#and its driving me bonkers that some people refuse to admit this!!!

[mr-payjay]

im actually going insane how are there so many people INSISTING pda does not have npd. pda has like the Most textbook npd i have ever seen on a character It's Okay for someone to have npd guys it doesn't make you Evil and Fucked Up

[onisionhurtspeople]

hey!! just found this blog and saw you sayin some negative stuff about Lainey; I wanted to know if she was a bad person like Onion boy?? If you could link me to posts or something talking about whatever it is that she did i would appreciate it!!

Well, hmm. There’s a lot of controversy that surrounds Lainey, but it’s a little bit less straightforward than the controversy that surrounds Onision. In his case, he is being judged by his actions, the things he says and does in his videos, on Twitter, to other people (his fans and other content creators), and especially the things that he does in his personal life to his friends and romantic partners; but in her case, most of the drama that revolves around Lainey stems not from her actions, but from her lack of actions, and how conspicuously silent she is in the face of her husband’s negativity, bullying, harassment, belittling, insulting, and manipulation of others, especially of the teenage girls and minorities that she claims to stand up in defense of and care so much about. The general consensus is that although she is undeniably a victim too, she is also fundamentally complicit due to the fact that she never says or does anything to indicate that she does not support his actions, and many people get the impression from her behavior that as long as it’s not happening to her, then she doesn’t really care much - and I tend to agree with them. Just for one example: Lainey goes absolutely bonkers and gets super aggressive when people purposely or accidentally don’t refer to her as “they/them”, yet she says absolutely nothing when Greg puts out his 7th video “coming out” as transgender/biromantic/gynesexual/whatever gender or sexual orientation he’s pretending to be for views that week. They both claim to be advocates on behalf of feminism and the LGBTQ+ community, yet Onision continually mocks and even openly insults women and trans people, and Lainey says nothing. Unless it’s somebody else saying those things to her, at which point it becomes a problem and suddenly she’s going on self-righteous Twitter rants about transphobia and misogyny, and Greg is insulting them and telling them that they’re being a transphobic, misogynistic bigot for saying something that hurt Lainey’s feelings. (The lack of self-awareness is astounding to me, these people should be a case study for cognitive dissonance.) Lainey’s empathy seems to be very selective and is mostly reserved for herself or people that she can personally relate to. To my understanding, she also indulges in thinspo blogging, even while her husband continually harasses Eugenia Cooney and accuses her of influencing her fans to become anorexic - all the while, his own wife is reblogging photosets of anorexic women and adding pictures of herself to the thinspo tag on Tumblr.

Despite Lainey’s ~smol sensitive agender emo space prince~ persona, and aside from her positive traits (of which I genuinely believe there are many, which I have outlined in posts before), I tend to find that Lainey as an individual is an overly sensitive, self-absorbed, passive-aggressive, highly immature baby who lives in a bubble of perpetual self-victimhood. And in no way is this meant to minimize or undermine the deleterious effect that I’m sure Onision has had on her self-esteem, her confidence, her personal growth, and her very identity, but I also think that Lainey sees herself as a helpless victim who is at the mercy of a cruel, sadistic, and unkind world, largely because there is a not insignificant part of her that actually enjoys victimizing herself. There is a part of her that genuinely gets something out of being a suffering victim - I think it’s actually a part of her identity at this point, and she wouldn’t know what kind of person she was or how to see herself if she wasn’t constantly in pain for one reason or another. (My boyfriend is one of these people too, and it’s maddening. He goes through extended cycles of sabotaging himself and driving everybody he loves away from him, only to then hit the panic button and stew in the resultant depression, loneliness, and self-loathing that comes along with his actions. Because then not only does he get to suffer as a result, but he’s also then just given himself a legitimate reason to hate himself for hurting the people that he loves. It drives me insane. I see much of his behavior reflected in Lainey’s actions, and Greg has openly admitted that he actually likes that she’s so weak and incapable of defending herself, because it forces her to rely on him for “strength”, which makes him feel powerful and gives him total control over her. Ironically, this entire process actually makes people like Lainey more anxious and more depressed, as they slowly lose more and more control over their lives and their ability to cope with their own existence. I also think this toxic cycle is part of the reason why she’s so thin nowadays - she’s lost so much control over her life that she’s exercising her control in the only way that she’s allowed to: over her own body. But this is a different topic that I think deserves a post of its own, so I’ll discuss it another time.)

The other thing is that not only is Lainey passively complicit in Onision’s actions by refusing to speak out against him, but in many aspects, she is also actively complicit in his abuse too. One of most valid complaints that people have about Lainey is that she allows Greg to leverage her position as a bisexual woman in the LGBTQ+ community in order to queerbait other girls into a relationship with them under the guise of a polyamorous “trinity” in which all three of them are equal partners in the relationship. These girls are usually younger than Lainey and always younger than Greg (typically anywhere from 17 to 21), tend to be the kind of girls that are naive, sensitive, impressionable, and open-minded (just like Lainey is), are usually fans of Onision (and are often harvested directly from his fan base), and are almost always completely inexperienced when it comes to relationships, especially when it comes to the kind of constant and very specific care and attention that is required in order to maintain a healthy polyamorous relationship in which everybody feels happy, respected, taken care of, and an equal participant in the trinity. And so for this reason, many people view Lainey as just as much a predator as Greg himself is, and rightfully so. Greg literally uses Lainey as bait in order to draw in younger, pretty girls who are open to experimentation, in a way that seems less objectively creepy on the outside, because hey, that 17-year-old girl is actually dating Lainey, not him! That’s not creepy at all, there’s only a five-year age gap there. There’s not that much of a difference between 17 and 22, you know! Back in the day, it was totally normal to get married and have children by the age of 15, and besides, 17 is perfectly legal in her state and it’s not illegal and you’re just close-minded and oops now all three of us are dating (totally by accident, of course) and if you judge us then you’re just being an ignorant judgmental bigot. Lainey is only there to lend legitimacy to Greg’s predatory search for younger girls, because he knows that it would be perceived as creepy and inappropriate if he were to be actively recruiting 17-year-olds from his fanbase on his own. (And then he convinces Lainey that he’s doing it for her, so that she can experiment with her bisexuality - but she knows better at this point because she’s seen with her own eyes that he can’t be trusted around “her” girlfriends; she actually admitted last January that she knew Greg was only pushing her to date other girls because he would get something out of it too, and not because he actually wanted her to experiment. So she knows this, and still she goes along with it - because, like Greg, she gets something out of it too.) 

This post got waaay too long. Sorry, I’m high af. Anyway, there are a few other reasons why people criticize Lainey too, but I can’t remember them all and I’ve already written way too much on this topic, so instead allow me to direct you towards a few other resources that may have what you’re looking for. Here’s the Laineybot tag on the omeansion blog, and here is my Laineybot tag. I can’t promise you’ll find what you’re looking for on there, but you might get a better idea of the reasons why people hold Lainey culpable just as much as they do Greg. 

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

a road map to what we know and what we are trying to learn about Trump-Russia

Trump and Russia is just a rat king of a story.

It’s hard to grasp how fucked up it is, because it is fucked up in so many ways. If it all blurs together, it’s harder to understand the facts of the case, to hear when it really is getting more serious, or to see how it connects with the other awful things that are happening. And because it’s so complicated, it’s easy to believe everything you read because so much of what we know is so bonkers that you don’t trust the smell test, or to reject everything out of hand because it’s all so implausible.

That doesn’t do any good. You can, and you have to, think critically about this story. This post is intended to be a tool to help you put things into context, so you can absorb new stories as they happen.

Main types of Trump-Russia stories:

Financial

Personal

Compromised Trump associates

Election 2016

Obstruction

Changes to US foreign policy toward Russia

1. Finance:

They really did get Capone on tax evasion.

It’s almost a joke, right? Al Capone, Scarface, actual OG of the Chicago mafia, locked up for paperwork. But it’s not some random technicality. Capone didn’t lie on his taxes just to pay less in taxes, he lied on his taxes because his income was illegal. If he admitted how much money he was making, it could’ve been used to help prove the bad things he was doing to get it.

That is why Trump’s finances are important to the various Russian interference investigations. The theory, and it’s pretty strong, is that there’s a paper trail connecting Donald Trump and his family to various players in Moscow. The connections themselves may or many not be illegal on their own. But the real issue is that if Russian power players invested in Donald Trump, they did so for a reason.

Various strands of this thread include:

loans Trump has gotten from Deutsche Bank, a European bank with links to Russia;

loans Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has gotten from VEB, a financial firm which handles transactions for the Russian government;

shady financial transactions at the Bank of Cyprus.

2. Personal:

Ways Trump specifically is vulnerable to influence by Putin and his people, such as:

his ideological admiration for Putin’s strongman style government;

blackmail (AKA kompromat). This can be legal trouble or personal embarrassment. If a financial story suggests he can be implicated in money laundering, say. Or, and you’ve probably heard about this one, the supposed pee-pee tape;

-Trump’s general weakness, which makes him putty in the large, manly hands of trained spies.

3. Compromised Trump associates:

Since entering political life less than two years ago, Trump has managed to hire an awful lot of people with unusual relationships to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, such as:

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

Former campaign chair Paul Manafort

Campaign foreign affairs adviser Carter Page

Also, a lot of powerful Republicans, whether or not they have their own connections with Russia, are in a politically compromising position because they’ve known that Trump’s ties to Russia are a national security threat but have stuck with him anyway.

Pence knew that Flynn was compromised, covered it up, and is still lying about it.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, AFAIK, wasn’t in the web until he met with spymaster/former ambassador Kislyak several times during the campaign, then lied about it at his confirmation hearings.

House Republican leadership are on tape laughing about Russia’s influence on Trump.

4. Election 2016:

Okay. Pause. This is intense and abstract and kind of existentially terrifying. Look away from the screen and relax your eyes for a few seconds.

You back? You with me? Alright.

There’s an honestly startling solid consensus on some aspects of the Russian election meddling. There’s no argument that Russian operatives enacted a massive disinformation and harassment campaign online, stole communications from various political groups and released the emails they stole from the DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and that they specifically intended to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. They also stole documents and released documents from various Democratic congressional candidates. It’s still worth trying to understand those parts of the story, but they’re less likely to be news.

Most news revolves around one of two major open questions.

What else did Russian operatives do? We know from a lot of expert testimony, strong reporting, and courageous whistleblowing that Russian hackers had some success breaking into the voter rolls in at least 21 states. We do not have any evidence that they successfully altered the voting rolls or that they actually changed the tallies of votes that have been cast. That may be because it didn’t happen, or because nobody has actually tried to find out if it happened.

What, if any, help did they have from Americans? We know that during the campaign, Trump advisers claimed to be in touch with Wikileaks. We know that at least one right-wing activist was in touch with Michael Flynn while attempting to help people he believed to be Russian operatives.

Those two stories aren’t necessarily the same thing. You can imagine a situation where the tech guys are good enough that they don’t need any help at all. Or you can imagine a situation where there are lots of Republican traitors who want to sell themselves to a white nationalist big daddy like Putin but for whatever reason they aren’t efficiently used. What we do know suggests that both of those things happened to some extent, but most developments in this story come from one angle or the other, so it’s worth being able to put them in context.

Those are the things that we’re aware we don’t know. There are also unknown unknowns – questions that we don’t know enough to be asking yet. Don’t drive yourself up a wall dwelling on that, just be aware that we might get a curveball.

5. Obstruction:

Trump and his people have pulled lots of unethical and some most likely illegal crap to keep the public from learning more about all this.

Remember, we don’t know why Trump might try to cover this stuff up. He sure is acting guilty of some degree of participation in Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But it’s entirely possible that he’s trying to hide other sleazy behavior, or even that his all-consuming narcissism forces him to try and squash any suggestion that he couldn’t have legitimately won an election on his own (especially since deep down even he must know that’s true).

Still, it does look pretty bad. Developing obstruction stories include:

potential obstruction of justice in having fired former FBI Director James Comey;

refusal to comply with congressional oversight;

disinformation coming out of the White House on a massive scale;

demonization of the “fake news,” which has a tendency to spike around the time a credible news outlet publishes a Russ-a-lago story.

6. Foreign Policy:

You can get into the weeds with this if you want but mostly what you need to know is that American foreign policy has swiftly started catering to Russian interests.

How it all fits (maybe):

On top of all the complicated subplots, it’s tricky to read about a Trump-Russia development because you have to do two important things at once: a) put the story in context with what you already know and b) remember that most of the people involved only had some of that context, and that nobody could predict how it would all work out.

Those things are important for your own understanding as this story unfolds. They’re also important to help you sidestep the strawman deflections. The issue is about what happened, not whether it was a perfect execution of Dr. Evil’s Master Plan.

Here’s a possibility. Again, this is something that strikes me as plausible, not an expert analysis or anything.

The Russian power elite is dominated by old-school KGB guys and oligarchs. (Their money in politics problem is exponentially worse than ours, and ours is bad.) Imagine you’re someone operating in that power structure and think about Donald Trump before he came down that escalator two years ago, say, as of his 2013 Miss America pageant in Moscow, or his 2005 loan from the Russia-linked Deutsche Bank. From their perspective, he is an American oligarch, so cultivating some sort of relationship with him would pay off. At the very least, his real estate empire is going to be useful as a place to stash their money. And once you invest in an asset, you want to get as much out of it as possible. So you have Trump who’s deft with the media and who has this racist hostility toward Obama, who Putin dislikes. If you egg him on to become a political nuisance: good. If you egg him on and he decides to run for office: better, because he has a bigger megaphone. But if you can actually get him into office: best.

At the same time as the American division is cultivating that relationship with Trump, the cyber division is developing its capabilities, and the European division is flexing its muscles with interventions into the elections of neighboring countries. All it takes is one apocalyptically-inclined influence to see how it can all fit together……

This story isn’t necessarily complex because it’s some top-down fourteen-dimensional chess strategy. It’s possible that it’s complicated because it was always an open-ended scheme to milk this tool for all he was worth, and it had been chugging along and picking up steam for years before the White House became the target.

Or, in TV Tropes terms, the story of Putin’s Puppet might well be less Batman Gambit and more Gone Horribly Right.

The important point here is, we don’t know. You don’t need to get too wrapped up in speculation or mind-reading. Just check your sources and get what you can out of the facts as they’re responsibly reported, and that’ll let you hear if/when there’s more you can do.

[hawthornewhisperer]

Incoherent Screeching about 403

We start with SO MUCH BRAVENLARKE I am enjoying this even if they’re bickering.

I honestly can’t decide if Clarke’s snappish reaction to Bellamy’s “I’m not going to be one of the hundred” is a sign that this is an argument they have been having for days and she’s sick of it because you will live if I want you to live, dammit or if it’s the first time she heard of it and she’s caught off guard.  Either one would make me flail like a turtle on its back, though.

So @ponyregrets pointed out that the way Bellamy knocks on the window of the rover and makes Jaha get out is a clear sign he watched a bunch of cop movies on the Ark, and we both agreed that this was because Octavia was super into Lethal Weapon and both Blake siblings probably really liked Speed and long story short, it’s now officially canon that Bellamy Blake has a crush on Sandra Bullock and Miss Congeniality is the official movie of the Blake family as it unites Bellamy’s two great loves (Sandra Bullock and feminism) with Octavia’s two great loves (makeup and punching.)

I am going to deal with the Raven arc in one fell swoop because eventually I’m just gonna be screaming about bellarke, so here goes:  I feel AWFUL for Raven.  She’s making decisions entirely on her own because she’s literally the only person who can, and fucking no one is stepping up to be her shoulder to cry on.  I was definitely on her side over Abby in the medicine debate, and it really hurt to see her sort-of-mom challenge her, even if Abby truly believed she was doing the right thing.  Raven’s arc is clearly not over and I do like where it’s going, but god, someone draw her a bubble bath and pour her an entire bottle of wine because my girl needs it.

I also really, really, REALLY loved the brief scene with Bellamy and Luna.  I was surprised by how it was initially presented with Luna thinking she doesn’t deserve their help because she didn’t help them with the flame, though, because I never saw her decision as wrong?  Like, yes, it would have helped them immensely, but the way they went about it was SO AWFUL and TERRIBLE that I felt Luna was totally justified in being like “no fuck you get off my rig.”  So to have Luna frame her decision as having hurt them was surprising, but also very in character for our lovely pacifist mermaid.

HOWEVER, what I loved about that scene was the genuine remorse and understanding on both their sides.  Luna basically admitted she would get it if he saw this as her just rewards, and Bellamy flat out refused that interpretation.  His “no one deserves to suffer” was just the right amount of heartbreaking, because he probably does resent her a little but he never, ever wanted this.  I also think he understands her pain better than most, and I have to move on now because if I don’t this will be too fucking long so check back this afternoon for 2k on Bellamy/Luna parallels.

To conclude the radiation arc: absolutely none of us are surprised that Luna’s nightblood makes her resistant to radiation, but that pales in comparison to that gutwrenching death scene.  I cried and cried and thank you show, for remembering what you’re good at.

Murphy and Emori: god I love those two grifters so fucking hard, and I am really glad they at least addressed the complete lack-of-consent bullshit that was Murphy/Ontari.  I also love that Murphy is ingratiating himself to Abby as a way of making sure he and Emori survive because that is On Brand for those two assholes and I could not be happier.

Before we finish with the bellarke flailing, back to Polis!  ROAN’S ELVEN CLOAK IS EVERYTHING TO ME as is Indra having a daughter and backstory and an arc for this season that has almost nothing to do with the Skaikru.  I am here for it, and I am here for Indra and Gaia having a complicated mother/daughter relationship that is just as deep and nuanced as Clarke and Abby’s.  I am also really pleased with Octavia’s “fuck it, she’s family” decision to go against Roan, because that is insanely reckless and probably the wrong call politically but it is from the heart and in that respect it is 100% Blake and that makes me happy.

Also making me happy: Murderous Elf Prince!  He’s so handsome and angry and yeah, I’m into it.

Okay, so....The Road Trip and the List.  First of all, I laughed at Jaha sitting in the back while people young enough to be his kids drive the van, because....god, Jaha.  Of COURSE you would think a cult can save everyone.  That’s literally your first instinct: You know what could fix this? A cult!  However, (and there will be MUCH MORE IN DEPTH FLAILING ABOUT THIS IN A SEPARATE POST) I really appreciated that his role in that scene was to a) present Bellamy with an easy option to assuage his guilt and b) lampshade the role that Bellamy fills in Clarke’s life, and then Bellamy rejected them both.  He does not think that “it was for my people” is sufficient justification for the massacre (which: agreed, it isn’t) and I think that line was more about Jaha than Bellamy.  Jaha has decided that so long as he thought he was doing the right thing, it’s okay, but Bellamy is following Beard Dad on this one, which I think is the right call.  Bellamy also cannot see how important he is to Clarke, but he can see how important she is to him.  It’s like, instinctive-- Jaha says “you center her” and Bellamy is like “lol no she centers me.”  He doesn’t even take a beat to consider it, it just is.  However, while he was right to reject Jaha’s solution for guilt, he was definitely wrong to reject his place in Clarke’s life buuuuut it’s also understandable because a lot of Clarke’s feelings for him are still buried deep down inside of her and only come out when he’s sleeping.

Sidenote: so clearly, some of Second Dawn survived and guys, this means Grounders are descended from Scientologists.  I find this utterly delightful.  Thank you, show, for being bonkers.

And then, we get a brief moment of peace.  I am going to go with “Bellamy fell asleep and Clarke chose that moment to write out the list”  as my headcanon for this scene because I don’t see a scenario where Bellamy is like “you do this awful thing; Big Boy needs his nap.”  That’s not how they operate, and while I could maybe see him falling asleep due to pure exhaustion while they work on the list together, that also doesn’t feel very likely to me.  So unless I hear otherwise, that’s the interpretation I’m going with.

So Bellamy falls asleep and Clarke watches him, glad that he’s getting a moment of peace in the oncoming hell.  I suspect she kept his name off the list for several reasons, but the most important one here is she knows he doesn’t want to be on it.  She’s trying to honor his wishes, but then she looks at him and is like, “I cannot imagine a world where he doesn’t deserve to survive.”

And then she breaks down.  Because Clarke is never going to put her own name on that list, and it means she’s going to lose him.  (Of course, she’d also lose him if they BOTH died, but she has already decided that is Not An Option).  The weight of everything hits her at once, and Bellamy’s Clarke Alarm goes off and he wakes up.  (Aside: Bellamy being kind of snort-y and noisy when he wakes up is like, the cutest fucking thing in the universe A+ work Bob).  He knows right away what’s going on and he does the only thing he can think of: he offers his life in exchange for hers.

Except this time, they’re not dying-- they’re living.  He’s saying “fine, you want me to survive?  I’ll survive-- but only if you do too.”  Clarke just can’t bring herself to say “yes I deserve to live” so Bellamy does it for her, and then he touches her-- gently, and just the once-- to show her she’s not alone, and then he makes himself leave.  I have SO MANY thoughts about why he chose that moment to walk away, but I think the main reason was that he needed to, because he’s on the edge too and breaking down in front of Clarke wouldn’t help her.  And that’s his only goal in that scene-- help her, lift some of that burden, remind her that she’s not alone.  She’s his center, so he does what he can for her and then he walks away before he has to ask her for something, because to him that would be adding to her burden and that is unconscionable.

Because guys...he loves her so much.  And she loves him too.