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rubra-wav · 8 months ago

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Snap (part 2) - Honesty

Snap (Part 1) - Deception

A/N: Listen man, I wish I could just say that Vox would just accept 'I love you' with his secret situationship he's terrified of losing and just say it back, fluff instantly ensuing, but we all know that would not be accurate at all.

Ow.

Td;lr for this one for the people who don't wanna read the actual smut - reader who's in a secretly mutually requited situationship with him catches Vox looking at them through cameras and decides to 'punish' him for it. In the end, though, the reader ends up accidentally telling them they love him. This fic ensues. Also, flower symbolism <3

Cw: rating 18+ (there's no smut, but it's part 2 of smut, so yeah), Vox is insecure and delulu as hell, reference to staticmoth/toxic/abusive relationship stuff, angsty asf, ref to physical abuse, miscommunication, hella infuriating - we get there eventually though, gn reader

There was one unbending, unspoken rule between the two of you ; that even with how obviously attracted to one another you were, you would never attempt to push it further.

You had your life, and Vox had his. His image being the clearly most important thing to him that trumped whatever you two had.

Even if your attraction to one-another became far more than just physical, you'd never push it further than friends with benefits for fear of it being unrequited and ruining everything the two of you had.

'I love you.' Spoken hazily, without a second thought however, changed that completely.

It broke all of what your relationship was fundamentally built upon; that being hiding your true feelings beyond what was physical for one another.

'I love you', spoken in your bedroom, under the eyes of the wilting red flowers that had now exposed not one but two deceptions, ruined everything you had going.

Or at least, that's what it initially seemed like.

Vox felt his heart go crazy at the words you'd just spoken, him feeling even more over the moon then he already did that you weren't going to kick him to the curb.

But then his heart dropped again as he realised what must have been really happening.

His face burnt with anger as you said those words, him sitting up and pushing you off of him.

"Do not say that to me." He growled out, standing up and moving awkwardly with what had just transpired to go put his clothes back on to go leave.

He'd done this before, and he really thought that this would be different, that his feelings for you wouldn't be played with like his were constantly his in his situationship with Val.

But here you were, telling him you loved him after fucking him and only after fucking just like he did.

How long would it take for you to start starting undesireable fights with him for no reason?

How long would it also take for the security you provided to be ripped away from him?

How long would it take until you moved on to find someone else because he wasn't enough for you.

How long would it take before he's always option 2 whenever that other person you want isn't available? When he's always just the afterthought and nothing more.

Your eyes widened in shock, and a wave of pain and regret washed over you. You didn't see the real reason he was flipping out, just seeing the man you loved telling you not to express that to him. Just saw your worst fears being confirmed.

You didn't have the guts to pry further to find the true root with your own hurt, unable to take his response as anything but bitter rejection of your feelings.

Vox didn't see the way you crumpled, expression fucking ruined behind him as unshed tears made your eyes hazy. "Right.. sorry." You apologised quietly to receive no response but him letting out a sound that expressed clear disappointment as he left your room without another glance towards you.

As Vox reached for the door, though, now out of eyeshot of you, he hesitated for a second. Tears once again formed in his eyes for what's the umpteenth time tonight.

His hand hovered above the doorknob as he considered a different thought process. Maybe you were actually being serious. Maybe this was real.

He grit his teeth, shaking his head and taking the only light in the house with himself as he left with bitter pain in his chest. He would not allow himself to have another Val in his life.

The door shut behind him with a sound that weighed heavy on your shoulders as the house became completely and utterly silent.

You sat with your head between your knees on your bed, feeling a mixture of sadness and anger forming a truly disgusting concoction of emotions inside of you.

You'd discovered he'd been doing this greatly violating thing and had given him a second chance, only for him to walk out on you because you told him you loved him? Of fucking course. It wasn't even surprising at this point. It was Vox.

You shook your head as you laid down on your bed, looking at the ceiling as tears blurred your already shit vision in the darkness, your heart in a million pieces.

Just what had you been expecting exactly? It was clear that the only person he had eyes for was Valentino, even if the piece of shit was a horrible boyfriend through and through. You'd been there many a time after their fights for him only to come crawling right back to the fucker.

Of course, he'd walk out on his side piece telling them they loved him. Your strange situationship with one another was never going to ever be anything but second to his real love; an abusive asshole who didn't love him and only showed up again when he got bored of his other toys.

You blinked into the darkness as you tiredly leaned over to the light on your bedside table, feeling for it and flicking the switch.

It didn't come on as it clicked.

Of course he'd caused the damn lights to break.

You growled in annoyance, turning over onto your side and curling up in a ball.

You'd fallen for such a piece of shit and allowed all that was good with him to slip away in one stupid moment of peace with him after a hell of a lot of pent up anger towards him.

It was stupid, really, that you'd be so upset over what was so obviously going to happen from the get-go.

It still hurt, though. So fucking much.

The next week was hard, to say the very least. In the whole fiasco with punishing Vox, he'd fried your phone as well as your lights so you now didn't have one.

He usually supplied you with new ones when this happened, but obviously, no Vox around meant no new phone.

His lack of effort to attempt to contact you pissed you off frankly. You repeatedly attempted to try and speak with him in person, but you just kept getting told to leave by his staff.

Your relationship wasn't exactly public, and you were sure he'd blow up rather than go silent on you if you told them you were together to try to get him to come out of hiding from you like a little bitch, so you just let bygones be bygones for now.

The man child could come crawling back to you whenever he got sick of whatever (you expected at least) he had going on with Val again, you weren't going to let any of this bullshit slide though even if he came back on his knees beggin for forgiveness. (Something that would, of course, never happen. Vox didn't do apologies. Not real ones at least.)

You were frankly done as fuck with him and his constant unending string of bullshit he refused to take responsibility for.

Your anger just worsened the longer he was absent. You almost wanted the thought that he was done with you this time to be true, despite the stupid fucking part of you that wanted him to come back.

Under all this bullshit and masks he wore; he was so different. You wished you could just be with that part of him, the real parts he hesitated each time to show to you because it was imperfect and a fucking mess. But of course, that would never happen. It was truly a fantasy.

After 6 days of nothing, the first sign of him showed up finally. A letter to your house saying he wanted to see you to 'talk'.

Vox knew damn well he was being completely unfair to you doing this, but he couldn't bring himself to back down and apologise.

He didn't make mistakes.

At least, that's how he liked to act. He'd rather hang onto his bullshit knowing full well it's bullshit until the end of time than ever admit fault.

After the incident, he'd spiralled completely. Privately having an angry breakdown about it, humiliated that he'd let himself fall into yet another Valentino situation.

It was easier to just take it out on you than actually hold himself responsible for shit and do the disgusting, pathetic practice of crawling back to you and apologising.

So even though he knew damn well that either way he was in the wrong, just expecting you had turned out to be another mistake along his path of failed lovers, he went silent on you rather then actually communicating at all. Naturally.

It probably looked to you like he'd run off, not giving a single shit anymore, but that was far as it gets from the truth. It was eating away at him. The rare feeling of genuine regret and guilt for his actions shocked him, and it only grew with each passing day.

He couldn't just let things end like this, he needed some... one last interaction with you before not seeing you again. As much as he had genuine feelings for you, he would not allow what he thought was going on to progress any farther.

As he lay in bed on his back, looking up at his ceiling he heart ached as that stupid goddamn thought entered it again. The idiotic idea that you could be actually telling the truth. He hated how it entered his mind and he had to again and again shoot it down to not fucking kid himself.

You didn't actually love him.

Never in a million years would he actually fall in love with someone and have them feel the exact same.

... right?

He pressed his hands over his eyes as his mandatory 'sleep' mode began to shut him off for the night. Tomorrow he would see you for the last time. Shut down what was happening before it began.

What he thought was happening between the two of you.

You almost didn't want to go and actually see him, funnily enough. You'd been trying desperately to go and talk to him for the past week, and it would feel pretty good to know he got stood up.

Not that it was really much of a place to be stood up.

For some reason Vox had told you to meet up with him in a secluded grassy field fairly in the middle of nowhere. To talk without any risk at all of people hearing, you guessed.

Still, it was weird. This was the type of shit murderers did, not your ultra-rich situationship. Whatever.

You forced yourself to keep walking up the hill despite really not wanting to see him. He was standing at the top facing away from you with his hands in his pockets, his face casting blue light down over the immediate grass before him.

As your crunching footsteps echoed out in the mostly silent clearing, he turned around to look down at you.

For agonising seconds, you two just stood there silently, staring at one another. The sound of distant insects, and the slight breeze passing through the leaves of outstretched tree branches the only sound.

He looked perfect as always, but his expression was unsure, hesitant as he looked at you.

Your heart truly fucking ached terribly, and you hated it. You fought the angry tears that you know would start spilling the probably second you heard his voice.

"What is it then." Your voice was quiet, but your words hung as heavy on his shoulders as it could get.

Vox gulped, clearing the lump in his throat, and slipped on a brave face. "I just wanted to see you one last time. I figured it would be shitty of me to.. break up? Over text." He said casually despite the agonising pit that felt like it was consuming him.

You grit your teeth, emotions swelling and bubbling out in a short, humourless bark of laughter. "So that's how it is, huh?" Your voice was thick with the constricting string of strong emotions bubbling up in your chest. You were pissed, the fact he called you out here just to 'break up' with you face to face was an asshole move even for him, sad that you were being told this bullshit, but also just fucking confused under all of that.

Vox would have just left and rode off into the hills and never would do this if he didn't actually give a fuck, so what the hell was happening?

Vox cringed hearing your tone, expression faltering for just a moment before slipping back on. "... yes?" He said it to sound concise, but it came out a question. He cringed inwardly.

You squinted at him, unshed tears making his bright face in comparison to the night all the more blurry with vectors of light messing with you.

His expression was unsure as could be, he wasn't looking you in the eye, and he was fidgeting with his hands. It's like he was expecting something from you. Something bad?

You briefly thought about how you'd seen him acting when he'd come to you after Val had hurt him and broken his screen after he'd gotten snippy with him.

That's when two things hit you like the worlds biggest truck. Why you were so fucking confused and had some nagging thought eating at you that you couldn't properly grasp up until now.

The first; He fucking clearly had feelings for you as well.

The second; He was expecting you to physically lash out at him. Anticipating some sort of Val level breakdown over you.

What the fuck was happening right now?

He would not have come out here if he didn't care at all, and certain times you thought he may have even felt possibly the same way you had.

So why in the fucking world had he stormed out of your house when you told him you had feelings for him as well?

Vox watched your progression of emotions as you didn't respond for a while with confusion, heart beating quick as his tenseness anticipating some massive blow up from you slowly eased off. Your next question caught him all the more off guard.

"Why did you call me out here to talk face to face to break things off?" You asked, brow furrowed and your expression equally confused, trying to read his intentions. You continued, blinking hard to try to clear your wet eyes so you could actually clearly see. One rolled down your cheek in the process, and Vox looked even more startled by it than the question.

"If you don't love me too, even a little bit, then why would you call me out here to break up with me face to face." You demanded an answer more than asked a question, expression hard.

He looked stunned at you, not believing what he was hearing, sputtering before letting out a strangled response. ".. No, you don't." He said.

You arched a brow at him in confusion. "Wha-" he cut you off.

"You don't love me! That was just some bullshit to play with my emotions after we fucked!" Suddenly Vox was angry as all hell, jumping to another assumption as he walked closer to you, towering over you and furious, the sound of electricity crackling loudly as his system begun to get overwhelmed quickly.

"And no-ow you're trying to convince me to not fucking leave!" Vox turned to side, laughing humorlessly and pressing his palm to his head. "God, I was right. You're just like h-i-im!" His words glitched with his overwhelming anger as he looked to the side at you.

You looked at him as everything fell into place, and suddenly, you were also furious. "Oh for fuck sake, Vox!" You yelled, stepping back. "Has all this shit happened because this whole time, all you've been thinking about is Val?" Angry tears welled up in your eyes, and you gripped his face, forcing him to look you straight in the eye as you spoke.

"I am not lying you insecure dumbass!" Vox's anger faltered as he watched your genuinely furious expression, a mess of tears and painful emotions. Not wanting to back down, however, he went to bite back some vile retort that never made it from his lips as you interrupted him.

"I said I love you then because I actually am in love with you! And I have been for ages at this goddamn point!" You let go off his face as his expression flickers to unsureness.

You press your hands into either side of your head as you look to the ground. "I fucking see you walk back to that asshole time and time again and my heart breaks each time because I actually love you and would treat you right like he doesn't!" Your voice cracks as you yell at him.

You don't see him begin flushing darkly and startled, now sparking in an entirely different way, extremely taken aback as he finally began actually listening to the sound of anything but his own voice.

"If you had just communicated like an adult instead of running off like an immature child, none of this would have happened. Do you understand that? Or are you too busy projecting your unresolved bullshit onto me to see that?" You look him in the eye again, your fury fading into severe emotional exhaustion after the past week.

"I hate that I love someone like you." You growled out through clenched teeth before turning away from the man who was stunned into utter silence outside of the occasional zapping sound, and began to walk away, shoulders hunched and fists clenched as you trembled.

Vox stood in place, staring dumbly at your back as you walked away feeling a nauseating pit of guilt eating him alive. He had no idea what the hell to do.

If anyone else had spoken to him that way he'd be utterly furious, compensating for all hurt going on within him, but even he couldn't project that shit onto you after what was so clearly true was spat at him. The extremely ugly truth of this whole situation.

He'd fucked up so goddamn bad, so bad he couldn't even lie to himself on that like usual.

His heart constricted painfully in his chest as he replayed your words again and again in his mind. 'I hate that I love someone like you.'

His mouth opened and shut as he fought to try find his voice again as he began crying, your silhouette making it hurt all the more the further you got away from him.

I hate that I love someone like you.

It stung like hell. Rightfully.

Someone he could have a genuine relationship with. Not some one-sided bullshit. Not some toxic requited relationship with someone who'd act as a doormat to his behaviour. You were slipping through his fingers with every second further he hesitated.

He forced himself to go after you despite how frozen he was, thoughts running a dizzying mess in his mind.

You turned back to him with an expression that was a conflicting mixture of relief and irritation that he was jogging after you.

The next words felt like agony for him to say, but despite his ego he forced himself. You had begun to do what no one could - actually started to change him. The thought filled him with a mixture of fear, but also sent warmth flooding through his chest.

"I'm sorry." He said as he caught your hand in his. "I'm sorry I-I..." he trailed off, words catching in his throat as embarrassment clearly burned in his expression.

He forced his red eyes to look into your surprised tired ones though, gulping. It caused his glitching to only worsen, but he kept his eyes on yours anyways.

"I'm sorry that I did-n-n't just talk to you. I sh-should have just. I shouldn't have assumed shit. You aren't Val, it's just hard-" He stopped himself, correcting himself. "It doesn't matter. I shouldn't have done that. Yo-ou-ou-ou-" You took a deep breath through your nose and turned around to face him properly, waiting while he stopped glitching and showcasing a flashing error message enough to get another word out.

His monitor stopped cutting out after a few seconds with a particularly loud zap, red eyes once again looking into yours, a claw coming up to cup your cheek - the gesture causing your expression to once again crumple and start crying despite your smarter parts telling you to not. "You deserved - deserve better than that."

You truly hated that you loved this absolute dumbass. Of all people, why did it have to be the guy who looked like he had a stick being shoved painfully up his ass as he simply said the words 'I'm sorry' after creating this dumpster fire of a situation?

You sighed heavily, leaning into his hand while closing your eyes, it pleasantly cold on your cheek in comparison to your overly warm, puffy face.

Vox grit his teeth, utter humiliation permeating every bit of him.

He couldn't believe he'd ever said such a disgusting thing out loud.

But, the way you leaned into his touch with your eyes fluttering shut made it worth it.

The sound of the surrounding environment filled the air as the warm moment was allowed to sit in peace for a few seconds. Just quiet which washed over you very welcome after everything, and in contrast made Vox all the more antsy.

Vox interrupted everything with an awkward sound clearing his throat, smiling very tensely. "Please tell me I don't have to say sorry again." He half-jokingly (but really more seriously) said.

You slowly opened your eyes again, looking up at him through your lashes. "Mmm. I'm not sure if I quite believe you regret everything yet," you said as if thinking about it. "Maybe if you get down on your knees and grovel a bit, I'll consider it." You smirked teasingly.

Vox let out an irritated huff at the very obvious joking remark but figured it was better he didn't bite back with his usual attitude right now.

You chuckled, and gently gripped either side of his screen as you pulled his face close to yours, very serious now.

"I'll make this clear right now: I do not forgive you. All of this was ridiculous, and your bad actions, which you haven't yet actually acted to remedy, are stacking up. You understand that, right?" He grit his teeth, eyes looking away from you but still slowly nodding begrudgingly. You relaxed a bit, exhaling deeply. "Good." You said, slightly smiling at his pouting expression.

You stood on your tip toes, pressing a kiss on his screen where his cheek should have been. Vox looked back at you, smiling slightly.

"Come on, it's been a week, is that all I get?" He asked, immediately regretting it as you looked annoyed once again.

You shook your head, glaring at him. "Don't push it." You growled, before leaning in and kissing him much more deeply anyways.

Your love was going to be rocky for sure, but as staticky lips moved against yours passionately, you decided that you didn't mind. Whether that would come to be a stupid decision or not, would show itself further down the line. For now, you just wanted to stay in the present.

This part 2 was a long damn time coming goddamn.

I'm gonna be so fr, I was tempted to make this just be angst in the end because oof. But no, I was feeling nice. So you get somewhat actually healing his shitty maladaptive traits Vox.

I'm almost considering making more to this, but also God, there's so much more I'm working on as well 💀 I wish i had more time.

Masterlist

#vox #vox headcanons #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel vox #vox x reader #vox x reader fanfic #hazbin hotel x reader

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hoyatype · 6 months ago

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hello! I’m not trying to argue or anything, I genuinely want to understand your point of view: do you think not voting for Biden would make things better? I am not American, but USA politics determine how the entire world works, so I’ve been following, plus we have a similar situation in my country, so I relate to the frustration. I agree with you Biden hasn’t been a good president, but how could reelecting Trump make things better? sadly, I think neither of them would do anything to stop the genocide. do you think there’s another way? what are your thoughts on this?

i meant to reply to this ages ago, even wrote out some paragraphs on my phone, and then the tumblr app crashed and i never got around to it! please know that ignoring it wasn't intentional, i was just throwing a fit about technological unreliability and how it often eviscerates my enthusiasm for POLITICAL DISCOURSE with a glitch

this ask was in response to a post i made 2 months ago where i said

the us really is a genocidal gerontocracy…and yet the democrats are blowing up my phone nonstop begging me to vote for biden…

and so to address your ask very specifically, here's what i'd say

being totally exhausted and disillusioned by how the democratic party is marketing joe biden to me is not the same as not voting for biden

if i were in a district where my vote might have a meaningful impact on who became president, i would absolutely vote for biden (feeling extremely unhappy the entire time)

however, due to how american politics works, that is not the case. my vote for president is completely irrelevant and of purely symbolic value. and thus i will not be voting for biden

you may or may not be familiar with the american electoral college system—i will briefly explain if not—basically the president is not decided by popular vote, but by an indirect system that originates from an elitist, slave plantation owner era that works like this:

every state gets some number of individuals known as electors, who each have 1 electoral vote. how many electors? it is semi-arbitrary and not directly correlated with current population numbers, which means some states have MANY more electors than voters, proportionally speaking, and some have fewer.

during an election, the popular vote for each state is added up. then whoever wins the popular vote for each state gets ALL the electors for the state (with 2 exceptions, maine and nebraska, who assign electors proportionally. note that those 2 states, per the 2020 american census, represent just under 1% of the american population).

someone becomes president if they get a majority of the ELECTORAL votes, not the popular votes. also, in theory the electors can change their vote; in practice i don't believe anyone has done so, the convention is that you follow the popular vote. but you can see how this system, with its 2 layers of indirection btwn the popular vote and the actual electoral vote that determines who becomes president, gives people very limited say—in some cases basically no say—in who becomes president. and by "people" i mean american citizens who have not been stripped of the right to vote. in many jurisdictions, felons are not capable of voting—this is a good paper ('to be young, black, and powerless: disenfranchisement in the new jim crow era') that discusses how this disproportionately strips black americans from voting due to racially biased policing, sentencing, etc etc etc)…

but basically, this system means that i, as someone who lives in an extremely democratic state, don't really "need" to vote for biden. whether he wins my state by 51% or 70% or 90% doesn't really matter.

but now that i've established that, i want to elaborate on the sentiment expressed in my original comment, which is that i am SO COMPLETELY SICK OF BEING A YOUNG LEFTIST CONSTANTLY BERATED BY THE LIBERAL MEDIA AND PRESS INTO VOTING FOR CANDIDATES THAT HAVE DONE ALMOST NOTHING MEANINGFUL FOR THE CAUSES I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT, AND HAVE THE TEMERITY TO DEMAND UNFAILING LOYALTY FROM ME WHILE DOING NOTHING WITH IT!!!!!!!!!!

there seems to be this idea that it's the overly ideologically rigid leftists who will be the cause of biden's downfall. this narrative is repeatedly issued forth from liberal writers and thinkers. it's a narrative that i—as someone who could vote for obama, and did so, and saw how disappointing he was in many ways…as someone who was then harangued about voting for hillary clinton over bernie sanders bc of the spectre of misogynist "bernie bros" (as if the most important political issue of my existence is the gender of my country's political leader and not the policies of said political leader)…as someone who saw her favourite candidate for office, maybe the only political candidate in america i have a real admiration for (i am speaking obviously of sanders) get TOTALLY shut out by the democratic machine, while being pressured repeatedly to vote for biden, a boring and banal and institutionally sanctioned and completely toothless presidential candidate…

—it's just a narrative i am exhausted by. this is the 3rd election i have been told that not voting against trump means voting for DEATH TO WOMEN, DEATH TO MINORITIES, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. and it has become clear to me that the democratic party will keep this grift going as long as possible in order to pull as many genuinely ideologically principled voters as possible into alignment, and shame them for expecting better out of their politicians than status quo american exceptionalism and warmongering.

there's a labor journalist (by which i mean: american journalist writing about labor issues from a leftist perspective, not a journalist writing about uk labour party politics) i quite like, hamilton nolan, who just put up a really good piece on his substack about this: "the left is not joe biden's problem. joe biden is"

Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s and if Biden loses and Trump wins politics would get worse. Do progressive activists, who are as a group deeply engaged in the issues, need thousands of words to understand this? To put a finer point on it: Who is this for?…where exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians…[and] any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror. …What Biden needs to worry about is not highly engaged activists making some considered calculation not to vote for him, but instead millions of regular ass people who will not vote for him because they don’t feel excited about him…Obama excited people. So they turned out to vote. In 2020, people hated Trump so much that they were excited to turn out to vote. Now, Biden is the incumbent and he owns what the government is doing and he has achieved the nifty trick of actively supporting a crime against humanity and isolating himself on the world stage and thereby causing deep moral revulsion within the left wing of his party at the exact same time that he needs them to rally to support him during election season. This is not a problem of miscalculation of leverage; it is a problem of doing something horrible and turning off his political allies right when he is supposed to be pulling them into his coalition.

i find biden's politics absolutely repellant and i also find the 10 texts/day from the democratic party urging me to vote for the man anyway, otherwise democracy lies in ruins, to be profoundly annoying. the truth is that the democratic party made 2 enormous tactical errors…first with with clinton's candidacy and how the party treated sanders (who had the rare and remarkable ability to energise millions of young voters into greater political engagement and interest—something the democratic party absolutely needs in the future but seems to have no interest in cultivating seriously as a skill, if cultivating the skill requires sacrificing the party's existing operating strategy)…

…and second with biden, who—as the quoted passage above argues (and i agree with) is hampered by being fundamentally unexciting to the avg voter, who is not the impassioned young leftist on a college campus advocating for palestinians and gazans. i do think that young leftist will vote for biden if it "matters". but also, that young leftist is learning an important lesson atm about how power works in this country, which is that the energy that the 2-party system puts into electoral politics is a shell game and in many ways often a distraction from the real work of pushing politics in the direction you want it to go. if the goal is to stop american involvement in genocide, doing anything to really help biden, beyond placing a swing state vote (where your state might reasonably go either way in the election), is a waste of energy.

and i basically think it is useful for the democratic party establishment to be scared. to not feel like they can depend on the votes of the young and of racial minorities as if they don't need to do anything to deserve those votes.

Movements exist before and after and beyond elections.…In the case of almost every familiar movement— civil rights, labor rights, gender equality, gay rights, anti-war movements, and on and on—the left was on the morally correct but politically unpopular side. How did they win anything, then? By forming national and international social and political movements made up of thousands and millions of people engaged in protest and direct action and education and community building and labor organizing and other actions outside of electoral politics that, over time, change society of itself and thereby cause politicians to follow that change. To focus only on the politicians and the elections is to miss the underlying fact that those officials ultimately do not cause change themselves—they are the end products of change… The useful thing about this vision is that it allows you, a person who cares about things, to focus on just working to accomplish the things you care about, rather than trying to game everything out secondhand through the blurry and unreliable lens of elections…What all of those outraged activists on the left who inspire so much political nail-biting are engaged in is the act of trying to get Biden to change his actions in order to save human lives.

#politics #us politics

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bambamramfan · 3 years ago

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Popularism and its discontents

(Is no one going to make the obvious joke?)

***

Anyway, "popularism" is the hot button term among lefty technocratic circles popularized by the likes of David Shor and Matt Yglesias. You can read Ezra Klein's very thorough interview on the subject in the NYT. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html or use Wayback machine to circumvent the paywall.)

Popularism is a shorthand for the belief that the Democratic Party, when it is trying to get politicians elected, should focus on policies that are popular and downplay things that are unpopular and irrelevant. Lot's of commercials about cheaper prescription drugs and border enforcement, less talking about systematic racism and anti-capitalism. And by popular we mean "tested in polls, and especially among white voters over fifty with no college degree."

It's obviously a response to perceptions of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the 2020 Democratic primary, and it leans heavily on the success of the Biden campaign, and the specific tactics Obama used in his two successful elections (where he was anti-gay marriage and cautious on immigration.)

Shor and Ygs and others have pushed this tactic in a very loud way, to counter what they see as groupthink among center-left staffers and activists in institutional non-profits, who value staying in like over effectiveness. And fair enough, we can all see where they are coming from.

But predictably, popularism has come in for a lot of criticism. Sometimes issues are more popular after they have passed and begun providing benefits. Sometimes you want to pass a policy because you believe in it, that's why you got elected after all. Sometimes you need to get your base excited and elections aren't entirely about the median voter. Republicans will say bad things about us no matter what we do (they certainly don't hesitate to call us socialists even when Democrats are like, de-regulating zoning restrictions.) Why do Republicans keep saying unpopular things but still winning elections anyway? And the rhetoric politicians use themselves can move public opinion. Playing to the crowd will only lead to centrist milquetoast policy that doesn't change America's underlying problems.

(Since they are always-online-political-pundits, the popularists of course have rebuttals to all of these questions.)

Most importantly I think, the line between "who is a political staffer that has an obligation to stay on message" and "who has responsibility to more people than just today's electoral campaign" is pretty vague, and I don't see why, say, the Ford Foundation which has been around for most of a century would feel obligated to change their message to fit the Harris 2024 campaign's needs. It's not clear who Shor and Ygs are really talking to.

Popularism is just one particular strategy, and I am sure if it gets lots of buy in, eventually it will have one high profile embarrassing loss. I do not recommend anyone put all their credibility eggs in their one basket, or else you'll become one of those people parsing all the data with a fine-tooth comb to say "if you look at this cross tab and that local trend, you'll see really we overperformed the fundamentals and popularism has never failed, it can only be failed."

You don't want to be that.

There is a more fundamental point, that these pundits risk losing for getting lost in the ideological weeds.

"Candidates should try to do what works."

The parsing of all messaging by all Democrats running for office to be acceptable to sensitive college-degree holders who live in big cities... has not paid dividends for the success of the party. The emphasis on supporting idealistic and edgy symbolic causes du jour over what bills can actually be passed and deliver results to voters this year, does not seem to make any situation better when you look at the results. It's not entirely fair to say "a decade of policing speech got Trump elected" but it's at least fair to say that attitude did nothing to *stop* Trump from winning, and the most reviled candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary from winning as well.

I don't think there is One Consistent Plan that will always win you elections. But a serious movement should care about what does and doesn't win. And when one tactic doesn't seem to be helping, it should be willing to drop that and try other tactics. "Winning" is not solely confined to elections, but it should be mostly about "policy change." You should care about what tactics change policy, and lead to better policy rather than irrelevant or badly designed policy. Popularism is a nod towards that, but it's really not the end all and be all of being politically responsive. Do it for a while if it works, but be ready to try something else when it reaches diminishing returns.

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gay-jewish-bucky · 2 years ago

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In response to the question in the tags about where this was and what the laws are: I'll elaborate.

I'm Canadian. Canadian society is generally secularized but... separation of church and state/state neutrality on matters of religion is not a protected freedom. We have freedom of religion and freedom from religious discrimination (which doesn't seem to have stopped Quebec... okay I'm getting off track).

Most hospitals here have no official religious affiliation at all and do their best to accommodate people of all religions. Then there is the problem of the Catholic hospitals, WHICH ARE GOVERNMENT FUNDED, whose patients often have no say in where they're taken.

The handful of Jewish hospitals we have in Canada came about because of systemic discrimination against Jewish doctors, medical students and patients. These hospitals have no problem providing care and accommodating other faiths.

Here are some articles on the problem: (below the cut bc this got long)

After outcry, Quebec hospital restores crucifix taken down in interest of ‘religious neutrality’

It seemed reasonable in a province where religious symbols are often seen as an affront to secularism. But it seems some religious symbols are more equal than others

The religious hospital problem

It is an abuse of a hospital's power to impose metaphysical beliefs on those in its care.

Paula Simons: Catholic hospitals put religious principles ahead of patient rights

There's little balance when a dying man's dignity is sacrificed on the altar of a hospital's religion.

I wont provide links to any of the catholic organizations but far too many people believe religion trumps a patient's right to healthcare and any attempt to put patients first is "tyranny" and an "attack". The opposition to change from the Catholic lobby is far more influential and powerful than should be and is actively harming patients.

They are also the biggest threat to abortion rights and the health and autonomy of everyone with a uterus who comes through their doors.

This is just the tip of the iceberg

look i understand that some hospitals are technically foundationally catholic, but putting crucifixes in patient rooms makes it so Jewish patients and their families cannot pray from their hospital bed, which feels.... not great

#jumblr #tw catholicism #the person i shared the room with was muslim so awkward for both of us

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cheri-translates · 3 years ago

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[CN] Season 2 Summary (Volume 4: Ch 10 - 13)

🍒 Warning: Detailed spoilers from S2 🍒

Along with the update on 3 June 2021, the CN server released a “Plot Review” which contains bullet-point summaries of S2 :>

Volume 3 Summary: here

You receive a name list of people involved in the Evol assassinations, and realise that quite a number of them were participants in the Hunter Game. After considering the significance of this list, you decide to discuss the matter with Victor

With Victor’s prompting, you do a cost-benefit analysis and find that disclosing the document brings greater benefits than disadvantages. However, doing this will make LFG a target of the true mastermind behind the assassination incidents

“After all, he isn’t the only one with a trump card.”

As expected, disclosing the list results in heated debate from various segments of society

While leaving Souvenir one day, the brake of Victor’s car fails to work because someone tampered with it

The two of you have no choice but to speed around the city. Despite it being an incredibly dangerous situation, he remains composed, successfully resolving the issue before him. It’s the first time you realise how skilled Victor is in driving

After the incident, you track down the person who tampered with Victor’s car, and find that he has been assassinated

Likely sensing your feelings, Victor invites you to the park after work. When you head to the park as arranged, you see his figure from afar as he waits for you

You deliberately send him a text, telling him that you’re still at work. He believes it at first, but reacts soon after. He scans his surroundings, then meets your eyes amongst the crowd

“Childish.”

While taking a stroll in the park, the both of you stop before a tree. A long time ago, Victor had coursed through time and entered the future in order to prove that the future could be changed. Back then, you had engraved your wish. This time, the same words are your source of determination. Next to you, Victor smiles and changes “May everyone be safe and healthy” to “Everyone will be safe and healthy”

When he takes you to the riverside, Victor finally tells you the true reason why he asked you to meet him. He’s currently acquiring businesses related to the “Small Syringes”. He needs this information to be publicly disclosed in order to lure the forces that are lying low to the surface voluntarily. Even though you’re worried, you choose to trust his decision. You volunteer to release this news as it can drum up a large volume of public opinion

Victor looks at you, his expression proud and gentle

"Here’s to a pleasant collaboration.”

After the news is made public, the reputation of LFG suffers a drastic decline as expected

On the surface, your interactions with LFG have lessened. At the entrance of LFG, Victor walks forward amid the remarks and hostility by passers-by. You want to defend him, but reason tells you to stay where you are, and not act impulsively

As your eyes gradually redden, you receive a message from him-

“The weather is pretty nice today.”

Victor’s plan progresses steadily. What you’ve done has also allowed the reputation of Black Swan to rise

Even though the two of you are walking in different directions, you are certain that you’re standing in the turbulent undercurrents together

The director of the hospital whom you once interviewed has discovered a reason for the pathological changes in Evolvers, and has invited you over to talk about it. Unfortunately, a group of Evolver gangsters has suddenly taken the hospital hostage

The STF rushes to the scene quickly. When you hear Gavin’s voice, your heart feels much more at ease

The main plotter, Yang Ping, has held normal civilians as hostages, and requests for a series of provisions to be made for Evolvers, so that Evolvers can have more “benefits”

Struck with an idea, you remain on the scene to assist Gavin at any moment. When he sees you, Gavin understands your intentions despite being worried

The STF receives an order from the higher ups to disregard the lives of the hostages, and go straight to quashing the situation. Gavin openly defies orders, choosing to safeguard the lives of everyone as a priority, and to negotiate with the gangsters

“I’ll take responsibility for all the consequences.”

During the confrontation with Yang Ping, Gavin uncovers Yang Ping’s true motive: to force the STF into harming someone in order to shatter the balance between civilians and Evolvers

Catching Gavin’s hint, you pretend that the negotiation went sour and that Yang Ping had injured you, turning the tides in your favour. After all, you’re simply an Evolver used as a chip in the negotiation. Yang Ping’s claim of “doing things with Evolvers in mind” no longer holds any weight

Because of this, the STF agents are given an opportunity to suppress the gangsters

Everything appears to be wrapped up smoothly, but the director is suddenly shot by a sniper. Yang Ping is also shot

Late at night, you spot Gavin standing below your house, braving the rain

Gavin seems to be experiencing complex emotions. To you, perhaps he was unable to fire every bullet for justice

Sensing that Gavin isn’t simply referring to the incident at the hospital, you tell him that you believe in his judgement

“I’ll find the truth behind this incident.”

Gavin also gives you an incredibly resolute response

A few days later, Gavin seems to have made up his mind. He tells you that he’s investigating an incident called “New Year’s Day Change”, and he needs your help

You agree immediately

Gavin has already contacted a key informant: an old ex-policeman. Because the forces behind the incident are incredibly complicated, he needs you to cooperate with him in putting on an act

“Miss Nox isn’t showing due respect by dampening one’s spirits the moment she enters.”

He needs those people who have been paying close attention to this incident to have a mistaken impression that he’s still searching for the old ex-policeman. In order to protect you, he needs you to leave his side

Gavin will be the target of scrutiny, while the eyes on you will slacken. You’ll use this opportunity to become the mode of communication between Gavin and his informants, safely assisting Gavin in advancing in his investigations

As the final step of this plan, Gavin pushes you off the top of a building

He appears determined in breaking off relations, while you're hesitant and powerless. But the both of you are clear that the plan is going as smoothly as imagined

“I’m the greatest danger.”

You know that Gavin is walking down his path resolutely. And you will naturally want to become the person standing beside him, walking down the same path

Through a report done by a member of Black Swan, you discover that the pathological changes in Evolvers are related to their Evol. You also realise that Helios seems to be investigating this matter

At the same time, Savin tells you that something has happened to Kiro, and he’s in the hospital. You immediately rush over, but you’re told that Kiro doesn’t want to see anybody

Across the door, you tell Kiro that you wish to see him. After a strange silence, he speaks slowly

“Thank you. You can go back.”

Behind the door, only Kiro knows the reason why he’s behaving strangely - due to a sonic bomb, he has lost his hearing

Kiro avoids you for many days, until he organises an exclusive “live concert” for you one evening. The next day, he’s finally willing to meet you. When you see that Kiro doesn't seem to have changed much, you relax a little, despite having many doubts

But in the evening, you receive a statement from him which says he’s “retiring from public life permanently”, and he vanishes

Knowing full well just how much he loves the stage, you decide to keep the matter hidden, attempting to look for him

Unexpectedly, you bump into Helios at the Black Swan building

“The person you’re looking for isn’t here.”

His cold attitude makes you understand that Kiro has turned himself into Helios. He’s hiding from you, and also himself

To have a better understanding of his actions, you look through the clues pertaining to him. When you investigate the Hunter Game again, a stone tablet with the symbol “8″ appears multiple times

In order to carry out a concrete investigation, you return to the forest where you had once participated in the Hunter Game, and search for that stone tablet

The moment you touch it, thorns and thistles grow on the stone tablet, cutting your hand and absorbing your blood. Before you can react, the ground underneath your feet opens. Just as you’re about to fall into the abyss, Helios saves you

Despite being faced with his icy attitude, you attempt to form a partnership with him to explore this place

In the dark, rays of light fluctuate into a message that neither of you can comprehend. 19, an artificial intelligence which remains here, enables you to understand that this place is a historical ruins left behind by the previous civilisation - “Lighthouse”

19 tells the both of you that their world was once as flourishing as it is right now, but it was destroyed. They left the “Lighthouse” behind in hopes of assisting the both of you in preventing the fated destruction

You and Helios also hear about the songs from that generation. Cultures and languages may not be the same, but music can cross barriers

When one song ends, Helios sings that melody in his own way, letting it echo in this time and space

"All of you still exist.”

After leaving the Lighthouse, you tell him that you’re going to continue with the investigations, and use your own method to tell Helios that you’re willing to face him, and would like to carrying out this operation with him. You hope that this time, he can walk towards you voluntarily

After returning, you receive a call from an unknown number

“It’s me.”

In order to investigate the Hunter Game further, you once again participate in the game as a punter

You do your best to search for the stone tablet in this game, but accidentally get targeted by two players. Just as you plan to fight with them, Shaw, whom you haven’t seen in several days, appears from behind you

The both of you cooperate, settling the score with the other two

“Tch. Not even one of you can fight.”

You tell him about the “Lighthouse”. Shaw, who has been researching on the historical ruins, guesses that the venue of the Hunter Game could be deliberately designed to be near the ruins. By using large amounts of Evol energy fluctuations, it could unseal the ruins

While the discussion has signs of a positive outcome, the two of you are still embroiled in the game

Shaw’s conspicuous ranking and high-key thunder and lightning have attracted numerous opponents to him. But with your cooperation, the enemies fail in succession

The metal chain around his neck notifies him that he has advanced into the next round, but he loses consciousness in your arms due to a fever

The youth who usually hangs around Joker appears before you. You use psychological tactics to goad him into sending Shaw to the hospital. On the other hand, you’re taken away by him for breaking the rules of the game repeatedly

When Shaw regains consciousness, he’s unable to contact you. He returns to the antique store, only to see that it has been swallowed up by an abnormal black flame

“Get lost!”

In spite of the firefighters’ obstructions, Shaw makes repeated trips into the shop, “rescuing” the calligraphy and paintings

By the time the fire is extinguished, the antique shop is already half scorched, as though it’s a warning

Based on the youth’s memories, you discover that Joker has once visited the former site of the BS research centre. In order to find out why, you hurry over

You inadvertently find that there’s someone in the archive room. Just as you're feeling tense, your phone suddenly rings - at 2.03pm, an unknown number calls you

The sound exposes you. Taking out a gun, you attempt to warn the person in the building

“I surrender.”

That person turns out to be Lucien, and he's holding a floppy disk in his hand

Lucien explains what he’s doing here, and even demonstrates how you can use the data in the floppy disk

A series of numbers flash on the screen before it turns dark

Having considered that this process of reading data is highly confidential, Lucien notes how they might have been watched earlier, and that it’s better to leave

However, you suddenly feel dizzy. In the next second, you find yourself in the corridor. The door to the archive room is shut tight, and you can’t see Lucien anyway

Even though you’ve clearly set your phone to silent mode, it rings again. The screen shows that it’s 2.03pm. It’s a missed call from an unknown number

Returning to the archive room, it’s as though Lucien didn’t meet you earlier

You surmise that you’re experiencing this for the second time, and Lucien believes you without hesitation, speculating that you might have been in a time loop

Just as he says, whenever a certain amount of time passes, everything returns to 2.03pm

Unexpectedly, but as a matter of course, Lucien believes you every single time. He analyses the situation with you, helping you escape from the time loop

After a few more time loops, Lucien figures out a way to escape

“This time, let me accompany you in jumping out of this looping time.”

Time requires an object of reference. You're at the centre of the time loop circle, and the compass drawing the circle is your phone

Because this phone is special, it doesn’t vanish when you leave it with Lucien. At the same time, in order to measure time, your phone reappears in your hand

Since one object cannot exist in two places at the same time, this results in a contradiction that causes time and space to collapse

The next day, you and Lucien meet along the corridor, and agree to go on a stroll outside

Even though many things are unclear, the radiance of spring before you makes everything seem as though they are going in a beautiful direction. You can’t help but mention the promise you once made with Lucien to fly kites

“Spring may not necessarily arrive at a fixed time.”

In a teasing manner, Lucien says that he isn’t late. You also think that perhaps many things can start afresh

All of a sudden, you feel a severe pain in your chest-

“Now, spring has just begun.”

The words Lucien just said have yet to disperse

At this moment, he’s holding your collapsed form. The only colour in his monochrome world is gradually fading

Volume 5 (Ch 14 - 17): here

More S2 content: here

A detailed translation of Gavin’s part is available here!

#mlqc #mlqc cn #mlqc spoilers

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dalekofchaos · 3 years ago

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What the Arkham Knight should have been

I do love Arkham Knight, but the reveal that the Arkham Knight was Jason Todd, I was honestly disappointed. If it were up to me, this is how it could’ve gone.

The Arkham Knight should have just been a symbolic title and ya know, ACTUALLY focus on the villains teaming up. The Gotham Rogues teaming up is the main threat. The reveal of the Arkham Knight being a re-skin of the Red Hood has been talked about to death. What hasn’t been talked about as much is the missed opportunity of having a game where Batman has to deal with the ramifications of the Joker’s death. Arkham Knight opens with Commissioner Gordon talking about how Gotham braced itself for the inevitable power struggle that never came. But what if it had? Instead of pushing some of Batman’s greatest villains into a few side-quests (that all played basically the same), the game’s story could have focused on the Bat Family as it fights to save Gotham. Players could have swapped between the best of Batman's team as they tackle missions all over Gotham, the Asylum, and Arkham City. Areas visible in the game but not accessible. This would have allowed the story of the Arkham games to come full circle as players would have traveled back to locations previously seen and explored them with the changes made as the story for the games went on. Plus it would finally give all the members of the Bat Family a chance to spread their wings. We needed to see Scarecrow, Harley, Ivy, Penguin, Hush, Riddler and Two-Face work together as major threats and we needed to see Bruce and his family work together to stop them and honestly that would’ve been so much better.

The Arkham Knight is Damian Wayne. Damian is the Arkham Knight. Talia talked about Bruce and Talia's night in Metropolis. So you could have a tease for Damian there. But Ra's raised Damian and indoctrinated him. This is a Damian without Bruce's influence and was raised to believe that Bruce is responsible for his mother's death and together Ra's and Damian will fulfill the LOA's destiny. Everything leading up to learning his identity is the same(though Arkham Knight uses a sword and throwing stars instead of guns) When the mask comes off, Batman is confused due to how much he looks like him. Damian explains that he is the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia Al Ghul. Damian blames him for the death of his mother and Ra's Al Ghul. But if Ra's is alive via the season of Infamy DLC. Work it into the story. Say Damian is working with Ra's similar to how Hugo Strange was working with Ra's. Damian names himself after the place his family died and now he wants his father dead. There'd be more emotional impact and would have made more sense than trying to convince viewers that Jason was Robin in this continuity.

Arkham Knight is Protocol 12. Hugo Strange works for Ra’s, but however, Let’s pay attention to this. From Quincy Sharp, he says “Strange came to me back at the asylum. He told me he had friends; powerful friends. The sort of people who could make things happen. All I had to do was turn a blind eye to his experiments, and work on my campaign. He said his friends would ensure that I won" In Strange’s confrontation with Batman. “ I have powerful friends, Batman. This is just the beginning.“ Now if you’ve watched Justice League Unlimited, you will know that Hugo Strange is a Departmental head of Project CADMUS. So What if In the Arkhamverse, Strange is still apart of Project CADMUS. While Ra’’s was the mastermind, the Arkham City project was planned by CADMUS as a start to take down Batman and Gotham, but a start to bring down the Justice League. The Arkham Knight would be Strange’s and CADMUS' last fail safe to bring an end to Batman. The identity is not important. All we need to know is it is a CADMUS experiment and Strange’s last trump card against Batman. The Arkham Knight should have been it’s own character and not a copout to make him Jason Todd and there was so much lost potential.

Jeremiah Arkham is the Arkham Knight. In Arkham Asylum, Quincy Sharp believed himself to be the Spirit of Amadeus Arkham. This could simply be Sharp being the zealous warden that he was but it could have set up something else. What if Jeremiah Arkham was the REAL reincarnation of Amadeus Arkham? He shares a similar story already, treating mentally unwell patients until it drove him insane. Instead of becoming the next Black Mask, he could have become the purifier of evil that Quincy Sharp tried to be: the Arkham Knight.

The Joker and Harley Quinn’s son is The Arkham Knight. In Arkham City it is heavily teased that Joker and Harley had a baby. Before anyone comments about Harley’s revenge, that was actually unpopular with the fandom, so it could’ve been retconned. From a comment I found on the Arkham reddit. “The game begins the traditional way where you lead a character around but can't perform any actions. You control Harley who's in shock after Joker's death and hasn't spoken a work since. You control her as she's being escorted into Blackgate staying true to the prison opening setting of all the games. Joker's death sends shockwaves across Gotham. Soon enough, her thugs break her out and they arrive at an abandoned warehouse where Harley walks in alone, she opens a shipping container and a kidnapped nurse from Arkham City walks out and pleads with her to let her go, telling her she's done all they've asked. Harley agrees that she has but says that no one can know about their child yet, she shoots the nurse and the shot wakes a baby inside the container, Harley then picks it up and sings it the lullaby we hear in the Arkham City end credits. Cut to black. 15 years later. Harley Quinn and the Arkham Knight gathers the rogues gallery. Scarecrow, Hush, Poison Ivy, The Riddler, Two-Face and The Penguin all working together to take down the Bat and make Gotham theirs. The difference is the rogues would not be used in side missions exclusively. They would work in the story mandatory similar to how Spider-Man PS4′s villains worked in the main story and we take them down one by one.

#DC #Arkhamverse #Arkham Knight #Damian Wayne #Harley Quinn #The Joker #Hugo Strange #The Arkham Knight #Jeremiah Arkham #The Penguin #Poison Ivy #Dick Grayson #Tim Drake #Barbara Gordon

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 8, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On this day in 1974, President Gerald Ford granted “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” Ford said he was issuing the pardon to keep from roiling the “tranquility” the nation had begun to enjoy since Nixon stepped down. If Nixon were indicted and brought to trial, the trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”

Ford later said that he issued the pardon with the understanding that accepting a pardon was an admission of guilt. But Nixon refused to accept responsibility for the events surrounding the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C.’s fashionable Watergate office building. He continued to maintain that he had done nothing wrong but was hounded from office by a “liberal” media.

Rather than being chastised by Watergate and the political fallout from it, a faction of Republicans continued to support the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong when he covered up an attack on the Democrats before the 1972 election. Those Republicans followed Nixon’s strategy of dividing Americans. Part of that polarization was an increasing conviction that Republicans were justified in undercutting Democrats, who were somehow anti-American, even if it meant breaking laws.

In the 1980s, members of the Reagan administration did just that. They were so determined to provide funds for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the leftist Sandinista government, that they ignored a law passed by a Democratic Congress against such aid. In a terribly complicated plan, administration officials, led by National Security Adviser John Poindexter and his deputy Oliver North, secretly sold arms to Iran, which was on the U.S. terror list and thus ineligible for such a purchase, to try to put pressure on Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorists who were holding U.S. hostages. The other side of the deal was that they illegally funneled the money from the sales to the Contras.

Although Poindexter, North, and North’s secretary, Fawn Hall, destroyed crucial documents, enough evidence remained to indict more than a dozen participants, including Poindexter, North, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and four CIA officials. But when he became president himself, Reagan’s vice president George H.W. Bush, himself a former CIA director and implicated in the scandal, pardoned those convicted or likely to be. He was advised to do so by his attorney general, William Barr (who later became attorney general for President Donald Trump).

With his attempt to use foreign policy to get himself reelected, Trump took attacks on democracy to a new level. In July 2019, he withheld congressionally appropriated money from Ukraine in order to force the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce he was opening an investigation into the son of then–Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. That is, Trump used the weight of the U.S. government and its enormous power in foreign affairs to try to hamstring his Democratic opponent. When the story broke, Democrats in the House of Representatives called this attack on our democracy for what it was and impeached him, but Republicans voted to acquit.

It was a straight line from 2019’s attack to that of the weeks after the 2020 election, when the former president did all he could to stop the certification of the vote for Democrat Joe Biden. By January 6, though, Trump’s disdain for the law had spread to his supporters, who had learned over a generation to believe that Democrats were not legitimate leaders. Urged by Trump and other loyalists, they refused to accept the results of the election and stormed the Capitol to install the leader they wanted.

The injection of ordinary Americans into the political mix has changed the equation. While Ford recoiled from the prospect of putting a former president on trial, prosecutors today have seen no reason not to charge the people who stormed the Capitol. More than 570 have been charged so far.

Yesterday, a 67-year-old Idaho man, Duke Edward Wilson, pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers. He faces up to 8 years and a $250,000 fine for assaulting the law enforcement officers. And he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for obstruction of an official proceeding.

This law was originally put in place in 1871 to stop members of the Ku Klux Klan from crushing state and local governments during Reconstruction.

If Wilson is facing such a punishment for his foot soldier part in obstructing an official proceeding in January, what will that mean for those higher up the ladder? Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has sued Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who wore a bullet-proof vest to his speech at the January 6 rally; and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who also spoke at the rally, for exactly that: obstructing an official proceeding.

Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) launched a similar lawsuit against Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, but withdrew from it when he became chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Ten other Democratic House members are carrying the lawsuit forward: Representatives Karen R. Bass (CA), Stephen I. Cohen (TN), Veronica Escobar (TX), Pramila Jayapal (WA), Henry C. Johnson, Jr. (GA), Marcia C. Kaptur (OH), Barbara J. Lee (CA), Jerrold Nadler (NY), Maxine Waters (CA), and Bonnie M. Watson Coleman (NJ).

Lawyer and political observer Teri Kanefield writes on Just Security that there is “a considerable amount of publicly available information supporting an allegation that Trump and members of his inner circle intended the rallygoers to impede or delay the counting of electoral votes and certification of the election.” She points out that the rally was timed to spur attendees to go to the Capitol just as the counting of the electoral votes was scheduled to take place, and that in the midst of the attack, Giuliani left a voicemail for a senator asking him to slow down the proceedings into the next day.

At the end of the Civil War, General U.S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln made a decision similar to Ford’s in 1974. They reasoned that being lenient with former Confederates, rather than punishing any of them for their attempt to destroy American democracy, would make them loyal to the Union and willing to embrace the new conditions of Black freedom. Instead, just as Nixon did, white southerners chose to interpret the government’s leniency as proof that they, the Confederates, had been right. Rather than dying in southern defeat, their conviction that some men were better than others, and that hierarchies should be written into American law, survived.

By the 1890s, the Confederate soldier had come to symbolize an individual standing firm against a socialist government controlled by workers and minorities; he was the eastern version of the western cowboy. Statues of Confederates began to sprout up around the country, although most of them were in the South. On what would become Monument Avenue, the white people of Richmond, Virginia, erected a statue to General Robert E. Lee in 1890, the same year the Mississippi Constitution officially suppressed the Black vote. Black leaders objected to the statue, but in vain.

Today, 131 years later, that statue came down.

Notes:

https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740061.asp

https://www.cfr.org/blog/orlando-massacre-and-global-terrorism

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/prosecutions.php

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/swalwell-lawsuit-trump/6d4926e63b9a8fcd/full.pdf

https://www.justsecurity.org/75032/litigation-tracker-pending-criminal-and-civil-cases-against-donald-trump/#Thompson

https://www.justsecurity.org/78035/why-a-trump-lawsuit-to-protect-executive-privilege-could-backfire/

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/idaho-man-pleads-guilty-assault-law-enforcement-and-obstruction-during-jan-6-capitol?s=03

Dr. Hilary Green @HilaryGreen77With Lee Monument coming down, I know that this site will be filled with apologists decrying the process. As someone who wrote about Richmond in book 1 and currently in book two, Black Richmonders rejected the Lost Cause monuments and routinely vocalized their discontent. 1/8

278 Retweets1,076 Likes

September 8th 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/robert-e-lee-statue-removal/2021/09/08/1d9564ee-103d-11ec-9cb6-bf9351a25799_story.html

Sha

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #The Law #political #equal under the law #presidential pardons #above the law #consequences #sedition #treason #Civil War #history

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lligkv · 4 years ago

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what the world will look like when it’s over

Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.

Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.

This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.

And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?

I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:

How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?

Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.

The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.

Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?

It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.

Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.

Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.

Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.

In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?

Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.

#adam curtis #documentaries #thomas mann #jordan peterson #richard dawkins #pankaj mishra #the relentless picnic #conspiracy

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snowflake-of-destruction · 4 years ago

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#ooooh so interesting....#what would their numbers be??#i would assume adam has a number similar to grace#and miya number must be in the mid 200s? because of his run with the apex maybe??

@raindvst tags on her reblog of my Sk8 the Infinity Train speculative plot post which you can read [RIGHT HERE]

Deciding numbers can be difficult. We see a range in the show, and, while we know the general idea of how starting numbers and increases/downsizing of numbers works, the exact “points system” has few references and sometimes just moves as the plot demands. Even starting numbers, we have them range from 50s to in the 300s. Now, 4 drops tomorrow and we may have new or more nuanced information soon.

Long-ish musings on numbers for Miya, Adam, Tadashi, Reki, and Langa under the cut, and some general talk/calls for opinions about Joe, Cherry, and Shadow involvement in the narrative in the final paragraphs.

Miya’s number probably started somewhere around Tulip’s (115), since they are similar age and have a lot of commonality (parents they feel don’t care or pay attention like they should, stubborn, gifted kid, etc.) and though Miya’s issues may not shape in exactly the same way as Tulip’s with her parent’s divorce causing a spike of anger and trauma, we also see that Tulip still has friends/support in her life. Miya is pretty isolated, so maybe we put his starting number a bit higher, like 140. In that case, 200s may be a lowball if he ran around with Apex for awhile, especially if he knew better than to take every word said to him as gospel truth, which I think he would, and he definitely knew some of their actions were wrong/harmful but went along for awhile anyway. Intent counts for a lot.

Even if he’s on his own now, I would still say maybe 400-500 for Miya’s number. We actually see some non-Apex, presumably “normal” passengers with numbers over 1000, but they are older than Miya. Not that age always means a higher number, as Jesse’s was fairly low to begin with, but Jesse was a soft heart from moment one despite other issues, and I think that soft heart and willingness to examine himself sooner than some others means a lower number.

Actually, let’s also look at Hazel and the 337 on her hand. We know that her number is there because that was Amelia’s number, but Simon and Grace don’t know that when first finding her, and though it’s understandable that the fact that Hazel’s number is not glowing trumps all other observations, there isn’t much focus on why a six-year-old who was just hanging out and playing with a denizen has a 337...ergo, maybe that’s not that high. Of course, I could be off base though as I don’t remember any background Apex members numbers (feel free to send them if you got them) so maybe 300 is still pretty high.

I’d still say Miya is around 500 though. Not insurmountable, but still a little problem child.

Adam’s number is indeed one that wraps up his arm, though it’s usually covered by his clothes, so what attracts attention is still the personality. Whether his number is higher or lower than Grace in season 3 is anybody’s guess. He doesn’t care or keep track. He’s just living his life however he wants, going overboard a bit on the principle of doing whatever he desires. He doesn’t buy into the “numbers are power” theory or ‘high number wins”. He never cared whether dwindling numbers meant death or a return to normal life, because he came to regard both as the same thing.

Tadashi’s number (not asked about, but now I am in speculation mode) would seem like it has to be fairly small in comparison with Adam’s. He’d wear gloves, but not long ones, and when he rolls up his sleeves, there is no glow to be found. However, his number would be an irrational number/constantly in flux I’ve decided, because, when our story would begin, his work toward resolving his core issues would enter a paradox. Tadashi’s heart issue is resigning himself to a life where he prioritizes being obedient and serving well over everything else (including right and wrong, his happiness, and even people he loves) refusing to so much as be vocal about his own opinions much less take action. So, finally finding something other than duty important enough to take a stand over, and making a change in how he is going to live his life from there forward is healing. However, and this is a big however, the change he’s made and life he’s chosen, leaving his responsibilities, is following Adam around, not objecting to anything he does, and viewing it as duty owed as much or more than affection...which is both wrong and the same exact pattern/problem.

The train isn’t infallible. We’ve seen that before. I don’t know that the system would know what to make of it. So, until he decides to make another change, finds different priorities, or his relationship dynamic with Adam changes, the anomaly persists.

Reki would probably enter under 100, much like Jesse, and stay right around the same area, decreasing or climbing slowly like we see with Tulip or Jesse most of the time.

Langa, I said before he keeps the same number, but what that number would be may be a difficult assignment. How do we rate the grieving process? Do we give him a number similar to Amelia’s starting place long ago at 330-ish or do we say Amelia had signs of other issues even then so let’s give Lange more along a 200? I’d probably split the difference and give him something like...288. Get the 8s in there to make sideways infinity symbols.

I am still not entirely sure how I am going to integrate Joe and Cherry. I have a thought for them as recently come aboard the train at the same time in separate cars, but I am not completely sold on the first scenario of an inciting incident I came up with. Okay, I’ll say it. Joe proposed, Cherry said no, they fought and broke up entirely, and then both ended up on the train. It could work but it seems a little...melodrama, perhaps?

I don’t have any idea about Shadow, and was tempted to have him as the gang’s train denizen guide. However, I don’t feel that’s entirely fair to him since every other character gets to be human (not that he couldn’t have his own focus or character arc as a denizen) and the au would otherwise be following canon backstories and just be “what if the Infinity Train existed in Sk8’s version of earth,” a path I’d like to stick to.

I am open to ideas about Hiromi/Shadow and Matchablossom if anyone has suggestions. I...think this AU may actually get written.

#sk8 the infinity train #sk8 the infinity #miya chinen #ainosuke shindo #tadashi kikuchi #reki kyan #langa hasegawa #hiromi higa #kaoru sakurayashiki #kojiro nanjo

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yobaba30 · 3 years ago

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Stolen from Twitter

I owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology. I’ve been critical of the Trump presidency these last four years, and am still exhausted from the experience. But to be fair, President Trump wasn’t that bad, other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Part 2 cont… Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic respon used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked US falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fucked up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, Part 3 continues… seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment. But other than that. . . Please share. This is how history books will read, because these are PROVABLE FACTS! Truth

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faelapis · 4 years ago

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@babybeetlebongos asked me whether i thought more “forgiving media” like SU will not be looked fondly upon by history because it’s not as “violent” as your spops or your gravity falls, and i had a lot of thoughts about that. tw for discussion of real-life politics, hopefully with enough sensitivity to explain where i’m coming from without being extremely tacky. i’ll probably fail, and i’m very open to criticism here, but i’ll try.

many people conflate healing with violence, and change with punishment. i don’t think they’re right about that, i think some people mischaracterize where SU would fall within “the politics of the moment” in the short term, even though SU takes the much more long-term, “cultures actually need to change over time, and there’s reasons people are the way they are that are bigger than the individual, and nobody will change if you don’t give them reasons to think that the future includes them rather than punishes them for sociological phenomenon outside any individual’s control”.

because the thing is, systemic change and “punishing the bad guys” aren’t actually the same thing. they’re sometimes related, but they don’t have to be. i think the “peaceful vs violent protest” debate has obscured another debate altogether - which is individualism vs structuralism.

individualism posits that, infamously, there’s “no such thing as society”, we are all individuals and we are all accountable for our actions. we have perfectly free will, so therefore, anything we do can and should be used against us.

structuralism posits that actually, we Do live in a society, and what we can and cannot do is extremely limited to our environments. everyone are shaped by their upbringings, socioeconomic status, culture, social norms, et cetera, and therefore, it’s more important to change society than to punish/reward individuals. our responsibility is collective, not just to ourselves. the point isn’t who is “bad”, the point is that society is the reason why many internalize bad beliefs, and that’s what we need to work on - it’s a collective failing that we haven’t, and we all need to take responsibility for *each other*.

and i think a lot of people who pretend to be for systemic change would settle for punishing their abusers, when it should really be the other way around. i really hate “individualistic leftism”, as a structural leftist myself.

to take the current political example, which, yes, i know is tacky and not the point, but it was what prompted the discussion so i think i have no choice but to address what the discussion actually became - defund the police is more important, imo, than punishing individual officers. one is transformational change on a large scale that actually makes life better for people. the other... is really just venting / individualizing things, as if it would fix anything. to me, the fix is not about punishing the bad guys, it’s changing the system as a whole.

i understand the idea of "why not both", i'm not against that, but i try to be consistently against individualistic framing. thinking punishing individuals fixes systems is equally a shitty liberal mindset as thinking that things will go “back to normal” once trump is out of office. it just has an edgier, more violent spin.

and that’s what bothers me about the framing of media like spop or gravity falls as the “good, revolutionary” media to SU’s “bad, reformist :(” media lens. it’s really reductive, and it makes that key prioritization that “punishment > change”, which is a very conservative mindset.

SU actually changes the system. the diamonds are no longer in power, and there is no hierarchy. everyone are slowly changing to find themselves in a world where everyone equally has the chance to do so. gravity falls and spop gets rid of the bad guy on top and thinks that fixes everything. to those latter shows, the status quo was actually fine, we just needed to get rid of the bad people. to SU, it’s the opposite - we can’t expect getting rid of the “bad guys” to “fix everything” (that’s what rose tried to do w/pink), because the sociological cultural norms of gemkind means that they’re taught to love the diamonds. so if you just kill them, you become their bad guys (the way everyone reacted to “killing” pink). you have to have the compassion to understand that to these people, this idolization is normal, and dismantle that normal without condemning the people as a whole.

but that’s not as sexy as “valid to kill anyone who does The Bad Things. having revenge fantasies about punishing your abusers = good leftist praxis. we fix things by punishing individuals for social issues beyond their control”.

and what’s sad about that mindset is that it often, actually, doesn’t think things can truly get better. nothing that happened in spop stops more shadow weavers from popping up, because the sociological conditions that lead to abuse haven’t been dealt with. it doesn’t seem to think it CAN be proactively prevented, only punished once the children are already scarred.

SU is a lot more... hopeful yet deterministic, in a way? as in, it thinks about (and cares about) how we are influenced by each other. it wants to achieve social equality so that those power relationships don’t exist to influence us in negative ways anymore. with the understanding that nobody is above those influences (not even the “good” privileged people like steven*). whereas spop - and gravity falls - are very much not that. they are individualistic. you kill the bad guys on top and that solves eeeeverything. no cultures need to change. they just need to be intimidated into knowing the “good” people are on top now and obeying them.

(*future is basically saying there’s no good diamond to replace the bad ones, and nobody should be "on top”. it hurts everyone - the same way the expectations of patriarchy hurts everyone. we’ve molded the ones on top into thinking they must and should take responsibility for everything, when that is neither good nor realistic. we’re all, collectively, responsible for healing the traumatized & creating equal relationships. and we can’t do that by individual reward & punishment. as much as that would validate some people’s anger.)

and those people? they’re ultimately just venting their feelings. which is fine. many have been told that their personal anger is something to be demonized, so they vent by engaging in these validation circle-jerks about how good and important it is to be angry. and then many think they’re woke leftists FOR being angry, rather than anger being a personal emotion without inherent good or evil.

many of them have people who’ve hurt them personally that they want to hurt back, or they just wanna make sure to condemn the Bad People so nobody will think they side with or excuse the bad people. the idea is that somebody needs to hurt. so we just gotta make sure it’s the “right” people.

maybe one day, they will realize that actually, social issues are bigger than individuals - and this goes both ways. it can’t just mean “and so we can’t blame the poor, disadvantaged for not being A+ students”, it must also mean “and so dismantling cishet privilege is more important than punishing individual, ignorant cishet people”. that’s the only way to be consistently sociological in your framing.

we don’t decide our upbringings, social norms, who are demonized/deified by society, or who has unjust amounts of power. we’re shaped by our environments, and so, it’s more important to change those environments (and undo those power structures) than to kill individuals we consider particularly heinous. punishing those individuals will not lead to social change. it never has. people generally don’t think they have to change because others were made “examples” of. they revel in being in a “battle”. people like having a fixed bad guy to fight. cops like the power & sympathy it gives them.

the current protests... aren’t even “violent”, in the spop or gravity falls sense. they’re just... property damage and collective direct action, which is much more targeted at dismantling the system than to punish individuals. they’re not really violent. people aren’t killing individual cops, they’re demanding that THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE change. its cop culture that’s bad, it doesn’t matter if the individual cop is good or bad. ACAB because the system sucks. even if you try to be a “good” cop, you’re likely to be fired for speaking up, because the whole culture is awful.

this is kinda similar to something SU is saying - changing the system is more important than figuring out who “the bad people” are and killing them. people think they’re doing the right thing, but ultimately, the structures around them are making them think the hierarchies they’re in are just. it’s the whole of cop culture that needs to change, and maybe the idea of cops in general is a bad one. the system is the problem, and it’s bigger than any individual... which in turn means, or SHOULD mean, that the system can be destroyed and the individuals within it can change, because they’re not really “the problem”. the idea of putting the individual responsible offers behind bars is a fine one, but... it’s more symbolic than truly transformational. the true transformation would be to defund the police.

i know these media comparisons are inherently tacky. they are. anyone who thinks that is more important than what’s going on irl is being shitty about it. you should be donating, protesting, doing a million more important irl things.

but these tacky comparisons ARE happening, and some people do think “liking the right media” is praxis, so... if you really wanna fit gravity falls or spop into this, the analogy would be more akin to like. defeating the biggest, scariest cop, and thinking that’s somehow gonna change policing as an institution. or thinking that someone killing trump will make all the police & right-wingers go away.

basically, it’s conflating your vengeance with true change. it’s spitting on the leftist value of universal compassion in the face of the sociological nature of reality, in which Everyone are influenced by their privileges and lack thereof in ways that are bigger than individual circumstances (and thus can’t be undone by individual punishment), and so we’re all responsible. but you’d rather not be - because you’d rather see the right people burn than focus your anger at the world and at challenging yourself and your own privileges.

#politics #social issues #steven universe #gravity falls #spop

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pitiless-achilles-wept · 4 years ago

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2020 Can Take My Hair, But Not My Hope

My hair started falling out on election night.

I thought at first it might be the anxiety, that I was literally pulling my hair out with worry over numbers I already knew were not going to be definitive before the night wore into morning but which I stayed up until 3:30am watching anyway. I tweeted rapidly, reassuring my jittery timeline that not only had we all known that the night would bring no results but that we had even expected Trump to lead in key states because of the greater number of mail-in ballots from urban areas that would largely count for Biden. We knew. We all knew. But we were all terrified, flashing back to 2016 and already dreading another four years of living life on high alert, in constant survival mode.

I posted a selfie with a tweet that read, "Could be the last presidential election I vote in (blah blah stage 4 cancer blah blah) and I wish it were better and clearer than this but it's a crucial privilege to have voted. Remember, whatever the outcome, the last thing they can take from you is your hope."

To me that last sentence has been a mantra for these years and for my treatment. I have consistently refused, despite overwhelmingly terrible odds, to lose hope. The story of Pandora's Box tells us that the very last thing left inside was Hope--that even once all the demons were out in the world there was that tiny, feathered creature left to hang on to. It hasn't been easy, but I am one of the most stubborn people you will ever meet (and if you doubt this just ask anyone who's ever fought me on anything!) and it has turned out to be a saving grace rather than an irritating personality trait. Feeling like the world was trying to take my hope away made me angry. And when I get angry I will fight back.

I know I'm not alone in feeling like we entered some kind of alternate nightmare timeline on election night 2016. To that point, despite periods of immense personal difficulty, nothing truly terrible had happened to me. Then, in short order, my marriage ended and I was diagnosed with and began being treated for a terminal illness, all against the backdrop of a regime so deliberately hateful that it was truly incomprehensible to me. Then, a global pandemic and national crisis swept away the small consolations I'd found in my new life with cancer. The temptation to feel hopeless was strong and I struggled with it, particularly in the isolation of quarantine. I'm struggling with it now, facing a winter of further lockdowns, social isolation, continued chemo, and the added indignity (and chilliness!) of not having any hair. But somehow the coincidence of my hair loss with election night seemed like a good omen for the future, if a sad thing for the present.

I heard the news that they had called Pennsylvania for Biden at a peaceful Airbnb in the Catskills after stepping out of a shower where lost hair in handfuls. It felt oddly like a sacrifice I had made personally. I joked about this with friends on the text chains that lit up and that (despite my promise to myself and my writing partner that we'd "go off the grid") I responded to immediately. Instant replies, with emojis and GIFs, participated in the fiction: "Thank you for your service!!!"; "We ALL appreciate your sacrifice!"; "Who among us would NOT give up their hair for no more Trump?". The feeling was real for me, though. It was as though the good news demanded some kind of karmic offering. You never get something for nothing, I thought, and really it was a small price to pay.

The rest of the weekend passed too quickly, with absorption in the novel I plan (madly, given that I also work full-time) to work on for "National Novel Writing Month" (NaNoWriMo), walks in the unseasonably warm woods, and nighttime drinks on the back deck under the stars, watching my hair blow off in fine strands and drift through the sodium porch light. My friend and I read tarot and both our layouts contained The Tower, the card for new beginnings from total annihilation, the moment of destruction in which (as the novel's title says) everything is illuminated. "This might sound dumb," he said, "but maybe yours is about your hair." It did not sound dumb.

[shaved heads, the 2020 election, and a couple pics under the cut]

There is probably no more iconic visual shorthand for cancer than hair loss. It happens because chemo agents target fast-proliferating cells, which tend to inhabit things that grow rapidly by nature (hair, fingernails), or that we need to replenish often (cells in the gut), as well as out-of-control cancer cells. But not all cancer treatments, not even all chemotherapies, cause hair loss. In my 20 months of being treated for cancer and my three previous treatments (four, if you count the surgery I had) nothing had yet affected my hair beyond a bit of thinning. This despite the fact that my first-ever treatment (Taxol) was widely known to cause hair loss for "everyone." I had been fortunate with this particular side effect in a narrow way that I have absolutely not been on a broader scale. "Maybe," I had let myself think, "I can have this one thing." The odds were in my favor too; only 38% of people in clinical trials being treated with Saci lost their hair. I liked the odds of being in the 62% who didn't. But--as we all felt deep in our gut while they counted votes in battleground states--odds aren't everything.

I had come to treat the "strength" of my hair as a kind of relative consolation (though as with everything cancer "strength," "weakness," and the rhetoric of battle have nothing to do with outcomes). I treasured still having it, not just out of vanity (though I have always loved my hair whatever length, style, or color it has been) but because it allowed me to pass among regular people as one of them. I had no visible markers of the illness that is killing me, concealed as first the tumor and then the scars were by my clothing. "You look wonderful," people would tell me, even when I suffered from stress fractures from nothing more than running or sneezing; muscle spasms in my shoulder and nerve death in my fingertips; nausea that I swallowed with swigs from my water bottle that just made me look all the more like a hydration-conscious athlete; and profound, constant, and debilitating fatigue. Invisible illness had its own perils but I would take them--take all of them at once if necessary!--if only I could keep my hair and look normal.

It was not to be. A part of me had known this, since a lifetime with metastatic cancer means a lifetime of treatments a solid proportion of which result in hair loss. But I had hoped. And I had liked the odds.

The hardest thing for me is having to give up this particular consolation before knowing whether or not my new treatment is also working on my cancer. Unfortunately, there really isn't a correlation between side effects like hair loss and effectiveness of treatment. If it is working then I will feel that--like the election to which I felt I had karmically contributed--it was all completely worth it. Yet, even in this best case scenario, there's a new reality for me which is that while I am on this treatment I will stay bald. When you are a chronic patient you hope for a treatment that will work well with manageable side effects. And if this treatment works--and if the other side effects are as ok-ish as they are now--then I will remain on it.

It's that future that I am furious about more than anything else. I want to continue to live my life, of course, but I don't want to have to do it bald! In part that is because I don't want to register to people constantly as an archetypal "cancer patient" when I know that I am so much more. It is also in part because I don't want to think of myself as being ill, and living every day having to disguise my absent hair will make that all the tougher. I have already noticed that I feel, physically, as though I am sicker because of my constantly shedding hair. How could I not, in some ways, when every move I make and every glance at myself (including in endless Zoom windows) shows me this highly visible change?

For that reason, I'm shaving my remaining hair tomorrow (Wednesday). It's a way to feel less disempowered--less like hair loss is happening to me--and wrest control of the situation back. I will try to find agreeable things about it: wigs, scarves, cozy caps, bright lipstick, statement earrings, and a general punk/Mad Max vibe that is appropriate to 2020. But I don't want anyone to think for a second that I find this agreeable, or even acceptable, or that I don't mind. I mind a whole hell of a lot. My hair was my consolation prize, my camouflage, my vanity, my folly, and my battle cry.

I dyed it purple when I was first diagnosed because I knew (or thought I knew) that I would be losing it soon. I didn't, and I came to cherish it as a symbol of my boldness in the face of circumstances trying to oppress me, to make me shrink, to tempt me to become invisible. I refused and used it to "shout" all the louder in response. Because of what it came to mean to me, I'm nearly as sad about losing the purple as I am about losing the hair itself. It both symbolized the weight I was carrying and also that I would not let that weight grind me down. It was my act of resistance and my sign resilience all at once.

I sent a text to my friends, explaining this and offering, as an idea, that I could "pass the purple" to them in some way, small or large. It would feel more like handing off a torch or a weight (or the One Ring) than anyone shaving their head in solidarity. (After all, if they did that it would just remind me as I watched theirs grow back that, in fact, our positions were very different.) You're welcome to do it if you'd like too, internet friends, with temporary or permanent dye or a wig or a headband or one of those terrible 90s hairwraps or whatever. But I don't require that anyone do it because I feel support from you all in myriad ways, all the time. (But if you do, please send me pictures!)

It's November 2020. The election is over and Joe Biden has won. I still have cancer and I'll be bald tomorrow. I hope it's a turning point, both personal and global, because it feels like one. We've given up a lot in the last four years and I cannot say that I feel in any way peaceful or accepting about having to give up yet one more thing. But in losing my hair I absolutely refuse to also give up my hope.

(On our walk we did also seem to find a version of The Tower, all that was left of an abandoned house)

#life update #my life as a cancer patient #stage 4 #mbc #metastatic breast cancer #losing my hair #unfair things #election 2020 #I just have a lot of feelings #the tower #us politics

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eretzyisrael · 4 years ago

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Has Joe Forgotten Joseph?

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph – Ex. 1:8

Ever since the day there arose a Pharaoh in Egypt who “did not know Joseph,” the dialectic of the Jewish people in diaspora has been the same. The Jews are first welcomed and treated well, but in time they grow numerous, and acquire wealth, influence, and position in society. They do exceedingly well. The reason for that is fraught with controversy, but the fact is undeniable.

And then the locals become unhappy with them. Perhaps they feel threatened, perhaps envious, perhaps greedy for the possessions amassed by the Jews. Perhaps they simply are repelled by the stubborn otherness of the Jews. Then the majority rises up, places restrictions on them, persecutes them, impoverishes them, expels them, murders them, or all of these.

It happened in Egypt, in the Roman Empire, in England, Spain, Byzantium, the Russian Empire, Iraq, and of course 20th century Europe. Over and over. Finally the Zionists realized that the only way to break out of this dialectic was to return to Jewish sovereignty, create a Jewish state of, by, and for the Jewish people. After a difficult struggle and a particularly horrific episode of large-scale mass murder, they succeeded to build a state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

But then the dialectic did not disappear. Rather, it raised itself to a higher level of abstraction, with the whole world playing the role of the diaspora nations and the Jewish state that of their Jewish communities; hence the expression “Israel is the Jew among nations” (usually attributed to Golda Meir).

Just like the various kings, princes, and sultans who adopted or spurned the Jews, the nations of the world took positions about the Jewish state. But as she became stronger and wealthier, and her people happier and more successful, resentment against her rose up throughout the world. Just as the Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to obtain their blood, the Jewish state was accused of horrendous crimes against Palestinians. A notorious parallel, called a 21st century blood libel, was the allegation that the IDF had murdered young Mohammed al-Dura, which became a cause célèbre for Israel-haters worldwide. Just as Jews were seen in medieval Europe as evil creatures for their refusal to accept the doctrines of Christianity, today Israel is called a racist and apartheid state.

What has happened is that while traditional Jew-hatred (although growing strongly under the radar, especially among lower economic classes in the West) has become at least publically unfashionable, misoziony, hatred of Israel no less extreme, irrational, and obsessive than Nazi antisemitism, is burgeoning. International institutions like the UN have adopted it as a pillar of their “moral” edifices, and it has become a litmus test for ideological purity on the left.

This didn’t happen by itself. It was a deliberate consequence of Soviet cognitive warfare. Starting in the 1960s, the KGB deliberately amplified anti-Israel sentiment, and worked to create it with every means at its disposal. The Soviets, well understanding the power that misoziony inherited from its Jew-hating roots, emphasized the demonization of Israel in its propaganda, contributing greatly to its strength and spread. In particular, the false identification of Zionism with racism and apartheid was a KGB creation.

Official American policy has been relatively non-misozionist since Harry Truman played the role of Cyrus the Great to the Jewish state in 1948. Elements in the State Department have always been biased against Israel to some extent, but in general US policy was rational, even friendly unless American interests (mostly connected to oil) dictated otherwise.

With the Obama presidency, America’s Mideast policy became driven by more than strict considerations of US interests. Barack Obama saw himself as motivated by moral concerns, but his moral principles were those of the contemporary Left (with a contribution from black liberation theology). He absorbed the Soviet conception of Israel as a colonialist exploiter of people of color, and saw Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a personal foe.

But he knew that the American people, especially including Evangelical Christians, weren’t ready for a president who would explicitly denounce Israel as a state that ought not exist. So he employed a dual strategy. On the one hand, he repeatedly assured Americans that he was committed to the security of Israel (“an unbreakable bond”), and he supported military aid to Israel, which sent a message of support while it provided leverage to control her, and weakened her domestic military industries.

On the other hand, he worked to weaken Israel and strengthen her enemies, including the PLO but especially Iran. The nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Iran, which had the effect of protecting Iran’s nuclear program instead of dismantling it, was a direct threat to Israel’s continued existence. And yet, the tortuous explanations of how this arrangement would benefit the US didn’t hold water. What is there about “death to America” that he didn’t understand? What is there about Iranian-sponsored drug trafficking that is in America’s interest? Had the Iranian regime ever done anything in response to the gifts it received from the US other than increase its support of terrorism and push harder to expand its sphere of influence, so as to surround its intended victims (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt)?

The answer is that Obama had replaced the traditional interest-based policy with one based on his understanding of morality. Unfortunately his ignorance of history and skewed ideology produced an equally skewed morality, in which there is no room for a Jewish state. American policy had sometimes been less than supportive of Israel when the perception was that US interests required it. But for the first time, it became ideologically anti-Israel.

Obama was replaced by Donald Trump in 2017. Whatever his motives, Trump’s actions in both the symbolic and the concrete realms were consistently pro-Israel. In particular, he took the US out of the dangerous JCPOA and increased pressure on Iran, both by means of sanctions and by assisting the targets of Iran’s aggression, Israel and the Sunni Arab states. Trump’s policy severely weakened the highly unpopular regime in Iran (Obama had supported the regime when it was challenged domestically by the Green Movement in 2009).

Trump and his movement were defeated in a remarkably rancorous and brutal election struggle that left the US bitterly divided. The Joe Biden administration has chosen its foreign policy team almost entirely from former Obama Administration officials, and has appointed some particularly anti-Israel individuals to key positions, including those that will be concerned with Iran. In his first days, Biden has reversed several of Trump’s actions relating to the Palestinians, restoring aid to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, reopening the Jerusalem consulate that was the unofficial US embassy to “Palestine,” and pledging to allow the PLO office in Washington to reopen.

But it is in connection with Iran that the intention to continue Obama’s policies are the most concerning. Although Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (the “good cop” in the administration) has said that Iran will get no sanctions relief until it “returns to compliance” with the JCPOA, Biden has already given Iran several important gifts: he has said he will remove the Iran-sponsored Houthi guerrillas in Yemen from the list of designated terrorist organizations; he will no longer sell arms to Saudi Arabia in support of its war against the Houthis; and he has suspended the impending sale of F35 aircraft to the UAE, an Iranian enemy and recent ally of Israel.

Israel has been waiting for Biden to call PM Netanyahu, because Netanyahu wants to present evidence about Iranian nuclear development, and argue that rejoining the JCPOA as it stands or with minimal changes would be a serious error. Biden apparently would prefer not to have this conversation, which might result in an open break with Israel. So far he hasn’t called.

I don’t know where Biden himself is at, or indeed if he is at anyplace at all. But it seems certain that the new administration has returned to Obama-era policies on issues of concern to Israel. I wonder if any of them have questioned the rationality of helping the misogynist, homophobic, dictatorial, terror-propagating, expansionist Iranian regime get nuclear weapons?

Does the existence of a Jewish state bother them that much?

Abu Yehuda

#Jew Hatred #US-Israel Relations #Zionism

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project-rebirth · 3 years ago

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PROFILE: Olivia Bonaparte

Name: Olivia Bonaparte

Epithet: Mistress Olivia, Napoleon 2.0

Personal Info

Status: Alive

Nationality: French

Age: 19

Gender: Female

Height: 5'2

Family: Emma Bonaparte (Younger Sister)

Magic Name: Salvare001 - Be the savior of those who are in need of it

Affiliation: Fallen Roman Catholic Church, House of Bonaparte

Abilities

Magic: [Stigma] (聖痕 Seikon (Sutiguma)?, lit. "Holy Mark")

Power Level: Saint-level

Equipment: Sword of Gallicans

Olivia Bonaparte (オリビア・ボナパルテ Oribia Bonaparute) is a major recurring character in A Certain Magical Index: Rebirth Testament, appearing as the primary antagonist of the Inquisitorial Invasion Arc. She is a member of the Fallen Roman Catholic Church and is a member of the elite House of Bonaparte. She's also a saint and the rival and Catholic-counter-part to Kanzaki Kaori.

Background

Olivia was born and raised in Paris, France and was born into the House of Bonaparte, an elite aristocratic family that secretly controlled France from behind the scenes. She spent her whole childhood training in the art of magic and eventually rose to become a full-blown saint at around the same time as Kanzaki Kaori. During one of her first missions, she confronted Kanzaki and the two of them fought which ended in a stalemate but Kanzaki was scared because Olivia had killed many members of the Amakusa church. Ever since then, the two have had a never-ending rivalry and they seek to fight each other whenever they can and want to see the other one be defeated.

Personality

Olivia is a strict disciplinary, always having a hard and stern look on her face and only smiling to those whom she deems worthy of it. She tends to act cold, calm and collected in general and this helps her especially in the battle against her opponents. She has fierce devotion and allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church going as far as to refer to Protestants as "heathen traitors". She is also loyal to France and longs to have it return to the days of the French Empire under Napoleon, her descendant. Olivia also has a rivalry with Kanzaki and tends to want to fight her and the other members of Necessarius whenever she can.

Olivia is also very strict and dedicated to the idea of victory. She believes in scoring victory for the Catholic Church and/or France and is willing to do anything to accomplish that. She has a very strong sense of pride and nationalism and refuses to have either the Vatican nor France cave in or negotiate until they've won. The same applies to her as well and holds her status as a saint in very high regard. Her sense of pride and victory is so strong that upon being captured, Olivia will shut herself out and lay in shame and will refuse to speak to her captors. She will be vigilant against them and will even go as far as to demand to be gagged so she can't speak to them believing that she'd be dishonoring either the Catholic Church or France by doing so.

Powers & Abilities

Like Kanzaki, Olivia is a type of magician born with Stigma. As a result, she has the ability to call upon God's power as a Saint who has bodily characteristics similar to the Son of God, and is endowed with super-human capabilities. It is said that she is capable of fighting with a christian angel in most circumstances. She is highly proficient in non-magical combat, having been trained sense childhood by the sword and other martial arts. Because of her ability, she is stated to be one of the top Magicians in Europe.

She has great knowledge of western magic, primarily christian and kabbalac spells.

The Sword of Gallicans

The Sword of Gallicans is a sword that is passed down from generation to generation within the House of Bonaparte to the head of state, the French monarch. It is a ceremonial sword that is used during the coronation ceremonies, however this was not its original use. The sword was used in battle by the Bonaparte family for many generations, and continues to be used as such by the family.

The sword is referred to as the "sword that brings judgement", specifically because it has also been responsible for many executions by the family head. It does not necessarily mean the sword is the symbol of the monarch but represents the proof of being the person chosen to be the family head. It is also known as the Sword of Honor and the sibling of Britain's Curtana.

Like Curtana, its importance lies in its use as a spiritual item where it is called the sword that determines the country's leader of the angels. The sword is able to empower its weilder with Telesma, the same type of power that Archangel Michael, the leader of angels, possesses. As a result, Olivia gains a significant boost in power. It should be stated however, that while the boost in power she gains is significant, its affects drastically weaken when she is not in France. Still, when armed with the Sword of Gallicans, she is formidable in combat and is capable of empowering her allies from the French division of the Roman Catholic Church and the revived Knights of Orleans.

The Sword of Gallicans does not have the same limitations as Curtana Original and its subsequent variants, as its effects can be used outside of the country of France, although as mentioned before, its effects will be much stronger in the country of its origin. With it empowering Olivia's allies, they also are able to possess telesma to enhance their own abilities, with the conditions that her party must all be French in order to feel its affects, for example, a person from Italy or Japan would not be enhanced by the Sword of Gallicans' power.

Sword's capabilities

Invisible Air Spell

The Invisible Air Spell (風王結界Fū-Ō Kekkai lit. Barrier of the Wind King) is a spell that produces a sheath of wind that covers the Sword of Gallicans and conceals it so that it cannot be easily recognized as such. It is made up of multiple layers of wind compressed into super-high pressure air with a massive amount of magical energy, which distorts the refraction of light and renders what is inside completely invisible. This spell is not just limited to the blade, as it can also be used on its wielder to conceal herself and others.

Upon the Sword of Gallicans, it takes on the shape of the blade and renders it as an invisible sword that doesn't appear even as sparks fly off of it. It lacks the capacity to annihilate the enemy like Light of Gallicans Spell, being more suited as a "sharp tool" in battle. It isn't used for any particular strength, but it is easier to use in battle than Light of Gallicans and it is a trump card that can bring about victory if used well. It is also possible to implement the barrier on something other than the sword. She can form the barrier in the area around her or as a quick defensive wall of wind, which she can keep active for a number of minutes with her magical energy. She uses it to completely envelop an entire Building in an unbreakable protection.

It is rather simple in execution, but it proves tremendously effective in hand-to-hand combat. The barrier isn't a vacuum, so the air constantly whirling around the blade is essentially a weapon. It increases the damage and cutting power of an attack, and the amount of mana released from each strike is high enough that it is visible to the eye. It also provides for an increased accuracy and defense against opponents unfamiliar with the nature of her weapon as it is difficult for the opponents to parry lunges and thrusts from Olivia. They cannot discern the length, width, reach, or trajectory of the blade, or even the fact that it is even a blade until they actually make contact with the weapon, which leaves them constantly on guard due to having to rely solely on Olivia's movement to decipher her attacks. They are confused both offensively and defensively, only allowing them to approximate the movements of the strikes and keep outside of her range to avoid being easily struck down. Against an opponent who can figure out the nature of the weapon quickly and correct the visual disturbance, or someone with a resistance to visual impediments, it becomes nothing more than wind around a sword.

Once the barrier is released so that the Sword of Gallicans can be used, the previously compressed wind surges around her chaotically, creating a vacuum as it diffuses into the air with enough force to knock over normal people and shake heavy, firm trees like a typhoon. The compressed wind can also instead be released as a single use projectile spell called Strike Air: Hammer of the Wind King (風王鉄槌, Fū-ō Tettsui?). Acting like a hammer made out of wind, it creates a gale made out of super high pressure condensed air that is powerful enough to easily crush and blow away armies and fling a stone slab weighing several tons into the air as if it were nothing. It is a long range attack with a constant amount of damage that is not influenced by Olivia's physical condition or her level of magical energy. It can only be blocked by overwhelming it with a higher amount of magical energy. It can also be used to accelerate her own body towards her opponent, allowing her to travel at three times her normal speed. By holding the sword in a backward wide stance, she releases the air and changes into a supersonic bullet that charges towards her opponent. If working together with another person, the partner can use the vacuum left behind by the attack to immediately rush in behind it by using the surge of air taken in by the vacuum as a Slipstream. After releasing it, she can recall it by compressing the surrounding air to reform the barrier.

Light of Gallicans Spell

Her strongest offensive spell yet, the Light of Gallicans is a spell that takes a large amount of Telesma within it and unleashes it as an offensive power. It has been noted by Olivia that it is an extremely dangerous spell to use and that it has a good chance of overloading and destroying her if not prepared properly. Because of its destructive power, it has been regarded as an "ultimate killing technique" that releases Telesma in its purist form from the tip of the blade once the sword is swung. To an observer, it looks like a giant beam of light, but the attack's target point is only at the tip. It is the "ultimate slash" that cuts through everything in the "area" the light goes through. Its enormous power heats space around the tip, and as a result, it is interpreted as a wave of light that mows across the surface of the earth. One could also call it a directed energy weapon. Even if it is dodged, those in close proximity can still be temporarily distracted by its intensity.

Because of its nature, the spell cannot be used consecutively and runs the risk of overloading the user with Telesma and destroying their body and the surrounding area. It is capable of eradicating entire armies at its fullest capabilities, as well as destroying numerous buildings in a place like Academy City. The sword itself being a spiritual item, it is able to be negated by Imagine Breaker, however, the Light of Gallicans Spell would have enough force to completely blow Kamijou Touma away, despite the spell being dispelled by Imagine Breaker. It is possible to limit its destructive power if the opponent focuses on close-range combat, and it cannot be used against opponents who fight at extremely close range.

#Muse Information #Kinoverse Lore #Character Profile

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bexterbex · 5 years ago

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A Soul to Mend His Own | Ch. 22

Warning, if it hasn’t been obvious in the movies there is Nazi symbolism within the First Order. I will expand on this much more throughout the story. If this is something that bothers you, please just exit the story. The author does not condone any Nazi ideals, this is just for fictional uses only.

A Kylo Ren x Modern! Reader in a soulmate au with some canon divergence. —————————————SLOWBURN————————————–

He is already the Supreme leader, searching the universe to find you, his Empress. Your name on his wrist has been the only constant in his life, while you have doubts about his existence and his acceptance of you. He isn’t in the database and why did the name Kylo Ren cover Ben Solo?

MASTERLIST

Chapter 22: The Founding of a Regime

You simply nodded in response. You wanted him to continue revealing the purpose of the First Order.

“The First Order has been built on the remnants of the Empire. Our ideals are based on their success but we have learned from their mistakes. As you know the First Order is a military regime. We can maintain order most efficiently this way. You must be familiar with military ranks and how they work. We have our officers and our enlisted ranks. We instill our ideologies at a young age. We have an academy that is unmatched anywhere in the galaxy. My father was one of the founding members of the First Order and this was one of his legacies.”

“How young is a young age,” you ask.

“Our enlisted troops start young, but our main academy begins at 16. My father’s was a senior academy on Arkanis. He rebuilt it in the image of imperial success and thus the initial founding of the First Order was born. There were several others including Grand Admiral Rae Sloane and Ornes Apolin. They helped build our new empire in the shadows of the outer rim. You know our enlisted troops as Stormtroopers. Now ‘troopers can become officers if they have proven themselves. They may even be given some command roles but for the most part, they are soldiers and not officers,” said the general.

“But how young is young,” you ask.

At this the general seemed to be annoyed, “Our ‘trooper program is one that helps people who would otherwise die from poverty and starvation. They start very young. Parents volunteer their children in the frontiercorps and they are guaranteed food, shelter, and education. Like I said they would otherwise starve and die without the First Order.”

“So you take children, young children,” you try to clarify.

“We take those in vulnerable positions and give them something they would not otherwise have. And we do not take children, their parents willingly sign their children up for a better future,” he was no longer pacing in the front of the room but was now standing directly infant of you.

You nodded and urged him to continue.

“I am a product of my father’s academy. I enlisted at 16, graduated with top honors and was granted an assignment on a starship. I quickly moved up the ranks and am the youngest general in the First Order and the youngest Allegiant General in galactic history.”

He seemed proud of his accomplishments, he definitely spoke with pride and his posture changed.

“While our Stormtrooper Corps start younger, any promising ‘troopers may be asked to join the academy,” he paused before starting back on the government of the First Order.

“The position of the Supreme Lead is the ultimate authority of the entire Fist Order and oversees the ruling military hierarchy. The Supreme Leader delegates power to some high-ranking officers and advisers, thus effectively removing any distinction between military and state. This forms an upper cadre of high-ranking officials who have the authority blessed by the Supreme Leader to oversee aspects of the First Order. Any and all alteration to strategy requires the Supreme Leader’s approval.”

“Do to the Supreme Leader’s status, any officer who has direct access to his person is effectively awarded greater authority than their military rank would indicate. We oversee the colonizations of the Unknown Regions and your planet.”

“The current Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren, was not an officer. He existed outside the formal command structure of the First Order and frequently came into conflict with military officials owing to his agenda consistently trumping military objectives. His placement in the hierarchy not only maintained fear within the First Order's upper ranks but also intentionally resembled that of Darth Vader's during the reign of the Old Empire. He usurped the former Supreme Leader Snoke and took the ruling throne.”

You could tell that this annoyed him a bit. Kylo had existed outside the carefully defined ranks of the First Order and took power for himself. Ignoring the rules and pageantry.

“Unlike our former Supreme Leader, Supreme Leader Ren likes to be in on the action. While he currently does not have an official capital planet he is more visible than Snoke. He still follows in his predecessor's footsteps by making his base the Supremacy. And he has arguably made more improvements in his first few years as Supreme Leader than Snoke had.”

So Kylo was doing well as Supreme Leader. You didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. The First Order was definitely not what you initially thought it was, but at the same time, it was.

“We despise the New Republic and view it as an illegitimate regime that tolerates disorder in the galaxy. We do not officially recognize it as a government and we view them as an ill-organized, poorly equipped, and badly funded group. We see our primary mission as restoring order to this lawless galaxy and we view the Resistance and the New Republic as obstacles to this goal.”

“In our annexation of your planet, we have discussed public execution. We are merciless towards treason and must maintain order. The First Order has made it illegal to communicate with the Resistance and we consider it an act of treason, which you now know results in execution. Also, the act of speaking ill of the Supreme Leader has been determined to be a crime. We also employ the First Order Security Bureau as an intelligence service within our administration. We often employ the use of being reconditioned in our ranks, for those who break lesser rules and seem to be slacking in work.”

You weren’t able to fully comprehend what he is saying before he moves on.

“While the First Order is a military regime and the main purpose of a military is war there are many things to consider. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the resistant masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. The First Order either commandeers what it needs or it will destroy it so it will not fall into the hands of those who would see us crumble.”

At this point, the general could see you struggling to comprehend what he was saying. “How about we pick this back up tomorrow my lady. I believe the lieutenant has taken notes for you to review. I believe the Supreme Leader will be back soon, and you have had a long day. If you will excuse me I have reports that I need to attend to.” With that, he left you and the Lieutenant in the conference room.

You received a notification on your phone of a document from Lieutenant Mitaka. It was word for word what General Hux had said. You thanked him and you made your way back to your chambers.

You took out your notebook again and started making notes on the notes you were given. Things you liked and things you didn’t like/had more questions about. Even though Kylo had left your education to General Hux you wondered if he would have a problem with you asking him a few questions. Like how did he usurp Supreme Leader Snoke? Also, why was the First Order this creepy? This whole thing made you feel like you were in some sort of futuristic dystopian novel.

You were getting slightly annoyed at how small your screen was trying to read and take notes. “Lieutenant can I have someone update my laptop like they did my phone. I feel like it would be useful in these meetings and while I am doing all this learning.”

“Yes, Lady Ren. I can have it updated for you.” You went into your room to retrieve it and you handed it to the lieutenant.

You then received a notification from Kylo, ‘I will be aboard the Steadfast soon. Why don’t you order dinner for us while you are waiting?’

You did as he asked when the door to your chambers opened the lieutenant saluted and immediately excused himself from your chambers, leaving you alone with Kylo once more.

A/N:I would like to thank the authors and editors of Wookieepedia. Like 90% of what Hux says in this chapter is edited but directly from the First Order article. Also a huge 1984 reference again.

#kylo ren #kylo ren x reader #kylo ren imagine #kylo x reader #kylo x you #first order #sw first order imagine #star wars first order #first order propaganda #star wars #star wars imagine #Star wars soulmate au #a soul to mend his own #armitage hux #am I making hux creepy enough #let me know #dont get me wrong i love his character but i need to get the power hungriness right

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