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deewithani · 2 years ago

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Long post ahoy, so I'm putting most of it under a readmore. Don't go on if you don't want to see me rage about what I view as bad parenting being weaponized.

Decided to go on the clock app earlier today because people are interesting, and my algorithm was just packed with some absolute fresh hell bullshit because I follow some of those involved and some who had commented. I'm pretty sure a lot of us know what it is, but if not you're only missing complete brain rot, rage farming, and bad actors pushing racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic bullshit and you're better off not seeing it.

Tl,dr: White Christian nationalists love it when you think that your personal responsibilities are actually the responsibilities of someone else because they want you use that belief to silence their enemies and make it easier for them to gain power.

I never really even went on it that often before. I deleted it today.

I am not posting this to show support for either party or place any blame. I understand wanting to protect kids. I also understand that adults should be able to have adult discussions with other adults. Further, I understand that there is really no safe place for kids to go online and that they can circumvent age restrictions on websites. None of that falls under the responsibility of the people who are not the parents of said child or the child themselves. Adults absolutely should not be engaging in conversations with adult content with people they know to be underage. You cannot also expect adults to know that the people they interact with online in an otherwise anonymous setting are truly of age. I can put minors dni on my page 7 days a week and twice on Sunday. We all take people at their word because what else are you going to do?

If your answer is "well, don't post adult content," I would like to circle back around to my earlier point, adults can have discussions with other adults. They can (in most places) share pictures and stories and lots of other things as long as it's not against the tos of the service they're using to share those things.

What we're left with is whose responsibility it is to prevent kids from accessing and interacting with adults and adult content. In this, I find it is no different than movie, music, and tv ratings. I have posted the content warning and told them to go away. It is a parent's job to parent their children. I'm older, true, but I never felt my mom was overly strict (I was a teenager in the 90s). I had to ask my mom for every penny I ever got to buy something for myself, and I had to show her what I got. There was not a single CD that made its way into my radio before she saw it first. She knew every movie I went to see. I could hang out with my friends, but she knew who was there, talked to their parents, and if I was supposed to be home by 8? You better believe I was there, because she put a lot of trust in me to keep my word.

I am a parent, not too long out of raising a teenager. My son still tells me where he's going when he leaves, who he's going to be with, and how long he thinks he'll be. "But Dee," I hear you say, "that's overbearing. You're being a helicopter mom." No. Stop. He's an adult, and since becoming an adult there is no reason why he can't come and go as he pleases. He does this out of courtesy. He's 6'3", 270. I'm 5'5". I couldn't stop him if you paid me.

But back to the subject at hand, a lot of comments from people about the entire original issue is "My kid has a debit card connected to my account so they can pretend to be over 18 and purchase access to this adult's page and their adult content." Is it just me who thinks this whole reasoning to completely ban adult content online is batshit insane? That because you, as a parent, gave your child, a child you apparently don't trust enought not to go online and buy their way into an adult space, free access to a debit card, that means that everyone else has to protect the child that you don't want to protect yourself. Do I have that right? You don't check your kid's purchases with your online banking? I checked that shit daily. You don't monitor their online access or social media and you just freely have them an internet connected computer or tablet or smartphone? You don't trust your own kids not to get into trouble online but you don't do anything that would inconvenience you or them to stop it from happening?

Take some responsibility for yourselves for pete's sake. Random people online aren't responsible for raising your children. They're not your babysitters. Neither are movies, or music, or videogames, or the books in public libraries that some of you braindead morons believe should be banned because your kid may read them.

STOP BEING A FUCKING SHITTY PARENT AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE HUMANS THAT YOU ARE RAISING.

Don't tell me you can't do it. "Everything is done online now and kids have to have cellphones and wah wah wah just ban the stuff I don't like." Stop. Your. Bullshit. You're the adult. Act like it.

Schools and businesses block websites all day long. I can't access social media from my work computer even though it's connected to my home network. Learn about filtering applications, learn how to filter at the router. Learn how limit access time for specific devices. What about phones? If you can't trust them with a smartphone, get them a flip phone. If you can't trust them with a flip phone, get a house phone with a cord (only 1 phone) and put that phone in the room where you are most likely to be when they're using it. Unplug it at night and take it to bed if you can't trust them to not be on it in the middle of the night. "Well, what about their friends' phones?" First off, they're not supposed to use them in school, so if you hear of them doing it, narc on them. Yes, I said it. Turn them in. Phones are a privilege, and it's a shitty thing to do to someone, but you're a parent, not your kid's friend and not some other kid's friend. You are responsible for the wellbeing of your child, and if another child is engaging in conduct that brings harm to yours, then it is your responsibility to act on what you know. If it's after school and you know your kid is hanging out with someone who gets them in trouble online (or lets them get in trouble), why are you letting them hang out together without your supervision? If you're at home and your kid isn't and is with another kid you don't trust, there's a quick, easy fix for this. You know what it is.

People on the internet, adults you don't know, are not responsible for your children's safety online. Every time I see someone post something about "Look what our kids are watching on youtube" I cringe. My kid watched Bear in the big fucking blue house and I was never shocked or surprised at what he saw. I would never sit a kid in front of youtube and just let it play. There's bad shit on the internet and YOU KNOW THERE'S BAD SHIT ON THE INTERNET SO WHERE IS THE DISCONNECT?

Anyway, sorry for the length of this. There is a concerted effort right now by white Christian nationalists to demonize a lot of things under the guise of "think of the children" and it is insidious and they want people to think they're targeting adult content when they're targeting marginalized voices and people. You only have to look as far as the drag queen laws that are popping up everywhere. If you, as a parent, don't want your child to go to drag queen story hour or drag queen brunch or a pride parade, guess what? There's not a pack of roving drag queens out there that is going to grab your child off the street and force them to participate. Stop being a fucking fearmonger and use your head.

This also applies to church, btw. If you are afraid that an adult is going to assault your child or have inappropriate conduct with them, be a fucking parent and do something about it, and don't just act like it's only a subset of people who do these things. You know it's not and you're acting purposefully ignorant when you close your eyes to reality. Abusers and pedos can be literally anybody, of any race, sexuality, gender, religion, or job. Protect your children yourself. Don't expect others to do it for you.

When you ignore certain groups of people because you want to demonize other groups you are doing the exact opposite of protecting children. Guess which group wants you to look at everything but their churches? I'll give you a hint. I talked about them earlier. They are banking on support from other Christians (or at least apathy) to get the laws they want in place. They don't care if your children are hurt in church. They just want you to believe that it won't happen there so you won't oppose the world they're trying to build.

They don't care about your children. They would serve them to the devil himself if it would bring about their vision.

You say you are the ones who are responsible for your children. Then be responsible and do it because so far all I'm seeing is a bunch of people who want everyone but themselves to raise their children. Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it.

#same old story different century #raise your own kids damnit #i'm not your nanny #and neither is anyone else #RAISE #YOUR #OWN #long post #parenting wank #not star wars

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the-rodent-of-shalott · 1 month ago

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@grungekitty-77 I have a story that I think relates to this, and tangentially to another post about how calling out members of a community / minority doesn't actually mean you think EVERYONE in that community is bad.

Long rambling post ahead, sorry! My apologies to the OPs in question if this reads as unrelated rambling - your posts just gave me the language to fully process and reflect on this hobby space anecdote.

Anyway - the preamble. A few years ago I found myself being bombarded with polarizing posts and videos of all sorts of topics with different sides yelling at each other on social media, everything from 'are vegans evil, are omnivores evil', to 'interracial relationships are wrong, interracial adoption is wrong', and the ever-ready 'white people are demonic and should pay reparations because slavery happened'. This was (and is) very disheartening to witness, so in my frustration at the time I put together a DNI for my tumblr description which stated that I do not want interaction from anyone who proposes that caucasians are racists by default, that reparations should be a thing, if you think men can't be victims of domestic abuse, non-vegans hate animals, media and fiction should be censored etc ' It was pretty much a blanket DNI for radical beliefs and discourse of any kind to protect my mental health, and it sat there peacefully for three years.

Until I ended up on a roleplay drama confessions blog in the roleplay community here on tumblr (yes, I know, old woman with hobbies, haha). At the time of me following, I at first had the impression it was a relatively peaceful blog for getting things off your chest related to this hobby, however I soon realized that was not the case once I saw that every reply to every confession gets posted, having the blog quickly descend into petty flamewars and witchhunts over which roleplayers, opinions and ad blogs are bad, don't post quick enough or post the wrong things, the use of epithets in writing, the morality of monsterfucking...Pretty much every day was a new drama and followers openly, repeatedly admitted they enjoyed it being that way. I once stood up non-anonymously for a friend of mine who was getting hassled, because I wanted her to have encouragement during a hard time in her personal life, and to see that people are willing to defend her. This put a target on my back. I was now 'cringe' for protecting a 'cringe' friend and, of course, people also found the DNI on my blog. I was suddenly an 'ugly racist', and blocked by more people in a space of days than I have been in over a decade of being on this site. I'm not sure how to tell you this, but if you think ALL people of color are ALWAYS right about everything no matter what and ALL white people are ALWAYS wrong (and that even monsterfucking is racist and I am DEFINITELY racist for agreeing with a user saying it isn't), then you are the problem and are indirectly contributing to the racial divide and the ongoing anger of the far-right. I understand not wanting to discriminate and think it's admirable. But -

I'm disabled. If we apply the 'disadvantaged / minority peoples are always right and should be believed and not questioned', then by that logic you should also not be able to question me - because I'm disabled. But that is the wrong conclusion to draw. You should be able to question and dislike me. I DO think that white guilt, opposing interracial relationships and adoption and any such adjacent rhetoric dangerously advances the racial divide, and I DO think people should be judged by individual merit rather than statistic markers like race, gender, nationality, economic standing, etc etc.

Where has moral judgment based on these external markers led us before? ''Who's going to believe you, you're a man [for male victims of abuse] woman / child / poor / black / a jew/ trans / disabled / mentally ill?'' We've been there before, we are largely still there now in varying degrees across the globe - do we really want the pendulum to swing all the way back around? The way forward is in unity, not division. Otherwise, what natural conclusion is the 'white vs black' rhetoric going to lead to? Happy interracial couples breaking apart underneath the weight of ''morally right'' white guilt? Adopted black children being taken away from loving white parents and returned to the foster system? Furthermore, the idea that people of color are always right is, in itself rooted in racism. Black people / mixed people / Asians (and the LGBTQ, disabled etc) are not a monolith all sharing one thought and experience, and to default assume a black or gay person's opinion and / or devalue it as 'wrong' if it somehow differs from X, Y, Z other opinion, is, in itself, racist. So which POC / gay person has the ''correct, good'' opinion among the natural multitude of opinions? We've reached a point of ''social quick consumption'' in which a person's appearance often quickly creates assumptions about their character and beliefs - something completely antithetical to racial equality as it's basically racial profiling 2.0. It's all too often that I've seen and heard about minorities receiving vitriol and accusations of bigotry online and in traditional media (including from other POC!) because their opinion does not fit the current mainstream in some way. You can't shame someone into being [your idea of] a good person, and sometimes people are just dicks, and sometimes the dick person is a minority. I love people of color - that doesn't mean I love every person of color [or insert other group / community here] - and that should not be a controversial take. Cancel culture and the fear around it [cancel or be canceled, and be thought of as a bad person] has become a death march to nuance, but don't let it be the death toll of critical thinking skills.

Everybody can be a dick! I'm a dick sometimes too! Everybody can be great! No one is, or should be deemed to be right or wrong by default every time all the time! That's equality!

As for me, I've gained insight on what kind of hobby spaces I'd rather avoid, and perspective that has made me realize my frustration from years ago perhaps made the DNI on my blog sound too needlessly oppositional and hostile. :)

And yes, by all means, you can still dislike me!

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

#the rodent speaks #long post

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kavat · 4 years ago

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I've been thinking a bit about Kids These Days and why they are Like That. This might be an Old woman yells at clouds thing, but I dont think so.

We millennials were the first generation to grow up online. Depending on how old you are and when you got access to the internet it might differ, but for many of us the internet was an early escape from a boring or not great reality.

We were the first generation to be kids online, when the internet still was a place for nerdy adults. The internet was dangerous for us, stranger danger was real. We learned (either from informed adults or because of our own mistakes) to not give any personal information or trust anyone. The image that anyone you talk to could be an old pervy man in a basement was very much real, because that was who our parents thought the average internet user was. Many of us never used our real names online until Facebook came along and changed the game completely, before that anonymity was the norm.

10 years ago there was a prevalent nerd culture online, meaning that most communities or forums was still mainly populated by nerdy guys. They had (have...) a certain jargon and humor based on being outcasts of their irl environment. The memes of that time was trollcomics, Bad Luck Brian, Socially Awkward Penguin, non mainstream pop culture references. It was based on superiority and elevating themselves by punching down. It lead to an online culture of racism, misogyny and homophobia in so many online spaces. If you found my old username on some forum you would probably find some shitty things, because I wanted to fit in. It wasn't safe to be anything but a straight white man online unless you created your own space.

But the internet isn't new anymore, it has become a lot more accessible and widespread and the majority of people depend on the internet daily. You can't see the internet as dangerous because you have to use it every single day. And I think that's why so many of the warnings about it feels either unnecessary or out of touch to younger people. They don't see the internet as a lawless wild west, it's their backyard where everything should be and is nice and safe.

The past 5 years or so there has been a lot of progress in online spaces, where racism, misogyny, queerphobia etc is less and less tolerated. And not without a fight, real people have had their lives destroyed because of the online hate campaigns (see gamergate). If you stood up for feminism you would get death threats. It still happens, but the internet is in general a much nicer place now than it was 10 years ago.

The younger people don't know that. They haven't seen the foul hate that was commonplace in every single comment thread. But they have grown into the backlash of that, where social justice is very widespread and seen as a virtue. Which is good! We should stand up for what's right! But the kids will often misdirect this energy towards undeserving people.

They will go after someone who said something problematic in 2008, without having any clue about what the culture was like then. They will shout "think of the children" without acknowledging that there are now measures in place to protect children (like age restrictions, tags, mute functions). They will claim someone as problematic because of one small misunderstanding rather than going after actual racists, because they feel it's the easier target. And it makes them feel good and like they've accomplished something. We chased off another person from the internet because we didn't like the particular thing they did, cheers all around.

Meanwhile, in the other corner of the internet, where the nerdy bro jargon has lived on and festered from feeling attacked for a decade, bigotry has grown so strong that we get mass murders in the name of a gaming youtuber and people storming the capitol. They should be the real enemy but no, the younger generation know that regular people have a conscience and are easier targets.

My point is that the modern purity culture on the rise among young people is the backside of the social justice coin. When you don't see the actual threat and just the weapon, you end up fighting the wrong people.

I have no solution for this. I just think that it's important to talk about the full context in which different generation of internet users grew up, and do our best to share our experiences.

#whatever cat #i was going to make a twitter thread but it grew out of hand lmao #anyway good morning

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angelicamerlinbarnes · 3 years ago

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TUA MEAN GIRLS AU

(please understand that by AU, I mean they share an incredibly small amount of things in common with the original source material which I barely remember BUT the “story” takes place in the setting of the film) (not to be misleading or anything :p)

(BEWARE: abuse, bribery, immoral deals, bullying, homophobia, outing, transphobia, violence, abortion, teen pregnancy, etc.)

(If you can handle watching Umbrella Academy, this will be fine for you.)

(Regina) Five is the king of this school, and he has no plans to give up that position. He needs it to protect his people, as few and far between as they are, and himself, if he’s honest - he’s a trans and ace-aro kid in platonic love with the health class mannequin who he calls Dolores. Ruling with fear is basically all he can do. While he’s mean, you’ll soon realize that everything he says is more of a blunt observation that will improve your life if you just heed his advice. He doesn’t respect almost anybody - not the jocks, theatre geeks, nerds, cheerleaders, band kids - no one. However, if he does respect you, you have his trust and protection. And as a thirteen-year-old genius who only takes advice from always-slightly-drunk art teacher Agnes, his protection is pretty damn valuable: the last person who tried to hurt one of his people will never walk again. Leonard Peabody - he assaulted Vanya, and he paid. Five beat him to the point of hospitalization without getting a single speck of blood or bruise on himself, and Leonard’s the one who walked away in handcuffs. Do not fuck with any of Five’s people, or you have to fuck with Five. And you do not want to fuck with Five.

(Gretchen) Vanya is quiet and subdued, to the point where people question how she’s a part of the school’s most popular trio. If you talk to her for long enough though, it becomes clear: she knows any and everybody’s secrets. She writes for the school paper, and is known to write the stories her subjects don’t want anyone else to find out about. Like Diego, who she outed as bisexual last year to throw people off the trail of her own secret relationship with Sissy, earning her an ex-girlfriend and an ex-friend. She’s been trying to win Diego’s forgiveness ever since, but he won’t talk to her, returning every single one of her letters and gifts. (He’s blocked her number and all of her socials, which she only created to talk to him anyway.) She doesn’t know why Five keeps her around - Klaus loves to gossip, but Five never seems to want any of her secrets. She’s pleasantly surprised to find out that he apparently actually enjoys her company. (What?)

(Karen) Klaus is a fucking mess. He plays the dumb blonde (well, brunette) despite being a genius in his own right, even if he’s not at Five’s level. (To be fair, he’s pretty sure no one is.) He’s a drag queen on the weekends, a hangover from his time in the mafia gang, which he joined with his boyfriend Dave for six months after running away from home. Dave died in a gunfight, and Klaus has been fucked up (well, more than usual) ever since. Anorexia, PTSD, anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, the works. But as lonely as he is, addicted to a fuckton of hard drugs and liquors to cope, he’s still an alluring, aloof, and bubbly popular girl, wearing pink skirts and glittery heels and leather corset crop tops to school every day. No matter how much his father Reginald beats him for it, he keeps being himself, because he’s brave and because even if Reginald hates him, someone far more important loves him… Diego. Diego, who Klaus has kissed under a million stars and in the lollipop shop down the road and on top of a cafeteria table. Diego, who Klaus has chased through the rain and into the street without rest or hesitation. Diego, whose words and promises and scribbles are immortalized on Klaus’ skin for all to see. Diego, who Klaus will love no matter how much bigotry they encounter or dickwads they’re beat up by or miles they put between them. Diego, Klaus’ ex-boyfriend.

(Cady) Allison is the new girl, and she has plans for the advantage being underestimated has brought her. She challenges Five on her first day there, earning his respect, and joins his group at the urgings of Klaus and Vanya, who like her company. A fashion queen, she acts as though she’s unfazed by any and everything, but nobody knows her true heartbreak - she still writes letters to a girl back home. Allison was expelled from her Christian private school for falling in love with a girl named Natalie, who she kissed in janitors’ closets and who she beat up racist and homophobic blondes for. She has no tolerance for bullies, and yet becomes one under Five’s guidance - until she upends his reign as queen bee and signs her death warrant. (Though she later finds out he was more angry at her for stealing Klaus and Vanya’s affection than his popularity.) Now her only hope for happiness in her final days is Ray, the Shakespeare-quoting nerd in her English class… or Luther, the quiet dork in the Star Trek t-shirts in her math class. Fuck, she misses Natalie.

(Aaron) Luther is the posterboard for toxic masculinity. He’s on the football team but hates it, preferring his math tutoring and fantasy books to tackling drills. His bisexuality is his deepest secret - he once slept with Diego when they were drunk at a party after a football game, and he can’t get it out of his head. He keeps thinking about what might happen if somebody found out - would he be shunned like Diego? Trapped like Vanya? Plastic like Klaus? He doesn’t know. All he can do is continue to be kind and hope Allison loves him enough to love every part of him, beyond his good lucks and British accent and fucking Ray. So Luther stands up to Five, and pays the price. He compliments Klaus on his skirts, and pays the price. (Diego seems to simultaneously love and hate him for it, it’s confusing.) He holds the door open for Ben, and pays the price. He’s big enough to be scary, kind enough to be overlooked - but after that incident with Vanya, everyone looks at him like he’s a monster to be locked up. And soon enough, “star student” Luther, “teacher’s pet” Luther, “completely under the principal’s thumb and completely friendless and completely terrified of the world around him” Luther might just break under all that pressure.

(Janis) Diego is the school’s resident outcast and rebel punk - he wears skirts and fishnets and whatever the fuck he wants because if Klaus taught him anything when they were dating it was that gender is a construct and he looks hot in leather. They broke up when Diego was outed and Klaus chose to stay quiet when people started shunning Diego for it, but despite it all, Diego still loves him. He misses when they used to paint their nails together, because he has to paint his own now. They used to stare up at the stars together and fall asleep in the grass, curled up in each other, on the nights that Klaus would run away in terror from his dad and Diego would breathe with him and let him press his hand against his heart until Klaus’ panic died down. His heart still flutters when he sees Klaus smile around a lollipop… but he won’t take him back. He won’t. He just can’t forgive him. So instead, he talks to his mom about everything. He plays soccer with his sister Eudora. He paints shit while smoking weed with his best friend Lila. He thinks of Luther being scared of him and laughs. You know, he was almost in Allison’s position freshman year - Five loved him, and so did Klaus and Vanya, but then Vanya outed him to the whole school for no reason like a day before he and Klaus were going to come out together. And now they’re all estranged, and Diego has the strangest feeling that he’s lost his family, even though his mom is the only real family he’s ever known. But maybe he’s wrong. Because Klaus keeps sending him “anonymous” letters, leaving them on the porch and spilling secrets Diego never even would’ve imagined him having. But forgiveness is still a question - that is, until one day Diego gets a letter in a different handwriting: Five’s, telling him to man the fuck up and love Klaus before he kills himself trying to tear the stars down for Diego’s own personal pleasure, and suddenly, Diego is crying on his porch in the rain, missing a slender, sassy skeleton in his arms and a pink, bruised but unbroken heart in his chest.

(Damien) Ben is everyone’s favorite, and the kindest person in the world. He used to be Klaus’ best friend, but that ended when Ben got into an accident (there was a bus involved, that’s all you need to know) that landed him in a wheelchair and Klaus couldn’t deal with the mental pain it caused him. They still stare at each other longingly from across the cafeteria, but never say a word to each other, not even in class. But beyond Klaus, Ben has never had any friends, though he has a million aquaintances: he’s the only student in the school that everyone loves and respects. Five holds the door for him, though Ben can tell without having to ask that Five would rather nobody know that. He hangs out with Diego because he knows Diego’s lonely, even if he never wants to admit it. He advises Allison not to let anyone control her, telling her he knows Natalie from summer camp and that the deaf girl still loves her and reads every single one of her letters. He gives Vanya his lunch when she skips to cry in the gym after Diego yells at her, even though a part of him might think she deserves it sometimes. He plays sports with Luther after school and offers him an ear and some jokes about his problems, and a few touchdowns when he’s feeling good. He acts as Ray’s student consultant, because he knows how hard Ray works to treat him like an equal. He tutors Eudora in basically everything, but cuts study sessions short to play video games when he can tell she’s too stressed to think. He’s ace and pan and proud about it; he runs the school’s GSA; he defends Diego and uses the right pronouns for Lila when they’re alone without Lila ever having to him he’s trans. He bugs Reginald’s office in one of their many meetings and records enough conversations to get him fired when he tries to expel Five. And finally, karma rewards him - Klaus shows up at his house with a box of brownies he baked himself, all covered in smiley faces, and shoves them into Ben’s hands, shaking his head when Ben assumes they’re for Diego. I miss you, Klaus tells him, and Ben tugs him down into a kiss, pulling away with a stammered apology. I’m sorry, he blushes, and Klaus beams, leaping into his lap and hugging him closer than ever, the two of them queerplatonic partners from then on, forever linked by their fingers in the hallway. Happy. Finally.

Lila is the shy artsy kid who carries around one of those leather brown satchels that looks threatening but is really just code for “I think I’m too cool for a backpack so I stuff all my incorrect homework and favorite comic books into this sack of knockoff pig skin instead”. He’s covered in paint most of the time, and wears Alice in Wonderland combat boots and Sharpie-doodle-covered jeans and big black hoodies and soft grey beanies; he’s trans and hacked off his own hair until an undercut with choppy slash bangs and there’s pink streaks in them, of course, to match the bubblegum he’s always chewing. His nails are bitten and black, and his skin is decorated with tattoos that are almost exclusively Bo Burnham quotes, with the exception of Diego’s name right over his heart. (Diego has Lila’s name over his too - and Klaus’ and Eudora’s, though he’d never tell them that.) He gives his skirts to Klaus and gets along well enough with Five, them both being trans and all, and everyone else knows him as that kid who’ll spread rumors and steal things for bribes. It’s not like he can get in more trouble than he’s already in - he lives with his bigoted and abusive bitch of a mom. But Diego is his best friend - the one he shoots and stabs things with, the one whose ex-boyfriend he talks to because Diego will never admit to himself that he misses Klaus like he would his own lungs if they were torn from his chest, the one whose sister he’s in love with. Wait. Fuck. Oops.

Eudora is Diego’s sister, and the captain of the soccer team. She wears her red jersey with the white numbers to school every day, and is covered in tattoos of magical creatures, because she believes in all of them. She wishes she was a werewolf, and has dressed up as one every year for Halloween since she was ten. (And she’s let anyone dressed a werewolf give her a hickey just in case that turned her. It’s good to have all your bases covered.) She has a broken down pick-up truck named Travis-Trevor-Thomas-literally-any-other-T-name that she loves beyond belief, and drives Diego to and from school in it, though he grumbles about it every day. She eats lunch with him even though he insists he’s fine eating alone and wants her to go away, because she knows he’s lying, and she hangs around the GSA with him sometimes too. She’s lab partners with her brother’s “secret” ex-boyfriend, and is concerned by how quiet he is - she’s seen enough documetaries to know that quiet never means anything good. But unfortunately, she has her own academic drama to deal with - Hazel and Cha-Cha hate her for helping Klaus, and she hates them right back, leading to failing grades in both English and history no matter how brilliant her work is. Mostly, though, Eudora tries to get to know Lila - the pretty, angry, sarcastic emo boy she shares half her classes with, and flirts with every day despite how he ignores her. (ONLY because Lila still smiles and laughs every time she flirts with him, and Eudora knows from Diego that Lila thinks Eudora only flirts with him because it’s some sort of game of “if you get the guy who’s hard to get you win the hundred dollar bet” deal. Otherwise she would’ve backed off immediately because not doing so would be harassment.) Eventually, though, Eudora runs off-field in the middle of a soccer game and over to the stands to ask Lila to prom. Finally, she gets a yes - and, most importantly, a real smile, curled against her own mouth like a Cupid’s bow of promise.

Sissy is Vanya’s ex-girlfriend, and Fuckwad Carl’s current girlfriend. She hooked up with him after breaking up with Vanya, too drunk to even speak, and now her belly’s ballooning and her parents are gonna kick her out unless she marries him like a good Christian woman. And she really didn’t expect herself to tell them to fuck off for this one, but apparently lesbianism makes you do crazy things - so here she is, standing on Ray’s porch in the pouring rain and hoping for the best. She’s depressed and shows that by reading the Bronte sisters; Klaus opens the door for her and brings her notes with doodles all over them which makes her cry; she misses Vanya but hates her for what she did to Diego. And yet Vanya’s there when she goes to the abortion clinic, smiling and joking and holding her hand like always. One day she’ll have a baby and she and Vanya will raise it right, but fuck - that baby sure as hell won’t be Carl’s. (Because fuck that guy.)

Ray is a humanitarian, so, naturally, he’s also the student council president. Five has never mistreated him, because everyone loves and respects Ray, even his critics. He nurtures Allison’s intelligence and encourages Vanya’s musical habits. He tutors Klaus in basically every subject but never talks down to him because he knows the kid’s a genius, just a bit spacey from all the drugs (and the ADHD, let’s be honest). He helps bring Luther out of his shell and takes Lila out shopping for boy clothes, all of which he pays for himself. He’s not scared or offended by Diego’s sarcasm or intensity, instead greeting him every day in class with a new dad joke. He treats Ben to intelligent conversation like an equal and doesn’t let Five be so harsh he’ll regret it later, though he still lets him say what he means and be himself. Everybody knows he’ll be the real President one day - even if for now he wears pajamas to school every day because, in his words, “Clothes are just too much fuckin’ work, man.” (There’s a possibility he may have still been high from hanging out with Klaus that day.)

The Handler is the evil physics teacher. (I don’t know why I said evil clearly all science teachers are evil.) (Yes this is coming from a place of aggression but hey at least I recognize that.) (Plus he deserves it. So fuck you.) (*sticks tongue out*) (Don’t you see how mature I am?) (I’m sorry I’m sorry back to your regularly scheduled programming -) She’s Lila’s mom, and continually and constantly misgenders him (and Five!) in class, not even because she hates trans people, just because she hates him (and Five!). Five always challenges her dictatorial rule, refusing to participate in solidarity with Klaus when she forces Klaus to sit out for wearing skirts. She keeps trying to flunk Ray too, the little bitch, but he just keeps doing so well that she can’t even come up with a falsely plausible reason to fail him! She’s been bribing Hazel and Cha-Cha to flunk certain students for years, unaware that Lila has been stealing from the Handler’s own purse to double those prices for those students to ace their classes. Everybody hates her, and for good reason. I hope she gets fired. (Shut up and let me project onto fictional characters, assholes.)

Reginald is the evil principal and Klaus’ abusive dad. He sends Klaus to school every day in a boys’ “uniform”, which Klaus has to change out of in the bathroom every day with borrowed clothes from Allison. (Anything he owns lives at her house; they have an agreement.) Once Klaus forgot to wash off his nail polish before Reginald came home and he broke all of Klaus’ fingers one by one. (Agnes wants to beat him into dust with a rolling pin.) Klaus stays at Diego’s house a lot, though Klaus refuses to come after they break up even though Diego makes it clear that his door will always be open. Five, therefore, is super protective of Klaus - every time he comes over, he’s super respectful when Klaus is in the room and then verbally rips Reginald to shreds as soon as he’s gone. He once stayed over for an impromptu sleepover when he noticed that Klaus was terrified-ly coming up with more and more ridiculous excuses for Five to stay and not leave him alone with Reginald, and as soon as Klaus was asleep, tiptoed around the house to set up bugs and cameras he got from Ben. He gives all of the evidence to Eudora to deliver to the police, who arrest Reginald and leave him to rot in a cement cell for the rest of his sorry fucking life while Klaus goes on to live Happily Ever After because fuck you and your stupid as shit traditionalism and inhumane experiments you lying scheming fuckwad of a psychopathic monster toad.

Hazel is the exhausted English teacher. His secret? He hates every book he teaches. Also he’s been taking bribes from the Handler and Lila because teachers don’t get paid enough in our society. Also his wife Agnes of twenty years divorced him a year ago for the whole bribery situation and he’s been sleeping in his car and using the school’s facilities to appear fine. Yeah, Hazel’s a mess. ANYWAY - Five is the only one who seems to know what’s going on, and Hazel would like to keep it that way. He knows Klaus is a genius with words but doesn’t know how to tell him that, and he knows Diego’s favorite book is Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen and has agreed to take that secret to his grave. (What, it’s a good book!) His class is the only place Diego and Klaus dare to interact, and he’s noticed - they often pair up for assignments and take to the floor or beanbags in the corner, often cuddling up and giggling over whatever book or assignment they’ve been sent off to read or do. Hazel also has another hopeless couple he teaches, Lila and Eudora - eventually Hazel starts leaving Lila’s sappy poems about Eudora on Eudora’s desk when she comes in for her own class (separate from Lila’s) because there is no other way those two idiots are getting together, let’s be honest. There’s just too much communication. Mostly Hazel misses his own wife, Agnes - but he’s been out of luck since he cashed it in with the science department, hot cocoa whore that he is.

Cha-Cha is the history teacher, and she has all the sass and dry sarcasm required for that job. She will beat a bitch up for telling her she can’t teach critical race theory, and plays Drunk History and Overly Sarcastic Productions in her class basically every day. She doesn’t believe in tests because if she did she’d have to grade them, and she likes animated kids’ movies and TV shows, especially Paw Patrol and Sofia the First. (Yes, obviously she’s single. She’s also ace-aro, so who the fuck cares.) She takes the Handler and Lila’s bribes because she runs an underground wrestling ring and would like to continue feeding her pitbulls gourmet food. The only kid she’s truly on edge with is Five, who often challenges her in debates - she can’t decide if she’s impressed or enraged about it. Whatever. School’s out, bitches.

Agnes is the art teacher who knows everything about everybody. All of her art is of donuts. (Of course.) She’s a damn good cook, especially of pizza - and donuts. (Naturally.) She always has munchkins available for her students - and donuts! (She always saves the chocolate glazed and jelly ones for Five and Klaus.) She likes to rap explicit beats in her car and play her music so loud it shakes the ground and you can hear it from miles away. (Obnoxious.) So she doesn’t restrict her kids’ projects because that’s not what art is about. (And because it would make her a hypocrite, obviously.) Sure, she divorced Hazel, but hey - she’s living her best life, and eventually he’ll come to his senses and come crawling back to her at three a.m. to badly lipsync a Justin Bieber song about missing her, and she’ll leap out the window into his giant hairy arms and kiss him on his ginormous teddy bear face. Because Agnes, at heart, is a hippy. (And that’s love, bitch.)

Grace is Diego and Eudora’s (and everybody’s!) mom. She goes out for drinks with Agnes on the weekends and to clubs with Pogo every Friday (the librarian/unofficial therapist who acts as her mouthpiece when Diego does something stupid and won’t listen to her advice, the moron). She’s kind to everyone, but takes no one’s bullshit: you hurt her kids, you die. Important Notice: Everybody Is Her Kid. So be kind to everyone, dickwads. Well - except Reginald. And the Handler. Both of whom she bitchslaps for mistreating her precious babies. She then takes in Klaus because Diego loves him, and Ben because Klaus loves him, and Lila because both Diego ad Eudora love him. The only reason she didn’t take in Sissy was because Ray already had her taken care of. She’s a literal angel sent from heaven and we should all be worshipping her like the goddess she is I’m sorry I don’t know when this became Grace Appreciation Day™ but hey I’m here for it and I have no regrets.

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aridara · 4 years ago

Text

So Siryouarebeingmocked, being the patethic and toxic imbecile he is, decided to complain about how people are treating the Capitol coupers differently than BLM protesters. Like, no shit, Sherlock, that’s because they ARE different. SYABM just pretends that BLM is somehow worse, because he has literally never denounced a white supremacist in his entire existence on Tumblr.

For example, he claims that, during this summer, cops were ordered to look the other way when it came to BLM protests. This is a complete and utter lie.

He also claims that Trump was accused of “being a fascist sending out government troops” just because he sent federal cops to protect federal buildings. Again, this is false. Trump sent troop to kidnap people off the streets and take them elsewhere for interrogation, on unlabeled vehicles, without showing or telling the arrested where they were going, and most importantly without any charge. Basically, they went in Portland, arrested any black person that happened to be there for no fucking reason, then dragged them away into some federal building to detain them. Of course, SYABM doesnt’t tell you any of that, because SYABM is a fascist sympathizer.

Someone called @lercymoth decided to dispel his bullshit. Here’s the post; I can’t reblog it, because SYABM blocked me after I pointed out that he was making cops look really incompetent.

SYABM responded. And his response was, obviously, shit. So here I am, trying to deal with his bullshit.

Before we start, a few rules. First: if SYABM misinterpreted or missed Lercymoth’s point, I will instantly dismiss SYABM’s argument without even reading the rest of it. The reason why is simple: countering your opponent’s argument requires you to counter what your opponent ACTUALLY said. If you don’t do that, then you aren’t actually countering your opponent’s argument, which means that you don’t have any actual objection to your opponent’s argument. Now, we could give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they just made a honest mistake... but SYABM doesn’t deserve any mercy whatsoever. So, if he fails to address one of Lercymoth’s arguments, Lercymoth automaticaly wins.

Second rule: if SYABM completely dismisses Lercymoth’s arguments as “irrelevant”, SYABM automatically loses. Again, SYABM deserves no mercy whatsoever. If he doesn’t bother to make a counter-argument, then he doesn’t have one.

>Yes, people some people got shot, but:

There’s an old saying; what comes after the ‘but’ is the real argument. It’s generally reliable. Especially when you’re being vague about identifying folks in this sentence when you’re ostensibly acknowledging victimhood of the recent DC protesters, but very precise in the following ones when you want to assign blame, or claim BLM are victims

This is a “tone argument”. SYABM isn't addressing Lercymoth's argument; he's whining about the way Lercymoth is presenting it.

Since SYABM isn't actually addressing Lercymoth's argument, this paragraph is worthless. Lercymoth wins.

>let crowd in

Yes, because they were outnumbered, IIRC. They physically couldn’t keep the crowd out without killing people.

Surprisingly, SYABM might actually have a point here.

Unfortunately, I have no intention of giving him mercy. SYABM conveniently forgets that the police has no problem whatsoever with killing black people for being potentially threatening. So why the disparity here? SYABM doesn't explain it, therefore Lercymoth automatically wins.

>took selfies

So you’re implying a few pictures obviates being shot?

SYABM is deliberately missing the point. The point is that the cops decided to be friendly with the insurgents despite the fact that they aren't supposed to be buddy-buddy with insurgents who are attempting a coup.

SYABM automatically loses, since he deliberately avoided addressing Lercymoth’s argument. Lercymoth wins.

>Had to to get attention

There are several things wrong with this statement.

So let me get this straight. you think government officials don’t care about the lives and livelihoods of black people. and so, you decided the best way to fix this problem is by destroying the lives and livelihoods of black people...

Nope. Black people didn't choose to protest. The violent reaction of the police, coupled with decades of racism, caused the riots.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “a riot is the language of the unheard”; and this is precisely what is currently happening. We're at the point where riots WILL happen, regardless of what black or white people want; and the only way to fix this is by addressing the cause of the riot. Continuing to blame black people without fixing the racist police system addresses the symptom, not the cause; and on top of that, it's precisely the mindset that caused the riots in the first place.

Also, 93% of all BLM since May have been peaceful (https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/) - and that's if we count “spraying graffiti” and “responding to an unjustified attack from cops/white supremacists” as violence. The vast majority of the violence came from white supremacists and cops. Therefore, any discussion about the violence that happened during the protests that DOESN'T acknowledge this is intrinsically dishonest, and therefore must be dismissed.

Ah, also this bit:

in fact some of them are still claiming it. like aridara. he implied the riots themselves by blm were all peaceful, but any actual violence? clearly that was done by undercover cops and 88ers.

Yeah, SYABM just made that up. As fucking usual. Rest of the section dismissed due to SYABM's dishonesty. Lercymoth wins.

>rubber bullets

yeah it’s literally impossible to aim those with precision outside of point Blank range. you cannot reliably shoot somebody in the eye from more than a foot or two away.

SYABM is missing the point. Lercymoth was talking about cases where people were shot directly with rubber bullets. Keep in mind that EVERY training says that rubber bullets must be aimed towards the ground, so that they bounce off and lose power before hitting the protesters. The sheer amount of times cops violated this basic training, and the fact that they violated such a basic rule, shows us that these aren't accidental cases; these are deliberate actions.

SYABM, instead, claims that the cops couldn't reliably aim at people's eyes, therefore cops didn't deliberately shoot rubber bullets directly at people. Which is bullshit logic. Rest of the paragraph dismissed. Lercymoth wins.

>fascist

Nope. People literally called the cops ‘troops’, including news sources, and called him fascist for sending them in.

SYABM is once again missing the point. Trump sent in federal cops to arrest people without any charge, kidnap them off the streets, and transport them to federal buildings without telling anyone.

Rest of the paragraph dismissed. Lercymoth wins. Again: if SYABM wants to disprove Lercymoth's arguments, then SYABM must actually talk about Lercymoth's arguments. If SYABM talks about other stuff without actually addressing Lercymoth's arguments, then SYABM didn't disprove Lercymoth's arguments - which means that the latter wins by default.

All that other stuff? Irrelevant. My point was “the cops used much less force than they did in DC to protect Federal property in Portland,...

SYABM is once again missing Lercymoth's point, which is that cops use IMMEDIATE violence against BLM for stuff like peaceful protesting; while they treated the Capitol coupers with kid gloves. SYABM failed to disprove this (no, his bullshit cherry-picked example doesn’t count jack shit), therefore Lercymoth wins by default. The end.

It’s funny you should mention Ted Wheeler, when he’s one of the people the rioters harassed. And the tear gas incident in July was when he was an anonymous face in the crowd, wearing a mask,...

This is false. As usual, SYABM just lies, lies, lies without bringing any source to back up his own claims. In fact, whenever he makes a claim without bothering to bring up any source, the chances that he's lying increase considerably.

Anyway, rest of the section dismissed because it's based on a lie. Lercymoth wins.

>- Putting fucking children in concentration camps. (They’re not detainment centers. Those don’t have fences cages with tin foil blankets.)

How exactly do you detain people without fences and walls?

SYABM is once again missing the point. Lercymoth specifically said “fence cages”; SYABM, instead, talks about fences and walls. SYABM refuses to address Lercyomth’s argument, therefore he abandons the competition; Lercymoth wins.

>No one wants the idea that the White House raiders being treated better than BLM to be true.

Really? No one wants to claim BLM are treated worse because of racism? Not a single person?

SYABM is once again missing the point. Lercymoth is pointing out that nobody wants X to be true; but X is true so people claim that X is true. Because it IS.

SYABM cherry-picks Lercymoth's argument into “nobody […] claim that X is true”. Which is a massive strawman. Which means that SYABM isn't attacking Lercymoth's actual argument – which means that Lercymoth, once again, wins by default.

And that's it. Literally ALL of Lercymoth's arguments win by default, because Siryouarebeingmocked is too coward, dishonest and spineless to actually try to disprove them.

#syabm is at it again

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uncloseted · 4 years ago

Note

my mom keeps badgering me about the capital event bc i really hated it but i support the blm protests and she says it’s hypocritical of me bc the protests were just as “violent” as the capital and “caused lots of deaths”. i never really have anything to say back to justify what went down, do you have any info i could use to explain myself? i know they were for completely different causes and one actually matters, but i don’t know how to justify the “violence” (i personally don’t think a majority of them were violent, all the ones where i lived were routinely peaceful and i think the extreme ones were sensationalized for the news). anyway sorry if it’s dumb i’m 14 and just trying to get into politics and stuff so i’m not super well informed and just trying to learn.

I’m sorry this has taken me a few days to get to. What happened at the Capitol is complicated, and I want to make sure I give you as full of an answer as possible. I also want to just quickly say that it’s awesome you’re getting involved in politics at such a young age and trying to help your parents understand these issues. I would love to answer any questions you have about politics or social issues (or just kind of anything in general, I’m not picky). Last thing and then I’ll get into the meat of this post- I’m a huge supporter of the BLM and police abolition movements and was a protestor over the summer, so I’m maybe a little bit biased. This situation makes me really angry on a personal level, but I’ll try to stick to just the facts as much as possible in this post and let you know when I’m showing my own opinions.

So the first thing I want to talk about is language. The Black Lives Matter protests were protests- a public expression of objection, disapproval or dissent towards a political idea or action, usually with the intention of influencing government policy. In the US, protesting is a constitutional right protected by the First Amendment. The storming of the Capitol was not a protest, and it wasn’t intended to be. It was planned several weeks in advance with the explicit intention of disrupting the counting of Electoral College ballots. Their stated goal was to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election, an election that is widely considered to be the freest, fairest, and safest election in US history (ironically, in part due to Trump’s insistence that there was voter fraud in the 2016 election). Storming a public building is not a form of protest protected by the US Constitution. Further, an attempt to overturn a democratic election is an attempt to carry out a coup. The Capitol rioters will likely be charged with sedition (conduct that incites rebellion against the established order) and/or insurrection (a violent uprising against an authority or government). The Black Lives Matter protestors were not attempting to carry out a coup against the US government, and none have been charged with offenses as big as those.

Next, I want to touch on motivation. The Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against police brutality towards minorities, particularly Black people. There has long been a documented history of police misconduct and fatal use of force by law enforcement officers against Black people in the US. Many protests in the past have been a response to police violence, including the 1965 Watts riots, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the 2014 and 2015 Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray. By contrast, the Capitol rioters were not motivated by fact. They were called to action by the President of the United States, Donald Trump. They were told that the election had been “stolen” from Trump, and were encouraged to march over to the Capitol to “take back our country”. The idea that the election was stolen from the president is demonstrably false. They weren’t motivated by a social issue, a concern for their own lives, facts, or even really principle. “Our president wants us here...we wait to take orders from our president,” was what motivated them. The affiliations of those rioters are varied, but many of them are affiliated with either the far-right, anti-government Boogaloo Boys, the explicitly neofascist Proud Boys, the self-proclaimed militia The Oath Keepers, or the far-right militia group Three Percenters. Many are also on the record as being QAnon followers (followers of a disproven far-right conspiracy that started off as a 4chan troll, which states that an anonymous government official, “Q”, is providing information about a cabal of Satan-worshiping, cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic party who are running a child sex trafficking ring and plotting against Trump. Yes, really).

The intentions of BLM were largely peaceful. BLM protest documents encouraged protesters to be peaceful even in the face of police violence, because the BLM protesters knew what the price of being violent would be. We were encouraged not to bring weapons or anything that could be misconstrued as a weapon. Even non-violent protests were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot gear. A reported 96.3% of 7,305 BLM protests were entirely peaceful (no injuries, no property damage). The 292 “violent incidents” in question were mainly the toppling of statues of “colonial figures, slave owners, and Confederate leaders”. There were also several instances of right wing, paramilitary style militia movements discharging firearms into crowds of protesters, and 136 confirmed incidences of right-wing participation at the protests (including members of the aforementioned Boogaloo Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys). It was also rumored that off-duty police were inciting violence (although to my knowledge, that is unconfirmed). There is no evidence that “antifa” (a decentralized, left-wing, anti-racist and anti-fascist group) played a role in instigating the protests or violence, or even that they had a significant role in the protests at all. People who were involved in crimes were not ideologically organized, and were largely opportunists taking advantage of the chaos for personal gain.

By contrast, the “Storm the Capitol” documents were largely violent; messages like, “pack a crowbar,” and “does anyone know if the windows on the second floor are reinforced” were common on far-right social media platforms. One message on 8kun (formerly 8chan, a website linked to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, etc) stated, "you can go to Washington on Jan 6 and help storm the Capitol....As many Patriots as can be. We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents, and demand a recount." The speakers at the Trump rally encouraged attendees to see themselves as foot soldiers fighting to save the country, and to be ready to “bleed for freedom”. The Capitol rioters were mostly armed; rioters were reportedly seen firing pepper spray at police officers, and pipe bombs, molotov cocktails, and guns (including illegal assault rifles) were found on the protesters. One protester was filmed saying, “believe me, we are well armed if we need to be.” Some protesters arrived in paramilitary regalia, including camo and Kevlar vests.

I quickly want to touch on scale. The George Floyd BLM protests are thought to be the largest protests in US history, with between 15 and 26 million (largely young, sometimes children, minority) people attending a protest in over 2000 cities in 60 countries. There were around 14,000 arrests, most being low-level offenses such as violating curfews or blocking roadways. 19 deaths have been reported, largely at the hands of police. Only one death is known to have been a law enforcement officer. The number of people who stormed the Capitol is still somewhat unclear, but it seems to be between 2,000 and 8,000 (largely older white, cis, straight, Christian men) people. 80+ people have been arrested for federal crimes, including 25+ who are being charged with domestic terrorism (something nobody associated with BLM is being accused of). There have been five deaths reported. One was a police officer, and the other four were rioters. Of those deaths, one was a police related shooting (a female Air Force veteran). The other three died of unrelated medical emergencies. One reportedly had a history of high blood pressure and suffered a heart attack from the excitement.

Now I want to look at government response. During the BLM protests, there was a huge response from law enforcement. 200 cities imposed curfews, 30 states and Washington DC activated over 96,000 National Guard, State Guard, 82nd Airborne, and 3rd Infantry Regiment service members. The deployment was the largest military operation other than war in US history, and it was in response to protests concerning, in part, the militarization of police forces. The police were outfitted in riot gear. They used physical force against BLM protesters, including batons, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets, “often without warning or seemingly unprovoked,” per the New York Times. Anecdotally, everyone I know now knows how to neutralize pepper spray, treat rubber bullet wounds, build shields out of household items, how to prevent cellphones from being tracked, and how to confuse facial recognition technology to prevent being identified (as six men connected to the Ferguson protests mysteriously turned up dead afterwards, and the police were using cellphone tracking technology). Amnesty International issued a press release calling for police to end excessive militarized response to the protests. There were 66 incidents of vehicles being driven into crowds of protesters, 7 of which explicitly involved police officers, the rest of which were by far-right groups. Over 20 people were partially blinded after being struck with police projectiles. When the BLM protests were happening, Trump said that, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

In contrast, the response to the Capitol protesters was relatively tame, especially given that the US Capitol’s last breach was over 200 years ago (when British troops set fire to the building during the war of 1812) and the rioters weren’t being shy about their aspirations to conduct an armed insurrection incited by the sitting president. There was (widely available, able to be found through a Google search, everyone saw it) prior intelligence that far-right, extremist groups were planning on (violently) Storming the Capitol on January 6th, with the intention of interrupting the Electoral College ballot counting and holding lawmakers hostage. However, the US Capitol Police insisted that a National Guard presence would not be necessary for the protests, and Pentagon officials reportedly restricted DC guard troop from being deployed except as a measure of last resort, and restricted them from receiving ammunition or riot gear. They were instructed to engage with rioters only in self-defense, and were banned from using surveillance equipment. Despite prior knowledge of the “protests”, Capitol Police staffing levels mirrored that of a normal day, and no riot control equipment was prepared. The Capitol Police weren’t in paramilitary gear the way they were for the BLM protests. The mob walked in to the Capitol with little resistance. Some scaled walls, some broke down barricades, some smashed windows, and one video even seems to show Capitol Police opening a gate for the mob. Rioters traipsed around the Capitol (one of the most important government buildings in the country) with little resistance, looting and vandalizing offices of Congress members. Some rioters felt safe enough to give their names to media outlets, livestream their exploits, and take selfies with police officers. One man was (ironically) carrying a Confederate flag, a symbol of a secession attempt on the part of the South (and of racism). It took 50 minutes for FBI tactical teams to arrive at the scene, and the National Guard were initially directed by Trump not to intervene. Pence later overturned that ruling and approved the National Guard. Police used finally used riot gear, shields, smoke grenades, and batons to retake control of the Capitol, but notably no tear gas or rubber bullets. Video showed rioters being escorted away without handcuffs. Trump’s response to the riot was, "we love you. You're very special ... but you have to go home."

This is where I’m going to get a little editorial, but I think it’s important to say. If the people storming the Capitol Building were Black, they would have been met with a large, pre-coordinated military presence, violent restraint, arrests, and quite possibly would have been shot. They wouldn’t have made it inside the Capitol, much less been given free rein to wander around without immediate consequence. Hundreds of people during the George Floyd protests were arrested for just being present- 127 protesters were arrested for violating curfew on June 2nd in Detroit alone, twice the number of arrests made during the storming of the US Capitol. It turns out that the police do know how to use restraint, after all. What an absolute shock. It’s almost like they’re a corrupt and racist institution we should get rid off...

The last big thing I want to talk about is the outcome. The BLM protests were meaningful, but the outcome from them has been tame. Nobody has been accused of domestic terrorism. State and local governments evaluated their police department policies and made some changes, like banning chokeholds, partially defunding some departments, and passing regulations that departments must recruit in part from the communities they patrol. Only one city, Minneapolis, pledged to dismantle their police force. The response has largely been localized. I think the biggest impact it’s had is introducing people to the concept of police abolition and getting more people involved in the movement. By contrast, the Capitol riots have resulted in over 25 people being accused of domestic terrorism and the second attempt to impeach Donald Trump, something that has never happened before in the history of the US.

But what really concerns me is the precedent this sets. Donald Trump is an idiot, and he’s gotten this far. We can’t count on the guy who takes his place to be an idiot, too. The next guy could be clever, strategic, well-spoken, well-mannered... not to invoke Godwin’s law here, but people liked Hitler. He was a persuasive speaker and capitalized on conspiracy theories about World War 1 to gain support. His 1923 attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government failed, but sympathy for his aims grew. He painted himself as a good, moral man who loved dogs and children and was trying to do right by his country (by, among other things, arresting communists and leftists, and then eventually all minorities). Trump isn’t Hitler. He’s not even a Hitler analogue. But Trump has already done this much damage to the fabric of our society. He’s worn down our relationship with the media, with one another, with democracy, with morality, and with truth itself. We have to be prepared for the idea that the next guy might be a much better politician. Getting rid of Trump isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of a fight against fascism that’s only going to grow from here.

There are other differences you could point to. BLM protesters wore masks to prevent the spread of COVID (and indeed, researchers have reported that the protests did not drive an increase in virus transmission), for example, while the rioters were largely unmasked. But I think the bottom line is that the millions of BLM protesters were doing their best to be responsible citizens fighting peacefully for an evidence-based, human rights cause, even though they knew that as a primarily minority group of people, they would be met with violence. The thousands of far-right, white, Capitol insurrectionists were doing their best to overturn a free, fair, safe, and democratic election because of a call to action by Trump and a stringent belief in disproven conspiracy theories, which they knew would be met with minimal resistance despite the severity of their actions. The insurrectionists are fascists, full stop, and we should call them what they are. The BLM protesters were by and large just people, of all different political views and motivations, who wanted to fight against something they saw as unjust.

I’m sorry that this is such a long post. This topic has been on my mind all week, and I wanted to give it the nuance it deserves. All we can do from here is to keep fighting- for justice, for truth, and, hopefully, for peace.

#Anonymous #effys-closet #effys closet

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anticallouts · 4 years ago

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(1) There's a blog from where I am on Tumblr who has been masquerading as a safe-space for writers to share their experiences of writing groups, or more alarmingly other writers. More often than not these ‘experiences’ are used as an excuse to attach controversial, baseless and false accusations against another person. When challenged, the author of this blog accuses the ‘threat’ of invalidating someone else’s experience and declares their culpability in poor behaviour.

(2) Terms frequently thrown around are: ‘toxic’, ‘disgusting’, ‘sexist’, ‘racist’ and ‘homophobic’. The author of this blog consistently names writers and tells their audience to avoid them. To make matters worse, this entire community is dictated by this blog. For years countless people have been forced to stop partaking in a hobby that they enjoy (writing) through unjust harassment and bullying.

(3) The community isn’t granted freedom of thought, instead we are expected to fall in line. Group admins must conform to a narrative that has been crafted by anonymous messengers and endorsed by the blog author. Usually there is little evidence of wrongdoing and instead, the owner of the blog and their ‘sources’ of information vilify individuals, manipulating the wider community to believe that someone has done wrong.

(4) The influence they have has created a culture of fear amongst us and most, myself included, dare expose ourselves and stand against these behaviours. In reality, most of these writers have created characters that don’t fall within the confines of their version of a safe space. They preach about protecting others, but instead isolate and target an individual until they have been bullied out. Sometimes, this goes on for months. We have been dealing with this for years.

(5) I know many people who have been banished. We are a small community conditioned to believe whatever information comes from this blog is not to be questioned, or challenged. With every person that leaves, I feel guilty. I feel hurt. We are a different community to the one that you discuss here, but we are writers nonetheless. I don’t know what to do, nor do I know how to remedy the situation.

When in doubt, start your own. Start your own discord, your own safe-space blog, your own archive, whatever the case may be. Start an appreciation group, or a shout-out group. Make it clear you don’t accept rumors or callouts without evidence of purposeful maliciousness. Poach the more accepting members of the fandom and leave the others to their own bitter medicine.

They have every right to complain about the things they want to complain about, but if they accept rumors as fact from little grey circles then that certainly speaks more about them than it does about any of the people they’re harassing.

No fandom is a monolith. You yourself are tired of being pushed around and told the correct way to enjoy your hobby, I’m sure there are others (likely including those who have been chased away in the past by this BNF/group). Take control, run things the way you want to run things, block the people who annoy you, create the welcoming space you want to see in your fandom/community/whathaveyou.

In the past, I got together with a couple friends and created a discord server from scratch to connect with ‘the wrong kinds of shippers’ in my fandom at the time. People like me, who just wanted to ship and let ship, who couldn’t have a conversation on this website without someone barging in to tell us to kill ourselves or making posts about what bad people we were and sharing it with strangers who had never even met us. I thought our server would have a handful of people at most, I wasn’t even sure it would be active at all. I was so wrong. I am no longer in that fandom and I left the server a long time ago, but to my knowledge it still exists and is going strong. They still host writing/art exchanges! It’s amazing how many people came out of the woodwork when we gave them the opportunity to do so in a safe space that was free of judgment and away from the anti-infested tags of tumblr. It took a lot of work, but it was so worth it to see our tiny little community grow and flourish.

The internet may not be the wild west it used to be, but it is by no means a rigidly controlled entity. Those people only have as much power as the community allows them to have. They literally cannot stop you or anyone else from doing anything you want to do, no matter what they say. Without more specifics about your community, that’s really all the advice I have to offer on the matter. I wish you the best of luck in whatever you decide to do!

#mod fox #purity culture #advice #responses #this really is sad btw #that kind of heavily policed atmosphere kills creativity and talent

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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‘People Actively Hate Us’: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/us/border-patrol-culture.html

Excellent article looking at what the Trump administration immigration policies are having on the men and women inside Customs and Border Protection (HINT:Not Good)

‘People Actively Hate Us’: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis

Overwhelmed by desperate migrants and criticized for mistreating the people in their care, many agents have grown defensive, insular and bitter.

By Manny Fernandez, Miriam Jordan, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Caitlin Dickerson Photographs by Kendrick Brinson | Published Sept. 15, 2019Updated 6:26 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 15, 2019 |

One Border Patrol agent in Tucson said he had been called a “sellout” and a “kid killer.” In El Paso, an agent said he and his colleagues in uniform had avoided eating lunch together except at certain “BP friendly” restaurants because “there’s always the possibility of them spitting in your food.” An agent in Arizona quit last year out of frustration. “Caging people for a nonviolent activity,” he said, “started to eat away at me.”

For decades, the Border Patrol was a largely invisible security force. Along the southwestern border, its work was dusty and lonely. Between adrenaline-fueled chases, the shells of sunflower seeds piled up outside the windows of their idling pickup trucks. Agents called their slow-motion specialty “laying in” — hiding in the desert and brush for hours, to wait and watch, and watch and wait.

Two years ago, when President Trump entered the White House with a pledge to close the door on illegal immigration, all that changed. The nearly 20,000 agents of the Border Patrol became the leading edge of one of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns ever imposed in the United States.

No longer were they a quasi-military organization tasked primarily with intercepting drug runners and chasing smugglers. Their new focus was to block and detain hundreds of thousands of migrant families fleeing violence and extreme poverty — herding people into tents and cages, seizing children and sending their parents to jail, trying to spot those too sick to survive in the densely packed processing facilities along the border.

Ten migrants have died since September in the custody of the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection.

In recent months, the extreme overcrowding on the border has begun to ease, with migrants turned away and made to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed. Last week, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to close the door further, at least for now, by requiring migrants from countries outside Mexico to show they have already been denied refuge in another country before applying for asylum.

The Border Patrol, whose agents have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated, is suffering a crisis in both mission and morale. Earlier this year, the disclosure of a private Facebook group where agents posted sexist and callous references to migrants and the politicians who support them reinforced the perception that agents often view the vulnerable people in their care with frustration and contempt.

Interviews with 25 current and former agents in Texas, California and Arizona — some conducted on the condition of anonymity so the agents could speak more candidly — paint a portrait of an agency in a political and operational quagmire. Overwhelmed through the spring and early summer by desperate migrants, many agents have grown defensive, insular and bitter.

The president of the agents’ union said he had received death threats. An agent in South Texas said some colleagues he knew were looking for other federal law enforcement jobs. One agent in El Paso told a retired agent he was so disgusted by scandals in which the Border Patrol has been accused of neglecting or mistreating migrants that he wanted the motto emblazoned on its green-and-white vehicles — “Honor First” — scratched off.

“To have gone from where people didn’t know much about us to where people actively hate us, it’s difficult,” said Chris Harris, who was an agent for 21 years and a Border Patrol union official until he retired in June 2018. “There’s no doubt morale has been poor in the past, and it’s abysmal now. I know a lot of guys just want to leave.”

EDUARDO JACOBO, AN AGENT IN CALIFORNIA’S EL CENTRO SECTOR:

The difference between doing the job now and when I started is like night and day. Before, it was a rush of adrenaline when you caught people with drugs. You were doing more police stuff. Now it’s humanitarian work. If you ask anybody about being in Border Patrol, they’re playing a movie scene in their head, jumping into a burning building and saving people. Now, it means taking care of kids and giving them baby formula.

By and large, the agency has been a willing enforcer of the Trump administration’s harshest immigration policies. In videos released last year, Border Patrol agents could be seen destroying water jugs left in a section of the Arizona desert where large numbers of migrants have been found dead.

Some of those who worked at the agency in earlier years said that it had changed over the past decade, and that an attitude of contempt toward migrants — the view that they are opportunists who brought on their own troubles and are undeserving of a warm welcome — is now the rule, not the exception.

“The intense criticism that is being directed at the Border Patrol is necessary and important because I do think that there’s a culture of cruelty or callousness,” said Francisco Cantú, a former agent who is the author of “The Line Becomes a River,” a memoir about his time in the agency from 2008 to 2012. “There’s a lack of oversight. There is a lot of impunity.”

The Border Patrol was established in 1924. Early agents were recruited from the Texas Rangers and local sheriff’s offices. They focused largely on Prohibition-era whiskey bootleggers, often supplying their own horses and saddles. Though horseback units still exist, the culture of the agency bears little resemblance to its past.

It has become a sprawling arm of Customs and Border Protection, the country’s largest federal law enforcement agency, which is responsible for 7,000 miles of America’s northern and southern borders, 95,000 miles of shoreline and 328 ports of entry. On a practical level, the Border Patrol’s hubs along the Mexican border, known as sectors, operate in some ways as fiefs.

In border cities, sector chiefs become household names, delivering annual State of the Border speeches. In the 1990s, an El Paso sector chief, Silvestre Reyes, used his popularity to win a seat in Congress.

In El Paso and other border communities, becoming an agent has long been viewed as a ticket to the middle class. A starting agent with a high school diploma and no experience can expect to earn $55,800, including overtime, climbing to $100,000 in as few as four years.

But given the long, solitary work, often in punishing heat and far-flung locations, and a growing workload, the agency has had difficulty recruiting: It remains about 1,800 agents short of its earlier hiring targets.

Some trace the increasing bitterness and frustration among agents to 2014, when large numbers of migrant families, as well as unaccompanied children, began arriving at the border. Many agents said they weren’t given the money or infrastructure to handle the emerging crisis. Desperate mothers and sick children had to be herded into fenced enclosures because there was nowhere else to put them.

Some agents blamed migrant parents for bringing their children into the mess. Their anger began building under President Barack Obama. Then, with Mr. Trump’s election, it found a voice in the White House.

Mr. Trump “said it to us, he said it in public, ‘I’m going to consider you guys, the union, the subject-matter experts on how we secure the border,’” said Mr. Harris, the former agent and Border Patrol union official from Southern California who retired last year. “We had never heard that from anyone before.”

The private Facebook group, which was created in 2016 and had more than 9,000 members, became a forum for agents to vent about the increasingly thankless nature of their jobs and the failure of successive administrations to fully secure the border.

Some agents who were members of the group said the tone of the posts shifted after Mr. Trump’s election, becoming raunchier and more politically tinged. A post mocked the death of a 16-year-old migrant while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Tex., with an image reading “Oh well.” A member used an expletive to propose throwing burritos at two Latina congresswomen.

AN AGENT IN SOUTH TEXAS:

What really pisses me off is that the agency knew about this group for a while. Those stories are true. There were patrol agents in charge on there. They knew it was wrong.

Most agents interviewed said a minority of those in the Facebook group were responsible for the most offensive posts.

BRANDON JUDD, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL BORDER PATROL COUNCIL, THE AGENTS’ UNION:

We have been pointed at with this broad brush and there are certain segments trying to make this out that all agents are bad and ‘Here’s the proof, look at these Facebook posts,’ when really the vast majority of our agents are very good people.

In some ways, though, the posts reflected a culture that was long apparent in parts of the agency. For years, the Border Patrol has quietly tolerated racist terminology. Some agents refer to migrants as “wets,” a shortened version of “wetbacks.” Others call them “toncs.”

Jenn Budd, a former agent of six years who is now an outspoken critic, said a supervisor at her Border Patrol station in California had explained the term “tonc” to her: “He said, ‘It’s the sound a flashlight makes when you hit a migrant in the head with it.’”

Josh Childress, a former agent in Arizona who quit in 2018 because the job had begun to wear him down, said the Facebook posts hinted at a deeper, darker problem in the agency’s culture. “The jokes are not the problem,” he said. “Treating people as if they aren’t people is the problem.”

Calexico, Calif., 120 miles east of San Diego in Southern California’s agrarian Imperial Valley, offers a glimpse of the relationship between a border community and the agents. Hemmed in by rugged mountains, desolate desert and the Colorado River, the valley has an economy that revolves around seasonal farm jobs and government work. Temperatures top 110 degrees during the parched summer months.

About 800 Border Patrol agents work in the vast El Centro Sector, which runs about 70 miles across the Valley. They patrol on bikes and in their white vehicles in Calexico, whose downtown sits up against the rust-colored bollards that separate the United States and Mexico.

When Mr. Trump visited the city in April to tout 2.3 miles of a new border barrier — a row of 30-foot-tall, slender steel slats with pointed edges — Angel Esparza organized a binational unity march that drew 200 people. But he said the march was to protest Mr. Trump, not the Border Patrol.

Mr. Esparza has featured Border Patrol agents on the covers of two issues of Mi Calexico, a magazine that he produces and distributes sporadically in this town of 40,000.

“The Border Patrol agents are part of the community,” he said.

NATALIA NUNEZ, A COLLEGE STUDENT IN CALEXICO, CALIF.

Being in the Border Patrol is a normal thing around here. I have three cousins who are agents. I have friends whose parents are agents. They aren’t supposed to talk about it. I wonder how they can sleep at night if they have to lock up kids in cages like animals.

David Kim, the El Centro Sector’s assistant chief patrol agent, is the son of a South Korean immigrant who worked for the Postal Service. He has been with the Border Patrol since 2000.

Asked about the agency’s relationship with the community, he recalled the government shutdown that began in December 2018, when Mr. Trump was locked in a standoff with Congress over funding for an expanded border wall. Border Patrol agents, who were working without pay, were offered food vouchers by restaurants. Jujitsu academies and gyms offered free passes. Mr. Kim’s chiropractor waived his co-pay.

Mr. Kim, seated in the sector headquarters building, went silent for about a minute as he talked about it. Tears rolled down his face. “The community,” he said finally, “stepped up for the Border Patrol when we were furloughed.”

But with the fraught atmosphere across the country over immigration policy, hostility can emerge even within agents’ own families.

BRANDON JUDD, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL BORDER PATROL COUNCIL:

I just had a relative four days ago send me one of the nastiest emails I’ve ever had in my life. How bad of people we are. How taxpayer dollars should not be used to abuse individuals.

Operating in communities that are often heavily Hispanic and quietly hostile to Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the Border Patrol has become more openly political than at any time in its history.

Agents have nurtured a strong loyalty to the president, whom many of them see as the first chief executive who is serious about border security. The union endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016, a move that gave the Border Patrol a line of communication to the White House but has also created friction in Democrat-dominated border communities.

A 10-YEAR VETERAN AGENT IN SOUTH TEXAS:

I have personally not come across any agents that do not like Trump’s positions on border security, on immigration. Hispanic, Latino, black, white — it doesn’t matter the origin of the agents, they all have a strong border-security mentality. So they love what Trump brings to the table. What they hate, what is detrimental, is the complete opposite feeling from the Democratic side.

Democratic lawmakers flocked to the Texas border throughout the spring, many holding news conferences to criticize the filthy, crowded conditions in which migrants, including children, were being held — some with unchanged diapers, little access to showers and little or no hot food.

Agents said they had done the best they could — some bought toys for the children in their care — but were overwhelmed by the number of new arrivals.

AN AGENT IN THE EL PASO SECTOR:

‘Oh, that kid’s cute’ turned into, ‘Oh, there’s another one, there’s another one.’ We’ve done more for these aliens than these senators and congressmen that come down here. They make this big scene but then the next day they get on a plane to go back home. They didn’t take any of them with them, right? They’re going home to their running water, to their nice, comfortable bed, and meantime, we’re here dealing with them.

The Border Patrol’s culture is unabashedly self-reliant and male-dominated. Agents operate largely alone in the desert and brush, using neither body cameras nor dashboard cameras.

About 5 percent of agents are women. Some interviewed spoke highly of the agency and their male colleagues. Others described a culture in which women were demeaned, passed over for promotions and assaulted by co-workers. A supervisor in Chula Vista, Calif., pleaded guilty in 2015 to seven counts of video voyeurism, admitting that he had placed a camera in a drain in a women’s restroom.

In a written account of her time at the agency, Ms. Budd described women being forced to perform oral sex on fellow agents and subjected to humiliating labels. “I never, ever met a female agent that was not targeted by the male agents,” she said.

The job has taken a psychological toll on men and women alike.

From 2007 to 2018, more than 100 Customs and Border Protection employees, many of whom had worked as Border Patrol agents, killed themselves. Ross Davidson, who retired in 2017 after 21 years with the agency, said he was certain that stress from the job has been a factor.

“The repetitive monotony of doing the same thing over and over and seeing no outcome, seeing no end to it and nothing changing,” he said. “It’s just going deeper and deeper, and getting worse and worse.”

SERGIO TINOCO, AN AGENT IN THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY OF TEXAS:

Now, with all this rhetoric, I actually have to go home where I want to unwind, and hear my wife tell me the comments she was told, and my kids tell me the comments they’re told. So at what point do I relax? The only time I relax is when my eyes are closed and I’m dead asleep.

Nicholas Kulish, Mitchell Ferman and Erin Coulehan contributed reporting.

#cbp #u.s. customs and border protection #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #u.s. news #u.s. politics #trump scandals #trumpism #trump administration #president donald trump #against trump #trumpcamps #impeach trump #president trump #ice #ice raids #immigrants #immigration #immigration reform

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minblush · 7 years ago

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og anon. i think your point abt revisonism ties in with over protective/infantilizing attitudes fans have to BTS. if there is any inconvenience in interactions w/ ppl in the us it's immediately horrible & while i get that there is a racist pattern & shows using them for views.. BTS aren't babies & can handle these situations. so ppl exaggerates how bad it was when they were there due to this infantilizing attitude. your answer was very well formulated and has given me a different perspective

yeah there is more factors at play here, i agree it plays into it, it makes me sad because from the last time like i have pretty good memories? the interviews were sometimes basic, but tbh i blame bighit for that more than anything they are very controlling and with interviewers that don’t have as much -influence- and/or imagination it might be hard to get in more thought provoking questions, but overall the boys seemed to have fun and played around a lot and they radiated like a pretty good vibes? when i watch the videos and gifs from then, for the most part.. and other people treated them with quite a lot of respect and they were welcomed warmly.. like the videos from backstage at amas and everything… yeah.. i feel bad that over time because of the jokes and things like this it gets written off as a terrible experience and “pls save the boys from america” when like? not really.. obviously it’s never perfect but it’s far from being a tragedy too? that’s life… anyway thank you, i like discussing stuff kadjs yeah so thank you for letting me rant

Anonymous said:Not to mention the fact that planes from Korea to LA are fucking L O O O O O N G . They have long ass schedules and the boy barely sleeps as it is. Sure first class is mighty comfortable but time differences and short sleep can make anyone look a little…unhappy. I flew from NZ to America and it took me actual weeks to get back to my normal self. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t get myself back on track. Even with a 10 hour layover to just sit around. He’s doing his best.

exactlyyy “He’s doing his best” honestly i feel this so strongly, even after this long flight and even being surrounded by screaming mob, he still makes an effort to wave and smile and people capture the one moment where he lets his expression fall down and are like GOTCHA YOU ACTUALLY HATE IT DON’T YOU… just let him breathe for a second pleaaase

#ask #anon #like jimin works so hard and gives so much he's a pretty sensitive person now tell me #why is he always the one that the whole fandom likes taking shots at????

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fuck-customers · 7 years ago

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Frequently Asked Questions FAQ

FAQ

I decided to get around to making a full FAQ to add to the sidebar. If I’ve missed anything, let us know.

Why can’t I tell you why you are wrong in the comments?

Because this is a blog that is designed to be a safe space for retail employees to come and vent about their frustrations and asshole customers. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s a petty reason or not. We do not need more customers coming into the comments and giving us more grief. If you come to this blog and act like a customer you will be permanently removed from the blog.

Do you accept fuck coworker and manager submissions?

Yes we do! A while back we tried running a couple of separate blogs on the subjects but they weren’t successful because we continued getting asks and submissions here about coworkers and managers. Instead of just rejecting these we decided to accept them because they are a part of why customer service sucks. Changing the name of the blog isn’t necessary and would hinder the ability of our old and even new followers to find us if we suddenly just changed. We’ve been Fuck Customers for years, and it’s going to stay that way no matter how the blog evolves.

Why is the inbox/submission box closed?

We need to catch up because we’re neck deep in back log.

Can I use fan mail to submit my stories since the inbox is closed?

For the love of God no! This clogs the inbox up so bad and makes the process of catching up so much harder! Please be patient! We can’t reopen in a timely manner if we have to sift through and delete fan mail submissions that had no place being submitted in the first place in that format. Even when the inbox is open we delete those. The faster we can reopen the better. That all depends on our inbox remaining closed and uncluttered by fan mail. I may seem rude saying this, but it has become a serious problem and is hindering progress a LOT.

Why hasn’t my submission posted yet?

See here.

Who are the mods?

Rodney.

Can you tag (insert thing)?

We used to, but with how big the blog has become it is unrealistic to be able to tag absolutely every single thing. We’re going to have to trust that our followers will be able to put trigger warnings before their own asks and submissions. We get up to 100 new asks and submissions a day on top of our personal and professional lives, so keeping up with posting/queuing is top priority.

Do you need anymore mods? Can I be one?

Ultimately this is up to Rodney, but at the moment the answer is no. There is more than enough for the blogs size. You know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen.

What don’t you post?

Anything racist, transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. for starters. Anything not on topic to customer service is a big one too. We also don’t accept customers whining about employees. There is a line where it might be acceptable, though, like a case where a customer may see a manager or coworker abusing an employee. But if you’re bitching because someone smashed your bread then you are in the wrong place. Go to yelp. Fan mail is not the proper course of submitting your questions or stories. Use the ask or submission options and if the inbox is closed then check back later. Finally, hate mail. We get a lot of it and it’s a waste of space. Now, sometimes we do post one of any of these simply to drag your ass through the coals. Catch us on a bad day and expect to get roasted. Don’t be an asshole and you’re fine. We also try not to post anything that includes real store names, so try to use a fake one.

Why have I been blocked?

If you said anything offensive in a note towards us or another follower then you will be blocked. That could be death threats, telling someone to kill themselves, racism, homophobia, basically being an asshole. If you’re dumb enough to send hate mail without being anon, whether it’s to us or another follower, you’ll also get blocked. We do not tolerate that shit.

I requested my submission be posted anonymous! Why did it get posted or why wasn’t it posted?

It is your responsibility to submit anon. We post what is given to us in a format that tumblr allows(why we don’t post fan mail btw). If we were to post your submission anonymous we would have to cut and paste. Multiply that by 100 per day and we’d be swamped. If it accidentally gets posted that is on you, but most of the time we just delete it. (To post anon, if it’s short use the ask and check the box to make anon. If it’s too long for an ask you can submit a story anon by signing out of tumblr, using incognito, or a different browser that you are not logged into.)

I found something on here offensive! I’m sending hate mail right now!

You know that is the equivalent of asking to see the manager, right? Just skip the post and move on, you’re holding up the line.

*This does not include reporting posts that were accidentally posted that we would definitely remove. If you’re polite about it that is fine, but if you’re going to yell at us and tell us you’re unfollowing then that’s customer like territory. We get a lot of hate mail when all you need to do is point it out nicely. We also don’t condone sending hate mail to other followers. Maybe what they said was offensive, but sometimes good people don’t realize that their wording wasn’t that great. Sending hate mail isn’t the proper way to get your point across and help them learn from the situation.*

Why can’t I use a company name?

It is a decision that we have made at the blog that protects both you and us. Companies have people whose job it is to scour social media and look for people bad mouthing their store. and they will either fire or harass the employee (if they can determine their identity.) or in the blogs case sue us for libel. As they have a team of lawyers and we do not we would have little chance to win in a court fight. So it is our choice to not publish company names.

If I’ve missed any questions that need to be added let us know. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Why hasn’t my submission posted?

We get this question a lot so I thought I’d compile a list:

1.) You sent it through fan mail. We do not post anything sent that way since it does not include an option to queue or post it, just reply. We stopped copy pasting submissions a long time ago.

2.) You included a store name. Some of these slip through, but for the most part these get deleted for the safety of your job and this blog. There are actually people whose job it is is to hunt down stories like these and punish those who tell them.

3.) You requested to be anonymous without actually submitting on anon. Again, we do not copy paste submissions.

4.) You said something extremely offensive. Such as racist, ablest, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. Sometimes you might find we will call you out on it, but for the most part these posts are deleted.

5.) You sent hate mail. We will sometimes destroy you in response, but we delete 99% of these.

6.) The subject matter has been talked about to death. After a while we stop beating the dead horse with a stick.

7.) You posted a customer complaint. Yes, we will post good experiences praising an employee, but if you’re here to complain about an employee from a customer point of view then you’re in the wrong place.

8.) Rarely tumblr will eat the post. If your submission hasn’t posted in a month and it does not fit the rules above then resend it.

9.) Also extremely rare we might have accidentally deleted it. Again, if it hasn’t posted in a month and doesn’t fit the first 6 rules resend it. I think this has only happened twice to me personally though.

10.) It’s already queued or still in our inbox waiting to be queued or posted. We get a lot of submissions and asks, so you’ll need to be patient.

11.) Also, if you send a long submission through several asks instead of the submission link then we’ll delete them all. It is difficult to find all the parts.

12.) It isn’t on topic for the blog or any conversation happening on the blog.

13.) Asking to become a mod. We’re not accepting new mods.

14.) Complaints about what has been posted that does not fit the criteria on this list. This is rare, but it happens.

15.) Anything that seems like it’s an advertisement.

16.) Your post did not seem like it was related to customer service in any way. If you did experience at work then you need to make it clear.

17.) We will no longer post any submissions that talk about adding or switching items in people’s food. If you tamper with peoples food you could cause an allergic reaction up to and including death. You have no idea what people are or are not allergic to and if you put in regular milk when they ask for soy because they were rude you could put them in the hospital OR KILL THEM! Don’t do it. If you submit an ask or story that has food tampering in it, it will be deleted immediately.

18.) If we feel you need to be called out for being unreasonable or for just being a dick, don’t be surprised that we do. Sometimes we just want to impart knowledge to help people grow as a person. Sometimes we just want you to know you’re being an asshole. This may be a venting space, but if you’re acting like a customer we’re going to let you know.

#faq

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resonanteye · 4 years ago

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The Great Awakening

You have arrived.

It’s been a long journey. Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Get a glass of water and sit down. This is going to be long. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, but it’s what you didn’t even know you needed to hear. The totality of this is greater than the sum of its parts and I implore you to read all the way to the end. It’s going to make you angry. It’s going to make you feel a lot of things you don’t want to feel, but you wanted to wake up and this was the only way. You are going to want to dismiss it. People will tell you not to read it. Belief is the most powerful force in this universe, and your belief is about to be challenged in a way you didn’t expect. Fortunately, you don’t have to actually believe anything written here. All you have to do is read it with an open mind. If you get to the end of this your thinking will change. You will be one step closer to being free, and then you can then go on to free the others. Where we go one, we go all.

Before we go any further, we need to set some ground rules:

1) The language here is going to seem really… off, but I promise you it will make sense by the end. This document is designed to be interpreted _literally_. I can’t stress that enough. Do not look for hidden clues—there are none. There is no misdirection, no deeper meaning, no numerology or special calendar to look at. This is the end of the line. This is a 1:1 conversation, speaking as open and honestly as possible. We are just two people having a chat. Any other meaning you try to derive outside of what is written here is on you.

2) Much of this is about language. To some, the language is going to seem very strange, crude, cryptic, nerdy, or childish at times. I’m trying to be as authentic as possible. Please understand it is not meant to be interpreted as racist, sexist or bigoted. Internet culture, “the chans” in particular, have a kind of language that is systemically all these things, but people do not interpret the language literally in use. I will try to keep it as civil and digestible as possible.

3) Be kind to yourself. Be kind to each other.

And before we even really get started, we need to everyone on the same level, with something that approaches a fair knowledge base. Over the past three years people have joined this movement from all around the world. Q Drops have been translated into dozens of languages. There are now mobile apps, shirts, hats, podcasts and documentaries. QAnon means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. As I’m writing this, former military generals are swearing oaths to QAnon. The movement has grown beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. Many people are joining the QAnon movement, but they don’t really understand what they are reading. They are confused. I want to talk just briefly about the history of a part of the internet where QAnon comes from, not in an attempt to legitimize myself as some elder sage, but to build understanding. To truly understand all of this you need context. Context about the people and platforms that now bring you your information—and ultimately, your news.

Some of you go all the way back to the Something Awful forums and the days when platforms like IRC and ICQ still felt new. Some of you literally just joined yesterday. I am going to give you an abbreviated history of the chans as it pertains QAnon. Most people know 4chan and 8chan as the place where Q lives online, but they don’t really understand them. “No outside comms” seems to be what the 99% of QAnon understands—that these are the “official” channels where Q posts. But have you ever been there? Have you ever really gone to boards and looked at them? Some you have, but the vast, vast majority of QAnon followers have not. Perhaps that is no surprise, as they aren’t easily comprehensible. So, let’s talk briefly about three things: Something Awful, 4chan, and 8chan/8kun. And I do mean briefly. You could write a book about each of these, but we can move forward with some broad strokes that should give you the context you need to truly understand Q.

We have to quickly go back to 1999. In 1999 someone known as “Lowtax” created a website called Something Awful (which I will refer to as SA going forward), which still exists today. You can go and check it out if you like. Before Facebook and Twitter, before YouTube even existed, and even before most people knew what Google was, there was Something Awful. SA has been a lot of things over the years, but it is mostly a forum—a message board. On SA everyone was mostly anonymous because, at the time, no one other than academics used their real name on the internet. SA was a semi-private board. It was the internet’s first large “secret society” of sorts. It was mostly focused on video games and Adobe Flash content, and it birthed some of the internet’s very first memes. It was a trollish but a (mostly) well-meaning community of nerds. Some members, known as the “GoonSquad” or just “Goons” would often group up and bombard players of the early MMORPGs to troll them. It was (mostly) harmless fun and pranks. In the late 90’s and early 00’s only nerds were on the internet anyway, so it was mostly nerds trolling other nerds in video games. You could identify other Goons by asking as simple question: “Do you have stairs in your house?” If someone answered, “I am protected,” then you knew they were a fellow Goon.

Why am I talking about this? Well, if you had to pick a place to put on a birth certificate for where internet culture itself was born, Something Awful would be that place.

A few years later someone known at the time only as “moot” created a website called 4chan. 4chan is a fully anonymous (seemingly, anyway) message board, based on a Japanese message board design known as 2chan. It’s actually better described as an “imageboard,” since you have to upload an image with every post. 4chan was open to all. There were few rules, and on some boards—none. Post whatever you want, do whatever you want. For the most part, everyone except moot himself was simply labeled as, “Anonymous.” This is where the “Anon” in QAnon comes from.

Like SA, 4chan was originally a haven for nerds talking about video games and anime. But its anonymous and open nature allowed to build its own form. The most iconic memes, from lolcats themselves to Rickrolling and beyond, started on 4chan. SA might have birthed internet culture, but 4chan gave it form—and it still powers much of the creativity of internet itself to this day. The anonymous nature of the form allowed for a kind of collaborative creativity that—and I truly believe this—has changed the world for the better. It’s a special kind of creativity and one that you really need to experience if you want to understand it. On 4chan you will see new creative concepts born and shaped in real time, and you can watch them spread around the world. You can contribute whenever and whatever you like, and the community then gets to riff on your contribution. 4chan has even birthed new formats and new types of creativity. I want to talk about some of these specifically, to provide some kind of context for what “the chans” are really all about it, but we are just scraping the surface here. You might have to Google around for quite some time to truly understand this if you are new.

Among the myriad of things that get posted on 4chan, one of them is known as a “green text” or “green text story.” A green text is a short story format that includes green colored text and a small picture, often a meme of some kind, like a Pepe. It can be pages long or just a few lines. It is often written in broken sentences and shorthand. They often start with the line, “be me…” and then launch into a short narrative. They can be true or fictional or somewhere in-between. They are often designed to be shocking, depressing or trollish, but they can also be uplifting. It is perhaps the simplest and most pervasive form of content on 4chan other than image macros themselves. I’m going to coin a new phrase and call this a form of Creative Anonymous Fiction or CAF for short. The anonymous nature of the platform lets you tell a story in a new way. Often times people will take green texts and remix them, giving them a different ending. I could post examples, but I’d be doing you a disservice. You are better off looking them up and reading them yourself until you understand it.

Green texts can sometimes end with what’s called copypasta, which is a type of bamboozle. Copypasta is a snippet of short form copy that gets reposted over and over again. A bamboozle is a type of switcheroo—you start telling what the reader feels is a novel story, building to some climax, and then end it with a classic copypasta for that “gotcha” moment. It is, essentially, a prank. A text based prank. This sort of content now exists all over the place, far beyond the reaches of just 4chan. You might be wondering where all of this is going… we’ll get to that. In some ways this is actually the most important part of this entire document. I wanted to make sure that everyone has some context for what is to come, but I can assure this is going somewhere. Please do not let this extensive clarification distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

So that’s a quick overview of the playful side of things. But on 4chan you will also see some dark and disgusting shit. With the good comes the bad—and the bad can be really bad. Because everyone is anonymous, everyone subject to being hassled by other anonymous posters. Everyone is gay, a fag, a retard or an autist. A thread without insults is a failed thread. The more people who tell you how gay and fake your shit is, the more people actually like it. 4chan may have given us lolcats, but it also ended up being a place for violence, misogyny, bullying, extreme racism—and even far more heinous things. For 12 years moot moderated the site. May criticized him at the time, but I think we can all look back now and know that he really did a fantastic job. For over a decade he was the beam scale that balanced free speech against the darkest depths of humanity—and I meant that literally. He developed a system to help identify “anonymous” posters and worked with the FBI to put away pedophiles, child pornographers, and even would-be domestic terrorists. He did this all while being told constantly how gay he was and how many dicks he sucked (as is the way). Moot was a hero we never deserved.

The two most popular boards on 4chan are /pol/ (for politics) and /b/ (which stands for random). People who post on these boards are often referred to as /pol/tards and /b/tards respectively, with /b/ being one of the more nefarious (but also one of the more creative) boards as it had essentially no rules on what you could post. If “tard” sounds harsh, know that it is said lovingly. Even seniority within the community itself is derogatory. There are “oldfags” and “newfags,” where being called an oldfag is an informal compliment and recognition of seniority. Opinions will differ, but oldfags are generally recognized as being those who were around 4chan since before the pool was closed—one of the very first large raids. In 2006 a sort of prank was organized on 4chan by a group of Anons to “raid” the Flash game Habbo Hotel. Hundreds of people created black avatars in the game and went around spamming the chat with racist and anti-Semitic nonsense, drawing swastikas and blocking off the pool area in the game, declaring that the, “Pool’s closed due to AIDS.” Why? For laughs. The average age of the userbase for this game was around 15 years old. Then again, the average age of the then Anons was probably the same. There is a lot more to this story, and I encourage you to look it up if you have the time, but the point is that this event eventually lead to 30 seconds in the spotlight on some news outlets. This was the first big event that was attributed to 4chan and Anonymous as a group. It was the first time that most people outside of the depths of the internet had ever even heard of 4chan.

After this, more newfags joined. 4chan grows and the subgroup of /b/tards and /pol/tards that would come be to known more formally as “Anonymous” starts to take shape. All the while, moot is trying to balance what content stays and what content goes. The rest, as they say, is history. You start to see all kind of digital activism being organized on 4chan. Raids turn into DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks that shut down websites. People get arrested. Splinter groups form. Anonymous becomes more political. /b/ and /pol/ start to leak out of the internet and into the real world. People start protesting various things, like the Church of Scientology, wearing the iconic mask that the character V wears in the movie V for Vendetta. Logos are created. Anonymous comes into its own as a digital force. The group aligns itself with what DnD players call, “Chaotic Good.” Anons enjoy playing a character that is either an anti-hero or anti-villain. Sometimes Anons will pretend to have some super elite hacker ability, and while that is sometimes true it is mostly embellishment. Some people refer to this as Live Action Role Playing (LARP or LARPing), but it is not quite that. LARPing is when people take their Dungeons and Dragons game to the next level or dress up like Harry Potter characters and roleplay out in the woods. What happens on 4chan is very much a form of roleplaying, but one specifically shaped by the anonymous nature of the platform. I’m going to coin a second term here—Creative Anonymous Role Playing, or CARPing. More on this later.

Moot continues to run 4chan until 2015. During that time, it gets harder and harder to manage. Anonymous becomes more unruly, and the site starts to spiral. Cyberbulling goes to a whole new level. There are celebrity nude photo leaks. Gamergate. A series of actual murders and killings get posted on 4chan. 4chan didn’t cause them, but that’s where the content ended up living. The site starts to become unmanageable with the old rules in place. Why moot bothered to keep it going I’ll never understand. There was never much money in the site itself and it always seemed like a huge headache. But the site starts to take moderation more seriously as harassment ramps up.

Boards like /pol/ start to get more strict rules. Even /b/ starts to see more and more threads get removed. In 2013, a piece of shit Anon known as “Hotwheels” doesn’t like what’s happening to 4chan decides to splinter the group and starts 8chan. While moot is trying to wrangle 4chan into something better, Hotwheels goes in the reverse direction and starts empowering (and in some ways, encouraging) harassment with things like Gamergate. 8chan doesn’t remove anything. No morals. Doesn’t matter who gets hurt. Free speech above all.

This stance obviously has consequences. While moot would work with law enforcement, Hotwheels gives them the proverbial middle finger. As a result, all of the bad actors now had a new platform. You see swatting become a popular tactic. More and more violent threats. While moot would work with the FBI to help track down pedophiles and terrorists, Hotwheels decides to relocate the site to Philippines (where the age of consent is 12, mind you). He can barely keep the site running. No one wants to host this content; he can’t even keep the .com anymore because the registrars don’t want to work with him. Hotwheels finds some other shitstain in Manila who runs a pig farm and a porn site designed to get around Japanese pornography laws. They partner up. After three shootings (Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso) in 2019 where the shooters posted their manifesto to 8chan, Hotwheels finally admits the site got away from. The site shut down for a while, but the pig farmer and his son started it back up and rebranded it as 8kun after finding a Russian hosting provider who was willing to host the content. It is now a safe harbor for literally the worst of humanity, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Hotwheels himself now advocates for shutting the site down, but the pig farmer and his son have run away with it.

This is where your information comes from. This is where it lives.

Now that you have a better understanding of who is creating this information—your news—it is time. This next part is going to be hard.

You have been bamboozled. QAnon is a hoax. It may well be one of—if not THE—greatest, most pervasive, hoaxes of all time.

How do I know this? Because I am Q. In fact, I am the original Q. One of them, anyway.

This is the point where many will stop reading. You are likely either angry or starting to feel embarrassed. I’m going to ask you to try and put those feelings aside for a moment and keep reading. You have absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed. This isn’t your fault. You did nothing wrong. You got caught in a world you didn’t fully understand and there are people now trying to prey on you at every corner to sell you hats and t-shirts.

If you are willing to go forward, allow me to explain.

What has happened here is what I’m going to call a “Galaxy Quest” moment. There is a lovely movie that came out in 1999 called Galaxy Quest. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s worth a watch. It’s a family friendly comedy about an advanced alien race who watches a TV show made on Earth called Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is a TV show, but the aliens don’t know it. They refer to the TV show as the, “historical documents.” They built an entire civilization around the historical documents, never realizing it was a TV show. It’s a fun concept. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. Anyway, the aliens weren’t stupid. In fact, they were the furthest thing from stupid as they made all the science fiction from the show come to life (although they are portrayed are dumb for the sake of comedy). The aliens simply did not have the context necessary to understand what they were seeing. They didn’t realize it was fiction. They didn’t know what fiction was. That is what has happened here with QAnon. You have read things on platforms you didn’t fully understand, and you brought your own context and understanding to it. You read fiction as non-fiction and no one has bothered to explain to you how or why this content even exists.

We are going to go back as far as I can remember. I ask that other Anons corroborate what follows, not for me, but for those who are trapped by what has become a truly insidious ideology.

This all starts in the summer of 2016. Someone on /pol/ makes a post pretending to be someone working with “intimate knowledge” of the “Clinton case.” They made a post in the style of an AMA (which stands for Ask Me Anything, a form of Q&A popularized by reddit). This is just another form of CARPing (Creative Anonymous Roleplaying). The first two responses are: “Will the Hillary get Pregnant again?” and “Why are you on 4chan on a Friday night?” This thread almost instantly devolves into what is commonly known as a “shitpost.” It is nonsense. You might say to yourself, “Why would someone go on the internet and tell lies?” Well, this person isn’t really lying, they are shitposting. It is a form of artistic expression. It’s an attempt to get someone to suspend their belief for a few moments. Any seasoned oldfag or /pol/tard knows exactly what this kind of thread is. No one takes this literally.

However, at the time /pol/ is growing. You’ve got new people coming in daily. Much of /pol/ favors Donald Trump, broadly for his trollish nature and memeability, but also for his politics. Months later, someone cites the AMA as the FBI source behind the Pizzagate theory. This finds its way to Twitter. No one actually understands what they are reading, and no one checks the sources. Someone actually thought a months old shitpost on /pol/ was some kind of real leak. Long story short, someone goes into a Comet Ping Pong pizza with an AR-15 and starts shooting. A Friday night shitpost turned into shooting.

Fast forward about six months.

Someone on /b/ posts a depressing green text asking for recommendations on a new cult to join after they found out their girlfriend was cheating. Someone mentions that OP should become a Tibetan monk, because Tibetan Buddhism is a really great cult (e.g. because you can “light yourself on fire if you ever get too depressed OP”). Tibetan Buddhism goes on forever because the Dalia Llama gets reincarnated infinitely, so maybe if you are lucky you get to be him one day. This is the thinking. This isn’t exactly enlighted discussion. I respond suggesting that I have a great new cult that OP can join (which is loosely based on Heaven’s Gate, I’m just making this up on the spot). I had recently listened to a podcast about Heaven’s Gate and I was riffing on it. I loved the absurdity. OP asked for more sauce, but I decided to start a new thread instead.

Warning: This about to get really nerdy.

I started writing some shitposts with pseudo biblical writing, talking about saving humanity. I’m actually more embarrassed about it now than anything, as it was not my finest work. I would refer to “the awakening” as being the time when I would deliver the evidence that would let people “wake up” and realize we were in a simulation. Have you ever seen the Matrix? Yeah, like I said… not my finest work. I signed my posts as Q. Where did Q come from?

Well, initially, because of John de Lancie’s character of Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The character of Q was omnipotent and omnipresent. In the show he would speak to Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise in his own form of strange riddles. Q took a particular interest in humanity as a whole and would appear as a jester-like sort of mix between an anti-hero and anti-villain, always giving Picard hints on how to expand his mind to solve a problem, usually to save all of humanity. So, this was my model.

The goal was to get a few believers and then set a date a few weeks later and reveal “the awakening.” The Awakening was just supposed to copypasta. It was a bamboozle. I was trolling I never even did it because I got bored with it. Most people could see through it (fake and gay) anyway. But someone was watching. Someone who likely called me fag and told me to choke on a bunch of dicks and kill myself was watching.

A few months later I start to see the first “Q” posts, which would eventually be called “Q Drops.” It migrates from /b/ to /pol/. Wow, so original. You took one shit idea from /b/ and made it political. Round of applause.

This person knew exactly what I was doing, not that what I did was that original either. Star Trek is pretty popular among internet nerds. But this is why Q has always talked the way he does. This was the model. This is where Q comes from. The “Q Clearance” stuff that came later is, well… coincidence. But not even a good coincidence because it doesn’t even really make sense, as that is a clearance for the Department of Energy.

The Q from Star Trek also exits as what is known as the “Q Continuum”, where there are other omnipotent beings, and everyone is referred to as Q. This is where the habit of Q referring to himself as “we” comes from. It’s a Star Trek fan, just like me—only one who managed to make a piece of creative anonymous fiction into something political. Likely for lulz at first, because lets be real no one thought it would turn into what it has.

I suspect that Q has been played by many different people over the last couple years as the tripcode has changed, but likely all of them are Star Trek TNG fans. You can really see it in the writing and the constant talk about “humanity.” It’s also possible that the person currently playing Q is the same as the person who was shitposting in my original thread. It doesn’t even matter.

So that’s it. That’s Q. Q eventually moved from 4chan to 8chan and then 8kun. It should be obvious who controls the narrative now. There is nothing truly anonymous or secure about 8kun. We have technologies for that (i.e. tor, torrents, modern cryptography) and 8kun ain’t it. QAnon is the cash cow for the pig farmer and his son in the Philippines who run 8kun, giving a platform to future terrorists and pedophiles. There is a reason for “no outside comms” and “no dates”—control the narrative and keep the machine rolling as long as possible. Why? Money. Between ad revenue and merchandise QAnon is now a profitable venture. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually you will make some prediction that will feel real enough, even if 99% of everything you say is bullshit, and keep the train running. In fact, it’s much easier than you think.

Take the twitter account, for example.

In early June I saw a number of trending hashtags around #JFKJRRETURNS. I could not believe the amount of people who were latching onto this. I watched the account go from zero to tens of thousands of followers in a day or so and then disappear. Everyone was saying that Twitter “banned” him. But when Twitter bans an account the language on the page says that the account was suspended. The account page for this account said that “This account doesn’t exist.” That means one of two things: 1) the account holder changed usernames; or 2) the account holder deactivated the account. When you deactivate an account, it puts it into a 30-day limbo period where you can recover it. I thought to myself, “If I could get ahold of this account perhaps, I could do something good with it.” I never thought I’d actually be able to do it. Low and behold, thirty days later I went to see if the handle was available and it was. Now I would get to play Q once again.

I just started riffing on whoever was playing Q with the account before me. No idea who that was. The envelopes were just responses from various government departments, nothing more. The postmarks are meaningless. Turns out if you write a letter to a government agency they will respond, and you get some cool looking envelopes. You can try it if you want—pull a FOIA request on yourself. July 22 was a date I pulled out of my ass. HUMAnity and ALl GOod ThiNGs are just more references to Star Trek TNG. The last episode of the show is called All Good Things, hence ALGO TNG. The very first Q Drops on record talk about Huma Abedin, and I thought maybe someone would try to make a connection with, “HUMAnity.” The last post from !!Hs1Jq13jV6 also mentioned “humanity”, but I didn’t even make that connection. It’s really not hard for those coincidences to pop up when you are all playing the same character. Manila, well, you know what that refers to now. St. Augustine is a reference to St. Augustine, Florida, where the largest QAnon merchandise operation is run from. The mentions of Hotwheels, moot and having stairs in my house was my way of gauging to see if anyone really had any idea about anything. The strange code in my location was just a Google Maps Plus Code. I picked a spot in the middle of the ocean off the Cook Islands and pulled the code for it. Turns out I didn’t even do it right, so it shows a different answer for everyone when you plug it into Google Maps.

So that’s it. That’s the whole thing. Beginning to end. Call it whatever you like, but that’s the story. The story of the chans, of QAnon and how Q became Q. Do with this what you will. Believe or don’t believe, it doesn’t matter.

Maybe this is all 100% true. Maybe it’s all 100% nonsense. Maybe truth is somewhere in the middle. What’s important is that you have more information today than you did yesterday. Where we go from here is a choice, and one I leave to you. What will happen to me? Well, I’ve been at a standing desk for 14 hours straight in order to bring this to you. I have done what I set out to do over three years ago and fulfilled my purpose as Q. My palms are sweaty. My knees are weak, my arms are heavy. It’s starting to fall out of my pockets already.

Mom’s Spaghetti,

#true stories

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

Text

Lists of Black-Owned Restaurants Are a Start, but They’re Obviously Not Enough

Peppa’s in Brooklyn | Louise Palmberg/Eater NY

Spending money at black-owned restaurants is a direct way to effect change under capitalism. But reading a list is the lowest bar to clear when it comes to engagement with black-owned restaurants

It’s been nearly two weeks of police violence in response to protests over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and the unrest shows no sign of stopping. Despite curfews, tear gas, and arrests, protesters continue to march, and now, governments are beginning to listen to their demands. There is also renewed interest in all the ways non-black people can support the black community, whether it’s by asking politicians to repeal racist laws, or just by supporting black-owned businesses. The latter instinct has led to the spawning of lists and ad-hoc spreadsheets chronicling black-owned restaurants across the country.

Encouraging people to spend their money at black-owned restaurants seems like a direct way to effect change under capitalism, given the historic and systemic lack of resources afforded to black communities and black business owners. Black and brown-owned restaurants are more than three times as likely to be denied loans than white-owned businesses. “A lot of us have had to build our businesses from scratch, and that may be through personal savings and loans, through family members, credit cards, or we have refinanced our homes,” Evelyn Shelton, owner of Evelyn’s Food Love, told Eater in a piece about how black women in the restaurant industry would be disproportionally affected by COVID-19. “We are in uniquely different positions when we start, which makes where we are now even more difficult.”

The creation of the black-owned business lists is one way to show support outright. “It came from a place of deep frustration,” Kat Hong said of creating a spreadsheet for black-owned restaurants in LA over the weekend. “I was frustrated that the government wasn’t doing more to protect Black people. Frustrated that I don’t have the funds to make huge donations, and that with all of the information we’re constantly being inundated with, it’s hard to know where our dollars would be best spent anyway.”

Hong is an editorial assistant for The Infatuation, and indeed many of the new spreadsheets that have circulated most widely over the last week have been started by those working in food journalism, though they’ve now pivoted to being almost entirely crowdsourced. The New Yorker’s food critic Hannah Goldfield is helming New York’s; San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho started the Bay Area’s; journalist Zachary Fagenson spearheaded Miami’s; and food writer (and Eater contributor) Naomi Tomky started Seattle’s. Many other lists and guides are anonymous, created by activists and other supporters, such as a list of black-owned wineries by McBride Sisters, or this list of restaurants in Richmond, Virginia by community leaders and the local tourism organization. There are so many, there is now a list of all the lists, both spreadsheets and published articles.

It’s striking that many of the most recent circulated lists were not created by black people. “That shouldn’t be the case,” says Hong. Which is not to say this is the first time someone has thought to create this kind of database: Black people have been doing this work for ages, whether through websites, apps, and directories of black-owned businesses; the famous Green Book guide of businesses that would be welcoming of black patrons; or Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League. These resources existed, and still exist, to foster community, support, and safe spaces for both business owners and customers.

The fact that these spreadsheets are spreading with such speed in non-black spaces speaks to the power these protests have had, but also to one of the reasons why black-owned restaurants have been considered by non-black patrons as non-mainstream spaces, rather than fully integral parts of any community’s dining landscape: Food media is very, very white, and while Hong’s and others’ positions in food media give their spreadsheets reach and authority, they’re also a symptom of a white supremacist culture that relies on non-black people to bestow wider cultural legitimacy on black-owned restaurants. (The same can often be said for the ways white diners view most restaurants owned by people of color and serving non European cuisine.)

“I had some concerns in making it because I think things like this can make people feel like they’ve ‘done something about racism’ when, really, thinking about where you spend your money is just this one, tiny part of the work that needs to be done,” said Naomi Tomky, who created the Seattle list. To that end, she made sure to include other anti-racist resources alongside the list of restaurants, hoping that the existence of the list would also make people question why it needs to exist in the first place. “Without even leaving the food side of this, asking yourself why you didn’t already eat at these places — and the systemic racism inherent in those reasons — is a good second step.”

But there’s also worry from black writers that these new lists erase ones created by and for the community, or about outright plagiarism of work that’s already been done by black people. Gabby Beckford, a black travel writer, wrote a list of black-owned restaurants in San Diego last fall, but she recently watched as non-black creators repurposed her list without credit, and as larger publications credited those creators instead. “The few that repurposed my list in order, word for word, concede 100 percent to using it and credited me only after the fact when I called them out,” she told Eater. She recently republished her list, with even more restaurants.

The lists come at a time when eating “in” is still a nebulous concept. In the midst of social unrest, there is also an ongoing pandemic, and while restaurants in many states have opened up outdoor dining areas or indoor dining rooms, there are often still restrictions on how many people are allowed inside, and lots of restaurants are still only serving delivery and takeout, or remain closed. Across the country, black and POC-owned restaurants are at greater risk of closure due to the pandemic. Just 12 percent of black and Latinx-owned businesses who applied for PPP loans received what they asked for, and the Center For Responsible Lending determined that 95 percent of black-owned businesses “stand close to no chance of receiving a PPP loan through a mainstream bank or credit union.” It’s a catch-22: Many black and Latinx-owned businesses never previously sought out loans, because of historically discriminatory banking practices, but often, banks only considered PPP loans from existing customers.

Between the pandemic, the protests, and the economic crash that’s disproportionately affected people of color and the food service industry, supporting black-owned restaurants is crucial. But aside from that, everyone agrees that reading a list is the lowest bar to clear when it comes to engagement with black-owned restaurants, and it’s highly likely that after a few weeks, many who promised to add black-owned restaurants into their restaurant rotations will fall back into old patterns. “The absurdity of these lists is the suggestion that dining at a black-owned business in any way addresses the brutal and deadly force that police continue to unleash on black people,” writes Ruth Gebreyesus for KQED. “At best, it scratches the itch of ego-driven guilt.”

Hong hopes that “in addition to using our spending power, when it comes to supporting black-owned restaurants, using our voices and platforms is just as vital. They will be crucial for not just their survival, but their ability to flourish.” Which means not just listing black-owned restaurants, but telling their stories, including them in lists and profiles where blackness isn’t the frame, and especially paying black writers to do that work. Because while the short-term goal is to infuse these businesses with cash, the long-term goal is to make sure they are viewed as essential parts of their communities by non-black people. That’s why Beckford said she sought to include context and history in her piece, not just phone numbers. “What I learned from going into these restaurants and emailing back and forth with these owners is that building a relationship and learning the stories of these businesses is what secures long-term customers,” she said. “And what I think will help generally decenter whiteness from these customers’ lives.”

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Peppa’s in Brooklyn | Louise Palmberg/Eater NY

Spending money at black-owned restaurants is a direct way to effect change under capitalism. But reading a list is the lowest bar to clear when it comes to engagement with black-owned restaurants

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a-path-beyond84 · 7 years ago

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Hey I'm the anon from a while ago that commented on the shunning people who support abortion thing. As answers to your questions 1) I mean, I try to maintain a consistent standard, but I'll have to be honest, I've never met anyone irl who advocates for legalizing pedophilia (and as I'm a minor, that wouldn't be the safest situation for me to be around a person like that, so not really for that one). However, quick note on this, pedophilia is different than people who support abortion... (part1)

(part2) Pedophilia is not common, and it's not something that a ton of people support. It's a radical, disgusting minority of people, and also it's illegal and extremely frowned upon. Pedophiles and pedophilia advocates are told all their life that pedophilia is wrong, and yet they abuse children anyways. That's a lot different than people who support abortion, or have abortions, who oftentimes grow up in cultures that say that it's ok to have an abortion, and sometimes may not know any better

(part 3) If I were to shun everyone who supported abortion, I would have to cut off contact with half of my relatives and virtually everyone except a handful of people at my school. I would have to shun my teachers, administrators, childhood friends, and nearly everyone in my classes. All of these people don't understand why pro-life people think abortion is wrong. They only see pro-life people screaming at women at abortion clinics and holding up bloody pictures of dead babies.

(part4) This is the culture in my region. If I were to shun these people who support abortion, they may never talk to a pro-life person who is kind to them and who will calmly explain their beliefs for years. As for the question if I would shun a white supremacist, the answer is probably not, and here's why. I have a couple of friends who don't like white people very much. There are countless stories of racists who changed views after meeting someone who will talk with them, and listen to them.

(part5) I have had friends who tell me that white people are responsible for every bad thing that has happened in the world, in complete seriousness. I listen to them, I let them talk, and I show them with my actions and words that white people aren't all terrible. I would do the same thing for a white supremacist. Listening to what people have to say and being rational and kind does more to change bigots than shunning ever does. Even the most disgustingly racist person can be eventually change.

(part6) So yeah, I try to keep a consistent morality. But keeping a consistent morality means not refusing to listen to people who oftentimes have been hurt in the past by members of groups that they hate. Just because someone doesn't repent right away doesn't mean they won't in the future. Abby Johnson said somewhere that she was considering leaving PP because of a kind advocate, but she changed her mind when people showed up condemning & screaming. It look her a lot longer to leave after that

(part7) In Paul's time, the church was young, it was persecuted, and it was new. They were also in a much different culture then. Their culture was focused on honor. Reputation was extremely important. It mattered to almost everyone what the community thought of you, so if you were excluded from the community, you'd get the message real fast to change or lose your reputation. Not everyone knew where the church stood on different issues & had to publicly say who they were/weren't affiliated with

(part8) In our culture, it's almost admired to be disliked by a lot of people. Rebellion is seen as cool, so when people see that christians and catholics are shunning them, they think "oh hey, look we're making them mad! reblog to piss off a christian!" and stuff like that. By giving a huge, dramatic reaction like shunning, you're pretty much just fanning the flames and encouraging them. It isn't encouraging them to change their minds, it's making them more set in their ways.

(part9) Also, might I add that you don't seem to be sticking to your rule of shunning people who support abortion? I mean, you're still talking/arguing with people who are clearly very pro-abortion, shouldn't you have blocked them if you really believed that? Of course we want people who support abortion to repent, but shunning them won't help. And women who have had abortions are oftentimes desperate and misled, and if you go straight to attacking them they'll automatically go on defense.

(part10) Condemning and attacking others doesn't help change minds. Especially people who have had abortions. Yes, it's terrible and tragic, but you have to understand that for many of these people, literally everyone and everything around them was telling them that abortion was the right choice. It's the same with racists. These people are often raised in cultures that tell them that their terrible views are right. You don't know the future. You don't know if they'll repent eventually.

Thank you for your comments. I’ll do my best to address them, and express agreement where it can be found. I’ll admit I haven’t fully formed this view - I’m sort of testing it out via Tumblr.

Pedophilia is admittedly not common, and one of the major reasons for that is that people react viscerally against it. There are people who advocate for it - I would suggest Googling it, though that probably isn’t the most wise thing to do. Trust me on this, rather than searching for that on the internet. I must say I doubt by mid-century that will be the case that pederasty will face the scorn it does today. The animus against pederasty is a holdover from a previous Christian culture and has no intellectual foundation in the current culture which focuses on consent. In our time, the culture rationalizes its animus against pederasty by presuming a person under age 18 can’t really provide consent, but I fully expect this to be successfully challenged. In cultures without Christian influence, such as ancient Greece, pederasty becomes more or less a fact of life the way abortion is with us. Recall that only 44 years ago, abortion was a crime in the United States. Anyway, the point being is that abortion, which is murder, is at least as bad and arguably worse than pedophilia/pederasty, and thus we should have similar attitudes towards both.

I agree with your comments about screaming at women at abortion clinics as being ineffective. Being shouted at by strangers rarely changes minds and so I wouldn’t recommend it either. In like manner, I would counsel discernment generally speaking, and if you are in a tiny minority shunning would not be effective at all - you’d be more or less shunning yourself. Especially in your situation as a minor, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I do speak about the subject with supporters of abortion on Tumblr, but keep in mind that we are personally anonymous to each other and thus shunning isn’t a live option. Moreover, I wouldn’t advocate shunning without patient dialogue preceding it, and being clear about the reason for shunning when it occurs. The point also is to reject the most serious advocates - it really isn’t directed at women who have mixed feelings about what they did. I would not condemn a woman who committed five abortions but regrets it (or is even uneasy about it), whereas I’d have serious problems with a person who never had an abortion yet strongly and publicly affirmed it. The point is not to cast stones at sinners but to help reduce popular support for an evil practice, thereby protecting people from ever considering committing abortion in the first place.

I don’t agree that our culture isn’t as focused on honor and public status as it was in the past. Our culture is quite vain and people want to be seen as virtuous - hence virtue signaling. This is why there are public campaigns to eliminate shame in certain circumstances (with abortion, fat-shaming, slut-shaming), and why words are created specifically to shame political opponents (homophobia, transphobia, etc). And yes, it’s easy for a person to ignore the shunning of a complete stranger, such as on Tumblr. It’s another thing entirely when people close to them IRL refuse to associate with them.

Some, like Abby Johnson, take a long while to repent because they consider their opponents too harsh. Others take a long time to repent, like me, because they don’t consider Christians to take their own views seriously.

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