#and yes i do know that its legally not enforceable in its specific wording. but guess what?

[dead-or-unalive]

I know I should probably just stay out if it but, as a trans guy, i wanna say something:

Being affected by something is not the same as being targeted by that thing.

Like, yes the anti-trans executive order affects the lives of trans men, and intersex people, but i do not think they were the primary target of the order. It so very explicitly is targeting trans women. Tbh, it feels like the conservatives are SO committed to hurting trans women they may have fully forgot [tme] intersex people and trans men existed at all. (Edit: not trying to imply that there aren’t intersex trans women, just that this EO is more overtly transmisogynistic, reading the order it felt like anyone else was an afterthought, they dont want any of us to exist but they fear monger more about trans women specifically, or anyone conservatives would lump in with them, which does include many intersex ppl too, but not all. I know “tme”/“tma” are dicey terms but idk a clearer way to note the distinction)

I just keep seeing comments on posts by trans women saying “dont forget this affects trans men too!” “Dont forget [tme] intersex people!” (Most ppl ive seen jump onto these posts are tme) And yeah, we shouldn’t forget that… but is that who conservatives were thinking of when they wrote this? Who exactly is doing the “forgetting” here when you comment on these womens posts? Do you keeping trans women in mind when you tell them to keep everyone else in mind? Is that vent post the right place to say that? Read literally the stated purpose of the order, the very first paragraph:

Section 1. Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women

I know a lot of the things within the order hurt all of us. But think about it: trans guys are often painted as “confused, manipulated girls”. Trans women are painted as a dangerous threat.

Who do you think people will be more inclined to enforce this against?

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Okay so earlier today, I got really pissed off at an article by The Telegraph and I decided to tear it apart.

Said article is The legal profession has seized control of Britain by Sam Ashworth-Hayes and it is so disingenuous that its sources debunk its own claims.

It is arguing that our judiciary system is making it impossible for our politicians to pass any laws as it has essentially been hijacked by activists consumed by the idea of fairness, diversity and human rights. You are meant to come out of it convinced that power should only be in the hands of politicians.

To do this, it misconstrues everything that it references. Almost none of what it says is true, and the parts that aren't blatant lies are subtle calls for a more fascistic rule in Britain.

And I'm angry about it so I'm gonna rip it apart.

Yes, this post will be lucky to get .1% of the readership the article will get. I know that and I don't care. Join me after the cut if you're interested.

Okay, so, the first thing I want to do is briefly explain how a law (specifically statute law) gets passed in the UK:

This begins with a bill. The bill will either propose a new law or an amendment to an existing law, and can be proposed by the government, individual MPs, or a Lord.

Before it is proposed, a bill will often have gone through a period of consultation with interested and affected parties. This is sometimes mandatory.

The bill can either be proposed in the House of Commons or House of Lords, and this is where it will go through Primary Legislation. It will be debated in both Houses and provided both Houses agree (unless it's tax related or House of Commons votes to pass it twice in consecutive years), the bill will become an Act of Parliament.

Now, it will undergo Secondary Legislation. The Act will have proposed the general outline of what it does in Primary Legislation, but this is where the specifics are set like how it will be enforced and when it will go into effect. This is done using Statutory Instruments. Once again, both Houses have to agree for the Act to pass.

At this point, it can go into law.

[Sourced from here]

You might notice that at no point in this process is a judge or the judiciary as a whole are involved. So here's some basic facts about the judiciary:

The judiciary are independent of the government, and this is like a key cornerstone of democracy as a whole. Judiciary independence is a pretty damn important part of the UK's constitution.

There is, of course, case law, better known as common law. But this isn't judges making laws, it's judges interpreting the law and making decisions upon it, and it's very dependent on prior precedent. And common law is a foundational part of our legislative system; it has existed since the Middle Ages. It is a feature not a bug. You can't exactly seize something that has been in the judiciary system's control for centuries.

When talking about judges "overuling" politicians, they are mostly talking about The Human Rights Act of 1998. [1][2][3] The reality of this is that if a judge interprets a certain law to be incompatible with the HRA, they can declare it so. The HRA essentially means that we cannot have laws that are considered a breach of human rights according to the European Convention to Human Rights. This does not affect the law at all; literally no impact on the law being enforced. It just calls for it to be amended by parliament. This has happened less than 50 times.

So with all that in mind, I'm now going to scream about this article.

Okay so, I've already demonstrated that the Houses of Parliament has the final say on laws because that's how the damn system works, so let's talk about "Want to cut disability benefits? Better ask a judge; it might be illegal if you fail to ask people about it."

So what is it referring to here? Because it's not a proposed cut to disability benefits; it was a proposal to change the wording on three questions in the application for PIP.

It would specifically make it so you could not include "psychological distress" as a reason for why you couldn't 1) plan a journey, 2) follow an unfamiliar journey without aid, and 3) followed a familiar journey without aid.

Yes, the government would save an estimated £3.7 billion, but that's because it would affect 220,000 people by not allowing them to access benefits they're entitled to.

It wasn't declared incompatible because they didn't ask people, it was declared incompatible because it breached human rights.

So moving onto the sentence "Want to ask people about cutting disability benefits? Careful, a judge might rule that unlawful."

The link provided debunks the claim itself; that specific consultation was ruled unlawful, not the idea of consultations themselves.

So in this paragraph, they provided a source for one (1) statement out of four (4).

I don't know what case is being referred to regarding wages; I've tried to find it and I can't. I read through about sixteen official press summaries in trying to though.

In terms of reshaping the "framework for oil exploration", that's entirely false. In the case, it was simply ruled that emissions from burning fossil fuels also have to be considered alongside emissions from extracting fossil fuels when it comes to approving new drilling locations. This information comes from the link they provided.

With the decision not to spend more on criminal defence lawyers, it comes down to the fact that there is a cost of living crisis where every product and service has gone up in price and Dominic Raab decided not to provide more funds in spite of that. The Law Society took the government to court over it and they won, and then there was not an increase in funding, as this blogpost from the Law Society in May 2024 details.

Again, I need more than "efforts to defend the UK's borders" to know what they're talking about. If it's more than what is detailed in the next paragraph, I can't help you.

They cleverly avoid any actual discussion of "the Rwanda debacle" because if you discuss it, you have to talk about those pesky human rights it breached.

As a brief summary, the plan was to essentially remove the UK from the asylum-seeking process that we agreed to abide by in the 1951 Convention Relating to Status of Refugees. Rather than following international law, UK officials wanted to immediately detain migrants and deport them to Rwanda where the asylum-seeking process would begin.

Further details can be found here and here, but safe to say, judges kept ruling that it was incompatible with the HRA, which it was, and we basically just sent Rwanda a bunch of money for a couple of years before the tories lost the last election.

Moving on, you'll notice that there is apparently a "long and impressive" list of people that haven't been deported as a result of judge intervention, and then only refer to a single case. And in referring to that case, the article is incredibly disingenuous:

It disinclines to mention that this murder was part of a mob of people who chased the victim down.

It ignores the fact that the murderer has already served his sentence because this happened in 2006.

It portrays mental illness as something that makes you a threat to everyone all the time.

It doesn't mention that the reason why the judge intervened was because it was ruled that there wouldn't be appropriate mental healthcare in Uganda.

It completely forgets that rehabilitation is part of our prison system.

Once again, you'll notice the lack of source provided for lengthy delays to any infrastructure projects because of course it does, take a shot every time this article refers vaguely to something with no source and you'll be drunk enough to believe this tat.

Also, Birmingham City Council was not bankrupt due to an equal pay debacle, it was to do with an IT mess-up as is explained in the article they linked to as a source.

You know what else undermines democracy? Judges bowing to the whims of politicians and saying "hey, you can break as many human rights as you like". That sounds like a recipe for goddamn fascism, you hack.

With where Labour are and where they were in 2003, I'm not particularly a fan of theirs, but making out as if this quote is insidious in some way is insane.

Power should not just be in the hands of politicians, it should also be shared by experts in the fields to which that specific use of power is related. We should have experts involved in the legislative process. That's a good thing, actually.

And that's the whole thing with this article, it puts forward the idea that judges are overruling the will of the people and of politicians not because that's what's happening, but because The Telgraph is owned by right wing hacks and billionaires and it would go a lot better for those people if the judiciary didn't hold any power.

They don't want the judiciary to be independent; they want the people holding the power to only be ones that they can lobby and buy with their blood money and corruption.

It'd be a lot easier for them if human rights weren't important as well.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes, you're a hack and a fucking liar, and we both know that you know that. I hope you enjoy the sound of fascism as it marches toward you; it's what you're advocating for after all.

[redtail-lol]

I think the solution to this is to make certain charges (theft or something else, if it needs a different name) AI-specific. AI generated imagery and real human-made art are fundamentally different, and holding them to the same standards is never gonna be fair.

I don't know enough about laws to know what regulations could be set in place, but they have to be made clear and specific for AI only if and when they do exist. I have some ideas:

Putting art into an AI training model without both compensation and permission from the artist could be considered unpaid labor, and piracy. Though I don't care about piracy from companies, the criminalization of piracy can be weaponized for the benefit of the little guy here.

The difference between sharing your Netflix password and the ability to mimic an artist's style would be the relative profit loss; Netflix still makes plenty of money despite people sharing accounts. AI mimicking an artist's style could completely destroy any income they get from art. This one specifically might, for the reasons of protecting others from unnecessary charges, go beyond potential; the person bringing this against an AI model trainer would have to prove that they've lost a significant percentage of their revenue due to AI. Would that significantly limit this protection? Yes. Necessarily, so Netflix can't bring up the potential for one person to share their account with everyone in the world. Other protections for artists would have to exist alongside this one.

Transformative artworks are protected from plagiarism charges, however only humans are capable of being transformative. AI models are really just probability calculators for what pixel will most likely come next, hence they don't have the capacity to think nor do things with a purpose. AI generators using your art is fundamentally different from an artist doing so

I want one that could protect intentional AI mimicry of an artist (putting an artist's name into a prompt) but I don't know how to do that in a way that keeps artists trying to mimic someone else's style protected. We might have to sacrifice this one unless someone can come up with good legal wording that would condemn one and protect the other. Until then I think we can just morally agree that putting an artist's name into an AI generator is wrong.

None of these are extensive, legally worded, or perfect and I'm open to constructive criticism just please be nice about it. Though I'm not a lawyer nor do I have any power to enforce anything, I think coming up with ideas for legal protections of artists against AI is beneficial because it allows us, as an online community, to think about and perfect what protections we need and want before we can actually start proposing them legally.

I do believe it is necessary to approach the issue of AI as different from art, with specific protections and regulations that can only be enforced on AI. Maybe that's meant to be the point of your post; other people don't approach the issue in a way that acknowledges that AI needs its own specific regulations, and their proposals will hurt artists more than helping us.

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

[thepoliticalvulcan]

"Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety" (Executive Order Analysis)

Direct link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-the-death-penalty-and-protecting-public-safety/

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250121145812/https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-the-death-penalty-and-protecting-public-safety/

Expansion of the death penalty is always something to be opposed. Especially when it comes hand in hand with so many other expansions of military and law enforcement power and the re-classification of people seeking safety as criminals and criminals into terrorists.

Conservatives tend to like legalized unaliving of those they assume are unworthy of living.

Their arguments are numerous and range from a belief that punishment deters crime (which I think is true of deliberative crimes like petty theft and vandalism, but not true of "crimes of passion" which are most acts of violence and murder.) To a deep, perhaps spiritual belief that human beings have a duty and a right to expel people from this mortal coil if they've been convicted of a serious enough crime.

The counter arguments are likewise obvious:

Once you factor in appeals processes to ensure that every argument and piece of evidence has been examined and refuted before execution (a thing a fair system would do but doesn't always happen) death penalty cases are VERY expensive.

The system is often flawed: law enforcement and prosecutors hide evidence and manipulate the process to exclude potentially exculpatory evidence and juries are often deeply prejudiced and full of irrational ideas lifted from police procedurals about how exacting real world forensics really is. Many "sciences" admissible in court are about as empirical as reading tea leaves.

I won't belabor either side.

At face value, bringing back the death penalty and with enthusiasm may seem like a snoozer of a topic. Its as predictable as the tides: a Republican administration is sworn in and loudly trumpets that its going to kill a lot more bad people.

Tragic and we do have a human duty to note this and register our discontent, but how big of a deal is this really?

Look, I don't know how big of a deal it is but I don't like that a mandate to aggressively pursue the death penalty comes along with lots and lots of public statements about investigating political enemies and potentially even charging them with treason. Is that something only Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have to worry about? Maybe some elite level media figures?

Or does it mean that nationwide there will be a call for Federal prosecutors to bring more serious charges, even if leniency would be called for, and with those more serious charges more use of the death penalty?

Were there to be another round of big, public resistance and disorder ala the BLM uprising of 2024, might some people be prosecuted for treason? Treason is a very specific crime per the constitution but its also a word used very cavalierly.

And that's what I worry about. That the death penalty will turn into a stick to use to quell otherwise lawful dissent and misdemeanor level disorder. The witch's brew of mass deportation, designation of cartels as terrorists, expansion of military authority and jurisdiction into immigration, and more all also gesture towards the possibility that any undocumented immigrant or anyone interacting with an undocumented immigrant is theoretically subject to being labeled a terrorist.

How likely is that? Hard to say but I wouldn't bet against at least one legal immigrant or American citizen being in the wrong place at the wrong time and made an example of.

If decent people EVER are in an opportunity to do so, the death penalty must be abolished. For all crimes. No matter how heinous. Yes even those crimes that are popular for people to say "kill all...." because they think the death penalty is a tame tiger that will only kill the most despicable people and that there is no collateral damage.

[bookoformon]

Mormon, Chapter 5. Part 2, "Taking Flight."

To put something underfoot is to make progress in the understanding of the Torah. A Gentile for example puts his uncivilized self underfoot in the process of becoming a Jew. A slave does this in the process of forgetting his slavery, a stupid, silly man in the process of becoming intelligent.

When the process is reversed and we don't enforce the law and allow men who are positiviely pregnant with savagery run for the White House, it puts the world underfoot instead of the other way around. It is very, very bad to allow this.

The shame on you.

When there is shame because the White House is allowing a very bad man to garner political power over the police in a repeat encore performance of evil, the people need to take flight. from the whole shitty show:

6 And it came to pass that in the three hundred and eightieth year the Lamanites did come again against us to battle, and we did stand against them boldly; but it was all in vain, for so great were their numbers that they did tread the people of the Nephites under their feet.

7 And it came to pass that we did again take to flight, and those whose flight was swifter than the Lamanites’ did escape, and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed.

8 And now behold, I, Mormon, do not desire to harrow up the souls of men in casting before them such an awful scene of blood and carnage as was laid before mine eyes; but I, knowing that these things must surely be made known, and that all things which are hid must be revealed upon the house-tops—

9 And also that a knowledge of these things must come unto the remnant of these people, and also unto the Gentiles, who the Lord hath said should scatter this people, and this people should be counted as naught among them—therefore I write a small abridgment, daring not to give a full account of the things which I have seen, because of the commandment which I have received, and also that ye might not have too great sorrow because of the wickedness of this people.

Can you see them? All the vindictive politicians, terrorists, and tyrants taking over the world without a single hint of opposition standing between them and us?

We sure are complaining about democracy all day long, like it's ass is 20 years old and backside up in a sling, glistening in the overhead spotlight, but no one is actually doing anything legally appropriate or effective to rid the world of its long line of rapists gathering online and around the fucking goddam block.

So the people, as I said are taking flight, and that's not as good idea as it once was either!

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 6: In the three hundred and eightieth year the Lamanites did come again against us to battle. The Value in Gematria is 9667, ז‎טוו‎ ‎ ‎zetav, "The sign of ruin."

v. 7 And we did again take to flight. The Value in Gematria is 12512, יבהאב, yahav "the burden."

v. 8: All things hidden must be revealed. The Value in Gematria is 10755, יז‎הה, "will be recognized."

v. 9a: And also the knowledge of these things. The Value in Gematria is 8569, חהוט‎‎, "wired,"

v. 9b: And the commandment I received. The Value in Gematria is 11703, יאז‎‎אֶפֶסג, jazefesg, "the Office Holiday."

Are we wired for war or for peace? We are wired for war. We have a suicidal impulse that is activated when we get needy, jealous, angry, highly emotional in anyway. The only way to overcome an inferiority complex and short circuit the survival instinct it activiates is to study the Torah and follow the Words of Moses, specifically the Tefillin, and train the self to cope with its needy feelings in constructive, moral, ethical, enlightening ways.

Forcing us to watch the Republicans rally against the rest of humanity howeveer, accompanied by their promises of rife criminality, racism, and abuses of power is not one of the ways people will learn to overcome their own misanthropy.

As for the White House, it cannot insist its constituents live and reign among organized criminals determined to efface their civil rights. There must be a well-versed legal response other than an election year to this.

[boredgamecieranshippy]

RACISM AND ANTI SEMITISM (WARNING: HOLOCAUST)

THIS RESEARCH WILL HELP ME IN THE SOCIAL ISSUE ASPECT OF WHAT BOARD GAME OR CARD GAME I WANT TO MAKE CONCEPTS OF AND IDEAS ABOUT AND HOW TO STRUCTURE IT.

How did Hitler use Fear and hatred as a weapon - He basically used his own beliefs and theories, power, even going to high lengths to have specific job like roles devoted into judgmental and racial stereotypes; to keep this trend going, with his own fears and thoughts upon them being elevated to enforce these rules, to gain that power and make it more prevalent. In other words "ONLY THE STEROTYPE BELIEFS AND OPINIONS WOULD BE ENFORCED AND BELIEVED UPON, NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE ELSE SAID OR DISAGREED WITH"

Which can enforce my idea further. with my game having similar style issues and focus points of judgmental unfairness and discrimination; to see view points from different people and how these situations can get haptic quickly.

What were the Concentration Camps For - In its early development it was used to remove enemy political parties; that disagree with many aspects. With many others as well, With homosexuality being chucked in their Jehovah's witnesses, with asocial and social issues admitted in as well.

in the world of democracy, they are used to detain and confine people; that will dwell into harsh circumstances and processes, which are acceptable in political democracy and for legal reasons.

Then in 1938 30,000 german Jews were sentence to the concentration camps for just being jews and incarcerated until eventually they could provide truth that they can show an ability to emigrate.

TYPES OF CAMPS AND THEIR USES

WARNING - HEAVY TOPIC AND OPINION

Could it happen again? In my opinion yes in the near future, it only takes one force in so much power to construct a plan, have conflicting opinions on another to cause another scenario like that, someone with that exact intention to judge and scrutinise another because they dislike them. It could happen with the Russians and Ukraine, it could happen between any conflict and anyone.

Is it Just The Jews

No. But people are forced into depressing situations by only doing either what they've been asked for a movie, or for what they are trying to represent whether or not they are jewish or not

Does it still happen

Does the game promote or rail against these elements? would knowing more about the Fascist regime help game play? who would play it?

SECRET HITLER - It feels like a game that isn't accurate but accurate enough to have some elements of these situations focusing on different points of views and dwelling into how these aspects fall into one or two categories and how they compliment or disregard one as one another, most may find this game to be offensive as the same in all dark focused topics (games and all) and some may enjoy its dry and harsh humour and aspects of what it dwells into.

[starstrucklucky]

The post text in case the link ever breaks.

The great Stop Fucking Him post

Mar. 4th, 2005 at 9:30 AM

Demure or something

This post won't be for everyone. If you're uncomfortable with hearty leftist political opinions, you might want to skip it. I've gone ahead and lj-cut it out of consideration for (a). people who'd rather pass on it and (b). people who are at work, and might prefer to skip repeated derivations of the word "fuck" in bold face type. That having been said, feel free to keep reading or move right along. I promise not to take it personally.

Edit: Yes, yes yes -- feel free to link

this wherever you like. I don't mind.

This is not about abortion.

If you read the article in its entirety, I think that much is obvious -- this is not about abortion. If this were about abortion -- specifically, about fewer abortions being performed -- then those interested in reducing that number would hop all over this bill. So I'll say it again, this is not about abortion.

This is about women having sex, and who gets to be in charge of that sex.

Well, really -- that's what it all comes down to, isn't it? At present, there is a movement in place to make sure that (to lift a phrase from Dan Savage) men have orgasms, and women have babies.

There are people in this world who very firmly believe that this is the natural order of things: men have orgasms, and women have babies. This is a sacred balance, whereby a man is made happy for two minutes and a woman spends the next nine months serving as host to a life-threatening parasite, then the next eighteen years held legally, morally, and fiscally responsible for the health and well-being of that parasite ... while the man is free to wander off or stick around at his leisure.

This is a balance that many, many people -- many of them in positions of power -- are willing to go to great lengths to enforce. Never mind that many (but not all) of these people are men, and are therefore unlikely to be held accountable for any parasite more complex than a tapeworm ... for some strange reason or reasons, these people want to make sure that it is very, very difficult for your average American woman to manage her reproductive system.

Most of the people who object to the wide, easy availability of birth control are men. These men have the luxury of assuming this position because they have no reason to believe that they, personally, have anything at stake. I find this baffling.

The solution is so obvious that it can be boiled down to three words: stop fucking them.

That's right. Stop fucking them.

If your man doesn't understand that if he's entitled to an orgasm, you're entitled to an unoccupied uterus -- stop fucking him. If he can't get it through his thick skull that his fleeting pleasure poses a mortal threat to you -- stop fucking him. No handjobs, no blowjobs, no orgasms for him whatsoever except by his own hand, until you can be completely assured of a baby-free future, at your discretion.

These men do not deserve access to your pants. Stop fucking them.

I don't know what you think you owe them, and I don't care how badly they whine or beg. I don't care if they're wonderful boyfriends otherwise. I don't care if you're married to them. Stop fucking them. It is still your body. It is still your call. Clearly, they do not understand this. So stop fucking them.

They will not die if you do not fuck them. Stop fucking them.

Remember: You can hold out longer than they can. I promise. Your sex toys are better,* your self-control is superior, and your stakes are higher. Stop fucking them. You deserve better. You deserve someone who is aware that your body is your domain, and who respects that. If he doesn't respect that, stop fucking him.

Just stop. Stop it. You deserve better, and he deserves a cold shower if he thinks he is entitled to control over your vagina and how you manage its daily operation. Stop fucking him if he thinks that someone other than you should determine what hangs around inside you. Stop fucking him, because he would sooner masturbate with a corkscrew than let you dictate how he receives his prostate exams.

Stop fucking him if he refers to birth control as your problem, then helps vote in legislation that makes it your really big fucking problem. Stop fucking him if he thinks that your inability to prevent conception should in no way prevent him from having sex with you.

It's not that complicated.

Stop fucking him.

Stop it. Seriously.

Christ.

* And illegal in some states. Coincidence? I think not.

Attn: conservative men

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Games Workshop declares war on its customers (again)

There’s a difference between a con-artist and a grifter. A con-artist is just a gabby mugger, and when they vanish with your money, you know you’ve been robbed.

A grifter, on the other hand, is someone who can work the law to declare your stuff to be their stuff, which makes you a lawless cur because your pockets are stuffed full of their money and merely handing it over is the least you can do to make up for your sin.

IP trolls are grifters, not con artists, and that’s by design, a feature of the construction of copyright and trademark law.

Progressives may rail at the term “IP” for its imprecision, but truly, it has a very precise meaning: “‘IP’ is any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers, competitors and critics, such that they must arrange their affairs to my benefit.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In that regard, it is a perfect grifter’s tool — a way to put you on the wrong side of the line for simply living your life in the way that works best for you, not the grifter.

Now, copyright and trademark’s framers were alive to the possibility that they might become this kind of weapon, and they wrote limitations and exceptions into each doctrine that were meant to safeguard the public’s right to free speech and free action.

But those limitations and exceptions are weirdly self-eviscerating. Both trademark and copyright’s limitations assume that they aren’t being weaponized by immoral sociopaths. Both collapse if they are.

Take copyright. Copyright has a suite of limitations and exceptions under various global legal systems, including US law. US law also contains a specific set of exceptions colloquially called “fair use,” a subject of much mystification for lay people.

Under fair use, someone accused of copyright infringement can ask a judge to find that their use of someone else’s copyrighted work is permissible because to deny it would be socially harmful.

The fair use law sets out four factors that judges MAY consider when considering such a claim. Note that these four factors are neither comprehensive (judges can weigh other factors), nor dispositive (failing to satisfy a factor doesn’t disqualify your use from being fair).

If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry. It is confusing. As the lawyers say, “fair use is fact-intensive.”

The specifics of a use really matter: who’s making the use, what they’re using, why they’re using it, how they use it, and how much they use.

That’s why anyone who claims that “X is never fair use” (for example, commercial fanfic) are full of shit — as are people who say “X is always fair use”).

Commercial fanfic absolutely can be fair use. No less a body than the Supreme Court says so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

Despite all this ambiguity and nuance, IP grifters who want to force other people to arrange their affairs to their own benefit are laser focused on the four factors, reasoning correctly that if they show a judge that the factors favor them, they’re more likely to prevail.

Half of the four factors are out of the grifter’s reach. As a rightsholder, you can’t control “the purpose and character of the use,” or “the amount and substantiality of the portion used.”

But the other two factors are more readily within the IP wielder’s remit. As someone seeking control a work, you can frame “to the nature of the copyrighted work” by talking up how much creativity and originality went into it, which judges will weigh in your favor.

More importantly — and disturbingly — is the way that an IP holder can influence the fourth factor: “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Think about that fourth factor for a moment here: if my use of your work doesn’t cost you any money, then it’s more likely that my use is fair.

The corollary: if you can bully some people into paying for something they’ve always gotten for free, then you can claim that the people who refuse to pay are ripping you off — that there is a “market” for the use, and that their failure to pay weakens that market.

This is effectively what’s happened to music sampling. Seminal albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” were produced with thousands of uncleared samples — but at the time, no one was clearing samples.

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Had the rightsholders to those samples dragged Public Enemy into court, they wouldn’t have had the fourth factor on their side. No one was paying for samples, so a failure to pay for samples had no “effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work.”

However, in the 33 years since Nation of Millions dropped, paying to license samples has become common practice — and the mere existence of paid samples makes not paying for samples more legally risky.

So say a rightsholder decided to aggressively license simple quotations — as the Associated Press did in 2008, when it offered to sell you a license to a 5-word quotation for a mere $12.50.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010341.html

All other things being equal, a short quotation from a news article is likely to be fair use. But if the AP managed to terrorize enough bloggers into coughing up $12.50 for a 5-word quote, it could create a market for 5-word quotations.

That market would change the fair use argument for people who don’t pay — yes, they’re making a transformative, critical use, but they’re also undermining the market for the copyright, and a judge might find this change tips the scales away from fair use.

Even more importantly, the additional uncertainty might stampede more people into paying $12.50 for a 5-word quote rather than risk a $250,000 statutory damages award for copyright infringement.

The more people who pay for 5-word quotes, the sturdier the market becomes and the riskier it is to rely upon fair use.

The fourth factor looks like an escape valve for uses that harm no one.

But it actually rewards to bullies who intimidate others out of money they don’t actually owe — until they do.

Trademark has a similar gotcha. Trademark is very different from copyright. Fundamentally, trademark is about protecting buyers, not sellers. Trademark meant to help buyers avoid being tricked into buying an inferior product because it was deceptively named or styled.

If you buy a can of Coke, you want the true Black Water of American Imperialism, not an inferior brand of dilute battery-acid.

But if your Coke turns out to be a fake, you might shrug off the harm or balk at the expense of punishing the fast operator who mis-sold you.

So trademark empowers Coke — and other vendors — to punish third parties who trick their customers, acting as their customers’ champions. Trademark doesn’t exist to prevent Coke from losing money to a rival — it exists to help Coke drinkers get what they pay for.

Trademarks can be registered with the USPTO, who nominally weigh trademark applications to ensure that they’re distinctive and original. Practically, examiners are busy, sometimes careless, and ideologically inclined to grant, not deny, claims.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

But you don’t have to register a trademark to assert it. You can threaten or pursue legal action on the grounds that someone has violated an unregistered trademark, which is any distinctive graphic or phrase that is associated with your product.

Registered or unregistered, trademark enforcement primarily comes down to whether a “naive consumer” would be mislead by someone else’s use of a mark. That is, when you bought a Coke-branded sack of chicken feet, did you think it was blessed by the Coca-Cola company?

If there’s no likelihood of confusion, trademark holders struggle to enforce their trademarks.

This standard seems reasonable, but, like the fourth factor in fair use, it has a sting in its tail.

One of the ways you can induce confusion in the public is to gain a reputation for being a litigious bully. Say Coke is known far and wide for clobbering anyone that uses its trademarks, no matter how trivial the use and no matter how bad it made them look.

If Coke is truly notorious for its zero-tolerance policy, that will lead to a widespread public understanding that every time you see Coke’s marks, the use was blessed by a Coke lawyer — meaning a use that might not otherwise be found to be confusing can be made confusing.

“If that was any other company’s trademark, I’d assume that they had nothing to do with it — but since I know Coke has an army of baby-eating attack lawyers who destroy anyone who uses a mark without permission, that must be an authorized use.”

Like fair use’s fourth factor, trademark’s confusion standard rewards the most vicious and uncaring businesspeople with new rights that their more reasonable competitors do not enjoy. IP selects for sociopathy.

Now, IP — in the most sinister sense of the phrase — has pervaded every industry, but the contradictions of IP are felt most keenly in its spawning grounds: the culture industry.

Culture is in tension with the control of ideas, because culture is the spread of ideas.

Creators (and execs) are vulnerable to the pirate/admiral fallacy: “When I take from my forebears, that’s legitimate artistic progress. When my successors do it to me, it’s theft.”

This pathology, combined with ready-to-hand IP weapons, incentivizes all manner of wickedness. Remember when Marvel and DC teamed up in a bid to trademark the word “super-hero” so that no one else would be allowed to use it?

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/

These perverse incentives are made tragic by the inherently participatory nature of culture.

It’s not merely that Marvel and DC wanted to steal the word “super-hero” right out of our mouths.

It’s that super-heroes are culturally important because of how we take and remix them in our lives. Marvel went on to use the law to stop us from pretending to be superheroes online, something Casey Fiesler called “Pretending Without a License.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277598023_Pretending_Without_a_License_Intellectual_Property_and_Gender_Implications_in_Online_Games

Which brings me, at last, to Games Workshop, a company that has consistently led the IP bully pack, indiscriminately terrorizing the Warhammer 40k fans who made it a massive commercial success.

Warhammer is a strategy/roleplaying game that is played with miniature creatures that players buy, modify and paint. If you’re not familiar with all this, maybe this sounds a bit like toy soldiers.

It’s a lot more interesting — not just because of the game rules or lore, but because of the incredibly, unbelievable, jaw-dropping virtuosity of Warhammer players when they paint and style those miniatures.

There’s a reason I look forward to Saturday morning’s weekly linkdump from Jonathan Struan of the week’s best Warhammer and other RPG miniatures:

https://www.superpunch.net/search?q=warhammer&max-results=20&by-date=true

and why I follow incredible painters like Aurelie Schick:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/110246635@N06

Warhammer is intrinsically participatory, co-creative and active — it’s not media you consume, it’s media you produce.

Games Workshop has become fantastically rich off of this…and they hate it, and they always have.

For years they’ve pursued fans for producing their own fan-made supplements and additions to the game:

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/99301

The more Warhammer players complained about the indiscriminate censorship of their fan media, the harder GW cracked down on them, wiping out whole genres of creative work:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/48933/games-workshop-files-purge-09

GW claimed it was only defending its rights, the grifter’s signature move, making you a crook for having the audacity not to put their shareholders’ interests ahead of your own.

Then Games Workshop claimed a trademark on “space marine,” a generic term that had been widely used in science fiction for decades, including, notably, in Heinlein’s classic “Starship Troopers” (1959).

https://web.archive.org/web/20130207002144/http://mcahogarth.org/?p=10593

They didn’t just go after RPGs that used the phrase — they used trademark claims to remove novels from Amazon for having the phrase in their titles.

“Space marine” is a generic phrase, but GW was betting if they were sufficiently, spectacularly brutal in their enforcement, they could create a proprietary interest: “Now, I know GW destroys anyone who uses ‘space marine,’ so this ‘space marine’ must be endorsed by GW.”

GW just launched a new set of terms of service, including: “individuals must not create fan films or animations based on our settings and characters. These are only to be created under licence from Games Workshop.”

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-WW/Intellectual-Property-Guidelines

Now, this isn’t how copyright works. There are many ways in which a fan film or animation could be fair use, no matter whether GW forbids or permits their production. But this isn’t mere overreach: it’s a direct play against the fourth factor in fair use.

If GW can establish that all animations and vids are produced under paid license, then any fanvid that doesn’t pay for a license has a weaker fair use case, because the fourth factor protects existing licensing markets.

Indeed, as Rob Beschizza points out on Boing Boing, GW timed the terms of service change to coincide with the announcement that they’re launching a subscription service including “cartoons, in-house hobby videos, access to a vault of ebooks and mags.”

https://www.pcgamer.com/now-even-warhammer-has-a-subscription-service/

This is bullying with a business-model, in other words. Fans have figured out how to have fun with each other for free, and GW wants them to stop and pay the company for its in-house version of that fun.

Warhammer creators are demoralized and disheartened. The creator of the hugely successful Oculus Imperia Youtube series posted a heart-rending message of surrender.

https://twitter.com/OculusImperia/status/1421136444437970949

Oculus Imperia also edits “If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device,” (TTS) another beloved Warhammer fan series. Alfabusa from TTS posted his own absolutely demoralized goodbye to his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXljeaktnDA

Ironically, both channels would have a stronger fair use case if they mocked and criticized Warhammer, rather than celebrating it, as fair use tips favorably towards critical uses.

The fact is, they love their hobby and its community and they want to improve it, not tear it down.

Neither wants to get dragged into a brutal copyright case against a deep-pocketed corporation. Even people with great fair use cases balk at that:

https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

Now, some people might be thinking, what’s the big deal? Why don’t these creators just make up their own stories instead of remixing the ones that come from Games Workshop?

Those people are assholes.

*All* stories are fanfic of some kind or another. Every mystery novel is a remix of Poe’s Murders In the Rue Morgue. Games Workshop’s stories are the thrice-brewed teabags of many sf writers (remember “space marines?”).

Tolkien straight up ripped off his characters from the 1000-year-old Norse poem “Elder Edda,” which features dwarves named “Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Nori, Dori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur.”

https://musingsofatolkienist.blogspot.com/2015/07/hobbit-origins-catalog-of-dwarves.html

Culture is made of other culture.

GW made something wonderful with Warhammer — by plundering the stories that preceded it.

The sin isn’t in the taking, it’s in the pretense that it never happened, and the vicious grifting that punishes anyone who does unto GW as they did unto everyone else.

[countessofbiscuit]

dirty two club

Fox loves Riyo with every beat of his propane heart | ao3 

Commander Fox Week - Day 4: Bonding | Laughter  No Warnings Apply Teen, 1000 words @loving-fox-hours . . .

It was one of the most protean statutes on Coruscant’s books: vehicles with certain uplift-to-thrust ratios (mup-per-ktu) were prohibited for public use.

Given the altitude of most skylanes, and the near-universal zoning restrictions regarding pedestrian-level traffic in built-up areas, owning a speeder bike in Galactic City meant paying more for storage than fuel.

The real target of this rule?

Swoop bikes and their dangerously elastic flight ceilings.

More specifically, the reckless racing of these overpowered engines with seats through the city maze.

A discreet citizen could get away with operating a speeder or swoop in the lower levels, provided it wasn’t modded to the Maw and back with rally lights, exhaust tips, and showy gas purges. Cops couldn’t be everywhere; the knowing knew CSF droids were only tripped by irregular speed. It was flying in an anti-social manner that got one into trouble.

Commander Fox, legal operator of an otherwise illegally modded Aratech 74-z speeder bike, never did that. Nor did he ever attend those unlawful fixtures.

But a tall, dark, and disguised being who called himself Kett did.

Tonight he was joined by a little lady who called herself Twirrl. Her pretty face was heavily caked up. She was made only mostly modest by velvet swatches and lace doilies that had been dubiously stitched together. Like a Corellian folktale had crashed into a brothel. Or a senator had dug through her closet for the hottest fashion circa the Apprentice Session of ‘71.

“You’ll blow our cover, Commander Hoverhands,” Riyo Chuchi teased, before using a trashcan to climb onto Fox’s shoulders.

She didn’t want to miss anything. She might have seen a topside race or two, where the fines were covered by the price of admission to designated penthouses. Everything was legal for the rich. The underworld flavor of speed would be altogether a new experience.

This race had been advertised on a forum that hadn’t made it onto CSF’s Traffic Division watchlist. Privately, Fox hoped it stayed that way. The experience was different for him, too. Better. Riyo’s gasp of delight when each pack cornered into view sounded almost vulgar. Her bare legs clenched against his neck every time an engine popped like a slugthrower, running rich.

Fox’s palms grew sweaty on her thighs. She’d demanded he put them there, instead of holding her primly by the ankles of her knee-high boots.

“I think my racer has yours pipped!” she squealed during the fifth heat.

“Is that so?” Fox replied, amused. She’d insisted on fronting all his bets.

Riyo leaned down and kissed his shrouded temple. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you pay up … unless you want to dip your big fingers into my pink purse later.”

Her hoarsening voice dripped into his ear. Bikes swept past in a rolling roar. His heart thumped wildly under the crush of everything he loved.

Dizzied, Fox squeezed her in agreement, beaming but burning under his shemagh. It wasn’t the racing scarf she’d gifted him. He kept that tissued in its box; the silk felt finer than sea-spray, and Pantoran plum dye—Pantoran-snails guts wasn’t flattering, if more accurate—carried a whiff of something ripe. Imperceptible to Pantorans, or so they claimed, noses in the air.

The delicious aroma of fumes was dulled enough. Fox laughed stupidly anyway, when their neighbor’s live holo confirmed Riyo’s racer the winner. She nearly strangled him with drunken rejoicing. And then she was falling backwards, shit—

Worse: she was planting a kiss on the polite devaronian who’d let them in front. Loudly complimented him on his handlebars. It had Fox ready to jump the painted cordon, commandeer a swoop, and remind Riyo of the real meaning of fast. Hold on, sweetheart.

They’d monkeyed down here, level by level, without his bike. It flashed Guard racing stripes and had probably flashed up in the rearview of more than one criminal here. CSF had a no-chase policy. Fox didn’t.

Fox relaxed his shoulders (but not his grip) and remembered why he was here.

“What would you do, if the war ended tomorrow and you could make your own life?” Riyo Chuchi had asked, over a closeted cup of caf in his office. Verbal references were often required for extending diplomatic protection. Totally professional.

Fox had been blindsided by the question. Marry you was his instinctive answer. But she probably already knew that. He blurted out the only other thing that came to mind, because his mouth had been spoiled by her generosity. Emboldened.

“Race swoops.”

“Really?” Her expression had been colorful. Not a shade of doubt. On a scale of one to ten, Fox’s bike was juiced up to eleven with the dial broken off. Its high-output repulsor coils didn’t belong in any government-issued speeder.

“Yes. But not arena racing. Too samey—and corporate. Off-world courses. Street, if you’d let me.”

“I would if I knew what that meant.”

Fox hemmed. “Erm ... the illegal ones. Downbelow.” Recreational strips and arenas had all succumbed to Corrie property tax and prices; it left the average Joph nowhere to blow his brakes off. Even if Fox would order them shot down if they ever entered federal or military airspace, he sympathized.

“Interesting,” Riyo had said, grinning behind her mug. NO FOX GIVEN was the least offensive one in his cupboard. “Well, what a senator doesn’t see can’t compromise her position.”

“You wouldn’t want to see. It’s dicey stuff. And not the most proper.” Nitrous blasts up skirts and the like.

“What makes you think so?” Riyo pressed. “And why do I sense you know a lot more about this than you’re letting on?”

“... Because I’m in law enforcement?”

Her had eyes glowed with the dawn of excitement. “Not that kind.”

Fox had once promised to take Riyo anywhere she wanted to go. She’d been bed-bound at the time. Hospitalized. Sad and injured and heartbreakingly fragile and—

And he had meant it. Fox just made a mental note that Riyo’s memory was stronger than symoxin.

And he took her to the races.

. . . . . 

with love to @tiend​ for pointing out the uncanny similarity between Tyrian purple and Pantoran plum. and just with love in general ♥  (ao3)

[daemonhxckergrrl]

I always think of this exchange, ironically from a US show:

Buffy: speak English, not whatever they speak in-

Giles: ...England ??

the UK has its own history tied into how we to to the Americanisation of everything, but that isn't the fault of working class Brits. in US culture the UK is typically seen as interchangable with England, ignoring that Scotland and Wales exist as countries within that Union and that the full name also includes Northern Ireland (which is different from the Republic of Ireland). don't get me started on the way US culture treats anything Irish either.

on the subject of accents, the only ones commonly known in US culture seem to be RP (received pronunciantion, the formal standard accent often coupled with grammar/vocab/syntax of Standard English), best described as that overly posh and clipped accent you may have heard on old British radio, and a modern working class accent around the Greater London area (where the meme phrases "Bri'ish moment", "it's chewsday innit" and "bo'uhl o' wo'er" come from). in reality, every major town and city has its own accent (or accents). just within the Midlands you have vastly different accents between Birmingham, Northampton, Leicester, Telford. these are towns and cities within a couple hours of each other. and yes, many of these places have their own words for the same things and pronounce the same words very differently. there's already a class history of suppressing regional dialects (Northern accents were considered a sign of lower intelligence) and Americanisation will just make that problem worse.

I've seen that Wiggan kebab video circling a few times and while yes a lot of our town-specific foods may look beige or have basic-ass ingredients or be carb-heavy and light on flavour, they're working class foods made cheap with what ingredients people had locally when they needed these meals. I'm talking about Northern mining towns needing to feed their overworked and underpaid miners on what budget families had.

another thing is how US media treats anything alcohol-adjacent with such a fragility and puritan mindset. tbh the US culture around alcohol is one I find both confusing and contradictory (I'm aware of prohibition bc we do learn some US history here). like yes a lot of people drink too much here (football culture is especially bad for this) but the pub as an establishment is an essential part of our communities.

it's a great place to hang out with friends, get to know the locals when you move, to sit an enjoy the sun with your cold beverage of choice (I recommend sitting out with a fresh lemonade just as much as a proper ale).

so far I've talked about US misunderstandings of the UK, but I think another important one is police. in the UK our police were not originally slavecatchers. that's a US thing.

we have a history of Acts of Parliament slowly (over nearly 1000 years) transforming watchmen and night watch models into Victorian-style beat policing and then into modern policing. the end result is absolutely still a force of the state using violence against its citizens and the threat of violence to enforce laws.

one final thing is absolutely how legal and political stuff is US-centric. like yes, there are instances where the outcome of a Bill in Congress will affect people in other countries, but the way with which the US political and legal system is assumed default and assumed that it will always affect people outside the US is so damaging.

a lot of technology laws are important bc I don't want US citizens to suffer at the hands of big corporations any more than I want anyone else to, but here's something important to consider:

Tumblr Live is available in the US (and possibly some other countries that have weak privacy and data protection laws) but not in the EU or in the UK where we have GDPR. let that sink in for a moment.

the treatment of the US as default is damaging to everyone. it hurts people in the US who then expect everyone to be like them and experience huge culture shock, it's damaging to countries close to the US who have their identity eroded by proximity, it's damaging to countries who share English as a native language bc their identity is eroded by the dominance of Americanisms, and it's damaging to countries whose citizens have to both learn (US) English and forcibly Americanise their speech and mannerisms in order to appeal to people in the US.

this is way longer than I intended but hey post be upon ye

DO NOT LET SOCIAL MEDIA TURN YOU INTO AN AMERICAN

[vkelleyart]

For well-meaning white American friends/followers struggling to understand black anger.

Disclaimer: I’d like to begin by saying that this message should not in any way be interpreted as implying that all looting/violence has been committed by protesters, especially since criminal gangs, anarchists, and white power groups have been caught coopting violent protest with the intent to undermine the struggle for racial justice. Nor is it meant to diminish the tragic effect that looting/violent protest has had on the very marginalized communities that need the most help. It is simply a window into a perspective you might not have considered or explored, which I offer in hopes of cultivating empathy.

It may make you uncomfortable to read this. Please bear with me.

Systemic racism is a term you want to get familiar with. It's larger and more insidious than black people being killed and brutalized by law enforcement, which should give you an idea of just how big a beast we're dealing with. Now, this is important: We ALL are immersed in systemic racism every day of our lives and, especially if you are white, you will not be able to see the ways in which you benefit from the oppression of black people.

I can feel your tension from here––the voice within saying “not me.” This is not what you wanted to hear. You're not a racist, you think to yourself. You have friends of color. Maybe family, too. You'd never intentionally harm a black or brown individual on the basis of their skin color. 

You're a good person. I'm not here to argue that particular point.

That said, please integrate this concept. If you are white, you are benefiting from systemic racism, which hurts black and brown people. It is sewn into the fabric of our culture. It's entrenched in everything you take for granted, from your property to your education to your access to healthcare and food. Moreover, systemic racism is specifically constructed to protect you from being able to see its effect on your life and the lives of people of color. 

In other words, you have a blind spot, by default. It's not your fault you have it. You were born into this culture made to shelter you from its evils. 

It also doesn’t invalidate any trials or injustices you have experienced as a result of any other marginalized facets of your identity, since discrimination can also happen due to class, ability, gender, orientation, etc. But it does mean that your skin color doesn’t compound your risk of being killed/brutalized/imprisoned within a definitively racialized justice system.  

Now that you know this, it's imperative that you realize you are not an authority on the experiences of people of color. You have not lived it. You do not know. To pass judgment on the despair of black people is to reinstate and protect white dominance. Which is a definitively racist thing to do, even if you’re not aware of it.

Follow me here.

One way systemic racism oppresses people of color is by codifying the law in such a way that literally prevents people of color from overcoming their own oppression. By extension, law enforcement historically has functioned as the arm of white supremacy, enforcing laws that by and large serve to protect white dominance and insulate white culture from its own racial self-awareness. 

Consider the ways police once functioned to enforce Jim Crow laws and segregation. These patterns didn't just erase with legislation. After the Civil Rights movement, bigoted lawmakers buried inequality deeper into the law, coated it in sanitized legalese, and assigned punishments designed to disproportionately imprison black bodies compared to whites.

This is the legal system that police enforce regardless of whether the officers themselves are white or black. That alone would be enough to indict law enforcement for their hand in perpetuating systemic racism, but it's clearly worse than that. "Bad apples" abound, with FBI investigations revealing the infiltration of KKK and other white supremacist organizations into police forces across the United States. There is very little leadership when it comes to finding these bad apples, prosecuting them, and preventing their existence in the first place. 

Now try to understand that the problem is bigger than bad apples who will brutalize black individuals and execute them without a trial. You need only compare how meek entire swaths of police officers were in the presence of armed white men spitting in their faces demanding the end of the COVID lockdowns to the ferocious way they tear gassed and pelted with rubber bullets the black lives protesters who were on their knees.

When you lack ancestral wealth, when you are born into a world that resists your right to agency, independence, access and dignity in every single possible way, and then makes it impossible for you to stand up for your right to all those things, these are the conditions that spawn violence. 

Looters who say this is about more than George Floyd are correct. It's not just about George Floyd. It's about forced subjugation in all ways, shapes and forms, being denied the right to exist in public, being denied access to wealth, prosperity, healthcare, etc.

It's about knowing, hundreds of years post-slavery, that your body still does not belong to you. To walk with a target on your back. Every. Single. Day. To struggle to protect your children from a world that does not value their promise. 

In the comfort of your home, try now to imagine the despair. The hopelessness. The abject terror. The anger over trauma that began in your childhood but keeps happening over and over and over again and therefore can never heal. 

White people can never fully understand because it is not our lived experience––it's theirs.

When you are white, you are safe, seen, protected, and included in a legal system built to insulate you at the *direct expense* of black individuals. That's why all this sounds so radical. Only people of color have insight into this reality, but instead of listening, we keep telling them to stop interrupting our lives with their desperation to be seen.

How many of you have either said or heard someone say these things? Each one reinstates white dominance:

"How could he kneel during the national anthem? That's so disrespectful!"

"How dare they stop traffic and make me late for work!"

"Listen to that thuggish language! If they want equality so badly, they should rethink the way they talk to us!"

Now is the time to silence your judgment. You have no right. You have no clue. People of color do not owe you their patience, their kindness, their time, or their obedience. You've taken from them your whole life and yes, you were unaware, but you were complicit.

What you can do (which will have the long term effect of mitigating violence) is amplify their voices. Support their businesses. Post their bail. Vote them into office. Use your protection, your privilege, your voice to demand change like YOU are the one in the crosshairs. Nothing will change without good white people owning the struggle for equality, and in a racialized world, we cannot expect the courtesy of being asked nicely.

ETA: This barely scratches the surface, I know. There is so much more to say regarding how racism overlaps with homophobia, ablism, sexism, transphobia, to oppress and endanger black lives. Wherever you reside on the spectrum of privilege, I just hope this provides an inroad to further introspection before you share a critical meme or pass a sweeping judgment on the anger of your POC neighbors. <3  

[linkspooky]

This Thing

de·hu·man·i·za·tion 

noun

the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.

This thing A meta on the dehumanization of villains done by the heroes in the manga My Hero Academia, if you’re interested read more underneath the cut.

Before saying anything else, yes crimminals are a group of people who can be dehumanized. People who break the law are still in fact people, and while this is mainly talking about a fictional work it’s worth remembering that dehumanization is a tactic used to justify violence and the taking away of human rights from crimminals and incarcerated people. 

People are still people. No matter what bad things they do they’re still people. And victims are victims even if they don’t present their victimhood in easy to digest ways. The conflict in My Hero Academia is one much more complicated than hero vs. villain because it exists within a society that generates its own villains through intentional neglect. I say neglect, because most heroes seem to be of the perspective that villains are either born evil, or choose to do evil entirely of their own free will and are never victims of circumstances or forced into the livelihood. 

Villain isn’t just what costumed crimminals are called in MHA, it’s a literal legal definition that are given to certain crimminal offenders. We don’t know what exactly the legal ramifications are, but the fact that you can literally be called a villain just for being a repeat offender shows the way hero society views it’s crimminals. 

Villain has different connotations, it means an inhuman evil, not just a person who has done bad things. Police also have much more power in comparison to our society as well, in the manga vigilantes when his sister Makoto brings up the fact that technically her friend who has been accused of villainry is innocent until proven guilty and formally charged. 

Tsukauchi gets physically angry with her. 

What’s important in this situation is the girl they’re arguing about pop step is an innocent victim. She was kidnapped by a man, had a parasite inserted into her brain and is being physically controlled. What she needs to be is saved not put down, but the law is so inflexible it’s only capable of seeing her as a villain not as a person caught in a bad situation who needs to be saved from that situation. 

And it’s much later revealed that there is technically a way to save her life, but because it requires breaking of the laws the police and heroes won’t ever do it. Beating her up won’t save her, it’ll just kill her as an innocent victim of circumstance, and stop her from doing any more damage to the people around her. Even if the police knew the way to save her life they won’t attempt it because it breaks the law. 

Being a by the book cop is all well and good, but when the law that exists doesn’t protect people there’s something wrong with the law. This isn’t an isolated incident either, we’re shown over and over again in the main manga as well this is always how villains are responded to, violent suppression. 

At the start of the manga Shigaraki says this, that heroes and villains are both violent but because heroes are categorized as such their violence suddenly becomes heroic. All Might just dismisses what he says as him being a madman.  

Not only that but in the aftermath of the break in the heroes all attempt to dissect Shigaraki’s character. They all make him out to be some kind of insane person that could have no possible rationale or reason behind his actions. 

They dismiss Shigaraki’s attack as him simply being a man-child who thinks he can do whatever he wants. There’s no possible way that he could have any kind of sympathetic reason or human rationale, because he’s a villain, right? Except we learn later that’s not the case. 

The words that Shigaraki is saying to All Might echo the words of his abuser. Shigaraki is like this not out of his own choice, but because he was deliberately shapped and moulded by someone. The reason why Shigaraki is impuslively violent is because as a literal five year old he was exposed to violence over and over again, and told this is who he was, this is what he was for. 

All Might later discovers that Shigaraki is not only the son of Nana Shimura’s son, a child he was personally responsible for when his mother died but decided to go along with his mother’s plan to abandon him (for his protection) and then also that All for One had specifically raised Shimura Tenko as a weapon against him. All Might knowing completely the manipulative kind of man that All for One is, and that Shimura must have been young when All for One took him in. Is still able only to see Shigaraki as a crimminal. 

He is literally told that he can’t see him as anything other than a villain otherwise his judgement would be affected. At this point it’s not even ignorance, it’s intentional neglect. All Might SHOULD know that something is up with Shimura Tenko and that he didn’t choose to become a villain and was most likely influenced by All for One and yet the heroes all choose to ignore that fact and instead put him down like any other crimminal. 

The problem with dehumanizing crimminals is that cops are not omniscient. Cops make mistakes. Cops are wrong, like... a lot. When you give people the power of law, there are people who are victims who were just trying to survive who are going to get caught up and treated exactly the same as people who are genuinely dangerous and out to hurt others like AFO. There are people who are perfectly innocent sometimes who will get caught up in it too.

People like Tsukauchi and Gran Torino may be good cops, they may be by the book cops, but that’s it. They’re the type that gets angry at the fact that due process exists because they believe that cops always suspect the right people, and that their hunches are never wrong or they could never possibly arrest someone who doesn’t deserve it. Neither of them acknowledge that the system is flawed and often makes mistakes, and because of that they end up believing that the police are always in the right, that the police could never prosecute someone wrongly, and those are dangerous beliefs to have for literally any law system, especially one with guys that shoot lasers out of their eyes.. The reason due process exists is not to slow the hand of justice, it’s because the legal system is really flawed. 

The problem with giving too much power to police is that we don’t exist in a perfect world where the police will obey even their own laws. Why don’t we just put cameras in everybody’s houses? People who aren’t doing anything illegal won’t have anything to worry about. Unless suddenly things like speaking out against the government become illegal because the police now have the power to enforce it. What I’m saying is the rule of law does not necessarily = good or evil. Rules are not always good, and they’re also not absolutes they change all the time, and they also don’t always exist to protect people they need to protect. We see this literally happen in My Hero Acadmia, the government uses it’s power to kidnap a child and erase his name literally the exact same way All for One did so he could be raised as a child soldier. 

The conflict in My Hero Academia is not good guys vs bad guys, especially when the good guys don’t even act as good guys, and a step beyond that rigid laws and adherence to social order is not ever going to solve the problems associated with villains like Shigaraki because those laws are fundamentally unjust. They don’t exist to protect the people who most need protecting, they exist to oppress a minority in order to maintain social order. 

Yes, violent crimminals are still a group of people. They are still human beings with rights. If they’re not guaranteed those rights they will be abused. We’ve literally seen this play out in action. 

Hawks corners Twice, and then says he’ll go out of his way to Save Twice because he personally likes him. The only one of the villains Hawks treats as a human and not just an enemy to put down is Twice, and only because he personally likes him. 

Twice brings up the fact that all of his friends deserve to be saved the same way he is. In fact, he even goes out of his way to say that he would die to save these people, and Hawks just ignores them because he sees no humanity in them only the one he personally likes. 

Then Hawks goes out of his way to mention that if Twice doesn’t stop fighting back, it’s his fault if they die. Twice is trying to argue with Hawks that the people he sees as a danger to society, and that need to be taken down are humans capable of being kind just as much as they are a threat. 

Twice murders him. He goes out of his way to murder him and stab him in the back. Hawks acting in a capacity as a hero, goes out of his way to dehumanize Twice again and again, completely ignore his own feelings and words, and then that conflict eventually escalates to murder. The point is not that Hawks had no choice but to kill him, but rather Hawks convinced himself he had no choice but to kill Twice. 

The problem with applying this extremely harsh and punitive, even war-like view of law and order is that innocent people like Twice who literally only wanted to keep his friends happy will get caught up in it. Hawks literally thought that Twice had a chance for rehabilitation, that of the league he was the one most likely to rehabilitate and he still murdered him.

Heroes aren’t interested in rehabilitation. They are there to beat up villains. For several of them, it’s not even that far of a jump to get to the point where they start justifying killing villains. Miruko is almost excited to murder the Nomu who are, you know, innocent victims of mad science. 

They want to take down Ujiko, but they don’t care at all about his creations which are all former people, and the heroes know this by this point. Finally, I want to discuss one of the most empathic characters in the manga. 

Aiawa is the current guardian of Eri. He participated in the mission to rescue her from Chisaki. He is someone who views Eri as a victim, and never gets upset with her or blames her for her out of control quirk the same way Chisaki once did. 

Not only that but Aizawa himself has had a friend kidnapped and stolen away by All for One. He knows personally what All for One can do to a person, by changing Shirakumo to Kurogiri he completely warped his personality and controlled him to the point where the person he once was was almost gone. 

He knows All for One is capable of having that affect on people, not only that but Kurogiri himself says that Shigaraki is like a lost kitten that he can’t throw away because he feels responsible. 

Aizawa has rescued a victim who is in similiar circumstances to Shigaraki. Aizawa has literally seen his best friend warped and changed by All for One’s hand. It should be obvious what Shigaraki has been through by now, and yet Aizawa doesn’t seem to care about Shigaraki’s circumstances at all.

Shirakumo has done bad things in AFO’s name as well. However, Aizawa decides to see Shirakumo as a victim. Even though Shirakumo is also complicit in the grooming and raising of Shigaraki for what he is, and almost certainly had a hand in manipulating him. 

Aizawa empathizes with Kurogiri because he knows him personally, because he wants Shirakumo back. He doens’t bother to care about Shigaraki, because he doesn’t know Shigaraki personally. It’s not only hypocritical, it’s also just plain ignorance. 

Aizawa is literally given every story reason to care. Shirakumo literally tells Aizawa that Shigaraki is a person he wants to protect and that he’s fond of. Aizawa believes that despite the terrible things he’s done, there’s still the boy who wanted to become a hero somewhere in Kurogiri, and he’s literally proven right. 

Shirakumo still has a chance and is given a chance to become a hero, because Aizawa cares about him because they were friends but that’s about it. It’s not like Aizawa is driven by a very rigorous and strict sense of justice. He’s clearly willing to make exceptions, even for people who have put his students at risk, or even personally attacked him. He’s willing to reach out and understand Shirakumo’s circumstances, so clearly he doesn’t have a completely black and white view of good and evil. However, Aizawa’s reasons for sympathizing with Kurogiri and only Kurogiri are ultimately pretty selfish. It’s because he wants Shirakumo back. He doesn’t care about the circumstances, or even who Kurogiri cares about now he just wants his old friend back. Therefore he has no reason to care about Shigaraki who was victimized in a similiar way to Kurogiri, just because he doesn’t know him. I guess you’re not obligated to care about anybody, but it’s the exact opposite of empathy, especially in a character like Aizawa who has always shown to be especially protective of children. Nobody tries to understand Shigaraki, nobody tries to empathize with him, even though he also once had the exact same dream as both Shirakumo, and even Deku. 

But Shigaraki’s just a monster that needs to be put down and stopped, there’s not a fragment of good in him like there was for Kurogiri, like there was for Twice. 

Aizawa even gets angry at Ujiko for the callous way he treats human lives. For the way they were tossed aside. He’s righteously angry for Ujiko’s victims, especially Kurogiri. But he doesn’t stop to think for a second that Shigaraki is possibly another victim manipulated by the likes of Ujiko. Once again because Aizawa doesn’t personally know Shigaraki, or because Shigaraki is a bad person, who cares if he gets hurt and manipulated by Ujiko. 

So we see by the heroes, Shigaraki referred to as a thing, Shigaraki referred to as an it. He’s just a monster to be stopped. It’s like he’s a boss in a video game the heroes need to kill. 

Even though they literally see him being experimented on by Ujiko, an actual abuser who has used his money and connections to commit inhuman experiments his whole life that too must be Shigaraki’s fault somehow. The heroes are repeating the exact same lines that Shigaraki’s abuser All for One did on him. 

By treating him as a monster. By treating him as a thing that needs to be killed, rather than a person who needs to be saved. They are doing All for One’s work for him by creating a symbol of fear and robbing a lifelong victim of abuse of his humanity. It’s like they want villains like Shigaraki to exist so they can remain heroes. 

[imaginethathaikyuu]

How did I find your blog? I was looking for soft Kuroo content on google. And your soft birthday hc’s for him came up. And that’s also how I found tumblr

What was the first story of yours that I read? That Kuroo piece ^

Roughly, how long have I been following this blog? Well I found that piece shortly after it was posted so…. Around the beginning of December 2019 I think. Got a tumblr a few months later and you were the first person I followed (had you in my bookmarks bar before that! (still have you in my bookmarks bar and when I share my screen in classes there are occasionally questions. I ignore them))

What’s something I’ve noticed about you personality wise? You’re really clever and funny. But you’re also sweet. But because you’re clever you have no hesitation in setting up and enforcing your boundaries, and I really admire that strength and confidence.

Have we ever interacted, either by PM, ask, or in the comments? What was my perception of you? YES!!! PM, SOOOOO many asks, comments, and you sent me an ask. And reblogged it. And I cried. A lot. My perception: you’re lovely and I want to h*ld your h*nd ….please.

What’s my favorite story of yours? Oh how to choose. Firstly, I’m a nb, biracial, bisexual. Honey, I’ve never made a choice in my life. But let’s try here. Anything you’ve written for Tsukki. Literally all of it is gold. Fight me. I was going to write “especially [piece title]” but I LITERALLY CANNOT CHOOSE ONE. Your Bokuto nightmare piece. Your Kuroo angsty fight. Your Tendou dealing with S/O with parents who yell piece. Your Kinktobers. Your Futakuchi and Mattsun pieces. And your Terushima pieces. Ugh. I CANNOT CHOOSE. OH AND YOUR STREAMER KENMA!!!!!! OKay just… all of it. I can’t choose. I tried, and I failed, and I’m willing to admit failure.

What’s a story I’d love to see you write? I don’t want to say this… because it hurts me… but I just KNOW you’d write brilliant angst. Some of my fav pieces of yours are pained beginnings with happy endings. That fight with Tsukki after a bad day at work. The pieces I mentioned above (nightmare pieces and fighting pieces and angsty home life ha.. ha.ha.ha.). That Oikawa one where the reader wakes up in bed without him and thinks he left. You write these gorgeous atmospheres and descriptive, visceral feelings, and if you chose to use it for evil…. You could get evil shit done. You’re SO powerful. So I want to read it… but also…. I don’t. I’d love to see you write ABO like you mentioned a while back or just see you explore a cutesy soulmate AU or something. I think you’d be really good at writing an AU where you hear what the other person’s listening too. I feel like you’d be so good at making me feel something for someone who was in another city. (think this would be cute with Tsukki cos he’s headphones boy, OR terushima because I like the dynamic of someone flirty, who clearly cares about looks, falling for someone he can’t see) ANYWAY….

Favorite pairing you write for?/fav reader insert? Tsukishima x reader. It’s my fav self-ship. (but also Mattsun, Bokuto, Oikawa, Tanaka, and Akaashi because you write them SO WELL!!!!)

Have any of your stories helped me through a hard time? Of course. Your self-harm piece came at a time I needed it. Iwaizumi’s in particular saved my life. But also your Tendou dealing with S/O parents who fight… came right when I needed it. Also starting college… was hard.. And reading and rereading your fluff really pulled me through it.

Have any of your stories hit closer to home? YES (see above).

Do I genuinely like your blog, it’s aesthetic or posts? It’s overall feel? It’s content? Yes. The aesthetic is, ngl, a wee bit basic. But I kinda love that. And the feel? It feels like home. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your blog is my safe space. So, yes, I love. It’s content? YES. OF COURSE. Your personality probably could have kept me here even if your content was kinda shit, but I follow you RELIGIOUSLY because of your content. So yes. I adore.

Is English my first language? Kinda??? I grew up in a trilingual household so I kinda learned three languages at the same time while growing up. But no, I don’t need to translate it in my head. Because English was one of the three.

Anything I want to share? Yes. Please keep being kind to yourself, caring for your mental health, enforcing your boundaries, loving Akaashi, and just generally being you. You’re so lovely as you are, and I hope you continue grow, but never change. Also I’m sorry about all your work stuff…. It literally makes me feel sick. And I hope you find a job where that’s not tolerated, or that your work finds a better way of protecting it’s employees. I know you know this, but none of it is your fault. I just hope things improve. AND I love you… a lot. And I’m so proud of you hitting 9K and you deserve so many more followers because your pieces are just... GORGEOUS. I can’t wait until I’m at Barnes and Noble in a few years and I can pick up a hardback copy of your debut novel. I’m so excited to say “I knew Em Akaashi (which is your legal name as far as I’m concerned) before she was so popular among the masses.”

so ive been trying to figure out the correct and worthy way to reply to this ask since the moment i got it......because its so fucking sweet and kind and amazing and pure and perfect and i just dont know how to use WORDS to explain the way it makes me feel so.......i will just reply in bullet points in regards to every question u answered to make it a lil easier :D

- the fact that u found my blog on google ....... like this may be odd and a very specific thing but before i made this blog i always hoped that 1 day my fanfic would pop up in google searches bc thats ALWAYS how i found fics when i was reading them religiously and i felt so much ENVY!!!!! LIKE I WANTED TO BE THERE I WANTED MY FICS TO B POPULAR ENOUGH TO POP UP ON GOOGLE.....that may sound very selfish but its true......so thats just very cool to me... :]

- u’ve been here for so long omg 🥺🥺🥺🥺 if anyone in ur classes ever asks jus promo my blog like its nbd 

- thats so sweet what 🥺🥺🥺 i try my best to advocate for myself and be confident for myself.....ive spent far too much of my time being silently uncomfortable because i was afraid of pushing someone’s buttons seeming rude.....but NO MORE!!!! i know what upsets me, i know my triggers, i know what i dislike experiencing, and im never gonna let myself be anxious or uncomfortable for someone else’s sake, esp if theyre being rude 2 me. i would say its less strength and confidence and moreso me attempting to take control of my anxiety in the places i can (aka on the Internet) bc i am SICK OF ANXIETY ATTACKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

- BBY no dont CRY!!!! im racking my brain trying to think of who u are i wanna know so bad so i can thank u personally for being the kindest person in the world n so i can send u more asks >:(........MY HAND IS URS TO HOLD!!!!! dont tell akaashi tho 

- OMG my TSUKKI pieces.....hes so hard to write why ;-; thank u so much im so glad u enjoy my works<3333

- NOT ANGST NOT LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!! pained beginnings to happy endings are my specialty.....IMAGINE me writing a sad ending like i CANT!!!!!!!!! ive only done it a few times and it is so Difficult.....YALL ARE SO LUCKY IM NOT EVIL!!!!!! ive had this idea for an angsty akaashi fic that i think about and write in my head every night before falling asleep and it Hurts and i wanna write it but i also can’t make myself :D ABO would be very fun but i genuinely do not know how to explore the concept while making it feel like it’s Written By Me.....u know what i mean? same with soulmate aus, i really dislike writing them because theyre just boring to me like they all feel the same everything’s been done for them.....which is FINE!!! but i write enough cliche stuff as it is HAHA, a long distance type soulmate au could be fun and interesting but ldr’s trigger me bc of a past relationship so </3 but hey maybe someone else could use the idea!!!!!

- gotta love tsukishima <3

- im rlly glad my writing could be there for you friend, one of the biggest reasons i write fanfic (and write the kind of fics i write) is bc i know firsthand how much reading sweet stories abt ur comfort characters can help u through the shittiest times - i just wanna offer ppl some support and happy feelings and love cuz sometimes fanfic is the only time we can find those things (and theres nothing shameful abt that either if anyone bullies u for reading fanfic i will fight them)

- I KNOW MY LAYOUT IS LAZY AND BASIC AS FUCK AND THAT IS BECAUSE I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT LMAOOOO so im glad u think its ok...... like i dont have the patience to create a fancy ass layout that actually works are u KIDDING ME??????? I COULD LITERALLY NEVER plus i kinda like that its just the basic kinda ugly boring default layout like it makes it simple and easy and i feel like it brings focus to the only thing on this blog that i care about which is my writing, i rlly only care about the content here and not aesthetics jdbljdabsdk that blue background will be there til i Die......i adore u more btw 

- WHOA trilingual what the hell ur so cool tell me more 

- you have my word, friend, that i will continue to do all of that so long as you do the same. take care of yourself, be kind to yourself - i know u can do it, ur so kind to others and u deserve to be kind to urself, too so this is the part that genuinely brought me to tears because *sappy dumb shit ahead* ok look ever since i can remember the one and only thing ive wanted to do with my life is become an author ...... dreams of book covers with my name written on them and words in pages written by me and fanart of my characters and going into my local bookstore n seeing my book there....these thoughts all haunt my fucking brain because i want it SO BAD!!!!!!!! so bad that it makes me CRY!!!!!!!! ive never wanted something more and just!!!!!!!!!!!! idk how much u meant that part but holy fuck!!!!!! i hope so bad that one day i can send u a free copy of my book as a thank u for being the person u are. u have all my love friend, every last bit of it <333333333

[sincerelyreidburke]

Can we hear more about the time nando got in a fight on the ice and got ejected 👀👀👀 and why this upset quinn?? 👀👀👀

Yes, let’s absolutely talk about this. And please do forgive me for the slight delay on this one, as I was getting my thoughts together.

Here’s the original post where I brought this up, in the context of a bunch of reasons Quinn would get mad at Nando. Since apparently “Quinn and Nando fighting or bickering” is a train of thought we’ve been on in the past 24 hours (this post went up yesterday, about their first Actual Big Fight), let’s go down this road now.

TW: on-ice homophobia, implied racism, and general hate. I won’t type out any slurs, of course, but I’ll imply some really shitty things being said by a Bad Guy.

(Ask me anything about the crickets!)

- So a little backstory. We’ve established that Nando is a walking target for some of the ugliest hate hockey culture can spew. Is this his fault? Of course not. Nando should not have to deal with so much awful just for being who he is in the sport he loves. But does this cause him difficulty growing up in the sport and playing in college, despite being unjust? Absolutely, yes.

- The thing about Nando is that while guys on opposing teams (and, pre-Samwell, sometimes his own teammates) won’t hesitate to throw hateful chirps his way, Nando is also a.) not afraid to stand up for himself, and b.) gigantic.

- Look, all I’m saying is, if I were an asshole on an opposing team, I wouldn’t make fun of the biggest guy on the ice. No matter how much my toxic urges were telling me to do so.

- But Nando also doesn’t like always having to be a ‘violent’ player on the ice. He’s a d-man, and an enforcer, and a lot of his retaliation for the hate he gets comes in the form of legal checks, concentration on defending one player, light tousles after whistles, that kind of thing.

- He’s always trying to find the balance between standing up for himself (and people like him who get the same treatment) and getting in trouble for fighting too much. We know Nando’s off-ice personality, and we know he isn’t aggressive in the slightest. On-ice Nando isn’t afraid to get in a scuffle, but he doesn’t like getting in huge fights on the regular.

- The one little confrontation he got in in this fic is pretty demonstrative of how he is on the ice, usually. In that situation, somebody makes a dirty move and trips Touille, and Nando jumps to defend him, then gets in a little tousle with the guy, winds up getting penalized, and is smug when he goes to the box. Nando is generally pretty shameless about fighting when it means he’s standing up for teammates or friends.

- He doesn’t really start fights unprovoked. There’s always a cause.

- Okay, so my point going through all of this is to establish that Nando walks a careful line between standing up for himself and others and trying not to constantly get penalized or thrown out because of the roughing he gets into. I don’t mean roughing in the technical hockey penalty sense of the word; I just mean fighting.

- Anyway. Nando doesn’t get thrown out of games often. Tousling on the ice is a part of hockey, and it has to get really bad for you to get ejected, at least from what I understand about the game. (I’ve never played, but I’ve grown up in some serious hockey country, and I’ve watched my fair share of NHL, college, and youth-level games.) I actually would say that at Samwell, Nando probably doesn’t get ejected more than maybe once before this incident that I’m going to talk about right now.

- It takes a lot for him to get into a fight that’s ejection-level. For the one time it happens prior to this, I think there was likely some kind of really awful racial hate speech being thrown around on the ice, and he just can’t not fight back about that kind of stuff.

- So finally, we reach the incident you actually asked about. This is junior year. It’s once the season has already been going on for a little while, probably one of the last games of fall semester or one of the first of spring semester.

- Quinn is manager. Therefore, he travels with the team and sits on the bench for games. This is notable because this is, although not directly, the cause of the incident.

- I wrote in this Quindo facts post about some little routines they adopt once Quinn becomes manager, and the one I want to bring to your attention now is the little pregame tradition they have where Nando skates over to him on the bench and gets a little kiss. It’s always just a quick peck and a few words of encouragement from Quinn to him, and it’s very very soft. It starts probably around the second or third game of the season, and they just wind up adopting it as a post-warmup pre-puck-drop ritual.

- Why? Look, there are several reasons. First, they love each other. So jot that down. But kissing on the bench, in plain sight of plenty of college-hockey-TV-broadcast cameras and potential NHL scouts and spectators and opposing team members, isn’t just about their own internal relationship. That’s a deliberate and intentional action that they take because they want to make the ice a safe place.

- This is really important to Nando in particular. He grew up fully aware of how hateful hockey can be, and by doing this— kissing his boyfriend in plain sight before every game he plays— he’s making an active statement about himself and about the fact that there is a place for people like him in the game. He’s continuing, in a sense, what Jack and Bitty started.

- But. Of course, this decision comes with its own difficulties.

- I think Quinn is fully conscious, and a little wary, of the fact that being open about his relationship with Nando as he assumes the position of manager will mean that Nando could be targeted on the ice for even more hate than he already gets. Nando is openly gay, but this situation puts his specific relationship a bit more on display, and, well... okay, let’s just say I feel like it would be much easier to target a guy for his gay relationship when his boyfriend is literally sitting twenty feet away on the bench.

- My point is: Nando wouldn’t change his openness about his relationship with Quinn for a second, but it does create another way for opposing teams to jab at him.

- Look, hockey is, as a whole, a really cruel, really toxic sport, with an environment to match. And SMH is the most supportive team Nando could ask for, but that doesn’t mean that when they leave the confines of practice at Faber, everybody else is going to be just as loving and welcoming.

- So they’re at this game. It’s a home game. Nando and Quinn go about their usual pregame business, and some particularly assholish guy on the other team takes note of that.

- Samwell is losing the game. This guy, along with probably a few of his teammates, starts heckling Nando. It starts as just a few comments, and it grows steadily until he sort of ends up cornering him.

- Nando really tries so hard to let most things roll off his shoulders when it comes to the stuff that gets said to him on the ice. There’s so much of it, and he has so much practice just trying to brush it off. But this time is a little different. This time, the guy says something directly about Quinn.

- I don’t actually feel like typing out exactly what the guy says. Just use your imagination. There are a lot of really cruel words you can use, and he uses many of them. The details of the confrontation aren’t something I feel is necessary to lay out here.

- Something about this, combined with the pressure from the fact that they’re losing, and the way the guy is sort of threatening and menacing in the way he speaks, sends Nando over the edge.

- So they get in a fight. It’s your standard hockey fight; it’s just heated enough that they both get thrown out of the game.

- Quinn watches all of this go down from the bench, and the reason he gets mad is because they discussed the fact that Nando wasn’t going to get himself in trouble defending against cruel things said by people who don’t matter.

- That kind of thing gets lost in the heat of the moment. Quinn watches him get sent down the tunnel, and there are a number of things going through his head: one, that he really hopes he’s not injured too badly, and two, that he’s going to chew him out for getting himself in trouble.

- I think they have an argument after the fact — and I wouldn’t count this at all as a big fight but more just a chance for them to weigh their conflicting opinions. Quinn marches right up to him in the locker room and he’s sort of like, Sebastián, what were you thinking? You could be suspended! You know the disciplinary people aren’t going to go easy on you—

- And Nando is like, baby, but if you heard what he said—

- And they go back and forth for a minute, like: I couldn’t just stand there and let him say that shit about you / but Sebastián, you know people are going to be awful about us; why would you let that jeopardize your ability to play? /  because I had to stand up for you, baby— / It’s not a matter of standing up for me when it’s putting your own hockey life in danger!

- And basically, the reason Quinn gets not exactly mad at him but more just frustrated is because Nando, who operates with his emotions as the first driver at all times, refuses to regret defending Quinn’s honor on the ice. Quinn really doesn’t understand the full toxicity of hockey culture quite enough to realize why this is so important to Nando.

- This isn’t the kind of argument that lasts a long time. They get it out and then they’re okay; they have a much softer talk after the fact. This is how basically all of their disagreements tend to go.

- But yeah, that’s what happens! Nando is a rough boy on the ice and it scares/concerns Quinn. We love to see it.

I hope this answers your question!

[pointlesstrashyexistence]

Any idea why my reblog wouldn't go through? Since I obliterated every single point you made, you ought to read it. The reply I posted tagged you instead.

No idea. As far as I know I haven’t blocked you and I don’t know what post you are talking about since I haven’t been tagged in anything.

Never mind. I realized that you were in fact were a racist and I blocked you’re other account so you got bitter and tried to argue using information that is innacurate. And if anybody would like to know the other account of this person, it is thoughtsandreplies.

So I’m going to go over each statement the person made with the exception of what originally began this, Immersion (Piss Jesus). Art is a very personal experience, but how you interpret art does not give you the right to use it as an excuse for racism.

So 1) No one is actually saying that Lincoln was a racist. They’re arguing whether or not the depiction of the Black man in the Emancipation Memorial, a real former slave named Archer Alexander is racist and if it should be taken down because of that. This specific instance is not about the white man involved, but the black man being represented and if his representation as someone physically and what could be taken as symbolically lower than a white man is degrading. This is a complex issues that even two of his descendants are have opposing opinions on. Muhammad Ali was a direct descendant of this man and his third cousin, Keith Winstaed, and his oldest daughter, actress Maryum Ali, have opposing opinions. Winstaed is in favor of keeping it because he is more focused on the historical context, that the sculpture of Alexander was meant to be seen as empowering because has broken his chains and beginning to rise. However, Ali is viewing with the eyes of someone living in the 21st century who expects better representation for minority communities that have historically been vilified in art, literature, television, and politics. She believes the statue is degrading and offensive because even if Alexander’s chains are broken, he is still below Lincoln, a white man, and is in a position that can be interpreted as him bowing to him. As I said before, art is personal and both people have valid interpretations of this piece. This is not the same as tearing down statues of actual racists. We put up statues of people to honor them, but we must be able to recognize that we can no longer honor people who were legitimately horrible. I don’t see any statues of Hitler in Germany so what’s your excuse for why you want to keep up sculptures of racists?

2) off the bat I could tell you were a racist who hasn’t bothered to examine their words and actions by referring to the Black Lives Matter Movement as a “historically illiterate mob”. Most of the people in the movement are black so I can assume you are perpetuating the stereotype that black people can’t read which is enforced by the fact that it was illegal for slaves to be literate and black and brown communities have historically and continue to receive less funding for their schools, which leads to lower quality books and teachers, which leads to students who have difficulty in their studies, which leads to students who have lower grades, which leads to black and brown communities being forced to accept work at lower paying jobs, which leads to black and brown parents that are not able to spend time with their children in order to make enough money for food, water, electricity, and housing, which leads to kids who don’t receive the attention they need, which leads to students who are being taught by these same lower standard teacher with old outdated books, which leads to students being frustrated over not being at the level of their studies that they should be but are unable to seek outside help because of a lack of tutors and familial help, which leads to students who “act out” because they were not able to develop the emotional tools necessary to monitor behavior and are then forced into prisons by teachers who have called the police on them, which leads to another lack of education because the U.S. prison system does not want to rehabilitate prisoners and help them become better people, it just wants to find a way to legally continue slavery.

3) It does not matter if someone had doubts about whether or not someone had doubts over their racial superiority. What matters is that they still willingly continued to be a part of that system that benefitted them because it was more convenient to not do anything. Also, nice job on conveniently leaving out the fact that Jefferson was known to have raped his slaves and produced multiple children with slaves, but still did not bothering freeing any of his slaves.

4) Don’t bother bringing up almost any of the other founding fathers also since they were also slave owners perpetuating the system because it helped them make money. And don’t try to excuse it by claiming that it was just accepted at the time. Abolitionism was a thing during that time. Even when Columbus began raping and pilaging, there were people who knew what he was doing was bad. There is writing about how people already knew Columbus was fucking insane and even Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, you know, the ones who started the Spanish Inquisition, was so disgusted by rumors about Columbus that they had him investigated and took away his titles when they found out about what was happening. They’re not off the hook though because they were still, you know, the reason for why many Saphardic Jews were imprisoned, killed, and forced to run away.

5) No, I don’t use the word “racist” too lightly, you’re standards for what count as racist just don’t include enough things that are racist.

6) Black people live in fear because they have historically and systemically have had legitimate reasons to, not because I’m calling out things that have been blatantly racist.

7) Yes there has been property damage. Yes there are people who are going to use these events as an excuse to do whatever they want. That will always be a part of protesting. But don’t act like cops aren’t doing this same thing, intentionally planting themselves in protests and then creating violence or causing property damage in order to give other cops a reason to attack protestors. If you know enough, you can spot them based on whose wearing shoes that can be run in or heavy combat boots, whose wearing nondescript clothes that you can see protective gear under, and who is wearing the “color of the day”, a tactic cops have used in order to disguise themselves among protestors but signal that they are cops to other cops by wearing matching accessories like armbands, headbands, or wristbands.

8) Funny how you don’t want to bring up the fact that these are populations with large black and brown communities that are usually overpoliced. Also, just because someone is a Democrat does not make them a liberal. The only reason I’m in preference of Democrats is because of the multiple marginalized communities that will hold them accountable for anything they do.

9) Not every single time a black person is killed is it because of racism. That “black-on-Black crime” people like to bring up? That’s not racism, that’s just the fact that people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other and there are still heavily legally segregated parts of America due to wealth disparity. That example you brought up about a black cop killing a black man? That’s not racism. That a person knowing that they are untouchable because of the power that they have because the only good cops are cops that have quit. If you haven’t quit or been fired, you are likely a member of the blue wall of silence that refuses to condemn offices who intentionally act violently knowing that they will not be punished. Also, let’s not forget that people can also be prejudiced against people in their race or ethnicity because of the shade of their skin and the socio-economic class.

10) When have you seen any white man being bashed for having a black wife or being a “big brother” to black children? Often the only people who have problems with black women getting married to white men are black men who feel like they own black women and then claim they are “betraying their race” when they seek love from men in other races and ethnicities, but expect black women to stay silent as they chase after snow bunnies who fetishize mixed children. The only other case I could think of would be racists not wanting races to mix. And the “big brother” thing? The only reason I could think of would be complaints about wanting more black men to be “big brothers” because white men just cannot relate to the experiences of being a black child.

11) You conveniently left out that despite being one of the smallest racial communities in the U.S., black people are also the most policed, and will get arrested for things cops would let a white man go with like weed charges. Look no further than lovely white wonderbread comedien John Mulaney saying in his second comedy special “the comeback kid” “it’s (weed) always been legal silly goose”. This means that they have a disproportionate amount of black people in their records because if black people only make up 13% of people in the entire nation, they should only make up about 13% of all crime to, but they make up more because policemen have quotas to fill for how many people they arrest in order to receive more funding, and its easier with a racist system backing you up to arrest Black than white people.

12) Again, people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other than people who do not know each other and people who live far from each other. Also, it’s the ultra extremists who really want to abolish the police. I still think we need a protective system, but we need it to work for the common people, not corporations and politicians. I think that every district should use the same system as wealthy white neighborhoods, where anyone who wants to be a policeman must be assigned a position in the neighborhood they are from because anything they do wrong will make them accountable to their neighbors, family, and friends. Also I believe that all cops should undergo mandatory psychological evaluations every 3-6 months, especially cops who have worked on extremely traumatic cases. I also believe that the U.S. should require at least 3 years of school for anyone wanting to become a cop because no one is actually able to learn the law, learn to enforce it through peaceful means unless in dire circumstances, and care for the wounded, mentally ill, physically disabled, or anyone mentally impaired by drugs and alcohol in 6 months.

13) Another example of how this person is racist because they are actually suggesting that we enforce racial discrimination and black poverty. Also, if you want to bring up gangs, the biggest gang in the U.S is police force using propaganda that promotes the idea of “belonging” and economic stability in order to entice people who do not feel like they belong wherever they are, and then giving them a gun and badge that basically means “kill whoever you want because we will cover it up for you”.

14) Unless a woman feels like she is able to provide a stable enough home environment for her and her child, NO ONE WILLINGLY CHOOSES TO BE A SINGLE MOTHER! Single motherhood is caused by multiple events. A woman was impregnated by someone who left her, a couple with a child divorced because of legitimate reasons because divorce is a long and financially exhausting process, a woman was raped and decided to keep the child, and woman was raped and forced to give birth because she lives in a state that limits women’s healthcare, which includes abortion.

15) Fatherless homes do not equate to a rise in criminal culture. If that were the case, all wlw couples and single mothers would raise criminals. Do you know what does equate to criminal culture though? Teaching people that they are superior to someone else because of their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality and then promoting violent behaviors in that child.

16) Black families were never more intact during slavery than after slavery. Slaveowners and slavetraders intentionally worked together to make money and create a lack of unity among slaves by selling individual families members to different regions. One of the first things that former slaves did after they were freed was go out and find their stolen family members.

17) I can’t say anything about economics since I don’t have much knowledge about the economic system before the New Deal. However I will say that this is the only valid point you have made. Politicians have historically tried to get as many black votes as possible when they realized what a reliable voting community they were and then never actually done much to help the black community. However this is a very general statement.

18) How is group called Black Lives Matter that is focused on gaining racial equality attempting to sow discord in a nation by basically say “can you stop targeting us just because you’re racist and don’t like the color of my skin”.

19) How is a group asking for racial equality a lie? Are you really going to deny racism when we have seen shootings, lynchings, and people getting run over by cars all within the last month and a half?

20) WTF IS A LIE ABOUT A CHANT THAT MEANS “I HAVE NO WEAPONS, DO NOT KILL ME”

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

For well-meaning white American friends/followers struggling to understand black anger.

Disclaimer: I’d like to begin by saying that this message should not in any way be interpreted as implying that all looting/violence has been committed by protesters, especially since criminal gangs, anarchists, and white power groups have been caught coopting violent protest with the intent to undermine the struggle for racial justice. Nor is it meant to diminish the tragic effect that looting/violent protest has had on the very marginalized communities that need the most help. It is simply a window into a perspective you might not have considered or explored, which I offer in hopes of cultivating empathy.

It may make you uncomfortable to read this. Please bear with me.

Systemic racism is a term you want to get familiar with. It’s larger and more insidious than black people being killed and brutalized by law enforcement, which should give you an idea of just how big a beast we’re dealing with. Now, this is important: We ALL are immersed in systemic racism every day of our lives and, especially if you are white, you will not be able to see the ways in which you benefit from the oppression of black people.

I can feel your tension from here––the voice within saying “not me.” This is not what you wanted to hear. You’re not a racist, you think to yourself. You have friends of color. Maybe family, too. You’d never intentionally harm a black or brown individual on the basis of their skin color.

You’re a good person. I’m not here to argue that particular point.

That said, please integrate this concept. If you are white, you are benefiting from systemic racism, which hurts black and brown people. It is sewn into the fabric of our culture. It’s entrenched in everything you take for granted, from your property to your education to your access to healthcare and food. Moreover, systemic racism is specifically constructed to protect you from being able to see its effect on your life and the lives of people of color.

In other words, you have a blind spot, by default. It’s not your fault you have it. You were born into this culture made to shelter you from its evils.

It also doesn’t invalidate any trials or injustices you have experienced as a result of any other marginalized facets of your identity, since discrimination can also happen due to class, ability, gender, orientation, etc. But it does mean that your skin color doesn’t compound your risk of being killed/brutalized/imprisoned within a definitively racialized justice system.  

Now that you know this, it’s imperative that you realize you are not an authority on the experiences of people of color. You have not lived it. You do not know. To pass judgment on the despair of black people is to reinstate and protect white dominance. Which is a definitively racist thing to do, even if you’re not aware of it.

Follow me here.

One way systemic racism oppresses people of color is by codifying the law in such a way that literally prevents people of color from overcoming their own oppression. By extension, law enforcement historically has functioned as the arm of white supremacy, enforcing laws that by and large serve to protect white dominance and insulate white culture from its own racial self-awareness.

Consider the ways police once functioned to enforce Jim Crow laws and segregation. These patterns didn’t just erase with legislation. After the Civil Rights movement, bigoted lawmakers buried inequality deeper into the law, coated it in sanitized legalese, and assigned punishments designed to disproportionately imprison black bodies compared to whites.

This is the legal system that police enforce regardless of whether the officers themselves are white or black. That alone would be enough to indict law enforcement for their hand in perpetuating systemic racism, but it’s clearly worse than that. “Bad apples” abound, with FBI investigations revealing the infiltration of KKK and other white supremacist organizations into police forces across the United States. There is very little leadership when it comes to finding these bad apples, prosecuting them, and preventing their existence in the first place.

Now try to understand that the problem is bigger than bad apples who will brutalize black individuals and execute them without a trial. You need only compare how meek entire swaths of police officers were in the presence of armed white men spitting in their faces demanding the end of the COVID lockdowns to the ferocious way they tear gassed and pelted with rubber bullets the black lives protesters who were on their knees.

When you lack ancestral wealth, when you are born into a world that resists your right to agency, independence, access and dignity in every single possible way, and then makes it impossible for you to stand up for your right to all those things, these are the conditions that spawn violence.

Looters who say this is about more than George Floyd are correct. It’s not just about George Floyd. It’s about forced subjugation in all ways, shapes and forms, being denied the right to exist in public, being denied access to wealth, prosperity, healthcare, etc.

It’s about knowing, hundreds of years post-slavery, that your body still does not belong to you. To walk with a target on your back. Every. Single. Day. To struggle to protect your children from a world that does not value their promise.

In the comfort of your home, try now to imagine the despair. The hopelessness. The abject terror. The anger over trauma that began in your childhood but keeps happening over and over and over again and therefore can never heal.

White people can never fully understand because it is not our lived experience––it’s theirs.

When you are white, you are safe, seen, protected, and included in a legal system built to insulate you at the *direct expense* of black individuals. That’s why all this sounds so radical. Only people of color have insight into this reality, but instead of listening, we keep telling them to stop interrupting our lives with their desperation to be seen.

How many of you have either said or heard someone say these things? Each one reinstates white dominance:

“How could he kneel during the national anthem? That’s so disrespectful!”

“How dare they stop traffic and make me late for work!”

“Listen to that thuggish language! If they want equality so badly, they should rethink the way they talk to us!”

Now is the time to silence your judgment. You have no right. You have no clue. People of color do not owe you their patience, their kindness, their time, or their obedience. You’ve taken from them your whole life and yes, you were unaware, but you were complicit.

What you can do (which will have the long term effect of mitigating violence) is amplify their voices. Support their businesses. Post their bail. Vote them into office. Use your protection, your privilege, your voice to demand change like YOU are the one in the crosshairs. Nothing will change without good white people owning the struggle for equality, and in a racialized world, we cannot expect the courtesy of being asked nicely.

ETA: This barely scratches the surface, I know. There is so much more to say regarding how racism overlaps with homophobia, ablism, sexism, transphobia, to oppress and endanger black lives. Wherever you reside on the spectrum of privilege, I just hope this provides an inroad to further introspection before you share a critical meme or pass a sweeping judgment on the anger of your POC neighbors.