#countersued

[tedhead]

Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe in outtakes from the unfinished film Something’s Got To Give.

[1eos]

the blade im working on reallly looks like leo....he's gonna sue me at this rate

[get-back-homeward]

listening to john lennon’s cover of chuck berry’s you can’t catch me

and my brain mindlessly drifts to come together

and I do a double take

y’all it’s the same song

[gallawitchxx]

hey there mornin i need financial compensation for this because it knocked me out on the spot and now im not right. i think i contracted demons.

"The jagged edges of your misspelled name peek out from underneath straps of smooth, black leather, which wrap around his toned torso like vines around a marble statue."

oh no, not the demons! 😈😈😈

ray, my certified disgusting beloved, you’ve shown great strength this morning in a) admitting you have a problem & b) asking for help! i’m so proud of you & i think i know of someone who can assist you in receiving the $$$ you need to recover:

ps. the vines were an absolute personal attack on you, @heymrspatel & @whatwouldmickeydo because y’all were getting pretty horny on main the other night about statues… 👻👻👻

[ur-mag]

Coldplay Countersues Former Manager for $17 Million | In Trend Today

Coldplay Countersues Former Manager for $17 Million Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[uluthrek]

au in which robert, the starks and the lannisters play monopoly instead of going hunting and pushing each other‘s kids from towers.

tyrion implements a tax system to make things more interesting and fights cersei over the cat for a solid ten minutes.

around thirty minutes into the game, catelyn realizes that she has free will and stops paying taxes.

arya and sansa haggle over new york avenue, which ends up being bought by theon. this causes the two to completely cast aside their differences, ally and subsequently start doing everything in their power to make theon‘s life hell.

theon himself is quite severely stoned the entire time throughout.

ned enters horrendous debt pretty much immediately and, after two hours of being financially sucked dry by both cersei and his tax evader of a wife, decides to just place his figurine in jail and never leave.

jon, playing the dog, controls the railroads and makes jaime, playing the ship, go completely broke within minutes. being beaten by a bastard and officially the first to lose the game makes jaime so mad he spends the rest of the evening perched on the family‘s ancestral armchair eating flaming hot cheetos and stifling sobs.

cersei is holding onto her last two dollars and her one house in atlantic avenue like a maniac and evades taxes like it‘s an olympic sport. she claims ownership of kentucky avenue on the grounds that red is her house‘s color at least twice. after three hours, she‘s consumed enough vintage red to kill a large mammal and keeps quoting the art of war. fascinatingly enough, she never goes completely broke.

robert, just as broke and drunk as his wife but not nearly as ferocious, proposes marriage for tax advantages to bran, who is in possession of the boardwalk and lets him dangle on his proposition for two rounds before accepting and feeling like a benevolent god.

sansa sees this and immediately proposes to arya, who accepts, only for them to be sued by their mother for public indecency („you‘re siblings, jesus christ!“). arya argues that this is just a game and that one could argue that robert‘s and bran‘s marital alliance is just as if not even more inappropriate, considering that bran is seven and robert thirtyseven. sansa countersues her mother for tax evasion, who promises she‘ll drop her lawsuit if her daughters let her keep hoarding perverse amounts of wealth. „love wins!“ arya says, which causes jaime, still perched on the armchair but now eating old nan‘s home made whiskey truffles, to hysterically sob. cersei stares him down.

robb, in a rare moment of almost prophetic foresight, excuses himself one hour in and goes on a very, VERY long walk with grey wind.

tyrion, whose tax system has spectacularly backfired in his face, proposes marriage to catelyn, jon and cersei in rapid succession, who all turn him down. „i wish i was the monster you think i am. i wish i had enough poison for the whole pack of you. i would gladly give my life to watch you all swallow it.“ he screams before he leaves the table.

at that, joffrey, who has refused to participate and instead sits on the couch playing doom on his nintendo ds, starts hysterically laughing. tyrion turns on his heel and awards his nephew with the bitchslap of the century. this causes cersei to completely abandon the game and chase after him with a broom. catelyn makes sure that everyone is distracted by the lannister antics and then reaches across the table and bags cersei‘s money and properties.

with a heavy heart, myrcella trades arya and sansa one of her limited edition bayala schleich unicorns for park place.

at this point, the game is between the tycoons that are catelyn and jon, the bran-robert alliance, the arya-sansa-alliance, and ned, who is still in jail and watching ice hockey on his phone under the table. that is when catelyn hears rickon gagging and discovers that he, in the absence of tyrion, the self declared bank manager, has managed to eat all bank notes from the box.

rickon gets his stomach pumped, cersei and tyrion have both been arrested, theon is still stoned, arya, sansa and myrcella have wandered off to go play schleich horses, and jon remains at the table, alone, content, and quietly considering himself the winner.

[mariacallous]

Celeste Borys and Kira Lynch don’t leave the house much these days. When they do venture into their small Utah communities—to go grocery shopping, to take their kids to school or the playground—neighbors whisper and stare. “I’ve had people take pictures and videos of me, and I've had someone come up and yell at me,” Lynch says. “Someone at my daughter’s junior high told me to keep my mouth shut and called me some bad names. It’s terrifying.”

“I don’t leave unless I have to,” says Borys. “My day-to-day life doesn’t exist.”

The man whose followers scorn and harass them seems to have no such problems. Long a household name in conservative Mormon circles, Tim Ballard has become nationally known in recent years: He’s the former operative for Homeland Security who says he became so alarmed during the Obama administration by the government’s supposed inaction on child sex trafficking that he decided to go out and fight it on his own, recruiting other true believers to join him on dramatic sting operations in dangerous places, later serving as cochair of the Trump administration’s advisory council on trafficking and ultimately inspiring the heavily fictionalized film Sound of Freedom based on Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), the anti-trafficking organization he founded. (The organization now goes by the name OUR Rescue.)

Ballard is also a defendant in ongoing civil lawsuits in Utah brought by women—Borys and Lynch among them—who allege that he sexually abused them under the guise of saving children. Borys and Lynch have filed police reports regarding their allegations that Ballard sexually assaulted them; Ballard has denied the claims made against him. OUR, which is mentioned in one of the suits, has countersued Borys and her husband.

“This is just a bunch of random details, gossip, and easily disproven falsehoods packaged up to generate some quick clicks,” Ballard’s spokesperson Chad Kolton wrote in response to a request for comment; he also notes that the claims against Ballard in a separate suit have been dismissed. That suit was brought by a veteran Marine who said she was injured at a training overseen by Ballard; a judge ruled she did not have standing to bring it because she had signed a waiver.

While Borys and Lynch mostly stay at home, talking to their families, each other, and their lawyers, Ballard, when not defending himself by claiming he’s the victim of a shakedown, makes regular appearances at high-profile Republican events. He showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. In March, he joined a Catholic event at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort alongside Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. In April, Mar-a-Lago hosted a fundraiser for the Ballard Family Legal Defense Fund. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer, he sat for an interview with Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. “The leftist agenda is almost verbatim the pedophile agenda,” said Ballard, grim-faced beneath a cap bearing the logo of Aerial Recovery, a self-described disaster relief and anti-trafficking group with which he now works. “You’ve got supporters here, Tim,” Giuliani told Ballard, adding, a moment later, “Pretty soon, you’re going to have one in the strongest and most powerful position in the world.”

All of this is fairly shocking to Lynch and Borys, who worked with Ballard at OUR. Just last summer, Borys says, she was by Ballard’s side as he crisscrossed Capitol Hill, meeting with Republican legislators about human trafficking and reveling with them in the success of Sound of Freedom, which brought in around $250 million in global ticket sales. “Those people know my face,” she says. “I was in those meetings and on phone calls and texting different people in the congressional world.” By fall, it emerged that Ballard and OUR had parted ways months before, following an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct that employees had made against him. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a longtime supporter of Ballard, publicly rebuked him for “morally unacceptable” behavior. And in the fall of 2023, accusers filed the first set of lawsuits against Ballard. Yet Ballard’s star on the Trumpist right never dimmed.

“They know what’s going on with him right now,” Borys says. “For them to ignore it but then to promote him, it’s so disgusting to me.”

Lynch met Ballard in 2021, when she was giving him a haircut. She’d seen Sound of Freedom in an early preview but at the time didn’t realize that she was cutting the hair of the man on whose life it was loosely based. All she knew was that he was famous.

“I’m kind of a big deal,” she remembers him telling her; he was taken aback and even offended that she didn’t know more about him. He told her, she says, about the amazing things he did and how children were saved by his operations.

“He’s talking about children and sex slavery,” she says. “I’m a mother of four. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I got sucked in right that second.”

When Ballard asked if she wanted to get involved in his mission, Lynch says, she enthusiastically agreed. She had just gone through a crushing divorce, and her father was dying of a brain tumor. Lynch was, she says, “desperate for something to come along and help me spiritually.” Lynch says that Ballard told her that he was close friends with M. Russell Ballard, a high-ranking member of the LDS Church’s second-highest governing body, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

OUR was a powerhouse long before Sound of Freedom appeared in theaters, raising millions of dollars in donations every year from devoted fans. The group’s exploits were frequently exaggerated. At the White House and in op-eds, for example, Ballard told the story of how the group had helped rescue a teenage girl who was trafficked from Mexico to New York and forced into sex work for several years, citing the story as evidence of the need for a border wall; at one point, he said the group had helped her “escape her hell.” In fact, according to court records, the girl rescued herself and didn’t come into contact with OUR until well after she’d escaped her captors.

Additionally, as early as 2020, a letter was circulating in philanthropic circles in Utah accusing Ballard of misconduct toward women. OUR denied everything: In a statement to Vice News at the time, an OUR spokesperson wrote, “OUR categorically denies the baseless allegations made in the anonymous letter shared with Vice. The OUR board of directors received the letter 12 months ago and, after a thorough investigation, found zero evidence to corroborate the allegations contained in the letter.”

In Lynch’s community, Ballard was still regarded as a hero. Members of her family, she says, were fans of Ballard’s; her mother gasped in excitement when she learned that Lynch had just done his hair, and showed her a shelf full of books that Ballard had written. “They were all praising him to the roof,” Lynch says. “Automatically, that put me in a very safe place with him in my head.”

Ballard’s books, several of which were published by an LDS Church–owned imprint and promoted by the conservative influencer Glenn Beck, contributed a great deal to his fame and followed two tracks. On one, he lays out supposed ties between figures from American history like George Washington and Mormonism. On the other, he positions himself as a modern-day abolitionist, part of a line with Harriet Tubman. One book, Operation Toussaint, is an adaptation of a documentary showing Ballard and his associates carrying out paramilitary work in Haiti. Missions like this were the basis of Ballard’s image as the leader of an elite group of operators doing the work governments didn’t dare and wresting sex slaves from the hands of traffickers. (Files from an investigation carried out by a Utah prosecutor and the FBI released under a public records request would later show these missions in a much less glamorous light—detailing, among other things, the role of a psychic medium named Janet Russon in providing intelligence and one of Ballard’s backers groping the naked breasts of a trafficking victim he believed to be a minor.)

Lynch never went on missions with Ballard. She was instead asked, she says—after being told of the visions he’d had of them working together to save children—to participate in training operations in which they went to strip clubs.

The first time, she alleges, Ballard arrived at her house beforehand with a close friend and OUR employee in tow, as well as Ballard’s son. At her house, Ballard asked her to put fake tattoos and eyeliner on him, getting into the undercover persona he used, which he called “Brian Black.” But almost immediately, Lynch says, once Ballard was in character, he began groping her and trying to kiss her body while she asked him to stop and reminded him that his son and friend were waiting. The behavior continued as the two rode in an Uber, Lynch says, which she calls “horrific.”

“He doesn’t listen,” she says. “He gets in this mindset where it's like he doesn’t see or hear you. It’s whatever he wants.”

Borys, for her part, began working with OUR in July of 2022 as a volunteer before moving on to paid roles in October of that year; by the time she left the organization, she was working as Ballard’s executive assistant. She also began secretly going on missions when, she says, Ballard told her he “was in the middle of a trafficking ring operation and needed a new female partner to come in” to play his girlfriend.

This was part of what Ballard has called the “couples ruse,” in which he and a woman would tell traffickers they were romantic partners, and act as such, while on missions. Ballard has claimed this was necessary to ensure that he and other male operators wouldn’t have to engage in sexual behavior with victims or traffickers while undercover.

Almost immediately after agreeing to work as Ballard’s partner, Borys’ affidavit says, she was flown to California to do “ops training,” which consisted of staying in hotels, hot-tubbing at a Four Seasons, doing workouts on the beach, and Ballard showing Borys what kind of physical acts they had to do while “undercover” and what his supposed boundaries were. She describes him lifting her shirt to admire her stomach, complimenting her “hot body,” kissing her on the neck and insisting it was fine since it avoided kissing on the lips, and showing her how he simulated sexual penetration during operations to fool traffickers who might be observing them.

Ballard, her affidavit says, told her that traffickers could “smell pheromones,” and so they needed to have real sexual chemistry in order to fool them. (The affidavit also alleges that Ballard removed his temple garment, which observant members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wear under their clothes, telling her “he sees angels all around, and that this isn't wrong.”)

Their first practice operation happened in Mexico, the affidavit says, where she was forced to get a couples massage with Ballard that culminated in a female massage therapist touching her in a sexual way while she froze, closed her eyes, and waited for it to be over. “I heard Tim say he had never seen this done so close and he was getting a lesson,” Borys writes in the affidavit.

"Within seconds, once I was there, I found myself in a situation where I didn't even have time to get out of it,” she says. “I was just staring at him for help.” Afterward, she recalls, she wept, and he told her, “We’re going to save so many kids, you have no idea.’”

Borys doesn’t believe these missions ever led to the rescue of a child. They nonetheless persisted—as did, her affidavit says, not just sexually abusive but spiritually manipulative behavior. Borys, who was raised a Latter-day Saint but is no longer practicing—”I’m so glad you’re not LDS anymore,” she remembers him saying—became enmeshed with Russon, the psychic medium. (Russon did not respond to a request for comment.)

“My life revolved around Janet and her readings,” Borys says; Russon would claim to channel her grandmother and allegedly encourage her and other operators not to worry about taking part in sexualized behavior.

“Janet would say, ‘Our bodies are just bodies, and God gave us bodies to use them to go save kids,’” Borys says.

Ballard, Lynch says, would also frequently assure her while touching her inappropriately that they were doing the right thing, saying things like “I know this is hard, but God will be with us,” and “we’re bringing light into dark places.” He also explicitly told her, she says, that the couples ruse was sanctioned by both God and M. Russell Ballard. (The denunciation LDS Church leadership issued of Tim Ballard in 2023 cited “the unauthorized use of President Ballard’s name for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable.”)

The allegations are not limited to the workings of couples ruse. At one point, Lynch’s affidavit says, Ballard came over to her house and sexually assaulted her on her staircase—something her lawyers say she reported to authorities in the fall of 2023, after joining the civil suit. (The following day, in text messages to her that WIRED has viewed, he asked to come by and pick up his belt, which he’d left lying on her floor.)

In early July, the women’s legal team filed a motion in which they say the state crime lab told them that DNA found on Borys’ skirt matched Ballard’s. (Borys alleges that Ballard sexually assaulted her and ejaculated on her leather skirt.) The motion urged the court to instruct the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to turn over the crime lab analysis to Borys’ legal team.

(In a statement to Utah outlet Fox 13, Ballard’s team accused Borys’ legal team of tainting a criminal investigation, asserting this was “consistent with the other illegal and unethical behavior that has been a hallmark of the Borys case.” Janet Russon, meanwhile, appeared on a podcast called The Last Dispensation and suggested that Ballard’s semen could have been found on her skirt because the two shared a suitcase. )

It took a while, Borys says, before she began to view herself as a victim of sexual misconduct. “I remember doing something on an op and I was so scared to go do this specific thing,” she says, her voice breaking. “And right before, all I could think was, ‘If little kids are having to do this, I can do this.’”

She would go home at night and make dinner—“trying to compartmentalize,” she says, while also texting with alleged traffickers on a burner phone.

“I would think I was doing good in the world,” she says. And she desperately wanted to see something tangible from the work—a “win,” she adds. “I felt so conflicted and dirty. I wanted that win so all the dirtiness would go away.”

At this time, Ballard’s reputation as a heroic anti-trafficking expert was at a peak. His rhetoric around trafficking—that it’s the world’s largest criminal enterprise, carried out with impunity due to the negligence and incompetence of the federal government generally and Democrats specifically—had become incredibly popular. QAnon believers took a particular interest, especially after Ballard appeared to support a false conspiracy theory that furniture company Wayfair sold children online by saying that “with or without Wayfair,” the selling of children online was “common.” (Jim Caviezel, who played Ballard in Sound of Freedom, has lent overt support to QAnon beliefs; Ballard, he claimed, taught him that traffickers extract a substance from children’s bodies that “elites” then inject to preserve their own youth. An OUR spokesperson denied at the time that Ballard had explained this to Caviezel.) As this was playing out, the QAnon-tinged Save the Children movement became a driving force in Republican politics, and Ballard himself began to eye a run for the US Senate.

In 2023, Ballard quietly parted ways with OUR following an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct that employees made against him. Lynch, who was not an employee, has a hazy memory of the time but remembers telling friends of an OUR employee that inappropriate things had happened. They, she says, told their friend, who then reported it to human resources. (Her lawyer, Suzette Rasmussen, confirms this sequence of events.)

Borys became Ballard’s executive assistant in early 2023. She was walled off, she says, from other OUR employees. When the investigation began, she knew little about it and was told that its scope was limited to a report made by one woman and would go away. It wasn’t until after she’d quit OUR, and after she’d seen attorney Suzette Rasmussen on TV discussing a suit the pseudonymous women she was representing had filed against Ballard in civil court in Utah, that she really began to process her experiences.

“I was still trying to understand all the stuff I had been going through working for him,” she says. “Once I saw Suzette, I felt like she was my safest place I could go to to protect myself.”

It wasn’t until after she’d gotten out of Ballard’s orbit, blocked his phone number, and filed a lawsuit, Borys says, that she started to understand how traumatized she was. “I was listening to a police officer doing a podcast or on the news, and he said you don’t get to—” here she pauses, and starts to cry. “You don’t get to create a victim by saving victims. And that really hit me.”

The legal process is ongoing; in addition to the suits and criminal investigation, Borys and Lynch have filed for permanent protective orders against Ballard, which currently await the scheduling of evidentiary hearings.

The two are also still very much processing their experiences not just with Ballard but with OUR, which neither now believes was ever a legitimate child-rescue operation.

“Where’s the proof?” asks Borys. “There just isn’t any proof, and when you try to talk to anyone about it who still works there and believes it, it’s like Tim Ballard—red in the face, flustered and frustrated. Instead of answering questions, they fire back at you.”

WIRED provided a detailed list of questions to Chad Kolton, a spokesperson for Tim Ballard. In response, Kolton wrote, in part, “I started responding to each of these and then reconsidered as it seems like a waste of time … There is absolutely nothing new about Tim’s work with Republicans which he’s done openly for years because they actually want to do something about the problem of trafficking rather than denying it exists. The cases against him have begun to fall apart, with one already dismissed and another facing an evidentiary hearing about serious allegations of illegal and unethical conduct by the plaintiff and her attorneys.”

OUR did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

“I hope he goes to jail,” Lynch says. “That’s a really honestly hard thing to say, and it’s been hard to understand that might happen. I have to realize it’s not me putting him in jail. It’s not us. It’s him and what he did.”

She also, she says, simply wants the truth to be known.

“Nobody deserves to go through something like this, and someone like him doesn’t deserve to be on a presidential campaign or speaking engagements,” she says. “He doesn’t deserve that right right now.”

[razorroy]

Graham Suggests Robinson Should Double Down On His Lie

The South Carolina GOP senator said if reports about North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson are untrue, “he has the best lawsuit in the history of the country.”

Deep down, Graham knows that Robinson is a liar and is lying now. One shred of truth is that if you're telling the truth then you have an open and shut case against your accuser.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trump sues and countersues all the time. Even when he has absolutely no chance to win. He does this to project the idea that he is defending himself against a wrongful act.

He's living out a lie in everything that he does.

Example: the big lie. He knows that he lost the 2020 election. But he also knows that he can now never admit that he lost the 2020 election. Nor can he ever admit that he knew that he lost the 2020 election.

Thus, Donald J. Trump is and has always lived in an imaginary world that he created. Where he is the very best at everything.

Conclusion: Donald J. Trump is a loser.

[dieinct]

everyone. seems to be so excited about the imane khelif suit and it's really stressing me out. i don't know much about french law specifically but here are some predictions

her legal defense seems likely to include the fact that they were specifically harassing, slanderous, or libelous lies because she is cis and none of the ppl tweeting about her respected this, not because harassment is bad

if france has favorable laws (for imane) in this matter, jkr and / or musk will countersue and drag the countersuits into a better venue for them. this will mean a whole bunch of different legal venues across the world will be ruling on whether it's legal to harass someone transphobicly on the internet and not all those rulings will be good.

the defense's legal approach will be vile and transphobic and will get more coverage than the prosecution's, which as mentioned will i suspect. also be transphobic.

the whole thing will be codifying either in law or in the public imagination the idea that calling someone trans falsely is libelous harassment a la calling someone an abuser; this is not actually good

the whole thing will get dropped from the public awareness and dragged out in court until even if she wins, no one will care anymore

like guys this is going to be such a mess

[notyouraryang0dd3ss]

I'm a hater so I wouldn't know, but is this first time one of her albums hasn't had plagiarism issues? She's always stealing songs and artwork; is this the first album she's genuinely written all by herself?

nope she has jack antonoff and aaron dessner as cowriters for almost every song on ttpd 😭 swifties really need to stop peddling her solo songwriting genius because she hasn’t written an entire album completely solo since Speak Now (2008) 16 years ago 😭

here’s what I could find about her plagiarism allegations by album:

Taylor Swift: Couldn't find anything

Fearless: Couldn't find anything

**Speak Now: A deleted reddit thread suggesting plagiarism by** Taylor Swift from the German artist Madeline Juno I misread it, the thread was about Madeline Juno plagiarizing Taylor Swift, not the other way around

Red: "Shake it Off" lawsuit from 3LW alleging she stole lyrics from their song, "Playas Gonna Play" (but this suit was filed after Taylor's re-recording, not during the original release)

1989: Ally Burguieres sues Taylor Swift for using her art on the 1989 merchandise, without proper credit or compensation to Burguieres

Reputation: Couldn't find anything

Lover: Poet Teresa La Dart sues TS for copying the concept and aesthetics of her chapbook of the same name

Technically related, but some people pointed out "Cruel Summer" chorus sounds extremely similar to LOONA's "Stylish" which came out a year prior

Folklore: Stole logo from Black-owned brand Folklore for the album merchandise

**Evermore: hit with a lawsuit from Evermore Park for infringing on its trademarks; However, its a messy situation because the park had been using TS songs without her knowledge/permission (which prompted TS to countersue) and its *speculated* that the park (which was financially struggling) saw an opportunity to make money by suing her. The lawsuits against each other were simultaneously dropped in March 2021.

Midnights: Latina-American musician Manuela Torres points out the striking similarities (implying plagiarism) between her "Glimmer" MV and "Anti-Hero" MV

The Torture Poets Department: Nothing (so far...)

**Corrections provided by @bunnythevampireslayer thank you so much for pointing out these mistakes!

[wyrmfedgrave]

The Texas Tribune: Ken Paxton sues Travis County to block voter registration efforts

The Texas AG is suing efforts by some county election boards to register new voters.

Simply because these are Democratic enclaves & the Republikkkans want to 'drown' such local votes.

But, all Texas counties have rules that they have to canvas the countryside & register new voters...

So, this must be another legal delay - holding Democrat voters up until after the election!!

And, this is just one out of the many Republikkkan dirty tricks going on now...

Project 2025 is being implemented in every state - in one form or another - before the election!!

Once P:2025 was revealed, Reps had to move quickly - trying to catch us all 'sleeping'!

We need to countersue their plans.

It's much too close to the election to be changing voting rules or to be suing over criminal legalities.

Let's use the Republikkkans' own logic against them & have all of these cases be heard - after the election!

Heh...

End?

For now.

[vintagegeekculture]

There is another section from the song "Gamers", and I'm curious if it refers to a specific incident.

I'm a live-roleplayin' gamer, I used to play out in the woods. Twilight 2000, Shadowrun, I'd play whenever I could. I'd put on my costume, shoot tin cans, and make firecrackers fly. Then my front door got kicked down again -- This time it was the FBI.

They stole my guns, my video tapes, every book I’d ever read, And a couple of bags of fertilizer out of the garden shed! They told the press I was a terrorist, who planned to blow up half the town. They called me a right-wing militia nut, and a neo-nazi clown.

The details are not the same, but I think this is a reference to a well known incident in 1990, where Steve Jackson Games, best known these days as the maker of the Munchkin card game, were raided by the Secret Service under suspicion that their game product, Cyberpunk, a roleplaying game, was actually a manual for computer crime. Agents literally walked out of the building holding the game company's computers.

Because this story is so well known to gamers, and spread at a time when word of mouth was so potent, there are many details that are altered by the telephone game. Many say it was the FBI instead of the Secret Service, for instance, or it was Cyberpunk 2020 that was raided (which was put out by R. Talsorian Games, not Steve Jackson).

To quote Steve Jackson:

In the course of that visit, it became clear that the investigating agents considered GURPS Cyberpunk to be "a handbook for computer crime." They seemed to make no distinction between a discussion of futuristic credit fraud, using equipment that doesn't exist, and modern real-life credit card abuse. A repeated comment by the agents was "This is real."

"Careless, illegal, and completely unjustified," the raid happened because author Loyd Blankenship ran an irreverent, anti-authority computer USENET BBS dedicated to computers and yes, hacking, and Steve Jackson was struck through guilt by association. It's exactly the kind of overreach that happens when the malevolent Eye of Sauron that is federal law enforcement fixes itself on you. In the course of investigation, the Secret Service justified its own warrant by saying that they would find evidence to justify the warrant, which is circular reasoning.

Due to the raid, Steve Jackson Games had to lay off half the staff and was close to bankruptcy fighting the charges. However, for once, they were able to countersue the Secret Service, because several committed technology lawyers, partially in response, formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is not the first time this happened. In 1980, a decade earlier, TSR was raided because of the spy game, Top Secret, due to suspicion of aiding international terrorism in Lebanon (!)

[pronoun-fucker]

(Open letter linked below)

“More than 130 people, including Gloria Steinem, and organizations in the field of women’s rights advocacy and domestic violence and sexual assault awareness have signed an open letter to support Amber Heard, who lost a defamation suit this year brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, for an op-ed in which she said she was a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

The letter, which was exclusively shared with NBC News ahead of its public release Wednesday, was signed by groups like the National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Law Center, Equality Now and the Women’s March Foundation. It was written by a group of people who identify as domestic violence survivors and supporters of Heard.

Heard filed a brief last month laying the groundwork to appeal a seven-person jury’s decision in Virginia’s Fairfax County Circuit Court to award Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages in June. Heard, who had countersued, was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages but nothing in punitive damages.

Although The Washington Post essay never mentioned Depp by name, Depp’s attorneys said it indirectly referred to allegations Heard made against him during their 2016 divorce. During the trial, she testified in graphic terms about a sexual assault she alleged, as well as allegations of incidents of physical abuse. Depp denied all allegations of abuse.

The letter, which denounces the “rising misuse” of defamation lawsuits to silence people who report domestic and sexual abuse, is one of the biggest public shows of support for Heard after months of silence from many groups after the verdict.

Representatives for both Depp and Heard declined to comment.

The jury’s decision was a legal vindication for Depp, who lost a libel case in the United Kingdom two years ago over claims that he had physically abused Heard. Justice Andrew Nicol ruled against Depp in 2020, saying a British tabloid had presented substantial evidence to show that Depp was violent against Heard on at least 12 of 14 occasions.

After the June verdict, activists called out other groups, like Time’s Up, asking why an organization that had championed victims at the height of the #MeToo movement was now silent. Many who did speak out in support of Heard, including the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, were met with ferocious backlash from Depp’s supporters online.

A spokesperson for the group behind the letter, who asked to remain anonymous because of the online harassment she has faced for posting in support of Heard, said she believes that after the trial “individuals were afraid to speak out because they saw what was happening to the few who had.”

The letter says the “ongoing online harassment” of Heard and her supporters was “fueled by disinformation, misogyny, biphobia, and a monetized social media environment where a woman’s allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault were mocked for entertainment.”

The vilification and harassment of Heard and her supporters were “unprecedented in both vitriol and scale,” the letter says.

Kathy Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said her organization signed the letter after it observed what she called a “growing backlash” against women who speak out against perpetrators of sexual assault, domestic violence and intimate partner violence.

“If this can happen to Amber Heard, it will discourage other women from speaking up and even filing reports about domestic violence and sexual assault,” Spillar said.

The letter says the verdict and the online response to Heard “indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of intimate partner and sexual violence and how survivors respond to it.”

In addition to two dozen feminist organizations, more than 90 domestic violence experts and survivors’ advocates from around the world signed the letter to “condemn the public shaming of Amber Heard and join in support of her.” They include doctors, lawyers, professors, authors and activists.

Others who signed the letter echoed their concerns that reaction to the trial on social media was harmful to everyday victims of domestic violence.

“They see the environment that this has created, and they feel even less safe than before to come forward and speak out about the abuse they suffered,” said Elizabeth Tang, the senior counsel for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

Tang said abusers can use defamation suits to “silence their victims” or as retaliation against their victims for speaking out.

Tang said that among the “reasons we felt it was very important to join this letter” are that “when courts do not dismiss these defamation suits in early stages, it creates a lot of trauma for victims to have to go through a very long, drawn-out and invasive process just to prove that the things they said are true or that they did not defame the person they reported.”

Christian F. Nunes, the national president of the National Organization for Women, said she hopes the letter is a reminder that the court system should never be used to strong-arm victims to recant statements about their abuse.

“We cannot silence victims by using courts and lawsuits as a way to retraumatize them, because this is what’s happening,” Nunes said. She said she hopes the letter raises awareness of new tactics some abusers use against their victims, such as social media campaigns.

Since the trial, there has been more public support for Heard on social media, the spokesperson for the group behind the letter said. She and other anonymous Heard supporters had been “working to combat disinformation for months” when they joined for the open letter initiative.

Experts said they had a unanimous message they hoped to send to survivors who read the letter.

“It is also a way to speak to all survivors and tell them, ‘You are not alone,’” Tang said.”

Article Link | Archived Article Link

Open Letter Link | Archived Open Letter Link

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

The Guardian: A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation

From the start of his career in the late 1940s, he looked around to see who else was getting attention, and it irked him when others seemed to outflank him. Truman Capote certainly annoyed him, and he honed his talent for feuding with this feline young novelist from the American south whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, swept the bestseller lists in 1948. That same year, Vidal’s first major novel, The City and the Pillar, arrived noisily on the scene; one of the first American novels with an explicitly gay theme, it turned Vidal into something of a pariah in the literary establishment.

Theirs was a minor squabble, with neither side missing a chance to make a joke about the other. But the feud expanded in the 60s, after Vidal had been – according to Capote, in an interview with Playgirl – tossed out of the White House by Bobby Kennedy because he was “drunk and obnoxious”. In fact Kennedy had taken offence at Vidal’s apparent intimacy with Jacqueline Kennedy – the first lady was distantly related to Vidal by marriage – and the writer had left in a huff. Vidal sued Capote over the remark, and Capote countersued. The legal case dragged on with Vidal winning in the end, though Capote had no money by then, so it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Vidal and Norman Mailer first met at a mutual friend’s Manhattan apartment in 1952. Mailer had made a huge splash with The Naked and the Dead, his bestselling novel of the Pacific war, frustrating Vidal, whose own war novel, Williwaw, had barely registered. The two young writers circled each other warily, and a complicated friendship began that would play out over the next five decades. The two had little in common.

The real trouble started in 1971, when Vidal chose to review Mailer’s incendiary book about the feminist movement, The Prisoner of Sex. He dismissed Mailer, combining him with two other macho men, Henry Miller and the murderer Charles Manson, to create a single male aggressor and sexist pig he called “M3”. Vidal wrote: “Women are not going to make it until M3 is reformed, and that is going to take a long time.”

Never, by his own admission, one to pass up the opportunity to be on television, Vidal accepted an offer from Dick Cavett to appear on his talk show with Mailer. In the green room, according to Mailer, Vidal put a warm hand on the back of his neck, a gesture that he interpreted as veiled aggression. Mailer answered with a not-so playful swipe on the cheek. Much to Mailer’s surprise, Vidal slapped him back. Then Mailer leaned forward like a boxer and, in a move that suggested to Vidal he had been drinking, winked before headbutting his cheek.

On the show, Mailer expressed his disapproval of Vidal, saying he was intellectually shameless. Somewhat clumsily, he described Vidal’s writing as “no more interesting than the stomach of an intellectual cow”. Vidal ignored him, offering an innocent smile. But Mailer attacked again, asking him why he didn’t, for once, speak to him directly instead of talking to the audience. Then he attacked Vidal for alluding to the fact that Mailer had stabbed his wife in 1960, calling him “a liar and a hypocrite”. Vidal didn’t flinch. Instead, he remained eerily calm when Mailer asked him to apologise for comparing him to Manson. “I would apologise if – if it hurts your feelings, of course I would,” said Vidal. Mailer replied: “No, it hurts my sense of intellectual pollution.” Vidal smiled serenely. “Well,” he said, “I must say that as an expert, you should know about such things.” The conversation grew ever more hostile, but – as anyone who watches a clip of this broadcast will notice – Vidal never lost control of himself. On the other hand, Mailer came off as a bully.

One night they [Vidal and Austen] attended a party for Princess Margaret, before going on to an expansive apartment owned by Lally Weymouth, a journalist and daughter of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. More than 100 guests crammed together. “You could hardly breathe,” Austen recalled, “everyone standing shoulder to shoulder.” It was a glittering affair, with Mailer, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, JK Galbraith, Gay Talese, William Styron and Jerry Brown – Vidal’s future rival for a senate seat in California – among the guests.

What happened next varies according to the teller, but Austen’s version accords with that of others:

[Mailer] saw Gore surrounded by friends, everyone talking and laughing. Gore was in a good mood as Mailer moved right up to him, got in his face, and everybody around them fell pretty silent. It looked like trouble. Norman told Gore that he looked like an old Jew, and Gore shook his head. He didn’t want to get into anything with Norman. Then Mailer threw his drink in Gore’s face, right in his eyes, then hit him in the mouth with a punch, a kind of glancing uppercut. Gore was stunned, and he stepped back. He wiped a dribble of blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. Then Gore said, ‘Norman, once again words have failed you.’

In 1984, Mailer decided to call a truce, inviting Vidal to participate with him in a fundraising event in New York. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us,” he wrote to Vidal, “has become a luxury. It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.”

This was never the case with William F Buckley, who was Satan as far as Vidal was concerned: a vicious rightwing polemicist who represented everything that was wrong with American society. Buckley was the quintessential US conservative of a certain stripe: Roman Catholic, Ivy League-educated, wealthy, with a mid-Atlantic accent that seemed to parody itself at times. He founded the National Review, a conservative magazine, in 1955 and used it as a platform to make himself the spokesman for laissez-faire, pro-business economics and a hard-nosed, anti-communist foreign policy. With his first book, a feisty memoir called God and Man at Yale (1951), he had laid down the gauntlet, helping to set in motion the movement that eventually led to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Their most infamous confrontation came in 1968, events now captured in the feature-length documentary film Best of Enemies. A few months prior to the presidential nominating conventions that year, Vidal was asked to appear in a series of 10 prime-time television debates with Buckley, moderated by Howard K Smith, one of the most respected journalists in the country. This promised to be the intellectual and political fight of the decade, and Vidal took it very seriously. “He was like a prize fighter getting ready for the big fight,” recalled Austen. In his hotel suite, Vidal made elaborate notes on hot topics such as the Vietnam war, housing for the poor and the constitutional rights of assembly for protest. He knew Buckley would come well-armed with statistics and Jesuitical arguments, and planned to fire back with everything he could muster.

[Vidal] talked about the repressive treatment of protesters, alluding to the riots on the streets outside the convention centre. Buckley interrupted him, recalling the time George Lincoln Rockwell, a leader of the American Nazi Party, had marched with his followers into a small town in Illinois. They had been turned away, and Buckley thought this had been justified by the unusual circumstances. Taking the cue, Vidal jabbed at Buckley: “As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” It was a deadly assertion, and Buckley curled his lip and sneered: “Now listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

A later feud involved Christopher Hitchens, the English journalist and flamethrower who, in his early days as a leftwing polemicist, modelled himself partly on Vidal. “He wants to be me,” Vidal would often say, once designating Hitchens, whom he affectionately called Hitchy-Poo or, more often, The Poo, as his successor. In a witty counter-move, Hitchens printed some words by Vidal on the cover of his memoir, Hitch-22: “I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.” The quotation is crossed out, with a handwritten note beside it: “No. CH.”

“He’s gone mad, our Poo,” he said to me one evening in the winter of 2010, after Hitchens published a nasty piece about him in Vanity Fair called “Vidal Loco”.

(Full article)

[jbfly46]

How to deal with butthurt government employees:

- Throw all government mail in the trash and claim you never got it

- Put off all court appearances until the last possible second, then say you're sick, then say you have surgery, then say your mom died, then countersue.

- Repeat over and over again that they're not being sensitive to you feelings no matter what they say

- Ask them what would their mother think of them now

- Ask them for legal advice, when they say they can't give you legal advice, tell them that qualifies as legal advice

- Ask them who they're voting for next election

- Ask them to define literally any word, bonus points for asking them to define 'terrorism", "equality", "conspiracy", and "oppression".

[suenitos]

A point for point summary of dream's drituation talk from 11/10/2023 stream under the cut

(disclaimer: this is not a transcript. a lot of this is taken from his words, but with some clarifying wording from me and some shifting i did of certain points he made to create a more structured and detailed summary. i recommend watching the vod to hear it from his voice and his wording because there are some details i left out, but this is basically what he said if you dont feel comfortable approaching the topic through audio.)

1. he didnt groom her. there's lots of complications in talking about it because its a very intense/serious thing to accuse someone of.

2. it's very scary to talk about for him because its such a real issue and anything you say in defense can devalue other victims from having their voices heard. but, she is a liar, and manipulated the situation. its scary for him to say that because it can devalue victims and come across as accusatory

3. because people made accusations of this sort to other people close to him (sapnap, bad) he was the first person to jump to their defense so he had to handle this very differently as the one in the hot seat. he told people not to publicly jump to his defense.

4. because she did not end up going to the police/legal route, suing her to prove he didnt send her any messages on snap or IG at all would be very difficult. defamation is insanely hard to prove because it involves having to prove the person you're suing is lying, lying on purpose, and with malicious intent.

5. for first few months, lawyers told him to wait and just countersue if she did go through suing, and sit tight. nothing moved at all from her side, so nothing ended up happening. he feels more comfortable to talk about it because enough time has passed and she has done nothing to go forward with her accusations. on her end, she only proved he messaged her privately but did not provide strong evidence of grooming. deleted messages of her own, apparently had a bf and fake accounts he doesnt really know exactly what happened

6. timing thing- he has to think of public opinion and his reputation because unfortunately a lot of this hinges on his reputation as dream. him and his lawyers had to think about the "strategy" of talking about it with timing, and he was busy with other stuff, and now that he's becoming more active again content wise he feels it's appropriate to address it.

7. plans to make a video on dreamxd in the future to talk about it

more details:

-he downloaded snapchat data to reveal that she doctored stuff, he questions her choice to not do that in order to prove her accusations

-didnt know she was a stan (which he admits sounds ridiculous), deleted the whole chat from instagram multiple times (swiped out of inbox, but until you block someone on instagram the messages stay forever). chatted about music and only had friendly messages becuase he thought she wasnt as big a fan/wanting to get into streaming because she asked him about that

-he has 3 snaps: priv priv snapchat (close friends family), private public snapchat (mod team, editors, old irls, csgo lobbies etc) <- the one she was on, the Public snapchat (that everyone can add him on, dreampublic)

questions from chat:

-why did you add her on snapchat? talking about music, wanted opinions outside of friends, and wanted to share on snap (deletes messages after 24 hours because she could leak it from ig and he didn't trust her)

-but she was a fan? didnt think she was that big a fan, also he tried to get her out of the inbox many times. assumed she was a small cc or a fan but not a stan

-why on personal snap? WASNT personal snap, it was front facing but it wasnt his public public one

-sexting: he thought she was 18 which doesnt really matter BECAUSE nothing he "wanted" from her was sexual. he never sexted her, her story takes place during the faceless era and that he added her on snap and then a week and a half of "talking" sent her a dick pic

-what proof does he have to show dishonesty: timeframes, intentions, snap data, transcripts of IG dms, she deleted a lot of messages that made her look weird that were showed in her video

-gift cards: grooming often involves gift giving and this is something people weaponized against him because he gave her a gift card as she said it was her birthday. she had said it was her birthday and he gave her one (he gave a gift cards to his mods etc for christmas and had a lot left over), not grooming just him being nice

-the meetup: the only person he met up with while faceless was sapnap, he didnt meet up with anyone during that era

-bikini comment: (apparently) he said she was gorgeous after she sent him a picture of her in a bikini when she was 18. he said saying that compliment probably wasnt far fetched from him but that message wasnt there on snap data, proving he didnt say it. he also thinks given the fact he is a massive figure who was faceless this entire time that it makes no sense for him to be so careless about who he's meeting up with or messaging and he always has to be careful about how he approaches messaging people who are under 18 or who he doesnt know. considering he had never even showed one of his best friends his face before meeting up with him, it makes no sense that he would be so risky about being "intimate" with someone he isn't that close with.

final comments:

-it affected him more than anyone knows. he was a victim in a situation but he doesnt want to victimize himself. he cares more about actual survivors and he wants to be respectful of that and be careful of what he says because it could come across as harmful or triggering to survivors

-there are factors of this situation that are out of his control like her (she can just say "believe victims" and people will be quicker to jump to her defense due to her positionality), and he wants this to die off as much as possible. he's talking about this against the advice of his management but as dream it's never going to die down so might as well talk about it.

-he understands as a controversial and flawed figure, the only way to convince people and get through to people is through compassion when people are spreading misinformation or malicious information against dream -> then he moved on to a conversation about general misinformation and how he thinks we as an audience can help mitigate toxicity and increase compassion and kindness from the community

reiterating this again: this is not the only time he's talking about this. he plans to make a video on dreamxd providing more concrete proof and actually going into depth more than this stream.