* hierarchy, flaring up again during the P2P wars, with ISPs insisting that users were violating their “agreements” by running “servers.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

Above all, this fight was waged in the deployment of home internet service. The decision turn the already-monopolistic cable and phone operators into ISPs cast a long shadow. Both of these industries think of their customers as passive information consumers, not participants.

As an entertainment exec in William Gibson’s 1992 novel Idoru describes her audience: “Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

Contrast this with the other cyberpunk archetype, the console cowboy who doesn’t merely surf the digital, but steers it — the active participant in the technological/media environment who is more than a recipient of others’ crafted messages.

For a long time, Big Tech and Big Telco tried to have it both ways. AT&T promoted teleconferencing and remote family life conducted by videophones in its 1993 “You Will” marketing campaign. Youtube exhorted you to “broadcast yourself.”

But AT&T also set data-caps, kicked users off for running servers, and engaged in every legal, semi-legal and outright illegal tactic imaginable to block high-speed fiber networks.

Youtube, meanwhile, blocked interoperability, leveraged vertical integration with Google search to exclude and starve competitors, and conspired with Big Content to create a “content moderation” system that’s two parts Kafka, one part Keystone Kops.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#content-id

While the questions raised by broad participation in networked society are thorny and complex, one question actually has a very simple and factual answer: “How should we connect our homes to the internet?” The answer: “Fiber.”

There is no wireless that can substitute for fiber. Wireless — 5G, Starlink, whatever — shares the same spectrum. We can make spectrum use more efficient (by tightly transmitting the wireless signals so they don’t interfere), but physics sets hard limits on wireless speeds.

Each strand of wire in a wired network, by contrast, is its own pocket universe, insulated from the next wire, with its own smaller, but exclusive, electromagnetic spectrum to use without interfering with any other wire on the other side of its insulation.

<img src=”https://craphound.com/images/broadband_comparison.jpeg" alt=”EFF’s broadband comparison chart, showing the maximum speeds of 4G (100mb), DSL (170mb), 5G (10gb), cable (50gb) and fiber (100tb).”>

But copper wire also has hard limits that are set by physics. The fastest theoretical copper data throughput is an infinitesimal fraction of the fastest fiber speeds. Fiber is millions-to-hundreds-of-millions times faster than copper.

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

We should never run copper under another city street or along another pole. Any savings from maintaining 20th century network infrastructure will be eradicated by the cost of having to do twice the work to replace it with 21st century fiber in the foreseeable future.

Trying to wring performance gains out of copper in the age of fiber is like trying to improve the design of whale-oil lamps to stave off the expense of electrification. Sure, you don’t want anyone sitting in the dark but even the very best whale-oil lamp is already obsolete.

But besides future-proofing, there’s another reason to demand fiber over copper or wireless: symmetry. Our copper and (especially) wireless infrastructure is optimized for sending data to end-points, not getting data back. It’s mouse-potato broadband.

(this is especially true of any satellite broadband, which typically relies upon copper lines for its “return path,” and even when it doesn’t, has much slower uplinks that downlinks)

By contrast, fiber tends to be symmetrical — providing the same download and upload speeds. It is participatory broadband, suited for a world of distance ed, remote work, telemedicine, and cultural and political participation for all.

Fiber is so obviously better than copper or wireless that America paltry fiber rollouts needed to be engineered — they never would have happened on their own. The most critical piece of anti-fiber engineering is US regulators’ definition of broadband itself.

Since the dawn FCC interest in universal broadband, it adopted a technical definition of broadband that is asymmetrical, with far lower upload than download speeds. Despite lockdown and broadband-only connections to the outside world, Congress is set to continue this.

The latest iteration of the Democrats’ broadband bill defines “broadband” as any connection that is 100mb down and 20mb up (“100/20”). Both of these speeds paltry to the point of uselessness, but the upload speed is genuinely terrible.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/future-symmetrical-high-speed-internet-speeds

US broadband usage has grown 21%/year since the 1980s. 100/20 broadband is inadequate for today’s applications — let alone tomorrow’s (by contrast, fiber is fast enough to last through the entire 21st century’s projected broadband demand and beyond, well into the 2100s).

Any wireless applications will also depend on fiber — your 5G devices have to be connected to something, and if that something is copper, your wireless speeds will never exceed copper’s maximum speeds. Innovation in spectrum management requires fiber — it doesn’t obviate it.

Today, the highest growth in broadband demand is in uploads, not downloads. People need fast uploads speeds to videoconference, to stream their games, to do remote work. The only way a 100/20 copper network’s upload speeds can be improved is by connecting it with fiber.

Every dollar spent on copper rollout is a dollar we’ll forfeit in a few years. It’s true that cable monopolists will wring a few billions out of us if we keep making do with their old copper, but upgrading copper just makes the inevitable fiber transition costlier.

China is nearing its goal of connecting 1 billion people to fiber. In America, millions are stuck with copper infrastructure literally consisting of century-old wires wrapped in newspaper, dipped in tar, and draped over tree-banches.

https://mn.gov/commerce-stat/pdfs/frontier-service-quality-report-final.pdf

Indeed, when it comes to America, monopoly carriers are slowing upload speeds — take Altice, the US’s fourth-largest ISP, which slashed its upload speeds by 89% “in line with competitors’ offerings.”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/immortan-altice/#broadband-is-a-human-right

America desperately needs a high-fiber diet:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

But it has a major blockage: the American right, who have conducted history’s greatest self-own by carrying water for telecoms monopolists, blocking municipal fiber:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

It’s darkly funny to see the people who demanded that “government stay out of my internet” now rail against monopoly social media’s censorship, given that a government ISP would be bound by the First Amendment, unlike Facebook or Twitter.

Luckily, Congress isn’t the only place where this debate is taking place. In California, Governor Newsom has unveiled an ambitious plan to connect every city and town to blazing-fast fiber, then help cities and counties get it to every home.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#fiber-now

In tech circles, we use the term “read-only” to refer to blowhards who won’t let you get a word-in edgewise (this being one of the more prominent and unfortunate technical archetypes).

The “consumer” envisioned by asymmetrical broadband futures is write*-only — someone designed to have other peoples’ ideas crammed into their eyeballs, for their passive absorption. A consumer, not a citizen.

As Gibson put it, it’s a person who “can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

Cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion.

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[route22ny]

The split-screen reality of the Trump era became all too real for Stephen Richer recently, and in a very literal way. On May 15, the Arizona election official — a Republican — was looking at two computer screens. On one was former President Trump’s claim that a key election database had been deleted, an “unbelievable election crime.” On the other screen was that very database, quite intact.

“Wow,” Richer tweeted. “This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”

A couple of days later, he made his dismay even more explicit.

“What can we do here?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “This is tantamount to saying that the pencil sitting on my desk in front of me doesn’t exist.”

When Richer unseated a Democratic incumbent to become Maricopa County’s recorder in November, he thought he had won the most boring job in politics: maintaining the county’s voter files. But he had not reckoned on Trump, #StopTheSteal, and the most massive, audacious and successful propaganda campaign in modern American history — a campaign that has adapted Russian-style disinformation to U.S. politics with alarming success.

Fortunately, Richer and his local Republican colleagues have refused to be victimized. Instead, they have shown how to fight back.

Information warfare takes many forms, but it has an overarching goal: to divide, demoralize and disorient a political foe by manipulating the social and media environments. As Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet intelligence defector, explained in a chilling 1983 interview, “What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.”

One potent weapon of mass distraction is the “fire hose of falsehood,” a torrent of lies that aims not so much to persuade as to confuse and disorient. After Russian intelligence services got caught poisoning a defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018, the Russian government responded with a blizzard of mutually contradictory lies: Britain did it, Ukraine did it, a jealous lover did it, it was a suicide attempt and so on.

Another standard technique: conspiracy bootstrapping. First you spread a rumor. Then you demand an investigation. Failure to investigate just confirms the conspiracy, but so does an investigation with a negative finding. It’s a trap: either ignoring or debunking the conspiracy theory propagates it.

Those techniques are not new. Intelligence services and propaganda experts understand them well, and master propagandists like Josef Goebbels and Vladimir Putin have used them to powerful effect. What no one imagined was that they could be deployed by an American president and his party — and not against a foreign antagonist, but against the American public.

Pundits often say that, whatever his authoritarian tendencies, Trump is too inept and inattentive to have done much lasting damage to democracy. They are wrong: In the realm of information warfare, Trump is a genius-level innovator. It was he who figured out how to adapt Russia-style disinformation to the U.S. political environment, no mean accomplishment.

His use of the fire hose of falsehood was masterly. In his 2016 campaign, according to PolitiFact, 70% of his checkable claims were false or mostly false, a flood of untruths whose like had never been seen in a presidential campaign. He began his presidency by lying about the weather at his inauguration and also lying about the size of the crowd. By the time his presidency was over, Washington Post fact-checkers had clocked him at more than 30,000 confirmed falsehoods, with nearly half coming in his final year.

Similarly, he was a master of conspiracy bootstrapping. He retailed conspiracy theories and falsehoods on the grounds that a lot of people were saying them, although of course he was the sayer-in-chief. Truth and common decency need not apply; when a prominent cable news host criticized him, Trump peddled an absurd (and deeply cruel) lie that the host was suspected of murder.

The black arts of disinformation had the intended effect, at least from Trump’s point of view. They exacerbated the country’s divisions, commandeered the country’s attention, dominated his opponents, disoriented the media and helped him establish a cult of personality among followers who trusted no one else.

Still, he saved the worst for last. His pièce de résistance was the propaganda attack on the 2020 election. Beginning months before the election, he launched a drumbeat of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting. Pundits were puzzled. Many Republicans vote by mail, and the pandemic was especially dangerous to older voters who lean toward Trump; why discourage them from voting safely and conveniently?

But Trump was aiming for the post-election. He saw he was in electoral trouble. With the anti-mail campaign, he was organizing, priming, and testing an unprecedented propaganda network, ready for use if he lost.

And then came #StopTheSteal itself, a disinformation campaign whose likes the country had never witnessed. It mobilized the White House, Republican politicians, social media, conservative cable news and talk radio, frivolous litigation, and every other available channel to broadcast the message that the election was rigged. The Big Lie, as it was aptly named, failed to keep Trump in office, but it succeeded at its secondary goal: turning the Republican Party itself into a propaganda organ.

In April, only a fourth of Republicans believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected, and GOP politicians who insisted on truth were persona non grata.

With that as background, we can see more clearly what is going on right now in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. In 2020, Biden carried Maricopa by more than 45,000 votes, and with it the state. The result was certified by the Republican governor, double-checked twice by the county’s election officials, and then confirmed by two independent audits.

But in classic bootstrapping fashion, Trump and state Republican leaders seized on conspiracy theories, such as that phony ballots had been smuggled in from Asia, to launch an unnecessary recount conducted by an unqualified company whose boss had promoted uncorroborated charges of election fraud. In textbook fashion, the controversial recount drove yet more public attention to the conspiracy theories, engendering yet more suspicion and spawning me-too demands for partisan “audits” across the country.

The Arizona shenanigans will not change the outcome of the 2020 election, but that is not the point. A great propaganda campaign is cyclonic and self-propelled: once unleashed, it takes on a life of its own, heedless of any underlying reality. By that yardstick, the Arizona recount is a great propaganda campaign.

Americans have never been exposed to Russian-style disinformation tactics, at least not coming from a major political party and deployed on a national scale. We are thus dangerously vulnerable to them. What can we do? There are no quick or simple answers; developing immunity requires everything from more sophisticated journalism and better-designed social media platforms to teaching media literacy, and much more.

But here is where to start: Do what Stephen Richer did. Insist loudly, unwaveringly and bravely on calling out lies, even at the cost of partisan solidarity.

Once it became clear that the #StopTheSteal campaign was escalating instead of dying out, Richer went public with a no-holds-barred denunciation of what Trump and his enablers were up to. “Just stop indulging this,” he told CNN. “Stop giving space for lies.”

At his side were all five of the Maricopa County supervisors — four of whom are Republicans. Calling the recount a sham, a con, and a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” they declared they “stand united together to defend the Constitution and the republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for truth.” They also wrote a blistering 14-page letter shredding the alt-audit in detail.

Propaganda attacks succeed when critical points of resistance collapse; they stumble when trusted voices expose lies for what they are. Individuals and small groups may not be able to shut down a propaganda campaign or neutralize all its effects, but they can strip away its facade of legitimacy and act as an anchor against runaway fabulism. That was why the Soviet Union struggled so mightily to silence Andrei Sakharov and other dissident voices, and why those voices ultimately brought down the evil empire.

And it is why Rep. Liz Cheney made a difference when she chose truthfulness over her job in the Republican congressional leadership. The day she was booted, she read her colleagues John 8:32: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She could not end #StopTheSteal, but she could, and did, dent its credibility and embarrass Republicans whose equivocation and silence abetted the Big Lie.

In the same way, Richer and his colleagues in Arizona laid down a marker. They risked their political standing and even their personal safety (Richer has needed security protection) to expose their own party’s propaganda and shame those who spread it.

The deployment of Russian-style information warfare has allowed Trump and his authoritarian cult to usurp the Republican Party. And they are not finished. Now that they have succeeded with mass disinformation, it will be a fixture of American politics for years to come.

Countermeasures begin, though do not end, with personal integrity: standing up for facts and staying reality-based, whatever the short-term political costs. Think of it as epistemic patriotism, and pray for more of it, especially from Republicans.

***

The author, Jonathan Rauch, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-arizona-dreaming-20210522-uyd6ivuv75hd5gof2geyd5adtu-story.html

[theawkwardterrier]

my whole trajectory's toward you, and it's not losing momentum (call it anything we want)

Summary: Anthony had expected a certain amount of trouble when he took over managing the Danbury campaign. He didn’t imagine this amount. He didn’t imagine that it might at some point become something other than trouble.

There was mention of rival political campaign managers Kate and Anthony and even though I couldn’t quite get there - or make a scene happen which directly featured Newton 😔 - I did manage rivals and political campaigning. So here’s something to serve as incentive, congratulation, or brief respite depending on how far @thesokovianaccords​ has gotten in her grad school application process. Sorry if it’s a bit OOC, Livia - maybe it’s just the right degree to make sense in a modern AU? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Read on AO3

A week into running Dr. Danbury’s campaign, Anthony realizes that he has made a grave error in allowing himself to give in when his mother requested “a bit of a favor.”

At the time she’d asked, he had just gotten the news that his previous candidate was dropping out of his own race for health reasons, and of course, Dr. Danbury has been a fixture for his entire life so he might well have stepped up merely because she needed help (despite knowing that the reason she needed the help was that she’d fired her entire previous campaign team). Besides that, he has rarely been able to deny his mother anything, and that’s even before she brings up the number of hours she spent in labor with him (twenty-two, as he well knows by now) but still...he damn well should have ignored all that this time.

For his money, the most annoying part of not being listened to by the candidate is that her instincts have mostly served her well. Three days after he started, she ignored the common wisdom of maintaining decorum and not insulting the opposition which he had reminded her of before she went on camera, and had only benefited from it; apparently the majority of the constituency agreed that the particular candidate she had been asked about was indeed a “first class wanker who should pray nightly for the brains God gave a goose.” At least she had heeded Anthony’s advice to refer to the man as “my opponent” rather than using his name and giving him free advertising in the soundbite as it was played on nearly every news broadcast for the next several days.

“Well, we seem to have come out of this one all right,” she says, sipping her coffee and looking just the slightest bit smug - he doesn’t lie to candidates, so he had been obliged to report that the latest polling numbers actually went up after the incident. “Anything else, Bridgerton?”

Swallowing the speech he wants to give about how easily things could shift during a campaign, not to mention the difference between what people told a pollster and how they actually cast their votes, he says, “Perhaps we might look to hire a policy director, ma’am? To help...guide the campaign a bit more?”

“If we did, I should wonder what I had hired you for.” She looks at him over the tops of her glasses as if she can tell he is dreaming of responding that ah, well, it seems he is unnecessary, and perhaps he will just excuse himself from the position now. He makes sure his expression remains neutral and finally she waves a hand. “Well, let me see some names and CVs after the weekend, and I shall decide then.”

“Very good.” He extremely purposefully does not sigh until he is out of her office and striding along the corridor of their campaign headquarters. There are plenty of people who will take a call from him on short notice and who will back him with the candidate. Yes, if he can’t quit altogether (and he can’t if he wants his regular seat at Christmas dinner) then having someone in his corner is just the ticket.

He arrives for work on Monday even earlier than his traditional first thing in the morning, wondering to himself whether it will be better to simply present his top applicants or if he should throw in a decoy or two to make his choices shine even brighter - although perhaps that’s just the sort of ploy that the candidate would sniff out in a heartbeat after a career of wrangling university students. Still debating, he turns the corner toward his office, only to find Dr. Danbury in the hall outside, speaking with someone. Anthony doesn’t recognize the person from the back, can only see a fall of shiny, dark hair, so he guesses it is one of the volunteers, perhaps someone new who has arrived early for orientation. He hopes that Dr. Danbury isn’t being too intimidating.

“Ah, Bridgerton,” the lady in question calls down the hallway, and something about her tone makes Anthony’s spine go straight. “Good morning.”

Still, he clings to his good mood as he greets her. “Let me put my things down, and then we can go over your schedule for the day. And I have those CVs you had requested as well.”

“Nevermind those,” she says, and the little smile on her lips makes every one of his nerves stand on end. “Did you know that your mother and I went out for a drink on Friday evening? Oh, yes, we had a wonderful time, and your brother Colin came around to escort us home. Such a lovely boy, had some delightful stories about his trip to Greece - and so interested in the campaign. In fact, he had a brilliant thought when I mentioned your idea for bringing on someone new to help shape things alongside the two of us.”

Whatever virtues his brother Colin might possess, interest in the campaign is absolutely not among them. Skin humming all over, Anthony manages a casual, “Oh?”

“Indeed, and luckily I was able to organize it all over the weekend so you wouldn’t have to do a thing.” She gestures toward her companion, and with a sick swoop in his stomach, Anthony knows who he is going to see before she shifts around.

“I believe you two have met before?” Dr. Danbury says, voice fading just a bit beneath the static in Anthony’s ears as Kate Sheffield turns to face him.

They have not actually met before, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t know of each other.

The first time Anthony heard her name, it was her sister saying it - about twenty times in a row, if he’s being honest. He met Edie Sheffield two years back at one of his mother’s galas. Edie ran a different prestigious kids charity than the one Mum was fundraising for, so he’d wondered if inviting her was somehow inviting the enemy or maybe bragging. But Edie was sweet, and passionate about her job, and looked absolutely gorgeous in sapphire satin, and he settled into a night of getting her drinks and chatting her up, despite the fact that she didn’t seem as interested in speaking with him as she did in mentioning that he really must talk with her sister.

He’d stayed the night in the hotel where the gala had been held (alone, in one of the rooms which had been set aside for guests from the event; he’d put Edie in a car at about 11) and was planning on taking his mother to breakfast after she came down from her own room. When he went to check out, however, the desk attendant handed him a message which had been taken down for him on hotel stationary.

Dickheads like you shouldn’t try to get with my sister. Don’t do it again.

KS

“Is there anything else that I can assist you with?” asked the attendant, holding onto her poker face remarkably. Perhaps they taught that in hospitality programs.

He’d crushed the note in his hand before smoothing his own face placidly and handing over his credit card. His mother was all smiles and chatter during breakfast, but his mind was still on the note, which seemed to have burned itself behind his eyelids.

Dickheads like you - oh, so only other types of dickheads need apply? And get with? Were they twelve years old and couldn’t use grownup words? Not to mention the signature, such as it was. Trying to play mafia boss, expecting that he’d know who had sent it. He did, but it took a lot of bloody gall to assume that he would.

Not as much gall as Don’t do it again. He couldn’t even think of that part, the demeaning certainty of it, without a certain vein beginning to throb in his forehead.

In the two years since, he found himself falling back into analysis of the note - it was barely more than a dozen words, so how could there still be so much to parse? - whenever her name came up, which became more and more frequent as she moved from nothing campaigns in the most forgotten corners of the country to deputy deputy whatever on somewhat more consequential ones. She was gaining a reputation among his peers. They said she was smart and canny, that she had a knack for looking at the bigger picture and acting on her instincts.

(Someone who’d once worked with her had also mentioned that it helped that she didn’t have a high opinion of her looks, didn’t flaunt herself the way some women did around the office - she certainly didn’t have a reason to do so, but sometimes that didn’t stop them.

“Oh, be fair,” said the other man. “She does have quite a nice—”

They’d shut up when he’d walked into the room - everyone knew better than to talk that way around him, and it wasn’t just because of “all those sisters” the way some people said. Eloise had been interning with the campaign that summer, and for the rest of the day while he’d talked with human resources, he’d let her make mistakes on all of their lunch and coffee orders and give them the wrong data for their reports when they’d made her look it up instead of doing it themselves. When he’d fired them, he spread the word on why, but left the particulars out of it.)

The note returns to his mind whenever someone new has their one experience of suggesting Kate Sheffield as a potential hire, or when he thinks he’s seen her in the background of some press conference or event for another candidate, or if he runs into Edie at another charity function, where he absolutely does not flirt with her just that extra bit harder while part of his mind thinks Your move directly toward her sister who he has never actually met in person.

Until now.

“We’re acquainted,” he tells Dr. Danbury, managing to remain polite by avoiding Kate’s gaze. He leaves it at that.

They’re the first two in the conference room for the all-staff the next morning, and somehow he’s not surprised.

“Good morning,” he says as he comes in to find her over by the coffee. She’s doctoring it significantly, clearly already familiar with the quality to be found in a campaign office. He always buys his own; he can’t stand the amount of milk and sugar and oddly flavored creamers required to make the other stuff palatable (and don’t even get him started on the alleged tea).

Tone cool, she replies, “Mr. Bridgerton,” and takes a sip from her mug.

It isn’t as if the staff goes around calling him “Tony” or “boss,” and only the most knock-kneed newcomers call him “sir.” He’s Anthony to most. He has no inclination to correct her.

He works to keep his tone casual and courteous as usual when he introduces her to everyone (“And this is Kate Sheffield, who will be doing some consulting for us”) but something about it must catch Dr. Danbury’s attention, because she raises an eyebrow at him from her end of the table and rests both hands atop her stick.

The fact that the candidate is aware that something is going on between the two of them makes it all the more exasperating when two days later she signs off on Kate’s media and advertising plan over his own. He shows up for dinner with Daphne and Simon that evening as planned, knowing that Daphne would be completely willing to pull the pregnancy card if he tried to get out of it, but she sends him home before the waiter has brought the dessert menus because he keeps muttering about how more people travel by tube and railways and for longer distances but are more likely to take more individual rides on buses and what that means for posting print ads.

(The numbers are seared into his mind, considering she’d included a full breakdown with three kinds of graphs and bloody footnotes in her presentation.)

Getting released from the restaurant early gives him extra time to go back to the office for a bit and put together a preliminary get out the vote strategy. He calls in several favors as a part of it, including one from an old friend of his father’s who asks incredulously, “Really? For this?” clearly wondering whether Anthony’s reputation is deserved if he’s pulling out all the stops for something so routine.

It’s well worth it, however, when Dr. Danbury raises an eyebrow as she looks over the document he’d put together, and tells him, “Well done, Bridgerton, very well done indeed. I think this shall do nicely.”

He does not even glance toward Kate; there really isn’t any need to gloat.

Well, one tiny peek won’t hurt.

Her jaw is set and her eyes are flinty, but she gives him just the slightest nod, as if to say that he might have won this round, but she’d like to see him try the next one.

Just before three in the morning, he wakes himself, panting, from a dream that makes him think he might have to report himself for workplace sexual harassment.

“I would have hoped you’d have better self-preservation instincts,” he says aloud to his body. “Or at least better taste.”

Collapsing back against the pillows, he pushes his mind toward images of ex-girlfriends and celebrities, but no, there is Kate, strong and challenging and gorgeous above him, a vivid afterimage that refuses to go away, and he sighs and gives into it, trying to set himself to rights so he can get past this and find at least a bit more sleep.

Anthony has never been the sort of boss who shouts at people in the office - he has always tended toward cold anger and “you know what you’ve done, now fix it” stares, and doesn’t intend to act differently now. But as he stalks over to Kate’s desk, he finds a fiercer anger taking over, just a bit.

“You changed my media statement,” he says, voice silken with it as he leans his palms down on her desktop and rests his weight on them. He is speaking low, the words just for her, although his eyes roam over the others moving busily around the main space of the office.

She turns her chair slightly, so that he feels the brush of her hair on his forearms where his sleeves are rolled up; it shifts his attention fully in her direction. Her hair tie had snapped earlier, and the thick topknot she tried twisting for herself has collapsed, leaving it free around her shoulders. He snaps himself back from examining the shining curls as she says, “Yes, I did.”

Part of him admires her straightforwardness, that she takes responsibility without even trying to deny it. The other part...well, the anger hasn’t exactly disappeared.

In a level tone which would have his siblings looking over in alarm, he says. “I had worked that statement out with the entire communications department.”

“The entire communications department does what you tell them to do. It’s what you pay them for.”

“And what, exactly, do I pay you for?”

They are facing each other now, their bodies a bit too close for it. She is looking directly at him, voice sharp and clear as glass. “I was hired by the candidate, to help run the campaign that she wants. Your statement was just a polite walkback of her words.”

He has the sudden thought that the brown of her eyes could be warm, that her gaze probably is warm when she’s looking at her sister or the dog whose photo she has framed on her desk (a plump, panting little corgi wearing a bright blue bow tie, absurd), but he’s never seen her that way. He’s only ever gotten this, annoyance and disdain and perhaps disappointment.

Still, he responds, “Her words need to be walked back if she wants to someday be more than the candidate. In this constituency, colonial reparations aren’t a popular enough issue to increase turnout for those who weren’t already interested, and it’s exactly the sort of thing which will put off those who were on the fence. We’re trying to flip a seat by reminding people of what their current MP is doing wrong; we have to stay on message, not muddy things with topics too few understand. Sending out a statement moderating the comment is the right move.”

“But that statement isn’t what the candidate believes, and her future constituents should know what her actual position is - they likely aren’t as stupid as you seem to think. And besides that, she has the right stance in the first place.”

In the weeks since she arrived, he’s found that the things people said of her were true: she is smart, perhaps too smart for the good of either of them, and decisive, easily seeing what’s been done and what needs to be and acting on it, the exact sort of person you would want at your side as you plot a course forward. But he hadn’t realized that she was a believer.

There are fewer idealists in politics than one might think, or at least who have risen to her level. He always finds them a bit off-putting, and it startles him even more with her - he had thought he recognized in her a sharpness and pragmatism which reminded him of his own.

“Don’t do anything like this again,” he says, trying to temper his own abruptness even as he is somewhat unsettled by the conviction in her. “Or I’ll fire you, and I don’t care what the candidate says about it.”

“I think she would have quite a lot to say in that circumstance,” Kate tells him, but she turns back to her keyboard and doesn’t argue anymore.

At least until the next day, when they end up nearly nose to nose in his office as Anthony maintains that they can’t get anyone’s hopes up with a promise of immediate action on climate change, especially considering the priorities in the party platform and the likely makeup of the next parliament, and Kate practically shouts that they’re showing people where their convictions lie and that Dr. Danbury will fight for them if she gets the chance.

When Anthony dreams of her again that night, they are not talking about policy at all. But when he wakes up, edgy and aching as he is, he finds himself hoping one day to see her smile at him the way he did in his sleep; he wants to know if her eyes really are as warm as he imagined.

On Saturday, there’s such persistent nagging in the older sibling groupchat that Anthony finally gives in and agrees to leave the office for a night out. Forcing him into some allegedly relaxing activity is a time-honored tradition when they’re coming into the final stretch of a campaign; he’s certain the others have been discussing tactics in one of the numerous other chats that are always going on. (The last he’d glimpsed, the sibling group which didn’t include Gregory, Hyacinth, or himself - but did, irritatingly, include Simon - was named “Anthony’s Scary Forehead Vein.”)

“Please tell me that we aren’t going to paint ceramics again,” Anthony says as he walks, hands in his pockets, beside Benedict. Their group is too large to all move together on the sidewalk, which is a bit of a relief. “I don’t think I could put up with another night of Eloise reminding me that there are stencils if I need them.”

Benedict very narrowly and very obviously avoids laughing at him. Now that Anthony thinks about it, actually, his brother had spent that particular outing using a dozen colors to intricately decorate a mug, spending so long on it that they had nearly closed the place around him. Their mother drinks her tea from it frequently, however. “Thankfully there won’t be any pottery or painting tonight.”

“And it’s not—”

“Not a club,” Benedict assures him, then grins. “Can you imagine Simon trying to make certain no one came within a foot radius of Daph on the dance floor?”

Anthony shakes his head, looking ahead of them to where his sister and brother-in-law are walking together, not holding hands, but so close that they might as well be. He still feels a bit strange about the two of them together, especially after all the drama on the way, but he can see that they’re in love each other, even if he can’t really imagine why anyone would want to be, and they’re extremely obviously happy, so he’s trying to grow accustomed to it. He can also absolutely see Simon working himself into knots playing mosh pit bodyguard.

“So where are we going, then?” he asks, but before Benedict can answer, Eloise, broken away from her friend Penelope, tosses her arms over their shoulders and wriggles her face between them.

“You’ll just have to see,” she says, and Anthony doesn’t have to look at her to know that she is twitching her eyebrows at them. He probably could get it out of her if he tried, but he actually is finding himself feeling a little lighter being out with everyone, so he just waits and ten minutes later, they’re entering an already fairly crowded pub. Colin and Eloise go over to register them as a trivia team - or more likely to bicker over what name their team should have. As if realizing the same, Daphne squeezes Simon’s hand once and pushes over to join them.

(Her stomach is still flat, even for someone looking, but Anthony notices that she places a protective hand over it as she walks through the crush anyway.)

The rest of them go to claim a table and start putting together an order for drinks and appetizers. Anthony is leaning across, shouting a promise that if Penelope doesn’t finish her chili loaded potato wedges, they’ll certainly be taken care of, when someone behind him asks, “Excuse me, can we borrow this chair?”

“Sorry, there are more of us coming,” he says politely, turning to face the woman. She’s thirtyish and tall, but that’s all he takes in before he spots, over her shoulder, the rest of her group. They’re all chatting with each other, wearing matching T-shirts in a variety of bold colors which declare them the Quizzie Bennets, and in the center, her hair up in a ponytail and definite warmth in her eyes, is Kate. Edie stands beside her, picture perfect nose crinkled in a teasing way, but all Anthony can notice is that he’s never seen Kate in jeans like this, that the odd, bright purple of her shirt looks electric instead of ugly against the dark of her hair, and all he can think is that he never imagined her as relaxed as she is, weapons laid down.

She seems to detect his gaze then, and as she meets it he expects the weapons to be picked right back up. There’s certainly surprise, a guardedness to her eyes as they meet his, but then she narrows them in his direction, as if saying game on.

So that’s how she wants to play it, he thinks, then turns to the others and says, “No alcohol.”

Benedict blinks. “What do you mean by that?”

“In solidarity with Daphne,” Anthony offers.

“Daph does know that it’s pub trivia,” Simon says. “And she’s not—”

“Fine,” Anthony interrupts before the compliment train can get rolling. He sets his jaw. “I mean that we need to keep clear heads if we’re going to absolutely trounce everyone here.”

Penelope looks a bit alarmed by the vehemence in his tone and Simon quirks a brow, but the others are game enough - Bridgertons have always had a competitive streak, and apparently the rest of them actually chose this particular trivia night because it’s done aloud, infinite bounce style, instead of on paper.

“We play with live ammo around here,” Eloise declares gleefully once she’s returned and been updated on what she missed.

“Damn right we do,” Anthony mutters to himself, glad that he is seated with his back to Kate so he can resist the temptation to see how irritated she looks just now, or how face might be a little flushed and her ponytail loosened from the heat of everyone packed together inside…

“Who exactly do you keep looking for?” asks Colin, who’d plopped himself into the chair Kate’s teammate had asked about. He cranes obviously around, and Anthony turns firmly back to the table before his brother can follow his line of vision.

For all that they didn’t pick their team in order to be serious contenders, they do cover the bases fairly well. Anthony has politics and current events, obviously, along with history. Penelope plays backup there as well, and covers literature alongside Colin, who handily takes on geography too. (Anthony has always inwardly wondered how reasonable it was to build a career around wanderlust and Instagram and freelancing for travel magazines, but if it brings them victory tonight, he will never question again.) Benedict apparently took in more about nature than any of the rest of them who grew up in the Kentish countryside, and knows quite a bit more about art and art history than Anthony had expected. Daphne, unpredictably, knows a lot about sports - she claims that it’s what happens when you spend your life being rambled at as “another one of the boys” - and, more predictably, music.

Anthony hadn’t expected Simon’s skill with numbers to be particularly helpful, but now he’ll have to buy him a drink at some point, both for doubting and for pulling them out of a sticky situation involving Bernstein's constant. He wishes that Francesca wasn’t too young to have come out with them - there are several instances where they could have used her chiming in with quiet calm about anything related to economics or science, but they instead have to all give questionable contributions in that regard. They all chip in for pop culture, too, although Eloise is clearly the master - she actually yawns as she announces that of course the country where Monica’s boyfriend Pete Becker took her on their first date was Italy, and Anthony has never been more grateful that he lets everyone sponge off his Netflix login (although would it really kill them to not be using all the screens on the rare occasions he actually has the time and inclination to watch something?).

The trouble is that there are plenty of other teams who are clearly regulars, and they were put together in order to be serious contenders. The questions and answers are flying through the air, the quizmaster, a skinny older man with big hair shouting “Correct! For ten points,” more often than not, and most importantly, the Quizzie Bennets are availing themselves nicely. (He should have guessed as soon as he saw the matching T-shirts.)

Questions his team can’t answer correctly bounce to them next, and he can’t help but toss Kate an incredulous look after she not only answers that Angela Merkel was voted chancellor of November rather than October 2005, but also rattles off the margin for and against. Her eyes meet his as if she was expecting his glance, but she just shrugs before wrapping her lips around her straw and taking a dainty sip of her drink. He has to look away then.

Still, Team Quizerton (apparently the name that both Colin and Eloise had hated enough for Daphne to negotiate them to agreement) has done well enough that Anthony feels confident as they move into the final round.

“And what will the twist be tonight?” the excitable quizmaster asks, although he then just presses a button on his phone rather than spinning some kind of enormous wheel. His face lights up as he announces grandly, “Ah, the ladder!”

He quickly outlines the rules: each team will have five questions selected for them in ascending order of difficulty, with point values from ten to fifty. For each correct answer, they will receive the corresponding points and the option of requesting a related bonus question for half the initial question’s value. Wrong answers mean a point deduction, double for bonus questions, and the end of play for that team. You can also pass, choosing another team to answer and forfeiting further questions for yours but freezing your points where they stand.

It’s more like a game show than any trivia night that Anthony is familiar with, but he actually appreciates the strategy element; he can understand why this would be Kate’s preferred contest.

He considers giving a pep talk to the table, but all of them - except for Simon, who’s looking somewhere between vaguely amused and bored - are dialed in, ready to claim victory, so he settles back and readies himself for it too.

It happens in the final round. Anthony is just allowing himself to feel the slightest bit smug at having earned them another 75 points by not only correctly responding that Sri Lanka was the first country to have a female prime minister, but answering the bonus of her name (Sirimavo Bandaranaike) and year of election (1960) as well. The quizmaster nods, turns, and reads off the next question: “This famous playwright’s last words were reportedly ‘I knew it! I knew it! Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it, dying in a hotel room.’”

There’s a strange, deep silence, then a buzz of whispering among the Quizzie Bennets, and Anthony is struck by the realization that they don’t know the answer. He certainly doesn’t either, and a glance around at his group tells him that they would have been screwed had they gotten the question, but it doesn’t matter. Excitement licks up his throat, victory so close he can taste it…

And then Kate’s head comes up from the huddle, and her eyes meet his, and he knows exactly what she is going to do before she does it.

“Ten seconds!” says the quizmaster.

“Trust me,” Kate mouths to her teammates, and then says aloud, “We’d like to pass, and give the Know It Ales a chance to answer.”

Anthony’s mouth goes dry. Stupid team name aside, they’ve been confidently answering questions all night, and this time is no different. Their leader is nearly bored as he immediately says, “Eugene O’Neill.” And Anthony can barely hear the room around him over the blood rushing in his ears as they answer the follow-up too.

When the quizmaster declares the Know It Ales the champions for the evening, Kate slings her arms around her teammates and cheers as if he’s announced her name instead. The other Quizzie Bennets look puzzled, but when she stares defiantly at Anthony, chin raised, beaming, glowing not like she’s in the spotlight but like she’s the light itself, he somewhat suspects that she’s the winner indeed.

“Isn’t that—” Colin starts somewhere close to Anthony’s ear.

“No, it is not,” Anthony tells him firmly, and wrestles him off to pay their tab.

Later that night, after he’s somewhat successfully distracted himself with work and somewhat less successfully distracted himself with looking for something to watch (why isn’t everyone asleep, and even if they are up, could they really not leave him one available screen?) he finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed with his work phone in one hand and his personal one in the other. And even though he knows exactly how bad an idea it is, he very carefully references the campaign contact group and keys one number into a new text message in his personal phone.

Sorry that this didn’t seem to be your night. Best of luck to your team next time.

He shoves out a breath and stands as soon as he’s sent it, forces himself to start getting ready for bed; she’s probably asleep now, or she might read it as rude or sarcastic and choose not to respond, and the text is just going to sit there, awkward and interminable…

There are plenty of ways to be lucky, thanks very much, and I think we found one - although I look forward to reclaiming my rightful title someday soon. See you on Monday, Bridgerton.

Regardless of what he tells himself, he can’t quite get the stupid grin off his face as he shuts off the light. He’s under no illusions about who his dreams will feature tonight.

Monday night before the election, Anthony leaves the office past eleven. He rubs his eyes as he walks past dark cubicles and conference rooms - unsurprisingly, he’s the last one around - and decides that what he needs more than sleep is something to eat, and not whatever cup noodles or single egg he might come up with at home. No, he needs comfort food, something generous and hot and greasy as Benedict’s face the year he was thirteen (not that his at fifteen was much better).

His favorite hole in the wall is open until midnight, so he stumbles over there and buys the biggest order of chips he can, the enormous burger nearly an afterthought. The place is tiny and not the sort of spot that has ever even heard of ambiance, but he’s tired and the idea of waiting to get back to his flat and eating in its emptiness isn’t particularly appealing. He turns with his food in hand and finds Kate looking up at him, startled, from one of the three tables.

He could take one of the others, leave them to eat in awkward peace, or he could pretend he had always intended to have his food to go. Instead he comes over and asks, “Can I join you?”

Her capable hands moving just a note too slowly, as though giving him time to reconsider, she collects the documents from the opposite side of the table, tapping them into order as he waits patiently. She folds her fingers atop the neat stack in front of her once she’s finished, watching as he dives into his meal; he should probably be embarrassed about it, but he doesn’t really have the energy.

They talk about inconsequential things - how the weather forecast might cause trouble with voter turnout, the unfortunate office incident with Johnson and the speakerphone last week, mutual political acquaintances - and Anthony realizes that it’s the first time they’ve ever done this, just made small talk without disagreeing. Kate doesn’t lose her sharp tongue simply because they are in casual conversation, but it’s different when her remarks aren’t directed at him; hearing her pert analyses of other candidates and campaign staffers actually makes him laugh.

She’s left half a piece of cold fish and polished off more than a few of his chips (completely unthinkingly, he’s sure) when they’re informed that closing time’s come and they have to clear the table. It would be completely natural for them to part ways and see each other in the morning for another round of sparring, but he finds himself saying, “I think I might go get a drink,” and finds her answering, “I think I might join you.”

He regrets it just a bit when he’s balanced on the bar stool (he really is exhausted; this is the earliest he’s been out of the office in days) but then Kate raises her wineglass and says, “To the homestretch,” and smiles just a bit as he touches his glass to hers. The light falls cozy and dim around them and he can still see exactly how long and competent her fingers are, wrapped around the stem, the places where strands of hair have escaped their pins, trailing down to rest against her exposed throat.

Right, he thinks inanely to himself. Right, excellent, this was a good choice, and belts back his scotch before signaling for another.

“Those were your siblings?” she asks, taking a sip of her own drink. “At trivia the other night?”

“Some of them were...are…” He shakes his head, trying to straighten out his own meaning. “It was some of my siblings, the oldest four, and my brother-in-law, and my sister’s best friend.” Then, before he can stop himself, he adds, “I saw your sister was there as well.”

“Hmm,” she says, taking another sip of her cabernet, and he can see her spine stiffening, armor reasserting itself.

For the first time, he realizes that she could easily hate Edie, her younger sister - her younger half-sister, even - who is sweet and accomplished and more apparently pretty, the one people’s eyes turn to when the Sheffield girls are around, but what Kate displays is no begrudging love.

It would probably be better for him to change the topic, get them back on safer ground, but though he might be smart, he’s not necessarily wise, so he tosses back his second scotch and asks, “Why did you warn me off her the first time? You didn’t even know me.”

“Yes, but I knew of you,” she says. As always, she faces the comment head on, doesn’t even pretend not to remember exactly what he’s talking about. “I was starting in the industry, I needed to have an ear to the ground and at least a general sense of the players, and I didn’t like the sense I got about you. It didn't make me think you were the kind of person to trust with my sister.”

“I’ve never—I would never—I don’t think I’ve—” he says, stumbling, slightly stricken. He knows that there are whisper networks about the people - the men - in their field, knows exactly who some of the whispers are about and has done his best to be the type of person who helps make those whispers into shouts. It would kill him a bit to find out that he’s done something that would make someone feel the need to speak about him that way.

“Not necessarily on a personal level,” she says, suddenly gentle, then circles her finger around the rim of her glass and amends, “Well, not that way. People actually said you were very smart and a good employer, but when I learned more about your history, the jobs you’d worked on in the past, it didn’t feel like there was any principle to your choices. As if you were just willing to sell yourself to whoever asked, or at least whoever looked good on a resume. Edwina deserves more than that.”

She is looking at him extremely frankly, as if she hasn’t just shrugged away the idea of the career he’s built, but with the way she says her sister’s name, the softness of it, how she somehow makes the full, old-fashioned version more personal than the nickname - he understands that sort of devotion. Hearing it from her steals the irritation beginning to build even as she continues. “I could never even entirely figure out why you went into politics rather than something else. You’re reasonably intelligent, you could have done any number of things if you weren’t particularly invested in the issues.”

Somehow, instead of the protest he was expecting, that he was intending, what comes out is simply, “It’s the family business.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Bridgerton Group. My father started it.” By her expression, she doesn’t think that two generations exactly makes a family legacy, but for once she holds her tongue, and his, loose with drink and exhaustion, can’t hold back.

“I grew up playing under the table at a dozen campaign offices across London and having poster mock-ups as my placemats. When I was a bit older, I was allowed to volunteer, and I loved seeing him there, in his element, listening to proposals and then telling everyone, ‘Well, here’s what we’re going to do.’” He swallows. “He—My father died, just after my first year at university, and I wasn’t old or experienced enough to take his place. The staff went off to work for other people, and all I could think about was how disappointed he would have been, to see this thing he’d built, this thing he loved, fall apart so easily. The entire time until I graduated, while I was getting experience with other consulting firms and working on other campaigns, I was just waiting until I could do justice to what he left behind for me.

“He nearly called it ABC Consulting, but my mother told him that it sounded too juvenile. My parents had me and my brothers fairly young - he was still a student when Benedict and I were born - and he wanted to name it after us.”

He realizes as soon as he’s said it that he’s only ever admitted that once before, to Simon on a similarly drunken night during their final year at school, forgetting the way that Simon and his father were, or weren’t, with each other; his friend’s face had closed up as soon as the words had left Anthony’s mouth, and they’d never talked about it again. But Kate’s face is open, listening, more than he thinks he’s ever seen from her, in such a way that he thinks he could reveal anything to her.

He could tell her about the trouble he and his brothers got up to as children, or how he likes watching baking shows to relax even though he’s not worth a damn in the kitchen, or that he can’t stop himself from adding another mile to his morning run each time he finds a gray hair. He could start talking about how complicated his feelings have grown regarding the man who was once his best friend, or about the way his entire chest had burned as his mother placed a squalling Hyacinth into his nineteen-year-old hands before closing her eyes and about how he never wants either of them to know that he’d tried to force himself not to tremble and had trembled anyway. But this isn’t the time for any of that, so he continues.

“I wanted to put it back together for him. There were candidates I took on in the early days who were stepping stones, necessary to building a reputation but who I wouldn’t work with again now that I have the reputation and the choices that come with it. And I have my own opinions on the issues - some of which might match yours more closely than you’d expect - but I’m there to make sure that the candidates who hire me succeed in getting where they want to be. I’m good at that, and I’m committed to it, and I’ve never run a campaign I wasn’t proud of. Sometimes, though, being around you, I wonder if you're going to eventually talk me into a different philosophy.”

His glass is full again though he isn’t sure when that happened, and a group of middle-aged men with ties undone and suitcases beneath their eyes fumbles past the bar behind them toward a booth, but the only thing he is paying attention to is Kate’s considering gaze on him as she absently swirls the wine remaining in her glass.

“I have the feeling,” she finally says, “that when you say a different philosophy, you consider it a more naïve one. And I’m not certain that our opinions on the issues would really match up considering that you grew up with family money.” Her voice is not arch or insulting, though, and he would certainly know.

“We were...comfortable,” he admits. She raises a waspish eyebrow in response.

“No one who’s actually middle class would ever put it like that,” she informs him. “You most definitely have a trust fund.” But she actually smiles at him, and for once he knows what it’s like to have Kate Sheffield look at him with warmth in her eyes.

He’d quite like to have that again.

“Do you think—?”

“That we should dignify the remarks with a response? No, I absolutely do not.”

Anthony glares down at the article he has pulled up on his phone, then looks over at Kate, striding down the hall beside him, eating slices of peach out of a reusable container. For a moment he’s distracted from the rumormongering on behalf of one of their opposing campaigns; he thinks of Kate’s hands carefully working the knife around the fruit, of the way her tongue flicks over to catch the juice when she takes a bite…

“I could reach out,” he says, too loudly, before he walks into a wall. “I know the head of the campaign over there, I can remind him about the spirit of fair play and all that, especially this close to the finish line.”

She looks over at him incredulously, snapping the top onto her empty Tupperware. “I don’t care if you were the best man at his wedding, he’ll laugh you off the phone. I’ve had at least three listicles of our candidate’s best insults toward her opponents forwarded to me just this morning.”

“I had the feeling that wouldn’t work.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. Just three days left, for better or worse. “Fine, so we say nothing and hope that it passes out of the media cycle quickly and doesn’t do too much damage to the absentee votes.”

“As I said from the beginning.”

“You are far too determined never to let me have the last word,” he says, just the slightest bit amused, as they circle around the desks of the main office, edging their way over to hers.

She snags the toe of her ballet flat on a computer charger trailing across the floor, stumbles, but he catches her hand just in time and sets her upright again. She continues walking as if it hadn’t even happened, raising her voice enough to be heard over the chatter and buzz of phone calls as she teases, “What would be the fun in that?”

Aghast, he says, “We aren’t here to have fun, Sheffield.”

“Oh, did you actually want to win?” She tosses the empty container onto her desk as she drops into her chair, then looks up at him, swiveling slightly from side to side and shaking her head. “You really are a cliché.”

“Yeah, well, here’s another one: get to work.”

“I’m not sure that’s technically a cliché, but I suppose I could do that,” she says, with a shrug and a grin, turning toward her computer. He watches her for another few seconds, and then takes himself off to his office before he becomes too much of a cliché himself.

Despite the phone call he had earlier with his mother promising her that he wouldn’t, he falls asleep on his desk the night before the election, startling himself awake hours later.

“Too bloody old for this,” he mutters to himself, grimacing as seemingly every joint and muscle in his body quite firmly announces itself when he stands. Scrubbing a hand through his hair, he gathers his things and makes his way through the darkened office.

Except it isn’t as dark as he’d expected. He scans the desks to try to figure out who left their lamp on, and finds Kate with her head resting on her arms, essentially imitating him from ten minutes prior.

Briefly, he stands there, not entirely sure what to do, but then he walks over, hand hovering by her shoulder before he gives her a light shake.

“Kate,” he says softly, crouching so he’s closer to her level. Her loose ponytail drapes over the burgundy of her blouse, quite close to his hand. He had not realized that he would recognize the scent of her, clean and straightforward with a subtly delicate edge; he should have known - he’s been smelling it in his dreams for weeks. He swallows and shakes her once more. “Kate, you should go home.”

“That was meant to be my line,” she says, far more lucidly than he would have expected. He shifts back as she stirs and sits up, massaging her fingers over her eyes. “I had the feeling that you weren’t going to leave at a sensible time, so I was planning on reminding you before I went home, only apparently I can’t leave at a sensible time either.”

“No, I suspect that sensible times to leave the office don’t involve the letters A or M,” he agrees. “Not that I would know anything about that.”

As she readies herself to leave, he tries to remember that the way she stretches out her back or takes down her hair, how she swings her bag over her shoulder, the quick, assessing way her eyes cover the room to make certain everything is in its place: all of that should be unremarkable. But there’s a moment, just the tiniest sliver of time, when she’s flicked off her desk lamp and they begin to walk out together in the glow of the emergency exit signs and the dim light of windows from other office buildings - she glances over at him, his hair rumpled, tie and briefcase dangling from one hand, and he thinks that he sees her swallow in a way that he recognizes all too well.

And then the moment is gone, and they’re out on the sidewalk, about to go their separate ways, the car he’d called for her already waiting.

“Big day tomorrow,” he says over the top of the door, holding it open as she climbs in. “Are you ready for it?”

“I’m always ready.”

He laughs, soft as the night around them. “Yes, I suppose you are. Good night, then.”

She looks at him one last time in the yellow beam of the streetlight, still a bit sleepy-eyed but no less aware for it. “Good night, Bridgerton,” she tells him, and drives away, and he can’t help but wonder about what if she hadn’t, what if he’d said something or she had made a choice, what if she didn’t drive away from him again.

The day of the election is always the worst for him - all the work behind him, nothing really to be done but let the people vote. He’s in the office earlier than usual anyway, early enough that he isn't certain it was worthwhile going home, but this, at least, he can control. He manages to keep himself busy throughout the day, but it’s all just a countdown to that night.

Somehow, despite - or perhaps because of - the sleeplessness and planning and stress, it isn’t one those contests that drag on. Dr. Danbury is brought on stage at about a quarter to one alongside the other candidates; the results, when the returning officer announces them, are decisive.

She’d brushed away his offers to help or choose a staffer or hire someone to work on her speech with her; instead she’s written it herself, and although brief, it’s as firm and irreverent as she is. He suspects that no one will ever pack as much sarcasm into referring to certain colleagues as “the right honorable.”

He makes some calls and receives congratulations from his mother and siblings, who have long since ceased to find these sorts of things interesting enough to attend but who make certain to keep up from home. As Dr. Danbury frees from handshaking and small talking, he makes his way over to her.

“Congratulations, ma’am.” He holds out his hand, which she eyes with a lifted brow.

“Anthony Bridgerton, I’ve known you since you were charming people from your mother’s arms, and considering that - not to mention all we’ve been through together over these last months - I think you can stand to give me more than just a handshake.”

He hugs her, which feels odd and tells him more than anything that the campaign is over. When he pulls away from her, she pats his cheek. “Now, go celebrate. You’ve earned it. I’m certainly going to.” And she winks.

The campaign staff is making plans for drinks and dancing and even just going home to raise a glass with loved ones. He wades into the group, patting backs and shaking hands, speaking briefly to some of them, smiling all the while.

And then he sees Kate, toward the edge of the crowd, chatting with one of the young guys from finance. Edwina is beside them, likely not as inured to the excitement of the night as the Bridgertons.

Kate, the taller of the two, spots him, leaning over to say something to her sister before weaving her way over. He tips his head toward a quieter little hallway, and they go over together, leaning against parallel walls.

“Congratulations,” they say to each other at the same time, and then immediately after, “I only wanted to say—”

He nods at her to go first. It’s only polite. But there’s an unusual sort of trepidation about her face, a pause that he doesn’t expect, that makes him wonder if she wishes that he’d taken the initiative. Still, she’s Kate, so she takes a breath and comes out with, “Edwina is here tonight, and if you still wanted—Clearly I misjudged you, and so if you were still interested in her, I wouldn’t say anything.”

“Oh,” he says, and that is all he can manage for the moment, standing frozen and watching Kate force her shoulders back and her gaze to his.

He does not know precisely how to communicate the depths to which he has realized that he does not want to date Edie Sheffield, that he never wanted to date her, that his interest lies entirely elsewhere. What he says instead is, “I had wanted to ask you to stay on with the Group. Permanently. You’re very, very good at what you do, and I think that...You know, your perspective and your clarity during the campaign was extremely helpful, extremely valuable, to me.”

He can picture it plainly, has been picturing it already: Kate taking him to task about every little issue, forcing him to remember the things outside of the campaign itself, the bigger things. Kate, with her hair swept up and her eyes bright and furious, challenging him to be the best version of himself, or at least to want to try.

But then she looks up at him and says, “I’ve actually had another job offer recently. The candidate—I’m sorry, the MP-elect wants me to be her new chief of staff, and I was already inclined to accept.”

“You’re going to be incredible at that,” he says immediately, blank shock quickly giving way to sincerity then laughter. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it sooner. Maybe I just didn’t think that Parliament was ready for it.”

“That’s probably for the best, though. Element of surprise and all.”

Her voice doesn’t trail away but as his laughter does, so does her smile, her animation; the air seems to fall thin and still. He doesn’t know that there’s ever been a beat of awkwardness between them like this, not even when they have been at their most prickly with each other, but it’s there now, in her eyes as she looks across at him, in his gut as he wonders what to say next.

“I’m glad you got another job offer,” is what comes out, and there is her unamused, interrogative eyebrow, hovering upward.

“So you weren’t serious with yours?”

“No, of course I was, it’s only that...Well, I’ve been your boss up until now, regardless of how much you might believe it should be the other way around.” That even gets him a slight returning smile, enough for him to ignore the dryness in his mouth and the franticness of his chest to say, “And if you had taken the job with me, I would have continued to be your boss. Which would have made it rather unacceptable for me to ask you out.”

In the space of that breath, with the silence heavy between them even as they stand right beside a crowded room, even as Dr. Danbury’s voice crows easily above the others, still practiced from projecting through the university lecture hall, he wonders if she is going to leave him like this, cards on the table, only the fall below him.

“Well,” she finally says, slow as anything. She is looking up at him, considering and careful, but he knows that her mind must be working at triple its already remarkable speed. “If I’m going to be around the city, and there’s no conflict of interest…”

He doesn’t entirely like the way it is turning into something neat and logical in front of him when he’s never felt anything close to that around her. He doesn’t like the way she looks tentative, pushing back against the edge of something more than caution - fear, perhaps, as if this might be a trick, as if the idea of allowing herself to crack open is unbearably terrifying, and it looks wrong on her face, so bold and familiar, he never wants to see that expression there again. He reaches out across the space, and when she reaches back, he takes her hand.

“Kate,” he says. “You are the most infuriating person I’ve ever known and possibly the smartest, you are wildly, overly principled and somehow make me want to be the same, you never let me have a moment’s peace, I can’t stop thinking about you, and I’d like to go on a date with you.”

“Well, that does sum things up nicely, Anthony,” she tells him, and despite herself, he can see a little snatch of a smile just there, the warmth growing in her eyes as they look right into him, the fear working its way from her. Still, she tries for nonchalance as she says, “My contract with the campaign doesn’t end until Friday. We can do Saturday night, if you’re up for it.”

He’s up for it. He takes her out Saturday night for dinner, hides a smile as she pokes fun at his shoes, gets into an argument with her about education funding, and goes to bed more distracted by a half hour of pressing her against her front door (and then onto her sofa for another twenty minutes) than he has any right to be considering he isn’t fourteen. He spends Sunday night with her too, and on Monday they go to see a movie they both hate but can’t stop talking about, and he is fairly certain he is going to spend essentially every night with her for the rest of his life.

It isn’t peaceful - and only likely to get busier once they both really get back to work - and her dog is a nuisance and Colin tries to take credit for the whole thing, and they’re so happy that neither of them cares.

[wu-sisyphus-gang]

Motion Sickness Chapter 80

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I walked up to Seventh Heaven. I still didn't have a new bike so I'd had to trek all the way down here from Atlas Academy. I'd even dodged my girlfriends a little which made me feel a touch uncomfortable inside. But it just might prove necessary.

I'd received a message from Bisque stating that we needed to talk in person. The lines might not be secure which as a terrorist organization I said ‘fair enough.’

Aurum laid low under the law. That's how he got by and made his money whereas Avalanche played things fast and loose. I wouldn't be shocked if they were being watched when Aurum wasn't per se.

The bells jingled as I walked in.

"Cloud!" Bisque exclaimed. "There you are. Haven't seen you in a few weeks."

"Yeah well I started playing for the other side of the law," I informed him.

"You mean…"

"I won't turn you in or anything but I can't exactly help you out anymore. You got information for me? Is that why you called me down here?"

"We actually wanted your help…"

"More of my help, you mean."

"Yeah well we're only a budding organization."

Someone came down from upstairs in the place. It was Jasper. "Cloud? It's so good to see you!" She walked over and hugged me, her tail swishing all the while.

"Yeah well I'm pretty sure I won't be here for long."

"Oh don't be like that. Let me get you a drink."

"Fuck it. Why not. Get me a screwdriver. Those house specials of yours are too sweet for me and I don't have Neo around."

"Oh? Where is she?" Jasper asked.

"Not sure at the moment. Hopefully laying low and waiting for the next storm to come in. Haven't seen her for two weeks or so. Been busy. Trying to make things right on the proper side of the law."

"Yeah, we've been doing a bit of that ourselves. We've been trying to calm down the protests while still having the political force to back Robyn Hill," Jasper said as she made my drink.

"It's been slow going though. We had no idea when we bombed the mine it would set all this off. If word ever spread around that we were responsible it would collapse in on us," Bisque informed me.

Jasper slid down my screwdriver and I took a long drink of the hard mixer. I took a seat at the bar. And Bisque leaned his elbows on the counter to talk to me.

"Ah…" I breathed off the alcohol after a moment. "How have the protests been going?"

"Good. The people seem ready to vote for Robyn. She made all kinds of campaign promises to make that happen. New standards for miners. An increase in minimum wages. That sort of thing," Jasper chirped in her usual upbeat tone.

"The people have Avalanche to thank for it and some of them know it. They're listening to us," Bisque followed. "Wenge is out leading a strike right now."

"You can hardly tell that they're still going on from up in Atlas," I murmured around my drink.

"They'll see once Robyn is elected," Bisque said. "And that's just a matter of time. No one down here wants Schnee to have any more power than he already has."

"And up in Atlas?" I asked.

"It's more divided. She still has a twenty point lead over him up there against a forty point lead down here. But it's more scary," Jasper murmured. "Atlas has always done its own thing and usually not to the betterment of Mantle."

"Easy enough to do when the city is so divided," I mumbled.

"Two cities," Bisque corrected.

"Not really," I fired back. And I genuinely believed that. It wasn't so different from the tiered cities of Mistral. Separate but together all the same.

Someone came in behind me and I turned to see Barret. The big bear of a man sauntered in with a new mechanical arm on his right side. It gleamed gunmetal grey and seemed to have a gun built into it. I'd seen more than my fair share of arms like that.

"Good, the merc is here," he said in his gruff tone.

"Been trying to get out of that business, actually. Wasn't sustainable for me," I told him. I crossed my arms.

"Dyne has gone off the deep end. He refused a new mechanical arm in favor of just a machine gun. When his wife, Eleanor, died from dust lung he lost it. He's planning all sorts of mayhem and destruction. He already killed fifteen people. Maybe more."

"I see…" I really didn't. I had no idea what he wanted from me in all of this.

"I'm afraid for his little girl, Marigold. She was hurt recently in the protests. I've been looking after her for the last couple of days. He hasn't even been by. I need your help to stop him, bring him back to his senses."

"What makes you think I'm interested or that you have anything I want?" I asked. My arms still folded.

"I have information. I know you'll wan' it. It's about how your bomb went off prematurely on the White Whale ."

I stared at him hard. He was right. I did want it. "Give me a teaser, so I know you are serious," I demanded of him.

"Sabotage. It was supposed to go off even earlier if the saboteurs had their way," The large man informed me.

I breathed in a deep shuddering sigh. He was right. I did want that information. Whoever they are they got Neo hurt. Amongst everything else, she was my friend. "I can't get caught doing anything that will violate my parole," I informed him.

"Dyne and his gang are criminals right about now. If you're working for the law, it's your job t' bring them in. Alls I'm asking for is a chance to talk t' Dyne before you do."

"And you'll hand over the identity of my saboteurs if I do?" I asked. My bomb going off had been suspicious as all hell to me. I was normally more than proficient with those sorts of bombs despite how flippant I'd been with them. It still stuck out in my mind.

"Got it in one." He grinned at me. Big and fierce under his dark shades. His mechanical arm flexing slightly. I took it in a firm shake.

"Well," I said. "What are we waiting for, then?"

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It was an old warehouse building we pulled up on in Avalanche's truck. I got out first followed by Barrett. "Do these guys have aura?" I asked. "I don't want to kill anybody."

"Some."

"That's just great," I said exasperatedly. I sighed and pulled my shield and my sword. I could probably go easy enough that nobody really got hurt. But still, why couldn't all my opponents have the decency to not only have aura but to broadcast how much aura they had?

Just because I was used to killing people didn't mean that I liked it. And I had seriously killed a lot of people in my time. A lot. If there were people as young as I was who had a higher body count I hadn't heard of them. That was going by either definition of age you wanted to use on me. It didn't matter how you wanted to cut how old I was, I was the ninety ninth percentile on murder and mayhem.

We waltzed in the front door of the place. Leaving Bisque out in the truck.

"Barret…" Dyne turned to look at us from a lowered section of the room where he was talking to a handful of people. There was all kinds of machinery to the room. Cranes and jacks and mining equipment.

"Dyne. I'm here to bring you to Marigold. Your daughter needs you," Barrett said.

"You brought the merc. The dust… brother...it's telling me something…" Dyne trailed off.

Okay. This was coming from me, but this guy had officially lost it. I might not be the most stable iceberg in the sea but crazy recognized crazy and this guy had some helpings of it.

"Is it telling you that you're nuts?" I asked. Barrett shoved me in the ribs with his metallic elbow.

"...the dust. My path of destruction has brought me here…" Dyne trailed off once more. I lingered behind Barret ready to take down all the others in the room. My longsword and great 't' shaped shield at the ready.

"Why are you doing this Dyne? Why'd you kill those people? The protests don't need to be violent." Barrett demanded of him.

"The dust told me to, brother."

"And did the dust tell you why?" Barrett wondered, a touch sardonic.

"Why?" Dyne repeated, a bit mockingly. "Why does there got to be a reason that people do things? Is there a why for Eleanor's death? How about your wife Barrett? There a why for her dying?"

"She...she's already gone. Dust lung. Same as your wife. That's the why." Barrett murmured in his baritone.

"And still you hold on, brother. You could let go. Be like me."

"And start the wanton, chaotic destruction of people and property?"

"Destruction of everything, brother. That's the goal. That's what we're starting," Dyne shot back.

"You used to be just focused on the Schnee. But then you just started hurting everyone and everything."

"Of course brother." Dyne let out a low chuckle. "Had to be done. The dust told me to do it all."

"What's the dust telling you now? Dyne?" Barrett asked. His voice pleading despite the baritone of it.

"It's telling me that I should see Marigold again." Dyne rubbed at his forehead with his real hand like he had a headache.

"That's… that's great news. Let's go see her right now. She's happy and healthy and safe. I've been looking after her. Just like I promised I would."

"She misses her mother, don't she? I'm sure she does…" Dyne trailed off into a low, mad chuckle.

"Dyne… what are you saying?" Barrett wondered.

"I'm saying I should be there to send her to her mother."

"Yikes," I muttered. "That is a yike from me, dog."

"You'd kill your own daughter? You're not the Dyne I used to know!" Barrett shouted. He ignored me. He pointed his wrist down range at Dyne and his accomplices.

"Oh if you point your weapon at me you best come correct," Dyne all but whispered. "You best come with fire and lightnin'!" Then he roared.

"I don't want to fight you Dyne!"

"I suspect you've got no choice, brother!" He pointed his own wrist mounted gun at the two of us. His friends took up their own arms as well. "Or my path of destruction won't end here! I'll go on to consume every man, woman, and child. Just like the dust consumed me! You understand dontcha? Just like the dust consumed me!" He repeated. His voice had a lilt to it that was hard to place. Like he finally understood everything. Instead he was just rambling like a mad man.

I got that. I'd been there and done that. The whole path of destruction thing, too. First one target then the next then the next. Each seeming as good as any other. Was this what it was like to see it from the outside? It seemed like a lost cause but then I'd come back.

Or had I?

Had I really come back? The only things that kept me from slipping had been the thought of my friends. I was with them now. Well not now, now but I was with them in general. I was back. They were worrying about me. I was worrying about them. We were doing what we could for each other just like before. I even had two girlfriends. Two! That was almost twice as many as one and they loved me. I'd felt their love and the beat of their warm hearts wrapped around me. I'd felt it tight around me. If I lost that like Dyne had would I keep going?

I shuddered at the thought. If Ruby or Weiss died that would probably be it for me. That's it. I'm done. I'm out. Maybe I'd kill myself. Maybe I'd just go on a tear. Tyrian had been a mass murderer. A serial killer. For a moment or two I got the appeal of that. Just killing just to kill. Just to feel something. Anything at all. I got that.

Then there was my Mother. Always pressing on the surface of my mind with her tentacles. Would I give in to that? Maybe. Hard maybe.

Maybe I'd lose them again. Maybe I'd have to run away once more. That wasn't the same as them dying on me. But it was still a possibility. Could I stand to do that again? Another hard maybe. At least I'd have Neo. Wretched thing that she was. That we both were. Couldn't exactly throw that stone.

I pointed my sword down the range and let my shield fall by my side. I was ready to move and act. I could see it all now. Barrett and Dyne opening fire on the other. The rest diving to the side while I moved in. Anybody without aura would be getting ripped to shreds.

"It don't have to be like this! We can still walk away, Dyne!"

"Yes it does brother. You know it does! I'm gonna fight and you gotta try and stop me!"

They started shooting. People dived to the side to avoid the spray of bullets. Rounds pinged off my thick aura and I moved. I blurred into a hovering roll and got beside Dyne and his men. I grabbed one and slammed him into my knee and sliced at another I was pretty sure had aura. I cut deep into it then I reached out with my shield hand and tossed him and he flew until he slammed into one of the cranes.

Barrett fired a grenade down into the pit and it exploded sending Dyne rolling with a flare of light blue aura. I sliced at another and bit through his arm. Blood sprayed through the air and he screamed until I punched him in the face with my shield. He went down with a massive bruise forming on his head.

I got on top of Dyne and he opened fire right into my torso with his weapon. The gun arm blared at me and punched holes in my aura that made me stagger about until Barret jumped into the pit and grabbed Dyne's gun arm with his free one and picked him up by it.

He then opened up into Dyne's chest.

I think he meant to stop shooting when Dyne ran out of aura but that grenade had already taken the lion's share of it.

"Don't!" I shouted a moment too late.

A hole blew straight through Dyne's torso and Barrett dropped him in surprise. It left a dying man crawling around on the ground and bleeding out.

"The dust, man. The dust..." Dyne groaned from the pit.

"Dyne!"

"Take this pendant. Give it to Marigold. It belonged to her mother. I can't ever hold her again with these stained hands," Dyne rolled over. "These stained hands." He ripped a pendant from his neck and tossed it up out of the lowered section of floor up at Barrett.

Barrett caught it and could do nothing but watch as Dyne died.

"Mine ain't any cleaner, Dyne," Barrett whispered. "Mine ain't any cleaner."

"Take care of her, like she was your own. Please. Look after my Marigold."

"I will." Barrett vowed. And Dyne died in the pit in the floor of the warehouse.

I stabbed my sword into the ground and listened to the sounds of the oncoming sirens.

"Those going to be a problem for you?" I indicated my head in the direction the sirens were coming from. I sheathed my sword and put the whole rig back on my shoulder.

"Nah man. I suppose you'll be wanting your information," he spoke downtrodden and muted compared to his normally fierce voice.

"Yeah. That'd be great."

"It was the Happy Huntresses. They have this invisibility field. They wanted to shut down your op," he told me. He rubbed his face in his hands. Reaching underneath the glasses he wore to rub at his eyes.

"Thanks." I told him. I wiped a few beads of sweat from my brow. "Best of luck with the little girl. That can be a lot to deal with."

"Thank you. For everything," he managed.

"What will you do now?" I asked.

He stretched. "I might join Avalanche. They could use someone like me."

"Might be a good fit. You've got a little girl to look after now, though. Will the terrorism agree with you?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. But I can't let her grow up in a world I know I could have done more for. For my wife. And for Dyne. I know I have to do more. You got people you have to do more for?"

"Yeah. These two ladies and their teammates. I'd kill and die for them."

"You want some advice?" He asked.

"Sure," I said. I could use some genuine advice in the spot I was in. It sounded like he'd lived through it. I could take it.

"Any old fool can kill and die for something. It takes a man to live and let live for something."

I just nodded. Maybe fucking so. It was easy to kill things. So fucking easy. It was so much harder to keep something alive.

I listened and waited for the sirens.

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-WG

[southeastasianists]

Covid-19 has upended many things in daily life - from travel to retail to education. More menacingly, it has also unleashed an authoritarian blitzkrieg from Hungary to Turkey to the Philippines, where populist leaders are taking advantage of state of emergency conditions and lockdowns that have made public protests and opposition mobilisation next to impossible.

This week's conviction of Maria Ressa, President Rodrigo Duterte's bete noire and founder of the Rappler news portal, on cyber libel charges, illuminates how this plays out in the broader landscape of rapid authoritarian consolidation made possible by the pandemic.

Mr Duterte, who has repeatedly threatened to impose nationwide martial law, has also long resented the liberal-leaning mainstream media. The reports by Rappler, ABS-CBN network and the Philippine Inquirer about his administration's brutal drug war and other questionable policies have earned them the ire of the President.

Since coming to power, Mr Duterte has launched an unprecedented campaign of intimidation against the country's freewheeling media. He has accused journalists of corruption and biased coverage and has warned that "just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination if you're a son of a bitch".

His threats against the media took a more menacing character in the light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The ABS-CBN shutdown came just over a month, and Ressa's conviction two months, after the Philippine Congress seamlessly handed the President sweeping emergency powers, which authorised him to "move, decide and act freely for the best interest of the Filipino people during this health crisis".

Since the imposition of a nationwide lockdown in late March, countless voices of dissent have faced unprecedented pressure. More than a dozen warrant-less arrests and subpoenas have been filed against netizens accused of engaging in "misinformation".

Of particular concern is the impending adoption of a draconian anti-terrorism law, which could potentially be weaponised against political opposition and civil dissent.

Also hanging in the balance is the fate of the country's oldest and largest media conglomerate, ABS-CBN, which was perfunctorily ordered in early May to go off the air. Its licence to broadcast its television and radio programmes was revoked even though the company's franchise was still under deliberation by the Philippine Congress.

The Philippine Supreme Court is set to deliberate the network's case next month, while civil society groups are expected to also challenge the new anti-terrorism law at the High Court. As for Ressa, who faces six years in jail for the cyber libel case alone, she is expected to appeal the verdict while also battling seven other charges, including tax evasion.

"I admit that it took me more than a month to defang the fear of jail. I hated that the baton was passed to me at this moment in time, but I also knew I wasn't going to drop it," Ressa, a Princeton alumna, told graduates at the university's virtual commencement last month.

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque was quick to dissociate Mr Duterte from the Ressa case, which has gained widespread international attention. Mr Roque asserts that the "President has said repeatedly that he has never filed a case of libel against a journalist despite his negative reporting" and that the Filipino leader "believes in free speech, and believes that anyone who works in government should not be thin-skinned". Earlier, the government made an almost exactly identical claim vis-a-vis ABS-CBN's closure, maintaining that what's at stake is standard application of law and Mr Duterte is "neutral" on the issue.

Ressa, the founder of the news portal, along with a former Rappler employee, Reynaldo Santos Jr, were both convicted on cyber libel charges on Monday in a case centred on allegations involving a local businessman.

Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa, who presided over the case, was adamant that what's at stake is "accountability" and that there "is no curtailment of the right to freedom of speech and of the press". The defendants, she said, failed to back up their allegations.

The case concerns a 2012 story written by Santos which alleged that a businessman, Mr Wilfredo Keng, had links to illegal drug and human trafficking. What has drawn criticism at home and abroad, however, is that the article was published by Rappler months before the Philippines' new cyber libel laws came into effect in 2013. Prosecutors argue that the law could still be applied because a correction made in 2014 to fix a "typo" in the story was considered a "republication" of the article.

Mrs Amal Clooney, one of Ressa's lawyers, condemned the conviction as "an affront to the rule of law, a stark warning to the press, and a blow to democracy in the Philippines". No less than Philippine Vice-President Leni Robredo has criticised the verdict as part of a broader campaign of "silencing, harassing, and weaponising law against the media".

The verdict against Ressa was the second major blow against the media. The first shock came when the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) issued an immediate "cease and desist" against the liberal ABS-CBN network last month. Observers noted darkly then that it evoked memories of the martial law years under strongman Ferdinand Marcos, who effectively shut down the independent media in 1972.

Although Mr Duterte has repeatedly threatened the country's leading liberal media outlets with potential closure, accusing them of legal violations from "swindling" to tax evasion to foreign ownership with scant evidence, the move against the ABS-CBN still came as a surprise. For a long time, many doubted if Mr Duterte would go so far as to shut the country's largest broadcast network responsible for the most popular entertainment and news programmes in the country, or oversee the conviction of Ressa, the Philippines' most celebrated journalist.

Concerns about selective targeting of media outlets and the existential threat to the Philippines' long history of press freedom were heightened when in a candid moment, Mr Duterte's most trusted aide, Senator Bong Go, confessed that what's really at stake are "the grievances of the President against the network". "If you are mean to the President, he will be meaner to you," he warned critics. "If you are nice to the President, then he will be nicer to you."

To be sure, the Philippines has long been a dangerous place for journalists, who have been harassed and killed by militants, crooks and political warlords. During Mr Duterte's first three years in office, those in the news business continued to live dangerously, with as many as 154 incidents of harassment and attacks, 15 of them fatal, recorded across the country. "Of the 154 cases, at least 69 had linked state agents - public officials from the executive and legislative branches, uniformed personnel, and Cabinet appointees of President Duterte - as known or alleged perpetrators. Of these 69 state agents, about half or 27 are from national government agencies," a media watchdog, The Freedom for Media, Freedom for All Network, reported last year.

In the global Press Freedom Index, the Philippines, formally a liberal democracy, ranks below several repressive Arab regimes and, in Asia, just above Myanmar and Thailand, which are under de facto military rule.

Even more worrying, the recent passage of a draconian anti-terror law, which could lead to charges of terrorism against anyone accused of seeking to "intimidate the general public" or "create an atmosphere to spread a message of fear" has had civil rights groups warning that it would give the government "almost free rein in determining who are suspected terrorists" with potentially devastating impact on the opposition and press freedom.

Mr Duterte's endgame is far from clear, but there are fears that he may follow in the footsteps of other authoritarian populists, from Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who systematically eroded free speech protections once in power.

But the fight is far from over. From challenging the anti-terrorism law and ABS-CBN's closure in the Supreme Court, to appealing against Ressa's conviction, the opposition and independent media are determined to hold the line in hopes of better days. After all, they survived the darkest days of the Marcos dictatorship.

And time is fortunately on their side, With Mr Duterte limited to one term and entering his fifth year next June, he effectively becomes a lame duck by the middle of next year. Also, progressive relaxation of the ongoing lockdown will create more space for protest and mobilisation; those who resist him may still have a fighting chance.