#don't you know we were among the first to let women vote?

[interdimensional-chaos]

The Ex-Mormon thing is complicated and if I see any blanket statements about it being a cult I will bring out the block button.

Yes we have a persecution complex.

No it was not JUST about Polygamy its always been a thing even before that got rolled out and we didn't move to Utah so we could "practice Polygamy in peace."

It was also because we advocated for freed slaves. That was the complaint about us in Missouri at least.

We were hunted down multiple times just for existing. Just like so many other groups that exist. Bullies will take any excuse.

LDS history is complicated and messy but don't think for a fucking moment that it's black and white "they're evil." That's the same trap the church has fallen into too

[evidence-based-activism]

regarding your vote post, I’m pro trump and not homophobic at all. It’s insane that you all believe this. Trump was the ONLY president to be PRO gay marriage even before taking the office. If you remember back when Obama was in office he was against it for years. Then he came around to it. Biden was against it then came around to it. Trump was the only one who was pro gay rights/ gay marriage before taking office. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Also people bring him up being “misogynistic” for that audio of him saying “grab them by the p” which was taken completely out of context. Let’s talk about the point he was actually making which is that when you’re rich there are women out there ( we all know the kind to which he was referring) who will allow you to do anything or act anyway. He said you could “grab them by the p” and they wouldn’t care.

I'm bumping this up the queue given the current election timeline. So, here you go Anon (and audience):

"regarding your vote post"

They mean this post, where I implore everyone who cares about women (and other similar groups/causes) to vote for Harris (and down your ticket) in the upcoming US election. Check it out!

"I’m pro trump and not homophobic at all. It’s insane that you all believe this."

It's insane to me that anyone can actually believe that "supporting Trump" and "not being homophobic" are not mutually exclusive. You are supporting a man – and a party – that wants to dismantle the rights and protections of the LGB community.

I'll detail all the ways he's hostile in another section. First,

"Trump was the ONLY president to be PRO gay marriage even before taking the office"

This is just factually inaccurate.

In 2011, on Fox News [1]:

"I just don't feel good about it," Trump said. "I don't feel right about it. I'm against it, and I take a lot of heat because I come from New York. You know, for New York it's like, how can you be against gay marriage? But I'm opposed to gay marriage."

In 2015, on CNN [2]:

"I’m just for traditional marriage.”

In 2016 (election year), on Fox News [3]:

WALLACE: But -- but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage? TRUMP: I would strongly consider that, yes.

"If you remember back when Obama was in office he was against it for years. Then he came around to it."

In the meantime, Obama directed the Justice Department to stop defending DOMA, explicitly stated his support for same-sex marriage, and signed an executive order protecting LGBT employees working for government contractors [4].

Did Obama start out opposing same-sex marriage? Yeah, and that was terrible. But he also opposed (and pledged to repeal) the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – which was, I must stress, a bipartisan policy at the time, supported ‘strong civil unions’ that ensured the same rights as marriage, and pledged to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – all during his campaign.

And the thing is, most people at that time opposed same-sex marriage [5]. In 2004, 60% of Americans opposed same-sex marriage and only 31% supported it. By 2019, this flipped with 61% supporting same-sex marriage and 31% opposing it.

All this is to say, that at the time, Obama's policies concerning same-sex relationships and discrimination protection for same-sex attracted people, were overtly liberal. More so than even the wider Democratic party or the American public as a whole.

The fact that he was responsive to the public, and became more supportive over time, Anon, is actually a sign of a good politician.

In contrast to all of this, Trump's explicit anti-gay campaign rhetoric took place during a time of unprecedented tolerance and acceptance of gay people, even among Republican moderates/leaners.

"Biden was against it then came around to it."

Biden "came around to it" around 2012, where he said [6]:

"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men and women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying men and women are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties and, quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that."

You'll note that 2012 is before 2020, meaning that Biden was the actual first President to be pro-gay marriage prior being President. (You'll also note that this was around the same time as Trump explicitly stating he opposed gay marriage.)

"Trump was the only one who was pro gay rights/ gay marriage before taking office."

I have explained in detail how you are wrong about this above. In addition to that, let's take a look at Trump's actual track record for gay rights:

Attempted to deny citizenship children born abroad to married same-sex parents [7]

Supported allowing adoption agencies to refuse same-sex parents on the basis of them being homosexual [8]

Appointed dozens of homophobic judges with a track record of anti-gay rulings/statements [9]

Removed or restricted protections based on sexual orientation in health care, and, just as importantly, failed to enact any protections [10]

Asked the Supreme Court to allow employers to fire workers on the basis of their sexual orientation, and, just as importantly, failed to enact any sexuality-based employment protections [11]

Selected a Vice President (Pence) with a long history of anti-gay remarks and legislation [12]

Prevented essential data collection about the LGBT community [13]

And a lot more general (e.g., immigration, economic) policies that, while not directed specifically at gay/bisexual people, still negatively affected the communities

"You have no idea what you’re talking about."

I have listened to Trump's words and watched Trump's actions and seen substantial proof that he – at the very least – would sacrifice homosexual/bisexual people to achieve his goals (e.g., winning the election, persuading Republicans on other issues, etc.). His actions have threatened our rights and encouraged hatred of and violence against our community [14].

Tell me Anon, what exactly are you talking about?

---

"Also people bring him up being “misogynistic” for that audio of him saying “grab them by the p” which was taken completely out of context. Let’s talk about the point he was actually making which is that when you’re rich there are women out there ( we all know the kind to which he was referring) who will allow you to do anything or act anyway. He said you could “grab them by the p” and they wouldn’t care."

Yes, Anon, let's talk about that audio. Let's talk about his exact words [15]:

"I've got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And let's count all the ways this is misogynistic:

Admittance of sexual harassment/sexual assault ("I don't even wait.")

Justification of sexual harassment/sexual assault ("they let you do it. You can anything")

Support of the "rape is irresistible/uncontrollable" rape myth ("just in case I start kissing her", "it's like a magnet")

Support of the "women secretly want it" rape myth ("they let you do it")

Support of the "some women deserve to be assaulted" rape myth (in this case the "some women" are presumably women in proximity to rich men)

Objectification and sexualization of women ("grab them by the pussy")

Let's talk about your implied support for many of these ("we all know the kind to which he was referring"), as if any behavior could ever justify sexual harassment/assault.

Let's talk about all the other objectifying, sexualizing, harassing, misogynistic comments he's made [15, 16]:

"She's probably deeply troubled, and therefore great in bed. How come the deeply troubled women — deeply, deeply troubled — they're always the best in bed?" About his daughter, Tiffany Trump: ' "Well, I think that she's got a lot of Marla. She's a really beautiful baby, and she's got Marla's legs." Motioning to his chest, Trump added: "We don't know whether she's got this part yet, but time will tell." ' About his other daughter, Ivanka Trump "She does have a very nice figure ... if [she] weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." "If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?" "I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm more honest and my women are more beautiful." “They said, ‘How are you going to change the pageant?’ I said ‘I’m going to get the bathing suits to be smaller and the heels to be higher’.” “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees”

This is just a small sample of what he's said publicly, Anon.

Not enough? Then let's talk about the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual assault and harassment [17]. (I guess they didn't really "let you do it", more like "couldn't stop it".) Let's talk about how many more there must be, who have not been able to come forward.

Let's talk about how a jury has found Trump did in fact rape at least one women [18]. (And about all the ways our legal system is broken, that this had to taken to a civil court.)

(And what act, Anon, could be more misogynistic than rape?)

More than that Anon, let's talk about all the ways Trump and his administration has hurt women (and other, connected, vulnerable groups):

Limiting access to abortion and contraception [19, 10]

Appointing three anti-choice justices to Supreme Court and claiming credit for overturning Roe v. Wade [19, 10]

Targeting anti-discrimination and equal-pay programs which will harm working women [20]

Advancing economic policies that will affect all poor and middle class individuals, but particularly women [10, 20-22], including, but not limited to: threatening Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, housing and rental assistance, and cash assistance; threatening child care assistance/family leave; cutting the National Domestic Violence Hotline budget; threatening global health cooperation; threatening unions; etc.

And remember how he took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade [19, 10]? That was via his nomination of anti-choice Supreme Court justices. And let's all remember that, in his concurrent opinion , Justice Clarence Thomas stated:

"In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell"

Which, if you're not familiar, refers to the court cases that protects women's right to contraception without government restriction, made it legal for homosexual people to have sex, and legalized gay marriage. (And, while we're at it, let's all remember that, as recently as 2003, states could make consensual, homosexual, sex illegal. Let's all remember the states that still have sodomy laws on the books, just in case Lawrence is overturned.)

So, let's mark that down as another way Trump has threatened the rights of women and gays. And let's all remember that the next President will – most likely – be appointing Supreme Court justices that will determine whether the court upholds or rescinds these very basic rights.

---

And, also, just for fun, let's also remember all the ways Trump and his administration has threatened and harmed the environment [24, 25].

---

In summary, Trump is a homophobic, misogynistic, rapist who will trample the rights of the poor and the vulnerable.

This is the man you support, Anon. These are the actions you endorse.

And for everyone else, please, go vote.

References below the cut:

Clark, D. (2016, August 15). Donald Trump is against same-sex marriage. @politifact. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/15/sean-patrick-maloney/donald-trump-against-same-sex-marriage/

Donald Trump on CNN’s State of the Union: “I’m in it to win it… I will make our country great again.” (2015, June). https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/06/28/donald-trump-on-cnns-state-of-the-union-im-in-it-to-win-it-i-will-make-our-country-great-again/

Fox News. (2016, January 31). Ted Cruz attacks Donald Trump’s financial record; Trump responds. Archived at http://archive.today/2016.05.05-023428/http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/01/31/ted-cruz-attacks-donald-trump-financial-record-trump-responds/

Steinmetz, K. (2015, April 10). See obama’s 20-year evolution on lgbt rights. TIME. https://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-lgbt-rights/

Attitudes on same-sex marriage. (2019, May 14). Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

Crowley, M. (2023, March 17). Tracking the shift before Biden’s same-sex marriage epiphany. @politifact. https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/mar/17/tracking-the-shift-after-joe-bidens-same-sex-marri/

Trump administration loses fight to stop child born abroad to gay couple from becoming US citizen. (2020, October 16). The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/trump-same-sex-marriage-parents-children-citizenship-b938265.html

Adoption agency should be able to reject gay couples, Trump administration argues. (2020, June 4). NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/adoption-agency-should-be-able-reject-gay-couples-trump-administration-n1224911

Lambda Legal. (2021). Courts, Confirmations, & Consequences: How Trump Restructured the Federal Judiciary and Ushered in a Climate of Unprecedented Hostility toward LGBTQ+ People and Civil Rights. Retrieved from https://legacy.lambdalegal.org/sites/default/files/judicial_report_2020.pdf

Compare trump and harris health care records and positions. (n.d.). KFF. https://www.kff.org/compare-2024-candidates-health-care-policy/

Garza, A. de la. (2019, August 25). Trump administration asks supreme court to legalize workplace discrimination against gay employees. TIME. https://time.com/5660956/trump-administration-anti-gay-brief-title-vii/

Drabold, W. (2016, July 15). Here’s what mike pence said on lgbt issues over the years. TIME. https://time.com/4406337/mike-pence-gay-rights-lgbt-religious-freedom/

Wang, H. L. (2018, September 20). Trump officials “did not want” census survey to ask about sexual orientation. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649752485/trump-officials-did-not-want-census-survey-to-ask-about-sexual-orientation

Lohr, D. (2018, January 22). Report shows massive increase in anti-lgbtq violence since trump took office. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lgbtq-violence-trump_n_5a625035e4b002283002897b

Schwartz, R., & Lange, T. W. U. last updated C. from J. (2024, September 20). 87 things Donald Trump has said about women. Theweek. https://theweek.com/donald-trump/655770/61-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women

All the sexist things Donald Trump has said. (2016, October 9). The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-sexist-quotes-comments-tweets-grab-them-by-the-pussy-when-star-you-can-do-anything-women-fat-pigs-dogs-slobs-blood-her-wherever-miss-piggy-miss-housekeeping-insults-hispanic-hillary-a7353006.html

González-Ramírez, Andrea. (2024, October 24). Trump Accused of Sexual Misconduct for the 27th Time.Archived at http://archive.today/2024.10.25-185528/https://www.thecut.com/article/new-trump-allegation-stacey-williams.html

Blake, Aaron. (2023, July 19). Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll. Archived at http://archive.today/2024.05.03-172431/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/

Ranji, U., Salganicoff, A., Sanchez, B. C., & Published, L. S. (2024, October 1). Harris v. Trump: Records and positions on reproductive health. KFF. https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/harris-v-trump-records-and-positions-on-reproductive-health/

McGahey, R. (2024, October 9). Trump’s economic policies will hurt working women. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardmcgahey/2024/10/09/trumps-economic-policies-will-hurt-working-women/

100 Days, 100 Ways the Trump Administration Is Harming Women and Families (2017, April 25). Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/100-days-100-ways-trump-administration-harming-women-families/

Trump administration budgets and social programs. (n.d.). Brookings. Retrieved October 27, 2024, from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-administration-budgets-and-programs-for-people-of-limited-means/

Sullivan, B. (2022, June 24). These 3 Supreme Court decisions could be at risk after Roe v. Wade was overturned. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096732347/roe-v-wade-implications-beyond-abortion

Gross, S. (2020, August 4). What is the Trump administration’s track record on the environment? Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-the-trump-administrations-track-record-on-the-environment/

Popovich, N., Albeck-Ripka, L., & Pierre-Louis, K. (2020, October 16). The trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. Here’s the full list. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html

[squalodinoappreciationsquad]

Headcanons - Dino's family

Because Amano did not give us anything at all, please see below my headcanons for Dino's family and guardians.

Big Disclaimer: these all all OCs except obviously for Dino and his dad, who canonly appear in both manga and anime.

I am also very conscious that I have used actual Italian names and surnames for my OCs, so yeah. Perks of actually being Italian I guess. Anyway. Here you go:

And here you have all general explanations.

So, Dino's family is mainly normal people - as normal as they can be in the KHR universe, let's say they are mostly Nana Sawada's kind of normal.

I still have to establish how the Cavallone family came into existence, but I figure they were once nobles and once Italy got rid of the Savoy family and voted to establish a republic rather than a monarchy (2 June 1946) they kind of went through the change to kind of save themselves.

So, the thing in Italy is that we don't really have horse races, unless you count the Palio di Siena and the Palio di Asti, BUT we have EVERYTHING about cars.

Car races are A LOT, there is Formula 1, Formula 3, Moto GP, rally, whatever involves car races under the sun. It's kind of our specialty lol, Alfa, Ferrari, Lancia and Lamborghini are VERY famous brands.

And car races means a lot of betting, which is something a mafia boss would want to have part in it money-wise and power-wise.

Which went quite well as an alternative income after losing nobility status until Cosimo Cavallone (the Ninth) inherited the thing from his father Giorgio (the Eighth) and kind of leaned too much into betting and went into huge and heavy debts. Reasons why Dino had to pay off his dad's debts whilst becoming the Tenth boss. :)

Surely this must have given Dino a deep hatred of betting, but I feel this is a headcanon for a different post.

Anyway.

Onto his family.

We of course know Romario and Ivan and all of his subordinates, but SURELY Dino has a big family.

Dino is an only child with an ungodly amount of cousins. He is also one of the oldest among the cousins, which means he has had to babysit A LOT during family gatherings. Here I am including the closest ones, but trust me, there is an entire army of cousins.

And he has to know them all.

Speaking about cousins, the most notable are:

Marco Gallo: son of his aunt Marta and his uncle Donato, Marco has never had a single serious thought in his head in his whole life. He loves playing pranks and whilst the 99% of the times they are harmless, he is also a very easy target if anyone takes his pranks the wrong way. Among his pranks, mainly at Dino's expenses, he snapped a "Christmassy" photo of teen!Dino and teen!Squalo crouched over one of the newborn cousins at a family event and dubbing it as "the Nativity". Oh, sometimes he shows up way too drunk at family events and shenanigans ensue.

Margherita and Irene Testa: they are twins. Those twins who look the same and you cannot distinguish them unless they wear different clothes/different hairstyles. Which was an issue until they hit their teenage years and they developed opposite tastes, as in Margherita is the one who will have everything made of natural fibers, is into the new age kind of thing and Irene is the exact opposite of it. In spite of everything they really get along well. when they were children their favourite sport was to corner Dino and make him play dolls with them, which Dino hated. Once Squalo was in the picture they made him play dolls too.

But Dino not only has cousins and a father, he also has a mother. Veronica Greco, aka the Most Beautiful Woman no one has yet understood how she could marry Cosimo Cavallone, a very average-looking man. Dino took after her in looks.

By the way, in Italy we DO NOT take the husband's name, unless the person specifically wants to, it's the very first "fuck you" to patriarchy that women could have, because up until the mid-seventies women were pretty much treated like property/objects.

Anyway.

Veronica is one of those people who are naturally good at everything. She also has the ability to step into a room and make everyone go quiet, which is very useful when family events go downhill. She just says "Stop" and everyone goes quiet, then she smiles and solves the issues at hand.

Dino can do that for about 1 minute, then he trips or falls down or something and the magic is gone.

Veronica also deals with a lot of the family drama and the gossips and has also gone very near a divorce because of Cosimo's gambling habits.

And speaking of Dino's dad, he is not actually dead, he decided to retire once Dino became boss and he is now enjoying the countryside with his wife Veronica. His hobbies consist in collecting scale models of cars and tending at the garden.

Of course Dino has his own Guardians. We do not usually see them because Dino can deal with most of the things himself, but - figure something like Byakuran happens - they will gladly join the fight. They all were people either saved or friended by Dino whilst Reborn was his tutor and was in the process of becoming the Bucking Bronco.

They are:

Alessandro Ferro: Storm Guardian. Very reliable in a fight, he uses a crossbow and he is a master sniper. Somehow he once got arrested for stealing manholes, but never served as his alibi was proved.

Diego Guerra: Rain guardian, he originally was supposed to join the Varia, but they had enough swordsmen and he needed a job, as he was deep into debt. Dino listened to him and helped him get back on his feet. since then Diego's loyalty has been with Dino. He uses a rapier as weapon.

Lucrezia Battaglia: Sun guardian, Judo black belt 8th dan, undefeated so far. She is short and way too much into cutesy stuff, but she will beat you to a pulp if she feels a hint of threat. She absolutely loves shoujo anime.

Cristian D'amico: Thunder guardian - and no, I have not messed the spelling, in Italy we tend to omit the H bc it is a mute consonant. The chillest guy on earth. Takes things with such a phlegm. It's obviously the calm before the storm when he fights. Would rather nap than fight tho.

Danilo de Angelis: he is the aloof one. He likes wandering about and looks a little bit lost, but don't be fooled. He is very perceptive and will notice when things are not going well.

Iacopo La Morte: everyone is scared of him because they hear his surname (aka The Death) andeveryone is like "OMG this guy is going to kill us all", and they kind of get disappointed when they see he is actually a really nice person. Unless you wronged the family, in which case he is going to make sure you regret it with all your being.

And I admit I have only developed everyone this much just because I was like "oh, it's only for the Big Damn Table, they are going to have sporadic apparitions whilst I fill the 100 prompts", but now that I actually see this written down I kind of want to expand. What do you all think about this?

[nokingsonlyfooles]

"His win is a remarkable political comeback rooted in appeal to frustrated voters" - the new narrative, as told by the AP

Don't pivot. I suspect every politician who wants to stay in power and every journalist who wants to keep their job is pivoting right now, but if they drag enough real human beings with them, we're going to keep collectively accepting more atrocities with a shrug. For fuck's sake don't do that. At least take five minutes and acknowledge the sincerely-held beliefs you had less than a day ago and why you're now willing to buy that, actually, the democracy is still okay and the people got what they wanted.

This result is rooted in the fact that both parties bent over backwards to indicate that NOBODY was going to get what they wanted, EVER, that's not even what democracy is FOR, and a whole bunch of people (non-zero Republicans, but many more Democrats, who aren't as mindlessly obedient to authority) weren't willing to disregard that and vote anyway this time. Or, they went with the chaos engine who breaks things, because at least that's some kind of change.

Voters had family members die on Biden's watch, due to decisions he made and defended. And Harris made and defended them too. Even voters without family members being genocided at the moment have seen dead children and bombed hospitals all over social media, and women bleeding out in emergency rooms, and queer kids beaten to death in bathrooms, and this administration failing to help them. That is not irrelevant just because we want to pretend it's impossible to help.

Trump managed to pass as the lesser evil among the people we actually let vote. That's still evil, but the system says what evil people want is what all of us want, if they win an election, so oops, ha-ha, let me re-type that - that's actually not evil, that's a functioning democracy and it's good.

It's not functioning, it's not good, and I'm sorry for the people who didn't notice that until today, but I'm scared of the ones who can pull off the pivot. The ones who can just rearrange their minds like that because they're supposed to.

Voters are frustrated? Yes. I believe they are. They find Trump "appealing"? Broadly, I suppose some of them do. The easily-terrified authoritarians like a big, strong man in charge of them. And they're willing to cough up quotes that fit the narrative if asked. But this guy isn't going back in the big chair because we wanted him there.

It turns out, that system that we were told is meant to prevent dictators from getting near power is actually very dictator-friendly and easy to manipulate (weird, huh?), that's why he made a "comeback." Impeachment didn't stop it, the justice system didn't stop it, the media didn't stop it, and, wow, the electoral system didn't stop it either. This guy, and people like him, can vacuum up all the legitimacy they want and start making decisions that might kill you. This has been going on for some time, this man is not the first Rapist-in-Chief, (We have had a blue version of that within living memory and they're still allowing him on the political circuit as if we remember him fondly! DO WE?!) he's just louder and harder to ignore. But we're gonna try to ignore him anyway! He won!

This shit narrative is designed to shut you up and get you to fall in line and waste all your energy blaming each other and yourselves. Don't buy it.

...And does anyone out there in the void know how exhausting it is to know you're probably more receptive to this message now than you would've been if the polite wannabe genocidal dictator won?

[linabirb]

okay i think ive looked through linagram masterlist here is my review

not going to review these who im completely neutral towards like they're... just here... they exist

miki - i like her design and the savior complex is funny

akio - skrunkly, i think his average ass design is his charm point👍 also sorry about the homosexuality

aimi - i like her design and the ideas with bullying are interesting to me, also you should redraw her to a frame from carrie

shun - i find him interesting as a character, neutral about him as a person, a lot of things wrong with him for sure

naomi - gorgeous t2 design and i like her personality, i like the idea of a sort of childish adult. FUCK THEM KIDS 💥 i love when adult women go fuck them kids this is hilairous

eiko - the woman ever 👍👍 thank you for e-dating representation

asahi - skrunkly, happy that i got to draw him out of all people for the new year requests

yurika - i like her, idk why you all people are so mean to her, girls must be covered in blood at all times

riku - boy situationship with a person you're sick of much 👍👍 get it 👍👍 being idolized and because of that isolated since you're not Just a Person like everyone but also not ready to let go of being idolized since you cant experience affection in normal ways👍👍

i think my top of those i like the most would be like ... asahi > naomi > akio > riku > yurika maybes?

also i really like the idea with two (well now three) wardens, that makes the vds much more lively, and the verdicts more, thought through? since you can actually see how the arguments went in their conversations, and you dont have to twist the warden's personality to adapt to the verdict since each represents only one verdict

have you ever made smth like a popularity poll i want to know what is the general rating among the linagrammers im new to the fandom

YAYYYYYYYY

"sorry about the homosexuality" made me scream you're so right.. sometimes i think about how if akio was straight maybe all of this wouldn't have happened /j

AND OH WAIT YOU'RE RIGHT ABOUT AIMI AND CARRIE... NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT THAT IT FITS HER SO WELL ESPECIALLY WITH HER FIRST MV... writing this down writing this down

and yes, when i started thinking about naomi's character more, i actually had this idea that like.. "what if we had a character who's an adult woman and who doesn't like children, but she has no idea that she's actually still a child on the inside". her third mv will focus a lot on that too..

thank you for summarizing riku's character 😌😌 the guy actually probably has a god complex that's worse than akio's but his story isn't about that. he's also a god who's kinda tired of his followers but knows he won't be able to do anything without them so.. what a dilemma.. kurae ban ban ban..

actually yes, i kinda went with multiple guards bc i did have only one guard oc at first but when i started to think about the vds the conversations sounded very awkward.. so i was like two guards it is! well now three. it's okay to forget hinode exists btw i forget about him sometimes too writing him is agonizing bc this guy is just linagram komaeda

i think i haven't really made any polls like that and i don't think linagram has like. a really big fandom hdjkskssk i think people were more active when i just started, but i remember making a poll that was like "hey if linagram was a dating sim, who would you date" and kei and eiji got the most votes. sanada brothers are overall very popular i think? and i think if i made a poll like that kei and/or yurika would win djsksls

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Horsey, The Seattle Times

* * * *

Great democracies don't fail when they are tested. We haven't before, and we won't this time either.

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

DEC 7, 2023

Have you ever thought about the role guilt has played in our national life?  It’s not omnipresent, it’s certainly not felt by everyone, most especially those sinned against, but I would say guilt rivals pride as the thing that has most motivated us.  Think about it for a moment.  The founding of this country wasn’t an immaculate birth – for one thing, there wasn’t a Founding Mother among all those long-heralded Founding Fathers, and one of the two greatest mistakes they made the day they came to an agreement on our founding document was what they left out.  They didn’t award women full citizenship, and they failed to deal in any way with the sin of slavery.

But an important portion of what makes America exceptional is how we have endeavored to fix our mistakes.  We have yet to make adequate amends to the Native Americans who were here before we were and were systematically murdered and kidnapped and abused as this country spread West before and after its founding.  But in fits and starts, we’ve been trying – some of us have, anyway – to make amends. 

Out of the frying pan of the abject mistake of slavery and into the fire of the Civil War went our first attempt to deal with what we may as well call our founding errors.   It took a century that included decades of Reconstruction and Jim Crow and tens of thousands of dead black bodies and burned-down churches and homes and seized land and wealth until the moral clarity and power of the Civil Rights Era forced us as a nation to begin to repair the damage we had done to our fellow citizens who were Black.  Even then, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act faced massive resistance.  Laws against segregation had to be enforced in some cases by armed soldiers to be carried out in schools and colleges in the South.  We stumbled through fights over busing in cities like Boston and neighborhoods like Canarsie.  White flight from cities across the nation – Detroit and Baltimore among them – damaged tax bases, hurt schools, and let’s not forget the continuing PTSD of having been on the receiving end of the racism behind it all.  How would you like to have been a Black family that moved into a white neighborhood anywhere – South, North, East, or West – and watched the “For Sale” signs go up around you and the schools to which you sent your kids nearly empty of white kids?

And we must not forget what this country did to its women.  It took until 1920 and the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution for women to get the right to vote.  That is more than 130 years that women were what is commonly called second class citizens in this country.  But I would go further:  the everyday work of women was used to build this country. By giving birth to new citizens, women, alongside immigrants, created the population that made possible the formation of territories and then the new states that would comprise the United States of America – all 50 of them.  When men went off to war, women stepped up and did every single job a man had done in their place.  And what did they get in return?  For decades, a one-way ticket back to the kitchen and the nursery.  Women had to start an entire new movement, the Women’s Movement, to begin the long process of realizing some modicum of equality with men in the workplace and in the home, and as we all know, it’s not finished.  Women earned 57 cents for every dollar earned by men in 1969.  Today, the gap has closed to women’s 80 cents for every male dollar, but jeez, 23 cents over 54 years?  That’s an improvement of only a half-cent a year.

It would take a lengthy book to discuss gender inequality in the eyes of the law.  Before the Women’s Movement made rape an issue with the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s epic “Against Our Will:  Men, Women and Rape” published in 1975, complaints by women that they were raped were often brushed aside by police and prosecutors.  It took decades for laws to be passed against using women’s sexual history against them in rape cases.  Women are still dealing with inequality on college campuses on countless grounds – how charges of harassment and abuse are dealt with, inequities in sports, inequities in employment of women by colleges and universities.  And practically every time women have thought they have secured a right they have fought for and won, it is either challenged or taken away altogether, the right to abortion being the prime example.

We have made great strides in the rights of LGBTQ people, but with the right wing attacking trans people and forbidding the teaching of LGBTQ books in schools, we’re not finished.  We’re not finished with any of it – with how we treat Native Americans, Blacks and other minorities, how we treat women, how we treat immigrants…we could go on and on and on. 

The only people who haven’t been crapped on in the 236 years of our history are white Christian males, and now with God only knows how much of the nation’s wealth and land, they are whining about being discriminated against by the people on whose shoulders they have been standing, if not stomping further into the ground.

We have been tested before and found wanting, but as a people, we have found a way to rally and at least attempt to overcome the problems we have faced since our founding.  Often the tests we face boil down to politics, because within the political process has lain the solutions we have found, often by enacting laws to forbid the bad and elevate the good. 

We are being tested yet again.  The Republican Party, which was once the party that stood against slavery and for equality, has made an about-face on so many issues, it’s hard to list them, but race, equal rights for women, gay rights, immigrant rights, and equality of economic opportunity are certainly among them.  And now they have chosen a leader, and even elected him president for one term, who not only wants to turn back the clock of progress on so many of the things that have made this country a shining light to the world, he wants to destroy the democracy that has haltingly, imperfectly, but steadily made progress possible. 

What I’m here to tell you today is this:  look back at the long and often difficult history of our country.  Almost all of these things that have been problems since the day of our founding are still with us in some measure, but we have accomplished the end of our original sin of slavery and we are at least still trying to make amends for the original sin of the slaughter of the people here on this continent before us who are now our fellow citizens.  We’ve done the same with the other people and issues I have cited here.  We must look at the victories we achieved in these fights with pride and renewed determination to overcome what stands before us in the next election.

He is one man.  He may lead a movement, but it’s a movement that has lost the fights we fought to get where we are.  He, and they, are not the future.  They represent the dead, rotting flesh of our disreputable past, the awful instincts of man to which we first had to admit guilt and then find a way to put behind us. 

I am telling you that if you look back at our accomplishments as a people, you will see our democracy is stronger than maybe we have been thinking.  We keep hearing that our democracy is under threat, but our democracy has been threatened before. We defeated Hitler and Hirohito and saved the world from a monstrous end, just for starters.  We are strong.  We have united in the face of adversity before.  It’s not all of us who will rally in defense of our democracy this time, but so what?  It wasn’t the entire nation who rallied behind Civil Rights, either, but we did it, and we can do it again, not with guns and bombs but with our ideas and our ideals and our votes.  There are more of us than there are of them.  Remember that.

[Lucian Truscott Newsletter]

[superbdragoncollection-stuff]

I saw the guardian asking why the democratic party lost the young white male vote. And I saw someone who said something along the lines of "the democrats focused on harm reduction while the Republicans focused on hate; it's clear that harm reduction doesn't work we should use hate".

First of all, only 43% of the country voted. Assuming that the numbers are equal, half of that would be men. 21.5%. sixty-one percent of the country identifies as white, so that means 13% of the voters were white men. and let us assume half of them voted for Trump. 6.5%. And if we guess age, 1/3rd of them are young white men. So that means the population the guardian is whining about that voted for Trump was... roughly 2%. Further, the default group everyone always appeals to in elections is white men. Not as often young folks, but white men nonetheless. So the Guardian is concerned about the lost vote of 2 people in a room of 100, where 57 people didn't even give their opinion. If only 43 people gave their opinion 2 seems like a lot, but is it really? Was this really the clincher voting block when so many other much larger groups gave their votes to the other side? How about women? You know, likely half the voters? 43 people and 11 of them voted for the other side.

The other bad take I saw really bugged me. Hate can just recreate the same problems you had in the first place, and also, I don't think they actually meant hate I think they meant being *mean*. I don't think being mean will solve anything! It can be important to harness emotions to the right ends, yet hate for hates sake is wrong! You can't create a world without hate by using hate! When you've finally "won" do you actually have a better world?

You can harness emotions for good causes, but it should be enough to say "the other side will lose", not "HATE AND KILL RIP AND TEAR" the other side!

Adopting republican tactics has arguably been the playbook for democrats for decades! Did you know, between 1865 and 1944, the republican party could guarantee a majority black vote? Lincoln's party freed the slaves and back in the 1860s, they were the progressive party. That guaranteed vote only changed with the FDR and the Truman administrations in the 40s, who, despite their flaws, made major strides for civil rights, with the New Deal programs and desegregating the military. This made them very popular! These were incredibly popular things among voters, subsidies of housing, better loans for college and houses, the war on poverty, the minimum wage... Since the 70s though, the democrats abandoned working class voters, and they left behind everything the New Deal ever had. And they did it for reasons that can be debated, yet some would say was to court right-wing voters.

So, they abandoned the things that won them support and ever since then have been on shaky foundations. Is it really "hatred" that won the republicans, or was it the democrats actively abandoning the things that made them popular in the first place to court right-wing voters?

Turns out chasing someone to the bottom when they already have a head start doesn't go well! Who knew?

I've figured lately that a major problem is politicians gaming the system in the same way speed runners in video games do. They're not actually interested in the realities of what the system was made for, they're intent on pushing, shoving, and breaking it so they can win. This applies to the economy as well as politics. Its why we had the 2008 financial crash among other reasons. Someone uninterested in the story of a game isn't going to be healthy for the denizens of those games: frequently speed runners will kill NPCs or break vital game functions. Yet at least with a speed runner you don't have to watch them!

There are a bunch of cliches in American politics, from all sides of the spectrum. "We should use the money on space to fix problems here on earth", "we should run the country like a business", and "Wait for progress".

We have TRIED all of those for DECADES. The space cliche is nonsense because A, space isn't that expensive, B, we tried that in the Vietnam War, money for Vietnam was literally the justification for a ton of NASA cuts, C, lots of progressive people in the 60s thought beating the Soviets would make everything better, and D, IT DIDN'T WORK. The business cliche is nonsense because people have been saying that LITERALLY SINCE THE 1930s, WHERE DOING THAT LED TO THE CRASH OF '29 AND DIRECTLY LED TO WWII. And as the big man said once, "wait usually means never". Progress has never come by being patient, it has come kicking and screaming with many efforts to drag it back.

You CANNOT win by courting 2% of the bloody country, and you CANNOT win by peddling in hatred and by adopting the tactics of the other side! We TRIED THAT. IT DOESN'T WORK

[therealvinelle]

I've always wondered this, but what do you think the Cullen's political viewpoints would be, given their individual backgrounds? if vampires don't change after they turn, then surely they would all be extremely racist (especially Jasper). would this not come up at some point? they aren't like the Volturi because the Volturi are too old to care, but the Cullens are young enough that they have been brought up with opinions on stuff like sexism, racism, homophobia and the like.

Oh fuck.

You get an early answer because otherwise I'll just chicken out and delete this one, pretend I never saw it.

UMMM.

Since I'm guessing you meant American political viewpoints, we need a disclaimer. I am not American, and not too knowledgeable about your politics. Not just in the sense that I don't follow the day-to-day drama, but as I am not an American citizen there are several things I don't know, can't know because I've never lived in your country and therefore can't know what the effects of living in a country ruled by American policies is like. What I do know is based off of the news in the foreign section, social media (by which I mean tumblr posts), and Trevor Noah's Daily Show.

I am an outsider looking in.

Which is really rather appropriate, since the Cullens are too.

The Cullens go to high school and college, Carlisle works, they pay taxes, they own real estate, and submerge themselves in American culture. Esme, Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, and Bella are young enough that this is in many ways their world, and apart from timeouts they've more or less spent their entire lives, human and vampire, integrated into American society.

Not fully integrated, mind you, they do what they need to to fit in and get to school or, in Carlisle’s case, to work. They go no further. No extra-curriculars for the kids, no book clubs for Esme, no game nights for Carlisle. They walk parallel to humans, not among us.

In addition to this they're obscenely rich, which puts them another thousand miles from the experiences of your average American. They won't deal with the health system, which means healthcare is a non-issue, they're not going to need welfare or other social programs, unemployment is another non-issue. Name your issue, and the Cullens don't have personal stake in it. Even the climate crisis won't be a problem for them the way it will for us.

What I'm trying to say is, American political issues are a concept to them, not a lived reality. Just like they are for me. So hey, you made a great choice of blog to ask.

I'll also add here that you say the Volturi are too old to care, and I agree- from an ancient's point of view, racism is a matter of "which ethnicity are we hating today?", and it all looks rather arbitrary after a while. Same with every other issue - after a while it all just blends together into "what are the humans fighting over today? Which Christian denomination is the correct one? Huh. Good for them, I guess."

I can't put it any better than this post did, really. The Volturi are real people, humans are nerds and tumblr having Loki discourse. Aro thinks it's delightful and knows entirely too much about Watergate (and let's be real, Loki discourse as well), but the point I wanted to get at is that politics really don't matter to vampires.

And I don't think they matter to the Cullens either.

So, moving on to the next point while regretting I didn't put headlines in this post, I'll just state that I don't think vampires' minds are frozen. Their brains are unable to develop further, and they can never forget anything, but... well, this isn't the post for that, but in order for this to be true of vampires they would barely be sentient. They would not be able to process new impressions, to learn new things, nor to have an independent thought process. Yes, we see vampires in-universe (namely, Edward, who romanticizes himself and vampires) believe they're frozen and can never change, but there is no indication that this is a widespread belief, or even true. Quite the contrary - Carlisle went from a preacher's son who wanted to burn all the demons to living in Demon Capital for decades and then becoming a doctor and making a whole family of demons. Clearly, the guy has had a change in attitude over the years. Jasper, in his years as a newborn army general, slowly grew disenchanted with his life and developed depression. James initially meant to kill Victoria and hunted her across the earth, then became fascinated and changed his mind about it.

Had these people been incapable of change, Carlisle would still be hating demons, Jasper would be in Maria's army, and James would still be hunting Victoria.

It goes to follow, then, that they are able to adapt to new things.

The question is, would they?

Here I finally answer your question.

So, we have these people who don't really have any kind of stake in politics, who keep up to date all the same (or are forcibly kept up to date because high school) and are generally opinionated people.

Where do they then fall, politically?

(And this is where you might want to stop reading, anon, because I'm about to eviscerate these people.)

Alice votes for whoever's gonna win. She also makes a fortune off of betting each election. Trump's 1 to 10 victory in 2016 was a great day to be Alice. MAGA!

The actual policies involved are completely irrelevant, she does this because it's fun. Election means she gets to throw parties. Color coded parties for the Republican and Democratic primaries, and US-themed parties for Election Night! (Foreigner moment right here: I at first wrote "Election wake" before realizing that's not what y'all murricans call it.)

Alice loves politics. Doesn't know the issues, but she sure loves politics.

Bella votes Democrat. She actually knows about the issues, and cares about them. This girl is a Democrat through and through.

Carlisle doesn't vote. I can't imagine it feels right. Outside of faked papers he's not a US citizen, this is meddling in human affairs that he knows don't concern him.

More, this guy has never lived in a democracy.

In life, Carlisle lived under an absolute monarchy that, upon civil war, became an absolute theocracy. From there he learned that vampires live under a total dictatorship.

For the first 150 years of his life, democracy was that funky thing the Athenians did in history books thousands of years ago, no more relevant to him than the Ancient Egyptian monarchy is to me. Then the Americans, and later other European countries started doing this.

Good for them.

There's this mistake often made by those who view history from a... for lack of a better term, a solipsistic standpoint. A belief that the present day is the culmination of all of history. “My society is the best society, the most reasonable society; all the others had it backwards. Thank god we’re living in this enlightened age!”

The faith in our current system of government is one such belief. We (pardon me if this doesn’t apply to everybody reading this post) have grown up in democracies, being told this is the ultimate form of rule, and perhaps that is true - but remember the kings who have told their subjects they had were divine and the best possible ruler based on that. Remember also that most modern democracies haven’t actually been democracies for very long at all, America is the longest standing at some 230 years (not long at all in the grand scope of things) and they have a fracturing two-party system to show for it.

Every society, ever, has been told they’re the greatest, and their system of government the most just. Democracy is only the latest hit.

This is relevant to Carlisle because he’s immortal and decidedly not modern. Democracy has not been installed in him the way it was the rest of the Cullens, Jasper included. To him- well, it’s just not his world. He has no stakes in our human politics, and as he is older than every current democracy and has seen quite a few of them fall, he’s not going to internalize the democratic form of rule the way a modern human has.

I think the concept of voting is foreign to him.

It requires a level of participation in human society that he’s simply not at. He does the bare minimum to appear human so he do the work he loves, but nothing more, and I find that telling.

As it is I think he'd be iffy about his family doing it. He won’t stop them, but in voting they’re... well it’s kind of cheating. They’re not really citizens, none of this will affect them, and by voting they’re drowning out the votes of real human voters. He does not approve.

Edward votes Democrat. He's... well he’s the kind of guy who will oil a girl’s bedroom window so he can more easily watch her sleep without being discovered, justifying it to himself as being okay because if she were to tell him to get lost he’d stop immediately. Same guy is so sure that he’d leave and never return again if she wanted him to, except this is the man who returned to Forks to hang around his singer, knowing there was a significant chance he might kill her. To say nothing of his Madonna/Whore complex, or of the fact that he tried to pimp out his wife twice, and was willing to forcibly abort her child.

This guy is very much in love with chivalry, with being an enlightened and feminist man who supports and respects women, while not understanding the entire point of feminism, which is female liberation.

He votes Democrat because he’s such an enlightened feminist who cares about women’s rights.

Emmett doesn’t care to vote, but if he has to he votes Republican. The guy is from the 1930′s, and has major would-be-the-uncle-who-cracks-racist-jokes-if-he-was-older vibes.

Esme doesn’t vote, that would require getting out of the house.

More, I just... can’t see it. I can’t see her being one to read up on politics and The Issues, period, but if she has to then I doubt she’d be able to decide.

Jasper doesn’t vote. Alice can have her fun, he does not care.

There’s also the whole can of worms regarding the last time he went to bat for American politics.

I imagine he stays out of this.

Renesmée doesn't vote. She has no stock in the human affairs. Who would she vote for, on what grounds? When Bella tries to pull her to the urns, she points out that she's three years old.

Rosalie, guys, I’m sorry, but that girl is definitely gonna vote Republican. Perhaps not right now as it’s become the Trump party of insanity, but the Mitt Romney type of Republicans? Oh yes.

And for the record, yes I imagine she does vote. To step back from politics would be another way she was relinquishing her humanity, and that’s not allowed to happen. So, yes, she goes to the urns, less for the sake of the politics involved and more because like this, she’s still a part of society in some way.

Now, onto why I think she’s Republican, I think it’s both fiscal and social.

This girl was the daughter of a banker who somehow profited off of the Depression, and who then became part of a family with no material needs that would soon become billionaires thanks to Alice. Poverty to Rosalie is a non-issue, as it is I imagine she views it as a much lesser issue than what she’s had to deal with. The humans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Rosalie’s infertility is forever.

Rosalie’s empathy is strongest when she’s able to project onto others, and she won’t be able to project onto the less fortunate at all.

Then there’s the fact that the Republican party is all about traditional family values, and pro-life.

Rosalie, a woman from the 1930′s who idolizes her human life and who‘d love nothing more than to get to live out this fantasy, is down for that. And as of Breaking Dawn she’s vocally pro-life, so there’s that.

This all being said I don’t think Rosalie cares to sit down and fully understand these politics she’s voting for, the possible impact they’ll have- that’s not important. What’s important is what voting does for her.

TL;DR: I bet anon regrets asking.

[agreatbigworldn]

Alexia Putellas: "The Ballon d'Or? I don't even know when it will be anounced?"

First of all, congratulations on the distinction as the best player in Europe.

Thank you.

Regardless of the team, such an award is exciting, right?

To always see everyone prefers to receive praise than not criticism but I am convinced that everything comes because last year we did what we did and it is not only what we achieved but also how, it is not only the award that I receive but all the nominations what are the companions are for the same

What congratulations was the most special?

Buf, luckily I have received many and I am very grateful to so many people who wish me well, I am very very grateful, I have received many, I could not stay with one ... family, friends, at the club, from the national team, a lot of people, a lot.

How was the event at the Camp Nou?

Very happy. At first there was a bit of a joke because since we don't have the awards yet we thought we would go out and applaud but we couldn't offer anything. It was very good, always very grateful to the culers, for how they treat us and me in particular, I am delighted.

All thanks to a historic season, have you digested what you have achieved?

I have not stopped to think about it. One of those messages told me to enjoy what I have achieved and the award, but I do not enjoy it, I do not know how to enjoy it because I am already thinking about this season, I am very grateful for the votes and that the work of the team has been valued and mine in particular, but I don't know how to enjoy it and I think I won't know how to enjoy it until all this happens, that time flies and I'm enjoying every day

The end was not what was expected, what happened to the coach?

In the end, if I'm not wrong, Lluís already gave the explanations that he felt. The club made a decision, they let us know and nothing else, this is what happened- Then they told us that the coach was going to be Jonatan, that we already knew him, that he was going to be a continuity line, and nothing, with a lot of desire to start this Saturday a new stage.

Do you think what happened was explained well and the fans are clear about what happened?

I am not going to assess whether it was done well or was done wrong, I am a player of the club, I am not the one to assess whether it communicated well or not. I understand that all parties explained how they wanted or how they believed it was the best and I can't tell you more because I don't know more. That's how it went.

Let's go to the future then. His speech at the Gamper was impressive. Had he prepared it?

They were being some complicated days for all the Catalans, from what we all know (Messi's goodbye), so they told me that I had to give a speech as captain next to the captain of the first team, Busi, and my intention was to give the message to close what we did last year, that no one had it in mind to return this year with the same desire to achieve the same, and a little message of pride, that in the end maybe these days the Culer pride and although she is only a player like the others, because I also wanted to value the last sentence I said ("I say it very proud, being from Barça is the best there is," she said then).

The faces of his companions said it all, what did they tell him?

(Laughs) It was because when I turned around, I don't know who said, "That's right, pull your chest out, stick your chest out," as in a well-spoken plan, that we have pride. It was because of that.

They start as champions of everything, how do you deal with it?

Well, not believing that you are the current champion of all competitions, that is why the holidays have served, to think that we have not done anything, that it is no longer useful and that we are not winning because we are the current champions. On the contrary, if there is something more difficult than winning the treble, it is to do it again. We need one more plus. More of us and push ourselves to the limit. In the end, putting on this shirt is what it entails, taking you to the limit year after year, and that is the idea with which we are going to come out and that it does not stop until the end of May.

Three high-level signings have arrived, how about the first days?

I start with Irene, who in the end among us we forget that she is a signing because we have been with her for many years in her selection. I'm not going to discover anything. Everyone knows what kind of central she is. The world top in his position and it is clear that playing for Barça is not the same as playing for others. Especially in the exit of the ball, but I train after training he has been catching it and between all of us we are going to take advantage of a lot of the talent that he has.

Another new one is Fridolina Rölfö.

Frido came back late because of the Games but she seemed to me to be a very good player, left-handed, left winger, which we had but from other non-left-handed profiles, powerful, very strong and vertical.

And finally, Ingrid Engen.

Ingrid was unfortunately injured on the first day and we have not been able to train with her but we know her from having played against Wolfsburg, she is young, physics that will give us a lot and we want her to start in team dynamics.

Is competition important to keep winning?

Yes, in the end, no longer simply to improve each other, yes not because if there are any casualties, I knock on wood, the one that replaces that player makes the level not go down. Last year it happened that you changed piece by piece and it was not noticeable, but this year it will be much less because the level is very high. How about the new coach? In the end the coaching staff has not changed, they are the same except for one incorporation in the second, but it is a continuous line but each coach has his own nuances. We have already taken in this preseason the nuances that he wants for the team, both he and his staff, and the truth is that we are learning a lot every day. There is much talk in the club that if there is no money, that if the salary cuts, does this noise reach them? Let's see, we are part of the club and it is clear that we are aware, all workers, of the situation in the club, which is very complicated, and from the first to the last we wish the best for the club and that everything is solve as soon as possible. Has the club asked you for something? No, during the pandemic yes, but not now. I do not know to what extent it would help if we did it, but if the club believes that it is necessary and that it would help a lot, it is clear that we are the first who want it to go well and be solved as soon as possible, just like the rest of the teammates. Is there still a great gap between men's and women's sports in terms of salary? Of course, in the end, the reduction that an employee of the club or ourselves can make, I do not know if it would help a lot, but I repeat, if the managers believe that we would help even a little, we would be the first to do it How did culé, how did Messi's departure experience? They were hard moments, even days of noticing a void because in the end I have lived almost my entire stage with Messi in the first team. The best player in history, let him leave the team that you feel because it is complicated but in the end also in the line we were talking about in the speech, Barça is the best club in the world, it is very big and has come out of many and this one too is going to come out. And now that the time to death with those who are here has passed, maximum commitment and to cheer on Barça as always. As the best player in Europe, she is a firm candidate for the Ballon d'Or, have you thought about it? I do not even know when it is anounced, with this I answer you a lot. My opinion is that several nominees would have to be from the team, because in the end, at the level at which the season was reached, I have not seen almost any player. Tomorrow the league begins and there will be an audience in the stands. How much does playing without an audience change? A lot, it is very different. In the end without an audience it is very cold, in moments of those that you can be less strong you do not feel that push that the stands give you. I remember the last ten minutes of the semi against PSG, at home, people were pressing and we were very involved and we knew that they were not going to escape. It changes a lot. Hopefully everything ends as soon as possible and people return 100% to the stadiums. What remains to be achieved? Well, as I said, in the summer I did mental work that I did not win the Champions League, League and Bone Cup to repeat it. It is also a Eurocup year and we are really looking forward to it. And enjoy every day that time flies by Any message that surpasses the Gamper's speech? (Laughs) Better put the video of the Gamper, it's the same and it will be. In spanish here

[atsunflower]

Hospital for souls — Intro

Rated: SFW

Author note: hey yall! This is the first chapter for my "Throne: the series". Remember, it's a yakuza!au, so there will be lots of mentions of dark themes. This chapter, thought, is safe and kind of plain, but totally important to the start. Please, enjoy your reading!

Warnings: cursing and slight mentions of anxiety and OCD.

I — Intro

Previous || Next

You walked down the aisle sandwiched between two bodies clad in Armani suits. Even though they knew you woudn’t dare to, they held you like you were about to run away from this whole circus.

There was no bridal march, neither a suntuous decoration. The Elie Saab gown you wore was heavy on your body, making you feel like you didn't belong; the harsh glares thrown at you didn't help either.

You felt helpless.

In the end of the red carpet, a man stood tall and stoic. His hair wasn't combed so the wavy locks were free to frame his face; the harsh glare he gave you three did nothing to diminish his beauty — at least, you tought, he's not a creepy old man. But this fact don't made you feel any relief.

Your head then hung low, as if you were trying to vanish away from this ceremony. The blond man by your left tightened the hold in your arm —not for support, but as warning— while the gray haired one only clicked his tongue; their implicit threat made your skin craw.

Two months ago, you'd never imagine your life would change completely, considering you weren't given any options.

Two months ago, a tall brown haired man would escort you out of the hospital you worked and then, take you to your doom: from a fatherless daughter to a bastard of Inarizaki and then, a bride for a man you never saw before. A whole arrangement that lasted 60 days and took you away from everything you had, from everything you knew.

Lost in thoughts, you didn't feel when your steps halted nor when the two figures who held you let go of your arms to take their seats. The man waiting for you don't bothered to acknowledge your presence by his side, but you saw his features hardening once you reached for him.

In shades of orange and black, the venue pretty much looked like a courtroom, its aesthetic doing nothing to ease your nerves. In the pulpit, an old man stood proud, sporting a wise aura only the time could give him.

The elder cleared his throat and everyone in the room stood on their feet.

"Good evening ladies, gentlemen and the distinguished people from the families" his voice sounded loud and mighty, even if he wasn't using a mic. "Tonight, we are reunited to celebrate an unprecendented moment in the history of our kind: the union of Inarizaki and Itachiyama households"

A minute of silence was made; everyone in the place held a solemn face, waiting for the man to proceed.

"I, Ukai Ikkei, the elder of Karasuno, feel honoured to lead such important event" He said placing his right hand on his chest "Assuring you all that, Karasuno, the household responsible for all the bureaucracy and diplomacy related to our activities, is still commited to keep a neutral eye over families matters only to officialize, document and inspect the agreements between the families. That being said, the ceremony shall begin."

His raspy voice dragged the boring speech until a men with bleached hair walked to where you and the groom stood, with a huge book in his hands. He carefully placed it on the desk in front of you, grabing the leathern material of its cover and opening it.

"Tonight, a new chapter is added to the Book of Deals. With clauses that concern only the involved parts, we witness the signing of this agreement by the main heads of Inarizaki and Itachiyama, as well the bride's signature. But first, shall we hear the marriage votes and the exchange of rings"

A man from Itachiyama's side stood and came to you both, holding a black velvety box. He opened it, offering its contents at you first; you took the larger golden band and started:

"I, [L/N; Name], daughter of Inarizaki, give you, Sakusa Kiyoomi, this ring as a symbol of my commitment to you and Itachiyama, manifesting my will to this alliance between our families" surprisingly, your voice sounded steady while reciting the speech you knew by heart, paying no mind to the snickering behind you.

Sakusa looked at you with distaste, his body going stiff the moment you held his hand and slipped the golden band to his ring finger. He then took the remaining jewel and turned to you:

"I thee wed" and you felt even more humiliated, the jiggles only adding more weight to the diamond ring in your finger.

To your relief, Ukai cleared his throat again, proceeding with the formalities

"Now may the newly weds to sign the Book. I also summon Inarizaki oyabuns to officialize the deal." Atsumu and Osamu were by your side, eager to finish this. Sakusa went first, smoothly running the pen over the page. Then, Ukai handed him a glistening object.

God, you hated it here.

Using the lancet, the tall ravenette punctured his thumb, smearing the blood between his fingers and then pressing the red fingerprint onto the blank paper.

Before handing you the fountain pen, he fished a tube of hand sanitizer from his pocket, rubing the alchool as if his life depended on it.

Did the man suffer of OCD? You almost pitied him. Almost.

Then, it was your turn. Scribbling down your name next to his, you sealed your fate.

Sakusa [Name].

You flinched when you felt your thumb getting punctured, Atsumu doing you the favor and smirking at your reaction; why the man hated you so much?

The blood stained the beautiful dress you wore, before printing your mark on the paper.

Almost a metaphor, as if you were now tainted too.

When the twins were done, the old Ukai was more than ready to wrap the event.

"With both consents and the power vested in me by the families, I now pronouce you married. May peace prevail among Inarizaki and Itachiyama"

"Aren't the newly-weds supposed to kiss now?" You heard Atsumu whispering to Osamu. The latter merely scoffed at his brother's stupid antics.

Everyone got out of the room, since Karasuno would host a reception in honor of the wedding.

During your time in Inarizaki, you learned that the place worked as a hotel for the Yakuza.

The Crow, as it is called, was supposed to be a neutral space where the most important matters to the families were held. With a glamourous western architecture, it looked like one of those luxury mansions from the movies.

In the ballroom, soft piano melodies were being played and waiters offered booze to the guests.

The champagne tasted stale in your mouth.

You were now sitting alone in a table on the corner, observing the other people mind their own business, too absorbed in their bubble of power and crime.

You would never get the way they acted so nonchalant, when everything they had was made of blood. This coldness was scaring.

"Why are you so sad in your big day?" The snarky question almost had you spitting the champagne. The brunette sat by your side, his mouth doing a soft curve as an apologetic smile.

"You tell me, you little shit" your reply came in a joking tone, trying to ease the bad sensation on your guts, but he got what you meant.

"You know, it could've been worse." he let out a breath, looking around the saloon "You know how Atsumu is. Also, Osamu shares that weird twin bond of theirs, so it's hard to tell what he's thinking. But it definetely could have been worse"

"I figured it out by myself, Suna-kun. It's just hard to accept the fact I was dragged to this against my own will." a tear rolled in your left cheek and the man by your side wiped it with his thumb.

"Yeah, but the former lady wanted you dead back then" always blunt, he never held back when stating the facts "Things work this way between the families. You were lucky you haven't to face a bigger mess" he held your hand over the table, while propping his chin on the other palm.

It was Suna who brought you into this life. Though, you never resented him because you knew he was just following strict orders. Besides, he was the only one who was nice towards you; never knowing when it happened, you both agreed on this weird friendship a couple of weeks ago. Now he was the only person you cared about.

"But it's not that bad. You are going to live in that huge ass mansion of your husband" the playful tone and the way he wiggled his eyebrows was comical. "You also can see the weird faces he makes first hand. Man, the way he looked constipated during the ceremony was fucking priceless." You accompanied him on a snort, almost forgetting the circumstances.

"I'm going to miss your antics so bad" and you would have said more, if it wasn't for the shadow looming over you.

Sakusa was standing behind your chair, with a face mask covering his features.

If stares could kill, you'd be dead on spot.

"Time to go" was all he said, waiting for you. You bid goodbye to Suna and followed your husband out of the hotel, a sleek sports car waiting for you two while you made your way towards it.

He stopped dead on his tracks, taking a hold of you arm.

"Listen. Itachiyama is famous for respecting our women." You frowned "But know your place and don't even try to make a fool of me or of my household, got it?" His voice was slighty muffled by the mask, but you still understood every single word he said.

"What do you mean?" You asked, ignoring the way he tightened the grip on your arm, resuming his steps.

"Simple. Stay out of my way or you'll deeply regret it, you fox runt."

❥ tagging: @kenmamazing, @keekee-732, @chiibichann, @shinguchi, @captain-shittykawa, @fortheloveofbakugo, @daisyjaebae, @jihoonspout, @floodinginstars, @fl4mepillar, @trash4sportsanime, @translucentthoughts, @kemochie;

[chimerarachnid]

As an American, i distinctly remember the turning point with former President Trump. On just one topic (though let's be honest - there are MANY more): The VIOLENCE that followed nationally among poc, women, lgtqia+, disabled, and more increased exponentially.

Anecdotal but worth sharing because it was to the point that even masking set Trump's ilk off: I would go into any store and if I was masking (which I still do because I'm disabled)... I've never seen so much hate filled in someone's eyes by doing such a simple thing. The hate is still residual. I've seen how yt men in particular look at me and it's just... VICIOUS. Even when I don't notice it, people who are with me will point it out. I've had friends stand next to me and pull me to the other side of them as a protection. 99.9% of the time it's always the same types of people. If you've faced this, you know who I mean. The fox/alternative news conspiracy-baited types.

Look at the NATIONAL NEWS of THAT TIME. This was FUELED by TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY. IT WILL GET WORSE IF HE'S RE-ELECTED. It will get worse because he will NOT be willing to let his position go this time. Do you think he'll just leave once more from the one of the most powerful positions in the world? Please consider that!

Or, if we get lucky and he does, consider that the entire mindset will overflow and perpetuate throughout the country... What do you think this will lead to?!

It scares me to go out sometimes (again, the southern USA) but it's NOTHING like then. THAT is a difference to many of us - especially those that live in the South or any of us who are specifically targeted by the right.

I had my friend's neighbor threaten or offhandedly say we [those that don't fit in the checklist] should be k*lled. The absolute sheer violence and HATE was at an all-time high. F*ck Biden and his ilk but if you have some notion that it will not get worse under Trump, I have to ask if you were aware enough under his first Presidency...

if we think it was bad then (which undoubtedly was worse than f*cking Biden), it will be infinitely worse this time., i cannot believe people are amusing the idea of doing nothing... when there is a GREATER EVIL

It really shows the state of things that we have to choose between a lesser and greater evil and to call someone GUILTY OF GEN0C*DE, A lesser evil. It's sickening that this is the state of things, but it is. Because Trump will be guilty just the same if not undeniably worse for all of the ongoing genoc*des and a plethora of other issues.

Consider the reality here for Palestinians alone (because to cover national and global topics entirely would take a book):

Palestinians both abroad and here will SUFFER MORE under Trump. He will have no need or desire to try and placate anyone the way Gen0c*de Joe does. The vitriol will be unlike anything we've heard before and it will extend its wretchedness to you and me as it did last time. The far right movement GLOBALLY increased under Trump's Presidency. It WILL happen again. And Palestinian Americans WILL have it worse under his Presidency. There is a very real threat here. I am so sorry to those that live in swing states but you have to vote. And for the love of it all, vote locally, vote small, vote every time. It matters.

Crazy how so many of you on here are shamelessly didkriding Joe Biden, when it just broke that the House of Reps approved a 1.2 trillion funding bill that bans UNRWA funding—mere days after the IPC said that northern Gaza is on the official brink of famine. The bill is now waiting approval in the Senate, and Joe Biden has literally stated that he would “sign the bill into law immediately.” Remember that this is all based on hearsay that the UNRWA had something to do with the initial Hamas attack on Oct. 7, which was already thoroughly debunked. But this is the “lesser evil” you want voted back into office? How can you say that in good conscience, knowing he’s an active participant in Gaza’s starvation and terrorism campaign?

[evilelitest2]

Do you know of any good resources on how and why Reagan won? He seemed to have a lot of resistance from the Republican old guard and all four of my grandparents absolutely despised him. But he somehow won with what sounded like was a very unpopular platform, and I don't understand exactly what happened.

I mean most electoral histories will have you covered, are you looking from a cultural perspective or an electoral perspective, or just a general overview of the 1980 election?  Personally I recommend the book “Backlash” on the larger reactionary movement of the 80s which is in no way relevant today...

But in short there are many reasons why Reagan won, many of them depressing familiar today

1) Ronald Reagan was an actor and was a really charismatic speaker, specifically he was very good at seeming friendly, approachable and non condescending.  It was extremely easy to understand Reagan’s message if you weren’t paying attention and he didn’t seem like some sort of elite who understood policies or knew where Cambodia was on a map, because he didn’t either.  With the possible exceptions of JFK, and OBama, Reagan is likely the most charismatic president in the last century and that makes a big difference in the election

2) Jimmy Carter was a bit of a mess.  I love Carter and I think he is one of the most moral people to ever be president (judging on a scale) but...his administration was extremely chaotic, inept, and really bad at messaging.  

3) Reagan cheated.  At his most famous debate with Carter, it turns out Reagan’s team had actaully managed to get Carter’s debate plans before hand, so Reagan knew exactly what Carter was going to say which is why Reagan seemed so invincible in the debate

4) The Economy.  Due to a wide variety of reasons including but not limited too the fallout of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil crisis, the natural eb and flow of the market, and the failure of Kenysian economics meant that when the 1980 election was happening, America was in a pretty bad economic place.  Unemployment was high, inflation was spiraling and for many white people it was the first time they had ever experienced an economic downturn

This wasn’t really Carter’s fault, just like the economic boom in the 80s wasn’t really Reagan’s fault (though the initial crash certainly was) but that is how it was perceived.

5) The Failure of Kenysian Economics.  Now when I say “failure” i don’t actually mean “this is a bad system” Kenysan economics got us out of the Great Depression after all and lead to the largest economic boom in US history.  However they aren’t the end all, especially when politicians running things don’t really understand what they are doing.  So while they aren’t nearly as awful as the Free market economics that would follow, people were becoming disillusioned with the prior economic model

6) Vietnam.  Oh dear god Vietnam.  Reagan would be the first president who didn’t preside over Vietnam in any way, which meant he wasn’t tainted by the total fuck up that was that war.  America was still reeling from losing our first major war to a small nation that nobody had heard off before they started to kick our ass, and the battle over Vietnam has basically torn the country apart.  A huge amount of people felt pissed and humiliated over the defeat, and rather than question why we went to war or the morality of our tactics, blamed protesters and leftists for not supporting the war enough, a stabbed in the back myth if you will.  Also Vietnam was a Democrat fuck up, Republicans weren’t in power when it started under JFK and LBG, who collectively created the horrific circumstances of the war.  The republicans who oversaw it were the comparatively (to Reagan) more ‘moderates” of Nixon and Ford.  So American both felt humiliated and weak from looking a major war to a people we saw as inferior and was blaming everything associated with the left for it.  Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” message was extremely attractive to a lot of people, and since he didn’t have anything to do with the war, you couldn’t blame him for its failure.  

7) The Soviet Union.  The presence of the USSR hung over every US election since Woodrow Wilson, but after Vietnam a lot of Americans felt like the USSR was winning.  This was ironically utterly untrue as the Soviet Union would collapse only 11 years later, but the perception in America was that the US had been defeated by COMMUNISM and needed to get our groove back for round II.  And Reagan was by far the most aggressively confrontational anti Communist president we have had since FDR, so much so that he accidentally almost triggered a nuclear war and destroyed all of civilizations...whoops.  But that is what American wanted back then

8) The rise of the religious right.  For most of the 20th century, while religion was certainly a thing which effected politics, the US political landscape was largely secular, religion being evoked more than it made its own demands.  But due to rise of the Counter Culture movement, religious folks sort of went into panic mode and suddenly conservative fundamentalist Christianity was one the rise.  And Reagan embraced them 100%, leading to the fundementalist cancer that lives with us to this day

9) The death of the Counterculture.  At the exact same time as the Religious Right came into power, the group it was opposing had largely collapsed.  I mentioned this before when talking about the civil Rights movement, but once overt legal segregation had been outlawed, what was left were the far more serious, complicated and unclear problems, which lead to a lot of hippies burning out, falling into infighting, declaring victory and going home, or turning to more radical and largely ineffectual approaches.  And since so much of the counter culture was linked to to its fashion and aethetic, as the Hippie style/music/clothing/demeanor became lame and uncool, the causes behind them were seen as uncool as well.  Also the most dedicated leftists quickly turned to auto cannibalism and spent more time fighting each other rather than focusing on their enemy a dynamic which the left can always be counted on (cough what happened to Counterpoints cough) 

10) The larger cultural backlash.  America as a whole was feeling threaten by the left, and by extention the progressive made for women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities, and was pushing back against them.  The 60s and 70s was a moment of sudden shocking change which took the old guard by surprise and they didn’t know what to do, but once the left had burned themselves out a bit, the Right was able to reorganize, refocus their efforts, and remake their arguments to reassert the oppressive systems they so valued.  And for a lot of Americans who were passively bigoted, the incredibly fast pace of change got them scared and they sought comfort in the return of the familiar.  Again Reagan wasn’t just an actor, he was a cowboy actor from shitty kitch family films.  And as we’ve seen before in terms of Whitelash or Male Fragility, fear of losing privilege can get people to vote against their own interest (cough union workers cough)

11) America was facing a big choice.  After WWII, we were basically the only major nation with a good economy, which we were able to turn into a great economy, and had an over 20 year post war high.  But other nations started to compete with us (most notably Japan) and our status as the singular nation started to be threatened by the EU, India, China, Latin America, and our own changing history.  For the first time, Americans started to realize that maybe, not right away, but eventually, we would just be one nation among many again, rather than the only superpower.   Simultaneous, the threat of Climate change first started to be noticed, and Americans started to realize that maybe we should tone down the materialism, the consumerism, and the reliance on fossile fuels.  Carter infamously wore sweaters in the white house to save on gas and put solar panels on the roof, which was seen by many Americans (idiots) as weakness.  

Basically we had a choice, we could either 

A) Prepare our nation for the transformation period we were going for, and slowly start to move off oil as our economy changed and we had to make adjustments for it 

or

B) FUCK THAT.  THIS IS AMERICA AND WE DON”T COMPROMISE FOR ANYTHING.  YOU KNOW WHAT...LETS BE EVEN MORE RECKLESS

Americans were asked to choose between accepting an uncomfortable reality or embracing a comforting delusion.  

12) The Iran Hostage crisis.  This made Carter look weak internationally and everybody knows that America looking weak is worth destroying our own internal economy.  

13) The Democrats were in the middle of a civil war.  The Civil Rights movement and the Great Society had torn the democrats apart which means Carter was never really able to get his own party to obey him like the Republicans did.  WHats worse is that the aftereffect of the Vietnam War had basically crippled LBJ’s Great Society Program, meaning the Democrats were really chaotic

14) Finally, it is important to remember, the Democrats had held power from 1932 all the way to 1980s, the US was kind of a single party state for most of the century, and a lot of people were pretty sick of them.  Corruption, incompetence and hypocrisy are around in every party and the democratic congress in particular was widely hated, so the Republicans felt like this new exciting thing, something which could maybe bring a new era in America.  “Its morning in America”

And of course, Reagan was in many ways what white America wants, a giant self congratulatory message that lets us avoid dealing with real issues....

[girlonfilmmovies]

Welcome to Friend Island: "Love Island US Season 3" and the Gaping Sores of America

So I foolishly thought that in the new year of 2021, the world would be in a better place than it was the previous year. After all, we were coming out of the "worst" of the most horrifying pandemic of the past century, a middling presidency that at that point served only a wealth of TV soundbites and less actual damage to the political system, and we were looking forward to a brighter future and a return to what some hoped would be "normal". The past was the past, and this was going to be a new moment.

Oh how naïve we all were.

As of this writing Covid-19 cases are hitting staggering new highs in the southern US, with Florida (of course) somehow hitting a record amount despite vaccines being easily available in the country for months. The death rates are at almost the same as last year. The middling disaster of the 45th president had one more trick up its sleeve, a firebomb brewing for dozens of years that went off in one of the most embarrassing fiascos of American political history. Misinformation has already implanted itself so thoroughly among half the country that people would rather die than admit they were wrong; the spread of such chaos being happily spat out through the algorithms of corporations only intent on raking in dollar signs. All the potential benefits that could have come from this once-in-a-lifetime moment are being briskly swept away: offices demanding their employees come back, no respect given to science and healthcare workers, the country's clearly weak infrastructure forced right back into action as if we didn't just see its gaping holes. The earth is dying and the people who actually have the resources do something about it instead have kickstarted a capitalist space race.

2021 has gone to show that old, toxic habits die hard.

Sigh.

Yeah, I watched Love Island again.

Despite my... let's say mixed feelings regarding last year's shitshow, I couldn't help but admit that it was the closest thing that I've had to appointment viewing TV that I've had in a long time. In an era of streaming and DVR boxes, it's a bit of an actual feat to get someone who works a fulltime job (especially one with erratic scheduling) to go out of their way to watch something the second it premieres. Love Island brings the family together, so they can engage in our favorite pastime: pointing and laughing at young, dumb, fame hungry cis-hets.

Plus, the second season had offered a fascinating glance at how to contend with a pandemic while also trying to stage a typical dumb reality show. The tropical island villa was swapped for a luxurious hotel rooftop in Las Vegas -- a literal ivory tower of ignorant hedonism looking down upon a plagued nation. You could feel the sexual tension of the hot, hyper-sexual adults forced without physical contact for months finally allowed to relieve themselves the only way they know how: toxic relationships. It was trying so hard to be an oasis in a desert yearning for frivolous content, but the façade was clearly visible to the point of satire. It was a wonderful thing to experience firsthand as what I originally thought as merely me dipping my toes into the genre.

Season 2 was the show that we deserved at the time, a funhouse mirror reflecting all the callous stupidity that had led us to this moment in world history. It attempted to offer a happy ending, a look towards the future: a black couple finally winning a reality show, a first for such a mainstream program (both of them actually kind of turned out to suck, but shhhh...).

It also allowed America to completely break the hearts of people while watching them fall apart live on TV. It was cruel, it was stupid, but most of all, it was fun as hell.

Season 3 is not about torturing the competitors. It's about torturing us.

In all fairness, there were a couple of lovely positive developments for the series this season. While still struggling with racial diversity a little bit, as evidenced by them casting only one very specific kind of black man like five times, strides are being taken elsewhere in the lane of body diversity. Alana makes her debut as literally the first woman on this show who isn't a size 0-2, looking absolutely gorgeous in every single shot.

The almost aggressively heteronormative nature of the show is slowly being shaken by a more openly queer cast than previously expected -- multiple bisexual/pansexual contestants participated, even though there wasn't any overtly queer romance shown (also almost all of them were women, with them describing their sexualities being confined to streaming exclusive episodes, which isn't... great). It's certainly a step in the right direction for a show that unceremoniously shuffled off the only queer member of the Season 2 cast overnight once the internet found his gay porn shoot. Ironically, they also ended up booting off the most openly queer member of this cast too, the purple haired proudly pansexual TikTok-er Leslie, but for the more legal reason of smuggling weed into the villa.

It's not terribly surprising that both Alana and Leslie garnered a lot of positive attention both inside and outside of the villa -- they stand out so much against the otherwise predictable casting that we've come to expect from this show and white American media in general. Alana is a woman with actual curves who looks stunningly gorgeous in comparison to the monotonous supermodel figures of everyone else. Leslie almost falls into a stereotype from the way she appears: dyed purple hair, tattooed all over, obviously queer, vaping weed constantly, exuding the kind of chaotic yet weirdly fun energy that only a former stripper can. Yet she obviously grabbed the attention of the contestants because while people like her abound in real life, in the fantasy land of reality TV she's an absolute rarity, a far cry from the sanitized beauty pageant-esque standards that they seem to pluck girls from. The men are still dumb, bland, boneheaded idiots in this show, but by offering some actual variety, they get to actually pursue people they aren't "traditionally" supposed to, while an outsider audience member like me gets to see women like herself be offered up for titillation in the same way "conventionally attractive" women are.

It's kind of cool, even if it is just playing into the icky sexualization of everyone, but hey...progress?

In an odd "two steps forward, one step back" kind of situation, the show has somewhat dialed down the outrageously toxic relationships of last year into a more relatively subdued level of toxicity. Gaslighting/cheating is at least kept to a relative low in this season compared to the nightmare that was last year, although this year's ratio depends on how much of that corresponds with sexy Columbian boy Will's obviously flimsy grasp of the intricacies of the English language. He continued to be plagued by the cliquey-ness of the cast until the very end but his genuinely sweet couple with Kyra still did enough to sneak into the final two.

The actual main problem this year was an almost unbearably long love triangle between Cash, Trina, and Cinco that refused to solve itself for nearly a month. Cash and Cinco perennially kept flip-flopping in their feelings for each other, bouncing between failed partnerships despite so obviously being into each other. Trina ended up roped in as Cinco's partner for a while, a constant victim of his own lack of courage to make up his damn mind. Cash, freshly single and in horny jail (aka Casa Amor), coupled up with the handsome and mysterious Charlie.

Now we need to discuss how bizarre Charlie as a cast member. Not only is he the only member who is, looks, and acts like an actual adult, but he also seems to show no adherence to the rules of reality TV: he's very relaxed and unassuming, seems genuinely uninterested in the "game" aspects of the show, and only perks up during rare moments of actual romantic potential. He's a fascinating spanner to throw into the machine of Love Island, and once Cinco was eliminated in the competition, Charlie had to sit there while Cash only continued to openly and aggressively pine for a man who isn't even her current partner. Proving once again to be an anomaly in the cast, he actually decided to do something about this: he unceremoniously dumped fan favorite Cash like a sack of bricks, sending her home while hooking up with the previously mentioned Alana. This smart decision was met derisively by viewers, despite him being the only person there who actually acted like a fucking adult for once. Ironically, this got him and Alana into the finals, where they finished in last place with the same trademark lack of enthusiasm that we've come to expect from him.

I suppose now we need to uncork the problem of the season and by extension the franchise as a whole. You might have read that previous situation and thought, "gee, a fan favorite got tossed aside while a guy that everyone hated ended up making it into the final four? That seems weird."

But by that point it really wasn't at all.

See, the problem with the voting is that you don't usually get to pick who goes; the audience only gets to pick who to prevent getting kicked. At that point, the audience control is out of our hands and now into the contestants', and if there's one thing we all learned in high school it's that cliques are very much a thing. The contestants seemed dead set on booting anybody who was new the second they had the chance, so many potentially exciting people were so quickly thrown out. Instead of the exciting potential we could have seen, we got a love triangle sucking anyone nearby into doom, with everyone else being a relatively stable couple or part of the Jeremy/Korey wishy-washy railway. Casa Amor was an absolute bust, with people making half-assed couplings despite still being in love with somebody else (it speaks a lot to the weakness of the Casa Amor men that Olivia literally preferred to come back single than with any of those planks of wood).

Part of the problem did rely on factors that nobody could control at all though. "Romance novel come to life" Slade seemed like a threat with his rugged handsomeness, twangy accent, and classic southern charm, but had to quickly leave due to ambiguous family troubles. Similarly, the nearly perfect Josh and Shannon, who seemed like an obvious shoo-in winner by virtue of being probably the only actual relationship on the show, had to depart in the middle of the night due to the tragic death of Josh's sister. Aforementioned chaotic pansexual Leslie was unceremoniously removed in the middle of the night once they had realized that her classic vape pen was actually full of weed, an especially tragic circumstance considering she basically had Cinco wrapped around her finger and was about to bring that love triangle crashing down (also tragic because she has gone on record saying that she was fully crushing on Genny while they were both in there, robbing us of any potential of a queer couple).

But part of the pain as always has to do with how the producers control everything no matter what: what we see, what we hear, who gets the villain edit and who gets the hero edit. It's why they seem to play Jeremy as dumb hot surfer bro instead of the actual funny and charming guy he is. It's why Trina was treated as a bitch and Cash as a woeful victim despite the roles more often than not lining up the other way around. And most embarrassingly, it's how the biggest joke couple of the show ended up winning it all.

Now, look at this picture right here: the poses, the awkward hand holding, the very strange smiles between those two. No, this is not a picture of two teenagers going to prom together who just met only five minutes ago and are taking pictures on their parents' front lawn; these two are the winners of season 3, the supposedly "strongest" couple on the show. This is Olivia and Korey.

Korey is a charming boyish sweetheart by way of an absolute fucking dumbass. He's sort of like last year's beloved and wonderfully stupid Carrington: a very sweet and nice teenager who seems to have "13 Going on 30"-ed his way into an adult body. He's childish in a way that's very cute and friendly but also woefully unattractive to anyone who's an adult. Just like Carrington, he notched up a staggering amount of dates with pretty much every single beautiful woman that came into the villa, all seemingly very interested in him. Carrington, for as dumb and childish as he is, could bag anyone because he was outrageously confident too. Korey on the other hand seems incapable of making any decision, following any girl who pays him the time of day like a little puppy, constantly looking up to her with his big puppy dog eyes. It's very telling that for all the dates he had, almost none of them actually went anywhere because it's just not that appealing to anyone. If you're looking to win, he's not someone who can scheme and play the game. If you're looking for love, he's not going to cut it because he can't seem to even understand the concept of romance. If you're looking for a friend, he's probably the best damn one you'll get in that villa -- but as constantly established by everyone, this show isn't called Friend Island.

Olivia is a bit of a thornier subject. She habitually couples up with people that you can kind of tell she's not at all into. She started the first half relatively unassuming and not particularly interested in the men that she was supposedly attracted to. But you could basically see her panties drop when Slade walked in, ready for him to pull her up into the saddle and ride away into the sunset. But his sudden departure only left her more empty, desperately grasping onto whatever random attraction she could. She went off to Casa Amor single and had the gall to come back without coupling up with any of them (although once again, they really dropped the ball with the men compared to the stunning Casa Amor women). And somehow in the midst of all this wishy washy mess, she finally settled on the one single man who she hadn't coupled up with and supposedly suddenly had feelings for: lonely, little Korey.

As a watcher of two seasons of this shit, I've seen a lot of fake relationships, but this one is just ridiculous. The chemistry is really nonexistent; she seems more annoyed or at best partially amused whenever he tries to say anything genuinely sweet to her. She reacts like how you would when a little kid tries to tell you they have a crush on you, an adult: you just kind of go, "aw, cute, thank you!" and walk away chuckling. It's genuinely comedic in how tragic it is, a boy who thinks he's finally found someone when all she's found is a trip to the bank.

And what did the editors do? They tried their very best to sell this as genuine, as actual romance. We know what romance is -- we basically saw it with Shannon and Josh, and to a lesser extent Will and Kyra. And yet they whipped out that expert level edit to say, "wow, look at these two lovebirds, huh?" It's ridiculous, especially since only in the final episode did they suddenly remember that Jeremy and the stunning Bailey (aka the combination of Gal Godot and Ashley Judd circa-2001) were an actual couple and even they looked more real than the winning couple.

Love Island is, if nothing else, a reflection of America.

It's an outdated tradition desperately grasping to what's left of the typical western idea of romance. No matter how many beauty pageant contestants they pick, men like women who aren't size 2s, or with natural hair/skin, or with family-friendly occupations. Women are probably tired of the big muscle bound hunks they usually put on here, the nearly identical men that they seem to cast every single season who have all the looks but zero of the confidence or personality.

It's an example of how our choices are an illusion, how our influence can be easily overwritten by those in charge. Votes that don't matter when they change the rules on the fly, ripping out the actual choice of the people in favor of letting them decide what stays and what goes.

It's a testament that even in the face of a viral pandemic that's quickly turning into part two, as the lives of millions are being further destroyed across the world, there will always be some asshole who has more than you and looks better than you, vacationing on a tropical island stolen from its people, ignorant of everything else that's happening around them.

Love Island hates everyone. It hates it's contestants. It hates the viewers. It hates change. It hates me.

But I do still kind of love it.

[pretty-weird-ideas]

Ok, so someone in the replies was asking me if you should use AO3 more to be disruptive or stop using it altogether. My response is, if you are going to continue using AO3 to post, 1) Post within the fandom-only rule to catch most readers off guard with information. It is much smarter to put information in already-done fics. Split a fic into two chapters so that your fic shows up top on the Latest Date filter, and fill the latter end of the chapter with important information about the OTW's racism. There is not enough power in the people who know about this to actively overwhelm the servers or cost them obscene amounts of money right now. The answer is to get a bunch of other fans (who could help you tip that scale LATER) who don't understand or know about this to get angry and speak out.

But the real power isn't on AO3, once again it's important to note that AO3 isn't algorithm-powered and is entirely emboldened by NICHE. That is NOT what we want here if we want to actually pressure AO3, because if they were willing to turn off comments, they are more than willing to take down fic if not knock around some accounts, let's be real. I wouldn't be surprised if some writers were suspended this week over breaking the fiction-only rule for speaking out about this.

The real power is in off-site collaboration and word-of-mouth spreading. Tiktok, Tumblr, and YouTube are hubs for fandom, especially multifandom AO3 content. If you want a massive amount of people to be able to spread this about AO3 and convince AO3 to change their behavior (or at least address it) you have to go to places where a majority of fans are, and that's on Tiktok and Tumblr. Then genuinely get these people angry. A majority of users are not going to see a rogue fic with ultra-specific tags, but multifandom cultural hubs will absolutely sit down and listen.

The answer, as it has always been with systemic issues in niche settings... is public shaming

That and calling for refunds of donations if you made them. I voted for the anti-racism campaigning last election (only for it to be uncontested) and I think it would be very bothersome if some of the donors... made some interesting emails and calls.... asking for their money back... Wouldn't that SUCK?

The only place to hit them where it hurts is word of mouth and reputation. They have a reputation, at least among white women, of a beautiful free speech site that protects ALL people, when in reality this is not very accurate. Shattering that illusion to casual audiences is what will actively cause a change in tune.

The "Place": Tiktok and Tumblr

The "Time": generalized multifandom spaces such as the AO3, fandom, fanfiction, etc tags where you have a 10-minute limit or an unlimited text limit.

Reasons

There is a high possibility that they will wait WEEKS if not MONTHS until they release their comments again

There's a high likelihood that they kneecap if not cancel or "suspiciously move" their meetings elsewhere to stop people from joining and complaining about this

That means the time to act is recent and is in the court of public opinion rather than pestering AO3 directly. We need to make it so that when you search up AO3, off of AO3, this is apparent and comes up. Fans search up AO3 on Twitter/Tiktok/Tumblr and the first thing they're blasted with is racism towards their volunteers and users. It shouldn't be hidden.

Btw, in regards to the anti-Palestinian OTW issue, "You can still use AO3" doesn't mean "You can uncritically use AO3, tell all your friends how amazing AO3 is, and then watch as your friends and followers donate to AO3 in droves while you blankly stare!". It means you can use AO3 while spreading awareness about its racist mistreatment of volunteers.

And again, nobody is holding a gun to your head to use AO3, country girls have made do, y'all. FFnet, Wattpad, Squideworld, etc. Get honest, get real. A nonprofit needs you to put pressure on it externally. That, or it needs its users to leave in droves, it needs volunteers being pressured to leave as well and clean up the place. And if you're a true doomer about it... there is nothing wrong with LEAVING.

Acting as if AO3 is the Roman Empire, while actively not protecting it is silly. I'm tired of seeing white folks talk about systemic issues while feeding the flames of it and then getting shocked when they get burned again.

And that's being nice on account of how I feel about OP distinctly acting shocked and angered that other disillusioned fans who were victimized by AO3's racism problem spoke about the racism in the comments of the post.

[7r0773r]

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

There were no Black people who clowned me or any of my pals for listening to so-called "alternative" music, because the people who introduced us to that music were Black people. Of course, there were the hip-hop stalwarts, just like there were the overly devoted punk kids or metalheads who didn't really have much interest in crossing genres up. But these were not a malicious bunch—one simply respected the territory as needed. Keep a wide range of cassettes in a bag, so that if the fate of school bus seating shook you out next to the devoted rap heads, you'd have something to pass around and collectively nod to. And if you found yourself with a committed Black goth, you could pull the dubbed tape of Cure songs out of your back pocket. I first learned to code-switch through the musical movements of my people, and done among my people in this way, it didn't feel like a shameful burden. It felt like a generosity—a celebration of the many modes we could all fit into.

I think of this particular part of my upbringing when I hear other Black people reference what they grew up listenIng to or watching in an attempt to distance themselves from other Black people, or to make their experience exceptional or unique. A better and more interesting conversation to have, I think, is the one about how we are all outside the borders of someone else's idea of what Blackness is. To someone else Black, I am either too much of something or not enough of something else. The impulse when confronted with these facts, it seems, is to either attempt to assert whatever ness you claim and know well, or punish or deride those who might dare question your identity.

But if Blackness and the varied performance of it are to be embraced, then what also has to be embraced is the flawed fluidity of it. How the performance is sometimes regional, sometimes ancestral, often partially forged out of a need to survive some place, or some history, or some other people who didn't wish you or your kinfolk well. And yes, sometimes forged out of an ambition to appeal to the limited imagination of whiteness. The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world. There is not always a way to prove (and possibly no way to trace) the how and why of your personal performance, until it becomes calculated. And in trying, high-profile figures often spiral further into being scrutinized by their doubters. I am thinking often on how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them. Even when that indictment is not out of love (which of course it sometimes is), but out of them clocking you for a standard you are not capable of rising to. I don't have any solution for this, but it has often seemed to me that even nodding and keeping it moving is an act of love when faced with the alternative of publicly debating the small or large nuances of specific modes of Blackness. And to not, in turn, make yourself a victim of Black people for the sympathy of a white audience. (On the Certain and Uncertain Movement of Limbs, pp. 103-04)

***

A country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage. Someone finds a place where they think themselves meant to be, and they stop moving. Had the first job my father interviewed for come through at the start of the '80s, I would have been born in Providence, Rhode Island, instead of Columbus, Ohio, where work at the time was more plentiful. A city adorned with the name of a violent colonizer, his statue looming over the center of the downtown, his history a happening unto itself. I never asked to be in this country, or this city, of course. But what we end up with in the earliest moments of our lives can be beyond asking. I think now about the story of my two pals sitting down with their three-year-old only child and telling her that she was soon going to be the older sister to a new, younger child—the introduction of whom would require a halving of attention. The child took all of this information in, sat quietly for a moment, and then plainly replied, "No, thank you." (The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Large Enough, p. 142)

***

Merry Clayton never gave birth to the baby she showed up to the studio pregnant with. Shortly after getting home from the session, she miscarried. There are those who say that the physical strain Clayton exerted in the studio contributed to the miscarriage, though she herself has never blamed the song or the Stones or the studio, which may be her way of keeping her grief her business and not aligning it with another piece of rock 'n' roll mythology. I don't know anything about what it is to carry or give life, but I know that when Merry Clayton's voice cracks in "Gimme Shelter," a part of me wants to jump as if it is the shot that begins the war itself. A part of me hears Mick shout and wants to know what he saw in that moment. A pregnant Black woman balancing on a stool, summoning all she had in order to leave behind something memorable. The backup singers, man. They get to be memorable for a few minutes at a time and forgotten in all of the minutes in between. I want to know if Mick saw every wretched tooth in the mouth of the world's most wretched beasts trembling and falling to the ground. There is some awful reckoning to be had in a song like that. Some awful things to be lived with. (I Would Like to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses, pp. 200-01)

***

I would like to give Merry Clayton her roses. I would like roses to burst forth from the walls of every room Merry Clayton is in. I would like to give roses to every singer who had a name tied up in liner notes and not on the tongues of people who sang along to their pristine vocals. I would like to bring roses to the doorstep of the house Merry Clayton walked out of at midnight in 1969 and I would like to lay roses on the stool where she sat, her pregnant belly hanging over the edge while she sang murder, murder, murder. I would like roses to come out of the ground somewhere any time a person's voice cracks under the weight of what it has been asked to carry, I would like to do this while the living are still the living, and I don't want to hear from any motherfucker who isn't with the program. I would like roses for Merry Clayton to fall from the sky whenever a gunshot echoes above and I would like roses for Merry Clayton in the hands of whoever could throw the first punch but doesn't. I want the small red fists to come from the earth and slowly open wherever Meredith Hunter's body is, or wherever his body had been. I want Merry Clayton to be as big as the Rolling Stones. I want teenagers to wear her face on T-shirts, and I mean her good face with her good afro and her fur coat and her father's eyes. I want record stores to stock the solo records of Merry Clayton in the front case and I want them to play all of the songs she sang alone, with no one else. I want enough roses to build headstones for everyone I love. I want the moment when the drums kick in on any version of "Gimme Shelter." I want that feeling in my chest to always remind me what I'd miss if it were taken from me. I want shelter, and I don't even know what that means anymore. I want nowhere, nothing sacred. (I Would Like to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses, pp. 203-04)

***

Late in 2016, after the election results had come back and the demographic voting breakdowns began to circulate, the most jarring of all the stats was that white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton at a 52 percent to 43 percent clip. Resting underneath that, however, was that Black women overwhelmingly voted Clinton, at 93 percent. A lot of the conversation centered on the intersection of gender and power, and how white women will vote in the interest of the latter if it means ignoring all else. But what also began was a groundswell of appreciation for Black women that read as disturbing to me, largely because it was rooted primarily in their ability to fix the country, or labor on behalf of a mess many of them didn't ask for. The discomfort was most visceral because a majority of people engaging in this narrative in its early stages were white, and potentially "well-meaning," but not considering what the building of those ideas might be doing. Or not considering the motives behind these actions. To shout "Black women are going to save us all!" might feel good to type out to send in a tweet, but it reads as less good when one stops to consider that Black people—specifically Black women in this case—are not here in this country as vessels to drag it closer to some moral competence. The American obsession with immorality and a willingness to push its hardest labor off on its most marginalized is integral to the Black American experience, and so it occurred to me that maybe Black women were simply attempting to save themselves. That many Black people in the country have to go to jobs they don't love, or deal with waves of microaggressions at work or at the coffee shop or at the gym, and still know that voting won't save or stop any of this but did it anyway because the bet was already bad but the dealer had the cards in his hand to make it worse, and so many of us knew it. (Beyoncé Performs at the Super Bowl and I Think About All of the Jobs I've Hated, pp. 215-16)

***

Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument. When the interviewers asked Buster Douglas what his plan was in 1990, days before the fight, he responded I'll just hit him, I guess. And trust, I have dragged myself back to the walls of my fears and thrown my fists into them, hoping a crack might open for the sunlight to gallop through. But it turns out I'm not the fighter I once was, and I was never much of a fighter in the first place. It turns out all of my fears have become immovable.

I am afraid not of death itself, but of the unknown that comes after. I am afraid not of leaving, but of being forgotten. I am in love today but am afraid that I might not be tomorrow. And that is to say nothing of the bullets, the bombs, the waters rising, and the potential for an apocalypse. People ask me to offer them hope, but I'd rather offer them honesty. Black people get asked to perform hope when white people are afraid, but it doesn't always serve reality. Hope is the small hole cut into the honest machinery. The milk crate is still a milk crate, but with the right opening, a basketball can make its way through. If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave. (Fear: A Crown, pp. 248-49)

***

August 2016

Young Thug is wearing a dress on the cover of his mixtape Jeffery and the Internet wants to argue about what it all means for the future of masculinity and I need a haircut tomorrow but I'm not going to the shop to hear them talk about this shit and I go because it's the only shop in town but I hate their politics but I gotta stay fly because I don't feel like myself without a fresh cut. Let me try this again. I don't feel like myself without something that makes me desirable to people I don't know, and to know this is to know that the future of masculinity is probably not in the shape people want it to be. But Young Thug is wearing an expensive dress on the cover of his mixtape, and on the Internet, there are people insisting that this will be the thing that pushes the conversation forward. Someone shares a video of Young Thug flashing guns and this is the juxtaposition: You can still be hard and wear a dress is the sentiment. I scroll through comments and see variations on this theme, but I don't see anyone mention the idea that perhaps one problem is the public's concept that the masculine antithesis to wearing a dress is showing that you are willing to enact violence. Within an hour of the cover art's release, outlets write about it, labeling the art as controversial. No one suggests that the very idea of gender norms themselves are controversial, or that any binary aggressively enforcing itself through rigid definitions is controversial. Young Thug wore a dress on the cover for a mixtape that had some good songs about that same shit Thug had been rapping about forever and no one I know really listened to it all that much because the talk about the dress eclipsed all else. About a month later, a man walked out of the train station near my apartment wearing a crop top, a full face of makeup, and tight jeans that flared wide at the bottom. The papers say he was chased by another group of men until they caught him on a corner two blocks from where I lived. He was beaten bloody by one man while the others stood over him, mocking the way he curled up in a ball while being kicked. This story made the last five minutes of the local news. I wonder what clothing masculinity could cloak itself in that might drive it further away from an obsession with dominance through violence. I don't get my hair cut for three weeks. (On the Performance of Softness, pp. 252-53)

[disgruntledexplainer]

sorry I have no idea how to "bundle" asks. tbh i can't be having it with the weird "if the klan liked it, it's always klan shit" angle. That's nuts on par with those conspiracy theorists. If I abort a fetus because I become pregnant and don't want to be pregnant, that is nothing related to eugenics. Do this for everything? Colonizer trash liked spreading Catholicism so you're basically a genocider?

you just press enter and it separates the two ideas

like this

no special feature. it just makes things cleaner.

you misunderstand my point. the Klan did not value human life any more than as a means to an end. not everything that the Klan did was strictly wrong, but they ALWAYS did it for the wrong reasons. for example, they supported women’s right to vote (good) but only because they wanted white women to vote for their other ghastly policies (bad). the issue is, though, that the reason why the Klan supported the establishment of Planned Parenthood and aided in it’s spread is because they wanted it for population control.

the real point is this: what is your philosophy ideologically consistent with?

abortion is not just being pregnant and then no longer being pregnant. there is an intervening step involved, which involves taking a life.

say, for the sake of argument, there was a single mother with 8 children, who can only work a single minimum wage job. this puts a SIGNIFICANT financial burden on the mother, and is quite frankly rather unfair to her, and indeed could even be deadly. there are three options: a) keep the children and try to work through it anyways, b) put the children up for adoption, or c) shoot the children and hide the bodies.

option a) is going through with the pregnancy, option c) is abortion. Option b) doesn’t exist yet in this context, but will hopefully be opened up soon as technology advances.

the reason why the mother would choose option c) are similar to the reasons why a mother might abort an unborn child. children can be a burden, and so can pregnancy. parenting alone can be dangerous for one’s own health, and so can pregnancy. parenting alone can be a serious financial burden, and so can pregnancy.

assuming putting the children up for adoption is impossible, would the mother be justified in shooting the children?

If the answer is no, than one must also say that abortion is not justified.

conversely, if abortion is justified, than so is shooting the burdensome children.

if shooting the children because they are a burden on the mother is justified, then how does that apply to society at large? would, for example, a government seeking to eliminate poverty and achieve 100% employment and produce a stable society in general (an objective good), might eliminate those they consider to be societal dead-weight; after all, if the population is kept at a specific level to match up with demand for labor, no-one will go hungry, and no-one would have to turn to crime. to that end, they would eliminate those who cannot work first, such as those with crippling disabilities who rely on charity or government support to survive, then those who are simply unemployed. do you have a population with a high crime rate? crack down on those especially. society doesn’t need any more crime. in fact, crack down on any demographic that matches them; better to be safe than sorry. oh, there is a group of people our citizens claim are responsible for all the crime? better eliminate them too. oh, but shooting them wastes too much government resources, there has to be a better way of doing this. I know, let’s make death camps! so much more cost effective than having our soldiers execute every person we blame for our problems by firing squad every single time.

there is no conspiracy here. this is human nature: cold and selfish to the core. no one is going “mwaHAhAHHA i’m going to convince everyone that abortion is good so I can do genocide”. rather, people are naturally tribalism and selfish. if killing people to alleviate burdens is put on the table as an option, the natural instinct of fallen human nature is to apply it across the board to everyone they don’t like. it’s already happening. you know those ICE camps which Trump had? yeah, they were mass sterilizing immigrants. they have the racist assumption that Latinos are naturally inclined toward crime, and since life is no longer sacred they feel inclined to act on it to eliminate crime. the United States with it’s highly individualistic culture has always been on the forefront of this kind of thinking; indeed, Hitler took inspiration from the American Eugenics Society as one of the models for his ideology.

next: the Klan never wanted to spread Catholicism; they wanted to exterminate it because they saw it as an un-american religion. same with the nazis, the upper echelons of which saw Catholicism as all together too Jewish (no, i’m not kidding). Hitler actually planned on outright marching on the Vatican and killing the pope, but one of his generals talked him out of it to avoid a diplomatic incident with Italy. so instead he decided to take out his frustrations on polish catholics, among others.

this is not to say that the Catholic Church has never engaged in what you have quite aptly described as “colonizer trash”. the history of Catholicism mixing with imperialism can be summed up as follows:

the rules have always been on the books: God is not pleased with forced conversion, and it doesn’t work anyways. but that does not stop morons like Ferdinand and Isabella from trying to do it anyways (just thinking about those two makes me angry). While the Church officially stood against it, the magisterial has an unfortunate history of being rather cowardly and lazy with regards to enforcing morality. for example, they explicitly forbade the spanish from enslaving native americans of any kind on pain of excommunication, but then took back their statement the moment Spain threatened to occupy the vatican.

usually the reasons behind this imperialistic attitude are associated with one of the heresies that I detest the most: the Divine Right of Kings. The idea that God has chosen a specific bloodline to enforce his will has caused almost as many problems as the strict predestination concept put forward by the calvinists. essentially, since the kings viewed themselves as the temporal heads of the church (despite, you know, EVERYTHING to the contrary), they viewed it as their duty to make everyone in their lands conform to their warped idea of God’s will. thus, everyone had to be of the same religion. they also saw it as simply a way of producing a stable society; if everyone believes the same thing, that’s one less reason for anyone to fight each-other.

it’s not genocide, nor will it ever actually lead to genocide. it’s still absolutely deplorable and evil, but it’s not nazism, nor is it kluxery. it’s good old-fashioned political assholery.

governments are naturally inclined to take ideas to their most extreme conclusions. if there is a bad way to practice an ideology, a government will inevitably latch onto it as the only way to interpret it.

(note: there are cases where attempts at evangelization HAVE resulted in genocide, but these were carried out by *drum roll* protestant missionaries! mostly along the boarder of canada. the problem is that they started preaching to the natives, but without fail after a few days of failing to actually appeal to them because they insisted on a purely european mindset in evangelization, decided that the natives were a lost cause and should be killed so that other protestants could take their land, and began purposefully spreading smallpox around)