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a-d-nox · 1 year ago

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a review of my 22nd solar return year

about a year ago, i made a predictions post for my year ahead and now here i am updating y'all with what actually happened as i previously suggested that i would! so let's jump into it - i pasted all my previous predictions in to this post for your reading ease!

1H IN LEO AT 3°

predictions: adventure, appearance, death of an aunt or uncle, grandparents, health, nation and its health, arrogance, bets, fainting spells, heart disease, politics, president, romance, royalty, social affairs, accuracy, activeness, anxieties, authors, books, logic, manuscripts, mentor, whispering, and wit. FINALLY SOME RECOGNITION! i feel like i may have some anxiety struggles and continuing health issues (i did get better this past year and i am still working on my health) BUT i have some hope that this may be my year. i have been trying to publish my manuscript since 2020 - i finally have found an english professor that actually wants more of me and my writing (he actually gave me a creative writing award before i graduated) and literary views so with luck i will have a mentor and a published novel. i also feel like i may be a bit popular this year (to say the least - yes; literally everyone wanted to talk with me after class, sit around me, do thinks over summer, etc.). the sun square as aspect still indicates me being me though - i'm abrasive (someone literally told me that i was intimidating and they thought i was plotting their murder before they actually got to know me) and literally only socialize when i must (bent my rule for sure). venus square asc too i don't feel like my first impression are gonna be that great or charming BUT THATS LIFE LOL. the pan sextile as is giving public panic attack vibes and i am not here for it... lastly that paris opposite asc - am i helen this year? possibly? if i decide to date, will people be unable to look away - DEFINITELY (literally so many people asked me if i was dating the dude that i was interested in because we were really close friends as well)! mostly because i never date (still don't i guess because it wasn't official) and everyone always "assumes that i'm already with someone." so it will definitely rock the boats.

what actually happened: this past year i feel like everyone was a bit more aware if my health - both mental and physical - and they were more understanding of my situation, thus more willing to help me. i feel like people liked me because of my openness and realness of my situation (though sometimes they found my irritability of the situation and my current feelings to be an annoyance). i was able to go out and do my thing and my friends were understanding of the locale choices and my limits there. i eventually had the ability to overcome my social anxiety a bit by presenting a paper i co-authored with other friends. it didn't get published but by the end of the school year i had all the english departmental awards - one of which was for creative writing. i did have a bit of a "dating or not dating" scandal where everyone was asking quite often if he and i were together too.

2H IN LEO AT 23° (contains abundantia)

predictions: budget, cash, voice, bets, courtship, astrology, society, and home. i feel like i never truly content with the 2h *shrug* - the fact that i have some aquarian influence with that degree feels like the universe giving me back up. it doesn’t matter what i do so long as i am happy - money matters but at the same time i’m young and stupid so it doesn’t matter. i sense having a lot of spare change and having a roaring 20s type of time - just fun and games. if the group is happy so am i. i feel like whatever it is i am doing to get money positively effects my home and societal status BUT it feels pretty up in the air as to how it will effect my social and romantic realm perhaps i will be paying for others giving abundantia’s presence here (kinda in the same vein were people feel awkward when a friend pays for your things or your lover takes you on a date and you grab the tab before they can? ya know?).

what actually happened: GUYS I'M ON BUDGETTOK!! i love budgeting and cash stuffing. i even have a google sheets for money tracking. the money is flowing in and it all started here when i started paid tarot readings, which then became paid astrology readings, and then became finding a part-time job (then i got a promotion there). money is good and all but as long as i can get what i want (like that tarot set that we did the dessert games with) i am cool with what's up financially! i do/did make people uncomfortable with how giving i am with the money i make (like i am buying christmas presents already and i am like "i'm almost done with your gifts" and everyone is like STOP WHAT DO YOU MEAN ALMOST).

3H IN VIRGO AT 18° (contains midas)

predictions: written agreement, savvy, dictionaries, novels, rumors, signatures, first aid, fingers, food storage, nerve specialist, and uterus afflictions. i feel great about the book indicators but horrifying by the health omens. not to mention the ruler being sickly virgo with abdominal issues and me having possibly DIE. seems like a hot and cold era. socially, i feel uprooted in terms of midas being here maybe as though i will be doing a lot of “short trips.” also as though socially i will receive both hate and adoration.

what actually happened: reading is nothing new for me, but this last year i was very technical like the virgo 3h would suggest (lots of tabs and even more footnotes). when i started working i had some hand/finger changes - bumps, calluses, blisters, pains, etc. (i feel like that a midas virgo thing?). but otherwise my abdominal/uterine pain was well managed with medication. i did go on a few shorter trips with friends - all the friends are nonexistent existent now though just like i predicted unfortunately.

4H IN LIBRA AT 19° (contains sun, mercury, venus, ambrosia, and aphrodite)

predictions: agriculture, ground, homestead, uterus, womb, art, love, music, poetry, unions, weddings, dead, reproductive systems, research, copper, surgery, ambition, power, wisdom, authors, book, confession, limericks, novelist, public speaking, companion, hope, hobbies, honeymoons, ovaries, and suitors. just wanna say could this be the year - a libra house with venus in it?? could i possibly be dating someone?? that would be a first. i feel like for sure i’m going to start gardening that’s the vibe of fourth house ambrosia - you are like a naturally a green thumb i have never gardened before but i already have pepper seeds!! i also have a weird feeling that maybe i won’t be publishing the book i thought i would but instead i will be publishing poetry (mercury conjunct venus, mercury 27°, and a heavy lean on libra energy for this house) which is not necessarily shocking. not to keep harping in “non-medical” houses but this one is the womb - i wonder if (sorry if this is over sharing) my gyn is gonna tell me i have to be on birth control and i get a cooper IUD (copper is venus and libra ruled). that would lowkey piss me off but ambrosia here makes me think maybe i’d feel better. aphrodite here makes me think with balanced hormones i’d be hot lmfao - or this could be another romance symbol with all the libra and venus energy going on.

what actually happened: i did indeed start my garden - AND IT FLOURISHED!!! i learned a lot about my garden and what i need to work on to make it better next year. but there was no wedding or death and the uterine problems were solved with little white pills and now i feel okay - but have some suspicions... on another note there were a lot of confessions from the person i thought would be more and those confessions did make it seem like he would be more at times. i even got confessions from others that were QUESTIONABLE.

5H IN SCORPIO AT 25° (contains moon and frigga)

predictions: magic, pelvis, poisonous plants, surgery, inflammation of womb, inflammation, pregnancy, romance, babies, breasts, childbirth, and fertility. i read this a part of my chart and go hm - pregnancy scare? endometriosis? raspberry leaf tea? endoscopy?? any way i cut it it seem sus??? or this could have to do with me writing poetry again considering the moon’s presence. frigg here makes me think of pregnancy because she’s the mother. but it could also suggest romantic promise!

what actually happened: i definitely went through some romantic fluctuations given the moon - BUT i would like to note that oddly he was a cancer (so is there a correlation between planets placed in the 5h and who you date that year? possibly? idk). i did have to deal with my fertility and start a birth control because my suspected DIE was causing me to be forced into stay home too often. when i got started on this birth control i did notice a lot of breast pain (scorpio is mars ruled and the this house starts at an aries degree - so i would think discomfort is pretty common). i am okay with it for now; as the alternative, it was suggested to turn off my hormones entirely which would force me into a pseudo-menopause... i do worry slightly after visiting my eye doctor in july that my taking a progesterone only (the only type of birth control i can really take) is causing PCOS (he found a cluster of blood vessels and said some scary things but among his list was pre-diabetes and PCOS often is due to increased testosterone and not enough estrogen which causes increased insulin (which is connected to pre-diabetes))... on a lighter note, i did have some poetry published this year and i did start writing more poetry again!

6H IN CAPRICORN AT 2° (contains pluto and huitzilopochtli)

predictions: doctors, healing, order, ashes, black, clocks, contraction, depression, limitations, politics, profession, beauty, copper, profit, voice, bladder, regeneration, and sex organs. i feel like this is like the last opportunity sign from the universe. i can get my shit together now and become my best self OR get really bad lol. it’s funny but it’s not because huitzilopochtli is just so energetic meanwhile we have contemplative, semi-hustler capricorn and slow moving pluto here - so this could go either way. given the ambrosia square saturn my best bet is likely food/diet. the square may indicate that i shouldn’t take it all upon myself to figure it out sooooo NOTED.

what actually happened: i saw a few new doctors this year (i even got a mineral hair test) all of whom are looking out for me - some say some scare sh!t though (thank you, pluto in the 6h). but generally this was a better year for me health wise - i didn't have as many mysterious leg bruises, i didn't feel like i gained or lost weight, i didn't have prescription change, etc. i did feel energetic, yet tired all year though with huitzilopochtli and capricorn in my 6h. i do feel like i am doing a lot of planning and such in my day to day life - like i have now started drafting and queuing posts for the month a month in advance and i also glammed up my google calendar - i do feel like my natal virgo mars still wants to keep plotting and planning though.

7H IN AQUARIUS AT 3° (contains saturn, amalthea, arachne, and paris)

predictions: art, boyfriend, books, communication, debates, intelligence, journalism, proofreader, studies, writing, cramps, freethinker, friends, society, ambitious person, blindfold, doom, doubt, long lasting friendship, ink, jealousy, monogamy, loneliness, possessiveness, cold, time, tragedy, tradition, and winter. the ruler is in the house :) perfect a relationship that is either gonna last or be toxic af considering it’s saturn lol. but we have to giggle little at this description he’s like paris - i’m the prettiest girl in his eyes, nurturing like amalthea, and talented like arachne. I KNOW WHO HE IS LMFAO - it’s the guy who sits next to me in class i am half curious if he is an aquarius. we are both nerds - he asked me to write a scholarly article with him. lol is that getting asked out? part of me says this connection is likely to further mature as winter sinks in.

what actually happened: there was no boyfriend, just a boy that took up the emotional real estate of what would be use for a boyfriend. we did communicate a lot and at the end of the day he was like we are just friends (thanks, aquarius 7h). he introduced me to the world of journalism though - as the editor he was very active. i wrote 5 articles in the 4 month span. while it was doomed from the start, he awoke something in me that i could have more and i could do more than what i was doing, so at the very least i can thank him for that. but i do feel like it was a bit convenient... we were around each other and he was curious of what i could be to him and by the end of the school year he was like "ehhh i don't want you, like you want me" - the summer was rough with the loneliness i felt after he stopped reaching out (immature it may be but i always take it intentionally when people don't reach out to me).

8H IN AQUARIUS AT 23° (contains kleopatra)

predictions: inheritance, occult, sex, sex organs, surgery, astrology, blood and circulation, cramps, and spirituality. kleopatra huh??? *smirk* looks like an intimate relationship. i don’t really feel like i need to say the stuff i have said before as i see similar words arise in this category/house.

what actually happened: nothing happen. i just got emotionally and mentally intimate with him.

9H IN PISCES AT 18° (contains jupiter, neptune, and chiron)

predictions: counselors, education, philosophical societies, long distance travel, university, writing, advisor, celebration, education, honor, luck, recommendations, writing, aesthetics, delusion, fantasy, fiction, mythology, poetry, editing, satire, studiousness, fictitious name, and self-undoing. this is my year - i’m gonna graduate, jupiter 0° is 100% the vibe. but as for the rest neptune could be writing now that i am in the english program it could be telling that i am getting into it-into it. refer to 7h i really am working with him to create a scholarly paper so :) it’s doing somethin’. the self-undoing may be my own fault in terms of anxiety :/ OH WELL WHAT ELSE IS NEW - i kid you not i’m not like “i have butterflies in my stomach” anxious i am “i skipped class tuesday-thursday this week because i got paranoid that i was going to vomit in my class in front of my peers and i wouldn’t recover from that” anxious.

what actually happened: i did graduate. and now i am on educational break (which i think is neptune and chiron involved - i think that it would be good for me to get a certification, a masters, or my MFA but i need to be more grounded than i currently am about getting any of those things). graduation was not the best, which i suppose is the chiron influence - there was a fair bit of drama (looking at you, neptune) about who was going and who i disinvited for my day. things got settled though and i got my awards and now i am free from the educational system in the first time in my life, considering i grew up in / going to daycare.

10H IN ARIES AT 19° (contains uranus and north node)

predictions: achievements, authority, career, cramps, curiosity, change, freedom, freelance, romance, freethinking, shock, writing, courage, energy, affection, companions, friendliness, partnership, and poet. i’m not getting a traditional job - i’m taking 6 months off to do whatever i want and that likely means freelance which is uranus vibes mixing with the libra degree. the freelance stuff could be very critical to me as a person as well as the forward movement in my careers to come. whatever it is has me talking and writing A LOT given the tight orb between the ruler mars and the planet mercury.

what actually happened: this is my freelance domain here - i opened readings - i have made since starting in july, around 500 USD which is pretty decent considering i do not charge a lot, nor do i offer readings consistently. i did not take off as much time as i thought i would because i had too much time to myself to think about what everyone who is still at my university is doing without me... i did not get a full-time remote position unfortunately though. but i do a lot of communication because i am a supervisor, so i am guiding people who i work with as well as customers (which is the house ruler aspecting mercury).

11H IN TAURUS AT 25° (contains mars, agamemnon, odysseus, and pan)

predictions: acquaintanceship, companionship, working ability, adventure, aggressor, ambition, challenge, chemistry, contest, fearlessness, fights, inflammation, love/passion, men, participation, courage, dancing, wealth, and voice. it’s gonna be an odd friendship year seems competitive given mars, pan, and agamemnon - all of these objects are competitive or have critical competitions within their myth. odysseus could indicate some travel with friends or becoming the last man standing - we should recall that odysseus came back home and only had two people who he could actually trust and having zero crew-mates left. given this is societal interaction house of things this could be a romantic or passionate light for me to stand in given - mars and taurus. the ruler in the 4h could indicate me being a hostess and opening my doors to others.

what actually happened: in terms of friendship, it has been a very challenging year. very quickly i learned that some of my "friends" weren't friends at all; perhaps we didn't know each other at all. i had a friend confess her feelings for my situationship then later say that a toxic part of her wants (inadvertently) him to be obsessed with her. i fell in love with my best friend (mars moments... and how still miss him despite the months of no communication). i had a group toss me out of their chat because they thought i did something i didn't even do. then attempt to immaturely defame my character. i feel horrible that they continue to seek out my downfall as they sometimes talk people into sending me screenshots of them bullying me in that chat in hopes of triggering me into responding. i hope all of them finds happiness one day, instead of trying to bring others down. i feel like the competitive/offensive nature was tangible in all these situations (shoutout to agamemnon and pan)... but more so i felt the odysseus placement here. i felt one thing after another lead me to realize that all i can trust is a very select few. and beyond that i can really only trust and rely on myself. a lot of people didn't have the best intentions towards me, nor did they really want to be my friend. their preference was to be intolerant of me and my personality (i'm not an easy person, i'm not perfect, but i'm not a monster and i am certainly not the snake some people believe i am).

12H IN CANCER AT 3°

predictions: anxiety, books, breathing, literature, manuscripts, restlessness, homemaking, and uterus. health anxiety. and escapism via reading, writing, and cookings lol YEP THATS ABOUT RIGHT LOL.

what actually happened: social anxiety is big for me lots of people don't take it seriously when i say i have it because i manage it well, but i found a great number of people who understood me this year when i said i have it... i was also an escapist writer this year, i often wrote when i was sad or mad instead of saying what was really going on and what i was feeling out loud (cancer / moon 5h vibes).

that's all for now!! keep an eye out next week for my newest set of predictions for my 23rd solar return year! are you interested in a solar return reading? consider purchasing a "sunny d" reading; read more about the reading and it's cost here!

click here for the masterlist

click here for more return chart posts

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space-spring · 2 months ago

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Re: this post I reblogged earlier, back in like 2020 I was thinking a ton about healing magic in fe3h for reasons I can't remember, and I ended up writing a canon-ish "textbook" like the kind of text you would find in-game in the Garreg Mach/Abyss libraries. Disclaimer that I'm not actually sure this is 100% lore accurate—I remember doing some research at the time I wrote it and I just now did a quick fact check, but it's been a hot second since I actually played the game so some of it might be a little off

Applications of Faith: An Analysis of Healing White Magic

Lecture II, A Healer's Limits

In the previous lecture, the benefits and basis of healing by faith were explored. While these serve as an excellent introduction to the topic of healing in white magic, it is perhaps more important for one to understand the limitations of the field. As a healer, understanding the measure of your abilities is an integral part of triage and emergency scenarios (for further examples and information, please refer to Lecture III, Ethics in Healing).

— Samuel von Hevring

Limitation 1: The potency of one’s white magic is directly related to one’s magical stamina.

For the ease of the reader, magical stamina is defined in this lecture as one’s relative ability to cast spells, just as one's physical stamina is related to their ability to accomplish feats of strength or endurance. It is the first and most vital limitation of white magic, and it is important to recognize and work to improve one’s magical stamina as much as possible.

Building up a healthy level of stamina in regards to casting is pivotal to increasing the number of spells that can be cast within a certain amount of time. However, magical stamina is also the defining factor responsible for the potency of any spells you may cast. A more experienced healer will find that their spells are able to heal broken bones in the time it takes an apprentice to mend a scraped knee.

For more information on magical stamina and the related biological processes specific to faith magic, please refer to Lecture V, Magic and Physicality. Another valuable resource is Verity von Essar's renowned "Crests and Other Magical Systems", though it favors reason magic in subject.

Limitation 2: A spell can only be cast as often as a healer's magical stamina allows.

As discussed above, this rule is heavily dependent upon magical stamina, and will be almost exclusively relevant to lower-level mages. However, that hardly means experienced white magic users should ignore it completely. It can occasionally be an obstacle to even the most talented priests, usually in the context of military affairs, natural disasters, or in other situations where a great number of people are injured over a short amount of time.

You will often not realize the extent of your cast limit until you hit it. This situation is frightening for most healers. Andrey von Hevring once described it as “seeing a drowning man in the water and reaching out your hand … only to suddenly realize you’d long since lost your whole arm.”

In these situations, remaining calm is pivotal. If you have other healing spells available, utilize them. If not, you will have no choice but to wait until your magical stamina returns. Many mages are tempted to continue forcing themselves—after all, a delayed healing can lead to permanent scarring or death. This will do nothing but waste your time and already depleted strength. Accept this limitation, and return to your work only when you are fully rested and able to do so.

Limitation 3: Healers can only learn spells they are predisposed to.

While the reasons behind this are currently unknown, mages are unable to learn more than a certain set of white magic spells. Nearly anyone can learn to Heal, but when it comes to Restore or Physic, you may find that you struggle to learn one or the other. This is true not only for healing spells, but also for other white magic such as Warp, Rescue, and Silence. Some theorize that the predisposition for certain spells is based on one’s hereditary lines, while others maintain that it is a matter of natural temperament.

Limitation 4: The range of white magic is absolute.

For many village healers, range will not be a significant issue in your day-to-day practice, and as such, many priests are unaware of their own limits in this regard. However, there are occasionally situations in which a patient will be trapped somewhere that the physician cannot reach, or will be injured seriously enough that a Physic or other long range spell is necessary to provide immediate life-saving care. In moments such as these, understanding your white magic’s range can be the difference between life and death.

Range cannot be increased on short notice. There are no artificial means of extending range save a single Hero’s Relic, known as the Staff of Thyrsus (for more information, refer to Lecture IX: Tools of the Trade). Certain specialized clerics, after years of practicing their trade, sometimes find that their range has extended some small amount. This is believed to be a result of increased magical stamina (see Limitation 1).

Limitation 5: White magic cannot heal disease or natural-born infirmities.

While white magic is extremely useful in mending wounds and recouping lost blood, it does little to combat even the most common of illnesses. Tradition explains this by way of the Goddess—since disease is inflicted by her, she is naturally disinclined to provide man with the supernatural power to combat it. This stands in contrast to wounds, which are inflicted by man and are therefore, in the Goddess’s mercy, allowed to be healed by them as well.

Recent studies by Marie Helena Conrad of the Kingdom's School of Sorcery indicate that healing can even exacerbate illness, especially in cases where infection or contagious disease are concerned. Many devout followers of the Goddess, including Marie Helena Conrad, have anecdotally reported that this occurs more often when the infection has already taken root in the blood, and indicates that there is little hope of recovery.

It should be noted that this limitation excludes illnesses caused by certain poisons and toxins—while it seems a technicality, poison-related illness can usually be healed by a well-cast Restore.

Limitation 6: One cannot heal oneself.

With some few exceptions, healers cannot heal themselves (it should be noted that the use of Nosferatu is not considered a healing spell in this series due to its highly dubious ethical status). This limitation of self-healing can become a serious issue in the smaller communities of Fodlan, where healers are few and far between. If a town’s healer is injured, there is little other recourse but to send as quickly as possible for the next town’s healer. This is often described as being one of the most unexpected limitations of healing with white magic, and has been the direct and tragic cause of many upstanding healers’ deaths.

Limitation 7: Healing must be performed at a reasonable speed.

The time it takes to heal with white magic is noted to be one of the most dangerous and frustrating limits of this field. Healing small injuries (such as a scraped knee or bruised jaw) will take little more than several seconds for most practiced healers, but more serious cuts can take up to thirty minutes to fully close. During this time, the patient will be in danger of losing more blood than the healing is replacing, so in such cases, it is recommended that several healers be brought in to assist with the process.

Other examples of injuries notably affected by this limitation are frostbite and burns. While small burns and areas of damaged skin can be treated relatively quickly, larger ones are more difficult to work with due to the skin’s temperature. While the healing will repair damaged skin, it will not normalize the skin’s temperature, and as such, the process may be considerably lengthened if the heat or cold has seeped into deeper levels of the skin. Healing in these cases can be an extremely long and painful process, and it is highly recommended that the healer find some way to control the patient's temperature while healing.

For more information on healing over greater periods of time, please refer to Lecture XIII, Long-Term Injuries.

Limitation 8: White magic cannot bring back the dead.

This, perhaps, goes without saying, but for the sake of completion this list will include it. White magic can sometimes close the wounds on a recent corpse, but it cannot return the soul that has departed. The point of death, however, is sometimes debated. In general, it is agreed among respected scholars that healing can benefit the injured up to five minutes after their last breath or last heartbeat.

It should be warned that life and death are the Goddess’ domain—healers should not desire to meddle in it.

#fire emblem #fe16 #fe3h #my writing #and there you have it!! mostly just a meta analysis of the magic system in a character voice trenchcoat #this also reminds me that I want to go update my tristrat healing post now that I have more of the in-game stuff ripped for reference #healing magic in fiction is just one of those things that I could spend forever thinking about #there's such a specific and recurring desire in fiction to have instantaneous healing #and yet stories still often want to include pain and death as narrative or thematic devices #and it's so so interesting to look at how each piece of media chooses to balance the two

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justinspoliticalcorner · 4 months ago

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Molly Olmstead at Slate:

Donald Trump announced his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, this week. That means the vice presidential race is finally underway, adding more fuel to the sense of Republican stability amid Democrats’ existential confusion over Joe Biden’s campaign status. The Trump campaign, and many right-wing actors and pundits, has been trying to ride this momentum even further—by beginning to beef up its attacks on Kamala Harris.

“Kamala Harris is incompetent,” a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told the New York Times. “She’s proven to be the weakest, worst vice president in history, and she has 100 percent supported Joe Biden in every single disastrous policy that he has implemented over the last four years.” Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump official, called her a “DEI hire.” The Federalist asserted that Harris “intentionally concealed” problems with the president’s “mental fitness.” (One of the Trump campaign’s Twitter accounts also alleged, “No person is more central to the coverup.”) And Trump himself tossed out a crass reference to a relationship Harris had decades ago, trading on sexist and false accusations that she rose to power by having an affair with a married man. Still, media and misinformation experts say that the right hasn’t yet landed on a centralized narrative to discredit Harris—and that we can expect many more lines of narrative attack to crystalize in the coming months. Because while Harris, a Black woman, has generally faced more animosity than Biden ever did when he was vice president, she has still been treated as an afterthought; disinformation trackers Slate reached out to don’t even register Harris as a major topic of misinformation in the current news cycle. Biden, four years into his presidency, has taken his place in the pantheon of right-wing villains as a corrupt and vindictive member of the elite, both foolish and evil. Kamala’s caricature, on the other hand, still has room to harden.

In the meantime, right-wing media has been throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies conspiracy theories, political communication, and the media, said that Harris has faced all kinds of attacks recently, some explicitly experimental. Some right-wing actors have portrayed her as “part of some kind of grand liberal conspiracy,” Nyhan said. Others claim she is too incompetent to do anything. Those narratives are somewhat in contradiction with each other, but “sometimes, with political figures who are less well defined, there’s a flooding of the zone,” Nyhan said.

In 2020, when Biden chose Harris as his running mate, the main right-wing attack narratives about her were that she was radical, weak, “nasty,” and “angry”; that she was a bigot who was also not Black enough and possibly not a U.S. citizen; and that she wanted to make the U.S. more like California. Outlandish and false conspiracy theories also circulated about Harris, including that she was involved in the baseless child-trafficking conspiracy known as Pizzagate and that she had somehow known in advance that the actor Jussie Smollett was going to stage an attack on himself. Now the general thrust is basically that Harris is deeply unlikable and was a vapid, affirmative action–style hire who lucked her way into power but has done nothing with it. Some of this characterization is built off valid critiques of her time in office and her sometimes-odd speeches.

[...] The racial elements of the Harris attacks are even more blatant. Right-wing stories repeatedly depict her as a woman who failed upward, reaching the White House simply by being a Black woman. The New York Post on July 6 warned that “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.” “Yes, maybe the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America may become the leader of the free world because the Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold,” the author wrote. With that line of attack comes the argument that identity politics is all she knows. Elements of some misleading headlines have included “ ‘Black Trees Matter’—VP Kamala Harris Asks NASA if It Can Track Trees by Race” and “Harris Pitches Race-Based Hurricane Relief.” This Harris, who engages with politics only at the most shallow level, still poses a risk to the country, silly or not, by risking the welfare of white people and stoking racial strife.

But if there’s any question about the racism Harris faces, it should be settled by one undeniable development: Some on the right have previously attempted a birtherism-style assault on her legitimacy as a candidate. That includes a former president and one of the biggest promoters of Obama birtherism. In 2020, before the presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that Harris was not eligible for the office because her parents were immigrants. [...] One thing is for sure: With Biden’s standing in question, and given how unlikely it appears to some voters that the president will be able to finish a full second term, there is little doubt that Harris will be a more prominent target of GOP attacks. And Republicans will be stepping up their attacks in anticipation of a potential vice presidential debate, slated to happen next month.

With VP Kamala Harris being the likely replacement nominee should President Joe Biden (D) step down, the right-wing has ramped up their racist and sexist attacks against Harris.

#Kamala Harris #2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections #J.D. Vance #Racism #Sexism #Joe Biden #Withdrawal of Joe Biden from the 2024 Presidential Election

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lookingforcactus · 2 years ago

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Non-paywall version here.

"Shawna Freeman Lane, 34, continued to teach college-level business by laptop after she gave birth by C-section in 2017. Her husband, Eric Lane, was home with her in Fircrest, Wash., for three weeks. The same thing happened in 2018, when their second child was born—except this time, Mr. Lane only got two weeks at home.

Having to leave his still-healing wife in the lurch was hard for Mr. Lane, as was tracking his children’s development via text messages while at work. But when their third was born last May, things were different. In 2020, Washington state had passed a new law entitling working parents to 12 weeks of paid leave, to bond with their newborn.

“It felt like winning the lottery, honestly,” said Mr. Lane, who stayed home for six weeks after their son was born, then another six weeks when Ms. Freeman Lane went back to work.

They are part of an explosion in the number of workers taking parental leave. In the 12 months through February [2023], a monthly 406,000 workers were absent on average due to paid or unpaid parental leave, up 13.5% from 2021, according to Labor Department data. The 478,000 working parents absent in January was the most since records began in 1994.

One driver behind the upswing is likely the increase in births in the past two years versus the prepandemic trend. The pandemic itself may also be a factor, as lockdowns and Covid kept many workers home.

But the main factor appears to be government and employer policies. While the U.S. remains the only advanced economy without nationally mandated paid parental leave, the share of workers with access to leave is growing, to 25% in March last year versus 19% in 2019, according to the Labor Department. Seven states plus the District of Columbia now require employers to provide paid leave, up from four in 2018, while private employers are also expanding the benefit. Four more states will require paid parental leave by 2026.

“As the state laws have passed, there has been a culture change, and more awareness and support for mothers and—especially—fathers around taking leave,” said Jane Waldfogel, a public affairs professor at Columbia University.

A greater propensity by fathers to take leave is an important contributor. The number of men on parental leave tripled to an average of 76,500 in the six months ended in February [2023] from five years earlier, whereas the number of women rose 11% to 336,000, according to census data.

More parental leave-taking benefits the economy in the impact on families’ well-being, said Emily Oster, economics professor at Brown University—ranging from near-term outcomes such as infant mortality rates to longer-term measures, including child test scores and adult earnings. “In this sense, leave now is an investment in the economic future,” Ms. Oster said...

Leave policies are a small but increasingly key way that firms compete for workers, according to Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. About 3% of currently active online job postings nationwide explicitly advertise parental leave, about a fivefold increase from before the pandemic, ZipRecruiter data show.

Industries seeing the biggest increase are retail, and transportation and warehousing, said Ms. Pollak—something she calls the “Amazon effect.” The e-commerce giant was at the forefront of offering parental-leave benefits, prompting competitors to do the same...

Parents are also taking longer leaves. The typical mother now takes 120 days of bonding leave, up from 110 in 2019, and the median father is out for 60 days, a 15-day increase, according to Sparrow, a leave-management platform. New York state family bonding claims data show a similar trend, with moms claiming 9.9 weeks in 2021, a three-week gain from 2018, and dads extending their average leave by 2.3 weeks, to 6.9...

“My son is so much fun now. He’s getting to the stage where he’s his own human,” [Jonathan Leslie, a 36-year-old software engineer] said. “Having the open-ended play with him—that opportunity won’t come again.”

-via The Wall Street Journal, 4/8/23. Non-paywall version via ProgramBusiness, 4/10/23.

#parental leave #labor rights #paid leave #pto #parenting #child development #infants and toddlers #united states #us politics #washington state #good news #hope

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spade-riddles · 1 year ago

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I just realized something very interesting about the surprise songs last night. Everyone was expecting her to sing a folklore song in honor of folklore’s 3rd anniversary and at first it seemed like she completely ignored it but upon further inspection I think she actually did acknowledge it by repurposing old songs. To be more exact, I think message in a bottle and tied together with a smile allude to 🎃 anon’s 8th and 9th messages which have a lot of allusions to folklore. Here are some parallels I found:

Message 8:

•Hold on, baby, you're losing it, The water's high, you're jumping into it and letting go // Your ship is docked too far out to sea. You’d swim to it, but the waters are infested with sharks. Your life raft is long deflated…in one swift motion, you replace the solid boards beneath your feet with rushing deep blue water

•And no one knows, That you cry, but you don't tell anyone, That you might not be the golden one // You’re a selfish asshole. So much of your fear is your own. You wince at your cowardice like it is a gaping wound. You so often find yourself unable to meet your own eyes. You scramble into shadows like a black cat. Scared, even, of being scared

•I think her diving into the stage after the surprise songs could represent her jumping into the aforementioned shark infested waters and being tossed out on waves (evermore, cardigan mv). It makes sense why midnights would directly follow this if we look at messages 8-11 which describe how after being attacked by sharks she made it back home and reunited with her lover at 3am (i.e. after midnight). I think the setlist, cardigan mv, and 🎃 messages all tell the same story.

Message 9:

•You are sitting on a beach, cold and windswept. The sea is dark and angry before you. The sun sets in muted colors. You finish scrawling on the parchment. Your pen dries up as you reach the end of a story in 11 parts. None of it makes sense anyway. You're sick of having to dilute everything so far beyond recognition. But a story told through metaphor is still a story told. Even the great poet Sappho is survived by stilted fragments and mistranslated lyrics -> This message pretty clearly describes how she felt while writing folklore back in 2020: the parchment paper which she’s mentioned in her betty speeches, the sun setting in muted colors (august to illicit affairs transition representing gray folklore following the failed lover era coming out which would’ve been daylight), the part about metaphors diluting the truth and Sappho’s story surviving all these yrs later is literally the definition of folklore

•And you're tied together with a smile, But you're coming undone // The flawed, scarred, angry, grateful, nonsensical heart. The one that hides deep inside glittering ballgowns. The one that questions everything, but mostly it questions if the world it has grimaced through so many smiles for would love it for what it truly is

•A message in a bottle is all I can do, Standin' here, hopin' it gets to you // You roll the parchment, slipping it into an empty wine bottle. You may have told the story inside out and backwards, and it may well sink to the bottom of the sea or fall on deaf ears. It may wash up on a sunny beach in Florida, or a rocky shore in the northwest. Either way, someone somewhere will know about that recipe card. And the warm safety you cherish within your fence. And the heist that stole more from you than you ever planned on stealing from the museum. And most importantly, they will know about the human heart // Lost in your current like a priceless wine // Her clinging onto the “folklore” piano in the cardigan mv representing how writing folklore was a coping mechanism and lifeline for her

She said that she picks songs that are related in some way and this is the only connection that really makes sense imo

#🎃#Well thought out anon

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justforbooks · 2 months ago

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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

The author of the bestselling Sapiens offers a penetrating critique of the insidious dangers of machine learning and its capacity to manipulate the truth

What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix, you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus. “For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.”

Language – and the human ability to spin it into vast, globe-encircling yarns – is fundamental to how the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understands our species and its vulnerabilities. In his 2014 mega-hit Sapiens (originally published in Hebrew in 2011), he argued that humans became dominant because they learned to cooperate in large numbers, thanks to a newfound aptitude for telling stories. That aptitude, which enabled our ancestors to believe in completely imaginary things, lies at the root of our religions, economies and nations, all of which would dissolve if our narrative-spinning faculties were somehow switched off.

Sapiens has sold 25m copies to date – a testament to Harari’s own storytelling prowess – though it’s had its share of detractors. Academics questioned its accuracy and the idea of cramming 70,000 years of human history into 450 pages. Sitcoms poked fun at Harari superfans who wave the book around like a modern-day bible. The appeal of Sapiens lies in its dizzying scope but, as a 2020 New Yorker profile pointed out, Harari’s zoomed-out approach can have the effect of minimising the importance of current affairs.

Nexus could be seen as a rebuke to that criticism. Though it executes its own breakneck dash through the millennia, hopping back and forth in time and between continents, it is very much concerned about what’s happening today.

If stories were fundamental to the schema of Sapiens, here it’s all about information networks, which Harari views as the basic structures undergirding our societies. “Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans,” he writes, and the “glue” that holds these networks of cooperation together is information, which “many philosophers and biologists” see as “the most basic building block of reality”.

But information doesn’t reliably tell the truth about the world. More often, Harari emphasises, it gives rise to fictions, fantasies and mass delusions, which lead to such catastrophic developments as Nazism and Stalinism. Why is Homo sapiens, for all its evolutionary successes, so perennially self-destructive? “The fault,” according to Harari, “isn’t with our nature but with our information networks.”

Casting his eye over how information has led us astray in the past, Harari has no shortage of examples to draw on. One of the more gorily memorable is Malleus Maleficarum, written by the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer in 1480s Austria. A guide to exposing and murdering witches in deliriously horrible ways, the book wouldn’t have travelled far had the printing press not been invented a few decades earlier, allowing Kramer’s deranged ideas to spread across Europe, stoking a witch-hunting frenzy.

Harari’s basic point is that information revolutions can give rise to periods of human flourishing but always come at a cost. When we invent shiny new technologies that carry words and ideas farther and faster than ever before, much of the information that spews out is dross or actively dangerous. It’s not helped by the fact that, when it comes to maintaining social order, fictions tend to be more reliable binding agents than truths.

What’s scary about the AI revolution isn’t just that we’ll be overwhelmed with misinformation from chatbots, or that the powers that be will use it to crunch data on our private lives. Unlike previous technologies such as books and radios, writes Harari: “AI is the first tool that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself.” We saw an early warning of this in Myanmar in 2016-17, when Facebook algorithms, tasked with maximising user engagement, responded by promoting hateful anti-Rohingya propaganda that fuelled mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

Harari makes a strong case for why we should regard such algorithms as autonomous agents and how, if we’re not careful, humans could become tools for AI to manipulate with ever more terrible force. Unless we take immediate action, this burgeoning “alien intelligence”, as he prefers to call it, could trigger catastrophes we can’t even imagine, up to and including the destruction of human civilisation.

This pessimistic take on AI is nothing new: “doomers” such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have been warning of its apocalyptic potential for years and even the AI industry has started voicing concerns. What Harari seeks to add to the debate is the long view. By applying his lens to previous information revolutions and showing how different forms of government have reacted to them, he believes we can prepare ourselves for the earthquakes to come.

Nexus has some curious blind spots; it’s odd, in a critique of a technology driven largely by profit-seeking corporations, that capitalism is hardly mentioned at all. But whether or not you agree with Harari’s historical framing of AI, it’s hard not to be impressed by the meticulous way he builds it up, speckling what could be a rather dry analysis with vivid examples, such as the story of Cher Ami, a first world war messenger pigeon, used here to tease out information’s fundamental slipperiness. As in previous books, he relies heavily on lists (“the two main challenges”, “the five basic principles”) and binaries (truth versus order, democracy versus dictatorship), but this serves to organise his thinking rather than dull the writing.

The solutions he proposes to restrict AI’s power range from the sensible (ban bots from impersonating humans) to the laughable (encourage artists and bureaucrats to “cooperate” to help the rest of us understand the computer network), but Nexus operates primarily as a diagnosis and a call to action, and on those terms it’s broadly successful. If it sells anywhere near as well as Sapiens did, we’ll be that bit better equipped as a species to deal with the rise of the machines.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Yuval Noah Harari #Nexus #book review

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upismediacenter · 6 months ago

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UP Cherubim and Seraphim shines in summer concert “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing”

The UP Cherubim and Seraphim lit up the IBG-KAL Theater in their concert titled “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” last May 11, 2024.

The UP Cherubim and Seraphim (UPCS), which was founded on September 21, 1971, is the official children’s choir of the University of the Philippines. According to its Director Emeritus Dr. Elena Mirano, former dean and Professor Emeritus of the College of Arts and Letters, “tonight is the culmination of a whole year that marks the coming together face to face, after four years, of our current group, who sang together virtually from their own homes throughout the pandemic, and during that time produced three concerts online.” The last solo in-person concert of the group, “Come Alive,” was held on March 7, 2020.

UP President Atty. Angelo Jimenez gave the opening remarks for the concert. “I’m very excited to be here to watch the Cherubim and Seraphim of the University of the Philippines, whom I’ve known since I was a freshman in UP back in ‘83.” He shared a few anecdotes of his experience growing up in the Manobo tribe surrounded by music, and how he enjoyed engaging with both the folk and contemporary music of his time.

“And I am very happy that our children—our kids, our young people, are singing today. Because I think that many of you in UP know my interest in the arts and culture,” Jimenez adds. “I truly believe that it is not a great idea that will move people. To move people, we have to have emotion, and emotion has to be driven by higher feelings. At least, it can help us move towards our dream, which should be, as a university, aligned with the nation’s deepest emotions, our people’s highest aspirations.”

After President Jimenez, Dr. Mirano also gave her own remarks, where she gave a brief preview of the flow of the program which she described as “serious, modern, and fun.”

The first part of the concert included classics from European repertoire. The first four songs were from John Rutter’s “Dancing Day,” a series of Christmas carols from the Middle Ages. They also performed Felix Mendelssohn’s “Laudate Pueri,” a song of praise written in Latin.

The second part comprised contemporary Filipino repertoire, and all songs in this section were written by composers from the UP College of Music. This segment opened with “Sa Dakong Sikatan” by Eudenice Palaruan, then three songs written by National Artist for Music Ramon Santos were also performed: “Dal’wang Sawikaing Pilipino,” “Handog sa Ina,” and “Batang Magalang.”

The third part of the concert featured more recent and popular songs—all with choreography. The last section began with “Top of the World,” originally sung by Shawn Mendes as part of the soundtrack of the movie “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” and continued with “Don’t You Worry ‘bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder, the concert’s title song. “You Will Be Found” from the musical Dear Evan Hansen, a song that was part of the repertoire in “Come Alive,” was also in this concert’s lineup. “Permission to Dance” by BTS brought out the K-Pop energy in the theater, and the choir closed out the concert by singing “Joyful, Joyful” from the movie Sister Act 2.

During the third part, the audience brought out white and purple lightsticks dubbed as “Cherubongs,” a mashup of “Cherubim” and the Korean colloquial suffix -bong, meaning “stick.”

Also in attendance at the concert were UP officials Vice President for Public Affairs Rolando Tolentino, Chancellor Carlo Vistan, Dean Jimmuel Naval of the College of Arts and Letters, Dean Jerome Buenviaje of the College of Education, Dean Pat Silvestre of the College of Music; and Mr. Ignacio Gimenez, the sponsor for whom the IBG-KAL Theater was named after. UPIS faculty members Assistant Principal for Academic Programs Dian Caluag, CA-EMA and SSH Cluster Head Cathy Atordido, and Ms. Kat Loyola were also present in the audience.

Behind this production were the UPCS music staff: Director Emeritus Elena Mirano, Associate Director Liya Dioquino, pianists Michelle Nicolasora and Samuel Silvestre, guitarist Luisa Dioquino, bassist Sage Ilagan, drummer Robin Rivera, choreographers Becca Silvestre and Sophia Maunahan, and program cover artist Hubert Fucio.

All in all, the concert ran for about two hours and ended with a repeat performance of “Don't You Worry ‘bout A Thing” as the encore.

To find out more about the UPCS, you may visit their Facebook page (U.P. Cherubim & Seraphim), Instagram account (@up_cherubs), and their website upcherubim.org.

//by Rache Bueno

#MC2025 #News #English #Rache Bueno

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velvet-cupcake-games · 2 years ago

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Reminder About Old Asks

The Screenshot of Coding Bloopers is here to remind everyone that my answers to asks, particularly old ones, may or may not be accurate to the current state of the game. I've noticed a few folks going through the deep archives, and that's awesome! I'm thrilled that we've inspired you to spend some quality time with the Tumblr!

Made Marion has evolved a great deal since 2020, and while the spirit of the characters has been pretty consistent throughout, many details have changed. Gui (aka Sir Definitely Not Geoffrey in the above image) in particular has evolved because he was the last character I added to the main cast and I didn't entirely know where his story was going when I first started posting here.

As another example, in one post I imply that Alanna and Layton have an intimate relationship. The original idea was that they were occasional lovers without an emotional connection, but several things changed. First, I axed the scene surrounding that fact a long time ago. It just wasn't very good. Second, I decided Alanna is lesbian and thus she's thoroughly uninterested in what Layton is packin'. She still has a history of casual affairs, just not with be-penised individuals.

Also also, occasionally I lie or omit important information for spoiler reasons.

So please keep in mind that asks are super fun but may or may not reflect the state of the game at launch!

#made marion #writing is a process #sometimes it's a process of deletion

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kylekozmikdeluxo · 1 year ago

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Those Two Times BIONICLE and TOTAL DRAMA Came to My Rescue

#longpost likely incoming...

Some things have a weird significance in my life, whether it's stuff I genuinely enjoy or stuff I could just take or leave...

But, I just remembered something...

I was looking through some older videos of mine, and came across a few I did in the pit of the miserable summer that was mid-2020. And while watching these old videos to see what kind of editing I did, I was hit with intense flashbacks... Flashbacks that reminded me how confusing and scary those times were for me, amidst the pandemic and life seemingly not about to get better. Add to that, a lot of nationwide happenings, and seeing people around me devolve into parroting all the worst misinformation about the then-current political climate.

I had some other things going on at the time, too, that ranged from disheartening to outright terrifying... I'd say July/early August 2020 was where I had some serious anxiety attacks...

Conversely, I was uncorking a version of me that I kinda had suppressed through high school, and really dialed down during my weird snobby pseudo-adult college years. So, I was letting a wild unchained side of myself flourish again circa May-August 2020. I was writing and drawing and creating some wiiiiild stuff, stuff I hadn't genuinely enjoyed creating in a looooong while. I think a lot of this was due to not having to worry about a work schedule and other commitments, I was home all the time! So, I had all the time in the world to let my creativity flow like a dam had been burst.

And then meanwhile, all this unrest was going on, COVID was not lessening because people kept spreading it, misinfo was everywhere, TFG is king!!! The 2020 presidential election looming, threats of violence and voter suppression from the right- which eventually plateaued with the 1/6 attempted insurrection... And then there was something else that I won't specify, but something that was emotionally draining me and terrifying the fuck out of me around this time... To the point where I was worried I'd associate my weird wacko creative autistic side of myself with this very thing, and suppress it again out of fear... Reject it outright, even! But luckily, I closed off the problem and continued onward, I continued to write and draw the stuff I love to make...

But by mid-August of 2020, it was like I had made it out of a trip through some kind of hell. Battered and smashed, to borrow from the opening monologue of MAD MAX 2...

And around this time, I guess because I was in the mood for them or I was feeling kind of warm and cozy inside... I revisited two things I dig...

BIONICLE and TOTAL DRAMA...

Weirdly enough, I turned to both of those franchises when it came to bad periods in my life...

BIONICLE and I go way back. As in, when this very Lego line was first introduced in North America in the summer of 2001. My love affair with BIONICLE was a bit on and off afterwards. It was my whole jam throughout 2001, all the way into the fall/winter. (I got tons of Bonkle sets for my birthday and for Christmas.) Into early 2002 as well, I was writing fanfiction even. I was like "When I'm older, I'll make animated movies, and a BIONICLE movie will be one of them!" And I was writing that theoretical movie for some time!

(I still would LOVE to make animated movies, but right now, I'm putting my focus on making comics and graphic novels.)

Then I kinda put BIONICLE aside, and then got back into it, somewhat, in late 2002. When the Toa Nuva sets came out... I remember buying the new Gali Nuva set on my first-ever trip to New York City, got it at the FAO Schwartz!

Then I put the franchise aside, again... and then turned to it once more in late 2003... That was when... The first MOVIE came out. The direct-to-video Miramax release BIONICLE: MASK OF LIGHT... Plus, the arrival of many new sets: Takanuva, the Toa of Light. The Rahkshi. Plus, beasts like the Gukko bird and Pewku the crab. I bought the blue Rahkshi back then, and played around with the mini-CD that came with it. Back when PCs having a CD-ROM (!) drive was a big must... So, I was all about Bonkle again!

And in late 2003, I needed it... Because I was dealing with middle school pains (it was my first year), my paternal grandfather slowly dying after a stroke, various bullshit, and me just not being myself and having a lot of personal problems to work through. The franchise took a break after MASK OF LIGHT, and it later made its big return with the all-new prequel storyline set in a whole new location. That was in late 2004. Naturally, I was ready to go all-in: New movie, new characters, new sets, everything. But I'm getting ahead of myself here... BIONICLE, during the MASK OF LIGHT era, was like a warm blanket I could to turn to in late 2003. A special interest I could sink myself in. I was writing stories back then, too, so it naturally appealed to me with its colorful array of characters and its rich worldbuilding and lore. It's why all those BIONICLE Lore memes bring me so much joy. Other people were engulfed in this stuff, too!

Eventually, BIONICLE was off my radar by about late 2005 or so, as my brain drifted to other special interests.

So, enter 2008... I had finished sophomore year of high school in June 2008, an absolutely horrid semester for a multitude of reasons that I went over in other posts (particularly my 2-part post on my weird history with the MADAGASCAR movies), but... The short version? I was 15, depressed, feeling like I was the worst person, I was absolutely shook by a friendship turned sour and going on cutthroat message boards as my unrefined autistic self, I didn't have one of my close friends around to help me feel better about things, and my maternal grandfather was slowly dying after a disastrous hospital visit, I was getting wind that I wasn't straight and that horrified me... Yes, late 2007 going into early 2008 freakin' suuuuuucked.

(15 years later, the present... I'm openly queer. Please don't read that above sentence as me being upset that I'm not straight. I was back then because I was 15 and homophobia was rampant in its own peculiar way in 2008.)

And by summer 2008, there was a streak in me of sorts. That I aggressively wanted for things to get better, but the bad chemistry in my brain wasn't letting me- until I snapped out of it. (It also helped that this bummer mood was pissing off others around me, and some of them have HAD IT, and they sure let me know!) And by the end of August 2008... All those horrible, hateful, bad feelings... Were gone...

Yes folks, I remember when these things specifically happened... That's how my autistic analytical photographic memory works, for better or for worse...

So, around that time, a particular Canadian animated TV series had come to Cartoon Network in the United States... TOTAL DRAMA ISLAND.

Now, when I caught wind of this show, I was like... "Total Drama? DRAMA? What has Cartoon Network come too???"

I had kinda given up on Cartoon Network sometime in mid-2007, a little after their president at the time - Jim Samples - got fired for the AQUA TEEN movie scare involving LED lights of the Mooninites hung around Boston that were thought to be bombs placed by terrorists throughout the city. (Yes, this actually happened. The W. Bush/immediate post-9/11 era was a weeeeeird time.)

Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, Cartoon Network after Samples left. I was uninterested by then, and kinda stupidly nostalgic for what the network was prior to 2006/07. I was definitely more into [adult swim] by then, for sure! But, once in a while I'd pop on CN in early 2008 and see things like... SKUNK FU? MR. MEN? JOHNNY TEST, I think? When I wanted to see reruns of, say, ED EDD N' EDDY or even something like FOSTER'S HOME FOR IMAGINARY FRIENDS. Keep in mind, this was during sick days... And CN mornings during sick home from school days were... Also weird... Heck, I think one of the things I randomly watched on CN during a sick day was that CGI GARFIELD movie where he and Odie go to the real world. When you're 15, depressed, bored, and whatnot, you end up watching unlikely shit.

Again, I went off track... It's what I do, sorry. I'm a tangenter, for sure. I probably lost you, if I did, I apologize! Anyways... So, I see these listings for this "Total Drama" show and I'm like... This is what it's come to, huh?

I had caught glimpses of it, and thought... What are these characters? They're all terrible stereotypes! Ironic, coming from an actual 15-year-old at the time... But then, for whatever reason, I put it on... It was the episode "X-treme Torture". The one where Heather's top gets ripped off by the tree branch, and they show her blurred breasts...

And I was like, "Wait? This is on CARTOON NETWORK and not ADULT SWIM???" I had also seen that it was rated TV-PG, rare for a CN show back in the day. I was used to their stuff being either TV-G or TV-Y7 (sometimes with an FV)... So, it was a surprise to me, and I was intrigued. What 15-year-old wouldn't be? So I watched more of it, and found myself quite enjoying it for its fun characters, weird humor, and... Well, I also had crushes on several of the contestants back then, too, haha. In true form, my favorite was probably Gwen, the goth girl. Yeah, I'm one of those sadsacks who always had a cliched love for goth gals. Loved goth gals then, and I love goth women now. It didn't begin with Gwen, for sure, but she was a major part of it all no less.

So, yeah, I really dug TOTAL DRAMA ISLAND. I even looked up uploads of the original Canadian version on YouTube at the time, to see all the cuss words we didn't get in the stinky states. (The butchering of Lindsay going off on Heather in 'That's Off The Chain' is a work of censorship that astounds me - in all the wrong ways - to this day.) I largely kept this love for the show secret, and eventually I kinda forgot about it over time. I didn't really check out TOTAL DRAMA ACTION much when it was airing in spring 2009-ish, the rest passed me by. I briefly checked out ALL-STARS for a bit. There's a new season that's been out... Only in Italy, apparently. "Short Run in Peru", haha.

But in mid-to-late 2008, I was all-in on TOTAL DRAMA...

And, I got back into BIONICLE around the fall of 2008! I didn't follow any of the new stuff, I strictly stuck to the 2001-2004 era BIONICLE stuff. Mata Nui era and early Metru Nui era. I rewatched the first two movies, and I had a blast. It was fun to dig out my old sets. (Which are now in my studio.)

...

So then, fast-forward... August 2020... Coincidentally...

For whatever reason, I decided to revisit TOTAL DRAMA ISLAND... And BIONICLE...

When I revisited TOTAL DRAMA, I was struck by just how genuinely funny and entertaining it was, how sharp the voice acting is (Christian Potenza in particular, like he's having a ball as Chris McLean), and I even found something to appreciate in its often-criticized art style. Its slow pace, the reality show format, how it parodies the genre and also embraces its most entertaining elements (making for what is perhaps the *best* reality show? Leave it to animation to make a genre I generally dislike into something enjoyable), the summer island vibes, its looseness... Like, there's something kinda cozy about it. Later seasons are a little faster and a little more hectic, I feel.

And when I was re-watching TDI, along with the cheesy direct-to-DVD BIONICLE movies, all felt right in the world circa August-September 2020ish. In a sort-of weird, maybe not nostalgic way, but in a cozy and comfortable way. One is a good vibes show, the other is a cool lore-packed action-adventure with colorful robots. They're both big hits with me, that's for sure.

Maybe I'll pop the lid off of both pretty soon... It's August 2023, and life's been rough for me once more... I moved out earlier this year, I'm trying to find a really good job (my work situation right now is kinda mixed), anti-LGBTQIA+ shit continuously brings me down as I grapple with being openly queer and having to deal with a good chunk of my family being very conservative, I have rent to pay now, and groceries too, and it's ahhhhhhh!

Maybe August is made for TOTAL DRAMA and BIONICLE...

Isn't it weird how life repeats certain verses and choruses?

#bionicle #total drama #personal post #random thoughts #anecdotes or whatever #autistic #autism #infodumping #infodump

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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An investigation uncovers a web of influence in the powerful coalition aligned behind the European Commission’s proposal to scan for child sexual abuse material online, a proposal leading experts say puts rights at risk and will introduce new vulnerabilities by undermining encryption.

In early May 2022, days before she launched one of the most contentious legislative proposals Brussels had seen in years, the European Union’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, sent a letter to a US organisation co-founded in 2012 by the movie stars Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

The organisation, Thorn, develops artificial intelligence tools to scan for child sexual abuse images online, and Johansson’s proposed regulation is designed to fight the spread of such content on messaging apps.

“We have shared many moments on the journey to this proposal,” the Swedish politician wrote, according to a copy of the letter addressed to Thorn executive director Julie Cordua and which BIRN has seen.

Johansson urged Cordua to continue the campaign to get it passed: “Now I am looking to you to help make sure that this launch is a successful one.”

That campaign faces a major test in October when Johansson’s proposal is put to a vote in the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It has already been the subject of heated debate.

The regulation would obligate digital platforms – from Facebook to Telegram, Signal to Snapchat, TikTok to clouds and online gaming websites – to detect and report any trace of child sexual abuse material, CSAM, on their systems and in their users’ private chats.

It would introduce a complex legal architecture reliant on AI tools for detecting images, videos and speech – so-called ‘client-side scanning’ – containing sexual abuse against minors and attempts to groom children.

Welcomed by some child welfare organisations, the regulation has nevertheless been met with alarm from privacy advocates and tech specialists who say it will unleash a massive new surveillance system and threaten the use of end-to-end encryption, currently the ultimate way to secure digital communications from prying eyes.

The EU’s top data protection watchdog, Wojciech Wiewiorowski, warned Johansson about the risks in 2020, when she informed him of her plans.

They amount to “crossing the Rubicon” in terms of the mass surveillance of EU citizens, he said in an interview for this story. It “would fundamentally change the internet and digital communication as we know it.”

Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”

Based on dozens of interviews, leaked documents and insight into the Commission’s internal deliberations, this investigation connects the dots between the key actors bankrolling and organising the advocacy campaign in favour of Johansson’s proposal and their direct links with the commissioner and her cabinet.

It’s a synthesis that granted certain stakeholders, AI firms and advocacy groups – which enjoy significant financial backing – a questionable level of influence over the crafting of EU policy.

The proposed regulation is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”, said Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe’s oldest hotline for reporting online CSAM.

“Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”

If the regulation undermines encryption, it risks introducing new vulnerabilities, critics argue. “Who will benefit from the legislation?” Gerkens asked. “Not the children.”

Privacy assurances ‘deeply misleading’

Star of That ‘70s Show and a host of Hollywood hits, 45-year-old Kutcher resigned as chairman of the Thorn board in mid-September amid uproar over a letter he wrote to a judge in support of convicted rapist and fellow That ‘70s Show actor Danny Masterson, prior to his sentencing.

Up until that moment, however, Kutcher had for years been the very recognisable face of a campaign to rid the Internet of CSAM, a role that involved considerable access to the top brass in Brussels.

Thorn’s declarations to the EU transparency register lists meetings with senior members of the cabinets of top Commission officials with a say in the bloc’s security or digital policy, including Johansson, antitrust czar Margrethe Vestager, Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas, and internal market commissioner Thierry Breton.

In November 2020, it was the turn of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was part of a video conference with Kutcher and an organisation registered in the small Dutch town of Lisse – the WeProtect Global Alliance.

Though registered in the EU lobby database as a charity, Thorn sells its AI tools on the market for a profit; since 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security, for example, has purchased software licences from Thorn for a total of $4.3 million.

These tools are used by companies such as Vimeo, Flickr and OpenAI – the creator of chatbot ChatGPT and one of many beneficiaries of Kutcher’s IT investments – and by law enforcement agencies across the globe.

In November 2022, Kutcher and Johansson lined up as key speakers at a summit organised and moderated by then European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, who three weeks later was arrested and deposed over an investigation into the ‘Qatargate’ cash-for-lobbying scandal.

In March this year, six months before his resignation amid uproar over his letter of support for Masterson, Kutcher addressed lawmakers in Brussels, seeking to appease concerns about the possible misuse and shortcomings of the existing technology. Technology can scan for suspicious material without violating privacy, he said, a claim that the European Digital Rights association said was “deeply misleading”.

The Commission has been reluctant to detail the relationship between Thorn and Johansson’s cabinet under the EU’s freedom of information mechanism. It refused to disclose Cordua’s emailed response to Johansson’s May 2022 letter or a ‘policy one pager’ Thorn had shared with her cabinet, citing Thorn’s position that “the disclosure of the information contained therein would undermine the organisation’s commercial interest”.

After seven months of communication concerning access to documents and the intervention of the European Ombudsman, in early September the Commission finally released a series of email exchanges between Johansson’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs and Thorn.

The emails reveal a continuous and close working relationship between the two sides in the months following the roll out of the CSAM proposal, with the Commission repeatedly facilitating Thorn’s access to crucial decision-making venues attended by ministers and representatives of EU member states.

The European Ombudsman is looking into the Commission’s refusal to grant access to a host of other internal documents pertaining to Johansson’s proposal.

FGS Global, a major lobbying firm hired by Thorn and paid at least 600,000 euros in 2022 alone, said Thorn would not comment for this story. Johansson also did not respond to an interview request.

Enter ‘WeProtect Global Alliance’

Among the few traces of Thorn’s activities in the EU’s lobby transparency register is a contribution of 219,000 euros in 2021 to the WeProtect Global Alliance, the organisation that had a video conference with Kutcher and Von der Leyen in late 2020.

WeProtect is the offspring of two governmental initiatives – one co-founded by the Commission and the United States, the other by Britain.

They merged in 2016 and, in April 2020, as momentum built for legislation to CSAM with client-side scanning technology, WeProtect was transformed from a British government-funded entity into a putatively independent ‘foundation’ registered at a residential address in Lisse, on the Dutch North Sea coast.

Its membership includes powerful security agencies, a host of governments, Big Tech managers, NGOs, and one of Johansson’s most senior cabinet officials, Antonio Labrador Jimenez, who heads the Commission’s team tasked with fighting CSAM.

Minutes after the proposed regulation was unveiled in May last year, Labrador Jimenez emailed his Commission colleagues: “The EU does not accept that children cannot be protected and become casualties of policies that put any other values or rights above their protection, whatever these may be.”

He said he was looking forward to “seeing many of you in Brussels during the WeProtect Global Alliance summit” the following month.

Labrador Jimenez officially joined the WeProtect Policy Board in July 2020, after the Commission decided to join and fund it as “the central organisation for coordinating and streamlining global efforts and regulatory improvements” in the fight against CSAM. WeProtect public documents, however, show Labrador Jimenez participating in WeProtect board meetings in December 2019.

Commenting on this story, the Commission said Labrador Jimenez “does not receive any kind of compensation for his participation in the WeProtect Global Alliance Management Board, and performs this function as part of his duties at the Commission”.

Labrador Jimenez’s position on the WeProtect Board, however, raises questions about how the Commission uses its participation in the organisation to promote Johannson’s proposal.

When Labrador Jimenez briefed fellow WeProtect Board members about the proposed regulation in July 2022, notes from the meeting show that “the Board discussed the media strategy of the legislation”.

Labrador Jimenez has also played a central role in drafting and promoting Johansson’s regulation, the same proposal that WeProtect is actively campaigning for with EU funding. And next to him on the board sits Thorn’s Julie Cordua, as well as government officials from the US and Britain [the latter currently pursuing its own Online Safety Bill], Interpol, and United Arab Emirates colonel, Dana Humaid Al Marzouqi, who chairs or participates in numerous international police task forces.

Between 2020 and 2023, Johansson’s Directorate-General awarded almost 1 million euros to WeProtect to organise the June 2022 summit in Brussels, which was dedicated to the fight against CSAM and activities to enhance law enforcement collaboration.

WeProtect did not reply directly to questions concerning its funding arrangements with the Commission or to what extent its advocacy strategies are shaped by the governments and stakeholders sitting on its policy board.

In a statement, it said it is led “by a multi-stakeholder Global Policy Board; members include representatives from countries, international and civil society organisations, and the technology industry.”

The financing

Another member of the WeProtect board alongside Labrador Jimenez is Douglas Griffiths, a former official of the US State Department and currently president of the Geneva-based Oak Foundation, a group of philanthropic organisations around the world providing grants “to make the world a safer, fairer, and more sustainable place to live”.

Oak Foundation has provided WeProtect with “generous support for strategic communications”, according to WeProtect financial statements from 2021.

From Oak Foundation’s annual financial reports, it is clear it has a long-term commitment to aiding NGOs tackling child abuse. It is also funding the closely linked network of civil society organisations and lobby groups promoting Johansson’s proposed regulation, many of which have helped build an umbrella entity called the European Child Sexual Abuse Legislation Advocacy Group, ECLAG.

ECLAG, which launched its website a few weeks after Johansson’s proposal was announced in May 2022, acts as a coordination platform for some of the most active organisations lobbying in favour of the CSAM legislation. Its steering committee includes Thorn and a host of well-known children’s rights organisations such as ECPAT, Eurochild, Missing Children Europe, Internet Watch Foundation, and Terre des Hommes.

Another member is Brave Movement, which came into being in April 2022, a month before’s Johansson’s regulation was rolled out, thanks to a $10.3 million contribution by the Oak Foundation to Together for Girls, a US-based non-profit that fights sexual violence against children.

Oak Foundation has also given to Thorn – $5 million in 2019. In 2020, it gave $250,000 to ECPAT to engage “policy makers to include children’s interests in revisions to the Digital Services Act and on the impact of end-to-end encryption” and a further $100,000 in support of efforts to end “the online child sexual abuse and exploitation of children in the digital space”. The same year it authorised a $990,000 grant to Eurochild, another NGO coalition that campaigns for children’s rights in Brussels.

In 2021, Oak Foundation gave Thorn a further $250,000 to enhance its coordinating role in Brussels with the aim of ensuring “that any legislative solutions and instruments coming from the EU build on and enhance the existing ecosystem of global actors working to protect children online”.

In 2022, the foundation granted ECPAT a three-year funding package of $2.79 million “to ensure that children’s rights are placed at the centre of digital policy processes in the European Union”. The WeProtect Global Alliance received $2.33 million, also for three years, “to bring together governments, the private sector, civil society, and international organisations to develop policies and solutions that protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse online”.

In a response for this story, Oak Foundation said it does not “advocate for proposed legislation nor work on the details of those policy recommendations”.

It did not respond directly to questions concerning the implications of Johansson’s regulation on privacy rights. A spokesperson said the foundation supports organisations that “advocate for new policies, with a specific focus in the EU, US, and UK, where opportunities exist to establish precedent for other governments”.

‘Divide and conquer’

Brave Movement’s internal advocacy documents lay out a comprehensive strategy for utilising the voices of abuse survivors to leverage support for Johansson’s proposal in European capitals and, most importantly, within the European Parliament, while targeting prominent critics.

The organisation has enjoyed considerable access to Johansson. In late April 2022, it hosted the Commissioner in an online ‘Global Survivors Action Summit’ – a rare feat in the Brussels bubble for an organisation that was launched just weeks earlier.

An internal strategy document from November 2022 the same year leaves no doubts about the organisation’s role in rallying support for Johansson’s proposal.

“The main objective of the Brave Movement mobilisation around this proposed legislation is to see it passed and implemented throughout the EU,” it states.

“If this legislation is adopted, it will create a positive precedent for other countries… which we will invite to follow through with similar legislation.”

In April this year, the Brave Movement held an ‘Action Day’ outside the European Parliament, where a group of survivors of online child sexual abuse were gathered “to demand EU leaders be brave and act to protect millions of children at risk from the violence and trauma they faced”.

Johansson joined the photo-op.

Survivors of such abuse are key to the Brave Movement’s strategy of winning over influential MEPs.

“Once the EU Survivors taskforce is established and we are clear on the mobilised survivors, we will establish a list pairing responsible survivors with MEPs – we will ‘divide and conquer’ the MEPs by deploying in priority survivors from MEPs’ countries of origin,” its advocacy strategy reads.

Conservative Spanish MEP Javier Zarzalejos, the lead negotiator on the issue in the parliament, according to the Brave Movement strategy has called for “strong survivors’ mobilisation in key countries like Germany”.

Brave Movement’s links with the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs goes deeper still: its Europe campaign manager, Jessica Airey, worked on communications for the Directorate-General between October 2022 and February 2023, promoting Johansson’s regulation.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Airey worked “closely with the policy team who developed the [child sexual abuse imagery] legislation in D.4 [where Labrador Jimenez works] and partners like Thorn”.

She also “worked horizontally with MEPs, WeProtect Global Alliance, EPCAT”.

Asked about a possible conflict of interest in Airey’s work for Brave Movement on the same legislative file, the European Commission responded that Airey was appointed as a trainee and so no formal permission was required. It did say, however, that “trainees must maintain strict confidentiality regarding all knowledge acquired during training. Unauthorised disclosure of non-public documents or information is strictly prohibited, with this obligation extending beyond the training period.”

Brave Movement said it is “proud of the diverse alliances we have built and the expert team we have recruited, openly, to achieve our strategic goals”, pointing out that last year alone one online safety hotline received 32 million reports of child sexual abuse content.

Brave Movement has enlisted expert support: its advocacy strategy was drafted by UK consultancy firm Future Advocacy, while its ‘toolkit’, which aims to “build a beating drum of support for comprehensive legislation that protects children” in the EU, was drafted with the involvement of Purpose, a consultancy whose European branch is controlled by French Capgemini SE.

Purpose specialises in designing campaigns for UN agencies and global companies, using “public mobilisation and storytelling” to “shift policies and change public narratives”.

Beginning in 2022, the Oak Foundation gave Purpose grants worth $1.9 million to “help make the internet safer for children”.

Since April 2022, Purpose representatives have met regularly with ECLAG – the network of civil society groups and lobbyists – to refine a pan-European communications strategy.

Documents seen by this investigation also show they met with members of Johansson’s team.

A ‘BeBrave Europe Task Force’ meeting in January this year involved the ECLAG steering group, Purpose EU, Justice Initiative and Labrador Jimenez’s unit within the Directorate-General. In 2023 the foundation that launched the Justice Initiative, the Guido Fluri Foundation, received $416,667 from Oak Foundation.

The Commission, according to its own notes of the meeting, “recommended that when speaking with stakeholders of the negotiation, the organisations should not forget to convey a sense of urgency on the need to find an agreement on the legislation this year”.

This coordinated messaging resulted this year in a social media video featuring Johansson, Zarzalejos, and representatives of the organisations behind ECLAG promoting a petition in favour of her regulation.

Disproportionate infringement of rights

Some 200 kilometres north from Brussels, in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, a bright office on the edge of the city’s famous red light district marks the frontline of the fight to identify and remove CSAM in Europe.

‘Offlimits’, previously known as the Online Child Abuse Expertise Agency, or EOKM, is Europe’s oldest hotline for children and adults wanting to report abuse, whether happening behind closed doors or seen on video circulating online.

In 2022, its seven analysts processed 144,000 reports, and 60 per cent concerned illegal content. The hotline sends requests to remove the content to web hosting providers and, if the material is considered particularly serious, to the police and Interpol.

Offlimits director between 2015 and September this year, Arda Gerkens is deeply knowledgeable of EU policy on the matter. Yet unlike the likes of Thorn, she had little luck accessing Johansson.

“I invited her here but she never came,” said Gerkens, a former Socialist Party MP in the Dutch parliament.

“Commissioner Johansson and her staff visited Silicon Valley and big North American companies,” she said. Companies presenting themselves as NGOs but acting more like tech companies have influenced Johansson’s regulation, Gerkens said, arguing that Thorn and groups like it “have a commercial interest”.

Gerkens said that the fight against child abuse must be deeply improved and involve an all-encompassing approach that addresses welfare, education, and the need to protect the privacy of children, along with a “multi-stakeholder approach with the internet sector”.

“Encryption,” she said, “is key to protecting kids as well: predators hack accounts searching for images”.

It’s a position reflected in some of the concerns raised by the Dutch in ongoing negotiations on a compromise text at the EU Council, arguing in favour of a less intrusive approach that protects encrypted communication and addresses only material already identified and designated as CSAM by monitoring groups and authorities.

A Dutch government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The Netherlands has serious concerns with regard to the current proposals to detect unknown CSAM and address grooming, as current technologies lead to a high number of false positives.”

“The resulting infringement of fundamental rights is not proportionate.”

Self-interest

In June 2022, shortly after the roll out of Johansson’s proposal, Thorn representatives sat down with one of the commissioner’s cabinet staff, Monika Maglione. An internal report of the meeting, obtained for this investigation, notes that Thorn was interested to understand how “bottlenecks in the process that goes from risk assessment to detection order” would be dealt with.

Detection orders are a crucial component of the procedure set out within Johansson’s proposed regulation, determining the number of people to be surveilled and how often.

European Parliament sources say that in technical meetings, Zarzalejos, the rapporteur on the proposal, has argued in favour of detection orders that do not necessarily focus on individuals or groups of suspects, but are calibrated to allow scanning for suspicious content.

This, experts say, would unlock the door to the general monitoring of EU citizens, otherwise known as mass surveillance.

Asked to clarify his position, Zarzalejos’ office responded: “The file is currently being discussed closed-doors among the shadow rapporteurs and we are not making any comments so far”.

In the same meeting with Maglione, Thorn representatives expressed a “willingness to collaborate closely with COM [European Commission] and provide expertise whenever useful, in particular with respect to the creation of the database of indicators to be hosted by the EU Centre” as well as to prepare “communication material on online child sexual abuse”.

The EU Centre to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse, which would be created under Johansson’s proposal, would play a key role in helping member states and companies implement the legislation; it would also vet and approve scanning technologies, as well as purchase and offer them to small and medium companies.

As a producer of such scanning technologies, a role for Thorn in supporting the capacity building of the EU Centre database would be of significant commercial interest to the company.

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal Foundation, the US non-for-profit foundation behind the Signal encrypted chat application, says that AI companies that produce scanning systems are effectively promoting themselves as clearing houses and a liability buffer for big tech companies, sensing the market potential.

“The more they frame this as a huge problem in the public discourse and to regulators, the more they incentivise large tech companies to outsource their dealing of the problems to them,” Whittaker said in an interview for this story.

Effectively, such AI firms are offering tech companies a “get out of responsibility free card”, Whittaker said, by telling them, “’You pay us (…) and we will host the hashes, we will maintain the AI system, we will do whatever it is to magically clean up this problem”.

“So it’s very clear that whatever their incorporation status is, that they are self-interested in promoting child exploitation as a problem that happens “online,” and then proposing quick (and profitable) technical solutions as a remedy to what is in reality a deep social and cultural problem. (…) I don’t think governments understand just how expensive and fallible these systems are, that we’re not looking at a one-time cost. We’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars indefinitely due to the scale that this is being proposed at.”

Lack of scientific input

Johansson has dismissed the idea that the approach she advocates will unleash something new or extreme, telling MEPs last year that it was “totally false to say that with a new regulation there will be new possibilities for detection that don’t exist today”.

But experts question the science behind it.

Matthew Daniel Green, a cryptographer and security technologist at John Hopkins University, said there was an evident lack of scientific input into the crafting of her regulation.

“In the first impact assessment of the EU Commission there was almost no outside scientific input and that’s really amazing since Europe has a terrific scientific infrastructure, with the top researchers in cryptography and computer security all over the world,” Green said.

AI-driven scanning technology, he warned, risks exposing digital platforms to malicious attacks and would undermine encryption.

“If you touch upon built-in encryption models, then you introduce vulnerabilities,” he said. “The idea that we are going to be able to have encrypted conversations like ours is totally incompatible with these scanning automated systems, and that’s by design.”

In a blow to the advocates of AI-driven CSAM scanning, US tech giant Apple said in late August that it is impossible to implement CSAM-scanning while preserving the privacy and security of digital communications. The same month, UK officials privately admitted to tech companies that there is no existing technology able to scan end-to-end encrypted messages without undermining users’ privacy.

According to research by Imperial College academics Ana-Maria Cretu and Shubham Jain, published last May, AI driven Client Side Scanning systems could be quietly tweaked to perform facial recognition on user devices without the user’s knowledge. They warned of more vulnerabilities that have yet to be identified.

“Once this technology is rolled out to billions of devices across the world, you can’t take it back”, they said.

Law enforcement agencies are already considering the possibilities it offers.

In July 2022, the head of Johansson’s Directorate-General, Monique Pariat, visited Europol to discuss the contribution the EU police agency could make to the fight against CSAM, in a meeting attended by Europol executive director Catherine de Bolle.

Europol officials floated the idea of using the proposed EU Centre to scan for more than just CSAM, telling the Commission, “There are other crime areas that would benefit from detection”. According to the minutes, a Commission official “signalled understanding for the additional wishes” but “flagged the need to be realistic in terms of what could be expected, given the many sensitivities around the proposal.”

Ross Anderson, professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, said the debate around AI-driven scanning for CSAM has overlooked the potential for manipulation by law enforcement agencies.

“The security and intelligence community have always used issues that scare lawmakers, like children and terrorism, to undermine online privacy,” he said.

“We all know how this works, and come the next terrorist attack, no lawmaker will oppose the extension of scanning from child abuse to serious violent and political crimes.”

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 1 year ago

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what's the mark watson thing?

Well, it is Google-able, and I’ve kind of hesitated to actually spell it out on this blog, just because I feel gross writing about that kind of celebrity gossip (I realize I write things about famous comedians’ lives on this blog all the time, but something related to their actual love life feels like a new level of tawdry). But I guess it’s not really any better to vaguely refer to it, as I’ve done a few times, than it is to spell it out. So since you asked, I’ll do that.

I’ll try to tell the story according to his comedy material, because anything he’s put in a stand-up routine doesn’t count as tabloid-style gossip, it’s just reporting on comedy. Last year I listened to all his radio shows in chronological order (those radio shows being basically made up of chunks of his stand-up, so it’s the closest I can get to hearing his old stand-up shows aside from the DVDs he released in 2011 and 2014 and a couple of other recordings I’ve found, which also follow the same pattern), the story is: early radio shows from the late 00s involve him talking constantly about being really excited to have a (relatively recent) wife. Next few years of shows involve a whole lot of jokes about anxiety about having babies and what it’s like to fight with your wife a lot. Then moves into a lot of jokes about drinking too much, more severe fighting while trying to raise children, drinking wine in hotel rooms on tour to escape family. Then he stops referring to his marriage at all for a bit, then in the late 2010s starts doing some jokes about what separation and divorce are like. In 2022, does a show that’s a bit unusually aggressive for him (still not very aggressive, it’s Mark Watson), talking about depression and divorce and having a drinking problem that is a cause and effect of both those things, a brief story about how he’d lived in Adam Hills’ attic for six months as his marriage/life fell apart. His 2023 show took this even farther, with a couple of jokes about being frustrated that he has to pay so much alimony, and some of the struggles of co-parenting with an ex-wife.

Things I know even though I haven’t heard it in a comedy routine: after getting divorced around 2018, he was in a relationship with Lianne Coop, the comedy producer who runs the Inpatient Productions company with him and occasionally appears in No More Jockeys videos. A relationship that I’m fairly sure ended in mid-2023, because I heard him do some stand-up in February that said his son had Googled him and learned about his ex-wife and current girlfriend, but when he streamed the same stand-up show from Edinburgh in August, he said his son had Googled him and learned about his ex-wife as well as the woman who until recently was his girlfriend, a change that I think made the bit more convoluted and work less well. Almost as though comedians don’t plan their love lives around what will make a line in their show sound smoothest. After seeing that, I said that’s probably the theme for next year’s show sewn up, I guess he’s got a breakup show coming. Though I now think he may have bigger issues than that to discuss next year.

I give the background because it is relevant to why I care about the recent revelations, which are that it turns out the reason his marriage fell apart is he had a three-year affair, including while his wife was pregnant with their second child. If this were a comedian I find funny but their material weren’t all that personal, I’d find it easier to separate the art from the artist.

But in this case, Mark Watson has been talking about that part of his personal life for years. Not just in stand-up, either. He did nine episodes of Sofie Hagan’s podcast from 2017 to the end of 2020, in which he’d come on every 6-12 months and they’d have a long, involved conversation about their personal lives, their mental health, their recovery from difficult things, which in Mark’s case included divorce. He talked about coming back from suicidal thoughts, from self-hatred, a lot of serious stuff that he was able to discuss insightfully and interestingly and at times in a way I found really emotionally moving and resonant, because he’s intelligent and analytical. But I did notice, during all those podcast episodes and also all his stand-up material, that while he talked about the pain of a marriage ending, he never actually explained why or how it ended. I just figured he wanted to keep that private, which is absolutely fair enough. It was a contrast, being so open about many things and keeping that topic closed, but celebrities should be allowed to do that. To open up about deeply personal things without being expected to tell us everything.

But now that we know what he was avoiding telling us, it feels pretty fucking disingenuous to me. He didn’t have to tell us why his marriage ended, but if he wasn’t going to tell us that, I think he shouldn’t have spent all those years talking about it at all. Because talking about it without mentioning the fact that it was all his fault is pretty misleading. Obviously got him a fair bit of unearned sympathy. It’s a new piece of context that makes me look back at years of his comedy material, and stuff he’s staid on podcasts (on Sofie’s podcast, and a couple of others, he did a really good one on Susan Calman’s mental health podcast in I think 2018), in a new light.

So that’s my defense for caring, at least a bit, about a celebrity affair/breakup – it is related to his work. I’m a lot less disposed toward hearing him complain about the pain of divorce when I know it wasn’t a mutual no-fault process, but him facing the consequences of something horrible he did to his wife.

Also, a whole lot of the appeal of Mark Watson’s comedy is based on him being likeable. I’m thinking of John Mulaney’s latest show, which opens with him saying “likeability is a prison”, as his explanation for how it felt to be vilified when he failed to live up to the “likeable” image he’d created to his fans. And I saw his point, I really did. I think there is no defense for what the tabloids or fans did to John Mulaney when he got divorced, which is why I’ve filled this post with about 80 caveats so far to try to avoid doing the same thing to Mark Watson. Celebrities should be allowed to be flawed human beings without tabloids or the public on Twitter jumping all over them for being insufficiently likeable.

But also, I would say the same thing about Mark Watson that I said about John Mulaney’s “likeability is a prison” line, which is that “don’t cheat on your wife” isn’t that high a bar. I said something yesterday about how the lesson here should be to not put celebrities on pedestals, but I don’t think this is all that high a pedestal. I didn’t find out that Mark Watson was rude to a stranger after a bad day once, making him disappointingly imperfect. I found out he carried on an affair for three fucking years including while his wife was pregnant. I mean… fucking hell. Three years. That’s not one mistake, where things get out of hand and then you feel terrible and never do it again. Surely there’s a happy medium somewhere between “Mark Watson has to be perfect” and “Mark Watson can have a 3-year affair and that’s fine”. Some middle ground where celebrities can be flawed but we’re still allowed to get mad when they do something absolutely awful.

Also, I don’t think I had Mark Watson in that prison of likeability. I knew he had, as his friend Tim Minchin would say and for lack of a less dramatic term, a dark side. If you only know him from panel shows and stuff it seems like his persona is of a really really nice innocuous guy, and I do like the really really nice harmless Mark Watson from panel shows, but I think my favourite side of Mark Watson is the darker stuff that comes out in his stand-up sometimes, when he gets a bit aggressive, gets into rougher topics like depression and alcohol and anger and jealousy. I never expected Mark Watson to always be sweet and innocent. I just… didn’t expect this. This new context for all his old bits.

But even if I like aggressive and dark Mark Watson just as much I like sweet and nice Mark Watson, that’s still all based on him seeming like the kind of person I like, and therefore making me want to hear what a person like that has to say. His humour is tied more tightly to who he is than it would be if he were a less personal comedian. So yeah, learning new stuff about who he is changes how I can enjoy his work. Makes it harder to separate the art from the artist. If I don't like him personally anymore, then it's no longer as much fun to hear what he has to say.

I don’t think Mark Watson should be canceled. And I do think some people should be canceled. I think comedians or other famous people who do horrible things to innocent people in their personal lives should lose their fans and ability to make money off their public image. But that should apply to predators and things like that. This isn’t that, I don’t think there should be professional consequence for cheating on your wife. It is, when it comes down to it, his own business. But I can't help that it changes the way I feel about him.

There’s also the question of why he said this publicly now, after not saying it for so many years. And he did choose to say it, by the way. This wasn’t some tabloids uncovering it through dirty journalism. He talked about it in a recent interview of his own volition. And he did, to his credit, say he regrets it and he knows it was an awful thing to do and he’s sorry and he makes no excuses. Which I think would be a plausible defense… if it happened one time and then he felt awful enough to stop. But three fucking years… Jesus Christ, I don’t know how anyone could keep that up for so long.

I don’t know why he decided to talk about it now. The most horribly, horribly cynical guess would be that his autobiographical book is just coming out and he wanted something in the papers that’s interesting about his personal life to make it sell better. I want to believe that’s not what happened, but I have to say it’s crossed my mind. I pre-ordered his book months ago, paid extra for a signed and dedicated copy, and I rather regret that now. I haven’t received it, and when I do I’ll still read it. But it feels weird.

It is also possible that he just decided to talk publicly about it now because his other relationship has ended recently, maybe that changed how he looks at things. Or maybe he didn’t want to worry about it “coming out” anymore. There is some stuff in Sofie Hagan's latest show that may possibly suggest that what was showcased on their podcast conversations may not have been the beautifully deep healthy cross-gender friendship it appeared to be, because actually nothing good is real and you can't trust anything, and that could have made him worried that someone else is going to put his secrets out there so he'd rather get them out himself. Point being that I can think of several things besides the release of his book that happened this year and could have caused this, and I really hope one of them was the cause, rather than the incredibly cynical possibility that it was for book publicity.

All right, this has been the comedian gossip section of the blog. Likeability is a prison but also I'd prefer it if my favourite comedians would keep the extra-marital affairs to under three years. Surely it's not too parasocial to say that.

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