#but the truth is you don't

[lonelyoleander]

fellas is it gay to um uhhh.. um.... uhh hhhhh ?????

[sol1056]

My father was the son of a carpenter (no HS degree) and a nurse (associate’s degree). His parents couldn’t afford college for him, but he scored high enough on college exams that a state school offered him a scholarship. He ended up enlisting for three reasons.

One, he lost his scholarship (D in history, geez, Dad). Two, with a draft afoot, enlisting was the only way to make sure he had any choice (however slim) in what he’d do and be. Three, the military paid for his bachelors, his master’s, and his doctorate -- and that education is what got him out of that small southern Georgia town and into teaching at some of the most prestigious universities on the US’ eastern seaboard. 

Enlisting has always been trade-off. If you come from middle class or higher, then you probably don’t need major financial assistance for your education, or a down-payment on a car or house. Even if you're legacy military, once your family’s middle-class, the tangible benefits aren’t as great, relatively.

But if your parents are farmers, factory workers, miners, or similar labor-intensive blue-collar workers and it’s looking like your only choice is to follow them down that same road or learn to be a waitress? The military has been, for several generations now, your best ticket out of a dead-end town, job, or life.

A lot of the time, it’s your only ticket.

The whole point of the GI Bill was to make enlisting worth the risk of dying in a foreign land for some rich man’s war. You put in so many years of your life and (assuming you survived), you'd walk out well-trained or even well-educated, with good job prospects and a social network of fellow former military to help you land softly. You’d have decent healthcare, a good pension, and access to a fair home loan. (And if you didn’t survive? The VA provides for children & widow/ers, so at least your family would see the benefits.)

Yes, to everything @johnbrownfunclubofficial and @natalieironside​ said above, because all of that is true. (Hell, it’s not much better when you’re a dependent, although the enlisted-wives and officer-wives bullshit is lot better than it used to be.) But it’s also true that depending on where you’re coming from, sometimes that trade-off is worth the price.

But we have to unpack that to see the real problem: we have no other consistent and reliable means for people to hoist themselves out of a lack of generational wealth or skills. There’s no broad-based funding for kids in poorer counties or states to get solid training or education (let alone with room & board provided plus a small stipend!).

The challenge of “if you want to do X, go learn how to do it” doesn’t work, if you’re coming from that far down. Learn it? From whom? And you pay for that training, how? And who pays for you while you do it? Education of any kind costs money and time. You may have the time, but without the money? It remains a pipedream.

Does the military take advantage of this? Absolutely. Blocking all other options for kids with minimal/limited prospects is by design. The US military complex absolutely wants those kids to see no way out except to hope they can survive that war in a foreign land fighting on behalf of rich men who couldn’t give a damn what those kids did, and will, sacrifice.

But now we come to a parallel truth.

This is a less-discussed but important contributing factor in the pushback on universal basic income. The Pentagon (and American imperialism and its wealthy cronies) are fully aware that, given any other choice, the average blue-collar, labor-raised, lower-class kid would not join the military. In short: basic income would cause enlistment to plummet.

It’s not difficult math. Beyond even the truth of the internal tyranny of the DoJ and the UCMJ and just the sheer madness of the insular culture known as ‘living on base’, most human beings prefer careers where “high chance of potentially being killed” is not in the job listing. And I’d be willing to bet an even larger number of human beings, given any other choice, would want nothing to do with a job that requires “potentially killing other human beings.”

As for those who would, they can just go be cops.

One time in Army we got into a big nerf gun fight inside our building and a bunch of people got really mad and decreed that all kinetic weapons including nerf guns fit the legal definition of firearms under the UCMJ and made us go secure our nerf guns in the armory.

I hid mine tho. I said this is goddamn America and we got a second ammendment.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

going through my old journals as part of therapy homework and i'm reading a section written in the emotional wreckage of a full-on breakdown when i get hit with this line:

There is never a satisfying answer to ‘Why didn’t they love me?’

like wow babe. good fucking point

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Look what we've become.

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[klaufir]

quick PSA before pride month ends

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[inkskinned]

before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.

you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"

and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.

it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.

you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.

in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.

the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.

you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.

after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.

the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.

you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.

[youchangedmedestiel]

You know what? Dean deserved to be fucked hard and raised from perdition.

[foreignswaggersession]

yes louis and armand had filthy kinky sex between this:

and this:

y'all felt this, don't lie. feel free to argue with the wall. and don't just take it from me:

[theluckiestlb]

girl...WHEN??? WHERE????

what are you talking about???? when you kept him isolated for 14 years??? when you robbed him of bodily autonomy???? when you exposed him to his mother's corpse to akumatize him, TWICE????

wait, wait—OH you mean when he was terrified for his life, literally begging you to stop after you beat him up. my bad.

no? OH, you mean when you forced him to leave the country and the love of his life.

Huh.

[edorazzi]

Page 28 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Felix's grand, extensively-researched plan of deception gets off to a less than impressive start... 🌹🌙

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[egophiliac]

LEON

LEON YOUR EYEBALLS

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji goes to Lotus Pier (No relation to the AU of the same name)

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[lil-motherfockin-ravioli]

[la-pheacienne]

George Martin, 2013: "In a very basic level winter is coming for all of us. I think that’s one of the things that art is concerned with: the awareness of our own mortality. “Valar morghulis” – “All men must die”. That shadow lies over our world and will until medical science gives us all immortality… but I don’t think it makes it necessarily a pessimistic world. Not any more pessimistic than the real world we live in. We’re here for a short time and we should be conscious of our own mortality, but the important thing is that love, compassion and empathy with other human beings is still possible. Laughter is still possible! Even laughter in the face of death… The struggle to make the world a better place… We have things like war, murder and rape… horrible things that still exist, but we don’t have to accept them, we can fight the good fight. The fight to eliminate those things.There is darkness in the world, but I don’t think we necessarily need to give way to despair. One of the great things that Tolkien says in Lord of The Rings is “despair is the ultimate crime”. That’s the ultimate failing of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, that he despairs of ever being able to defeat Sauron. We should not despair. We should not go gentle into that good night".

JRR Tolkien, 1962 : "One reviewer once said, this is a jolly jolly book, all the right boys come home [...]- this isn't true of course, he can't have read the story. [...] Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (He quotes Simone de Beauvoir) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings".

"Lotr is all rainbows and unicorns and Asoiaf is nihilistic and grimdark". Wrong, and wrong. In all its hope and radiance, lotr often gets very dark, and despite all the death and suffering, the hopeful moments in asoiaf shine bright. The meeting point of these two is this: having hope while in despair, and even better, refusing to give up because you have to go on despite not having any hope left.

[vaguely-concerned]

fun detail I only put into context after seeing the post-fade jail romance scenes with all the companions: lucanis is the only one where rook is surprised when they realize he's there as he starts talking, because they didn't hear him come in haha. (Bellara and Neve knock before entering, like relatively normal people fhsda. Harding's scene starts in medias res but from the staging my vibe is that she and Rook entered the room together. Taash walks into the room ahead of Rook. Davrin comes in through a door left open for him -- Rook is standing with their back turned but they clearly expected him, they just smile a bit and don't seem surprised. Emmrich of course takes you to the Grand Necropolis for the top goth hookup since Mary Shelly fucked on her parents' graves, the man quite simply never misses.)

lucanis has also closed the door behind him without rook noticing. old assassin habits die hard I suppose lol. he totally still accidentally jumpscares the others without meaning to all the time because he moves around quietly when he doesn't think about it, I know this in my heart. I wonder if he was just... looking at them for a while before he spoke up.