#and try to blame it on a ‘failure’ of the education system is telling

[lesbiansanemi]

Those posts that are like “Americans don’t know geography and are so stupid and self centered” that are then filled with Americans being like “WELL ACTUALLY ITS BECAUSE THEY DONT TEACH US IN SCHOOL THATS NOT OUR FAULT” make me roll my eyes because like. If you don’t know basic geography because, supposedly, you never ONCE had a class that taught it at all, you should probably get on that. If you can whine on tumblr you can learn where other countries are and a little bit about them

But also as a certified American, I distinctly remember in my freshman year world geography class (a REQUIREMENT class we needed to graduate) there were ppl who dead ass could not even identify the state we actively lived in let alone countries on another continent and also completely avoided actually learning these things so maybe Americans are just fucking stupid and self centered

[inkskinned]

it is totally okay to be hurt and tired and fed up with the american schooling system but i need you to understand that we need to be better about loudly and routinely defending public education.

yes, many teachers suck, many schools utterly suck. i also got bullied and was absolutely not given the right support for my needs. i am not defending public education because it was kind to me. i am defending it because it needs to exist.

right-wing republicans do not want an educated population. they want kids to be homeschooled or in private school. there is a huge religious undertone to this.

the most common argument is that despite high costs, the "result" is not "good" enough. they point to failing schools as proof that public education is just never going to work out. there will be arguments made here that you actually agree with: that teachers can be bullies, that we taught online for 2 years and still charged the same amount of tuition, that we have no recourse for students to actually have agency or a voice, and that schools are now unsafe for kids due to risk of illness and gun violence.

these are all placing the blame in a fraudulent way, one intended to get your parents to homeschool you. the less kids in a school, the less federally-awarded funding for that school, the less any school succeeds. they will not mention the fact it is their legislation that takes away important funding opportunities, that teachers are living at or below the poverty line, that buildings are not kept up to code, that administration is overpaid and forces specific curriculums, that corporations like (my personal enemy) Pearson Education control certain classroom goals because teachers can't afford other options. they pretend to be ignorant of the gun violence and say "oh just get a gun" - but these are the same people who will be sending their child to a private school with a bulletproof backpack. they don't care if your kid dies, though. they "don't believe" in covid, but they did get their kid vaccinated, because of course they did.

it is a closed loop. conservative parents hear the fearmongering and remove children from the system. frequently these parents are also deeply religious. the kids are raised without access to other media & learn to parrot their parents. you have now created a new generation of conservatives. additionally, one of the parents/caregivers must stay home and homeschool the children, usually for free. i will give you 1 guess which parent tends to stay home to homeschool the children. these parents are encouraged to have many, many children. those children are most likely not getting access to safe sex ed.

we might laugh at fox news suggesting teachers are forcing children to use kitty litter but: first of all, there is kitty litter in the classroom. it's part of an emergency kit in case children are locked in due to a shooter. so that's fucking dystopian, and the fact they've completely reimagined the scenario to somehow make the teachers look bad when it's instead a fucking huge symbol of our failure as a country to protect our children.... it feels a little intentional.

secondly: don't just dismiss the situation. because, yeah, obviously, no teacher is encouraging kids to be a catboy. but the actual undertone that fox news is trying to sew is an outright distrust of teachers and of public education. they rely on the dehumanization of trans people as a common touchstone to hide the fact they're pushing two agendas at once. (which is ironic. because the thing they accuse teachers of. is pushing. an agenda.)

whenever someone tells you they want you to read less, you should be suspicious of that. when someone tries to separate you and your education, you should be suspicious of that. i don't even like incel rhetoric nor would i want my kids exposed to it - but i would not take away my child's (age-appropriate) access to the internet. i would just provide more educational materials, not less. the difference here is that i believe we can resolve ignorance with knowledge; whereas conservatives believe that ignorance is bliss.

they misappropriate funding and demonize teachers. they pull the same trick each time - the same thing we are seeing with anti-trans rhetoric. they do not want you to have access to safe sex ed, so they act horrified, claim sex ed teaches you how to thrust deep, claim that we have no idea what "age-appropriate" means. since the mid-nineties, the united states has spent at least 2 billion dollars on abstinence-only education, even though to quote the above link: "a preponderance of studies has found no effect of abstinence education at reducing adolescent pregnancy". conservatives want you to think less of any person struggling with addiction so they can continue their racist "war on drugs", so they spend up to $750 million dollars a year on the DARE program which has absolutely no effect. acting like teachers "must" be "grooming" children is just the same thing - so they can demand that funding either goes to their causes or the funding doesn't "exist" ("i'm not paying for our kids to learn that thing!")

and they want you to feel uncaring about this. they are aware that you will hate some parts of your school experience. pretty much everyone does. they want to lean into the parts that you hate so that you don't put up a fight about it when they take it away for not being "good enough."

i know i maybe sound like a conspiracy theorist. but truly. truly. it is beneficial for conservatives to reduce your faith in the american public schooling system.

one of the explicitly stated campaign promises of the conservative party: to axe the Department of Education in 2024.

i know we are all tired and burnt out and there is so much else wrong with their entire platform. but maybe just - pay attention to this one.

[beardedinfluencerdestiny]

Please read the whole thing!!!!

Let's be very clear we need to stop blaming 3rd party, indigenous and more groups. They didnt have much affect on the votes with 3rd parties accounting for 0.04%. To start off, These are why Kamala wasnt electes

1. The democratic party were very problematic aiding in a war and genocide.

2. Kamala is a woman and biracial

3. importantly 87 million didn't vote most of which were in the democratic party as well as trump supporter actively having a reason to vote after they felt "wronged". As well as indigenous and brown people feeling betrayed for what the administration have done but not wanting to vote for Trump and i understand that america is basically a 2 party country but it still had a big impact. Trump didn't even have much of an increase but Kamala had a significant decrease.

4. Kamala didnt explain her policies enough to people instead driving of a fear of trump

5.However the main problem is the rise in extremism in the West that allowed trump into presidency and created a cult like facist regime,which will most likely continue.

Back to the people who chose not to vote: it was because they either did not care, didnt have a driving motivation to vote or felt failed democratic party's actions because they preached for equality but when it came to support indigenous communities, kamala being a cop or the explotation of the environment they failed severly. Or people where in a comfortable position of priveledge which is the main problem.

Moral we need to stop the conviction against 3rd parties and smaller indigenous communities

So how do we change this:

4 year plan: disclaimer i am british so if you have any advice send it on the plan. And this is rushed so i will put a full plan in detail out later but it will take a while

We start by promoting 3rd parties in our communities.We start with smaller sections of communities. Vote 3rd party or democratic party in smaller sections.

We focus on promoting the youth through education and tiktok to vote and why it is resourceful in change.

We send petions and protest to elected official or chosen officials on manditory things we need.

If you dont want to get pregnant get the implant now.

If you need medicare try by all means to move out of the country or to a blue state.

Disabled, poc or immigrants move to blue states. Your more likely to get help.

We need to have community discussion to start funds or community charities.

Promote to the youth. Socail media is powerful.

Make an organised voting system ensuring palestinian supporters, congo and sudan supporters to put stress on democrats whilst advocating for their vote in a 2 party system.

Simultaneosly promote 3rd parties as we start to over 8-12 years put them up as viable candidates BUT explain that it isnt vaible for 2026.

Read the democratic plan and explain it because that was their biggesf failure and explain the harmful rhetoric in far right administrations, that will be easy over 4 years. We need to prevent the youth from extremism.

I will edit and go into more detail adding an 8-12 year plan to keep a government that is beneficial for us and the world as a whole but, if you cant tell i have been rushjng

[avixthecat]

the american public school system is going places

....and it sure isn't anywhere good. warning: gun, attempted murder, & sexual assault mentions yes, this is a rant. if this is illegible to you, then congratulations, you're experiencing what it's like to read my fellow students writing.

lemme tell you all about the failure of an education system mine is. because trust me, it's bad.

ENGLISH & MATH 1------------------- There were kids in my 8TH GRADE language arts class who got stumped on a really hard word. the word? AVALANCHE. you know, the word meaning, at it's simplest, THINGS LIKE ROCKS AND SNOW FALLING DOWN A MOUNTAIN we had to do these two programs because the kids in the ENTIRE SCHOOL SYSTEM were so far behind "because of covid" the programs were one math and one LA, and we were told "students who show they don't need it will stop at some point while students who do will be taken out" these interfered with our actual learning. that's right, they did these IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR CLASSES. AND THEY NEVER EVEN STOPPED. like most of the kids didn't even do them in the first place we weren't allowed to listen to music while we did it. we were required to sit in SILENCE as we did these shitshows, which hindered a LOT of kids because some of us need sound to be able to focus. the english program told me that the verb "serve" (as in, to serve in the military) was not a verb. the math program forced you to do math their way, which is really bad when you've got kids who are able to do that same math a different way and are being marked as failures for no fucking reason. oh yeah, and the school computers have grammarly installed. by the admins. the administrators installed grammarly on our computers and set them up. they're encouraging us to use grammarly. the school.

[ID: An image labeled "Extensions", listing extensions on a school computer installed by the school administrators. The extensions included in the image are "Equatio," "Gaggle," "GoGuardian," "GoGuardian License," "Google Docs Offline," Google Keep Chrome Extension," and "Grammarly: AI Writing and..." End ID.] SCHOOL SAFETY 2------------------- PFFT SAFETY, MY ASS fun fact: there was a bag of ammunition found on the track, and i'm pretty sure a gun in a car. did they send us home once they found out there was no immediate threat? no. did they move us to safer locations when the discovery of such items was made? no. there's been rumors that kids that have been expelled last year are returning this year. those kids are expelled for reasons like attempted murder and sexual assault. and people are saying they're coming back. i'll update this if they do or not.

TEACHERS AND DISCIPLINE 3------------------------------ like school safety, discipline doesn't exist. or, it does, but it's so weak because i guess the school is afraid of upsetting parents or something, they don't actually punish kids the way they need to, and punish kids who don't need to be punished (you come to class late again because you were in the bathroom because we don't let you go for the first twenty minutes of class? lunch detention for you.), and seemingly have never heard of the term "praise" before. this leads to kids not caring and giving up, because there's no reason to try and the punishments mean nothing. teachers are quitting their jobs left and right because they just can't deal with the kids being disruptive and not doing their work because they can get away with it no matter how strict or lenient the teacher is. this is a problem for students who actually try, because now we can't focus, we get bad grades, we're grouped with the students who purposely don't learn, and now we don't care either and don't see the point in trying to learn anymore. one of the counselors place blame on hurting students. the person kids are expected to talk to when having a hard time (and required to have as their counselor by some stupid rule) is practically telling students their struggles are all their fault. i've heard a girl was raped and she was told it was her fault by that counselor. and the admins didn't stop to think for even a second "hey maybe we shouldn't keep this counselor, they're kinda sorta not doing their job" SCHEDULE 4----------- last year, they changed the middle school schedule to "match the high school" this meant we have five minutes to get to each class (not needed when 90% of your classes are five tiles across the hall), classes are an hour at most (one of the classes was an 1:30 instead of 1 hour) since classes are so much shorter, teachers can't even get through all of their lessons or even all of their UNITS before the school year ends. CONCLUSION 5-------------- now, let's do some thinking, something i don't think any of the kids in this damned school do. with the lack of safety, reason to try, inability to finish the units we need to finish, and failure to teach kids effectively, what do you think that causes? if you guessed "under-educated adults", you're correct! congratulations!

[unoisveimved-un-proffesional]

I have got to learn how to shorten shit.

If Hitler really was all that charismatic, he would've been able to bullshit his way into that art school by just saying his off-designs and messy perspective was intentional or something, like he very clearly fumbled his way into being dictator and had to be kept in check by those around him. He really was just riding an already brewing reactionary movement that was then utilized and nurtured by the Nazi party. It was all coincidental really, but still manufactured just right for everything to make a difference about it.

Hitler has kind of taken on an inhuman legendary role among the populace that I blame on the school system trying to downplay the role the general german populace and other members of the party as well as the germans flawed government system played in the Nazi's rise to power (and all of Europe's populace and their role and their own flawed governments) and also being too Great Man Theory poisoned. Liberal logic and critique of Hitler as simply a "Great Evil", it turned him into the symbol the party really wanted him to be. The contrast of the real guy vs Mr. Nazi is honestly kind of strange to think about. That liberal logical critique of Hitler laid the ground work for a new idealization of him and his movement by displaying them as powerful and competent and dangerous, rather than just being lucky until that luck ran out and was crushed with real power and competence, because the ideology was accelerated and hyper-militarized supremacist conservatism and was doomed to fail, just like the slow march of slightly militarized soft-supremacist liberalism is doomed to fail.

The system that the education and stories had to conform to was honestly too close to the Nazi's own ideology to make an honest critique that could stand up to time. With no mainstream criticism of Hitler as just a man the product of his time and environment and the Nazi's as an eventuality of trends that was beaten because they were using old and outdated tropes of war that complimented their blind and uncritical worship of the past, people were free to imagine the Nazi's as something greater, history defining people we'd always talk about and never escape. Now they're hiding in Antarctica with an army of Hitler clones ready to enact their revenge. By god, if ONE Hitler could do All That, imagine what an Army could do?! Heheh. I jest but. That's the messy logic of liberals. They don't get what makes fascists, fascists. It's the loserdom. They're all sad, hopeless honestly. I can't bring myself to hate them anymore than I can a rabies ridden animal, it's just kind of sad to see no matter how dangerous it is, it's dying inside, it's on borrowed time, best to put it out of its misery.

There's no hope, no future in fascism, only what once was and can never be again. Fascists themselves are forced to make concessions with the now because they never will be able to relive the "glorious" times of The Roman Empire, Old Germany, and will never see a future where the Nazi's won because that's not how our world works, that's not how the story goes. The contradictions make it doomed to fail. It's why they all failed, and why everything will fail again. Out of that failure to resolve contradictions though may rise a new resolution, something that won't shoot itself in the foot, or head, and eventually outlive the old failing ways, perhaps just by virtue of being young, perhaps by virtue of being stronger, time will tell the difference. Perhaps by virtue of being closer to reality.

I guess that's what can make history different. Just because you "know" history doesn't mean it can really help you. Are you gawking at it and admiring it, or studying it and learning from it? Learning why we're here now and where we'll go next and why? What you could do to be a part of that even? If your history doesn't move next to philosophy and applying that philosophy to the development of history, I don't think you're really studying history, you're reading stories that may as well not be real to you because you don't put them in a real context.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: February 2023

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of February 2023 to make sure that they are never forgotten.    

There’s words to describe Matt Walsh stating that doctors providing gender-affirming care should be executed, chief amongst them “genocide”

I’m sure that billionaire manchild Elon Musk has a very good explanation for why he switched off Ukrainian military’s access to Starlink right before a major Russian offensive that meant Ukrainian drones could not be used.  And no, it better not be him repeating the guff Gwynn Shotwell vomited out about using drones for “offensive purposes” which demonstrates a crippling inability to tell where Russia ends and Ukraine begins

The main question about Liz Truss launching her comeback is why the hell did Liz Truss believe that anybody wanted her to launch a comeback - other than as a possible psy-op to bring back proven liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, based on saying “Well you allowed Liz Truss to stage a comeback...”

...and how did Liz Truss try to frame her abject failure as a Prime Minister and tanking of the UK economy in her Daily Telegraph essay masquerading as a manifesto?  Blaming it on “the left-wing economic establishment” of course, because her refusing to listen to economically literate people so she could bulldoze through her demented plans definitely didn’t have anything to do with crashing the economy and seeing both Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng out on their backsides PDQ

It’s difficult to guess which response Suella Braverman had to the far-right riot in Knowsley was worse: her hiding under her desk for the best part of a full day without comment, or when she finally crawled out from under her desk to try and suggest that the asylum seekers who the far-right were going after were somehow responsible while making no reference to the far-right mob who were kicking off - but that might require her to consider her rhetoric might have something to do with it

Isn't it funny how Richard Sharp failed to inform, educate or entertain a Select Committee meeting about how he loaned proven liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Jonson £800k shortly before that same proven liar announced him as BBC Chairman and forgot to mention that fact during the vetting process?  Almost as funny as how the BBC really went out of their way to avoid informing, educating or entertaining the public about this story...

Billionaire manchild Elon Musk demonstrated once again what a big brain tech boy he is by locking his Twitter account as an experiment to see if people following him would still see his posts, which is the sort of thing that Twitter used to be able to fix due to having a dedicated team to sort it out - until big brain tech boy Elon sacked them all

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk demonstrated what a big brain freeze peach boy he is by announcing limits on tweets, DMs and follows for people who aren’t paying him $8 a month to use a free platform 

...soon after billionaire manchild Elon Musk convinced himself that he was shadowbanned from the platform he owns and quickly organised a meeting to whine and complain that his tweets weren't getting enough action.  When one of the two remaining principle engineers left at Twitter explained to him that the drop in engagement was because people simply got sick and tired of his constant bullshittery, Musk demonstrated why he is so popular and why everyone finds him hilarious by firing the engineer on the spot

...and then it emerged that billionaire manchild Elon Musk was so upset that his Super Bowl tweet did not get the engagement that Joe Biden's did that that pathetic little amoeba of a homunculus demanded Twitter's algorithm be changed again because the system he installed to have his tweets show up above anybody else’s wasn't working, but that’s definitely not because he's getting muted and/or blocked left and right 

...soon followed by billionaire manchild Elon Musk having another one of his great ideas, this time locking two-factor authentication behind Twitter Blue - including countries where Twitter Blue is outlawed - which definitely doesn't look like a protection racket asking $8 a month to protect people's accounts, especially after the billionaire manchild tried to defend his latest in a long line of lunkheaded moves with the usual “something something bots” schtick 

...yet somehow billionaire sociopath Mark Zuckerberg saw all this slow motion trainwreck unfold over several months and thought “Hey, that's a good idea”, when he decided to launch verified Facebook and Twitter accounts for the bargain price of $12 a month, aka a 50% markup on Musk’s idiocy

Just when you think the BBC have got as far from informing, educating and entertaining as possible, you see them spouting complete bollocks about the fruit & veg shortages in the UK being because of poor weather in Spain and Morocco which is affecting fruit & veg across Europe - even though EU nations and even Ukraine have plentiful fruit & veg being supplied, almost as if there’s something else which is to blame but the BBC is too scared to dare suggest what that could possibly be.  It's Brexit, it's always fucking Brexit

...and the fact that Therese Coffey repeated that exact same lie multiple times before and after the BBC spun that web of complete bullshit, including in Commons meaning it's forever enshrined in The Hansard, only serves to beg the question who writes copy for the BBC’s news broadcasts at this point

Ultra-relatable nice guy Rishi Sunak showed just how committed he is to his pledge to have a less sociopathic Tory party by appointing Lee Anderson to Deputy Party Chairman in his latest reshuffle

...and what did Lee Anderson do as soon as he was announced in his new role/  Start prattling on about bringing back the death penalty while invoking the name of Lee Rigby to get maximum gammon penetration, ignoring the fact that Lee Rigby’s family have spoken out about right-wing grifters exploiting his name for their own ends

It transpired that there was collusion between social media and the 2020 presidential campaign...that collusion being Fox News getting on the blower with the Trump campaign to give him a heads-up about Biden ads that were in the pipeline so he could counteract them, an act which strangely hasn't seen billionaire manchild Elon Musk post another Twitter Files in spite Fox News now being on record of having done this

Even by Daily Mail standards their take on Emma Pattison and her daughter being murdered by her husband where they tried to frame it as a side effect of her successful career was beyond the pale

...and then the Daily Mail decided that they could go that bit much further beyond the pale by deadnaming Brianna Ghey when posting reports about  Brianna Ghey‘s murder, presumably because they needed to pick up a few extra Culture War Points that week

Nobody seems to have told Marjorie Taylor Greene that walking around Congress carrying a balloon to make some “point” about Chinese spy balloons only draws attention to the fact that Donald Trump allowed three Chinese spy balloons to fly over the US during his presidency and not only did nothing but didn't tell anybody about them, but apparently Joe Biden is A Bad man for shooting down the first one spotted over the US during his presidency

...and if Marjorie Taylor Greene didn't look like a clown then, she sure as hell did with her dogwhistle-laden comment howling why people are talking about George Floyd but not about Ashli Babbitt, where not only did she try and make a direct comparison between somebody shot while looting the Capitol to somebody choked to death for not committing a crime, she also repeated the far-right conspiracy theory about Floyd dying of a drug overdose instead of having cops kneeling on his neck for the best part of ten minutes

I’m sure at some point Lancashire Police were determined to actually look for Nicola Bulley after her disappearance, it's just they seemed more interested in deflecting the blame onto everybody else for their inability to find her, to the point they even through Nicola Bulley under the bus

...although that does not let the armchair sleuths off the hook by any stretch of the imagination, given their coining one theory after another that led to press releases needing to be fired out by both Lancashire Police and Bulley’s family pleading with people to stop turning an ongoing investigation into a very real person's disappearance into a pulpy detective novel 

Not too good for GOP Republican victimhood where their Twitter hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop (yes, they're still banging on about that...) only served to highlight the pro-Republican bias at Twitter, most notably how they had to keep changing the rules in order to not ban Donald Trump from the platform - but only for Trump and nobody else.  Oops!

I’m coming to the conclusion that Lee Anderson enjoys being sued for libel, as he decided that it would be a very bright idea to suggest that the person running a food bank only gained access to the site where the food bank operates because of bribery

Another month and Kari Lake is still deluding herself about the result of the Arizona gubernatorial election which she lost.  In November.  Of last year...

Unifying force for good Keir Starmer showed just how good he is at pulling together the Labour vote by sneering about the “narrow interests” of people who voted for the party in 2017 and saying that if they didn't support the current vision of Labour where everyone walks in neoliberal lockstep they know where the door is, because that’s going to encourage floating voters

...and by complete coincidence Margaret Hodge said during a Radio 4 interview which aired on the same day as Stammer's comments non-Zionist Jews who didn't feel safe in Labour know where the door is, which is quite the coincidence

It’s funny how Scott Adams is whining about how Dilbert is practically dead, yet somehow never quite put his finger on the fact that Dilbert wouldn’t be practically dead if he didn't post himself going off on racist rants that gave newspapers reason to not want to keep publishing Dilbert strips

I’m sure the reason Turning Point UK asked their followers who were turning up to harass people in Honor Oak to not bring any far-right logos with them was entirely to make sure nobody unintentionally distracted from their message and not, say, give the away long before Calvin Robinson showed up to start waffling in front of a crowd of a couple of dozen middle aged angries

When you have Barry Moore petitioning to make the AR-15 the National Gun of America and Marjorie Taylor Greene petitioning to give Kyle Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal, it's worth asking if GOP Republicans once watched Zardoz and mistook it for a documentary

Bloody hell has Kate Forbes been a slow motion trainwreck ever since announcing her intention to stand for SNP leader, stepping on one rake after another to the point where only Kemi Badenoch can try and step in to claim she hasn't proven to be a complete nutjob on a consistent basis, while also begging the question as to why the BBC gave a disproportionate amount of airtime to the anti-rans, anti-gay marriage, illegitimate-hating, claims-dinosaurs-don’t-exist whacko, almost as if they were using her to paint the entire SNP as a bunch of deranged bigots

Unifying force Keir Starmer proved that spite has nothing whatsoever to do with how he is running the Labour Party by reinstating Luciana Berger to the party - and because Luciana Berger is Luciana Berger, of course she went right back to spouting the same lies she was spouting back in 2018, apparently unaware of who is actually Labour leader in 2023

Oh boy did Manchester United fans cover themselves in glory with their whooping and cheering at the news that charges against Mason Greenwood being dropped as if the audio and video evidence which is freely available doesn't exist.  I’m going to presume that, if he plays for the club again, commentators will have the same convenient amnesia for why he's getting booed at away games that they do for Thomas Partey

...not helped by The Sun reporting that Greenwood had been found not guilty, which is patently untrue and gravely irresponsible for them to report

Somebody should explain to Adin Ross that the reason that Twitch permabanned him isn't because he’s a cis white male.  It's because he’s a bigoted fuckwit who wishes he was Andrew Tate, as demonstrated by how the second Twitch shitcanned him he immediately began palling around with every Neo Nazi he could find

Oh boy, did Mark Steyn not respond well to GB News requesting he take responsibility for his actions by signing a contract which made him and not the channel liable for Ofcom fines every single time he spouted his antivax bilge on air, as his response saw him storm off the channel with an almighty hissy fit...which looks uncannily like Steven Crowder’s hissy fit to the Daily Wire offering him a contract which expected him to take responsibility for being demonetised.  As in, suspiciously similar, to the point where the first question is who is funding Steyn’s new setup where he sits in front of a Canadian flag spouting antivax bilge to an even smaller audience than he had on GB News

Smooth operators Netflix thought they could get good PR by saying they use AI to make their anime due to a staff shortage - which, naturally, led to several animators blasting the platform for the mass sackings, crippling amounts of crunch, and abysmal pay they were putting them through while the anime industry was making record profits

...almost as smooth as Netflix announcing their methods of clamping down on password sharing by doing a monthly internet check, a policy they very quickly tried to pretend wasn't theirs and in fact a result of somebody hacking their Twitter as if Xbox users don't remember Microsoft planning to implement a similar policy for the Xbox One to stop people playing secondhand games

The increasingly irrelevant Laurence Fox is now having to try and get attention by claiming that every single death threat sent to black political commentators are false flag attacks, which doesn't make him look desperate at all

This month Covid truthers mainly settled on the complete gobbledygook about there being an egg shortage because governments are destroying egg production because eggs protect people from Covid, citing a study about egg production from two years ago...

Still waiting for Tumblr to sort out the sexbots...

And finally, still not admitting weakness, is Donald Trump going on yet another rant about the 2020 election - you know, the one he lost - wittering on about how it was stollen.  What a fruitcake...

[mammalsofaction]

If he leaves he never sees his family again.

->Episode Come Home Perry determines that Mono can decide to relocate Perry on a dime for absolutely ANY reason (or no reason at all) and if this happens, Perry would no longer be allowed to contact his host family (it would be immediately reassigned) or the Doofenshmirtzes (he would be assigned a new villain. Heinz was the one who tracked PERRY down.) Heinz would be reassigned to a different agent.

If he goes Rogue, he will be hunted down and jailed in OWCATraz

->Episode No More Bunny Business tells us the story about an agent who goes rogue trying to take OWCA down from the inside. Perry is the one who recaptures him.

->Episode Return of the Rogue Rabbit is the sequel showing us that Dennis, the Rogue, had been sent to high security solitary confinement in OWCATraz. Heinz had been the one to bust him out.

->Episode Cheer Up Candace, where Heinz frames Perry with various machine clones of him doing nefarious things, proves that if Perry DOES go rogue, he will be hunted down by ALL of OWCA. They chase him down through the whole city. Might I remind you OWCA was the one who made Perry who he is today, knows everything about him, has all of the Tri-State Area under its thumb. Perry couldn't've run forever.

If Perry goes rogue, he can't be home to protect the boys

->The climax scene of the Second Dimension movie shows that OWCA has an archive of every single invention Phineas and Ferb ever made

->Episode Undercover Carl shows Carl basically framing Phineas and Ferb and putting them under suspect of becoming Evil. Monogram sends Perry out on a wild goose chase while they keep an eye out for damning proof, and they had an ENTIRE SWAT TEAM at the ready to take the boys into jail were Carl to convince them that they were. An entire SWAT team. For a band of 10 year old kids.

->Episode Phineas and Ferb get Busted established that Perry's worst nightmare consists of his cover being blown and the entire Flynn Fletcher family would be taken hostage, him being powerless to stop it.

In his and Candace's combined nightmare, Phineas and Ferb were shown to be tortured (waterboarded) and abused by the prison system, sucking out all their life and creativity.

He will never see Heinz again, and Heinz will be paired with someone who will abuse him, or fail at thwarting him.

->We have only seen fail at thwarting Doofenshmirtz ONE TIME. Like legitimately fail. It's in the episode Quantum Boogaloo, where Candace's intervention of the time period makes it so Perry fails to thwart Heinz during the first episode with the Giant Magnet inator to pull the eastern seaboard. Due to her intervention, Perry gets seriously injured for some time (either 3 or 13 months) and during that period I assume someone else was thwarting Heinz instead. They fail. Heinz takes over the Tri-State Area in a condition of absolute tyranny, and Heinz locks up all children under the age of 18 in a fully encased body suit. He bans all of education, knowledge of history, union and rights, as well as creativity. (Yeah. Just like Perry's nightmare)

One of Heinz's moves after becoming Emperor was to render OWCA completely powerless, but not demolished. Perry's forced to confront the fact of his failure as an agent every fucking day, for every new policy. This version of Heinz forces OWCA to WATCH. And he doesn't show it, but you just KNOW that Perry blames himself.

->You don't need me to tell you how insanely codependent Perry is in his relationship with Heinz. Since the closest he ever came to actually quitting was because Heinz managed to convince him he didn't need Perry anymore. And that's in episode About Time. But also I made a separate post detailing all of that if you would like

Tldr; the only reason Perry is still an agent is because OWCA is keeping his families hostage.

It’s currently 3 in the morning and I’m thinking

Literally the only thing keeping Perry in his job/from completely losing it and going rogue is because OWCA were the ones who trained him so much, so he has too much loyalty to them to begin with

Being fr, Perry can do so much. He is a threat if left unchecked

….

but

what if something pushed him in that direction

(I say as I pull out my Google docs with a smile :3 )

[that-nd-infp]

The Trouble With “Gifted” Labels in School:

//TW: discussion of s*icidial thoughts and depression

Growing up, I was considered “smart”. I was reading before my peers and had a much larger vocabulary than them. I had better comprehension on a wide variety of topics. My test scores always fell in the “advanced” range. I could carry on conversations with adults with ease. It wasn’t long before I was put in “gifted” classes.

By high school, I was a straight-F student.

“You’re a smart kid,” my teachers would tell me. “You clearly understand the information, so why are you failing my classes?” I never knew how to answer that. They were right, I understood the information. I had no idea why I couldn’t do better. I was told repeatedly that I was just lazy, that I wasn’t trying, that I lacked self-discipline. I believed every word of it, and I was constantly frustrated with myself.

At 21, however, I understand now why I struggled so bad. All that time I was struggling with ADHD in a system that provided no help. Yes, I understood the information, but I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it.

Let’s talk about the role that the “gifted” label played in that.

I was never taught in school how to study, or that I even had to. I just knew that I was “smart” and therefore I naturally understood the information. In 3rd grade I switched to online schooling only, which provided minimal structure and minimal interaction with my teachers and peers. I was expected to work off of my own structure and complete work on my own. I had absolutely no idea what to do.

Imagine you have to run a marathon. Your whole life you’ve been told “you’re so fast, this will be easy for you!” and that’s all you know. So as soon as that marathon starts, you break out into a full sprint and pass all the other runners. But after awhile, you get tired and start cramping up, and you have to stop. Before long, all the other runners have passed you and left you behind. Because the thing is, they were taught to stretch before hand, to hydrate and pace themselves. They were taught proper running form, but you? You were fast, that was all you needed. Now you have no idea why you can’t keep up or even how to move forward at all. All you know is that the people around you are telling you that you’re lazy or that you’re not trying hard enough, even though you can barely stand.

That is exactly what the education system felt like to me. I was not given the resources I needed to succeed and I watched all my peers pass me. I still don’t know how to pick the pieces up, if I’m being honest. I don’t know how to apply to college or choose a career, I still don’t drive, and I have no idea how to fix that.

The thing is, no one would have expected this in the beginning because I was “smart”, and they assumed that my failure to keep up was because of laziness. Teachers need to be trained what to watch for in students to help identify ADHD early on and effectively support the students dealing with it. Because that never happened, though, it led to so many other problems in my life.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me and I blamed myself for all of this. I started having panic attacks looking at a single worksheet because no matter how many times my eyes went over it, I couldn’t process the words that were written (and I should add that I didn’t even know what a panic attack was, I just thought I was dying because I suddenly couldn’t breathe or feel my limbs). I would get so overwhelmed I would freeze in place and stop functioning. By the time I was 11, I was dealing with depression and constant suicidal thoughts. I thought I was broken and useless because I wasn’t able to do what was asked of me.

Ten years later, none of this has gone away. I still get immense anxiety trying to complete basic tasks. I’m still chronically overwhelmed and exhausted, and I still face bouts of depression. I still deal with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis that I can’t seem to get rid of no matter what I do, even when I’m not actively depressed (passive ideation, not active).

I am an adult still trying to undo the damage that the failings of this schooling system did to me. I know that I’m not alone in this, and it breaks my heart to think of how many kids have been through —and are still going through— these things. Kids need to be told that it’s okay to struggle, and receive support when they do. They don’t need to be told they’re smart, they need to be encouraged to give their best and then helped when tasks are beyond their capabilities.

[writingwithcolor]

Justice for Chantel Moore, help Edmundston, New Brunswick

Hello again. Mod Lesya with another police death in Canada that deserves its own post.

On June 4th at 2:30 am, police were called to do a wellness check on Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman from British Colombia who had recently moved to New Brunswick. She was fatally shot and killed for supposedly threatening officers with a knife. Police refuse to comment on if non-violent de-escalation was used before reaching for lethal force.

According to her aunt, she was very gentle and would never hurt a fly.

She was a mother of a 5 year old daughter.

[Due to potential violation of tribal belief, her photo has been removed. please be respectful and try to follow tribal protocol, as it clarifies in the coming days. I apologize for potentially adding to the community’s pain]

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is a movement to address the widespread disappearances and deaths of Indigenous women across the globe, and the justice’s systems ignoring of the issue.

Some of these women are murdered or kidnapped by police, some by unidentified individuals, but it is an epidemic and a justice system failure.

The systematic killing of Indigenous women by police has been deemed an act of genocide.

Trudeau had promised to commit $13 million to the cause, but has since backed out of that promise.

Anti Indigenous racism in Canada

To anyone who says it’s not as bad here: educate yourself.

40% of incarcerated women are Indigenous despite only making up 4% of the total Canadian population

Canada has systematically ignored the clean water crisis on reserves for over 20 years, with more and more reserves continuing to be added in this time period as infrastructure isn’t maintained.

Statistics Canada cannot tell how many people die at police hands because they only count how many criminal charges were laid against the officer as a result. (breakdown of statistics with probabilities for the number of dead—this number might be drastically higher, as provinces such as Quebec do not have civilian watchdog agencies and Toronto’s watchdog agency is notoriously corrupt)

An average of 3 Indigenous women a month, every month, have gone missing over a 3 year span, and that’s only a fraction of the total time period this issue has been ongoing.

Wet’suwet’en was actively invaded by Canadian forces this year to build a pipeline.

Colten Boushie is only one of many non-law-enforcement deaths where the killer was deemed not guilty because Colten was an Indigenous man who was victim blamed

The genocide has not stopped.

Ways to Help

Go Fund Me https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-family-of-chantel-moore

Canada: Find your MP and demand they investigate Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en

New Brunswick: Find your MPP and demand they investigate Chantel’s case https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/contacts/MLAReport.html

Sign the petition https://www.change.org/p/new-brunswick-city-council-justice-for-chantel-moore?recruiter=408908395&recruited_by_id=5f02ba02-b284-4047-b5d4-f05fcaba86b5

[fireemblems24]

Merit Based System

This is a bit all over the place. Sorry about that. I watched a show this weekend that really illustrates why I no longer believe in Edelgard's system after her support with Ferdinand.

Spoilers for Fire Emblem Three Houses CF route and Edelgard & Ferdinand's support and the show Segodon up to episode 8.

Segodon is a taiga drama that retells the life of historical figure Saigo Takamori a. k. a. the last samurai. This man was a brilliant politician and played an instrumental role in Japan's tumultuous 1800s where they overthrew the shogun and instated a modern government. The show itself is absolutely fantastic so far (though, I love anything to do with the Bakumatsu, no, that's a lie, there's some real shitty Bakumatsu anime.).

Like the real life Saigo, the fictional representation has a lot of "merit." As the show writes him, he has a high level of empathy for people who are hurting because of Japan's horrible, outdated systems and is constantly does whatever is in his power to convince the powers that be to back off a bit because their taxes and punishments are so harsh at times, his native Satsuma was at serious risk of starving its entire agricultural force out of work.

Not only is Saigo intelligent, but he's also tenacious. He "dares" to ask his "betters" to see the errors of their way, goes out of his way to try and get audiences with people far above his station, and does everything he possibly can to help everyone around him. Whether he's tackling problems with a larger system or a hurting individual around him, he's trying his best to make things right. And when people listen to him, things improve. People are also naturally drawn to his leadership and overall gentle disposition.

He's also broke.

Saigo comes from a very poor, very large family. So when the powers that be grant him an opportunity to travel to Edo (then capital of Japan), where he could get real experience, where he could start rubbing shoulders with the right people and find ways to gain influence, learn, etc . . . He can't. Because his family can't cough up 30 ryo.

No matter how much merit Saigo has, his upbringing keeps him from reaching his full potential. The top leadership of the area invites him to the opportunity of a life time, but even with an open invitation, he can't so easily accept it.

His mother, father, and grandfather had all just died (and this is a historical fact, at least) and left him in charge. The family went into even more debt buying medicine during various illnesses. There's younger and elder family he needs to look out for, a sister who he now needs to find a husband for, and a new wife on top of everything else. They don't have 30 ryo to spare.

No matter how much merit Saigo has, no matter how much he wants to make a difference, he can't. Because he was born into poverty, because he can't afford to step away from the family land or else risk running out of food in the winter. His merit isn't enough. You need privilege. And he's already got privilege in that he wasn't born a farmer, that he has the personal attention of those in charge through connections and channels his family name permitted him, he's already jumped over hurdles others can't - and he still can't take advantage of his merit.

A merit based system benefits those who have and punishes the have nots. All the rich kids with rich parents who don't have to think twice about spending 30 ryo and have servants to take care of the elderly and young in their families. They can take every opportunity so the gap widens even further. Even worse, a merit based system tells the people born poor, born sick, born neurologically divergent, born into an abusive family, born into a historically disadvantaged race/gender/sexuality/etc, etc . . . that it's their fault they're not at the top. That if they just "tried harder" and had "more merit" they could make it. You too could be a billionaire if you just pulled on your bootstraps hard enough, and failure means you didn't try hard enough. And, yes, this is very much happening in our culture today.

That Edelgard didn't even consider something as huge as inequality before starting a war that would kill thousands really shocked me. Her support with Ferdinand exposed just how naive she is and how narrow-minded her world-view and experiences are. If she's going to sacrifice thousands of people for her supposedly better system, I wish she'd put at least some thought into it.

I do not expect a Fire Emblem game to get hyper-political or into nitty-gritty details. Honestly, I wish this support didn't exist. If their A-Support focused just on educational reform or even Ferdinand cementing himself as a actual check/rival to Edelgard, then I'd be more willing to believe she could make a good leader. But, for some reason, they decided to use this support to show how little Edelgard actually thought about her actions despite the dire consequences of them. These details aren't needed. These lines could be completely omitted and let the reader imagine Edegard has the political know-how to actually pull what she wants off. But instead the game went out of it's way to show she doesn't really have a single clue what she's talking about, and I cannot fathom why. This isn't even touching on her admitting it didn't even occur to her that her actions would leave a power vacuum and would need to fill it (like - what -), but that's for another day.

THIS is why I can't get behind Edelgard. Because her merit based system isn't worth all the lives she destroyed in her war. She thinks her ideas are worth everyone that dies, but her ideas aren't well thought out. This episode 8 of Segodon illustrated perfectly why Edelgard's system is a house of cards that will do nothing but pat the nobility and otherwise rich and privileged on the back while blaming farmers and otherwise disadvantaged for their continued poverty because "lack of merit."

I honestly can't express how badly I wish these lines in this support didn't exist. It serves no purpose except to expose Edelgard's lack of forethought and lack of understanding about the lives of the people she's claiming she's making better.

But, yeah, watching this episode just made me think about Edelgard's system and reminded me again of the exact moment I gave up on supporting her war.

(spoiler alert about Segodon: all those people he kept helping scrounge together 30 ryo so he can go to Edo and leaves the lands in charge of his younger brother, and yes, he's going to go down in history, but also . . . prepare for a downer ending if you actually watch this (I mean . . . it's the Bakumatsu). I already know I'm going to cry my fucking eyes out and I haven't even meant this version of Sakamoto Ryoma yet)

[stillness-in-green]

MVA In Memoriam (3/5)

The Comprehensive Account of the Butchering of My Villain Academia

(Introduction and Part One, Episode 108: My Villain Academia) (Part Two, Episode 109: Revival Party)

Part Three, Episode 110: Sad Man's Parade

Chapter 229 – All It Takes Is One Bad Day

• The full first page, of Jin getting mobbed by Puppet!Jins, them tearing his mask off, and flinging it and then him away. Saved them a bit of budget, I suppose, but it’s a shame to lose the drama and the violence of Twice having his mask pulled away, since it’s decent foreshadowing (indeed, possibly intentionally so, on Skeptic’s part) for the violent bewilderment he’ll be subject to shortly.

• Re-Destro’s line, “Not when he’s using his meta-ability to puppeteer, unless you want another nagging lecture.” They didn’t keep the first nagging lecture, so of course they wouldn’t keep this. I’m still annoyed, both on general principle and at the loss of RD’s implication that these nagging lectures are a regular occurrence, especially if one tries to bother Skeptic when he’s using his meta-ability. Has RD himself been on the receiving end of one? Possibly so! But you’d be less likely to think so just from the anime.

• Re-Destro’s line, “This allowed our warriors to momentarily hold back and stay out of danger.” Because why would the audience need to know that Skeptic planned for and Re-Destro cares enough to observe something like that lol?? Obviously the MLA is perfectly content to just throw their peoples’ lives away because, whatever, more where that came from! Dammit, anime, the fandom believes this enough as it is without confirmation bias from your cuts!

• Skeptic’s “fufufu” laugh, because the anime is allergic to the MLA having fun.

• The police officer’s line, “Sure, but in a case like this, you’re still to blame.” The rest of the exchange hints at it, of course, but there’s a horrifying callousness to a police officer just saying straight to the face of a teenaged orphan facing his first offense, “Yes, you were obeying the law perfectly and this guy just ran out in front of you, but it’s going on your criminal record anyway, whatever.” A weight the anime lost, and another that makes me very suspicious of the patterns behind what, precisely, was put on the chopping block.[1]

• Jin’s narration, “That police officer couldn’t have known. Me neither.” Demonstrates that Jin doesn’t really hold his fall against the one policeman. It’s a consistent thread with Jin’s character that, while he’s very jaded, he’s not actually vengeful, nor is he looking to enact systemic change. While he’s very defensive of his friends, people who hurt Jin himself are never in any real danger of him coming to collect his pound of flesh in return; he just rolls with it as part of how the world works, in the way of someone who was never given reason to believe any different. This line is a good example of that.

• From Jin’s old employer’s angry rant, deletes the note that the client that called is angry, and that the client said, “That young punk of yours did this!” It’s nothing that wasn’t obvious from the rest of the conversation, but I do I think cutting it loses a sense that this guy is just unloading all of his frustration and fear on Jin. The length of the screed, the extra details—it clearly communicates that Jin’s boss is so angry and upset he’s not paying any real mind to filtering, but just recounting every point of contention the moment they come into his mind.

• In modern society, when you’re someone without roots… Well, not a lot of people can relate to that.” It isn’t just the police that failed Jin; it’s a whole society that’s distrustful of people who don’t have a place in the fabric, and thus are unwilling to try and bring them into it. Like Tenko, there are a thousand little places where someone could have reached out a hand, but no one ever did. The audience can intuit this, but I feel it’s better to be clear about it—it’s not just the legal system that screwed Jin over; it’s every other person that never tried to help him because they were afraid of his eyes or distrusted a guy who had no connections. When Shigaraki comes, he’s not going to be coming for heroes alone; he’ll be coming for this entire tapestry of indifference and timidity.

• Skeptic’s lines, “Hrm? Fighting back? I was sure he’d either flee or cower in place... We didn’t anticipate such unity between them.” This gets at two things. Firstly, and once again, that the MLA did their research; that they came into this with educated expectations and a definite plan. Secondly, an in-character observation of what the arc has been showing the audience all along: that the League isn’t just a disparate gang of hoodlums anymore; that they’re developing real bonds. Those bonds mark them as unusual—Re-Destro comments on it in 223, as did Overhaul in 147; even Mr. Compress remarks disapprovingly on Twice’s “habit” of getting overly attached to people. It’s striking that, even though the MLA knew from Giran’s records that the League was uncommonly well-bonded, Twice’s devotion still fell outside Skeptic’s parameters.[2]

• Again Skeptic’s line, “Now his legs.” The drones don’t actually get this far (though you can see them gearing up for it on the next page), so it’s a reasonable enough cut, but it does emphasize the ludicrous, over-the-top extremes Skeptic in particular is willing to go to in securing what he wants. If, you know, “Kidnap the doubler so we have a method to make copies of the Grand Commander at our leisure,” wasn’t bonkers enough.

• Twice’s line, “Even against Gigantomachia!” It really highlights just how much mental energy Twice has been dedicating to avoiding injury, that he was able to keep it in mind even fighting a foe as overwhelming, and for as extended a period, as Machia. And like, the anime blitzed over the Machia fight so quickly, and with so little visible wear and tear to the League, that it really could have used all the reminders it could find room for about how intense those six weeks were.

• Twice’s line, “I won’t watch a friend die!” Such an important line that the composer named an entire track for it, not that the anime gave us that track in the moment it was clearly scored for. They added in a new line later in the scene which mostly gets the important sentiments back in, but loses out in being slightly less fitting to his breakthrough. See the Additions portion of the write-up on Chapter 230, following.

Framing Shifts

• The policeman in Jin’s flashback looked up at him in the anime, where in the manga, his eyes stay down on his paperwork the entire time. I realize that anime can’t just still-frame every panel of a manga and call it an adaptation,[3] so characters will do things like move and look around in different directions just in the course of inhabiting a room, Still, in this case, it has the effect of making the officer look more alert and engaged than he was in the manga, and given that this whole chunk of backstory is about Jin slipping through the social safety net, it feels appropriate to me that the officer should be completely checked out.

Additions

• A new shot of Jin(s) in his pre-massacre doppelganger army days. Didn’t tell us anything we don’t already know—it’s little more than a new angle of the gang in the truck—but it was nice to see.

Bonus Note

• They left Re-Destro’s phrase, “My company,” alone when he was talking about the micro-transceivers Skeptic was using. That’s accurate to the manga, but I’d like to remind everyone that, at that point in the anime, viewers whose only reference is the anime itself have no idea that Re-Destro is a businessman. The show skipped the commercial, RD’s intro, the dinner scene where his company comes up, and Giran’s association of RD with Detnerat; it will further go on to skip Shigaraki recognizing him from the commercial. The news report mentioning Detnerat was ten full episodes prior to Episode 110, and was followed up on in not the faintest degree. For heaven’s sake, would it have been so hard to have Hirata Hiroaki say, “My Detnerat’s,” instead of just, “My company’s”?

Chapter 230 – Sad Man’s Parade

• Deleted the MLA members that are attacking Compress as they get pushed off by the Twice wave. Not the first time, and not the last, that the anime didn’t animate the random MLA people on the street. It’s hard to take the threat of their numbers seriously when the anime kept deleting them from what are supposed to be crowd scenes, you know?

• Mr. C thinking worriedly about Dabi as he’s mulling over Geten’s strength and disregard for catching his own people in the collateral damage. It’s just a, “Dabi—!” but it’s yet another tiny cut that shaves away at the manga’s clear depiction of Leagues’ concern for one another—even Mr. Compress, who claims that such things aren’t very villainous.

Framing Shifts

• Changed the random MLA’s exhortation to kill all the Twices to a generic, “Damn—!” I know American censors have often taken issue with the words “Kill” and “Die” in kids’ cartoons, but I was never of the impression that that was the case in Japan. And it’s not like the show made any bones about Curious planning to kill Toga. A rephrase to save a second and a half on dialogue, maybe?

• Had Skeptic give his lines about failure on the way over to the elevator instead of stalking over in silence, and then dumping the whole monologue all at once. The manga’s extended silence over three identically sized panels is much funnier and more characterful. I grow ever more confident in my assessment of Skeptic as the second-most ill-treated MLA character in this adaptation.

• The return of the Doom Choirs for the Twice Parade. I really wish the anime would lay off slathering Doom Choirs all over everything, especially a moment like this: a triumph for Twice, and, true to form for Twice, also crammed to the gills with visual and verbal gags. The Doom Choir is out of keeping with both the victory and the comedy—Mine Woman, later on, served the Parade much better.

Additions

• Gave Twice a new line, “I will protect my comrades!” It was nice to make up for his, “I won’t watch a friend die!” but the latter is more characterful, especially since a more literal translation is, “I won’t kill my friends!” Which is, you know, relevant to the fact that Twice has problems telling himself apart from things that just look like him, and he just had to intervene to stop some of those look-alikes from killing one of said friends. At least it got his use of nakama back in.[4]

• A new little cut of animation as the action went back to Geten and Dabi. I suppose the Dabi fans liked it, and it was nice to see more of Geten’s ice dragon, but I’d have much preferred they could keep the scenes we already have before adding new ones.

Chapter 231 – Path

The scene of Hawks wondering why he hasn’t heard from Dabi and his subsequent flashback to the last time they spoke were relocated to the beginning of Episode 102, the first thing the audience saw after the prior episode ended with Shouto inviting Bakugou and Deku to come intern with him at Endeavor’s. In the manga, of course, it’s not “a few weeks ago in Kyushu,” it’s “meanwhile in Osaka.” Also, the order of the scenes was flipped—the episode led with the flashback, then returned to the modern day. It really makes the timeline needlessly confusing—the viewer has no real context for what we’re seeing and when, especially since the anime neglected to specify how much time passed between the two scenes. You have to assume it was enough time for an outcry to be raised over Jeanist’s disappearance, but the random shot of a bird flying over was not at all helpful there.

          Alterations included (as usual, outright removed material is in bold text):

          1. Cut Hawks’ thought, “That’s why you keep calling,” and his line, “What’s the job?” I know I should give a breakdown here about Hawks’ mentality and training, but I’m afraid I don’t have it in me to complain about any lines Takami Keigo loses. God knows the anime gives him plenty enough bonus material.

          2. Spliced in the flashback scene of Hawks reporting to the Commission from Chapter 243, but subtly changed it to suggest that it took place after the phonecall in which Dabi demanded Hawks kill a non-Endeavor top hero, rather than it taking place right after Hawks and Dabi’s first contact, which is what the manga implies.

          3. Deleted several key shots in the Jeanist apartment scene, with the effect of making Hawks way less creepy. We got an anime-original shot of his eyes, narrow and serious, but not either of the shots of his big, off-putting grin and widened eyes as he pulls a feather-blade on Jeanist. We also lost a shot of Jeanist turning to face him, framed between extended primaries of Hawks’ Fierce Wings. It’s not like the anime dropped the fake!Dead Jeanist plot, so I’m not sure why the shift, unless it’s just that they wanted to keep Hawks likable for the merch-buying crowd, not creepy and unsettling. And while I personally never believed that Hawks really killed Jeanist, a lot of people thought it was plausible, no doubt based on how off-kilter he comes across in this scene. It loses a real frisson, to just play it straight.

• Shigaraki decaying a missile in mid-air. So Dabi can get those little animation flourishes but Tomura can’t, huh, anime? I see how it is. I. See. How. It. Is.

• Spinner’s little side comment about all the ice everywhere. A nice demonstration that Geten and Dabi’s fight really is affecting huge swathes of the city; that’s certainly apparent already in a bunch of the wide shots showing exactly that, but it’s helpful to have the more zoomed-in moments, too. Also, I do enjoy those little side quips wherever we get them, and the anime often removes them.

• Thinned out the crowd guarding the route to the tower somewhat (it’s particularly noticeable on the mid-distance rooftops) and, as best I can tell, removed Shigaraki and Spinner from the shot. Why keep all the lines harping on the 110,000 number when a) it’s not even accurate to the MLA’s forces, just the League’s assumptions, and b) the studio doesn’t even have the resources to adequately convey the numbers the manga does portray?

• Somebody in the crowd being defiant about Twice’s multiplication and vigorously declaring that the League are all just sacrifices for the MLA’s Revival Party anyway. The background nobodies? Allowed to express even bog-standard over-confidence? Well I never. How dare those people think their lives count enough for them to get dialogue.

• Spinner’s, “This keeps happening!” Of course he couldn’t have that line in the anime, since the anime cut the other big place Trumpet clearly used his power to rile up his followers. What other times were you even talking about when you said, “Every time he talks,” Anime!Spinner? That scene was the first time we even saw Trumpet since he welcomed you guys to town.

• Twice calling Re-Destro a cult leader. He just called him a damn moron (bakayarou) in the anime; he uses the considerably more specific baka kyouso (Google Translate gives “guru”; jisho gives “founder of a religious sect”). He uses the same term again immediately afterward—Viz’s translation gives, “More like chrome dome cult!”—which the anime also deleted.

          So here’s another example of the anime doing everything it could to erase the presence of cults in the HeroAca world. The easy assumption to make is that this was tied to broadcast standards about the depiction of what Japan refers to as “new religious movements,” which—and pardon the brief swerve into real life historical horrors here—have been very unpopular in Japan since Aum Shinrikyo and the sarin gas attacks in 1995. But were these elements removed because the anime didn’t want to represent anything that smacks of new religious movements at all, or because the depiction of both the MLA and particularly the CRC are explicitly villainous and calling religious movements, even made-up ones, evil on TV leads to a lot of angry phone calls?

• Re-Destro’s line, “Unlike my good Miyashita, there’s nothing charming about you.” Of course they’d cut this, having cut the Miyashita scene, but I hate it anyway. As I said earlier, RD’s invocation of Miyashita in front of two people who are going to have not the slightest clue who that is tells me that Re-Destro really does miss and feel bad about killing the guy. Cutting the reminder that RD still feels that sting makes it much too easy to assume that Shigaraki’s right about RD hiding up in his tower, uncaring of the blood shed on his behalf, when if you read Re-Destro with even the slightest of attempts at good faith, it’s clear that those losses weigh very heavily on him.

          Incidentally, and not to harp on the art again, but in the manga, Stress is still visibly spread down from RD’s temple to the ridge of his brow over his eye socket. The anime returned it back to its normal resting state, again suggesting that the death toll mounting in the streets below (as well as, possibly, the new stress of confronting a quirk as powerful as Double) left RD completely unmoved. The spread was back in the following shot, so it was probably just an art error, but it would be nice to have had fewer of those, especially when they impact characterization as much as what RD’s Stress blots are doing at any given time.

Framing Shifts

• Had Machia doing this weird cannonball skim just over the ground, when in the manga, he’s still half-buried, spraying earth and stone everywhere. The manga never namedrops Machia’s Mole quirk during the story itself, but it’s important to know for later that Machia can not only tear through obstacles, he can tear through obstacles extremely quickly.

Additions

• Gave Hawks a few new lines about how too many unexpected things happened for their last arrangement, and that Dabi should have given him more warning. Largely seemed to be there to give the anime an excuse to flashback to the High End fight, in case the viewers had completely forgotten about Hawks and Dabi having a clandestine meeting and sniping at each other in the aftermath of that event. An understandable addition, but deeply frustrating in the context of all the lines that got cut.

Chapter 232 – Meta Abilities and Quirks

• Dropped a third instance of Twice calling Re-Destro a cult leader. I don’t know what the S&P restriction is on this, but given that the movie was allowed to create and villainize an entire international terrorist cult, it is really incomprehensible that the MLA doesn’t get to keep their designation as such. Why?? Because the movie involves going out and defeating its cult, but the series is going to engage in a more sympathetic treatment?[5] Because the self-selecting movie crowd is less likely to complain than the TV audience? Did they just not want to draw attention to how much the movie was ripping off the MLA’s whole shtick? What??

• Missed that RD’s swole arm swipe wipes out the puppets Skeptic left behind; they just vanished from the scene entirely after Twice’s arrival. It’s hard to blame the anime for this; the manga also seems to lose track of the fact that they’re right there in between RD and the elevator—they’re nowhere to be seen anywhere between the end of Chapter 231 and the aforementioned arm swipe, where you can see them getting obliterated. Both versions could have stood to be more attentive to this; indeed, the anime could have fixed it, small error though it is.

• A sort of twitchy sparking around Shigaraki’s hand right after he decays the tower. This is foreshadowing that Shigaraki’s big AOE decay attacks are hard on his body, which will become extremely apparent after he unleashes it on the city at large during the climax, and factors into his decision to accept the mysterious power Ujiko offers. The damage Shigaraki sustains there doesn’t come out of nowhere; Horikoshi is, on the whole, extremely good at layering in foreshadowing many chapters before the foreshadowed elements come fully to light. It makes the writing look much messier than it actually is—more convenient, more pat—to delete this stuff.

• Shigaraki recognizing RD from the Detnerat commercials. Well, they ditched the Detnerat commercial, so of course they ditched this. Still, it lost one of the indicators that Shigaraki is, despite not receiving a formal education, actually quite up to speed on current events—even, apparently, when those current events are happening while he’s been fighting Machia in an isolated stretch of mountains for six weeks! I already suffer enough through fanon characterizations of Shigaraki in which he’s a basement-dwelling feral manchild glued to his gaming console whom AFO bans from accessing information about the outside world, anime! I don’t need you dropping the scenes that most clearly demonstrate otherwise!!

• In the anime, Baby!Chikara’s face was unmarked, just a normal infant face—you’d never even know the kid had a meta-ability just to look at him. In the manga, the skin of his face is clearly darker, contrasted against the paleness of his mother’s hand. It’s obvious that he’s not “normal” looking, and thus equally obviously would have attracted negative attention in his era.[6] Also had his mother smiling; her face in the manga is too shadowed and vague to make out an expression, befitting the murky tragedy of her story and the fear she must have been living with.

Framing Shifts

Additions

• A little thing: they had Twice echo, “Cushion?” when Clone!Shigaraki told him to get ready to cushion Giran’s fall. If anything, Re-Destro and his little thought-bubbled question mark is probably the one who should have had this reaction line.

• Added a visual for Clone-araki catching himself on the window. A perfectly reasonable way to fill screen time while a dialogue beat was ongoing.

• Added a panning still over a reaction shot from a bunch of Twice clones when the tower came down. It had a few good faces in it.

                                                           ---

So, generally, this episode was better. I definitely still had issues with it, but compared to what came before, when they were trying to cram 5+ chapters into the episodes, there were far fewer cuts, and what cuts and tweaks there were, were relatively minor. Definitely nothing that made me want to throw chairs Jerry Springer-style the way 108 and 109 did.

Sadly, I can't say the same for the remaining two episodes. Come back next time for Part Four, Episode 111: Shimura Tenko, Origin.

FOOTNOTES

[1] After witnessing the massacre that was Episode 108, I was convinced they were going to cut the policeman scene entirely, and just go right to Jin getting fired for hitting someone with his bike, letting the audience think it was his fault completely rather than cast aspersions on police and the justness of the law. I was pleased they kept it at all, but less pleased with the steps taken to soften the sharpness of its accusation.

[2] Of course, it’s not like the MLA themselves don’t understand the willingness to give everything for the people who matter. They just label those feelings Devotion To The Cause, and don’t think the League is capable of such resolution.

[3] Netflix’s Way of the House Husband, be told.

[4] Nakama is, of course, a shonen standby, but, to the best of my knowledge (which is admittedly limited; I don’t follow a lot of shounen series), it’s pretty rare to hear the word coming out of a villain’s mouth! Jin calling the League his nakama ties into how the League are both sympathetic villains in the larger story and also the protagonists of the current arc, thereby operating under a lot of protag tropes for the duration—foreshadowed by Spinner’s earlier talk of Shigaraki and his boyish, dream-chasing eyes.

[5] Sometime after the mass arrests, one hopes.

[6] This could well be a coloring error in the manga, but if so, you’d think they’d have corrected it for the volume release. Especially given that, again, the color is in a different shade/screentone than the shadow that covers most of his mother’s face, and her hand stroking Chikara’s chin isn’t shadowed at all.

[newhologram]

I've been doing some thinking and realizing just how far back this all goes. Those of you who know me and my family IRL may have a hard time believing the emotional abuse and gaslighting because whenever you've met them, they seemed fine. They may have even bragged about me to you which made you think that they thought very highly of me. They also may have neglected to inform you that I have been disabled by chronic illness the past 10 years (many of my other family members had no idea until they spoke to me personally. It's... really fucking weird? To just not tell anyone that your offspring is in bed all day in horrible pain and constantly at the doctor/ER?). Unfortunately this is also part of the gaslighting, putting on a persona of parental perfection so that no one believes me when I try to talk about it. Instead people, even within my family, make excuses for the abuse and say that I should just be grateful. Behind closed doors it's always been very different. In the event that me processing this in private spaces gets out to them (which WILL endanger me): This isn't about *~exposing~* or *~revenge~* or *~punishment~*, it's about putting the pieces together and saying, yeah, I'm right to finally put my foot down about the way I have been treated. This is my experience. This is my trauma. I'm finally claiming that after a lifetime of being told that these experiences and my pain around them are apparently "not real" (gaslighting). By talking about this, I am not victimizing myself, but empowering myself. Because none of this treatment was ever my fault. None of it was ever deserved. And none of this is to be blamed on my "response" to abuse. I hope that by talking about this I can paint a picture of the dynamic and inspire investigation into the health of your own family dynamics too. "But they're family" is literally what enables this kind of abuse to continue. And I'm done. My health and survival is more important than upholding a toxic family system. They're learning that the hard way, finally. I don't think my family members are bad people. I truly do love and care for them. They have some amazing qualities. They love animals and they've come a long way to now being LGBTQ+ allies even if they don't always use the right words. But they have a lot of flaws that most likely come from their own trauma... But these aren't just self-contained flaws. Because I am the one who will be undoing the damage for the rest of my life. I don't know if they will ever go to therapy themselves, but I certainly won't be waiting around for them to work on themselves if it means I'm going to continue to be mistreated and re-traumatized. - It's always been this way but things definitely got worse in my home when I became disabled (possibly bc it triggered insecurities in them?). Both parents ignored me to my face all my life. I'd say or ask something, and there'd be no response most of the time. If I said, "hey, I'm talking to you, that's rude" they would blow up at me about "WHAT. WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY. I HAVE THINGS ON MY MIND OKAY I HAVE MY OWN LIFE". This happened even when I was a literal child. I grew up believing that nothing I had to say was worth hearing and that if they ignored me that it was because I was unimportant and annoying. But if I ignore them or take too long to respond because I'm thinking, they scold me me about being rude, that they are my parents and I need to respect them. My emotions and pain have been invalidated since I was a child too. I would get picked up from afterschool care, or my bully's house, and of course I'd be crying from enduring a day of bullying. I would say, "I didn't do anything to them, it's not fair." And my dad's response was always, "WELL GUESS WHAT LIFE'S NOT FAIR. WAIT UNTIL YOU'RE AN ADULT IN THE REAL WORLD." He has continued to say this to me on a regular basis whenever I am struggling, either with work, friends, relationships, a death, or my chronic illnesses. I wonder why he has never considered my world to be real? Why is my reality not real to him? What

makes that even more painful is that I was still sent day after day to the school where I was bullied, to afterschool care with my bullies, and to my bullies' homes. No matter how much I was always crying when they picked me up, they just kept sending me back. And then a few of my dad's girlfriend's had children who bullied me too. I literally could never escape it. If it wasn't that, his response to me crying about something would be, "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO CRY ABOUT. YOU'RE LIVING THE LIFE OF LUXURY HERE, YOU DON'T PAY RENT! JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU'RE OUT THERE HAVING REAL PROBLEMS!" Again, he said this to me when I was a 24 year old who was suddenly in the span of a year so disabled that I could barely work. I was scared for my future, because I had taken the time to educate myself about my illnesses, and I knew that things were going to be hard for me. What I needed was support, not "tough love" and emotional invalidation. I was also scared of the situation I am in now. I was scared that I was going to be too sick to afford to move out and that by age 30 I would still be stuck at home with a parent who did not see my reality, my pain, as real. I am living that and it's not fun. Whenever I tried to talk to him about this invalidation, it just turned into a fight, because he refuses to admit the things that he said, and says things like "That's a You Problem" which he has said since I was a child in response to him hurting my feelings. I have always thought it was worth the effort to communicate to my loved ones this sort of issue, because that's what I was taught at school. If there's an issue, you talk about it. But my family doesn't believe that I guess. - When I first got sick, I was throwing up a lot. It had built up over several years since I was 19 but then after I was officially diagnosed with my Big 4 (colitis/fibro/ME/narcolepsy) I started having really dangerous vomiting attacks. The first attack I had lasted 6 days. I lost 12lbs. I overheard my dad complaining on the phone to a friend that I was keeping him up all night throwing up. I felt so bad for bothering him, I had learned to value his comfort over mine. But after the third day of nonstop vomiting, I told my dad I needed to go to the ER, that something was wrong. He sighed and rolled his eyes and said I didn't need to go. He was so annoyed with me for being sick. I was completely pale. I hadn't eaten anything. I could barely keep water down. I argued but he wouldn't listen. I went back to throwing up, at this point just dry-heaving. A while later I said, "I'm taking myself to the ER." I grabbed my car keys and my dad stopped me. He said, "That's ridiculous, you aren't driving yourself to the ER, I'll do it." But he still wouldn't take me for some reason. I don't know if he just didn't want to pay the copay or what. But I was literally trapped. I tried to fight it and said, "If you're going to take me, then take me. If not, let me take myself." I kept throwing up for three more days before he finally agreed to take me. The ER was packed so I ended up going to urgent care, where the nurse scolded me. She said I really should've gone to the ER after the third day of vomiting. She said that if I had gone a 7th day I could have collapsed. I didn't know how to tell her that I had tried. She asked where my family was and I said my dad had to go to work so he had just dropped me off. She had tears in her eyes and she held my hand. She said, "he should be here with you." THAT is how sick I was. That year, I went to the ER three more times. Each time I would be sobbing and ashamed of myself just for bothering my dad and for him having to pay the copay since I was too sick to earn the money myself. Again, that's how little I had learned to value myself and my health. By my birthday that year, I was suicidal from this shame. A few months later, in the new year, I started having vomiting attacks again. My dad stood over me while I was hunched over the toilet gagging and he said something I will never be able to forget, "You need to snap out of it

because I can't go through this again." He was the victim of my illness. He was the victim of my pain. This year was when my dad told me that he and his gf had been "talking" and that they had decided it was "time for me to be independent". He said they'd even help me find an apartment. I cried and said, "Dad, I'm sick. I've been so sick the past year. How am I supposed to afford even splitting rent with a roommate when I'm in bed in a neckbrace all day long?" and his response was, "But your dad needs his bachelor pad." I couldn't even identify what I was feeling. I was so shocked. Did he really think having the apartment to himself so he could have girls over was more important? But he was always telling me that I was the most important person in his life. I was so confused.

He gave me a time frame to move out and I was terrified. I thought my life was over. But most of all, I thought, "it's not fair to my dad that I'm sick." I thought so little of myself and my pain because that is what I learned as a kid. I blamed myself for not being "strong enough" to power through these debilitating illnesses. I blamed myself for my dad's money troubles. I literally could not live with myself knowing that my dad had to support me. I was so ashamed that I learned to vomit quietly so that he wouldn't notice. I was in a constant state of suicidality for several years after this. And it's no wonder, because year after year my dad has barged into my room to harass me about "it's time to be a Real Adult! It's time for you to Contribute to the household! You need to Make Money! I'm HEMORRHAGING money supporting you! I'm having to use my savings!" and because I was too sick to do this, I felt like a complete failure who did not deserve to live. I was self-harming constantly because I hated myself for "doing this" to my father. He had convinced me that I was the villain. I would start freaking out about money, forcing myself to work even if it meant vomiting literally on set (and almost being sent home bc of it, but I insisted I was fine to work). But I still couldn't make enough to afford my medical expenses. So I would shame-spiral and be suicidal again and then suddenly the story would change. My dad did a complete 180 and said, "Why are you even worried about money? We're doing fine. Even if I didn't have to support you, it wouldn't make that big of a difference in the money that I spend on this household. Don't worry about it." And then as soon as bills were due, he was back to telling me that I needed to make money. Back to saying we spent too much money on food despite me not eating that much. Back to refusing to try shopping somewhere cheaper when I suggested ways to save money. When I brought this up to my therapist back then, she said, "He's giving you mixed messages. Maybe you should bring this up to him so he realizes he's doing it." But when I did bring it up, of course my dad denied doing this and called me ungrateful even as I worked two jobs. When I eventually got a third job (fucking up my health more) to pay off my medical debt, my dad patted my back and told me how proud he was. When I told my therapist that he denied it, she suggested I bring him in so she could help us communicate. When I asked him to come with me to therapy, he got angry and said, "I am NOT going to therapy with you, that is ridiculous." But even with those 3 jobs it still wasn't enough and I was constantly being pulled between "YOU HAVE TO MAKE MONEY RIGHT NOW END OF THE WORLD" and "uhh why are you even worried about money, you need to work your mindset..." When bugged about money I would ask, "What else do you want me to do? I'm working 3 jobs. I'm not hiding money from you. I'm sending you everything that is leftover after I pay my own bills. I've even been buying a lot of my own food, I've been living off ramen and cans of ravioli." And he never had an answer except "just make more money." -- Now to the dynamic I'm currently living in. My dad moved his gf and her dog in without talking to me about it to see if it was going to impact my health. She was only supposed to stay here for maybe 4-5 days while she figured out a new home situation. But when I asked my dad about it in the days leading up to her arrival, suddenly the answer was "oh, she's staying indefinitely." I had no say in it. But we had a talk about what I needed to make this work. I said to my dad that the most important thing was that I have some scheduled quiet time. If I'm recording content or editing audio, I'm going to need quiet that morning so I can get my work done. If I'm resting, I need there to not be shouting or slamming doors happening in the house. He assured me that this was fine and that it'd all be easy for the three of us. The first weekend she was moved in, I let my dad know that I was editing audio that morning and needed

some quiet. He was cheerful and said, "No problem!" I thought wow, this is different. This is nice! This is going to be great for my productivity and health. As soon as I started editing, his gf was blasting music in the kitchen (right next to my room) and they were both laughing and talking loudly just a few steps away from my door. I thought, okay, we talked about this. But I'll just power through. When I was done, I went to my dad and said in a calm manner, "Hey, so this morning I let you know ahead of time that I was editing audio but there was still a ton of music and stuff in the kitchen, so it made it take a lot longer for me." His eyes immediately went dark. He put on an angry parent voice and said, "Okay, I am about to pop. I have enough going on without worrying about making too much noise for you." I said, calmly still, "We talked about this, though, and you assured me it wasn't a problem that I needed this quiet time for editing. So I'm not sure what to do. I'm just letting you know that there was still loud music right next to my room even though we had talked about it." He responded, "Then you need to be more specific because I don't know what you're doing in there." I corrected, "But I told you this morning that I was going to be editing audio and you said it was no problem to have some quiet in the kitchen while I did so." He got more aggressive, "No, you need to be more specific." Again, "I was specific. I told you the time frame that I was going to be editing audio in. You said you understood. I don't know what else to do to fix this other than by openly communicating to you about it." I started crying because--I mean, uhh?? This is gaslighting. I couldn't believe that mere hours after I had specifically told my dad that I was editing audio and that he had assured me it was no problem to have some quiet, that he was accusing me of not telling him what I needed, and that he had not agreed to it or something. Like wtf. He got nastier and blamed me for his stress. But me crying triggered his guilt so he tried to soothe himself by hugging me like he does and I pulled away. I tried to emphasize to him that I'm not just making content for fun. I'm literally trying to make money and contribute to the household like he has told me I need to do for the past 8 years. And when he disrupts my editing process, it just makes it take longer, and it makes it harder for me to earn extra money. His gf was also super rude to me when I tried to be friendly and have a conversation with her. I was telling her about how great it felt to have my sister initiate a conversation about my gender identity and she interrupted me (like she does constantly) to say, "YOU KNOW YOUR SISTER DOESN'T ACTUALLY GIVE A SHIT, RIGHT?" (wtf...) After this, I didn't speak to them for three days. I was feeling the urge to self-harm that whole weekend and all I could do was stay in bed crying after that. I knew if I spoke to them I would just get triggered so I was protecting myself. My dad felt guilty and tried to talk to me in my room. I tried to explain how triggering this whole situation is for me and he said he would do anything to make it easier for me. I had told him what I needed but that he had gaslighted me about it. - This next and last part is going to illustrate the priorities in this household. A few years ago, I started having problems with hives. I spent almost a whole year having very painful breakouts all over my body. It kept me up all night and caused me so much discomfort during the day. I kept telling my dad about it (no response, or annoyed responses), I went to the doctor several times about it (useless ointments), and suffered month after month. I tried so many things, I thought maybe it was bugs, spiders, etc. My asthma was also acting up and I remembered that an ex-neighbor had been suspicious of mold because of their health issues getting better the second they moved out. They had told me back then that we should test for mold. I brought it up to my dad that I had been suffering from this for

long enough and that we should do something about it (mold also makes fibromyalgia and ME way worse). He angrily snapped, "What do you want me to do about it?" I suggested we ask the landlord to mold test the apartment. He refused bc he doesn't like to bother the landlord. I said that I would just order a mold kit myself and he said, "No, let me do it, I'll pick the right one." But he wouldn't even after I kept reminding him. Even after I sent him links to mold kits that we could order. After I got rid of my mattress, my hives got a lot better but I still have issues every now and then. For years I have just lived with this because I couldn't get him to even care about the fact that I was spotted with these big pink hives. When his gf moved in, we had a random rainy day, which seems to have activated the mold. His gf got one tiny little hive and the sniffles. She said to him once, "Hey, I think you have mold in this house." Want to guess what happened after that? You're right. He immediately ordered several mold test kits. I said to my therapist, "How am I supposed to feel about that? Is it really unreasonable, am I really in the wrong to feel hurt by that?" My therapist said, "I mean, I would feel completely invalidated and like I didn't matter." This isn't the first time empathy has been withheld from me obviously (above examples during my flare ups), but sometimes even when it's right in front of him he just can't bring himself to care for some reason. One time a big piece of glass was in my thumb. I said, "Ahhh, glass, help! Glass!" He was eating snacks in the kitchen and just glanced at me, didn't move or say anything. I realized he wasn't going to help, so shaking and bleeding, I managed to pull the glass out with tweezers very painfully. It bled so much and I stood over the sink trying to stop it. My dad just kept eating his snacks, not asking if I was okay or anything, he didn't even look at me. After 5 minutes I still couldn't get the blood to stop and asked my dad if he could help, maybe get me some gauze. He put food in his mouth and sighed, "Just put pressure on it" and walked away. It feels like he's just disgusted with me. I know that he does love me and that he's trying the best he can with all of his mental/emotional/personality flaws but he thinks that just because he puts a roof over my head that he can treat me however he wants and not work on his issues, that it's my fault for being hurt. He thinks that his issues are all on me to learn to endure and it's not right. I know that he resents me for getting in the way of him having a relationship because that's the only message I have gotten since childhood, with every woman he's brought into my home. But in the end his relationships always fall apart because the woman ends up realizing, and stating to him, that he is "emotionally absent". And every time, I comfort my dad through the break up. When he has tried to blame his ex I said once to him that therapy can really help him with his emotional issues and relationships. But he refuses, so. That's on him. But I refuse to believe that I am in the wrong here for saying enough is enough. But he's going to keep trying to make me believe that the problem is just me and my feelings, not his behavior. Nope. Boundary is up. I just have to keep to myself and do what I need to do to stay safe until I can move out. Because I guarantee you he's going to realize he doesn't get enough validation from his gf and then come running back to me as always and then be angry that I'm still holding my boundary strong. I know that this will hurt less as I get distance from it, but I don't like the idea of my pain being my fault when I grew up with this toxic stuff. I'm working so hard to make it hurt less but I can't heal if it keeps happening, so all I can do is back away from what is hurting me instead of being surprised when I'm hurt again. THAT is on me 100%. Hopefully he doesn't grab my desk and slam it against the wall again like in 2014 when I first tried to set this boundary. And of course when he

"apologized" he accused me of "punishing him" by not spending time with him. Jee-zus, dude. Get therapy. I can't be the only one in this family bearing this weight and working on my shit.

[whitehotharlots]

CRT and the sad state of educational politics

If our culture is studied 100 years from now, the predominant theme of the research will be a sense of perplexed revulsion toward how we did nothing to address the climate crisis in spite of having decades of forewarning. If there is a second theme, it will be a profound confusion regarding our immense and unearned sense of self-certainty. A retrospective of the early twenty first century would be titled something like Who the Fuck Did These People Think They Were? 

The latter theme is illustrated in the debacle surrounding a recent slew of municipal and statewide bills that seek to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. For the record, I am strongly against these bans. But I’m also self-aware enough to know my opinion matters very little, and therefore realize that an analysis of the discussion surrounding the bills will yield much more worthwhile observations than a simple delimitation of their pros and cons. Regardless of your personal opinion, I hope you’ll humor me.

I am, in some regards, a moral absolutist. But I also realize that abstract morality has very little bearing on material and political realities. In my ideal world, classrooms are free from political meddling. Teachers teach to the best of their ability, presenting students with truths that are confidently unvarnished due to the thorough amount of work that was required to reach them. I don’t cotton any of that socratic bullshit. Students are there to learn, not to engage in weird Gotchas with some perverted elder. The teacher’s job is to teach. The material they teach needs to be subjected to some graspable and standardized mechanism of truth adjudication before it is worthy of being taught. Teaching is not therapy. Teaching is not poetry. Teaching is not love, nor is it religion, nor is it a means of social or political indoctrination. There are plenty of other avenues available to accomplish all of those other things. Teaching is teaching. 

That’s the ideal. But ideals are just ideals. They never come true. The art of teaching, regardless of setting--from overpacked classrooms to face-to-face instruction to curricular design to nationwide pedagogical initiatives--boils down to a teacher’s ability to reconcile the need to convey truths with social and political pressures that are heavily invested in the suppression of truth. 

I have formally studied and practiced education for nearly two decades. In that time, the prevailing political thrust toward education has been a desire to casualize the practice of teaching, to render educators as cheap and fungible as iphones. The thrust takes different shapes depending on the political affiliation of whomever happens to be in charge of the state and federal governments that fund education, but the ultimate desire is always the same. The goal is always to attempt to make teaching rote and algorithmic, something akin to running a google search for How to do math? or What is morality?. The framing is always just windowdressing, empty culture war bullshit. 

Maybe it’s the inescapability of this thrust that’s rendered so many educators so blind to it? We only have nominal political choice, after all. The discourse gets more blinkered and vicious as the stakes decrease. At any rate, this is the undeniable reality, and anyone who doesn’t see that isn’t worth listening to. 

Non-administrative per-pupil spending as been on a steady decline since George W. Bush was president. Administrative bloat and meddling are becoming as common in k-12 as they are in higher education. The will of parasitic NGOs are implemented as common sense pedagogy without anyone even bothering to ask for any proof that they work. The so-called Education Reform movement is sputtering out due both to its manifest failures and rare, bipartisan backlash. But it will be replaced with something just as idiotic and pernicious. The thrust of causalization will not abate. 

And so what do we decide to do? What’s the next big thing on the education policy horizon? Critical Race Theory. 

Okay, this makes sense. In 2021, a local paper can’t run a news story about a lost cat without explicitly mentioning the race of every human involved and possibly also nodding toward the implied cisnormativity of pet ownership. So it makes sense that this broad rhetorical mandate would come to dominate the transitional period between Bush-Obama Education Reform and whatever bleak future awaits us. The controversy is so perfectly inefficacious that its adoption was inevitable. Because, seriously, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the outcome of this kerfuffle, no problems will be solved. The real shortcomings of public education will not be addressed. Larger social problems that are typically blamed on public education in spite of having little to do with public education will especially not be addressed. Maybe white kids will have to do struggle sessions in lieu of the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe black kids will get full credit for drawing the Slayer logo in the part of the test where their geometric proof is supposed to go. Or maybe it won’t happen. Maybe instead these practices will be banned, and in turn liberals will begin to embrace homeschooling, the charter movement will be given new life as a refuge against the terrors of white supremacist behaviors such as, uhh, teaching kids to show their work. Whatever.

Within the context of public education, the outcome will not matter. It cannot matter. There will be broader social impacts, sure. It will continue to drive Democrats more rightward, providing their party’s newly woke corporate wing with progressive-sounding rationales for austerity. But so far as teachers and students are concerned, it won’t matter.

Why do I give a shit about this, then? To put it bluntly, I’m struck by the utter fucking inartfulness of CRT’s proponents. At no point has any advocate of CRT presented a case for their approach to education that was at all concerned with persuading people who aren’t already 100% in their camp. There’s been no demonstration of positive impacts, or even an explanation of how the impacts could hypothetically be positive. In fact, so much as asking for such a rationale is considered proof of racism. Advocates posit an image of existing educational policies that is absolutely fantastical, suggesting that kids never learn about slavery or racism or civil rights. But then... then they don’t even stick with the kayfabe. They’ll say “kids never learn about racism.” In response, people--mostly well-meaning--say “wait, umm, I’m pretty sure they do learn about racism.” The response is “we never said they don’t learn about racism.” You’ll see this shift from one paragraph to the next. It’s insane. Absolutely insane. 

Or take this talk from a pro-CRT workshop in Oregon. The speaker freely admits that proto-CRT leanings like anti-bias education, multiculturalism, and centering race in historical discussions have been the norm since the late 1980s. The speaker admits that these practices have been commonplace for 30+ years, as anyone my age or younger will attest. Then, seconds later, the speaker discusses the results of this shift: it failed. Unequivocally:

We had this huge, huge, huge focus on culturally relevant teaching and research. [ ... ] So you would think that with 40+ years of research and really focusing and a lot of lip service and a lot of policies and, you know, a lot of rhetoric about cultural relevancy and about equity and about anti-bias that we would see trends that are significantly different, [but] that’s not what we’re finding. What we’re finding that you see [is] that some cases, particularly black and brown [students] the results, the academic achievement has either stayed the same and gotten worse.

Translation: here’s this approach to teaching. It’s new and vital but also we’ve been doing it for 40 years. It doesn’t work. But we need to keep doing it. Anyone who is in any way confused by this is a dangerous racist. 

Even in the darkest days of the Bush-era culture war, I never saw such a complete and open disregard for honesty. This isn’t to say that Bush-era conservatives weren’t shit-eating liars. They were. But they had enough savvy to realize that self-righteousness alone is not an effective way of doing politics. You need to at least pretend to be engaging with issues in good faith. 

This is what happens when a movement has its head so far up its own ass that it cannot comprehend the notion of good-faith criticism. These people do not believe that there can exist anyone who shares their basic goals but has concerns that their methods might not work. Their self-certainty is so absolute and unshakeable that they can proffer data demonstrating the complete ineffectiveness of their methods as proof of the necessity of their methods.

For decades, the most effective inoculation against pernicious meddling in education has been to lean upon the ideal form of teaching I described earlier in this post. We claimed that teaching is apolitical and that no one is trying to indoctrinate anybody. Regardless of the abstract impossibility of this claim, it has immense and lasting appeal, and it was upheld by a system of pedagogical standards that allowed teachers to evoke a sense of neutrality. The prevailing thrust in liberal education is to explicitly reject any such notions, and no one--not a single goddamn person--has proffered a convincing replacement for it. We still say, laughably, that we’re eschewing indoctrination. But people aren’t that stupid. If you find it beneath yourself to make your lies digestible, people will be able to tell when you’re lying to them. 

This, my friends, bodes very poorly for the future of education, regardless of whatever happens in the coming months. A movement that cannot articulate its own worth is not one that is long for this world. Teachers themselves are the only force that can resit the slow press toward the eventual elimination of public education, and they have embraced a worldview and comportment style that renders them absolutely unable to mount any worthwhile resistance. 

[sepublic]

Lilith learning from her mistakes

           A while ago I made a post analyzing and dissecting Eda and Lilith’s role as teachers, and the different ways they engage with this. And how Eda isn’t much of a great/academic, conventional teacher herself, while Lily is… but on the flipside, Eda is much more of an emotional role model with life-lessons, while Lilith is kind of a bad influence both as herself and as a medium for the Emperor’s Coven and its propaganda. But then a recent reblog just made the joke, reminding me of ANOTHER joke-post I made about Lilith…

           And I’m just considering that while Eda is the weird academic teacher and Lilith is the normal one- Eda is the conventional role model in that she has her stuff put together, and generally is experienced and street-wise, and well aware of her own shortcomings and tries to improve them… While Lilith serves as an unconventional purpose in that she’s a cautionary tale, of explicitly what NOT to do! It’s a very unorthodox, but in some ways potent, way of showing kids why you REALLY want to do the right thing, because the wrong thing can really mess you up in its own way…

           So you have Eda and Lilith; One is conventional as an academic teacher, the other not so much. But on the flipside, one is conventional as the kind of mentor that teaches you life-lessons and encourages you to grow, while the other… Isn’t. And it’s a hilarious duality, because in a lot of ways Eda is unorthodox while Lilith isn’t- But in just as many ways, Eda is the more conventional, in contrast to Lilith! 

          These sisters really are two sides of the same coin and parallels, I love it, and it’d be hilarious if Lilith herself came to this realization in-universe… Maybe with Luz admitting that after seeing how Lilith screwed up with Eda, Luz knows better than to lie to Camila about what happened, and will tell the truth as soon as she gets the chance. And Lilith just has this weird epiphany… And realizes that if others can learn from her mistakes, maybe she can learn from her own?

           Especially since Lilith has more access to the ‘educational materials’ (AKA her memories of her own shortcomings) than anyone else… So coupled with some outside input from others who can actually tell Lily what she’s doing or HAD been doing was wrong, and I think it could be an interesting way for Lilith to really self-reflect… To finally consider where she went wrong, with information from the people she actually wronged- So that when Lilith DOES try to improve herself, she can do so as efficiently as possible. And hopefully, she can recognize the distinctions between what she did right VS what she did wrong, so she can focus on repeating and expanding upon the former…

           If Lilith becomes resigned to the idea that she can only do wrong, Luz and Eda can really show her that the reason they’re even giving her this second chance, is because Lilith HAS proven she’s not a hopeless cause to them! And considering how much Lilith hurt those two, that’s saying a lot- So it can really provide a lot of hope for Lilith that hey, if Eda really does know better than you… Then maybe she knows better when she says Lilith is worth helping and loving, compared to when Lilith insists otherwise about herself. Plus, it’d just be really surreal for Lilith to look to herself for guidance for once, to actually look to herself for the responsibility and initiative of deciding what to do.

          Especially since the last time she made her worst mistake (cursing Eda), Lilith did so by considering what Belos would do… Not what SHE would do, because Lilith was a kid, and kids don’t have the best concept of self-identity, especially not when there’s a Coven System that actively discourages this. And maybe that’s what she does and DID do, for a while… Deflecting the blame onto Belos low-key, with Lilith reassuring herself that she’s only doing what HE would’ve done, in a “I was just following orders” sort of way that really culminates, when Lilith is called out by Eda for taking Luz hostage- And Lilith gets frustrated and even takes this personally, because she’s just doing what BELOS is telling her to do, in addition to of course the threat of execution- She’s just enforcing Belos’ will, just a humble messenger for the Emperor, as the Emperor is a humble messenger for the Titan…

          And so by taking responsibility for her own actions or at least considering her part in them, it’s this kind of self-reflection that will really force Lilith to consider her own identity, her sense of self… It will make Lilith consider what choices of hers were actually HERS, or just the toxic influence/decisions of others. She’ll have to reflect on where she DID have the freedom to make a choice, so Lilith can see where she could’ve done better, and apply that to the present. And Lilith has to consider how much personhood she’s actually built up in the Emperor’s Coven, how much of her identity is wrapped around it; And what parts of herself aren’t, what parts of herself she CAN build off of, etc.

          Lilith will actually have to consider who she is and what that means, and whether or not she wants to change that, and in what way… And hopefully, it can all lead to Lilith developing a better sense of self, and feeling so much more liberated in as she can now explore who she is, and create more of that person if there’s not much depth to be found. It’s by choosing where choices are offered to her, that Lilith can form any semblance of identity and decide who she is; And now, she has SO much more freedom to make these decisions!

          It’ll be scary the possibilities, the ways things could go wrong, all the potentially-amazing choices you might miss out on without someone telling you what to do… But that’s why Eda, Luz, and King are here to guide Lilith, and make her feel comfortable with making decisions, even if that means mistakes- Because Lilith can learn from new mistakes, just as she does from her old ones! Just as Eda provides this to Luz, Lilith now has the support network, the safety net to try out different things, without fearing backlash and consequences that make her regret the power of choice in the first place.

          She no longer has to fear failure, Lilith will realize that she can both recover and even learn from it… And that can encourage her to go ahead and attempt things, be it a new look for yourself, or the effort to help someone when you think there’s nothing you have that you can provide. It can give Lilith certainty in her decisions, leave no room for doubt on what she chose after exploring the other decisions… And maybe enable Lilith to keep fighting for a better future, even if she knows she might not win. Because it’s better to be true to yourself, to go down for maintaining your own sense of identity, than to become a covenscout to the system- And Lilith knows firsthand just how terrible that is! Even if Lilith knows she’ll fail, she might still insist on fighting alongside her sister Eda anyway, because going down together is much better than living on alone, as Lilith has experience in renouncing.

[amphtaminedreams]

COVID-19, Negligent Manslaughter, and a Timeline of Tory Indifference

“I feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He is doing the best he can in the situation and I don’t think anybody else could have done a better job.”

[exhibit A: a gem somebody that I’m Facebook friends with reposted earlier]

It’s a sentiment that I cannot quite wrap my head around. I sit here hopeless and furious and trying to hold back tears because it’s been almost a year since England first went into lockdown and yet here we are, almost 100,000 dead, in an even worse position than we were before whilst other countries begin to slowly return to normality. It is clear to me who is to blame for this, however there are a large proportion of people who don’t want to “politicise” the actions of the PRIME MINISTER with regards to his approach towards handling a virus sweeping the country he GOVERNS. 

Typically, these kind of posts making the rounds on social media will be accompanied by some kind of photo of Boris Johnson looking somber as if to suggest that the way things have played out were beyond his control and that he is some kind of broken man beleaguered by the suffering he has, despite good intentions, inadvertently caused.

This one in particular of Johnson with his head in his hands is a staple. In reality, this is a photo taken back in 2018 whilst he was receiving flack from party members for comparing Theresa May to a suicide bomber (for her handling of Brexit, ironically) as well as from the papers due to his rumoured (now also proven, in a completely non-surprising turn of events, to be true) affair with his former aide, Carrie Symonds. 

So let’s shut this narrative-where we should feel for Boris because he’s doing his best, and apparently a better job than anybody else could’ve done in his situation- down right here. In a supposedly developed country with one of the world’s largest economies, if we’re talking by proportion, our COVID-19 death toll is up there with the worst of them. It seems that every other state figurehead (bar a small handful), and I mean almost every single one of them, is doing a better job. People love to throw figures out there about how densely populated we are to combat damning statistics as if we haven’t got just as many factors playing to our advantage, as if it’s unfair to compare our response to Germany’s or Japan’s or Singapore’s (both of which are far more densely populated) or New Zealand’s or Vietnam’s, but we are an ISLAND with world-leading technology and infrastructure and healthcare equipment and professionals and a relatively high standard of living. In what world is almost 70,000 dead in a country with abundant time and means to prepare a response reflective of said country’s leaders doing a good job?

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Johnson feels some sense of moral responsibility for this astronomical failure. A man who refuses to acknowledge the multiple children he has fathered outside of his marriages and who has had repeatedly engaged in affairs and one-night stands throughout said marriages. A man who continued to cheat whilst his most recent wife was receiving treatment for cervical cancer, for fuck’s sake. Yep, a real stand-up guy. 

So where does this idea that Johnson must feel remorseful for this catastrophe come from? We haven’t seen a second of remorse or a hint of accountability for the lives lost from him nor any members of his cabinet. That much is really no surprise; I have this hypothesis, and it’s not a stretch, that these people do not have an ounce of empathy in their bodies. These ridiculously privileged, privately-educated individuals who have had everything handed to them their entire lives simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of the average working person and that is the problem. Unable to recognise that what distinguishes them from most others is little more than the luck of being born into wealth and the abundance of recourses and connections that has entailed throughout their lives, they see us as beneath them-as less intelligent, less driven, and thus less deserving of the status and respect they enjoy. They see us as a bunch of whining, unmotivated idiots who do not recognise the chokehold they have over our media nor the fact that everything they do is a desperate grab to keep money and power within the hands of a select group of people, an exclusive members club from which most of us are barred (just take a simple Google search and watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opinion of the Grenfell victims or the buried Johnson speech where he talks about how inequality is essential). They know that we will squabble amongst ourselves about who is to blame rather than wising up to the truth which is that every decision they make is fuelled by cronyism and the inability to make and follow through with difficult choices, the pandemic being no exception. The supposedly self-made elite see the life of the average working class person as having far less value than their own, and their parties actions over the last 10 years have made that very clear. 

It was in December 2019 that the first case of COVID-19 was declared to the World Health Organisation and on March the 11th that they announced they considered it as a pandemic. In Wuhan, people were dying of pneumonia in their clusters. And what was Boris Johnson doing in this time? Well for starters, here in the UK we didn’t even have a pandemic committee-Johnson had scrapped it six months before. If years of benefits cuts and defunding of the NHS in favour of funding nuclear weapon programs, keeping British troops on other people’s lands, and tax breaks for the mega corporations that donate to their party didn’t convince you that the Conservatives have little regard for human life, them getting rid of this committee-whilst a pandemic has been declared year after year as the greatest threat to mankind-should have been the first sign of trouble. As if that wasn’t enough, he also skipped five of the COBRA (meetings are made up of a cross-departmental committee put together to respond to national emergencies and PMs routinely attend those pertaining to crises on the scale of COVID-19) meetings addressing the situation. Whilst other countries were closing their borders and stocking up on PPE, Johnson and his ministers were selling PPE abroad and simply telling people to wash their hands to the length of the tune of happy birthday. Their only policy was one of “herd immunity”, which was in fact not a policy but just an abandonment of their party’s public duty disguised as one, intentionally obfuscated with pseudoscientific jargon.

Even thinking the absolute worst of politicians you would hope that when it came to the point where the UK’s non-response to COVID-19 was becoming an international disgrace, Johnson and his ministers would take proper protective measures if only to save face. But when they eventually seemed to do so, it became clear that the priority was not the safety of the ordinary people affected by the virus. Outsourcing their test and traces system to companies such as Serco, Sitel, Deloitte and G4S rather than public health services, Conservative ministers could not resist attempting to line the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the process. According to the Guardian, instead of reaching out to the experts or using publicly funded services to handle COVID containment measures, the Conservative party has awarded a disgusting £1.5 BILLION WORTH of contracts to businesses with explicit connections to its MPs and donors, the majority of which lack any relative experience of the tasks they’ve been trusted to carry out. Unsurprisingly, the National Audit office found that when awarding contracts relating to the production of COVID-19 protection measures and treatment needs, there was a “high-priority lane” for suppliers referred by senior politicians and officials; companies with a political referral were 10 times more likely to end up winning a government contract than those without. On top of this, it is not hard to draw a link between the late initiation of lockdown measures and preemptive openings of pubs and restaurants against scientific advice to the interests of frequent donors such as Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin. Even if one chooses to ignore the blatantly obvious correlation between the owners of the businesses whose profits were prioritised over safety concerns and the number of those owners who donate to the Conservatives, party officials at the very least were reluctant to follow the lead of many other countries in financing furlough schemes themselves and instead avoided this responsibility by using loose lockdown measures to leave it down to the discretion of small business owners, who couldn’t themselves afford to furlough staff, whether or not to stay open. 

Time and time again, as the government flounder and fuck about, favouring personal desires to keep their powerful, high-paying jobs and to satisfy the corporate allies who make this possible, blame has been shifted from the public to care homes to NHS workers and back again whilst we, the public, make the biggest sacrifices of all under the illusion that we were being guided out of this pandemic rather than lied to and thrown under the bus. Whilst the elite continue to pick and choose what rules apply to them, it’s students and the elderly and the vulnerable paying the fines and scrabbling to afford basic living costs and hoping that they don’t lose someone dear to them.

Don’t get me wrong, a large proportion of the public have contributed to the spread too with their selfishness and entitlement and the arrogance it takes to develop a sudden refusal to acknowledge basic science from experts who have studied in the field their whole lives so that they can justify their need to go to the pub (speaking of, it’s absolutely HILARIOUS how many “mental health advocates” are suddenly coming out of the woodworks on football avi Twitter after they’ve spent years calling people on mental health Twitter attention seekers). And don't get me wrong, there were inevitably going to be casualties of this pandemic. But it didn't have to spread to this many people, and there didn’t have to be so many deaths due to a lack of preparation, and this wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inherent apathy of the Conservative party towards the lives of people of lesser status than them, the reluctance to put those lives before party interests. I wish I felt like there was an end in sight, I wish there was some positive takeaway from all of this, but even now, we continue to see corners being cut with the vaccine lauded as our saving grace and anti-maskers gathering outside hospitals to chant about how “oppressive” it is to be urged to wear a bit of cloth over their faces for the short periods of time in which they leave their houses and all I can think of is the selfishness that runs like poison through our country. It makes me sick and leaves me to question desperately where we go from here. I don’t like unanswered questions, I don’t like feeling politically directionless, and I don’t like the growing fear I have about the state of the world which seems to intensify every single day. In the UK at least, it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever change-we’re told we live in a democracy and yet mainstream media is owned by the people whose interest is to keep their Conservative friends in power. The stronghold they have over print media in particular allows them to continually get away with smearing and defaming every person who comes along and seems to want to actually help ordinary people, without being challenged, to the point where the only kind of “opposition” we’re left with promises nothing but a big boss approved tactical reshuffling of the status quo (which they call “electability”); it doesn’t feel like democracy when the majority of the country are being fed misleading information and convinced against voting in their best interests. 

This is the result of that. The state we find ourselves in is the inevitable result of being manipulated into helping the elite build their protective wall whilst the rest of us scrabble to get in and step on each others heads along the way, the people inside shouting over that it’s those even more vulnerable than ourselves that are taking our places. Outside the wall, the earth is falling from beneath our feet, and instead of throwing over the ropes to help us out, the people inside are stockpiling them so they can secure their firm place above ground and then later flog the rest. How many more people have to die before we reach some kind of widespread realisation of that? Where do we go from here and what do we do? Well for one, we can stop spreading those god-fucking-awful textposts on Facebook and get our heads out of our arses. Wear our masks over and wear them over our fucking noses. Have some fucking consideration for others. Don’t wait til an issue affects you personally to give a fuck about it. AND START HOLDING THE FUCKING PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MINISTERS AND HIS ENTIRE PARTY AS WELL AS THE OPPOSITION MPS THAT HAVE SAT BY THE SIDELINES AND ALLOWED THIS TO GO ON WITHOUT PROTEST ACCOUNTABLE. That would be a good start. 

I’m so tired. Things didn’t need to be this way, and yet because of the selfishness of the few, thousands upon thousands are dead. It’s not about “throwing around blame”, it’s not about “throwing around” anything, it’s about expecting a leader to do his best to protect lives. If that is “throwing blame”, let’s get things clear, I have no issue with hurtling it torpedo style at those who handed out a death sentence to so many in this country rather than do anything that might compromise their own privilege. Honestly, pass me the shovel after and I’ll happily bury the wreckage in the ground. Who wants to join?:-)

[kadeunpc]

the life of a barbarian;

An orphan in Clubs is less of a rarity and more of a staple. Some are taken in by kindly neighbors, others by calculating adults with ill intentions, but most are left to fend for themselves. Orphanages in practice if not in name are relatively common, and this story begins in one of them.

A small boy, old enough to walk but not to speak, appears on the doorstep of one such household accompanied by no one. The older children, used to new blood appearing in this fashion, take him inside to protect and raise him as brother just as their siblings had done for them. A house full of Club children with no guardians outside of the few teenagers who stuck around is a wild place to grow into adulthood. Fights were common, education near absent, but a warm home with others just like you is a better place to grow than the streets.

When he is old enough to question the world he asks one of his older sisters why he does not have a name. “Parents usually name kids, an’ you haven’t got any,” she replies bluntly, too busy trying to figure out how she’ll find the food to feed the budding shifter to care much for gentleness. “If you wan’a name you’ll haf’ta think’a one yourself.”

He ponders the issue. When others talk about him, they call him “HIM”, putting particular emphasis on the word. So isn’t that already his name? He decides it is, and though some of his siblings say his new name is stupid, they all smile when they say it, so he’s happy enough.

HIM grows quickly, eating far more than his siblings, even the older ones. Eventually, once he’s big enough, they tell HIM it’s time for him to get a job. Suspecting he is a shifter given the complaints of his siblings about his food intake, HIM harasses an old hunter in their neighborhood until he takes HIM on as an apprentice.

As his skill with axes and bows improves, HIM eventually becomes a hunter in his own right. Not only does he hunt enough to feed himself and his makeshift family, he’s eventually able to start selling the excess to bring in some coin. It is during this time period he confirms he is, in fact, a shifter. Luck and skill allow him to take down a dire bear, and after that it is a rare thing for him to be injured.

Never having learned maths nor how to read, HIM is taken advantage of by a few merchants around this time. When he catches on to the severe underpayments he’s been receiving, quite a few butchers go missing and a number of shops are destroyed.

It’s a poor part of town, in Clubs, so rather than confront the boy on the brink of manhood about his actions, the adults teach him. Reading is beyond his ability to care, but he latches onto maths and commerce. It takes less than a year for the man to amass a small fortune. He’s moved out of his childhood home, but he still provides the children living there with food. Eventually, growing weary of hunting daily, he looks for a new way to earn money.

He loans out his fortune: a bit here to help start a business, a bit there so a family can buy a bigger home. When the time comes for him to be paid back, there are few who try to fight back against him, and fewer still who live to tell the tale. While HIM has never been nor will he ever be the smartest man on the block, his ruthlessness and his strength have made him the poster boy for a rags to riches story. 

Years pass, he enters the Spade Arena fights out of boredom and a desire for greater wealth. He wins, he’s the champion, he’s the best in the city... except he isn’t. Keahi Hilo, the prodigy. The strongarm avoids the Arena but HIM corners the other man for a fight back in Clubs, and he loses. They were both Kings so HIM didn’t lose rank, but as friendly competition turns into jealousy a cloud begins to cover him. He soothes his darkness with drink and warm bodies until he is always with one, the other, or both. 

One of these bodies tastes sweet, too sweet. HIM is addicted but it’s not to the man beneath him, it’s to the chrono the other has introduced to his system. It’s during this time his fights become more violent and he earns the title he can never get away from: The Barbarian. 

Addiction grows and logic fades. He’s on a bender when he contracts a witch to take care of his little problem. As Keahi Hilo loses status HIM finds he is not at all satisfied with this victory, because he was not the one bring about the man’s end. His thirst for power fades as he wallows in his own misery and attempts to change. He tries to find the witch again, to get her to reverse what she’s done, but she’s overdosed on chrono and left this world.

He can’t look at himself anymore.

Trying to find who he once was, he visits the home he’s long since ceased helping. The building’s been purchased and the children chased out. The old man who taught him how to hunt died years ago. HIM wants to do something, to change, but he cannot allow himself to become Ace. He does not deserve the rank, not after what he did, so he’ll have to find a different way. Fluctuating wildly between would-be messiah and the neighborhood addict, many in the city cannot decide whether they should idolize him or use him as an example of everything wrong with Clubs.

He funds the resistance, donating his monthly winnings from the Arena as well as a percentage of his underworld gains to help their cause. He donates through proxies, a new one every month so they never realize just how much he’s given them. Perhaps if rankings didn’t exist, men like him wouldn’t step on their brothers to get a leg up. He opens up real orphanages through further proxies still, paying people to take care of the city’s neglected children. He can’t kick his chrono habit, but he does his best to cut back. He’s still a loan shark, but only because he’s in too deep to get out. At least, that’s what he tells himself in his clearer moments, when the red hazing his eyes cools his head and reminds him of his ledger.

The corruption comes to Kadeu. He takes care of his own people and uses his power over the underworld to put pressure on others, forcing contributions to help fix the broken outer wall. He plucks natural-born leaders from their communities and funds their causes, knowing he’s burned too many holes in his own brain to lead the Clubs. His men start referring to themselves as the Barbarians; it’s supposed to be a sign of loyalty so they don’t earn his ire by taking credit for the work he funded, but none of them know how much he hates that name.

Days fill up with decisions he doesn’t want to make. People who should hate him look at him with eyes that beg him to take further action. Even strung out of his mind on chrono he could win a fight against Thagard, he could become the Ace, restore order to the city. Some make excuses for him while others begin to question why they’ve chosen to follow. He doesn’t want this responsibility, he never did. He hired leaders to do these things for him but they keep trying to make him approve plans. He was never supposed to be a real leader, he was only ever meant to be the figurehead so the target would be on his back rather than those crucial to the stability of the faction.

Where had it all gone wrong? Thagard had been a worse Ace than he’d thought, but was it the other shifter’s actions to blame or HIM’s own failure to truly lead? How many water elementalists had died because of that idiotic arrest order? How many business would go belly up thanks to the food requisition orders? Rather than devastate families who ran businesses essential to the Club economy, HIM had placed the burden of food rationing on everyone’s shoulders regardless of station. If he had taken the burden of being Ace, how many more people would be alive? How many more businesses would be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel?

It was too late now, he wasn’t the leader the people needed then, how could they trust him to be the leader they deserved now? Making himself the figurehead of this ramshackle organization of barbarians may have been the worst decision he’d ever made. He wasn’t the man anyone wanted nor the leader the Clubs required, but he knew who was. 

Without a word to his followers he shifts into an eagle and, claws digging into the windowsill of his hideout, he sets off for the Keahi residence.