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wily-one24 · 4 months ago

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The easy one to ask for me is Olivia Benson. But in case someone already has or you want a different choice: Amanda Rollins or Alex Cabot.

Time to buy a lotto ticket, because Imma do all three (!!! in my dreams, right?)

OLIVIA BENSON

--> How I feel about this character:

I mean, it's no secret that I love Olivia Benson.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about SVU and how it's lasted a long time. It's not just because the stories are interesting (they are) or even titilating (sexual assault, molestation, murder, they all have the possibility of titilation, but I don't think SVU goes there... not often at any rate... they do a pretty good job of not glorifying the abuse and horror).

A large part is, of course, Olivia Benson. She is the beating heart of SVU.

Olivia is strong, empathetic, fierce, she takes no prisoners, her morals are strong, she is caring and protective, and she will fight like hell for justice, sometimes at great personal cost.

Olivia is the person each of us has needed at one or more points in our lives. Also the person that the majority of us did not get.

Mariska talks about fans sending her letters to tell her how much Olivia has helped them. And it's true.

We have all wanted and needed an Olivia in our lives. And we have all, to some degree, wanted to be Olivia.

She is not perfect, she has her flaws, but they are easily overlooked for all the benefits she brings.

And we have watched her from baby Benson to seasoned Captain. We have grown with her.

She gives us hope.

And that is why we have 25 seasons of SVU.

--> All the people I ship romantically with this character:

Well, Elliot obviously. It's very strange, I don't even really like Elliot that much and during my rewatches by the end of S12 I am just counting down the episodes until he leaves. BUT, he is Olivia's main choice and he makes her happy. So, because I love Olivia, I want her to have what she wants.

Alex. Amanda. Barba. Langan (thought I get why they never went there). Rita a little.

I don't really read much of anything besides EO, but in my little dreams, I think the others would make excellent partners, or at least bedmates.

--> My non romantic OTP for this character:

Just to completely step on my own toes from the previous answer, but...

Barba. I adored their canon relationship, the besties that they were. They adored each other and were there when each needed the other. She needed a strong friendship like that, that wasn't tied to being their boss.

Obviously Noah. She waited so long for that boy. She loves him dearly and he loves her and they deserve all the happiness in the world together.

--> My unpopular opinion about this caracter:

I don't know if I really have one. She's a little too quick to anger and she's always a little too ready to break the law to suit her needs. But these are not opinions.

Perhaps, despite her later claims that she never wanted to be part of the "good ol' boys club" and how she acts distraught at the possibility one of her old interrogations may have been a forced confession... in the early years Olivia is all too ready to look the other way and, in fact, join in when Elliot and even Fin are being overly rough and forceful and breaking about ten different codes of police conduct.

There was one episode I saw recently where Elliot got all up in a step father's face, yelling, red faced, almost spitting out his hatred as he spoke of this man's lust for his daughter that they assumed he'd raped... it was quite heavy handed. And the guy eventually reacts and goes at Elliot. Olivia is instantly cuffing this guy and gleefully arresting him for assaulting a police officer. And like... Olivia Margaret Benson, you litereally just WATCHED Elliot provoke him.

Elliot's violence got results and she was all too ready to excuse him for it.

She never would have grown into the amazing police woman she is had Elliot stayed around. She gave him way too much power in that partnership.

--> One thing I wish would happen/had happened with this character:

I want somebody to choose her.

So many of the people she has loved have ended up leaving, because they stayed too long, because they sacrificed their own morals for her, because they broke the law for her, because... because... because... and she even says "I didn't ASK you to" and it makes no difference.

I'm not saying they didn't have good reason to leave. They're adults they can choose.

One thing I have consistently said, is that the show repeats "the average stint in SVU is two years" several times. That is, of course, unless you meet Olivia Benson. Then it becomes your life's purpose. She doesn't see that these people have stayed for her, stayed longer than is healthy, longer than they meant to.... and all because of her. She doesn't see that, she sees them leave.

But just once I wish someone would choose to leave the job and stay with her.

Girl deserves a bit of happiness and stability.

#dahllaz #look ma i got an ask #olivia benson #some thinky thoughts

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nicklloydnow · 21 days ago

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“Voting is widely thought to be one of the most important things a person can do. But the reasons people give for why they vote (and why everyone else should too) are flawed, unconvincing, and sometimes even dangerous. The case for voting relies on factual errors, misunderstandings about the duties of citizenship, and overinflated perceptions of self-worth. There are some good reasons for some people to vote some of the time. But there are a lot more bad reasons to vote, and the bad ones are more popular.

(…)

In all of American history, a single vote has never determined the outcome of a presidential election. And there are precious few examples of any other elections decided by a single vote. A 2001 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter looked at 56,613 contested congressional and state legislative races dating back to 1898. Of the 40,000 state legislative elections they examined, encompassing about 1 billion votes cast, only seven were decided by a single vote (two were tied). A 1910 Buffalo contest was the lone single-vote victory in a century's worth of congressional races. In four of the 10 ultra-close campaigns flagged in the paper, further research by the authors turned up evidence that subsequent recounts unearthed margins larger than the official record initially suggested.

The numbers just get more ridiculous from there. In a 2012 Economic Inquiry article, Columbia University political scientist Andrew Gelman, statistician Nate Silver, and University of California, Berkeley, economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the 2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of a randomly selected vote determining the outcome of a presidential election is about one in 60 million. In a couple of key states, the chance that a random vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10 million, which drags voters into the dubious company of people gunning for the Mega-Lotto jackpot. The authors optimistically suggest that even with those terrible odds, you may still choose to vote because "the payoff is the chance to change national policy and improve (one hopes) the lives of hundreds of millions, compared to the alternative if the other candidate were to win." But how big does that payoff have to be to make voting worthwhile?

(…)

In their seminal 1993 book Decision and Democracy: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge University Press), University of Virginia philosopher and reason Contributing Editor Loren Lomasky and his co-author, Geoffrey Brennan, offer an alternative theory of what drives voters. But first they offer a methodology for calculating the value of a vote. On their account, the expected utility of a vote is a function of the probability that the vote will be decisive, delivering gains (to the individual or society as a whole) if the preferred candidate wins. The probability of casting the decisive vote decreases slowly as the size of the voting pool gets larger, but it drops dramatically when polls show that one candidate has even a slight lead. Which means that in a presidential election, where the number of voters is about 120 million and one candidate is usually polling a point or two ahead on Election Day, you're screwed.

In his brilliant 2011 book The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press), on which I have relied heavily for this article, Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan (no relation to Geoffrey Brennan) applied the Lomasky/Brennan method to a hypothetical scenario in which the victory of one candidate would produce additional GDP growth of 0.25 percent in one year. Assuming a very close election where that candidate is leading in the polls only slightly and a random voter has a 50.5 percent chance of casting a ballot for her, the expected value of a vote for that candidate is $4.77 x 10 to the ?2,650th power. That's 2,648 orders of magnitude less than a penny.

(…)

Those figures reflect 2006 GDP figures and 2004 voting totals, but it almost doesn't matter what batch of reasonable numbers you plug into the equation. Say you think victory is worth 10 or 100 or 1,000 times more than the roughly $33 billion that 0.25 percent of GDP amounts to. Say the polls show a gap of two percentage points between the candidates. In any plausible scenario, the expected utility of your vote still amounts to approximately bupkes. A vote for a third-party candidate pushes the figure into even more infinitesimal territory.

(…)

In October 2000, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw penned a column for Fortune called "Why Some People Shouldn't Vote." During his years-long stint as a columnist for the magazine, this was the only article the editors refused to run. The column, which he published on his personal blog years later, suggests that "the next time a friend of yours tells you he's not voting, don't try to change his mind."

Mankiw's argument draws on a 1996 article by economists Timothy Feddersen of Northwestern University and Wolfgang Pesendorfer of Princeton University that cites the phenomenon of "roll off"—people who make it all the way inside the polyester curtains on Election Day and then leave some blanks on their ballots—to illustrate the point that people who believe themselves ill-informed routinely choose not to vote, thereby increasing the quality of voters who actually pull the lever for one side or the other. There is some additional evidence for this claim: Education is one of the two best predictors of voter turnout (the other is age). Better-educated people are much more likely to vote, which suggests that the pool of voters is better informed and more qualified to make election-related judgments than the pool of nonvoters.

"A classic argument for why democracies need widespread public education is that education makes people better voters," Mankiw writes. "If this is true, then the less educated should show up at the polls less often. They are rationally delegating the decision to their better educated neighbors."

What Mankiw doesn't go on to say, perhaps because he fears insulting his readers, is that people aren't particularly good at knowing whether or not they are well-informed. Many people who follow politics closely hold views that are dangerous and wrong (see George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan's October 2007 reason cover story "The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters"). Even if everyone who had the slightest suspicion that he was not knowledgeable enough to vote stayed home on Election Day, millions of people would still be casting ill-informed votes.

(…)

Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it's morally wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged—the primary targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns—is likely to have the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.

To explain why we might worry about casting an uninformed vote even when no particular vote is likely to be decisive, Brennan conjures this terrifying thought experiment: Imagine you come across a firing squad about to kill an innocent child. Assume all the bullets will strike at the same time and that there's nothing you can do to stop them. You are invited to be the 101st member of the squad. What do you say? Brennan posits a framework to deal with this kind of hypothetical, the "clean hands principle," which states that "one should not participate in collectively harmful activities when the cost of refraining from such activities is low."

None of this is to suggest that the government should test voters or use some other legal means to limit voting. Instead, this is a private moral concern for each voter. If you believe your vote is likely to be ill-informed or that a particular race is likely to yield an unfair, unjust, or otherwise bad outcome, you should refrain from participating in a collectively harmful activity, thus keeping your hands clean. Get-out-the-vote campaigns promote precisely the kind of morally condemnable ignorant voting we should be discouraging.

(…)

In his 1851 book Social Statics, the English radical Herbert Spencer neatly describes the rhetorical jujitsu surrounding voting, consent, and complaint, then demolishes the argument. Say a man votes and his candidate wins. The voter is then "understood to have assented" to the acts of his representative. But what if he voted for the other guy? Well, then, the argument goes, "by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority." And what if he abstained? "Why then he cannot justly complain…seeing that he made no protest." Spencer tidily sums up: "Curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this." Indeed.

(…)

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Maybe people vote not because of what voting can accomplish, but because they like to vote. They like the message that voting sends about who they are (e.g., the kind of person who cares about poverty, or fiscal responsibility, or what his neighbors think).

Many people like to be perceived as altruists, for example. Voting is one of the cheapest forms of altruism. If you (rightly) believe that the expected material payoff of your vote is near zero, then it's easy enough to vote in a way that maximizes your halo rather than your bottom line. "Voting sociotropically," Jason Brennan writes, "is cheaper and easier than volunteering at a soup kitchen or giving money to Oxfam."

A 2009 survey of 569 professors conducted by philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California at Riverside and Josh Rust of Stetson University reinforces this view: 88 percent said they considered voting in public elections to be morally good. In fact, when asked to rank different acts, the professors reported that they considered voting to be on par with regularly donating blood and giving 10 percent of one's income to charity.

Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan theorize that voting is best understood as an expressive act. Communicating preferences at the ballot box is something people do for its own sake, not a duty they perform or a selfish bid for material gain.

(…)

Bryan Caplan takes the idea a step further. Perhaps, he suggests, voting is more like cheering while watching the same game from your recliner in a darkened living room. If you really try, you can still tell an (ultimately unsatisfying) story about why your actions matter in the rest of the world. After all, your viewership of the game might show up in the television ratings, which boosts the team's advertising revenue. Of course, you're probably not a Nielsen household, so you may not show up at all in the metrics that the team's owners can see. Which leaves solitary game watchers right there with the voters: The main payoff is that you can show up at work the next day and say you did it.

So what's wrong with that? Individual cases of expressive voting in large elections are just as unlikely to affect the outcome of the election as other kinds of voting. But the fact of widespread expressive voting explains why elections are silly season. Politicians offer themselves up as opportunities for expressive voting, as aggregations of easily comprehensible slogans rather than as avatars of sensible policy. Ignorant expressive voters, even rationally ignorant ones, may be committing immoral acts, as Jason Brennan argues.

All of which is a pretty steep price for an "I Voted" sticker.”

“The choice in the elections is between corporate and oligarchic power. Corporate power needs stability and a technocratic government. Oligarchic power thrives on chaos and, as Steve Bannon says, the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Neither are democratic. They have each bought up the political class, the academy and the press. Both are forms of exploitation that impoverish and disempower the public. Both funnel money upwards into the hands of the billionaire class. Both dismantle regulations, destroy labor unions, gut government services in the name of austerity, privatize every aspect of American society, from utilities to schools, perpetuate permanent wars, including the genocide in Gaza, and neuter a media that should, if it was not controlled by corporations and the rich, investigate their pillage and corruption. Both forms of capitalism disembowel the country, but they do it with different tools and have different goals.

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison in their book “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism,” refer to corporate power as “housebroken capitalism.” Housebroken capitalists need consistent government policies and fixed trade agreements because they have made investments that take time, sometimes years, to mature. Manufacturing and agriculture industries are examples of “housebroken capitalism.”

(…)

Monbiot and Hutchison refer to oligarchic power as “warlord capitalism.” Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

The political champions of warlord capitalism are the demagogues of the far right, including Trump, Boris Johnson, Giorgia Meloni, Narendra Modi, Victor Orban and Marine Le Pen. They sow dissension by peddling absurdities, such as the great replacement theory, and dismantling structures that provide stability, such as the European Union. This creates uncertainty, fear and insecurity. Those that orchestrate this insecurity promise, if we surrender even more rights and civil liberties, that they will save us from phantom enemies, such as immigrants, Muslims and other demonized groups.

The epicenters of warlord capitalism are private equity firms. Private equity firms such as Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, buy up and plunder businesses. They pile on debt. They refuse to reinvest. They slash staff. They willfully drive companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain businesses but to harvest them for assets, to make short-term profit. Those who run these firms, such as Leon Black, Henry Kravis, Stephen Schwarzman and David Rubenstein, have amassed personal fortunes in the billions of dollars.

(…)

The wreckage private equity firms and the oligarchs orchestrate, is taken out on workers who are forced into a gig economy and who have seen stable salaries and benefits eradicated. It is taken out on pension funds that are depleted because of usurious fees, or are abolished. It is taken out on our health and safety. Residents of nursing homes, for example, owned by private equity firms, experience 10 percent more deaths — not to mention higher fees — because of staffing shortages and reduced compliance with standards of care.

Private equity firms are an invasive species. They are also ubiquitous. They have acquired educational institutions, utility companies, and retail chains, while bleeding taxpayers hundreds of billions in subsidies which are made possible by bought-and-paid-for prosecutors, politicians, and regulators. What is particularly galling is that many of the industries seized by private equity firms — water, sanitation, electrical grids, hospitals — were paid for out of public funds. They cannibalize the nation, leaving behind shuttered and bankrupt industries.

(…)

The housebroken capitalists are represented by politicians such as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron. But “housebroken capitalism” is no less destructive. It pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the American working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which placed crippling restrictions on union organizing. It revoked the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) which separated commercial banking from investment banking. Tearing down the firewall between commercial and investment banks led to the global financial meltdown in 2007 and 2008, including the collapse of nearly 500 banks. It pushed through the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan as well as the Telecommunications Act under Bill Clinton��s presidency, allowing a handful of corporations to consolidate control of media outlets. It destroyed the old welfare system, 70 percent of the recipients of whom were children. It doubled our prison population and militarized the police. In the process of moving manufacturing to countries such as Mexico, Bangladesh and China, where workers toil in sweatshops, 30 million Americans were subjected to mass layoffs according to figures compiled by the Labor Institute. Meanwhile, it piled up massive deficits — the federal budget deficit rose to $1.8 trillion in 2024, with total national debt approaching $36 trillion — and neglected our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, while spending more on our military than all the other major powers on Earth combined.

These two forms of capitalism are species of totalitarian capitalism, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” In each form of capitalism, democratic rights are abolished. The public is under constant surveillance. Labor unions are dismantled or defanged. The media serves the powerful and dissident voices are silenced or criminalized. Everything is commoditized from the natural world to our relationships. Grassroots and popular movements are outlawed. The ecocide continues. Politics is burlesque.

(…)

The Weimarization of the American working class is by design. It is about creating a world of masters and serfs, of empowered oligarchic and corporate elites and a disempowered public. And it is not only our wealth that is taken from us. It is our liberty. The so-called self-regulating market, as the economist Karl Polanyi writes in “The Great Transformation,” always ends with mafia capitalism and a mafia political system. A system of self-regulation, Polanyi warns, leads to “the demolition of society.”

If you vote for Harris or Trump — I have no intention of voting for any candidate who sustains the genocide in Gaza — you are voting for one form of rapacious capitalism over another. All the other issues, from gun rights to abortion, are tangential and used to distract the public from the civil war within capitalism. The tiny circle of power these two forms of capitalism embody, exclude the public. These are elite clubs, clubs where wealthy members inhabit each side of the divide, or at times go back and forth, but are impenetrable to outsiders.

The irony is that the unchecked greed of the corporatists, the housebroken capitalists, created a small number of billionaires who became their nemesis, the warlord capitalists. If the pillage is not halted, if we do not restore through popular movements control over the economy and the political system, then warlord capitalism will triumph. The warlord capitalists will cement into place neo-feudalism, while the public is distracted and divided by the antics of killer clowns like Trump.

I see nothing on the horizon to avoid this fate.

Trump, for now, is the figurehead of warlord capitalism. But he did not create it, does not control it and can easily be replaced. Harris, whose nonsensical ramblings can make Biden look focused and coherent, is the vacuous, empty suit the technocrats adore.

Pick your poison. Destruction by corporate power or destruction by oligarchy. The end result is the same. That is what the two ruling parties offer in November. Nothing else.”

“Yet, 79 years after he killed himself in a Berlin bunker, more than one in 10 (11 percent) of Americans believe the barbaric German tyrant leader had some 'good ideas'.

A DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners poll found that more than one in five (21 percent) of both Gen Z and black voters and 19 percent of Hispanic voters agreed with the statement.

The survey asked 1,000 likely voters whether they think Hitler had some 'good ideas' or if he was 'evil and had no redeeming features.'

77 percent said he was 'evil', 12 said they were 'unsure' and a surprising 11 percent believe he had some redeeming qualities.

When broken down by age group, 21 percent of those under the age of 29 said Hitler had good ideas, compared with 16 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49, seven percent for voters between 50 and 64 and just five percent for those over 65.

Fourteen percent of Donald Trump supporters said Hitler had some positive aspects, compared to nine percent of Kamala Harris.

'If you need an example of the corrosive impact that social media can have on younger Americans' view of the world, this is it,' James Johnson, founder of J.L. Partners, told DailyMail.com of the startling results.

(…)

Earlier this month, TikTok was forced to remove AI-generated and translated videos of Hitler's speeches that had racked up more than one million views.

(…)

A Pew Research poll (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/) in 2020 found that while half of U.S. adults knew what the Holocaust was and when it happened, but less than 50 percent could answer how many Jews were killed and when Hitler came to power.

In December, a DailyMail.com found that one in five young Americans had a positive view of 9/11 mastermind and Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden.

The alarming survey also found three in 10 Gen Z voters believe the views of the anti-Semitic terrorist leader who slaughtered thousands of innocent people were a ‘force for good'.

(…)

Another DailyMail.com poll from October 2023 found one in 10 voters under the age of 30 had a positive view of Hamas, despite the group's murderous attack on Israel that killed more than 1,300 men, women and children.”

#voting #politics #elections #2024 #trump #donald trump #kamala harris #biden #joe biden #vote #chris hedges

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lovelytayforce · 2 years ago

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Shifu's not so complicated relationship with fraud

Why do we as a society not talk about how comfortable Shifu is with committing fraud?

Now, first, let’s talk about fraud itself, this is what it means: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. Or a person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities. Now before we start, I want you all to know I am not condemning Shifu for his crimes, if anything I love the fact Shifu is so unapologetically happy with himself and who he is to just wake up a day after “the worst day of his life”, his words not mine, and choose violence and fraud above all things against his Master’s wishes because he didn’t get his way. Girl boss, Gate keep, and Gaslit amirite? Like what an icon!? I love this and think we should talk about it more cause it’s canon Shifu loves him some fraud and if he doesn’t get his way he will ruin everyone’s day for it. Again, we have to start from the beginning, because again, THIS IS IMPORTANT. “Oogway is choosing the dragon warrior.”, simple enough but the thing is Oogway never says it’s going to be one of the five anywhere in the film. Just “It’s time.” So, it could be anyone, he could point to the west and say “The Dragon warrior is not here but to the west.” and no one could say he lied about anything because it was Shifu hyping the whole town up with posters at the ready for HIS WIN. Not his student, his own. This is all about him. This is all about Shifu. This is Shifu’s show. And I have to highlight this short exchange between Oogway and Shifu before the tournament because it's so telling in their arcs. I know people love the joke, Oogway just dipped on Shifu to deal with his own bs, and tbh I would too cause that’s your family drama, not mine. But he warns Shifu, he feared he would not live to see this day and even implies “Whomever I choose.” again not a single confirmation he would choose one of his students, would bring him peace. And Shifu is left to ponder those words as this elaborate celebration he’d created for this “historic day they’ve been waiting 1,000 years for!” is also for him. Imagine that for a second. You are also a part of this historic day and its results. But Shifu, our beloved idiot does not intake that in immediately, no. He’s ready to show off his five totally awesome lotto tickets, I mean the furious five. That and he’s so focused on his own grandeur, he’s out here sounding like a wrestling narrator, selling the strength and technique of his students rather than who they are outside of that skill. Which shows even he does not understand who the Dragon warrior is meant to be. Again, Oogway only says “I sense the Dragon warrior among us.” That doesn’t mean his students, just anywhere in the area. HE WAS WARNED. And then the Dragon warrior is chosen and Shifu’s immediate response is to try to stop everything even though it’s moving as it should just not in the way he wanted what’s the first thing this man does when his students, specifically Tigress apologizes for failing him?

That’s right baby, FRAUD. Didn’t even hesitate or think about it for longer than 10 seconds. Just straight up creating a toxic situation for fraud and bullying while his Master is alive and well in this world. But as we’ve established Shifu is an angry gatekeeping girl boss. And it only gets worse from here. Shifu not only threatens to kill Po but oh no. Cause that wouldn’t be enough for this Girlboss, okay? No, he’s got to demean and make fun of Po for his body and insinuate how the Dragon warrior is chosen and given the scroll when again, OOGWAY HAS NEVER SAID ANY OF THESE THINGS. And when he realizes Po is aware of the history of the Wuxi finger hold + how it affects the holder, etc, etc and even states “Oogway may have picked you and when I’m through with you. You are going to wish he hadn’t! Are we clear?” which means he’s VERY VERY VERY aware of what he is doing. Shifu willingly committed fraud. And even laughs about his decision, he is so happy with his ingenious idea to underplay what his Master, who sees him as a friend and a loyal student at his side and even supports his efforts for the tournament that wasn’t needed. It was just a flashy appetizer before the main meal. But nonetheless doesn’t tell him to stop because his hard work deserves to be shown off but also Shifu, a 60+ year old man is not only beefing with a 20 year old but also stepping all over Oogway’s decision because he is super upset he’s not the center of attention. He even throws away every shred of honor and dignity within Kung fu to make sure Po feels as unwelcome and inadequate as possible, we’ve all seen the “Level zero” scene but did y’all notice how even the furious five goes to help Po when he falls into the training Hall and Shifu straight up STOPS THEM WITH HIS HAND, and then smiles as Po screams in pain. This man enjoys fraud and revels in it with joy, it brightens his damn day more than the sun itself!!

Shifu willingly breeds and approves of his students also bullying Po because he didn’t get his “I trained the Dragon Warrior” trophy with his five lotto tickets-I mean The furious five… Which translates to the next few scenes that define their latter interactions with Po because students tend to mimic their masters. In good ways or bad ways… Especially to his daughter, Tigress who especially perpetuates Shifu’s ire toward Po even though her goal as clearly shown in the flashback was never the scroll but Shifu’s love as a father. Which the scroll would have never given her cause Shifu’s a selfish twat. Shifu even laughs RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS DAUGHTER, about the fact his beautiful fraud and bullying got Po to quit and he’s so smitten with himself about it as they walk to the training hall and even says “All we can do is resume our training and trust that in time, the true dragon warrior will be revealed.” He’s just outright ignoring the fact, Oogway will never change his mind about who he chose. This is peak delusion ladies and gentlemen. So, if you ever wonder why Tai Lung so easily brought up fraud in their fight scene together, just know from this moment before they opened that door to the training hall. Shifu was all about that fraud to fix his problems. Until he got into one last argument about peach trees and seeds, and Oogway died, showing he wasted his time being a controlling asshole on the final days of his friend's life. And then remembered: “Oh wait bro fraud is actually wrong, oh god what have I done!?” And then he got physically beaten up by the consequences of his actions via Tai Lung and the mere sweet scent of fraud again, which he says no to. And that’s Shifu’s not so complicated relationship with Fraud. We need more fics where people have Po and the five bringing up the fact he was cool with fraud once upon a time. It’d be funny.

#Kung fu panda #Master Shifu #Po ping #Master Tigress #furious five #Oogway #I promise I won't do another one I just had to get this outta my system #cause its FRAUD #its so funny shifu is just doing a crime and doesn't get shit on for it #outside his son beating his ass #how do other masters not clown him for this???#Taylor talks #long post #text post

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mysticbewitched · 2 years ago

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I keep persisting on winning the lottery (it started last december) and whenever I see the lotto results my numbers aren’t there. So I keep on persisting until the present because I know it will happen, and all this delay are just some test of doubts. I am claiming that I’m a lottery winner. I’ll update if I won 🫶

You have already won the lottery for sure, and that's an epic accomplishment.

Try not to pay any attention to the "outside delay" and remember to stay focused on living in the end of being a successful lottery winner.

Continue to enjoy knowing that you have already won the lottery because you are the powerful creator and you are in control of your own reality. Keep persisting in the new state and living in the end with self-belief and confidence in your power. You are most definitely on the right path for success.

I'm so proud of you, anon. Keep it up.

#loassumption #law of assumption #manifestation #manifesting #neville goddard

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thisstableground · 2 years ago

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Hi, I'm curious about something and you're like the one person I know who knows both characters so what would a meeting between Usnavi and Bruno be like? Just wondering

(this is broadway usnavi btw, i haven’t seen the movie)

okay! so, i actually think that bruno and usnavi have way more in common than you’d think just from a quck glance.

usnavi is clearly deeply loved by his community, whereas bruno is shunned by his, but (at least before usnavi’s character arc in the show) both of them feel on the outside of things. it’s probably not a coincidence that usnavi’s the only one breaking the fourth wall in ITH. he’s really no more the main character than, say, nina, but he is the one who chats with the audience directly, and i think that reflects the fact that he feels, like the audience, that he’s watching everyone else’s lives rather than participating himself. the world spins around while i'm frozen to my seat. and isn’t that so similar to bruno, sitting isolated in his room, watching visions of everyone else’s lives but never getting out himself, or putting on his rat plays in his space behind the wall? they both view themselves more in the role of narrator or observer, not a character with their own arc.

it’s obviously got a different vibe. i don’t think usnavi realises quite to what extent he’s loved by the people around him (he seems absolutely baffled by sonny and vanessa being upset about him leaving) but he definitely does not feel unloved. i think bruno also doesn’t realise how loved he is, but in his case he also has very good reasons to feel unloved, and is much less welcomed by the wider community (though perhaps when he was younger, this was different). and i definitely get the impression that usnavi’s relationship with his parents was an affectionate one, not a fraught one like bruno’s.

but there is that sense, for both of them, of having lost the thread of their individual identity under all the pressure of legacy and lost parents and their role and duty to their community. and both of them are stuck. they're living a life that isn't where they want it to be, there are things they want and relationships they crave but they can't move out of the place they're trapped in. there is also the sense that some part of is their own subconscious doing.

i always interpret usnavi’s as a result of anxiety that largely comes from losing his parents, a past that he can't change but wishes he could: what if he makes a wrong choice and something else bad happens, what if he loses someone else or loses his memory of his parents? better keep things exactly the same, to be safe. and bruno's as a result of seeing futures that he can't change but wishes he could, and what if he is cursed? what if he is the reason things go wrong? better knock on wood, hold your breath, spin in a circle, to be safe. when your life throws you a pain that you can't control, you create a routine that you can control, even if it eventually takes over and controls you.

usnavi's goal for a long time is to go back to the dominican republic, apparently, but until abuela claudia wins the lotto it really doesn’t look like he’s got any intention of taking steps towards that. and bruno is very similar - doesn’t actually manage to run away, because he’s too connected to his home and his family, but he doesn’t know how to change things so he just hides, stays the same, watches everything else grow and change without him. i’d bet that usnavi and bruno have had similar thoughts so many times of like “oh i’ll ask vanessa out, i'll sell the store, i'll move to DR. one day. probably. not yet.” and “i’ll talk to my sisters, i'll leave the encanto properly, i'll go outside. at some point. probably. not yet.”

and part of that pressure is external circumstances, but part of it is self-imposed, as a defense mechanism. if you lose yourself in your work or your duty to that extent, if you hide behind the things that are honest about it, then you always have an excuse to tell yourself for the rest. someone does always need coffee or a vision or a stable job or to be protected, that's true, so you can pretend that you're putting that big plan off because you're just too busy with all that other stuff, not because you're scared to do it. stay in the store. stay behind the walls. part of it is kindness, or duty, or practicality, yes. part of it is fear.

oh and speaking of abuelas! (though, again with a very different vibe depending who we're talking abut) i think both of them are very led by their love and respect for the respective maternal figures in their lives, but that this clouds their own desires/goals. claudia says to her own mama, "i spent my life inheriting dreams from you", and i think that without meaning to, the same happens with her and usnavi about moving to the dominican republic. as soon as it was him making the choice alone, he realised that it wasn’t what he wanted. i think there’s always some part of him that does want that a little, i doubt claudia picked that up from nothing, but it’s possible that she read usnavi's vague ideas of going to DR more strongly through her own experience of missing where her family came from, the part of her that regrets not going back to cuba, and didn’t recognise that the indecision probably meant part of usnavi felt it wasn't right for him.

and that’s so similar for alma, though it's much more harsh and hurtful in this instance: she parents her children and grandchildren based on her own history and regret and fear and wishes. she wants a safe place to hide, she wants outsiders not to find them or cause them harm: bruno lives up to that and then some when he goes into the walls. and he convinces himself it's the best choice for himself and for the family, but it isn’t. they probably don’t even realise that it’s something he learned from her example.

neither claudia nor alma mean any harm by this, they try their best, and they sacrifice for it: alma locks away her own grief and her trauma to build a whole community from the ground. claudia could use her lotto money to go back to la vibora after days into weeks into years away from home, but it’s puerto plata that they’re getting a plane ticket for, usnavi's island, not hers. they’re both misguided, their own pasts biasing their perception, but they do love their kids.

anyway!! you asked what it'd be like if they met, not for a list of things they have in common or for an extensive meta about abuelas. tough shit i guess you got that too.

so. i think that usnavi may see the similarities between himself and bruno, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who dislikes people who he can see his own flaws/insecurities in. if anything it just makes him reach out to them more. i think he would want to help. he’s been scared and lonely and saddled with too much responsibility from too young an age and felt like he lost everything before, too, but he’s doing so much better now, and he'd want to extend that hope to anyone else who is struggling similarly. and what bruno needs more than anything is to be shown kindness and acceptance, both things that usnavi can very easily give. i also think usnavi has absolutely no concept of people being weird, he’s extroverted and makes friends easily but he’s not exactly Mr Social Cues himself. bruno could say the most absolute batshit thing you’ve ever heard and usnavi would just be like “lmao yeah i get u :)))"

bruno, on the other hand, probably would struggle to like someone who he felt was too much like himself, but i don’t think he’d see usnavi that way. someone who has struggles, fears, insecurities that bruno does relate to, but who unlike bruno is also bubbly and bouncy and chatty, and who is trying so, so hard all the time to be positive (even when it would be healthier to let themselves feel angry, or sad, or hurt, even when it's blatantly obvious that they are feeling those things), someone who helps other people when they're in the middle of their own crisis and who thinks of themselves as just a totally unremarkable, ordinary, nothing-special person because they don’t see the way that everyone gravitates towards their warmth and kindness. he’s not going to see himself in usnavi. he’s going to see mirabel.

they’d get along great.

#character: usnavi #character: bruno #fandom: in the heights #fandom: encanto #ended up just character analysis instead of what a meeting would be like sorry #the meeting would be a lot of coffee and conversations with 20 different tangents that neither of them are quite following #but theyre having a nice time. neurodivergent solidarity #usnavi would love the rat telenovelas #mirabel and usnavi would also get on so well #this does however increase the risk of sonny and camilo meeting and i think that would be hell for everyone else #edit: i just realised too that i think the way i characterise my versions of usnavi's parents #have kind of a julieta and agustín vibe #usnavi should hang out with the madrigals i think he'd have a lovely time

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