#care amendment

[sherdnerd]

Alright so this week's referendum in Ireland is kind of Devious. We're being told we're voting for feminism when we're actually absolving the state of a duty of care. This is the care referendum, not the family one. My stance is Yes for families, No for care. Right now our constitution states that "The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

The proposed amendment states "The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.” So under the new amendment, the state is under no obligation to ensure a caregiver has the economic freedom and security to choose whether or not to work, and in fact shifts the burden of care entirely onto families. The State is under no obligation to provide "care" to infants, or, as advocacy groups have pointed out, disabled people, instead shifting that burden entirely to families, whom the state is no longer under any obligation to ensure have the economic freedom and security to become fulltime caregivers. Honestly, its kind of Devious pairing this with the amendment extending the definition of families, the care amendment has sort of been buried by the uncontroversial extension of protections to unconventional family units not centered on marriage. Everything is pointing to "vote yes for families" and what little I've seen of the care amendment is couching it as the simple removal of sexist language. On March 8th no less!

So, any Irish people voting on Friday, Vote no on the care amendment!

[galkyrie]

Jason knows he doesn't have a right to be mad at Tim for forgiving him, of all things.

He knows he's reaping the rewards from that. But-

Something about it pissed him the hell off. Maybe it was the way Tim had looked at him, head tilted in the way that made it feel like you were being seen down to the subatomic level-

Or maybe it was the way Tim forgave him, with barely a shrug.

"I don't see how staying angry would've helped the situation," was all he'd said, and then he'd gotten back to the task at hand. Like it was an- afterthought maybe, to consider that Jason could be sorry.

Tim didn't see the utility in holding a grudge. And it was already decided that he had to work with Jason, so forgiveness was just a box he had to check off in order to make that go as smoothly as possible-

Jason's actions and remorse or potential lack thereof were irrelevant. Tim's feelings about it seemed equally as unimportant, if there were any to know of at all.

It was worse than if Tim had refused to forgive him, he decided, to have been long ago and had such a thing just...not matter to the person he'd wronged.

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

hey. uh, sorry, but can we drop the notion that Dazai arranged for the Flags to die in Stormbringer? Look, I'm too lazy right now to go back and pull up the direct scenes, but that was never stated, it is heavily implied Dazai gave Verlaine the information after they had already died, and if you look at this post by @/popopretty, you'll see that Chuuya only punishes Dazai for doctoring the intel so that he got tortured and Murase died. There is no mention of the Flags.

[book-lover85]

fics where Inej tells Kaz it's ok if he can't always touch her or can't always bring his full armor down as long as he's trying >>>>>>>

[dykedvonte]

The second fic idea is a what-if scenerio where Jimmy dies in the crash due to and altercation with Curly and how Curly would navigate being Captain once he has to notice the little things and how he and Anya's relationship develop as he adopts an identical view point to hers rather than just keeping the peace.

And maybe i will write it but only time will tell tbh but it's stuck in my brain dome for the time being.

[defensive-tactics]

Gun free zones not only do NOT make us safer, they also make the areas more dangerous!

[tanglepelt]

Dc x dp idea 60

Vlad is the one who gets Danny help.

He has a realization that he became so fixated on Maddie he lost sight on everything else. Maybe he find Maddie and Jack experimenting on a ghost, maybe a plot to capture and cut open phantom. Something makes him see the light.

Regardless of what he is the one who realizes how dangerous Danny’s home life is. How at risk he is.

So vlad leaves an anonymous tip on the justice league helpline regarding a portal into a different dimension. The location fentonWorks in amity park Illinois.

It would be even better if amity had an info block out so it just didn’t exist online. Maybe when they respond either the GIW have phantom and are ready/doing experiments.

[yansurnummu]

TES fest day 6: abandoned

In the grief of supposedly losing her brother, Lilanwe certainly made some choices. She joined the Worm Cult, becoming a much more cold and cynical person. Granted, it wasn't entirely Auredil's fault for what happened to him, but I don't know that she'll ever really forgive him for leaving her behind.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?

Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!

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

Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/

Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."

This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.

Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc

And even better, your broadband speed measurements:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access

This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/

There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan

The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1

I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."

This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1

Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1

The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Mike Mozart (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/

www.ccPixs.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[the-music-maniac]

Reading shin soukoku fanfic is a minefield because for every fic that makes me go "aww Dazai and Akutagawa are moving on from their past" and "Dazai's such a little shit, I love him" there's another fic out there that makes me wanna skin Dazai alive and then dump him in salt

[ablogofcourage]

[lloydfrontera]

in a better timeline where theo is actually a character and not just a plot device he and rakiel develop this weird and confusing dynamic where rakiel is still very clearly theo's older brother except for those moments where his inner ahjussi comes out and he parents theo more than his father ever did and he slowly starts taking asterion's place as theo's father figure.

neither of them really notice because 1) lee han was an only child and he's not really that aware of what is or isn't normal sibling behavior and he doesn't really care either he just sees theo craving approval and being lowkey passively suicidal and goes "is anyone gonna take care of that" and then doesn't wait for an answer before doing it himself and 2) because theo has been neglected his entire life and doesn't recognize what rakiel is doing as 'parenting' because, well, asterion never did that with him so his first experience with that kind of care and treatment is from rakiel so he automatically files it as 'hyung behavior'. so none of them actually realize when their dynamic blurs the line between siblings and parent-child.

but asterion does. just... way too late. when he's already lost his chance with not one, but both of his children. when one son is forever out of his reach and the other has filled what should've been his place with someone else. only then does he realize what his neglect and putting his title as emperor above that of father has cost him. when there's nothing he can do about it.

he wanted his sons to grow up without needing him. and they did. they don't need him anymore. and he didn't realize how terrible of a thing that was until it was far too late to fix it.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

I sat in this hole for thousands of years, thinking of nothing but redemption, of reclaiming my good name. I thought of nobody, no cause, other than my own...The only thing that matters in the end is the mission -- protecting those who would not and cannot protect themselves --the humans. None of us is bigger than that -

[raceweek]

The six weeks what lore????

i told a lie it was three weeks that alex didn’t text george back for (please see below). in alexs defence he was in the middle of losing his job and george was probably talking an obscene amount of crap about the people about to rid alex of his job lmaooooo

[apple-spider-vinegar]

Not a Norman Osborn Apologist or a Norman Osborn Hater but a secret third thing

[gomzdrawfr]

The funny thing about writing royal au is just me playing around with what I think are royal au related terms or old English but it’s prob just regular English to others

Like preposterous, impertinent, incorrigible, beneficent, chamber, prude, felony, ordeal etc