#because he encouraged the methods that led to his assassination when it was about murdering someone else

[mxtxfanatic]

Interesting little tidbit I found while looking for something, but for all the people claiming that LanlingJin was just “sooooo powerful” that everyone else was “afraid to go against them” and that’s why all the other surviving sects post-Sunshot Campaign rallied to eradicate Wei Wuxian and the Wen remnants per their wishes:

This is Wen Ruohan’s assessment of the Jin clan:

Among the four sects, the LanlingJin Sect was on the fence—watching how all of the sects were angrily going on some expedition, it wanted to take part as well, but if it suffered more defeats than victories, it’d soon realize that there was no good in it, perhaps even coming back to hug the Wen Sect’s leg and worship it once more

—chapt. 61, exr

And this is what the Nie clan might was, as per Wei Wuxian’s recollection:

During the Sunshot Campaign, Nie MingJue won almost all battles. The enemy couldn’t even approach him, much less cause him to be so badly injured.

—chapt. 48, exr

The Jin were fence-sitters who would suck up to whoever they deemed the most powerful at the time. Because they didn’t know which way the tides would turn in the war, they didn’t want to commit to an alliance with anyone. They also knew that they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) afford losses in battle. On the other hand, the Nie under Nie Mingjue were near unstoppable. “Won almost all battles” in a war in which you were severely outnumbered? That’s astonishing!

But once the Wen clan fell, a power vacuum was left, one that Jin Guangshan was given the opportunity to fill with the other great clan leaders’ reluctance to take up the political power QishanWen left behind. The problem: his clan was simply not powerful enough to stand against the one clan that was successfully able to hold QishanWen back even before Wei Wuxian’s aid. In that same assessment Wen Ruohan made of the Jin, he noted that while nmj was a tank onto himself, killing him would leave the Nie clan listless, neutralizing them as a threat. Jgs realized this too, which is why he had to resort to trickery and then assassination: there was a higher chance of loss against nmj (especially with wwx’s refusal to join the Jin) than success. And the Jin do not take up opportunities without a guarantee of success.

Had nmj not been willing to cede political power after the war and had kept the Jin in check as wrh had (albeit because he was a tyrant and not for any moral reason), jgs would have had no choice but to stand back and continue playing second fiddle to the powerhouse clan above him. But by the time nmj began to understand the treachery of the Jin as a concretely bad thing, jgs had already gotten bold enough to choose assassination as a solution to his problems.

[thatonehiddenbladeingibraltar]

I don't know if it's just me but when I play like and open world style game I kinda get this I must murder everything and see cool ways to kill people. I get a maniacal laugh the whole this person has lost their mind thing. So could you do headcanon for Reader, Genji, Hana, Reaper, and Hanzo with a s/o like that. Please and thank you.

Reaper/Gabriel Reyes:

He’s impressed with every unique method you come up with when you execute in-game

Your laugh rarely deters him, instead opting to encourage you as you began scheming for your next murder plot

If it was truly that impressive, he would laugh along with you

Reaper can appreciate a good plan when he sees and hears about it

His frustration does rise occasionally when you remain tight-lipped about your plans as you run around to position yourself in the right spot

He does offer you a few ideas of his own, but generally leaves it to you

Sometimes Reaper’s plans take inspiration from your own creative NPC murders

An example of that would be when he had a Talon agent plant an explosive golf ball in his target’s ball basket and chuckled darkly as they flew into the air, just as you had planned a few nights ago while playing your game

He did remember to thank you for the idea

In a way, this became your personal date night that no one would understand

Just going around and murdering NPCs in the most creative and unique fashion you could think

Hana Song/D.Va:

The two of you often switch the controller if the game was only available in single player

You are careful to make sure that some of your kills don’t set off any sort of mental distress for Hana, just in case if her memories from the battle lines resurfaces

She doesn’t hear you laugh sometimes since she pays more attention to the screen than her surroundings

If she does though, Hana does look at you weirdly but she shrugs it off

She’s probably heard weirder sounds from other gamers before

Hana’s quick to point out any NPC that might ruin your plan as you’re in the midst of making your way to the starting point of your plan

She is impressed if you take out a random NPC in a way that she hasn’t seen yet

You have tried to explain your plans to her, but you quickly realized that it was better if you showed her through actions instead of words

There’s a designated timer on D.Va’s phone that indicates when the two of you should really take a break from whichever open world game you were playing together so the two of you didn’t develop massive sight problems later on

Hanzo Shimada:

Much like Reaper, Hanzo is impressed with some of your plans and its unique executions

He occasionally uses your plots when infiltrating his childhood home and you’re quick to comment on it as the two of you are leaving

Hanzo does get slightly disturbed every time you laugh, but as long as you didn’t instantaneously murder someone on the street, he wasn’t too concerned

He does keep a close eye on you though and has his dragons do so if he wasn’t available

Although he favors the plans that relies mostly on stealth, he can appreciate some of the extremely creative plans that required you to be in the open

Sometimes Hanzo has to pry your fingers off of the controller if it’s starting to get late or if your eyes are starting to droop

He won’t lie, it was strange to see someone who could easily experiment with killing a person in a simple video game

If Hanzo truly was being honest with himself, he would admit that this would be something Genji may have done had he not ‘died’

Genji Shimada:

Is a bit more concerned for your sanity than Hanzo or Reaper is

Not because the other two didn’t care about you, but because Genji tended to worry about you a lot more than the others when it came to video games

Especially the ones that you could get easily addicted to when it came to plotting the deaths of NPCs

It might be hard to get him to open up about his past if you didn’t know him before, but a bit of prying and a few observations led you to the conclusion that Genji used to be heavily involved in the games you were interested in

And you can bet that he used to be interested in the same games that you’re into as well

Sometimes he lets out a small laugh as well when he watches you pull off the latest plot that you’ve cooked up

He does have to admit that they were unique

Genji does suggest where you could get the resources you need to tackle your next idea

Like Hanzo, he is concerned about your laugh sometimes but knows that you aren’t about to go on a murder spree in real life

While he has always preferred tackling assassinations or murders the stealthy way, Genji did enjoy blowing vehicles and/or buildings with RPGs and C4 occasionally

And you can bet that he loves seeing what you could come up with when only given either one of those items

Who knows? You might end up surprising him

Sometimes Genji has to cut you off for the day just so you didn’t pass out in front of the monitor

He’ll have you meditate with him until he knows that you’ve calmed down before whisking you off to bed bridal-style

@elise-the-assassin @templarboyband @sylvennia @freedomaboveallelse

[citizentruth-blog]

'To Live and Die in Manila', Documenting Music's Defiance to Duterte's Drug War

We caught up with Angela Stephenson, the director behind To Live and Die in Manila (which you can watch free below), Boiler Room’s new short documentary on President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal authoritarianism and extra-judicial killings in the Philippines and the artists who oppose it using their creative output. Since becoming president of the Philippines in 2016, Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has caused widespread fear and devastation across Manila. Set in one of the world’s most dangerous cities, To Live and Die in Manila gives a vital voice to the musicians putting their life on the line for their right to showcase creativity that their country associates with drug crimes punishable by death. After coming to power with an anti-crime campaign that pledged to slaughter thousands in a national crackdown (where he also compared himself to Hitler), Duterte and his sanction on extrajudicial killings raised the alarm of global human rights watchdogs in 2016. Two years on, its death toll is reportedly over 20,000, with DIY executions committed by police and citizens alike. The targets of Duterte's "narco-state" are all those taking part or suspected of taking part in illegal drug activity. Fear has skyrocketed within underground creative communities due to their assumed ties to drug culture. To Live and Die In Manila documents the lives of musicians and artists surviving under these conditions.  Manila-born artists Eyedress, Owfuck, BP Valenzuela, Teenage Granny and Jeona Zoleta share their musical inspiration, their unique methods of production, their thoughts on the city they call home, and their fears of possible death. Enjoy the interview and To Live and Die in Manila below. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from what is happening in the Philippines. You can also watch the short documentary itself at the end of the interview.

INTERVIEW

Hello Angela! To start things off here, what initially inspired you on this project? The artists in the film and the burgeoning music scene in Manila is what drove me to document what was going on at this particular point in time. They are all not only talented and deserved a platform to share their music with the world, but were vocal in expressing their concerns about the war on drugs and how it’s seeped into their collective consciousness. It’s both sad and kind of refreshing at the same time to see these youthful voices speaking out against the authoritarianism of Duterte. Yet, I suspect there are many more insidious and creeping effects behind his drug war than most people would think of. One thing I’m curious about there, what do you think the effects have been on freedom of expression in the Philippines in particular? I want to be able to say that there is still freedom of speech right now, but like with a lot of other places in the world currently, public opinion is extremely polarised. It means that you can say what you want, but if you go against the grain, people are going to tear you to shreds and they won’t be forgiving about it. Not unlike the US now. People are defensive when it comes to this current regime, a lot of public figures, be that journalists or politicians, have been shut down and even imprisoned in their efforts against it, so I feel like we’re starting to cross into really dangerous territory and it’s quite unsettling to witness. I fear the US may be getting closer to that sort of thing. It’s unfathomable that Duterte has got away with a lot of the statements he’s made. The one at the beginning of To Live and Die in Manila, which was taken from one of his speeches and left intact, is shocking enough, but that’s one of many absurd things that he’s said. It makes no sense that we’re discouraged by other Filipinos to criticise or question those statements, we only have concerns for the progress of the country and what damage he’s doing to the Filipino psyche by treating human beings like they are disposable. So many parallels with Trump. Do you see a larger resistance to Duterte and his drug war building? I believe his popularity rating has gone down in recent months, but I worry for any resistance being ignored and undermined. When you hear news of protests, or see articles that are critical of the government, it’s Filipinos themselves that are quick to dismiss those participants. We are mocked and ridiculed, and expected to fall in line by the majority of Filipinos that support the drug war and are unaffected by it because of their social status, they don’t understand the need for anyone to speak out on behalf of the people that have been killed unjustly. I hope by releasing this film we’re encouraging more and especially young people to continue to participate in public discourse, who need to make sure they’re ready to intelligently defend their opinions if they differ from the majority. It’s an odd thing when you look at places like the USA which are, of course, also dealing with drug issues (and variants of authoritarianism, which I have a question on below) but in many ways are choosing the route of liberalization (state marijuana laws becoming more open for instance) and treating the problem of drug abuse like a public health issue and not a penal one. Although we also dealt with people like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions who did all he could to make drug-related penalties more draconian, really not unlike Duterte, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Erdogan in Turkey. My question there, what do you think can be done to change the current course in the Philippines? There’s a big problem in Filipino society with classism and prejudice against the poor or anyone who doesn’t fit the average mold. In order for people to sympathize with the victims of the war on drugs, they have to first see those victims as human beings, and the unfortunate reality is that a lot of people in the Philippines don’t. The heinous crimes committed by the people participating in the drug trade need to be addressed without tarring everyone that are also victims of those crimes with the same brush. Instead of engaging with the affected communities and making an effort to understand the social and physical environments that allow people to fall into the trap of poverty or drug addiction, Duterte continues to perpetuate this underlying culture of violence that the Philippines has suffered from at the hands of previous governments, and encourages them to be killed mercilessly without any evidence of wrongdoing. And the problem with that is there are so many innocent people getting caught up in it, children included. As usually happens with these things sadly. If it isn’t children being killed in the crossfire, they’re finding the bodies, and they’re attending the funerals of their friends or parents, there’s long-term damage being done here. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of these struggling communities to police themselves. Those of us that do wish for the country to improve from the ground up, have to continue speaking up for those that don’t have a voice or the means to escape their situation, but we’re up against a very conservative mindset. What should Americans (with Trump and his authoritarian tendencies) learn from A- what’s happening in the Philippines and B- the brave example of the artists in your film in advocating for change? Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist who has just been named as one of TIME’s people of the year alongside other journalists from around the globe, is finally being recognized for her work in covering the war on drugs, and it’s people like her that we need to protect as well as the artists in this film who are being vocal. Absolutely. I fear that’s getting harder with the war on the press that is, unfortunately, being waged in the US. Ressa explained that ‘the Philippines is a cautionary tale for the United States’. In the case of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was assassinated, leaders like Trump have been slow to condemn the actions that led to his murder, and he’s not doing enough to say that journalism can continue to be a safe practice, and that’s what’s worrying. Precisely. Khashoggi was based in the US from 2017 onwards, and Ressa is questioning who is the moral leader in this case, who is going to set the right example if world leaders like the US won’t take appropriate action? Profoundly sad and scary. It’s also a scary time in which social media is being weaponized against real journalism, and I think there’s a lesson to learn in how we can protect ourselves from manipulation, companies like Facebook need to start being held accountable for the ways in which they’ve contributed to the problem, for example by failing to manage the fake news that Duterte’s campaign was built on. Indeed. Facebook is still utilized by the current regime to control Filipinos who spend a large part of their time online, I’ve witnessed some of my own family fall victim to it and I feel powerless to stop it. Yeah. The Philippines is actually the top country for social media usage in the world. Put another way with the initial question, with this seeming authoritarian trend worldwide, do you think there is hope on the horizon in finally getting the world in the right direction away from that? The recognition of people like Maria Ressa gives me hope even though her case is a bittersweet one. I don’t know if I could say that we’re going to move away from this trend any time soon, but I think we all need to continue to educate ourselves on the root causes of the issues that some of these authoritarian-leaning leaders are choosing to tackle in misguided ways, we need to learn how to put ourselves in positions to offer positive alternatives and work together towards that. Very well said. What can our readers do to help the artists in the film in their efforts for change? Just showing support helps, and being aware that these artists are in the minority in believing that changes need to be made, they’re still in the minority in believing that the deaths need to stop. Therefore they need to be encouraged to continue speaking out, it’s incredibly disheartening when a lot of people in the country continue to undermine their efforts to create awareness of the truth. Yes, it is. But their example does give some hope. Our final question, what’s next for you? I’m concerned about not being able to go back to the Philippines in the near future, but I would like to continue to make films there. There’s still a lot of aspects of Filipino culture that I’d like to celebrate as well as critique, and I hope to achieve that through either documentaries or narrative films.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwJJPPVgx7s Read the full article

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Let's start calling the Russian 'troll' attack what it really is

It's Troll Week on Mashable. Join us as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of internet trolling.

Fellow citizens of the internet, it's time to face facts: We are at war. 

An authoritarian nation state invaded our beloved platform with a shady shape-shifting army of paid writers, and did its best to populate it with highly divisive, truth-obscuring garbage. Now other authoritarian nation states are attempting to do the same. 

And because not enough of us are truly aware of this fact — hey, who can blame us, it's really bizarre! — we are losing the war. We aren't even using the right terminology to describe the problem, so how can we ever hope to fight back? 

Here's the issue in a nutshell: We seem to have collectively decided to call members of this shape-shifting army "trolls." That's exactly how they want us to think of them. The internet knows trolls: They annoy, they harass, they attack targets in swarms. They've always been with us, and always will be. 

What trolls don't do is systematically assume hundreds of fake identities or work toward a geopolitical goal on behalf of a foreign adversary. It would be more accurate to call these invaders undercover intelligence operatives. Or in a word, spies.  

Cold War Redux

Because the nation state that started all this is Russia, we carry a set of historical assumptions that work against a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. We remember the Joseph McCarthy-led "Red Scare" of the 1950s as a shameful moment in American history, and rightly so. The bullying and blacklisting should never be forgotten. 

We also hear "Russian spies" and our minds go to James Bond, you know, campy undercover agents in tuxes and slinky dresses. Didn't we leave that all behind in the 1980s?

Well, yes, we did. And then in 2000, a former East Berlin KGB agent named Vladimir Putin won a presidential election after a series of so-called terrorist bombings, about which intelligence experts remain dubious. Putin then made common cause with Russia's oil-rich oligarchs — and thus began nearly two decades of murders, or assassination attempts, on opposition leaders and investigative journalists.

The internet-based information warfare can be traced back to 2013. That's when the St. Petersburg Times first alerted the world to an entity in that city calling itself the Internet Research Agency, which was paying employees to flood the comments sections of stories about opposition leaders and Russia's rollback of rights for LGBT citizens.

The IRA operatives "react to certain news with torrents of mud and abuse," an activist named Vladimir Volokhonsky told the St. Petersburg Times. "This makes it meaningless for a reasonable person to comment on anything there."

IRA activity ramped up in 2014, and crossed to U.S. shores for the first time that year — where it made its first foray into fake news. This just so happened to coincide with the 2014 midterm elections for Congress.

Via YouTube videos, tweets, and phone texts, the IRA convinced much of a Louisiana town that there had been an explosion in a nearby chemical factory. Seeing similar media three months later during the Ebola panic, Georgia voters believed that the flesh-eating virus had arrived in Atlanta. On the same day, a different fake video told of a black woman being gunned down by police. 

The IRA found every fresh wound in American society, stuck its finger in, and tugged. Via a fake account called Blacktivist, it encouraged a demonstration at the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It created a Facebook group of "2nd Amendment patriots" and one called "LGBT United;" their Facebook ads received millions of impressions. The IRA designed hundreds of Twitter accounts to look like heartland newspapers, such as @KansasDailyNews, @JacksonCityPost, @MilwaukeeVoice and @StLouisOnline. 

To the IRA, the politics of these accounts didn't matter. All that mattered was the potential for havoc.

SEE ALSO: An ad industry group nominated Russia's election hack for all the awards

In 2015, the IRA faked a video of a U.S. soldier shooting a Qu'ran, likely hoping to cause an uproar in the Muslim world. It didn't even seem to matter that the video was disprovable when you looked closely — the soldier's helmet was something you could buy online for $25, not Army issue. By the time viewers disproved it, the shape-shifting army of info-spies had moved on to its next issue.

If you haven't heard of any of these greatest hits, it's because they have been drowned out by the controversy over the IRA's involvement in the 2016 presidential election. But the facts of each case are surprisingly clear. 

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's role in the 2016 election, is famously silent on most things. But he has told us exactly what the IRA did next, in a damningly methodical indictment that named 12 major players — his first and only Russia-related charges to date. 

(Separately, on Friday, the Justice Department indicted another IRA figure on information warfare charges related to the 2018 midterm elections — showing clearly that the threat is not over yet.)

Trolls provide cover

While those first IRA forays were happening in the U.S., a parallel development was unwittingly helping to provide cover. Swarms of actual trolls (read: people, mostly men, with a grudge and too much time on their hands) emerged from sites such as 4Chan and Reddit. 

Spurred on by rising alt-right figures such as Milo Yiannopolous and Mike Cernovich, who were reportedly working to a playbook called Trust Me I'm Lying, these troll swarms saw diversity and feminism as the enemy. They brought us concentrated harassment campaigns such as GamerGate, ComicsGate, and the backlash against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. 

The scale of the trolling was unprecedented, and it took some time for the internet to fully figure out what was going on. As the various hate-gates are studied and reassessed, there is a legitimate argument for defining their collective trolling as what Wired recently called "domestic information terrorism."

But the Internet Research Agency activity is a different order of magnitude. We're talking international information terrorism: tens of thousands of accounts operated by paid individuals on every major web platform, each one given a quota of a hundred posts a day. We're talking hundreds of millions of users who saw these posts, thinking they were genuine. 

The full scale of the attack is still emerging, and the numbers keep going up. Last week alone, Twitter released a dataset with 10 million tweets and 2 million images from Russian-linked accounts going back to 2009. "It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease," the company wrote. 

With an oligarch-funded budget of $1.25 million per month on one influence project alone, the thousand-strong IRA aimed "to conduct what it called 'information warfare against the United States of America' through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media," the Mueller indictment says. 

Enter the Jedi

Another reason to call this a spy campaign is the way that those fictitious personas tried to blend in. Last month, a study of a thousand Twitter accounts that attacked Star Wars director Rian Johnson concluded that 16 of them were IRA members. 

In January and February 2018, the accounts latched on to an early wave of criticism of Johnson's movie The Last Jedi, then ceded the stage to disgruntled fans.  

Those who noted that it was a small number of accounts, or claimed this was a way to smear everyone who disliked The Last Jedi as Russian operatives, missed the point. Which is that the shape-shifting army did not miss a single opportunity to jump into any debate that divided American society, even a debate about a movie. 

"They're method acting," says Morton Bay, the Ph.D behind the Last Jedi study, who has been tracking what he calls "Russian influence operatives" since 2015. "If the Grammys are on, these accounts will be commenting on it to give themselves a sense of legitimacy ... they latch on to every cultural division, however small." 

Such tactics, Bay concluded, were similar to those used by the infamous spy service where Putin cut his teeth. "Their methods are very close to what the KGB was doing during the Cold War," Bay says. "The only difference is the KGB was pushing a specific ideology, and these guys aren't." 

Instead of ideology, the IRA aimed to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It consistently aimed to flood the zone with shit, to echo the infamous words of Steve Bannon. Fill the comments section of honest stories and harass their writers, and soon there'll be fewer honest stories. The same holds true for social media as a whole. They want to exhaust us to death.

In a recent study, Hungarian security researcher Anatoly Reshetnikov described this process as "neutrollization" — or "creating conditions where political mobilization becomes absurd, so any risk to the regime is neutralized."

One of the few employees interviewed since leaving the IRA directly compared himself with Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Working there felt like "you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line." 

Doesn't sound an awful lot like trolling, does it? Sounds like something worse. 

Sounds like information war. 

The internet strikes back

Understandably, there is reluctance in the U.S. to describe any of these activities as acts of war. For one thing, many of us are employing a Cold War perspective: Don't antagonize the Russians! They're armed to the teeth! Do we really want to return to those dark decades of superpower conflict? 

To answer that question, we have to change our definition of what conflict actually is. And here we're dealing with another 20th century mindset: Aren't wars fought over physical territory? Aren't they won with tanks and bombs?  

Not since 9/11, no. As America learned painfully in Iraq, nation states are won and lost in the hearts and minds of the people. These days, the only wars that matter are in those minds, on the plain of ideas. Propaganda's younger, hipper cousin, information terrorism, is now the most important weapon of war on the planet. 

SEE ALSO: Twitter shuts down spambots spreading pro-Saudi hashtags related to Khashoggi disappearance

We saw that clearly in the past week, as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fought a desperate rear-guard action against reports that it had killed Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Turkish consulate. Twitter had to step in again to shut down bots that were flooding the online discussion with pro-Saudi hashtags.   

But it isn't just Russia and Saudi Arabia. Syria, Iran, China, North Korea: Everyone's getting into the info-war game. 

Of course, we shouldn't use the word "war" lightly. And thanks to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the phrase "info war" is tainted — but we also shouldn't shrink from using it. Allowing a state of war to exist in the shadows is exactly how Putin approached his invasion of Ukraine in 2014. 

The eastern half of the country came under assault from "little green men" — Russian special forces that Russia denied belonged to them. The last thing he wanted was global economic sanctions, so that's exactly what we gave him. 

In the case of the IRA, no one is suggesting we ramp up tensions or rattle any nuclear sabers. This isn't a matter for the Pentagon. If this information war is being fought on the internet, then the internet is where we must fight back. If the object is to wear us down with lies, then we must not be worn down. If truth is under attack, then the truth is what we must protect.  

That means calling out bullshit whenever you see it, even if you see it all the time. It means maintaining skepticism about no-name news sources and oddly-named social media accounts. It means staying in touch with that crazy Trump-loving uncle who forwards the conspiracy theory emails; it means repeatedly speaking calmly and clearly about a Russian influence operation that is both ridiculous and demonstrably true. 

And it means that we stop using a cutesy word like "trolling" to describe a massive, coordinated, ongoing military-style affair. "Don't feed the trolls" is a piece of advice as old as the internet; to that truism we should add, "Don't confuse the spies with trolls." 

WATCH: Google's new Home Hub won't spy on you ... maybe — Technically Speaking