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qwanderer · 6 years ago

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Crowley & Aziraphale are unique in their world because they are a communally focused demon and an individualistic angel.

I've been having a lot of thoughts recently about the angels and demons of the Good Omens TV universe and their relationships to the concepts of individuality and community. In a lot of ways, what distinguishes the two groups is that angels are focused on a concept of what is Good that prioritizes the larger narrative of the universe without regard for the individual, and demons are focused on a concept of what is Evil that revolves around getting individuals to defy that narrative.

Crowley is unique as a demon because he is drawn to community. He invents ways of not just drawing individuals away from the path of Good, but steering whole communities in devious directions. He seeks out Aziraphale's company not because of any advantage he can get from it personally (although he frames it that way now and again) but because he simply enjoys the company. He even fell, ultimately, because he was drawn to the company of the other rebel angels rather than because of any personal conviction of his own.

Aziraphale is unique as an angel because he is drawn to individuals and their narratives. He sees his duty as an angel from the perspective of having his feet on the ground with the humans and seeing for himself what they are like. He collects and treasures and shares the stories they've written about themselves and has personal relationships with them. One of his first acts on Earth was to prioritize the needs of individual humans over the general gist of the orders he'd received.

I started thinking about this because of Neil Gaiman’s post about the animals demons have on top of their heads sometimes in which he implied that it would be just as accurate to say that the demon is riding around on a humanoid body. In one of my fic serieses, I’m playing with the idea of demons as inherently plural - as if when they fall, they splinter, and become vessels for the clashing of multiple contradictory perspectives. This makes them the natural counterpart to angels, who tend towards uniformity and a lack of questions or doubt.

Angels bring many together into one, and demons turn one into many.

It’s interesting to look at this in terms of some of Crowley and Aziraphale’s most notable actions.

It would seem to be a typical action of angels to inspire people to sing religious hymns, to bring many together with one voice to say something Good. This seems like the equivalent of forming the M25 into the shape of the sigil Odegra, so that many humans join together to add power to the message, “hail the Great Beast, devourer of worlds.”

It’s a typical action of demons to possess humans, thereby turning what was one into many. Aziraphale possesses a human the same way, if more politely. There’s an interesting parallel between the exorcism of Legion by Christ (which is also an example of demonic plurality) and the exorcism of Aziraphale by the Antichrist.

It’s interesting how the show backs this dichotomy up with the imagery used for the two sides. With angels, it’s done by creating a strong association between heaven and a corporate office - the way they dress, the way they speak, the attitude of “follow the party line or else,” as well as the use of the words “discorporation/corporation” to describe their physical states.

With demons, of course, it’s done by having them all look incredibly different, and by giving them plural bodies of various kinds. I almost wonder if having multiple bodies acts the way a horcrux would, as a backup plan - all their bodies must be killed before they lose the ability to influence the physical world. Holy water may be an exception because it is not acting on the body.

I’m not sure of every instance of the word “corporation” versus “body” in the show but it does feel like “corporation” gets used a lot more by and for the angels and “body” when humans or demons are involved. Aziraphale definitely refers to Crowley as having a body when he briefly contemplates inhabiting it.

I think if any other angel and any other demon attempted to inhabit the same body, it would explode, simply from the force of the dichotomy between a single perspective versus multiple minds. But perhaps the reason that Crowley and Aziraphale were able to coexist closely enough to switch bodies was because this dichotomy already exists, to some extent, inside them both.

Crowley is a demon who has a taste for unity. The plurality of his body seems to be a side note, in the form of his tattoo, and perhaps also in terms of his multiple gender presentations. He does still like to be one person at a time, and he does like to share perspectives with other beings.

Aziraphale is an angel who has a taste for individuality. Although he presents himself consistently over the years, he doesn’t dress quite the way the other angels do, doesn’t always stand entirely behind the party line. And as an avid reader, I think he probably has quite a number of differing perspectives living inside his head.

The two of them work so well together because, in many ways, they already operate more like the opposing side than like their own.

#good omens #good omens tv #aziraphale #anthony j crowley #ineffable husbands #meta #I was thinking about going into my Swedenborgian upbringing and how it contributes to the 'angels as communities' idea here #I was also considering making a 'corporations are people' joke #but I elected to keep it a little more succinct

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sugamamacustard · 4 years ago

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Feral Animal

Pairing: Alpha! Kentarou Kyoutani x Omega! Reader

Genre: Fluff

Request: Hi! I love your abo blog! I was wondering if you could write about Alpha!Kyotani with an Omega!Reader, where their first encounter catches everyone by surprise? Like, Reader has a traditionally alpha scent (like burning/smokey wood) and can usually get away with being mistaken as an alpha at first glance? It’s fine if you’re asks are full or you don’t want to do this but thanks for your time 😊 —Sno

Summary: You just wanted to get the boys to practice on time. You weren’t prepared to deal with this. Good thing you had a gaurdian angel- or should we say, dog.

Author’s Note: I love Kyoutani so much. Like he’s in my top three people I simp for.

Requests: Open!

Kentarou Kyoutani

➵ No one gathered in your way when walked down the hall. You smelt strong enough to put them on edge.

➵ Peoples hackles were constantly raised when you were around, and truthfully, you didn’t know why.

➵ You were still you. You were still an omega.

➵ You still ached to reach out for touch, to scent someone, to just have the smallest bit of attention from anyone that wasn’t Iwaizumi.

➵ You and he had met when you were young, and he took to being your personal guardian—since he was a year older than you.

➵ You were thankful for him and his friendship, but that was all it would ever be. You both tried dating in your first year of middle school (Dating being a loose term), but it was obvious you were better off as friends.

➵ You both still hung out constantly though, and eventually he grew to be an older brother to you.

➵ When you got to high school though, you quickly realized that with Iwaizumi came Oikawa. You had known him just as you had known Iwaizumi, but the other male seemed to keep his distance from you.

➵ It didn’t take a genius to figure out why he was keeping his distance with you. When you and Iwaizumi explained to him there was nothing between the two of you, nor would there ever be, he calmed down.

➵ The fellow omega (Oikawa is an omega ass bottom change my mind. Unless it comes to requests. Then he’s an alpha for you :D) grew to be close with you as well and if one or the other was being idiotic you stepped in as the shoulder to cry on.

➵ You were happy for them, truly, but you knew sooner or later you were going to be out of the picture.

➵ They were third years, and you were a second year. They had a relationship that ran deeper than any thing you could offer them.

➵ And that was okay.

➵ Facing the obvious, it’s clear that, because your best friends are those two dorks, you’re into volleyball. Or in the very least, know of it and how to play. Because of this, you’re elected manager.

➵ No more choice.

➵ You don’t fawn over Oikawa constantly, you can handle Iwaizumi’s outbursts, you were calm with the first years, and you don’t put up with any fan girl’s bullshit.

➵ You didn’t get the chance to refuse honestly.

➵ “I’m sorry, but unfortunately, Oikawa-Senpai is busy at the moment- “

➵ “Please, just- Let me see him! I won’t be long!” The Alpha pleaded, trying to appease to your sense of empathy. Unfortunately for her, that was dried up before the second girl even looked at you to ask the very same thing.

➵ You were tired of girls, obviously not getting the hint, trying to confess their undying love to Oikawa every other day. How did they not see he was an Omega?

➵ Yeah, he had suppressants out the wahzoo but, good golly, his mannerisms were all Omega.

➵ Apparently this alpha though her and Oikawa would be the ultimate power couple.

➵ “Like I said before, he is busy. Any time you take up is time wasted.” You snorted, turning tail and shutting the gym door, ignoring the screech of anger behind it. You were used to it.

➵ Most times you locked them out, they’d throw a bitch-fit, turn and bad-mouth you to their friends for a few days.

➵ They’d tease you for your scent—which was a, frankly lovely, pinewood and amber scent—and poke fun at you, saying how ‘you’ll never get an alpha smelling stronger than them” with a sneer. You’ve learned to ignore those types of girls.

➵ What you didn’t expect however, was for her to scream some more, banging on the metal door.

➵ It was ripped open in your moment of shock, making you turn on your heel to face her.

➵ Her hair, though still relatively upkept, was frizzy with fly-a way’s running out occasionally, but her eyes were what scared you.

➵ They were constricted to ball point bulbs that were locked onto you, fangs poking out as she snarled at you.

➵ Of course. Because why wouldn’t a feral Alpha be part of your day today?

➵ You growled yourself, trying to reign in your scent but it was getting harder and harder as she stalked closer.

➵ No one else was in the gym, as they were changing in the club room, but you figured you could handle her.

➵ You hoped at least.

➵ She tried pouncing on you, your arms quickly crossing in front of your face to shield yourself, but instead of an angry alpha trying to claw your eyes out, you merely got a gust of wind.

➵ Peeking open an eye—you couldn’t recall closing them, but whatever—you frowned at the face staring back at you.

➵ You hadn’t talked to him, personally, but you knew who he was. Kentarou Kyoutani.

➵ He was incredibly strong, a worthy advisory, and worst of all…

➵ A ticking time-bomb of an alpha.

➵ He had the resting bitch face to end all resting bitch faces, and the attitude to go with it. He had only said one word to you ever and it was ‘move’. His voice was gruff and angry when he said it, but his eyes softened when you looked up at him.

➵ He waited patiently for you to gather your things before moving. That was the first, and what you thought, last time you’d ever see the alpha. He entranced you though, so you wouldn’t ever necessarily be opposed to seeing him again.

➵ Just maybe not in this circumstance.

➵ Kyoutani held the alpha by the collar of her shirt, his lips poked up in a snarl with his canines gleaming dangerously in the sunlight

➵ . Contrary to popular belief, he’d only ever gone feral once in his life. His stepfather, an awful, awful, excuse for an alpha had raised a hand to his Mama.

➵ He refused to let anyone ever raise a hand to omega that day and stuck to his grits with it.

➵ Many people often feared him because of his careful eye and quick reflexes.

➵ They claimed he was close to going feral because they never cared to admit they were planning on hurting someone. He didn’t care.

➵ At least he didn’t. When he saw you simply turn and close the gym door, he felt his heart skip a beat.

➵ Maybe it was just the fact that you didn’t relent, or maybe it was the fact that you didn’t care or bend or submiss in the absolute slightest, or maybe it was the waft of the most calming scent he’s ever smelt before.

➵ He knew the other alpha’s scent, as she had practically reeked all over him while asking him for things Oikawa liked before he snapped on her, so this was all you. And he…liked it.

➵ He hated scents that were too sweet or too ‘exciting’ in a way, but this? This was calming and euphoric all in one and he wanted to straight up bathe in it. It smelt that good.

➵ He watched the alpha screech, stomping her foot—he could guess she was the very definition of daddy’s girl with her reaction to being told ‘no’—and before he could growl at her to leave, she was forcing open the door and snarling.

➵ So, he dropped his bag and ran to make sure you were okay. His alpha pawing at him to hurry up.

➵ He had felt the very same as they day he ran his stepfather out of his life, but this time…This time, he would be sure not to go feral. That would scare you and he couldn’t, wouldn’t risk that.

➵ When he got there, the alpha lunged and he had barely enough time to grab her. You looked shocked to see him, or maybe it was residue from when she broke into the gym, but you didn’t say anything.

➵ He took that as a good sign, turning tail and dragging her to where he dropped his bag. He grabbed it quickly, instead dropping her and rushing back to the gym.

➵ You closed the door behind him, Iwaizumi and Matsukawa quickly locking it. In the time, between Kyoutani dragging out the feral alpha you had the chance to text Iwaizumi, sending choppy and shaky, but succinct, messages to let him know what was going on.

➵ The rest of the team were on their way anyway, so they merely hurried their steps. When they turned to lock the door, you stopped them, crying for them to just wait for a minute.

➵ Kyoutani had run in seconds after your plea and the door was quickly shut.

➵ Scents were going insane in the gym, but his was most discernible to you. He smelt scared.

➵ Before anyone had a chance to mention it though, he was turning to you and reaching for your face.

➵ you flinched but that didn’t stop him. His fingers were gentle, more so than you could expect from him, and he was so soft while turning your face to observe the damage. Iwaizumi tried to get close, but he was growled at as you were held to Kyoutani’s chest.

➵ The team could only watch, flabbergasted, as you were hugged and scented by their mad dog. Even more so when you began laughing and purring, placing your hands around his neck.

➵ You whispered something (They were ‘Thank you’ and appreciation whispers) into his ear, making his shoulders visibly relax. No one could really understand what had happened, but they weren’t sure if they wanted to question it just yet.

➵ Well, most of team didn’t at least.

➵ “Aw, Mad dog-Chan! How do you know our little Chibi-chan?” Oikawa laughed, leaning off Iwaizumi as he spun a volleyball on his pointer finger.

➵ Kyoutani grunted, abruptly pulling away, only to growl and pull you back when his alpha snarled. “Don’t.”

➵ “Wait- wait, wait. Hold on.” Hanamaki snorted, holding his hands up. “So you, Mad dog, most vicious alpha this side of the equator, just decided fuck it, and chose to not only save an omega you’ve never met, but then hog her? I don’t know, Mattsun, seems kind of sus to me.”

➵ “Very sus.” Matsukawa agreed, snickering. He yelped however, when Kyoutani turned to snarl at him, only for you to hold him back. Matsukawa had never felt more scared for his life in that very moment, and he owed you a whole ass chapel.

➵ It stayed like that for the rest of the practice, with you calming Kyoutani down ever time he needed a ‘time out’ and over time he got much better at controlling his anger.

➵ No one was surprised when you walked in two weeks later, a small, thin leather choker clipped on around your neck with a hand-made moon charm hanging from it.

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vaguely-concerned · 5 years ago

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The Mandalorian Fic -- And we are kind to snails

Gen, 3700 words. Story time on the Razor Crest! It was obviously way too early to introduce the kid to combat training, but there were other ways to prepare a child for the world, surely.

If that meant Din was occasionally stuck trying to imitate animal calls for the enjoyment and edification of a delighted and indefatigable one-person audience, so be it.

Can also be found here on AO3

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Din had, he was slowly becoming aware, created a monster.

“Da-wah,” the baby announced, reaching his arms out to be picked up and dropping the holodisc next to him in Din’s lap once he was safely positioned.

“...oh,” Din said faintly, slumping back a little in the pilot’s chair as he kept the baby steady with one hand. “Again?”

The baby turned wide expectant eyes on him, and Din — who had in fact been planning to troubleshoot the concerning noise one of the engines had been making the last time they took off — sighed. Well, he supposed that would be easier to get done uninterrupted once the baby was asleep anyway.

“Right, again,” Din agreed, and went to activate the ship’s holoprojector on the dashboard before sliding the disc in for the second time that day.

The reading had been a bit of a shot in the dark. It was obviously way too early to introduce the kid to combat training and he may never be suited for it in a way Din would be able to teach him, even in maturity — and for all Din knew about the kid’s species that might not even be within his own lifetime, it didn’t seem worth holding his breath on this one. There were other ways to prepare a child for the world, though, surely. It was probably a bit on the premature side for engineering too, since the kid still had a marked tendency to put everything he could pick up into his mouth at least once, which ruled out most of Din’s own expertise.

He’d mulled it over for a few days until a half-buried memory of his parents reading to him had presented itself for consideration. He no longer recalled what exactly they’d read — only the feeling of sitting nestled between them, his mother’s fingers running through his hair, the way his father’s voice had taken on a specific cadence when he read aloud. That they would sometimes switch off doing the voices for the dialogue so it became almost like a real conversation.

It was… well. He still remembered some of it.

Recognizing in himself no great talent for acting Din had elected to aim for something more practical, at least to begin with. In the end he’d chosen something he hoped would be both suitable for a kid and something useful to teach him and gotten, among a few other things, a holodisc that included information on and pictures of a great variety of animals from around the galaxy. Despite the breezy assurances of some people who were born and raised in the tribe, Din suspected that there was such a thing as too early an age to be introduced to the bloodthirsty treatises of Mandalore the Conqueror.

As it turned out the kid had taken to the whole thing with so much gusto that getting him to go to bed without reading at least a little first was starting to become a minor diplomatic incident. It didn’t seem to matter so much what they actually looked at — Din sometimes wondered if he could have gotten away with reading the ship’s manual aloud every night and had the same entranced reception. But for that space of time every night and sometimes during the day, the kid was glued to Din’s lap and poured his full undivided attention into whatever was set before him, and filling that time with anything less than worthy of that attention felt unacceptable.

If that meant Din was occasionally stuck trying to imitate animal calls for the enjoyment and edification of a delighted and indefatigable one-person audience, so be it.

The holoprojector sprang sluggishly to life and the image flickered until Din leaned forward to give the dashboard a succinct and practiced thump. He really should open that up and take a proper look at it one of these days, it’d been acting up for years and the components were likely older than him. “There we go. Okay, then. What are we looking at today?”

In the flickering light of hyperspace illuminating the cockpit he squinted at the small hovering icons that served as previews for the full articles, looking for one that seemed interesting or failing that an old favorite. Before he could settle on something the kid leaned forward and pointed at one of the icons with an intent yelp, so Din opened that one and gave a surprised huff of laughter when the large four-legged bulk of the creature rose from the holoprojector, its horned head immediately familiar where it was lifted in a silent roar. He hadn’t realized the disc included extinct species. The kid glanced up at him, waiting for him to start the normal routine of saying the animal’s name.

“That’s a mythosaur,” Din said, unaccountably pleased the kid had zoomed right in on it. “Our people used to ride them, a long time ago.”

The kid made a long intrigued coo and reached out towards the hologram, moving his hand like he meant to stroke the mythosaur’s horned, ferocious head.

“Too bad they’re extinct or we could’ve gotten ourselves one,” Din said, genuinely a little wistful. “Wouldn’t that have been something?”

Apparently the kid got just enough of that to fix Din with a wide-eyed look, ears perking up in breathless expectation.

Regretful to burst his bubble Din was forced to clarify: “I don’t have one. They aren’t around anymore.”

After a moment’s pause the baby took this revelation with somber dignity, turning back to the mythosaur. “Bah-ta,” he intoned, waving his little hand at the hologram like he was bidding the creature a solemn farewell.

“You still got one here, though,” Din said, in the hopes of softening the blow, tugging gently on the mythosaur skull pendant the kid wore around his neck most waking hours. ”See how they’ve got the same horns?”

The baby grabbed the pendant and glanced down at it, then between it and the hologram a few times, before holding the pendant up for Din’s inspection with a triumphant happy cry.

“Yeah. We keep the important parts,” Din said, grinning a bit at the enthusiasm.

The baby absentmindedly stuck the pendant in his mouth, small toes wiggling in contentment as he turned back to the hologram, clearly awaiting what was next. Biting his lip Din added ‘toy mythosaur?’ to his inner list of things to look out for in markets when he went to resupply and then read off the sparse information the holodisc’s compilers had thought worthy of inclusion.

��Remind me to find a more exciting version of this for you one day,” Din said as he closed the article. “There’s gotta be some better stuff about them out there.”

The baby gave a garbled sound around the pendant, idly swinging his legs while Din picked a new article at random, coming up with something aquatic and vaguely frog-like from a planet covered almost entirely in shallow oceans. The kid’s eyes sparkled.

“I think you’ll find that’s a lunch buffet too big even for you, buddy,” Din told him, moving through the different pictures of the sort-of frogs flitting between corals and strange tentacle-like sea plants. “They’re at least twice your size and squirt poison. Which apparently has psychedelic effects for some species. Huh. Let’s definitely steer clear of that, then.”

Quite apart from anything else Din had no idea how much the baby’s inexplicable mind powers were controlled by conscious thought and how much was purely instinctual — Din already felt out of his depth enough as it was with this, he could only imagine with dread the results of any unforeseen variables. If Din had already wondered whether the kid could lift himself into the air as well as things around him, it was only a question of time before the baby’s inventive and ever-active brain came up with the same idea. Din tried to keep it out of his mind most of the time, outside of the involuntary planning for endless contingencies he engaged in when he couldn’t fall asleep at night. One particularly fevered evening he had, for a while, seriously considered padding the entire ceiling of the interior of the Razor Crest, just to be safe.

After the frogs were duly ‘ooh’ed and hungrily ‘aaah’d over they continued through a few types of bugs until Din used his veto by right of being the person in control of the holoprojector to get them over onto something else. He never knew the universe contained quite so many beetles or that they all looked basically the same. The Naboo guarlara got a raucous reception, though Din suspected this might have more to do with the fanciful and brightly coloured costumes of the royalty depicted riding on them than the animal itself.

Hm. Maybe hunting down a history book or two might be a good call, actually, and not just for the kid. Din had never had much of an interest in the subject himself — surely the world was bleak enough without going around dredging up the muds of ancient strife and suffering to cloud the waters even further. But these Jedi were currently the best lead he had on finding anyone like the baby out there, and if they had once been powerful enough to challenge a Mandalore… they had to have left tracks somewhere. He couldn’t imagine the Empire having tolerated information about formidable sorcerers, however ancient, being freely available, and sometimes knowledge faded surprisingly quickly if it was stamped out hard enough. Off the top of his head he was having a hard time coming up with anyone among his established contacts who might have an interest in banned literature on the side. People in his line of work did not tend towards bookishness, by and large. But then again they might have clients who did and who had the credits to back it up. It could be a useful trail to pursue, anyway, and less risky than trying to ask around about such a loaded subject in person.

What he’d do if he actually found these people was a bridge he’d have to cross — or burn behind him while fleeing blaster bolts, he could only wryly extrapolate from recent events — if he ever managed to get to it.

Still half-lost in thought Din switched to a new animal at the kid’s urging, then startled out of his distraction when the kid sat up straighter in his lap and gave a call of accusation and reproof that came straight from the depths of his little body.

“Huh? What’s wrong?” Din blinked at the hologram of the round-faced fuzzy creatures and tried to understand what was freaking the kid out about them.

“Eh!” the kid insisted, gesturing hotly at the hologram.

Realization finally dawned; Din had to push down a laugh. “Oh yeah, you had a little run-in with one of those on Sorgan, didn’t you. It’s called a Loth-cat, it’s a type of tooka. It’s not dangerous,” he added, chuckling a little despite himself when the small body in his lap remained rigid with outrage and resentment. He wrapped his arms more securely around the kid and stroked a calming hand over his side. “Some people keep them as pets.”

The kid still scowled distrustfully at the image of the Loth-cat like he found this very hard to believe, but burrowed closer against Din’s chest, tucking himself into the crook of his arm.

“See there,” Din said, pointing out the kittens cowering behind the bigger animal. “It has little ones to take care of. That’s why it’s hissing, it’s protecting them.”

Blinking slowly the kid seemed to consider this, his tiny hand wrapped around one of Din’s fingers. He gave a quizzical sound and looked up at Din, pointing at a kitten too.

“Uh-huh,” Din said. “It’s a baby. Like you.”

Softening slightly the kid lowered his hand again and tilted his head to one side.

“That’s the parent,” Din said, indicating the adult. “Buir. And they’re its children. Ade.”

He still couldn’t quite tell how much language the kid actually understood yet, but it felt like the right sort of thing to do, so he kept going.

“Together they’re a family. Aliit. I, uh. Don’t know if they really do clans, but it’s the same word.”

The kid gave a thoughtful sound and fumbled for a handhold on Din’s armor. Din gave him a squeeze, stroking his head when he butted his forehead against his palm to ask for it without taking his big dark eyes off the hologram.

“Every being gets scared and angry if its children are in danger,” Din said quietly, rocking the child gently on his lap. Since this one had sparked an interest, and to give the kid some time to get used to seeing the animal without fear, they read all the information provided, going through galactic prevalence, social structures, speculated planet of origin for the tooka, anatomy and behavioral patterns, history of domestication and hunting strategies. Din was almost sure most of it went right over the kid’s head, but the attentive tilt of his ears never wavered and he seemed to listen the whole way, even glancing questioningly up at Din when he fumbled a little in getting to the next page at one point and left a pause in the flow. Maybe the facts weren’t the most important part.

The last image of the article was of the Loth-cat asleep, its kittens tucked close all around it. Apparently reaching a place where he was ready to bury the hatchet and extend a gracious hand of peace the kid finally leaned forward and tried to pat the Loth-cat’s head like he’d done with the mythosaur, making a soothing sort of warbling sound.

“Yeah, we’re not gonna mess with its babies,” Din agreed. “It doesn’t need to be scared.”

“Nahwa-lah,” the baby babbled sagely, sitting back and leaning against Din’s side again.

“Well, while we’re on things you’ve already seen before...” Din did a quick search and found the large one-horned head he’d had the dubious pleasure of surveying from extremely up close several times.

The baby stilled in his arms, ears perking up.

“You remember this one too, huh. Guess it’d be hard to forget. Well, it’s called a mudhorn,” Din said. “In the capacity as your father, let me take the opportunity to advise you to learn from my mistakes and leave their eggs the hell alone. My vision still goes double sometimes if I turn my head too quickly.”

“Aaah,” the kid said, imperiously waving his hand in the way that meant he wanted the next page of the article, then let out a squeak when the next picture was a mudhorn contentedly grazing with its calf, plump and with a head nearly comically oversized, the horn only about the length of a human hand. The baby pointed to the calf, his excitement so radiant that Din had to smile.

“Yeah, that’s another baby. Actually...” Din knitted his brow as he scanned through the article until he found the section about anatomy and brought up a hologram of the mudhorn’s skull in profile. “Look familiar?”

The baby’s mouth turned into a little ‘o’ of surprise; he glanced up at Din, stretching up as far as he could to tentatively poke the edge of a shoulder pauldron.

“That’s right,” Din confirmed, twisting a little so the kid got a clearer view. “That’s our signet. Which you should rightfully get most of the honour for, honestly, I wasn’t doing so hot on my own.”

Running a three-fingered hand back and forth over the edge of the signet the baby babbled away, his free hand gesturing towards the hologram. Din nodded and ‘uh-huh’ed dutifully along until the kid’s story culminated in him throwing both his arms up with a shout and looking up at Din in a ‘can you believe it?’ sort of way.

“I did go flying a couple of times back there,” Din hazarded while sitting up straight again, and was rewarded with a firm nod. The kid chattered some more and patted Din’s breastplate as if in reassurance, pressing his small round cheek to the smooth metal and blinking cheerily up at him.

Din’s chest did some strange twisting things he didn’t quite understand.

“How could I be worried out there when I’ve got you watching my back, huh?” Din said thickly, cupping the back of the baby’s head in his hand and stroking his thumb along the downy crown of it, making his ears droop in contentment and his eyes slip closed as he craned into it.

Clearing his throat Din turned back to the hologram and indicated the bundle of nerves right behind the mudhorn’s jaw on the anatomy cross section. “Anyway, it went down so quickly because I managed to get it right here after you incapacitated it. Cut that connection and it’s lights out right away. Odd quirk of anatomy, but there you are. You’d do better to snipe it from a distance, though, under normal circumstances — if I didn’t have a set time I had to be back with the egg it probably would have been smarter to lie in wait until it emerged from the cave on its own, shoot it before it even knew we were there. Even tossing a few grenades into the cave would be a better choice than taking it on up close, if you don’t have to worry about the state of the egg. I’m sorry, I realize it is probably a bit on the early side for tactical reviews for you,” he added apologetically, as the baby blinked at him in what looked like well-meaning and attentive incomprehension. “...I’m not very used to having conversations about anything else. I’ll work on it.”

Thankfully the kid was already a far smoother conversationalist than Din and simply tugged on Din’s hand insistently until they could go back to the mudhorn calf, squealing happily as he spotted it again, so Din rather assumed he was forgiven.

The next animal was another bug, so Din quickly skipped it while the kid looked the other way. They detoured through the squills of Tatooine, who despite being largely composed of leathery skin, teeth, aggression and generalized malice got a much friendlier initial greeting than the small fuzzy Loth-cat had. Go figure.

Then they reached one that made Din trail off mid-sentence and grow quiet.

The creature itself was something small and pointy-faced and furry that lived in the high mountains of Alderaan — or at least it had, before, well. There was a twinge of something he couldn’t place in his gut; he’d heard about it, of course, since he hadn’t been actively living under a rock at the time and the destruction of an entire world is the sort of thing that fights itself to the front of people’s minds no matter where you go. It had seemed nearly absurd, though, hard to really imagine, enough so that he hadn’t thought much about it one way or another until he’d seen the look on Cara’s face when she heard the name of her homeplanet spoken by the wraith-like shade of the empire that destroyed it. She had looked the way Din felt hearing ’Mandalore’ from Gideon’s mouth.

This holodisc must have been put together a while ago. The creature wasn’t marked down as extinct yet.

Din glanced down at the kid, who was already looking up at him, getting a bit heavy-eyed but otherwise perfectly cheerful, not seeming to suspect anything was amiss. A collection of memories stirred in the depths of Din’s mind, though mercifully vague and transient — something about the beginning of the war, his parents’ voices, low and worried, conferring in the kitchen when they thought he’d fallen asleep, the slight brittleness to his father’s smile when he called him home from play in the evenings, just a bit earlier than he would have before. He wondered now if they’d been planning to leave or if they had surmised, probably correctly, that there would be nowhere truly safe to go and that the only thing they could do was to shield him from the worst of the fear.

He’d been frightened anyway, of course, but they’d tried. It seemed to him an ancient, unspoken sort of pact, that trying and that fear. A bittersweet creed all its own.

“Let’s skip this one for now,” Din said, as lightly as he could manage while he skipped the article and wrapped one arm more protectively around the baby. “Maybe another time.”

The kid didn’t seem to mind, only gave a contented yawn and turned towards Din’s chest in that way that meant drowsiness was finally catching up with him, his ears fluttering languidly. Din found a smile tugging at his mouth and started on the next animal anyway, in the knowledge that it would probably do the trick.

Din’s hunch was right; between the rdava-bird’s colouring and their mating calls the baby’s eyes were starting to slip closed every so often and he had curled himself up completely in the crook of Din’s arm, sucking absently on the pendant while he fiddled with the edge of the cloth of Din’s gambeson. Finally, in the middle of a description of the bird’s favoured habitat, his head drooped towards his chest and Din decided it might be time to call it.

“Time to sleep?” Din asked, stroking his thumb over the kid’s forehead. The baby gave a weak cry of protest and struggled to sit up a bit, managing to keep his eyes open for all of five bleary seconds before they fell closed again. “Sssh. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere, you can sleep. I’ll be here.”

Whether because of the words or simply the cadence of his voice the baby relaxed, gazing up at Din with soft-eyed sleepiness and the perfect trust that still made Din feel a little dizzy if he let himself think about it too hard. He swallowed and stroked the baby’s ear, rocking him slightly when his eyes finally slipped all the way closed and stayed that way.

“I’ll be here,” he repeated quietly, holding the kid for longer than he probably needed to before getting up to place him in his seat and tuck him in.

You have no idea how desperately I NEED Mando having to actually tackle a children’s picture book about mythosaurs and being persuaded by big hopeful eyes to do the voices, I’m probably going to have to write it for the sake of my sanity if nothing else

Title is from Fleur Adcock's poem 'For a Five Year Old', because the combination of that poem and this show, what is the word... absolutely devastates me emotionally.

#star wars #the mandalorian #the mandalorian fic #baby yoda #my writing #here you go it's literally just 3 000+ words of baby and mando being adorable and no plot lol #plot? who's 'plot' never heard of her

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quincywillows · 4 years ago

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i know this is kind of a general question but how do you and the ambition crew go about writing episode listings descriptions, i’m having trouble coming up with long enough yet semi vague and intriguing episode descriptions for my spec season

hi pal! this is an interesting question, and i hope i’m the person equipped to answer it since i’m the one who predominantly crafts our promo materials. i can’t guarantee easy solutions -- no part of writing is inherently Easy as i’m sure you know -- but i can least provide some general thoughts i use in the process and hopefully that’ll help!

so obviously the first step is to know your story. one of the things i’m most impatient about during our story breaking process is getting the story structured enough to start brainstorming these things lol, but you want to make sure you feel confident about the important plots of each episode so that you can accurately reflect that in the synopses. that’s partially why we haven’t released the descriptions for 3B yet. we’re still refining the story in that half of the season and so we figured we’d keep the focus on the first half and come back to the rest when it was more solidified and the intrigue of the first half had receded.

then, once you’ve got your episode titles all figured out (and picking titles is a whole other process), you’re at the point where you are now where you’re figuring out how to phrase the description. a few things go through my mind during this process.

one, you want to keep things succinct. the episode description isn’t the place for wordiness or nuance. save all that rich storytelling for the actual episode! as someone who hates being brief believe me i hate this part, but it requires cutting out a LOT of the elements of the upcoming episode and just honing in on a couple of key features or storylines. as you’ll notice with the aaa synopses, they RARELY encompass all of the storylines going on in an episode, in fact sometimes they don’t allude at all to major plot lines. but that’s okay! the description is about the basics: who, what, when, where, why -- just not with all those elements at the same time to maintain that mystery and intrigue.

which brings us to the second point, intrigue. you want to decide on information that’s interesting or evokes a response of some kind from the reader (worry, excitement, tension, etc). and a big piece of this i think can be in withholding information. for example, if a description says “and one student says goodbye to aaa forever,” that’s a great intrigue factor bc it sets off a dozen responses in a reader’s head at once. like WHO is leaving aaa? and WHY? and then they start going through everything they already know about the show thus far and try to deduce who it most likely is, probably with multiple possibilities. you gave SOME important intel to get them intrigued / worried -- the WHAT (leaving aaa), the WHEN (that episode, presumably), and the WHERE (aaa) -- but leaving out those other elements above is what really gets them hooked on that tidbit.

following that thought, i think what it comes down to is you want your descriptions to elicit theorizing from your readers. like ideally, they should be able to read your episode descriptions and get just enough information to start spouting ideas about what’s to come, but not enough that you reveal all your cards or state the entire episode for them. you know what i mean?

then the third thing to think about, along the same thread, is which stories you want to highlight. in general, i think of synopses as having 3 points. there’s generally an overarching explanation of what the episode will be about (i.e., the main plot or focus of the ensemble). then, you follow up with one or two characters and their specific plot line, typically ones that have a decent amount of importance that episode or best relate to the theme. then, finally, you land with a finally whammy statement that holds a lot of worry or excitement in it, but in general i make this one the most vague.

lets look at a couple of ambition descriptions and deconstruct them as an example of how this works in action! i’ll do one from S2 and then one from 3A. it goes without saying, but below the cut involves SPOILERS for ambition season 2 and season 3 thus far.

[ 2.12 ] “Final Run” // CURTAIN CALL – The complications surrounding Lucas’s presence at Adams reach a climactic pitch. Jack makes one last desperate maneuver. Riley and Isadora orchestrate an opposition, but true help comes from an unlikely ally. Someone says goodbye to AAA.

so we’ve got point 1, the ensemble / general plot: lucas’s enrollment is reaching its climax. we know who -- lucas; what -- the bradford case; when -- now; where -- aaa. but we don’t know how it’s going to resolve, which is the intrigue for point 1. but it mainly serves to establish the plot or theme the episode will be revolving around.

point 2, select characters: we know jack plays a major role in this episode because of him fighting for lucas, but we don’t know What that desperate maneuver will be (threatening to resign if they kick out lucas as his last-ditch statement). riley and isadora are planning something major (the student protest), but the biggest impression comes from someone unexpected -- we don’t yet know the WHO in that situation (farkle).

point 3, the whammy: someone says goodbye. this immediately elicits worry from the audience, and a scramble to fill in the missing information. mainly, WHO? one might assume lucas, since the plot revolves around him... but the best synopses are misdirects that make things seem obvious when in fact they aren’t. and there’s some hints here, considering who ISN’T mentioned in point 2 -- as we know, charlie is the one who says goodbye, and he was specifically not mentioned earlier in the description. you kinda see how those small choices make big impressions? and have little twists of their own? that’s what you’re going for at the end of the day!

let’s try another one from 3A.

[ 3.05 ] “Battleground State” // THE VOTES ARE IN – The A class fights to advance in the senior showdown semi-finals. Charlie bonds with his classmates as Haverford proves they’re fierce competition. Adams elects their next student body president, and someone gets a serious wake-up call.

point 1: we’re focusing on the senior showdown semi-finals. we know much will hinge on that throughout the episode. this can also be said of the later mention of the election, which is partially why i chose this example. it doesn’t have to be a strict and straightforward structure like you can throw other elements in different sentences, i’m just giving you a bare bones idea to follow as you’re getting the hang of it!

point 2: charlie gets the character focus, since he’s so removed from the others. this is a trend actually through the 3A synopses -- charlie tends to get slightly more mention by name than the others, but it’s because he’s carrying a whole story world by himself at this time and thus doesn’t fit the “ensemble” point as easily anymore.

point 3: someone gets a serious wake-up call. this is that whammy beat, as we don’t know basically anything. wake-up call could mean ANYTHING, but the word choice signals to us that it won’t be good (wake-up calls rarely all, as they mean that how things are now aren’t working). but we don’t know the WHO (zay), the WHAT (his injury), the WHEN, WHERE, or WHY. it’s vague and threatening, and tacked right on the end to give one last rush of adrenaline for the episode as a whole.

so yeah, that’s the gist to help you get started. i think the other main thing i would impart is the wisdom that like at the end of the day... it doesn’t really matter. it doesn’t need to be perfect. just have fun with it! and if you can include some wordplay (using “creme de la creme” for charlie’s phrase in the episode where he’s struggling with french; isadora getting a “rich” surprise in the episode where she got her inheritance), that’s also a fun plus. best of luck!!!

#writing tips #writing #maggie.txt #writing gabs #Anonymous #ask and you shall receive

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veryphantombear · 4 years ago

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The Mighty Power of Words

Words matter. I have had this catchphrase on my WhatsApp status for quite some time. And still, I’ve found no reason good enough to change it — words matter. Whether we are giving negative feedback, framing a topic, describing someone, or just sending a short electronic message, the way we choose to do that can mean the world to the recipient.

The use of words is an obsession for writers. Words are like little jewels — they have a sound, a color, and of course, a meaning. Arguably poetry is the means through which words detonate their maximum power. The white space on the page of a poem is filled with the richness each word emanates for the reader to experience.

The choice of words tells you a lot about who’s using them. One can distinguish a speech “coming from the heart” from a detached and formal discourse. A huge number of books and articles have addressed the role of communication in regulating relationships in various contexts. Meaningful silences have become equally associated with the ability to captivate attention and mastering audiences.

Politics is the activity that perhaps best exemplifies the link between words and actions. Electoral narratives are created to trigger a voting action. The choice of words can significantly contribute to gauging support for a legislative initiative. The centrality of the use of words in politics is also responsible for degrading the very act of speaking, in many people’s eyes. Words with no deriving consistent action can kill one’s credibility.

Language is behavior. It will signal our values (or the lack of) and will bring into the light of day our attitudes and assumptions. When the language used is authentic and the underlying values are healthy, it stays in people’s minds and goes a long way.

Words bear responsibility

Looking things up in the dictionary was a frequent activity in my childhood home. I was educated early on about the importance of utilizing the correct words, and to learn as many words as possible so to never run short of options for expressing something.

Still now, if I see a poorly written text or an inappropriately used word, I get slightly irritated. But that’s just me and my almost holy respect for verbal and written expression. At the macro-level, one cannot overstate enough the impact of choosing certain words over others. From the role of hate speech in inciting violence to the impact that generalizations have on minorities and diverse groups, words can be more powerful than weapons.

The “Right” speech

Buddhist monks are masters in the wise use of words. Buddhism preaches “Right speech” as the fourth leg of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. Far from being a Buddhism expert, I still find this approach fascinating. The “Right speech” is about telling the truth and doing so in a kind manner which promotes harmony among people. Lying while saying something nice or being honest while hurting the other person are both short of positive outcomes. Being truthful in a loving way seems the perfect solution to reconcile authenticity and ethics.

This approach is in contrast with the belief that harsh feedback helps the receiver, which is very popular in traditional management theories, and is still largely applied in the business world, unfortunately. Despite many managers still believing in the “power” of harsh feedback, there is enough literature out there, both scientific and otherwise, showing that it is ineffective and, more often than not, counterproductive. Most of you reading this piece should be familiar with the work of Dale Carnegie, namely, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The very first chapter of the book speaks on the uselessness of harsh criticism. By the way, that book was originally written over 80 years ago in 1936.

A manager also encounters his/her team on many other occasions and not just during “reviews”. I’ve experienced many instances of lack of trust and a choice of words painfully reflecting that fact. Usually the conversation contains little information, does not include any positive message, and leaves the recipients confused (and even more diffident).

If we are managing people, we should always remember that people are the most important asset to any organization. Our words need to be a reflection of that. Understanding, kindness, truthfulness, respect should inform our choice of language. Every human being has an inherent need for acknowledgment and appreciation of his/her unique characteristics. The words we use will tell someone if we hold them in the proper consideration.

Gender issues in language

Language itself is not sexist, just as it is not obscene; but it can connote sexist attitudes as well as attitudes about social taboos.

Intrinsically masculine terms like “men” when describing human beings or the fact that most generic appellations are masculine (such as “God”), contributes to the feminine dimension still not being equal.

Attention to this topic has certainly increased in recent years, but a lot remains to be done to create and normalize new words and new ways of expressing things.

Can we be thoughtful yet fast with our speech?

One could argue that the speed of modern communication makes carefully crafted wording speech or messages an unrealistic expectation. Yet, U.S. President Donald Trump has often engaged in hateful speeches within the space of a tweet. But on the other (and more positive) hand, newly re-elected New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will likely be remembered for, among other things, her succinct “be strong, be kind” message to the population during this pandemic.

Words matter. Linguistic and social change go hand in hand. Every time we choose how we want to say something, we suggest an intention. We position ourselves. We express who we are and our vision of the world.

My WhatsApp contacts will continue to see “Words Matter” on my status. It is one of my humble ways to keep the attention to this vital topic. The childhood dictionary may have been buried under the dusts of time but my love for words has only grown larger. The Right speech is a shape of communication but is above all a mindset. Whatever we choose as our preferred way of communicating, we always leave a mark. Let’s strive for that mark to be positive.

#wordsmatter #communication #language

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knifeonmars · 4 years ago

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Capsule Reviews - June/July 2020

I didn't read as many comics that I felt the need to write about these past couple of months, but the ones that I did I generally had a lot of thoughts on.

Hawkworld

Back in 1989, DC attempted to revamp Hawkman, notoriously the most confusing character in a stable comprised of confusing characters, with Timothy Truman's Hawkworld, a dark, modern take on the sci-fi version of the character. The result is flawed in the most frustrating ways, just good enough that parts of it feel like they could be coming from a hidden classic of DC's back catalog, but never living up to its potential. The story entirely is set on Thanagar, casting Katar Hol (Hawkman) as a privileged heir who has thrown his lot in with the police force and pines for Thanagar's lost golden age, when men were men and heroes walked the Earth. The first couple of issues do some genuinely excellent work depicting Thanagar as a corrupt and crumbling empire which bears more than a little resemblance to the USA and casting Hol as a well-meaning but ultimately deluded dupe whose role as a cop makes him at best complicit in his culture's worst excesses.

Unfortunately, the second half of the series never manages to live up to the first half, skipping forward in time by about ten years and ditching the systemic critique of its first half. Instead, the corrupt police commander who had previously appeared as a symptom of Thanagar's ills is turned into a literal monster, a strawman for the newly christened Hawkman to soundly thump over the head in place of addressing larger issues. The systemic concerns of the series' first half are never meaningfully addressed in the later issues and Hawkworld ends up falling back into being a simple tale of good cops versus bad cops, despite the first half of the series having been largely unambiguous about cops' nature as agents of state violence and imperialism. It's a shocking and deeply confusing disconnected that I can't tell if it's because I'm bringing modern politics and assumptions to the book or that someone at DC completely lost their nerve halfway through. This is what makes Hawkworld so frustrating to read, on the one hand its insightful and anti-colonial and surprisingly relevant to 2020, but on the other it never commits to those ideas because doing so would be too radical, the end result is a book which is very good right up until the point that it completely wimps out and shuffles back into mediocrity.

She-Hulk

After a long interval of living, unread, in my Comixology files, I finally read She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido. The quality of the series almost goes unsaid; it's one of the best of its era and niche, a part of the a whole constellation of early to mid 2010's "street level" Marvel superhero books which started, more or less with Daredevil and Hawkeye, ran through She-Hulk and Spider-Woman, extended into Hellcat and debatably Squirrel Girl, and then fizzled out several years ago. I try to fight nostalgia back most of the time, but it can't be overstated how good that whole wave of titles was, almost universally fun and approachable, grounded and empathetic, and with top-notch art across the board. Anyway, She-Hulk by Soule and Pulido is fantastic. It keeps to a relatively straightforward procedural style, makes the courtroom antics feel real thanks to Soule's actual background as a lawyer, and connects with the Marvel Universe in ways which set it among the others without ever feeling too overwhelming. The whole deal with The Blue File, the series' overarching mystery is well handled and does something really interesting with Nightwatch, an absolutely nothing character, who I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen turn up again since this reinvention. Reading She-Hulk made me nostalgic for this whole era, of which this series was one of the best.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal

Petals to the Metal is the arc where the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone podcast found its footing and really began to blossom into the series that it would become, so there were a lot of expectations riding on this entry in the graphic novel adaptations of the series. Generally speaking, it continues to nail most of what made the series work and polish the story into something a little more refined and coherent. The narrative trimming and changes done are smooth, the jokes still work, and its able to foreshadow events in a way that the podcast, given its nature as an emergent narrative, could never really do. Carey Pietsch's cartooning remains fabulous, and what makes this story work as a graphic novel must certainly be credited to her. This series remains the defining work of her young career and while I greatly enjoy what she's doing, I do wonder if she's really going to stick around do all seven potential books, especially if they keep ballooning in size. The only criticisms of Petals to the Metal as a comic are much the same as could be made about Petals to the Metal as a podcast and the big one is the main characters are kind of incidental to the story and don't feel like they have an important role in the emotional climax. Such is the nature of trying to tell a story in a DnD campaign, and its something that TAZ would get better at subsequently, but in graphic novel form hard not to think about. Without as clear of a distinction between "player characters" and "non-player characters" it's not quite as strange to see the main trio take a back seat, but without the charisma and speed of the podcast form it's much easier to sit back and say "wait, the main character's aren't even doing anything here". This volume is also noticeably thicker than the first two volumes of The Adventure Zone, and I hope that this series isn't going to swell, Harry Potter-like, with each entry, if only for the sake of Pietsch not keeling over from the effort.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Supposedly the capper to the Batman stories Snyder and Capullo's started telling all the way back in 2011 with the New 52 reboot of the character, though that's a little hard to swallow when they are still very much doing a bunch of Batman stuff in their current Death Metal event series. It's Batman playing in a post-apocalyptic DC universe, bombastic and unhinged, upending the toy box and smashing things like there's no tomorrow. It's fun, beautifully drawn, and incredibly over the top, but it's not going to be for everyone. For one thing, it's a tour of a ruined DC universe, so it's not exactly kind of most characters; there's a lot of death and mutilation and grotesqueness abounds. It's also deeply, deeply, misanthropic. I've got an essay talking about the politics of this book at greater length ready to go up at some point, but the short version is that this is a comic which starts off with an incredibly unsubtle allegory for the 2016 election and then ends with a big, cheesy hope shot that means absolutely nothing.

Even beyond my political reading of it, not everything about the story works. Snyder and Capullo's Batman work has had a ton of Joker in it and his role here is obnoxious and contains a bafflingly unearned redemption arc. More importantly, the book is built on misanthropy and the evil that ordinary people do but is completely unable to actually confront this thematically or narratively. It's a major thematic shortcoming.

I'm reminded of the ending of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc, a similar endpoint to an era of Batman which was fundamentally informed by the rejection of Morrison's vision by the rest of DC Comics. It's a bitter, angry book, but still beautiful and engaging, and fun to talk about.

Batman Universe

The complete other end of the spectrum from Last Knight on Earth, Batman Universe is a glorious romp through the DC universe, exploring the setting and characters and having fun in this day-glo fantasia. Nick Derrington knocks the art out of the park, and the constraints of shorter chapters mean that Brian Bendis' writing is more succinct and energetic than I've ever seen it before. I've idly wondered for years now why there's no current Batman animated series, and Batman Universe seems very much designed as the equivalent of one: the ties to current continuity are nearly nonexistent, the art is distinct and skews away from pseudo-realism in favor of pop aesthetics, and the approach in general is lighthearted.

It's not the deepest book, at least on an initial read, it's pointedly light fare, but it's still incredibly good. It is an unabashed, all-caps SUPERHERO STORY that doesn't feel retro or dated.

#words #capsule reviews #last knight on earth

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megrimlocke · 5 years ago

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How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists. The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read. The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this. Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been. In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior. Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at. Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call. The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack. But the machine was really just trying to be helpful. It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations. It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it. I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others. I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function. The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture. The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it. The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone. In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us. It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem. If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all. It further engages you with the content that annoys you. The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing. If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at. You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content. All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia. It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads. It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions. This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically. There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I. But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic? I’ll bet that you have. Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people. Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years. No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish. The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments. We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week. Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars. But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him. I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants. No such gesture here. My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact. We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information. We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things. Real attention from real people is much much better.

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again. We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 6 years ago

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to help yourself understand the Mueller investigation, read this novel

“This novel” being, of course, a stack of court documents filed in the course of the investigation.

Hear me out.

This isn’t to trivialize or sensationalize an ongoing existential threat to western democracy. Precisely because it is not a fucking game, I think it’s really important for people to get new ways into this story. Because it still seems alarmingly common for even generally well-informed people to throw up their hands and say “well, the right says ‘no collusion!’ and liberals say ‘he’s a Russian agent!’ but the partisans all seem really worked up, I guess the truth is somewhere in between/it must not be as big a deal as they think.”

Maybe sometimes that’s motivated reasoning or sheer ignorance. But it’s also possible that “this Rusher thing with Trump and Russia” is unusually resistant to understanding as a conventional news story. We want our news to be solid, with “hard facts.” Maybe this is more like gas. Like gas, it always takes up as much space as it’s allowed. On slow news days it can expand to envelop everything else; unrelated dramatic events can compress it down to almost nothing. And you can’t get a grip on gas.

This whole bizarre situation is genuinely unprecedented in American history, which is perhaps why special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been doing something unusual in issuing a series of speaking indictments. Remember, a bill of indictment is basically a list of the crimes that a prosecutor has convinced a grand jury that someone has probably committed. Prosecutors are smart to keep these minimal, because every fact they allege in their indictment, they damn well have to be ready to prove. A speaking indictment means that the prosecutor is saying more than they have to say. In a case like this – which deals with a lot of sensitive information, and implicates people who haven’t yet been charged or even interviewed – that’s even trickier, because there’s a lot it has to avoid.

Generally, when a person makes their own job harder, they’re doing it for a reason. And I think at least part of the reason here is that the special prosecutor’s office is trying to tell the American public a story. Our minds can comprehend dramatic plot lines more easily than the seedy, fact-heavy, choppily-paced web of a real criminal conspiracy. There’s a narrative logic to the pre-election events described in the most notable speaking indictments in the order we’ve seen them, moving relentlessly closer in time, space, and relationship to Donald Trump on Election Day, 2016.

So if you’re frustrated or baffled by what you catch of this story in the news or on your Facebook feed, it’s not because you, personally, can’t understand it. You might just need a new angle of approach. If you are a movie person, I can recommend the documentary Active Measures (Hulu, iTunes). If you’re more of a reader, these documents, in this order, can be read like an epistolary novel – specifically, a pulpy, beach read-y spy thriller.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

TO BE CONTINUED [probably]…

I’m serious. Download the pdfs onto your e-reader – remember to make a note of the order! – brew yourself some tea, and turn off pop-up notifications for a while. (Don’t get too hung up on figuring out who “Organization 1″ or “Person 2″ are - sometimes it’ll be obvious, but don’t worry if it’s not. You can just treat the big tables like illustrations: look and see what they’re about, but you don’t need to read every line to get the gist. You can also skip the last page or so if you start hitting headers like “statutory allegations” or “substitute assets.” There’s no post-credits stingers.)

These aren’t all the documents that have been filed in court by the special counsel, let alone in related cases, and I doubt even the courts have heard the whole story yet. Most of the documents related to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn are still redacted. Maria Butina was charged by a different prosecutor’s office just as she was about to make a run for it, but her infiltration of the National Rifle Association could quite possibly be Chekhov’s gun. And it doesn’t even mention the UK spinoff! But I think they’re the ones that are, intentionally, useful to someone who wants to understand.

Still skeptical? Recap/analysis below.

Part I: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Richard W. Gates III

The first indictment of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort took its focus far away from, and several years before, the main story, deep into a 2010 election in Ukraine which ominously foreshadowed the 2016 election. Manafort, an old friend of Stone, a Trump Tower resident, and the employer of his co-defendant Rick Gates and of future Sanders consultant Tad Devine, ran the campaign of a buffoonish businessman who was in hock to the Russian government. Their strategy relied heavily on exacerbating ethnic tensions within Ukraine and seeding skepticism about international alliances, as well as a vicious smear campaign of his opponent, an accomplished public servant who would have been the nation’s first woman president. Manafort’s candidate took office, was exactly as bad as his opponents believed he would be, and had his opponent imprisoned and tortured – but was eventually forced to release her and flee the country for Russia.

Part II: United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al

The Internet Research Agency indicted Russian nationals who worked on the propaganda campaign, spending over a million dollars a month to manipulate American public opinion from a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg. The action starts in 2014 and picks up in 2016, but still takes place a continent away. It deliberately stays away from the hacking and dumping of Democratic party emails, and pointedly does not accuse any Americans of committing crimes.

Part III: United States of America v. Paul J. Manafort, Jr. and Konstantin Kilimnik

An installment with a foot in both worlds indicted Manafort and a Ukraine-based co-conspirator, while also showing Manafort’s corruption of a respected American law firm. This part shows us how Trump’s campaign manager – both his dirty politics and his illicit money – moved from Ukraine to the United States, set in the same time frame as Part II.

Part IV: United States of America v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al

Then another indictment did name the Russian military intelligence officers who stole Democrats’ emails in the spring of 2016, and traced their cooperation with “Organization 1,” which released those emails. This moves the story closer in time to the election, and shows the stolen data moving west from Moscow to Julian Assange’s hideout in London before being dumped on the American public.

Part V: United States of America v. Michael Cohen (a)(b)

The next installment targeted Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a New Yorker like Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty to hiding what appears to have been early 2016 real estate negotiations for a property in Moscow, and of committing apparently unrelated crimes to affect the election illicitly by covering up the candidate’s affairs in the weeks before the election. The Southern District of New York – filing at the same time and in clear cooperation with the special prosecutor, but not working directly for him – overtly said it could prove Trump’s complicity in crimes. Trump is tagged “Individual 1.”

Part VI: United States of America v. Roger Jason Stone, Jr.

Currently in the barrel is Roger Stone, a longtime supporter of Trump’s political career and an old business partner of Manafort. Stone has a colorful backstory of extensive wrongdoing, but his indictment is laser-focused on conversations he had with a known Russian intelligence cutout in the summer and fall of 2016, and the crimes and lies he tried to use to hide those conversations. This indictment mentions the Trump campaign by name, and it includes a lot of specific conduct by individuals who are not named but are nonetheless readily identifiable. The document is succinct, clinical, clear as a bell. But it leaves one omission which leaped out screaming at just about everyone who read the whole document.

[A] senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.

If you’ve taken high school English, you already know the million ruble question. “Was directed”? Who gave that direction? The indictment doesn’t say.

If you’re trying to avoid drawing conclusions the way a newscaster might, you would probably think it was not another senior campaign officer – otherwise, why not refer to them as “Senior Campaign Officer 2”? – but still someone important enough to boss around a senior campaign officer. Maybe if the candidate had adult family members who were not given official positions on the campaign, they would be suspects – though only because they could reasonably be assumed to be speaking for the most likely culprit. The simplest explanation for They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Pseudonymed is the most dramatic one. The candidate is not a senior campaign officer. The candidate is the candidate.

We don’t have all the facts yet. The only thing we can be sure of is that the special prosecutor has, quite deliberately, not yet shown this particular card.

But if you’ve taken high school English, you have a pretty good idea about the answer.

Okay, the genre snob reviewers might say it’s a little heavy-handed. Personally, I’ve always felt that subtlety is overrated.

#donald trump #trump russia #paul manafort #rick gates #konstantin kilimnik #internet research agency #michael cohen #roger stone #mueller investigation

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boglog · 6 years ago

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HoC Onion !

[TW mention of sexual abuse/violence]

I’m foregoing the pros/cons format here but generally-speaking my negative points are still gathered at the top w the highlights near the end.

Obviously, between letting a sex offender have a platform in mass media and potholes, I’d choose the latter. My below crits absolutely are not a demand for Spacey to be brought back and he can die in a fire for all i care. I just wish his character’s absence was not the nº1 reason for this season not making any sense

as far as i can gather, this season’s primary arc is as much about Frank’s death (in lieu of Doug’s) as it is Claire’s emotional and political divorce from Frank while she undergoes your traditional postbreakup analysis of who she was pre Frank and post Frank and were Frank actually there this idea might have legs

...but instead we have Doug ://

the level of intensity that the plot demands cannot be carried by forcing Doug into being a deeper character than he was intended, all the way until the end, he truly just reads as either a pitiful sadist or a henchman. It’s disharmonious and dangerously close to bad.

Frances Underwood makes more sense if Frank dies in episode 8!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She’s literally going to be his reincarnation!!!!!!!

literally...who cares if Doug gets stabbed by Frank’s letter opener? whomst?

Doug can’t be Frank’s proxy, but sans a certain pedoph*le, the plot will just have to suffer.

Other side effects of Doug’s undeserved promotion include but are not limited to:

forcing Doug to share the role of antagonist with the Shepards, yet another New Villain © that feels totally unnecessary and confusing (the Conways at least got two seasons)

Frank’s diary feels forced and out of character for someone decidedly so unsentimental

How does Claire have a bun in the oven when she clearly didnt sleep with Frank for all of season 5 and locked herself in her room while he was being assassinated? How is a Dramatic paternity test not going to be insisted upon in the show’s universe?

fixation on Frank’s will as a McGuffin is really... I don't know boring considering no one cares for the guy? What property of his does claire stand to lose? I’m sure the rich people fandom can speculate but i honestly needed this manifested in the show via some examples instead of the grand abstraction that is The Will bc losing Frank’s assets would set Claire back but it would not directly threaten her presidency. Not to mention that i’m not entirely sure Frank’d have Doug of all people as his sole heir if it didn't serve as revenge against Claire, which just lowers Doug’s importantance even more

Frank never cared for Doug, a largely unlikeable character, which we already knew from the beginning, so Doug’s entire arc is pathetic at best as well as his tangential inclusion in the Cliare v Frank arc

My major problems with Doug’s character began as early as season 4.

Did not understand why they didn't actually have Doug switch sides by joining the Dunbar campaign in earnest in season 4. Like... it’s such an obvious opportunity to Thicken The Plot © that it’s reached this gif levels of dropping the ball:

P much everything about Doug’s character since then is just so.... lacking, while for the last few seasons they give him depth when he magically has empathy for one (1) woman before she dies (possibly as a direct result of his actions). This entire plot about him evaluating why he was so loyal to Frank could've been unpacked whilst he avoids Dunbar finding out about the murders he did commit. I’d rather him having agency than be a flat, troubled underling.

Aright I'm going to stop complaining about Doug. In season 3 and 4, his insecurity over being replaced and his sacrifices for Frank (and subsequent guilt) came close to giving us a real Moment with him as we delve more into how colourless his life outside of work really is. But beyond that, when his character started getting repetitive, there’s very little to compensate for his alternating acts of extreme narcissism/violence versus his childish confusion / self pity when he doesn’t get what he wants.

Anyways I'm basically at a point where I’d be okay if Frank’s long-lost cousin replaced Doug replacing Frank

I’m appreciating the writers’ distinct refrain from plot formats and that the seasons progressively move towards the Underwoods but what if just for circularity and added balance we return to having a full-on reporter B plot in s6? More emphasis on Janine and Tom’s sleuthing, culminating in Tom’s assassination and Janine publishing the tell-all expose against Frank---including a reference to Zoe---that becomes the magnum opus of her career (and Claire using that against Frank). I just think the season needed more balance that Doug, the Shepards and Tom were not offering

The Shepards and Tom, meanwhile, are decidedly banal. First of all, I had a hard time even telling Bill and Tom apart esp given that they were introduced one after the other. All white guys are the same.

Bill just kind of sits around until he has a platform to reference his favourite action movies doesn't he?

Moreover what does Tom do!? he doesn't want power, he doesnt seem to want anything. He’s just kind of there?

Unlike the Conways, the Shepards don’t have a clear goal and are not often in direct conflict with Claire the way Frank and Conway were. They want to control the presidency for money and Claire is always bouncing back from reliving her girlhood to political rivalry w Anette, yes, but what does that mean? What are the consequences? The logistics are so indirect and complicated, what precisely does Anette want? And why does anyone care? The Shepards are extremely boring.

Frank’s asides were purple and long af so I appreciate Claire’s succinct style not to mention her fantastic screen presence. I’m left to wonder, though, if maybe hers and every other aside in HoC is a little too on the nose. Like, they didn't hafta spell it out that the bird in the wall was a representation of Frank’s shadow trapping her, I think we got that

The artistic intercuts to Claire’s troubled childhood wherein a group of bullies coerce her into stripping naked through the forest, while visually stunning and clever for its self-explanatory nature, feel really passive. They don't visually show us any reason for her not to resist, the bullies even let her keep her clothes after cutting them off her so we’re left to wonder why she does nothing....

Claire was raised to be ~proper~ so her resistance (likely) comes in the form of biting, passive-aggressive poise which is hard to get across in a silent montage but it just feels.. weird

Frances Underwood is going to have a very sad childhood

nearly all the Claire flashbacks are cinematic masterpieces and as much i think Claire’s backstory deserves more attention, i also appreciate the minimalism and the choice humanising moments of her adolescence

listen I'm sure we all agree Robin Wright is peak acting but the actor for young Claire, who has the arguably harder task of copying Wright is fantastic

Of all the characters who crop up every season seemingly out of nowhere only to disappear once more once when the plot the Underwoods are done with them, Jane is one of my favourites and possibly one of the greyest characters alive. Smart, mysterious, worldly, a bit of a hippie despite her job, severe despite her sense of humour. Really loves her extremely pedestrian surname. We stan.

Secondary characters rarely get anything close to a backstory on this show, esp ones that were introduced so late. Still, her motivations seem more complicated then others (i.e. betraying Cathy, one of two people she cares about) and I wonder if they deserve a bit more of an explanation. Especially seeing as she has a relationship with every major character.

If anyone deserves a spin-off it might be Jane and her name-dropping career/social life

Cathy faking her own death with a terrible french accent? On stan !!!

Seth teasing Doug even while he’s completely undervalued by everyone around him is a power move

Impressed that they managed three characters named Tom, their distinctly different appearances and the fact that they're almost never in the same POV shots works to separate them.

Claire using the word “female” even facetiously is cringe

Whenever they use the cinema room, the movie they watch is always symbolic. Before the 2017 election, Frank and Claire imitate the characters in Double Indemnity, and this season a pregnant claire watches Rosemary’s Baby. Clever.

i liked the whitehouse tour guide’s inclusion and the cameo from _____ though this season was especially white without their usual token secondary character

So overall i liked season 6 as an exploration of Claire’s character even while it did v little justice to most of the other characters and unfortunately spacey’s absence did affect the storyline

and finally: that cinnamontography !

Not that the series should be pushed past its prime, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see Claire as a mother?

#hoc #house of cards #robin wright #claire underwood #hoc season 6 #house of cards season 6 #u #c #onion post

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Three-ring binders and 14-point font: How Biden preps for a news conference - CNN Politics (CNN) — One day before holding his first formal news conference, President Joe Biden seemed to write the whole thing off. “What press conference?” he joked when asked Wednesday evening how he was preparing. In reality, Biden has been getting ready for days to face the White House press corps, according to multiple people, who all conclude he recognizes the bright spotlight it will garner. Biden has talked his strategy through with several members of his inner circle and even held an informal practice session earlier this week. The event, scheduled for early afternoon in the White House East Room, will be Biden’s most extended period of questioning since becoming president. For all his years in Washington, it’s a moment he hasn’t quite experienced for himself before; senators and vice presidents rarely hold their own solo televised news conferences. He’s taking the step later in his presidency than his recent predecessors, who all convened formal news conferences within their first 40 days in office. The White House officially put Thursday’s event on the calendar in the middle of last week, giving reporters – and themselves – ample time to prepare. For most of Biden’s formal events at the White House, he has spoken directly into a camera mounted with a teleprompter and read from a prepared speech. His encounters with reporters have been more ad-hoc, responding with one or two sentences when lobbed a question at the end of an event or on his way to his helicopter. He has prepared extensively for some of those events, including his prime-time address to the nation earlier this month. He spent days line editing his remarks, ensuring he was striking the appropriate tone while using exactly the right words and phrases. Biden did not want to make a single mistake, he told others. A news conference, however, is a different prospect. While Biden is expected to open with prepared remarks, the question-and-answer session won’t be scripted. To help punctuate the event with agenda-driven news, Biden plans to announce a new vaccination target after reaching his initial 100 million shots goal well ahead of schedule. That fits within his desired messaging about the pandemic response. But the remainder of the event will be dictated by reporters’ questions that are certain to veer from the White House’s preferred topic of confronting the pandemic. To prepare for the event, aides have written sets of talking points for potential questions on a wide array of topics. White House officials expect a number of questions to arise on immigration, but have also been preparing for a number of other topics, from the state of bipartisanship to the future of the Senate filibuster to a decision on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As he has before other major public appearances, Biden has taken home briefing books containing policy positions and framing for potential answers. Biden’s three-ring binders are typically organized by topic, with tabs separating the sections and the contents typed out in 14-point font. He has read them in the evenings and returned the next day with feedback for his team. So, too, have Biden’s advisers worked to avoid situations that would cause the President’s temper to flare, as it did a few times on the campaign trail when faced with questioning he didn’t like. Among former staffers and people who have worked closely with him, Biden’s penchant for defensiveness when challenged is well-known. He once lashed out at a voter who questioned him about his son, Hunter, calling the 83-year-old Iowan a “damn liar.” Another time he called a younger voter in New Hampshire a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” when she asked a question about his electability. He’s gotten into verbal spats with reporters as well when questioned about his family or, early in his administration, about his goal of administering 100 million vaccines within 100 days. “Come on, gimme a break, man!” he said. While advisers do not believe occasional flashes of anger are necessary a bad thing for Biden, they do not believe his news conference should be marked by open hostility in the same way President Donald Trump’s were. Part of avoiding that is providing Biden as many potential questions as possible, aides say, in the hopes he feels prepared for whatever might come his way and not be caught off guard in a way that puts him on the defensive. How questions are phrased – which, during a presidential news conference, is often quite pointed – could also cause Biden’s temper to flare. Asked by reporters this week how Biden was preparing, press secretary Jen Psaki joked he was “looking at your Twitters and seeing what’s on your mind.” “He is, you know, thinking about it,” she said aboard Air Force One. “It’s an opportunity for him to speak to the American people, obviously directly through the coverage, directly through all of you. And so I think he’s thinking about what he wants to say, what he wants to convey, where he can provide updates, and, you know, looking forward to the opportunity to engage with a free press.” PHOTO: Drew Angerer/Getty Images Like his predecessors, Biden has been provided succinct talking points that attempt to boil down complex issues in ways that would be easily communicated to a general audience. That has not always been Biden’s strong suit. He sometimes meanders into the inner complexities of matters or uses confusing turns of phrase to describe a thought or idea. Since his presidential campaign last year, he has noticeably worked to curtail those kind of tangents, telling audiences that he doesn’t want to bore them. “It’s gonna be, like, Sanskrit to people listening here,” he said when answering a question about last year’s delayed transition during an interview with ABC News last week. “I’m going to get into trouble,” he said during a CNN town hall in February. “I’m supposed to only talk two minutes in an answer.” Indeed, keeping Biden succinct has been a perennial challenge of the people who work for him, and a press conference provides precisely the venue where brevity is viewed as an advantage – but where lengthy answers have befallen his predecessors. In his recent memoir, former President Barack Obama said he “enjoyed the unscripted nature of live press conferences” but admitted to sometimes droning on about policy matters. “I succumbed to an old pattern, giving exhaustive explanations of each facet of the issue under debate,” he wrote of a health care news conference in 2009 that became overshadowed by an answer he delivered about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home in Massachusetts. For all presidents, news conferences present the unique challenge of facing questions that have little to do with that day’s preferred topic. Biden has taken extra pains to remain strictly on message during his first two months in office, rarely veering away from taking about his efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic. But events this week alone illustrate the difficulty in sticking to that message. Two mass shootings that have left 18 Americans dead, an influx of migrants on the Southern border and fresh provocation from North Korea all have little to do with the agenda priorities he has worked ardently to promote. A news conference will only exacerbate the difficulty in remaining on message as Biden is forced to answer key questions on topics he hasn’t discussed at length since taking office. Questioned on one such issue this week – diversity within his Cabinet, specifically focused on Asian Americans – Biden offered a flash of defensiveness. “We have the most diverse Cabinet in history. We have a lot of Asian Americans who are in the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level,” Biden told reporters in Ohio, before raising his hands to add, “Our Cabinet is formed.” Source link Orbem News #14point #Biden #binders #CNN #Conference #font #news #Politics #preps #Threering

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

Text

Three-ring binders and 14-point font: How Biden preps for a news conference

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/three-ring-binders-and-14-point-font-how-biden-preps-for-a-news-conference/

Three-ring binders and 14-point font: How Biden preps for a news conference

“What press conference?” he joked when asked Wednesday evening how he was preparing.

In reality, Biden has been getting ready for days to face the White House press corps, according to multiple people, who all conclude he recognizes the bright spotlight it will garner. Biden has talked his strategy through with several members of his inner circle and even held an informal practice session earlier this week.

The event, scheduled for early afternoon in the White House East Room, will be Biden’s most extended period of questioning since becoming president. For all his years in Washington, it’s a moment he hasn’t quite experienced for himself before; senators and vice presidents rarely hold their own solo televised news conferences.

He’s taking the step later in his presidency than his recent predecessors, who all convened formal news conferences within their first 40 days in office. The White House officially put Thursday’s event on the calendar in the middle of last week, giving reporters — and themselves — ample time to prepare.

For most of Biden’s formal events at the White House, he has spoken directly into a camera mounted with a teleprompter and read from a prepared speech. His encounters with reporters have been more ad-hoc, responding with one or two sentences when lobbed a question at the end of an event or on his way to his helicopter.

He has prepared extensively for some of those events, including his prime-time address to the nation earlier this month. He spent days line editing his remarks, ensuring he was striking the appropriate tone while using exactly the right words and phrases. Biden did not want to make a single mistake, he told others.

A news conference, however, is a different prospect. While Biden is expected to open with prepared remarks, the question-and-answer session won’t be scripted.

To help punctuate the event with agenda-driven news, Biden plans to announce a new vaccination target after reaching his initial 100 million shots goal well ahead of schedule. That fits within his desired messaging about the pandemic response.

But the remainder of the event will be dictated by reporters’ questions that are certain to veer from the White House’s preferred topic of confronting the pandemic.

To prepare for the event, aides have written sets of talking points for potential questions on a wide array of topics. White House officials expect a number of questions to arise on immigration, but have also been preparing for a number of other topics, from the state of bipartisanship to the future of the Senate filibuster to a decision on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

As he has before other major public appearances, Biden has taken home briefing books containing policy positions and framing for potential answers. Biden’s three-ring binders are typically organized by topic, with tabs separating the sections and the contents typed out in 14-point font. He has read them in the evenings and returned the next day with feedback for his team.

Temper?

So, too, have Biden’s advisers worked to avoid situations that would cause the President’s temper to flare, as it did a few times on the campaign trail when faced with questioning he didn’t like. Among former staffers and people who have worked closely with him, Biden’s penchant for defensiveness when challenged is well-known.

He once lashed out at a voter who questioned him about his son, Hunter, calling the 83-year-old Iowan a “damn liar.” Another time he called a younger voter in New Hampshire a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” when she asked a question about his electability.

He’s gotten into verbal spats with reporters as well when questioned about his family or, early in his administration, about his goal of administering 100 million vaccines within 100 days.

“Come on, gimme a break, man!” he said.

While advisers do not believe occasional flashes of anger are necessary a bad thing for Biden, they do not believe his news conference should be marked by open hostility in the same way President Donald Trump’s were.

Part of avoiding that is providing Biden as many potential questions as possible, aides say, in the hopes he feels prepared for whatever might come his way and not be caught off guard in a way that puts him on the defensive. How questions are phrased — which, during a presidential news conference, is often quite pointed — could also cause Biden’s temper to flare.

Asked by reporters this week how Biden was preparing, press secretary Jen Psaki joked he was “looking at your Twitters and seeing what’s on your mind.”

“He is, you know, thinking about it,” she said aboard Air Force One. “It’s an opportunity for him to speak to the American people, obviously directly through the coverage, directly through all of you. And so I think he’s thinking about what he wants to say, what he wants to convey, where he can provide updates, and, you know, looking forward to the opportunity to engage with a free press.”

Talking points

Like his predecessors, Biden has been provided succinct talking points that attempt to boil down complex issues in ways that would be easily communicated to a general audience.

That has not always been Biden’s strong suit. He sometimes meanders into the inner complexities of matters or uses confusing turns of phrase to describe a thought or idea. Since his presidential campaign last year, he has noticeably worked to curtail those kind of tangents, telling audiences that he doesn’t want to bore them.

“It’s gonna be, like, Sanskrit to people listening here,” he said when answering a question about last year’s delayed transition during an interview with ABC News last week.

“I’m going to get into trouble,” he said during a Appradab town hall in February. “I’m supposed to only talk two minutes in an answer.”

Indeed, keeping Biden succinct has been a perennial challenge of the people who work for him, and a press conference provides precisely the venue where brevity is viewed as an advantage — but where lengthy answers have befallen his predecessors.

In his recent memoir, former President Barack Obama said he “enjoyed the unscripted nature of live press conferences” but admitted to sometimes droning on about policy matters.

“I succumbed to an old pattern, giving exhaustive explanations of each facet of the issue under debate,” he wrote of a health care news conference in 2009 that became overshadowed by an answer he delivered about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home in Massachusetts.

For all presidents, news conferences present the unique challenge of facing questions that have little to do with that day’s preferred topic. Biden has taken extra pains to remain strictly on message during his first two months in office, rarely veering away from taking about his efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

News events

But events this week alone illustrate the difficulty in sticking to that message. Two mass shootings that have left 18 Americans dead, an influx of migrants on the Southern border and fresh provocation from North Korea all have little to do with the agenda priorities he has worked ardently to promote.

A news conference will only exacerbate the difficulty in remaining on message as Biden is forced to answer key questions on topics he hasn’t discussed at length since taking office.

Questioned on one such issue this week — diversity within his Cabinet, specifically focused on Asian Americans — Biden offered a flash of defensiveness.

“We have the most diverse Cabinet in history. We have a lot of Asian Americans who are in the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level,” Biden told reporters in Ohio, before raising his hands to add, “Our Cabinet is formed.”

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/biden-trump-campaigns-get-ready-for-debate-news-sports-jobs/

Biden, Trump campaigns get ready for debate | News, Sports, Jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ahead of the first debate between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, each campaign is promising a stark contrast in policy, personality and preparation.

Trump has decided to skip formal preparation, though he said Sunday that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his former 2016 primary rival, Chris Christie, are helping him.

“We had a little debate prep before we came here,” Trump told reporters as Giuliani and Christie looked on in the press briefing room at the White House.

And while Biden’s team believes the significance of the debate may be exaggerated, the Democratic nominee has been aggressively preparing to take on the president.

Biden’s campaign has been holding mock debate sessions featuring Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser and former White House general counsel, playing the role of Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the preparations who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Bauer has not actually donned a Trump costume in line with Trump stand-ins from previous years, but he is representing his style and expected strategy.

“I’m sure the president will throw everything he can at (Biden). My guess is that they’re preparing for that — bombarding him with insults and weird digressions,” said Jay Carney, a former aide to Biden and President Barack Obama.

Trump and Biden are scheduled to meet on the debate stage for the first time tonight at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The 90-minute event, moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace, is the first of three scheduled presidential debates. Vice President Mike Pence and California Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, will debate in October.

For some, the debates represent the most important moments in the 2020 campaign’s closing days, a rare opportunity for millions of voters to compare the candidates’ policies and personalities side-by-side on prime-time television. Trump trails Biden in the polls, a reality that gives the president an urgent incentive to change the direction of the contest on national television if he can.

Others, including those close to Biden’s campaign, do not expect the debates to fundamentally change the race no matter what happens, given the pandemic and the economy. They also point to high-profile debates in past elections that were thought to be game-changing moments at the time but that ultimately had little lasting effect.

Those with knowledge of Biden’s preparations suggest he will not take the fight to Trump if he can avoid it. But on Saturday, at least, he was on the attack when he discussed his strategy on MSNBC.

“I’m prepared to go out and make my case as to why I think he’s failed and why I think the answers I have to proceed will help the American people, the American economy and make us safer internationally,” Biden said, arguing that Trump won’t convince voters with broadsides because “the people know the president is a liar.”

He also compared Trump to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, saying, “He’s sort of like Goebbels. You say the lie long enough, keep repeating, repeating, repeating, it becomes common knowledge.”

While Biden has said he will try to be a fact checker of sorts on stage, the Democrat is being advised to avoid direct confrontations and instead redirect the conversation to more familiar campaign themes of unity and issues that matter most to voters: the economy, health care and the pandemic.

“Arguing over facts, litigating whether what he’s saying is accurate, that is not winning to Biden,” said Jen Psaki, a former Obama aide who is close to Biden’s team. “This is an opportunity to speak directly to the American people. His objective should be to speak directly to them, but not be pulled in by Trump. That is hard.”

Trump aides and allies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said heading into the weekend that Trump had not been in formal preparations. The president offered mixed messages Sunday with his confirmation that Giuliani and Christie were prepping him, essentially combining to play the role of Biden. Yet Trump downplayed the sessions.

“Sometimes you can go too much in that stuff,” Trump said, arguing that he defeated Hillary Clinton four years ago despite her extensive debate preparation.

The president added that he takes far more questions from the White House press corps than Biden takes from the reporters covering his campaign, arguing those sessions with reporters are a form of debate prep.

Trump offered a preview of his approach when mused that Biden’s previous debate performances were influenced by medication. He’s offered no evidence. First in a tweet and later at the White House, Trump said he would demand that Biden take a drug test and that he would take one as well.

Trump’s message seemed to be an attempt at both tripping up Biden and preemptively offering an explanation to his supporters if the Democratic nominee has a strong performance.

Biden, in Delaware on Sunday, laughed and declined to comment when asked about Trump’s baseless assertions.

Privately some aides and allies are worried that Trump’s lack of formal preparation will lead him to fall into the same hubris trap as other incumbents in their first general election debate. Obama, for example, famously struggled in his first matchup against Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

But other Trump backers are confident that the president is ready to handle any tough questions or pushback from Biden.

“The debates matter,” said Lara Trump, a senior adviser to the campaign and the president’s daughter-in-law. “Donald Trump certainly did a great job on the debates (in 2016) and I think this will be no different.”

Lara Trump also seemed to simultaneously raise and lower expectations for Biden.

“Joe Biden spent a lot of time in his basement to study up. He’s been in this game for 47 years. I assume he’ll do OK,” she said. “Quite frankly, the bar has been lowered so much for Joe Biden that if he stays awake for the whole thing it’s like maybe he won.”

The mixed messages were in line with those of Trump’s allies who spent much of the year raising questions about Biden’s physical and mental strength, while in recent days trying to cast him as a strong and experienced debater facing a relative neophyte in Trump.

A former reality show star, the president is keenly aware of the power and pitfalls of live television. Aides say that he is acutely mindful of the power of “moments” to define how a debate is perceived and that he intends to make his share of them happen.

Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and onetime national Democratic chair, said Biden must fashion a succinct, debate-stage version of his message since the spring: Draw a straight line from Trump’s personal deficiencies to his handling of the pandemic, its economic fallout and the national reckoning on race and then explain why a Biden presidency would be different.

“Trump’s just looking for a Hail Mary here,” McAuliffe said. “He knows he’s in trouble.”

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progressiveparty · 5 years ago

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America is socialist, more so than you think

Graphic by Ashley Marshall / The Vermilion When historians look back on this time in history — especially this election — they will probably do so with a particular sense of interest in the amount of political turbulence we seem to have experienced. There looks to be a pattern of political turmoil at the start of a new century, and this century is no different. In 1700, the War of Spanish Succession overtook Europe; in 1803, the Napoleonic Wars, again, overtook Europe; and, in 1914, the world witnessed the beginning of the first of two world wars. Though these skirmishes were ones of munitions, battle lines and treaties, the skirmishes that we find in the U.S. today are over ideology. “What line of political thought should be our guide in resolving disputes, divvying resources or even identifying what are and aren’t human rights?” we ask ourselves. The top contenders vying for dominance in American political thought today are socialism and capitalism (a binary, black and white choice in true spirit to American democracy), wherein the president, proudly standing arms akimbo in staunch capitalist spirit, proclaims “America will never be a socialist country” to the applause of many. And diametrically opposed to him stands a candidate looking to take the presidency with a succinct, yet powerful message that has radiated cross-country. “Not me. Us.” As much as the president or his party would like to be contrary, America is a socialist country. Many programs that millions of people rely on, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and government housing, are all socialist programs; they redistribute wealth to take care of those who need it. Seeing how hard older people advocate, donate, vote, scream, yell and fight tooth and nail to keep their Social Security and Medicare running and flowing, it’s no wonder why there is a movement to expand them. In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities , “Social Security benefits play a vital role in reducing poverty in every state, and they lift more Americans above the poverty line than any other program.” They go on to say further, “Without Social Security, the poverty rate for those aged 65 and over would meet or exceed 40 percent in one-third of states; with Social Security, it is less than 10 percent in two-thirds of states.” America is socialist, just not for everyone. I have heard dissent from older people on this point, though. Their concern, as with a lot of rhetoric from the right, is that they have “earned” their bit of socialism by working for it; that they put into the system for decades and are now reaping the fruits of their labor. As wonderful and idealistic as that is, it’s not true. Sure, they worked, and I’ve no doubt very hard, but the money taken out of their paycheck was not put in a nice, neat little account in the treasury labeled “For John Doe, upon retirement.” Absolutely not, that money was sent directly to an elderly This Piece Originally Appeared in www.thevermilion.com Read the full article

#BernieSanders

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sweetlifetownsville · 6 years ago

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The Massive Difference Between 'Buy Local' And 'Local Buy' ... How Mayor Mullet Has Played The Townsville Business Community For Mugs.

Jenny Hill has traded on a trick of language to fool Townsville into thinking she is a champion for local workers and business, when the exact opposite is the case. It all revolves around the Local Government Association of Queenslands business arm called Local Buy and it is a deliberate play on words to line the coffers of the LGAQ. As The Pie reports, this one looks murky indeed. Also, the Townsville Bulletin goes beyond beyond parody, with one of their biggest side-splitting bungles yet and overall, it was a week you couldnt make up unless of course, youre the Bulletin. And is rebel councillor Paul The Angry Ant Jacob shaping up to take on The Mullet well, he may well have delusions of popularity and adequacy for a tilt in 2020 but there will be one powerful group that will try to block him. Also, the funniest comment on a news story this week comes from the most unlikely place and by popular demand, our regular pictorial gallery from Trumpistan. But first The shared thought-fart of the week belongs to One Notions P Hanson and the Katteronics R Katter. No sooner had Hanson quavered tremulously over the radio that people on the dole should be put to work catching cane toads at ten cents a pop, than Katter jumped on this creaky bandwagon and and upped the ante.

Bob Katter (right). Columnist James Jeffrey once wrote the Bob uses words like a cliff in Norway uses lemmings, and during the week, the member for Kennedy obliged with proof when he gurgled, giggled, sneered and croaked out his proposal that kids should catch the toads for 40 cents a time and be armed with air rifles to get the job done. It all makes one think that both Hanson and Katter are still smarting from their latest rejection letters from The Mensa Society, but the ever-practical Bentley thinks no matter how the creatures are caught, there might be a bit of a flaw in the idea.

Gosh, kids could be recruited under the banner of The Toady Army oh, hang on, maybe not, Townsville City councillors might sue for copyright. Is The LGAQs Nice Little Earner LOCAL BUY Costing Townsville A Motza? Some well credentialed business folks around town at increasingly frustrated with the little-understood Queensland Local Government Associations business arm Buy Local. And on the face of what two well-placed identities have told The Pie, the whole set-up looks ripe for rorts of all sorts, even progressing to very serious corruption unless proper transparency is in place. First this landed in the Nests inbox from a respected and successful Townsville businessman. Just wanted to highlighta program that shows that Mayor Mullet cannot only stuff Townsville as Mayor, she is also doing it as a Director of LGAQ against local businesses who payrent/rates and employ people.Townsville City Council is among those Queensland Local Councils using LGAQ Local Buy to avoid going to tender locally, allowing them toappoint out of town contractors with the LGAQ taking a cut (understood to be 10% of any contract, which of course is just added on to what the cost would otherwise be). Townsville businesses who were previously and successfully supplying services to Council have lost out under this scheme with many being forced to the business and had to put off staff. Any complaints about the dire situation made to Richard The Screaming Midget Beckett (no longer with the council met with threats that they would be locked out of any Council tenders in the future all under the culture from the Impailer and Mayor Mullet . To be an approved Local buy supplier you have to apply and I think pay an amount to be approved and there is a period of 5 years in which other similar other local businesses cant even apply. Momentum for change must be building as this excerpt from a letter from Local Government Minister Stirling Hinchcliffe indicates, after he received a petition complaining about the situation.

Also, has anyone questioned the $400k yearly service agreement between T.C.C . and the LGAQ and does the Mullet disclose her Directors fees from LGAQ ? As a LGAQ director, Jenny Hill, pops into her purse $31,000 p.a ta very muchly. Under the circumstances, that could be seen as blood money, since she must know the hardship this state-wide legalised rort is costing Townsvilles well-being. The Nest has received a number of complaints about Local Buy, but until this week, The Pie didnt have a coherent idea of what was happening so to get an independent assessment, The Magpie asked a business professional well versed in both business and LG matters to give this over-view. Given the current climate of spite and uncertainty, the person asked to remain anonymous. Local Buy is flawed in many aspects, even if one were to concede that its creation was well intentioned.Lets give them the benefit of the doubt to start with procurement can be complex and costly. Good procurement practice (eg. due diligence, evaluation requiring technical expertise etc) could be provided as a shared service, so that smaller organisations can in effect benefit from the capabilities of a larger organisation able to hire the appropriately skilled personnel. Theres also the prospect of negotiating better aggregate rates on the basis of aggregated volume. Thats the theory. The reality is that it is nowhere near this. Im not sure about the 5-year protection racket claim, but I do know that getting on the list involves not much more than paying some fees and ticking some boxes. This means a local council is more or less free to then pick and choose from the list, subject to the requirements of the LG Act. Magpie note: This means that the TCC can choose from a list based solely on price, which often means true locals cannot compete. This raises a moral question of whether it is more desirable to pay perhaps a bit more locally and materially contribute to a more vibrant local economy than to simply save some money because outside organisations that make no real contributions to our city. And it is this part of the system that is clearly open to corrupt influences. The Pie knows of none, but its an open invitation to it. Local Buy of course takes a Commission, from memory 10%, from registered suppliers when they win work, so in the end the potential benefits of savings arent materialised. Suppliers actually add the commission in. Theres also real doubt as to whether the Local Buy organisation actually has any real procurement capability. As a result, the tendency is for increasingly standardised or vanilla offerings, because thats the nature of generalised procedures run by people with limited specialisation and knowledge of local requirements or specialist areas eg, technology. Local Buy is a misnomer, of course. It neither compels nor guarantees procurement by a local authority from suppliers located within this authoritys area. Having said that, what goes to constituting local is never actually an easy question to answer, which makes a mockery of the entire buy local trope. One other thing on the Local Buy (and council procurement in general): theres a category called standing offer arrangement. This is basically a set of approved rates for services / products that a council can basically go back to time after time, without going out to tender. In theory, not a bad thing for pencils, paper clips and such like but as is always the case in procurement easily abused or at the very least, mis-used. The Magpie thanks the author for that succinct summary. It would certainly appear that we are being dudded one way or the other, but two things raise the Magpies curiosity: what do we get for our $400k annual contribution to the LGAQ? And noted in hindsight, just as this Local Buy system was being introduced, Mayor Mullet started dropping in the odd buy local slogan the timing appears to havde been there to fool people when they started hearing about local buy. Low level chicanery at its worst, spread about at the very time it now appears the council Jenny Hill heads was doing exactly the opposite. For Jenny Hill to trumpet the buy local cry is the height of hypocrisy, anyway. One of the very first acts she did when first elected mayor was to buy her new mayoral car (a top of the line Holden at around $70-$80,000) IN BRISBANE AND STIFFED THE RATEPAYERS TO HAVE IT SHIPPED HERE. And why was this? Because she had had a previous fight with Tony Ireland of TI Holden about repairs her previous vehicle, which she had mildly pranged into a gutter _ Ireland point blank refused her request to illegally mark it down as an accident insurance claim, which it clearly wasnt. Even although the Ireland company agreed to match the Brisbane price, Jenny Hill went ahead with the Brisbane deal anyway. Shes a sweet piece of work sometimes.

So if youre ever thinking if its true that local business people are fearful of spiteful retribution if they disagree with this civic leader, just keep that in mind. And Heres An Interesting Thought Wonder if Local Buy had anything to do with the controversial choice of pipe for the new Burdekin line, and did Local Buytb have anything to do with the pipeline jobs that went to Adelaide in stead of the promised boon to Townsville? Just askin. ya know. Yes The Astonisher Has Gone Beyond Parody The satirists lot is not a happy one lately. I mean, how do you make fun of something like the Bulletin that is so unintentionally crazy-funny to start with? Is this a secret plot to spike The Magpies guns? Last Tuesday, this appeared on page 16 as the editorial page of the Townsville Bulletin.

This is a stupendous blunder in a Townsville publication, that through their typical technical ineptness, the hard copy paper had published THE CAIRNS POST EDITORIAL PAGE the community voice (supposedly) of any newspaper. The editorial was of bugger all interest here, as well as being pretty stupid, anyway. It even had the Cairns deputy iditor signing it under the Townsville Bulletin masthead.

There was a time when this bit of prize fuckwittery wouldve caused an uproar, given the sensitive feelings between the two cities, but it appears weve been bludgeoned into not caring about the Bulletin anyway. Honestly, if it were not for the circle-jerk leadership of this city, the mayor and the head of Townsville Enterprise would be so incensed by this particular A community without a responsible newspaper is like a beautiful woman with only one eye (apologies to Brillat-Savarin). But still the harmless laughs kept coming. There was this story

which included this quote from one of the ladies of the night about southern blow-in blow-job competition on the streets: Theres false advertising, they send out a photo of a really hot looking chick and when they get there its some frumpy number. The girls have had a gutful of it This has been brewing for ages. Yknow, Thd Magpie thinks the lady might have a point. What sort of deceptive, conniving, immoral low-life would stoop to such trickery. Bet it would never happen in the Townsville Bulletin, would it? Huh, what? oh, oops.

But even when credibility-destroying cock-ups are right before their eyes, they still get into the paper. One should feel sorry for a decent old-time journo like Tony Raggatt, having his pic plastered between these clearly conflicting claims (the list clearly being nothing to with him).

But The Astonisher makes it easy to err take the piss.

This reeks of wreaking havoc on the language. Is The Angry Ant About To Up The Ante?

Paul Jacob Paul Jacob knows a cushy number when he sees one he is after all a Townsville City councillor. But it would seem our man is a tad more ambitious. The Ant broke ranks against Mayor Mullets Adani airstrip rort, conveniently just before he made an abortive run for state as a Labor-aligned but not endorsed candidate. Ever since, he has been regarded as a rebel ever since among the council sheeple and certainly by head shepherd Jennifer. So when he was front-paged in todays Astonisher

calling for an easing of water restrictions, many a pundit including The Pie, immediately assumed this was the signal for a Jacob joust for the top office in Walker Street. And that will be tricky. Unless Mayor Mullet abdicates and retires to malta, or runs on a Labor senate ticket her dearest wish but said not be shared by those who could make it so Clr Jacob will come under some intense pressure and even be flattered with promises of future glory by the Labor Party. Because despite her simpering shy denials of being a Labor mayor, Jenny Hill is, and is seen as, just that, and mainly by Labor itself. The party back room boys reckon mayor is as far as shes going, so they wouldnt rock what they see as a returnable vote boat in local government in March 2020. They know poor old Dolan Hayes will need Ashley and Martin soon with all the hair-tearing last thing the already beleaguered mayor needs is a Labor split ticket. But trust the Bulletin to come galumphing on to this particular scene with a few editorial bromides, but the best being this hilarious piece of total unselfawareness in an iditorial, which clearly is not Astonisher editorial policy.

Take your own advice, dearie. But Does The Pie Detect A Sly Dissension In The Senior Ranks At The Paper? Although The Pie doubts the feeling is mutual, he has great respect for the old-style work and values of John Ando Anderson he offers a very readable weekly service to the valuable rural readership of the paper, which clearly involves actual field work, and not just a few phone calls or, heaven forbid, lazy Facebook trolling. Now, Ando is nothing if not a steadfastly loyal News Ltd man; he has reason to be, the company spared no expense successfully defending him against spurious charge brought by the DPP over a jail interview almost 20 years ago. But The Pie couldnt help wonder if he wasnt trying to get a subtle message into the editors ear when writing today about Townsvilles landscape of words, waffle and impossible dreams.

Gotta love that line Pep talks are good for morale, but in the end, they start to sound like the boy crying wolf. And that, Ando, described PRECISELY the Bulletin editorial policy. very funny. Clever too, if The Pie is right. Pop in and have a chat to , will you? For all of us. Ghosts Of Iditors Past:Theres A Reason Hes Called Typo Gleeson

Typo Gleeson leaving an unsuccessful job interview as editor of Tailor & Cutter magazine. If you believe Sky Newss squeak fest hosted by Peter Typo Gleeson (sorry, only kidding) you might think David Crisafulli is returning to town for a special job and the head of TEL has changed her name.During the week, ww were treated too a hindenberg of hot air when Lil Patty OCallaghan and state opposition pollie Kid Crisafulli fielded a number of Dorothy Dixers from Typo. But one would think it was Typo in charge of the on-screen titling.

And when they got around to realising their mistake, in typical Typo fashion, they got that wrong too.

And Another Thing .. Best comment of the week goes to the bloke who replied to a totally embarrassing piece of nonesense in the paper about whether we are a friendly city. He suggested that of course we are we even wave to you from the roof of the Cleveland Detention Centre as you drive in from the airport. Luv it! Just what such a space-waste story deserved. Finally Its Been Another week of Wall-To-Wall umm .. Wall And we start with Mexico announcing the obvious

A Final Dad Joke (Well, Worked As A Granddad Joke)

Oh dear sorry. .. Thats it for another week, were off and running for 2019, its promising to be a cracker. There are a wider variety of folks taking to comments of late, keep it up, some are thoughtful, some hilarious, so entertain and be entertained. And if you have anything left over from the festive season, a donation to support The Magpies Nest will be of great assistance, the how to donate button is below. http://www.townsvillemagpie.com.au/the-massive-difference-between-buy-local-and-local-buy-how-mayor-mullet-has-played-the-townsville-business-community-for-mugs/

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