#for one of your conservative double-speech takes | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

batboyblog · 2 years ago

Text

"My Name is Harvey Milk and I'm Here To Recruit You!"

If you don't know Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. To this day Harvey remains the most famous queer person elected to office maybe in the world. His short and tumultuous time in office was dominated by the fight for gay rights. In the late 1970s there was a huge backlash against the rise of gay rights spearheaded by a group called "Save Our Children". Across the country they organized elections to revoke local gay rights ordinances in Miami, Saint Paul, Wichita and Eugene in the summer and fall of 1977. In 1978 a California state Senator John Briggs brought forward a citizens referendum, Proposition 6, which would ban gay people and supporters of gay rights from being teachers any where in the state of California. The last year of Harvey's life was consumed with the struggle against Briggs who he debated across the state. In the end the Briggs Initiative was defeated 58-41% with Harvey's home of San Francisco turning out over 70% against. The national anti-gay fever broke and "Save Our Children" never recovered.

Harvey opened every speech he ever gave with "My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm here to recruit you" In the 1970s rather than accusing gay people of "grooming" children (an idea that didn't exist then) they were accused of "recruiting" them. "Recruiting our children to the homosexual lifestyle". So Harvey used it as a joke but also a battle cry

Today it feels like every day there's more bad news. Across the country state legislatures are trying to ban trans health care for minors and even adults. Local school boards are banning books about LGBT people (and others). States are trying to ban drag. violence and the threat of violence are trying to stop companies from doing Pride and attacking Queer events. The internet is flooded with "groomer" attacks on our humanity. There are days it does feel like the 1970s all over again.

BUT! we won then, and there are many lessons we can take from Harvey and his struggle and use to win the fight against the current wave of hate plunging American in darkness. Harvey's been gone a very long time so... My name is Max and I'm here to recruit you, here are some things I want everyone to do.

VOTE BITCH!

Are you an American citizen 18 years of age or older? Are you registered to vote? if the answer is no, register to fucking vote bitch, here check out what you need. If you want registered, click the link any ways and double check. If you're 16 or 17 years old good news more than half the states in America allow you to "preregister" so you're all signed up and become a registered vote right on your 18th birthday. Whats more ask every vaguely left of center person in your life, everyone who supports LGBT rights, if they're registered to vote and if any one says "no" bug the shit out of them till that changes.

But more than just registering to vote you have to go and vote, yes every election. Right now across America conservative queerphobes are using local elections that get little to no attention and are often very low turn out to take over and push wildly extreme and hateful agendas. Local school boards across America are banning books that have LGBT characters or themes. They pushing policies that refuse students the right to their correct names and pronouns. They want to require schools to out students to their parents against their wishes. Check Vote411 or ballotpedia to find what elections are happening around you.

Candidates on a local level, school board, town/city council, county government, even up to state Rep and state Senate candidates are almost always very responsive to questions. Email everyone running and ask them where they stand, you will get answers I PROMISE you will get answers. Its the easiest thing to do and everyone who has the right to vote in this country should do it, vote in every election.

"But I live in a super blue area my vote doesn't matter" SHUT UP! SHUT UP! even if every local election is Democratic it can be more progressive, ask local candidates what they're gonna do to push LGBT rights forward. Will your local school board push teaching LGBT history? respect trans students pronouns? will your local library board host a drag queen story hour and put together programs for pride? ask! push them! let local candidates know!

"but I live in a super red area my vote doesn't count" BULLSHIT! where ever you are there's a local election that can swing to the non-shitty side if people show up, you can be the difference in a school board election. No matter what stand up and be counted.

Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are.

Since the earliest days of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s before Stonewall, through Harvey Milk's time in the 1970s through to right now, the most powerful tool we have is to come out. It is easy to hate the homosexual, the transgender as an abstraction, as a stereotype as an unrefuted lie. It is so much harder to hate a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter, a friend, a neighbor, your lawyer, your doctor, the mailman, your 8th grade English teacher. In 1978 Harvey said:

"Unless you have dialogue, unless you open the walls of dialogue, you can never reach to change people's opinion. In those two weeks, more good and bad, but more about the word homosexual and gay was written than probably in the history of mankind. Once you have dialogue starting, you know you can break down prejudice. In 1977 we saw a dialogue start."

Thats what they're scared of, thats why they're freaking out in Target, why they're trying to shut down Drag Queen story hours and take away the books. Ignorance and hate lives in darkness and dies in the light. In 1978 gay men and lesbians went door to door in California and introduced themselves to strangers to explain the harm Briggs would do to them. They vote for us 3 to 1 if they know they know one of us.

It shouldn't be like this, it should be when you're ready when you have all the words, but they're coming for us all so come out come out wherever you are. If you know your parents will love you but you've been holding off because it's scary or stressful, nows the moment. If you're a grown ass adult who lives on your own and don't need mom and dad's money to pay your rent, tell them, no matter how much it hurts, call them on the phone, write them a letter if you have to. Does your family know but they asked you not to tell grandma, grandma, great-aunt Marge because they're old or whatever, or your aunt and uncle who are born again Christians. Listen if they still vote they could be hurting you and if they really love you they shouldn't want to do that, tell them! tell them who you really are, and it might be the work of years to bring that person around, but you never know till you try it.

Are there family members you have who know and love you but you know they're conservative and still vote Republican and you've been avoiding talking to them about it because it's awkward? Stop avoiding it, explain it to them, explain that it's not "just politics" explain to your loved ones that they ARE hurting you. If they don't hear it the first time, don't stop, if they love you they shouldn't hurt you.

Come Out at Work, Come out at your bowling league, come out to that friend of a friend you see sometimes, wear a pin, rainbow shoes, a shirt in public, tell your co-workers, your clients, your Church, your Synagogue. Wear that rainbow pin, that pronoun t-shirt, put a sticker on your car, your bag, your phone. If it's safe for you to be out in a space, claim it, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE.

COMING OUT AS TRANS OR NON-BINARY

COMING OUT AS LESBIAN, GAY, OR BISEXUAL

Go To Pride This Year.

Conservatives are trying harder than any time in my lifetime to shut down Pride. Florida and Tennessee have passed laws that will limit pride events. Terrorists are threatening and attacking brands that are doing Pride themed events and products. These events and products go back at least 20 years but the violence of attacks against them is really new. So the only answer is to GO TO PRIDE. I don't care if crowds are not your thing, I don't care if its 97 degrees out the day your city does it, I don't care if your local pride is small and embarrassing, I don't care you might see that one ex, I DON'T CARE. If you physically can go to a pride event this June DO IT. If you're scared to be seen, wear a mask, go in drag, put make or body pant over your tattoos whatever you need to do. If we want to have Pride again next year in many areas this year needs to be a show of force. If you've never been and you never go again this is the year, do it, go, find the Pride event closest to you and do it.

Get Involved Whore!

So far I've offered you pretty easy asks for things you can do, voting, coming out, going to Pride. Now comes the harder ones, get involved. In 1978 gay men and lesbians knocked on doors and told voters across the state of California how an anti-gay measure would affect them personally. If they had the nerve less than 10 years after Stonewall to go to strangers houses and come out to them, I believe you can do it too. Get out there, knock doors, make phone calls, mail postcards, wave signs. Talk to Voters from anywhere, find your local Democratic Party, check out LGBT Democrats in your state, check out groups like the HRC and PFLAG

if you've got money give to HRC, give to GLAD, Give to The National Center for Lesbian Rights all 3 of whom have been the tip of the spear fighting the insane anti-LGBT laws coming out of the states.

If you don't have money, check out The Victory Fund thats supports LGBT candidates and find one close to you and sign up to help. Can't find anyone? try Run for Something that supports young progressives. If you live in a Blue area of a blue state, you can check the Sister District Project which links up volunteers with swingy districts across the country. Swing Left does much the same on a more federal level

crazy right wing extremists can count on organized support from Churches and far right groups. You, yes you, talking to you Glenn! HAVE TO be the support network, the volunteer base for LGBT candidates and their allies and supporters. You have to HAVE to get out there, give if you have money, knock on doors, call, text, write letters go to a protest, sit at a booth, register people to vote, hand out literature, WHATEVER whatever. You can do it, please give at least one weekend over the next two years to a political campaign, be it a local school board candidate, town council, working for the Democrats or volunteering through the HRC or a progressive group, the people who want to destroy you are out working to win elections, you have to be too.

Fucking Run, why not?

This is the last thing, the hardest thing and the thing I don't expect everyone to do. Run, yes really, run for office, yes you, yes I mean it. If the crazed insane conservative who thinks Hillary Clinton drinks child blood out of kids like a juice box is qualified for School Board to ban all the books with queer people or black folks, you are MORE than qualified. I don't care if you're a high school drop out with face tats, you're more qualified than these people, so do it, if you've ever thought of it, do it. Frustratingly dozens of dozens of offices across this country are filled every day but uncontested elections only one person signed up, hell that person can be you why not? Look into it Last year 41% of the seats in the Florida Legislature went uncontested, 37% of the seats in Texas, 53% in Tennessee, 58% in South Carolina. It's not for everyone, but if you've ever wanted to, ever thought about it, take this as your sign, do it. Do you have a friend who's so smart, cool, involved and just better than you in every way and you think they should run the world? Nominate them, give them a push to run

I think Harvey put the importance of electing queer people better than I ever could so

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio, there’s a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay. Knows that if the parents find out, they’ll be tossed out of the house. The classmates will taunt the child and the Anita Bryants and John Briggs’ are doing their bit on TV, and that child had several options. Staying in a closet, suicide, and then one day that child might open a paper, and it says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco,” and there are two new options. An option is to go to California or stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected, I got a phone call, and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and the person said, “Thanks.” And you’ve got to elect gay people so that that young child and the thousands upon thousands like that child know that there’s hope for a better world. There’s hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those Blacks, and the Asians, and disabled, and seniors. The us’s. The us’s without hope, the us’s give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give them hope. Thank you very much.

If you read all this thanks, I can't make anyone do anything of course, but whatever you choose to do, I'll be out there knocking doors. I wish I did not live in such dark times but as Gandalf The Gray said "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Finally to all my Queer brothers, sisters, and siblings, even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.

#Pride #Pride Month #lgbt pride #Queer #LGBT #Gay #Trans #Harvey Milk #Voting #protest #coming out #lgbt community #Hope

218 notes · View notes

starseedfxofficial · 2 months ago

Text

BoE's Rebuilding Plan: GBP Set for New Opportunities? Rebuilding Bridges with Bailey: BoE's Strategy to Tackle Trade Imagine you just opened a fresh pair of snazzy new sneakers only to realize they were two sizes too big. It's a moment of "Oops, that wasn't right," much like how the UK's relationship with the EU has been for the last few years. But here comes BoE Governor Bailey, not with a new shoe, but with a new approach: rebuilding EU relations to fit the UK's economy like a well-fitted sneaker. Bailey wants the UK to embrace the chance to rebuild ties with the EU, focusing on free trade and open markets. It's a lot like when you realize trying to resist the call of those gorgeous EU markets with tariffs was just making things awkward. It's time for a smoother, freer trade environment—the kind that makes everyone feel like they're wearing shoes that actually fit. But Bailey isn't stopping there. He threw his support behind Chancellor Reeves's plans to boost UK investment. That's a bold step forward—like upgrading from a budget sneaker to a full-on designer pair. And here’s where it gets a bit spicy: Bailey thinks the UK isn't properly measuring its "economic intangibles." That's the economy's equivalent of not counting the air in your tires—you can't drive very far if you don’t know the whole picture. Schnabel's Playbook: ECB and Interest Rates Across the Channel, we have the ECB's Schnabel stepping into the ring with her insights on interest rates. It's like having the world's simplest toolbox—just one tool: the interest rate lever. According to Schnabel, it's still the ECB's main go-to for monetary policy. Asset purchases, meanwhile, are better suited to steadying wobbly markets, rather than sparking an economic fireworks show. Think of them as the stabilizing training wheels for uncertain market conditions—essential, but maybe not the tool to win the race. France's PM Barnier: Skipping the Bureaucratic Dance In France, PM Barnier is taking a different route altogether. Imagine a dancefloor, and instead of making moves, Barnier's decided he's just going to sidestep the whole formal process and drop the budget without a parliamentary vote. It's not exactly "by the book," but it does skip all those awkward legislative tango steps. It's a bold move, sure to rile some feathers, but also a reminder of how some leaders prefer getting straight to the point—for better or worse. Advanced Insights: Reading Between the Lines The big takeaway here is that Bailey, Schnabel, and Barnier are not just giving speeches—they're laying out blueprints for how each economy should react in a rapidly shifting global landscape. For the UK, Bailey is pushing for less resistance and more connection, a move that should ideally ease some of the post-Brexit wrinkles. Schnabel, meanwhile, doubles down on a traditionalist view of monetary policy—fewer flashy tools, more stability. Barnier, on the other hand, throws caution to the wind and just sidesteps the rules. As a Forex trader, these insights aren't just economic anecdotes. They provide clues about possible currency pair movements. The UK’s rekindled relations with the EU could suggest a more robust GBP in the medium term, while the ECB's steady hand on rates may imply less volatility for the Euro—until markets inevitably start speculating on the next move. Hidden Opportunities: Trading Like a Pro For those with an eye on the trading horizon, consider this: Bailey's support for more investment and open trade could mean opportunities in GBP pairs. Keep an eye on GBP/EUR—an improving relationship with the EU might just turn the tide in the Pound's favor. Meanwhile, the ECB’s conservative approach might signal a quieter Euro, but with Schnabel emphasizing stability, it's all about picking up on those undercurrents that move the needle ever so slightly. And don't sleep on France. Barnier’s move might seem bureaucratic, but it could send ripples through EUR pairs—the kind that an eagle-eyed trader could leverage. Lacing Up for Opportunities It's an exciting time in Europe. While it may feel a bit like each leader is playing with a different strategy, that's precisely where the opportunities lie. Rebuilding bridges, recalibrating tools, or simply sidestepping old protocols—each move shapes the trading landscape in its own way. And for you, the trader with an insider's perspective, these aren't just headlines—they're a call to action. So lace up those metaphorical sneakers, stay ahead of the curve, and let these market-shaping moves guide you to new opportunities. It's all about getting the right fit—whether in your shoes, your trades, or your understanding of the shifting tides of economic policy. Read the full article

0 notes

maturemenoftvandfilms · 2 years ago

Text

Newt

Featuring Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich

Back in 2011, I attended a lecture given by Former Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich at the University of Pennsylvania. He was just my type, probably in his mid to late 60's, silver haired, huskily built which was my weakness. My eyes were zeroed in on his wide ass and imagining plowing. His speech quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extramarital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values. The student was clearly trying to provoke and embarrass Gingrich in front of the college crowd. Gingrich tried to cut off the question. Other students loudly criticized Gingrich, waving signs and yelling as they walked out of the event while he was still speaking.

After the lecture, I was in the bathroom, at the urinal pissing when the bathroom door opened and in walked Mr. Gingrich. Damn if he didn’t take the urinal right beside me. I didn’t mind, but I thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye looking over the divider. I thought, what the hell and I looked over briefly. What I saw was a thick, uncut cock which had to be 7 to 8" when hard. I never would have suspected that this short, chubby, older guy would have such a nice cock and I admit I started to get pretty hard. Sure he's a a horrible human being, but turn me on with their power and arrogance.

I guess it was because I was surprised (and aroused) that I stared too long and he noticed. I looked up and he was looking right at me. So I decided to make a bold move.

“Sorry, sir... I don’t mean no disrespect, but aren't you Newt Gingrich?” I finally asked.

"Ah, yes I am son." Gingrich replied as he reached over and offered me his hand.

Well, one thing led to another and our conversation turned into how I would satisfy him if I got him into my bed. Sure he was antigay, but he was a cheater. And most cheater, if not all, can't pass up getting their dick wet. Next thing I knew, Gingrich and I were in the handicapped stall with his cock hanging out of his pants. The head was big as a fuckin crab apple. I shut the lid to the commode and sat down.

"Don't get the notion that I'm gay.” Gingrich said softly with a sexual charge as he reached down, grabbing his hardening cock shaking it back and forth.

"I'm married," He said as I I reached out and took hold of his beautiful dick, "And I fuck her all the time."

"Whatever..." I respond before I closed my lips around his pale cut dick.

“Oh! GOD!” He exclaimed when I started sucking gently on the head of his dick.

“Hell, that feels wonderful.” He added as he suddenly reached down and grabbed me behind the head. I loved the taste of the old man's dick. It was fresh and masculine. He grunted each time I would inch further down his shaft.

I managed to take inch after inch of his thick dick down my throat until my lips were pressed against his pubic hairs. He held my face to his crotch until I gagged before he pulled my head back. Then he started moving my mouth up and down his thick dick shaft as he fucked my mouth like he was fucking his wife’s pussy. I took his plunging dick and made love to it with my tongue as this conservative repeatedly shoved it down my throat and pulled it quickly back out.

I looked up to see his head was tilted back and his eyes were closed as he hunched toward me, his belly hitting my forehead. He was biting at his bottom lip as sweat rolled down his forehead. I wanted to make him explode and sucked all I could of the huge cock head in my mouth. After a minute or two of this, I easily deep throating his thick dick as I worked him into a frenzy.

“Damn, your mouth is hot!” The old man called out excitedly as he fucked my mouth faster and faster. “Get ready. I’m going to unload! Damn! Here it comes!”

Then suddenly the old man did a double clutch with his hips and started to spew his thick hot milky cum in my mouth.

“Ahhhhhhh....” He cried out from the intense feeling.

I sucked every thick wad that shot out of his big red cock head. The last few times he hunched I took every inch of his cock in my throat. His breathing was short and he grunted and moaned as quiet as possible. Then I quickly I stood up and jerked my boxer shorts down. My long fat dick sprung up and stood straight out from my body. It was so hard it was throbbing. The old man's eyes got big as he looked at my thick dick.

"Damn! What a cock! Shit, I bet my wife couldn't take that thing. GOD, is it thick." Newt said as I moved up to him until my dick was touching him. Not to brag, but I have a solid 10" thick cock.

"Hell, makes my dick look small." He added. Then he surprised me by reaching down, grabbing hold of my dick and started jacking my dick hard and fast.

"GOD! I would love to have a cock the size of yours." He said looking into my eyes. I guess seeing monster cock thrilled Newt.

Knowing that and him jerking me off caused me to shoot off with the old man watching. Damn if it flew out with such force that it shot onto Newt, striking his cock with more hitting the front of his shirt. Instead of making Newt, it looked like he enjoyed being cummed on or he still could be in the thrall of his own nut. What followed was a brief awkward moment as I stuffed my dick back into my pants and he doing the same with the sudden shame of what he had done.

“Don’t worry, Newt. This is just between the two of us.” I said as I hurried out of the bathroom.

#Newt Gingrich #Newt #fan fiction #politician #american politician

96 notes · View notes

potteresque-ire · 4 years ago

Text

More ask answer about Word of Honour (山河令, WoH) and the so-called “Dangai 101 phenomenon” under the cut ~ with all the M/M relationships shown on screen, does it mean improved acceptance / safety for the c-queer community?

Due to its length (sorry!), I’ve divided the answer into 3 parts: 1) Background 2) Excerpts from the op-eds 3) Thoughts This post is PART 1 ❤️. As usual, please consider the opinions expressed as your local friendly fandomer sharing what they’ve learned, and should, in no ways, be viewed as necessarily true. :)

(TW: homophobic, hateful speech quoted)

After WoH had started airing, I had waited for one of China’s state-controlled media to publish opinion pieces about the show. Specifically, I’d like to know ~ what is the administration’s current take on Dangai (耽改), as a genre? How does it characterise the closeness of the same-sex leads—the closeness that is suppressed when the original IP, of the genre Danmei (耽美) was converted for visual media presentation?

This is important, as China is a country where the government’s attitude becomes the official public attitude. The state opinion pieces will be quoted and parroted, especially if they come from heavy-weight sources (state-controlled media also have their importance/influence hierarchy). Production of the upcoming Dangai dramas will adjust their scripts accordingly. Marketing tactics will also adjust, make sure it doesn’t spread “the wrong message”; Dangai and Danmei dramas have both been pulled off shelves during or immediately after its airing before (Addicted 上癮 and Guardian 鎮魂, respectively), despite having already passing the censorship board.

If a heavy-weight state opinion piece pans the one-lead-fawning-over-the-other scenes in WoH (there are a few of them), for example, scenes / lines of such suggestive nature will likely disappear from the upcoming Dangai dramas for at least a year or two. If the critique spills over to a harsh stance against the presence of queers in Chinese media, all future Dangai dramas can become strict “socialist-brotherhood” stories, their “no homo” message reinforced by, for example, by inserting a female lead (or changing one of the leads to female).

Whether the official public opinion equates the true public opinion or not, public behaviour in China is quickly driven by the official public opinion. Example: the Xi regime’s conservative stance on queer issues has already translated to a quick deterioration of queer tolerance in China; open expressions that were tolerated, even welcomed, just several years ago are now met with significant hostility in the public.

This is a reflection of the nature of their government. A quick thought experiment may explain this. Take … jaywalking. It’s probably fair to say we’ve all committed this “crime” before?

Will you still jaywalk if your government declares it immoral to do so? Where I am, in the United States, the answer is definitely a no. The public will probably laugh at (and make memes about) the poor official who made the declaration, kindly ask the government to do something useful for once (f*** off), and keep jaywalking.

Now, what if the declaration comes with a law that includes a one-year prison term + lifelong criminal record for jaywalking? Let’s say this law is fully executable and irreversible, given this being a thought experiment—nothing you, or the public, can say or do can contest it.

Will you still jaywalk, even if you disagree with government’s stance that the act is immoral? You’ve got a neighbour who continues to defy the law. Will you think twice before letting your young loved ones go out with them?

Very soon, jaywalking becomes “bad”—even though such “badness” had little moral basis at its origin. It is bad because the government has “characterised” it to be so—an authoritarian government that doesn’t allow challenge of the characterisation.

The retention of queer elements in Dangai is the jaywalking in the example. The Chinese government stepping in to characterise (定性) an event, a phenomenon etc is common, and the people know the drill well that they fall in line quickly.

If a powerful state-controlled media publish a negative opinion piece on the queer elements in Dangai / Danmei, therefore, those elements can disappear overnight.

My question had been: will the state do it? The Xi regime has made its distaste for LGBT+ representation in visual media abundantly clear with its NRTA directives. However, while the Chinese government typically puts ideology (意識型態) as its Guiding Principle, exceptions have always been made for one reason. One word.

Money.

TU is a legendary financial success story every production company (Tencent itself included) wants to replicate. As a result, there are ~ 60 Danmei IPs (book canon) with their copyright sold for Dangai dramas; this long line of Danmei dramas in the horizon has been nicknamed “Dangai 101”, after the name of the show “Produce 101” Dd was dance instructor in. These dramas are all competing to be the next TU by profit.

Adoration from fans is nice, but money is what matters.

C-ent is currently in a financial bleak winter. The anti-corruption, anti-tax-fraud campaign started by the Xi regime in 2018, which cumulated to a sudden (and unofficial) collection of 3 years of back-taxes from studios and stars, has drained a significant amount of its capital; the number of new TV dramas being filmed fell 45% between 2018 and 2019, and production companies have been closing by the tens of thousands. The tightening of censorship rules also means production is associated with more risk. The commercial sector outside c-ent is also eager for replications of TU’s success—they need more “top traffic” (頂流) idols like Gg and Dd whose fans are sufficiently devoted to drive the sales of their products. Such “fan economy” would benefit the government, even if it doesn’t have direct stakes in the companies in and outside c-ent. People’s Daily, the Official State Newspaper, previously published a positive opinion piece on fan economy in 2019, estimating its worth at 90 billion RMB (~13.7 billion USD) per year.

But if the state allows the queer elements in Dangai’s to pass the censorship board (NRTA) for profit, how can it do so with the current “No homo” directive in place? From previous experience (scarce as it may be), the queerness has to be sufficiently obvious for the shows to make the profit everyone is wishing for. Dangai dramas in which the leads’ romantic relationship remains subtle have not sold the way TU does, even if they are well-reviewed and feature famous, skilled actors (as Winter Begonia 鬓边不是海棠红 last year.)

NRTA, and the government behind it, can’t just say I’m turning a blind eye to the flirting and touching for the money. What can it say then?

Here’s what I’d thought—what it can say, or do, is to “characterise” these Dangai dramas in a way that leave out its queerness. It did so for TU. TU’s review by the overseas version of People’s Daily devoted a grand total of two characters to describe WWX and LWJ’s relationship—摯友 (“close friend”). The rest of the article was devoted to the drama’s aesthetics, its cultural roots. (The title of the article: 《陳情令》：書寫國風之美 Chen Qing Ling: Writing the Beauty of National Customs).

How could it do that? The State’s power ensuring few questioning voices aside, I’ve been also thinking about the history and definition of Danmei (耽美)—Dangai’s parent genre as the causes. Based on the history and definition, I can think of 3 ways the queer elements in Danmei (耽美) can be characterised by the state, 2 of which provide it with the wiggle room, the movable goalposts it needs should it choose to want to overlook the queerness in Dangai.

The 3 characterisations I’ve thought of, based on the history and definition of Danmei (耽美) are:

1) The queer characterisation, which focuses on its homoerotic element. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is gay.

2) The “traditional BL” characterisation, which focuses on BL’s historic origin as a “by women, for women” genre. The M/M setup is viewed as an escapist protest against the patriarchy, a rejection of traditional gender roles; displays of M/M closeness are often “candies” for the female gaze. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is women’s fantasy.

3) The aesthetic characterisation, which focuses on beauty—from the beauty of the characters, the beauty of a world without harm to the romance. * Summary for the characterization: Danmei is pretty.

The queer characterisation (1) is well-understood, and likely the default characterisation if it is to be made by the fraction of i-fandom I’m familiar with. Most i-fans I’ve met, myself included, would likely and automatically associate the M/M relationships in The Untamed (TU) and WoH with queerness.

The “traditional BL” characterisation (2), meanwhile, equates Danmei with BL as the genre of homoerotic works developed in 1970’s Japan for women comic readers, and has been widely interpreted from a feminist point of view.

Under such interpretation of “traditional BL” works, the double male lead setup wasn’t meant to be an accurate depiction of homosexuality. It wasn’t about homosexuality at all. Rather, it was about the removal of women and along with it, the rage, the eye-rolling, the unease women readers had often felt when attempting to interact with mainstream romance novels of the time, in which the female leads had mostly been confined to traditional women roles, and their virtue, their traditional feminine traits.

The M/M setup therefore acted as a “shell” for a het relationship that allowed removal of such social constraints placed on women. The lead with whom the woman audience identified was no longer bound to the traditional role of women, such as being the caregiver of the family. The lead could instead chase their dreams and roam the world, as many contemporary women already did or aspired to do; they were no longer limited to playing the passive party in life and in the relationship—and they enjoyed such freedom without risking the love, the respect the other male protagonist felt for them.

BL, in this traditional sense, has therefore been interpreted as an answer for, and a protest against the heteropatriarchal gender norm still dominant in societies deeply influenced by Confucianism, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China. The M/M setup is, at heart, (het) women’s fantasy. The inclusion of two young-and-beautiful male leads also satisfy “the female gaze” ~ the popularity of BL among het women has therefore been compared to the popularity of lesbian porn among het men. In both cases, the audience is drawn not for the homosexual element but by the presence of double doses of sexual attraction.

(Please forgive me if any of my wording comes as disrespectful! I’m not used to talking about these topics.)

The availability of the “traditional BL” characterisation (2) is key to bypassing queerness as a topic in the discussions of Danmei (耽美).

The aesthetic characterisation (3) is very closely related to 2) in origin, but deserves its own point as a characterisation that can stand on its own, and may be more obscure to the English-speaking fandom given the common English translation of Danmei (耽美) as Boy’s Love.

Boy’s Love, as a name, amplifies the queer characterisation (1) and de-emphasises the aesthetic characterisation (3); Danmei (耽美), meanwhile, does the reverse.

Where does the name Danmei come from?

When BL was first developed in Japan, it used to have a now out-of-fashion genre name: Tanbi. Tanbi was borrowed from same name describing a late 19th century / early 20th century Japanese literary movement, known as Tanbi-ha and was inspired by Aestheticism in England. Aestheticism “centered around the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose”. Along the same line, the core belief of authors of Tanbi-ha was that art should celebrate beauty and reject the portrayal of ugliness in human nature, the darkness of reality:

…Tanbi writers argued that the ideas of naturalism writers such as “objectivism,” “truth is more important than beauty” and so on would “oppress human beings’ desire” so as to “lose beauty and human nature.” Accordingly, they insisted on “acute mental and emotional sensibility” [Ye, 2009].

(Source, with more details on Tanbi.)

Neither romance nor homosexuality were requirements for works in the original Tanbi-ha genre. BL borrowed the name Tanbi because its early authors saw their work created under the same principles: the emphasis on the beauty of their characters, their love (romantic and platonic), in a world that was also beautiful and untouched by ugliness such as sexism and homophobia.

The stubborn persistence on keeping one’s eyes trained on the beautiful, the willingness to turn a blind eye to reality for the sake of the beauty is built-in in the genre’s name. Tanbi meant more than beauty, aesthetics; its kanji form was written as 耽美; 耽 = to sink, drown in, to over-indulge in; 美 = beauty.

Tanbi, therefore, literally means to drown in, to over-indulge in beauty.

Over time, as the genre expanded its writing style, Tanbi eventually fell out of favour as BL’s genre name in Japan. However, as it gained popularity in the Sinosphere in the 1990s, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong, the kanji of Tanbi was retained as the Chinese name of the genre.

In Mandarin Chinese, 耽美 is pronounced Danmei. A hyperfocus on the aesthetics, the utopian aspects of traditional BL is therefore retained in Danmei by its name. People’s Daily could therefore devote its review of TU on its aesthetics. Realism, including politics and all discussions of social issues, can therefore be swept aside in the name of respecting the genre’s tradition.

I’ve mostly been reading about and observing c-fandom, and I believe these 3 characterisations have all attracted its own kind of fans. Fans who care and talk about queer issues even when it isn’t encouraged by their sociopolitical environment, who shine a light upon these issues in their fan works. Fans who treat the M/M leads as if they were a traditional cishet couple, such as calling one of the leads 老婆 (wife) and assigning him biologically female functions when needed (via, for example, the ABO trope). Fans who insist the works must meet their beauty standards, rejecting those that fail (for example, if the leads are not good looking enough) by claiming they’re there for Danmei, not Danchou (耽醜, “over-indulgence on ugliness”). Fans who are drawn to the genre by a combination of these characterisations.

By the history and definition of the genre, all the above reasons for fanning Danmei are as valid, as legitimate as one another.

I thought about this related question then: are c-fans of the second (traditional BL characterisation) and third (aesthetic characterisation) groups homophobic? When I first asked this question, I—a fan whose fandom experience had been entirely in English-speaking communities—assume the answer was yes. I thought, in particular, the insistence of treating Danmei’s M/M couples as cishet couples in a homosexual shell had to be conscious queer erasure. How can anyone ignore the same-sexness of the leads? How can anyone talk about Danmei without associating it with homosexuality?

However, as I read more—again, specifically about c-fandom, and in Chinese—I realised the answer may be a little more complex.

Previously, I had largely thought about homophobia in terms of individual attitudes. This has to do with my current environment (liberal parts of the United States), in which the choice to accept or reject the queer community has become a close to personal choice. Pride flags fly all over the city, including the city hall, every summer, and most churches welcome the LGBT+ community. I hadn’t considered how an environment in which queers have never enjoyed full social exposure, in which education of related topics is sorely lacking, would affect Danmei’s development as a genre.

In such an environment, it is difficult for Danmei to evolve and incorporate up-to-date understanding of RL queerness.

The consequence I can see is this: Danmei is more likely to be “stuck” in its historical characterisation as (het) women’s fantasy inside than outside the Great Firewall, with its queerness de-emphasised if not erased—and it draws fans who are attracted to this kind of characterisation accordingly. This is, perhaps, reflected by the fact that the (het) women-to-queer ratio of Danmei / BL fans is significantly higher in China than in the West (Table 1 in this article summarises how Danmei / BL fans have split between different genders and sexual orientation in the Sinosphere vs the West in different research studies).

Another driving force I can see for Danmei to retain BL’s traditional feminist and aesthetic characterisations: women in China are not free from the social pressure that led to the birth of BL in 1970’s Japan. While many of them have achieved financial freedom through work and have high education, the young and educated have been subjected to immense pressure to get married and have children especially in the past decade.

In 2007, the China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation (中華全國婦女聯合會), coined the term 剩女 (literally, “leftover women”) for unmarried, urban women over 27 years old. The government started a campaign that, among other things, associated women’s education level with ugliness, and their unmarried status with pickiness, moral degeneracy. The reason behind the campaign: birth rates are plummeting and the state wants educated women, in particular, to nurture a high quality, next generation workforce. More importantly, the government sees a threat in the M/F sex imbalance (high M, low F) that has commonly been attributed to the country’s “one child policy” between 1979-2015, which encouraged female infanticide / abortion of female foetuses in a culture that favours surname-carrying boys. The state fears the unmarried men will become violent and/or gay, leading to “social instability and insecurity”. Therefore, it wants all women, in particular those who are educated, to enter the “wife pool” for these unmarried men. (Source 1, Source 2: Source 2 is a short, recommended read).

For Chinese women, therefore, patriarchy and sexism is far from over. Escapist fantasies where sexism is removed—by removing women from the picture—are therefore here to stay.

Danmei is therefore not queer literature (同志文學). The difference between Danmei and queer literature is highlighted by this reportedly popular saying (and its similar variations) in some Danmei communities:

異性戀只是傳宗接代，同性戀才是真愛 Heterosexuality is only for reproduction. Only homosexuality is true love.

The attitude towards heterosexuality is one of distaste, viewed as a means to an end the speaker has no interest in. On the contrary, homosexuality is idealised, reflecting the disregard / lack of understanding of some Danmei fans have towards the RL hardships of c-queers. The ignorance may be further propagated by gate-keeping by some Danmei fans for safety reasons, keeping queer discussions away from their communities for fear that their favourite hangouts would meet the same uncertain fate of other communities that previously held open queer discussions, such as the Weibo gay and lesbian supertopics. Such gatekeeping can, again, be easily enforced using tradition as argument: the beauty 美 is Tanbi and Danmei (耽美), remember, includes the beauty of utopia, where ugly truths such as discrimination do not enter the picture. A Danmei that explores, for example, the difficulty of coming out of the closet is no longer Danmei, by its historical, aesthetic definition.

[I’ve therefore read about c-queers viewing Danmei with suspicion, if not downright hostility; they believe the genre, by ignoring their RL challenges and casting them as beautiful, even perfect individuals, and in some cases, by fetishising them and their relationships, only leads to more misconceptions about the queer community. Dangai, meanwhile, has been viewed with even more distaste as potential weapons by the state to keep gays in the closet; if the government can shove the Danmei characters into the “socialist brotherhood” closet, it can shove them as well.

I haven’t yet, however, been able to tease out the approximate fraction of c-queers whose views of Danmei and Dangai is negative. The opposing, positive view of the genres is this: they still provide LGBT+ visibility, which is better than none and it would’ve been close to none without Danmei and Dangai; while Danmei may skim over the hardships of being queer, fan works of Danmei are free to explore them—and they have.

This article provides insights on this issue. @peekbackstage’s conversation with a Chinese film/TV director in Clubhouse is also well worth a read.]

That said, Danmei can only be dissociated from the queer characterisation if there’s a way to talk about the genre without evoking words and phrases that suggest homosexuality—something that is difficult to do with English. Is there?

In Chinese, I’d venture to say … almost. There’s almost a way. Close enough to pass.

The fact that M/M in traditional BL has been developed and viewed not as queer but as a removal of F also means this: queerness isn’t “built-in” into the language of Danmei. The name Danmei itself already bypasses a major “queer checkpoint”: it’s impossible to refer to a genre called Boy’s Love and not think about homosexuality.

Here’s one more important example of such bypass. Please let me, as an excuse to put these beautiful smiles in my blog, show this classic moment from TU; this can be any gif in which the leads are performing such suggestive romantic gestures:

How can I describe this succinctly? In English?

Two men acting in love? Er. That’s… the definition of gay, almost.

Two men acting gay? Well. GAY.

Right. Fine. Let’s go negative. Queerbaiting? … Still gay, because the word “queer” is in there.

[Pie note: for the record, I don’t think TU or WoH is queer-baiting.]

Personally, I find it impossible to describe the GIF above in English that I do not automatically associate with RL romantic love between two men, with homosexuality. But can I do it in Chinese?

… Yes.

There’s a term, 賣腐 (pronounced “maifu”), literally, “selling 賣 the rot 腐”, derived from the term known among i-fans as fujoshi and written, in kanji, as 腐女. Fujoshi, or 腐 (“rot”) 女 (“women”), describes the largely (het) female audience of the Japanese BL genre (>80%, according to Wikipedia). Originated as a misogynistic insult towards female Japanese BL fans in the 2000s, fujoshi was later reclaimed by the same female BL fans who now use the self-depreciative term as acknowledgement of their interest being “rotten”, for BL’s disregard of the society’s traditional expectations on women.

賣腐 is therefore to “sell the rot” to the rotten women; ie. the suggestive romantic gestures, exemplified by the GIF above, between the M/M leads are catering, performing fan service to their target audience.

[賣腐 is also a term one will see in the state opinion pieces.]

There’s nothing gay about this term.

I’ve therefore found it possible to talk and think in Chinese about Danmei while giving little thought to queerness. The history and definition of Danmei allow that.

Again, I’m not saying any of this to excuse homophobia among in Danmei and Dangai fandoms. The point I’m trying to make is this — given that Danmei has three potential characterisations, two of which can be discussed without abundantly evoking queer concepts and vocabularies, given that history of Danmei, as a genre, already favoured characterisation 2 (traditional BL), the government addressing homosexuality in its opinions on Danmei and Dangai is far from a given.

By extension, the popularity of Dangai may mean a lot or little to c-queers; by extension, the state can approve / disapprove of Danmei and Dangai in a manner independent of its stance on homosexuality, which is itself inconsistent and at times, logic-deying (example to come…).

This is both good and bad, from the perspective of both the government and the c-queer community.

For the government: as discussed, the “triality” of Danmei allows the state to “move the goalpost” depending on what it tries to achieve. It has characterisations 2 (the traditional BL characterisation) and 3 (the aesthetic characterisation) as excuses to let Dangai dramas pass the censorship board should it want their profit and also, their promise of expanding the country’s soft power overseas by drawing an international audience. These characterisations also allow the state to throw cold water on the popularity of Danmei / Dangai should it desire, for reasons other than its queer suggestions—despite the Xi regime’s push against open expressions of queerness (including by activism, in media), it has also been careful about not demonising c-queers in words, and has countered other people’s attempts to do so.

Why may the government want to throw cold water on Danmei and Dangai? They are still subculture, which the state has also viewed with suspicion. In 2018, a NRTA directive explicitly requested that “c-ent programmes should not use entertainers with tattoos; (those associated with) hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), decadent cultures.” (”另外，总局明确要求节目中纹身艺人、嘻哈文化、亚文化（非主流文化）、丧文化（颓废文化）不用。”).

Subculture isn’t “core socialist values”. More importantly, it’s difficult to keep up with and control subculture. 環球網, the website co-owned by People’s Daily and Global Times (環球時報), ie, The State Newspaper and The State Tabloid, famously said this on its Weibo, on 2020/03/04, re: 227:

老了，没看懂为什么战。晚安。 Getting old. Can’t figure out what the war is about. Good night.

The State also cannot stop subculture from happening. It doesn’t have the resources to quell every single thing that become popular among its population of 1.4 billion. What it can do to make sure these subcultures stay subcultures, kept out of sight and mind of the general public.

Characterisation 1 (the queer characterisation), meanwhile, remains available to the state should it wish to drop the axe on Dangai for its queer elements. I’m including, as “queer elements”, presentation of men as too “feminine” for the state—which has remained a sore point for the government. This axe have a reason to drop in the upcoming months: July 23rd, 2021 will be the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the state may desire to have only uniformed forces and muscled, gun-toting “masculine” men gracing the screens.

What about for c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans)? What good and bad can the multiple characterisations of the genres do for them?

For c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans), their acceptance and safety are helped by the Dangai genre, by the Dangai 101 phenomenon, if and only if the state both characterises the queer elements in these dramas as queer (characterisation 1) AND their opinions of them are positive.

Personally, I had viewed this to be unlikely from the start, because a queer characterisation would mean the censorship board has failed to do its job, which is embarrassing for the Chinese government.

Characterisations 2) and 3) are not bad for c-queers and their supporters, however, and definitely not “enemies” of Characterisation 1); they can not only serve as covers for the queer elements in Dangai to reach their audience, but also, they can act as protective padding for the LGBT+ community if the content or (very aggressive) marketing of the Dangai dramas displease the government — with the understanding, again, that the “traditional BL” arm of the Danmei community is itself also highly vulnerable by being a subculture, and so its padding effect is limited and it also deserves protection.

The downside to achieving LGBT+ visibility through Dangai is, of course and as mentioned, that these dramas are, ultimately, deeply unrealistic depictions of the c-queers. The promotion of these dramas, which has focused on physical interactions between the male leads for “candies”, can encourage even more fetishising of queers and queer relationships. The associated (character) CP culture that makes and breaks CPs based on the dramas’ airing cycle may also fuel negative perception of queer relationships as attention-seeking behaviour, something that can be initiated and terminated at will and for the right price.

Finally, with all this said, which characterisation(s) have the government taken re: Dangai and/or WOH? And what opinions has it given to its characterisations?

PART 1 <-- YOU ARE HERE PART 2 PART 3

#pie metas #yizhan #bjyx

372 notes · View notes

duggardata · 3 years ago

Text

Anna and Mary Maxwell Might Be Attending [Bible] College. (Wow!)

Recently, an eagle–eyed Anon spotted the 2 Youngest Maxwell Girls, Anna (28) and Mary (25), in the absolute last place you'd ever expect—a college campus. It's all on Facebook... Anna and Mary appear in a photo posted by Appalachian Bible College to its official Facebook Page, along with caption: "The first day of classes. That's something to smile about!" (Permalink.)

Why Are We So Surprised By This?

Ordinarily, two young women attending college wouldn't be at all shocking, but the Maxwells are not ordinary. Anna and Mary's Parents, Steve + Teri Maxwell, are openly anti–college. Steve thinks that state–run education, including higher education, is "a godless, promiscuity–promoting, humanistic environment," and that it traps young people in debt. He is wary even of Christian colleges, since he believes they cause children to rebel. He’s proud of his sons' lack of higher education, and praised them for "avoid[ing] the influence and cost of college." Teri is, sadly, just as opposed to college—especially for women. Back in 1999, she wrote an article speculating that college may undermine a woman's ability to be a good and godly wife. Her article laments—

"As far as our daughters go, I wonder how many of us developed independent spirits during our college or working days. Has this made it more difficult for us to submit to our husbands in the meek and quiet way we would like?"

Finally... Anna and Mary's views on this topic seemed to be aligned with their parents, until now. According to Steve + Teri, all of the Maxwell Daughters had planned to be Stay–at–Home–Daughters until marriage. (See Also.) (And all 3 Daughters seemed to be doing so, since none had moved out.) What is more, in 2010, Anna described college as "silly," and said that she thought attending would expose her to unsavory influences, and possibly hold her back from her ultimate goal of "be[ing] a stay–at–home wife and mother."

So, yeah... This is quite a surprise! And, while neither Steve + Teri, nor Anna or Mary, has actually confirmed that they’re enrolled at Appalachian Bible College, their appearance on the Facebook Page is definitely suspicious!

Tell Me About Appalachian Bible College.

TL;DR If you just want to know how conservative and restrictive Appalachian Bible College is, skip down to “Student Life.”

Appalachian Bible College (ABC) is a tiny (~250 Students), insular bible college, located on 150 Acres in rural Mount Hope, West Virginia. (The Maxwell Family hails from Leavenworth, Kansas, which >800 Miles Away.) It self–describes as a “non–denominational and fundamental” institution, primarily associated with “Baptist and Bible churches.” Unlike many so–called “bible colleges,” ABC is nationally and regionally accredited. (Hurray!)

A lot, lot more information... After the jump.

Admissions—

ABC requires prospective students to submit an application; transcripts from high school or home school; ACT, SAT, or CLT test scores; and two reference letters, one from a pastor and one from another mentor, e.g., teacher or youth group leader. A high school diploma or GED is required, unless the student is homeschooled. In that case, a detailed homeschool transcript is needed, and standardized test scores are “especially important.”

As part of the application, prospective students must attest that they agree w/ the college’s Doctrinal Statement.

Academics—

ABC offers four degree programs—Bible Certificate (1 Year), Associate of Arts (A.A.) (2 Years), Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) (4 Years), and Master of Arts (M.A.). In addition, it runs an online program for degree–seeking or non–degree seeking students. (But, Anna and Mary were spotted on–campus, so they don’t seem to be in the online program!) Anna and Mary haven’t gone to college, so they almost certainly aren’t in the Master’s program. Let’s just look at the rest...

(Sidenote—Before we go on, just want to point out... All ABC graduates must, in addition to completing academic requirements, show that they are members of a church and that they possess good Christian character. If they don’t, they won’t give their diploma!)

Bible Certificate—ABC describes the one–year program as an “opportunit[y] for you to dig into Scripture and build your life on its unchanging truths.” The program has two tracks—Bible + General Education and Bible + Ministry. As the names suggest, both tracks’ core curriculum is the Bible and Bible study. Both also require three courses in ministry—Foundations of Ministry, Biblical Theology of Missions, and Personal Evangelism & Discipleship. Where they differ is is what else they require...

For the Bible + General Education Certificate, students must also take four ‘core’ classes—English Composition, Speech, Physical Education, Music, and “Success Seminar”—plus, an elective of their choice. (This curriculum also mirrors the first–year curriculum of ABC’s A.A. and B.A. Degree Programs, so students can easily continue their studies, should they decide to do so.)

For Bible + Ministry, ‘core’ classes are waived in favor of extra theology. Students take Principles of Biblical Interpretation, along with classes on Systematic Theology (2 Classes), the New Testament (Survey Class + 2 Classes), and the Old Testament (Survey Class + 2 Classes).

Associate’s Degree (A.A.)—ABC also offers a 2–Year A.A. Degree in Bible + Theology. (That’s the only major offered.) For this degree, the curriculum is a 50/50 split between General Education and Bible + Theology courses, plus a few ministry classes and electives. All students take the following courses—

General Education English Composition (2 Classes), Speech, Physical Education, Music, Biblical Worldview, and Ethical Issues in Ministry

Bible + Theology Principles of Biblical Interpretation, Survey of the Old Testament, Survey of the New Testament, Matthew to Acts, Genesis to Deuteronomy, Paul’s Letters (2 Classes), and Doctrine (2 Classes)

Ministry Theology of Missions, Foundations of Ministry, Evangelism & Discipleship, and Homiletics I (Males) / Bible Teaching (Females)

Additionally, students must take a history class, a science or sociology class, and an elective.

Bachelor’s Degree (B.A.)—Finally, ABC offers a 4–Year B.A. Dual Degree in Bible + Theology and in Ministry. Each student completes General Education classes. Beyond that, each student is also a “double major.” Everyone’s first major is Bible + Theology and everyone’s second major is ministry–focused—but, not everyone has the exact same Ministry Major. (More on that in a bit...) As far as curriculum, students must complete the General Education, Bible + Theology, and Ministry courses required for the Associate’s Degree, plus the following additional core classes—

General Education Health, Psychology, Sociology, Finance, 2 History Classes (History of Western Civilization and American Church History), and 1 Science Class (Earth Science or Biology)

Bible + Theology Joshua to Esther, Hebrews to Revelation, Isaiah to Malachi, Job to Song of Soloman, Doctrine (2 Additional Classes), and Bible Capstone

Ministry World Religion and Cults, and Homiletics II (Men) / Women’s Ministry (Women)

Finally, students must also pick a Ministry Major and complete its mandatory coursework. At ABC, there are seven ministry majors to pick from—some of which have concentrations. Here’s the list of Ministry Majors, with additional concentrations or sub–specialties listed in parentheses—

Biblical Counseling (Youth & Family or Women’s Ministries)

Camping Ministry

Elementary Education

Missions (Biblical Languages, Foreign Language / Spanish, International Studies, Nursing, or Teaching English)

Music (Pedagogy, Performance, or Worship)

Pastoral Ministry (Biblical Languages or Youth & Family Pastoring)

Interdisciplinary

The Pastor Ministry Major seems to be limited to male students.

Click the links to check out the coursework each Ministry Major requires.

Student Life—

So, yeah... ABC is not a progressive place. At all. They’re upfront about it, though, which is nice. Their Student Handbook is online, available for all to read. Here are some highlights... (All italics are mine, not in original.)

Discipline / Consequences—Students who break the rules face discipline in the form of “a verbal or written Carefrontation, a fine, a work assignment, a temporary room or dorm confinement, a social [or] ... campus restriction,” or “some other determination.” Egregious offenses may result in the student being “suspended ... , asked to withdraw from the college, or dismissed.”

Dress Code—There’s a detailed Dress Code, with different different activities requiring different standards of dress. Perhaps surprisingly, pants are allowed for female students for all but the fanciest standard of dress. (For that, they’ll have to wear skirts or dresses.) Here are a few of the rules...

“Earrings may be worn by females only,” and “all other body piercing is prohibited.”

ABC students are prohibited from getting new tattoos. If a student has an old tattoo, they may be required to cover it at all times if the Dean of Students deems it “offensive.”

Prohibited Activities—ABC says that, “in order to remain above reproach,” students are prohibited from the following “questionable activities”...

Consuming “alcohol as a beverage,” tobacco in any form (including e–cigarettes), or drugs for non–medicinal purposes. (Penalty for violating this rule is dismissal.)

Serving alcohol to others, even if done in the course of a student’s off–campus employment.

Gossiping, or engaging in “other forms of impure speech.”

Listening to, viewing, or reading “unwholesome” media or literature, or accessing websites “that do not promote godliness.” (See Prohibited Media and Prohibited Music.)

Attending “commercial movie theaters.”

Gambling.

Dancing.

Prohibited Media—Per the ABC Student Handbook, ABC students shall not consume “any media (including social media) that features vulgar or obscene language, sexual innuendo, nudity, immodest clothing, or ... a blatantly non–Christian message.” Additionally, students may not—

Watch movies rated PG–13, R, X, or NC–17, or shows rated TV–MA.

Play video games or use apps rated A, M, or RP.

... and, they’re strongly cautioned to avoid media that promotes “unbiblical definitions of love”; endorses “witchcraft or the occult”; mocks “law or law enforcement”; denigrates “marriage and the traditional family”; or contains “excessive violence.” Students are urged not to consume media made by people—e.g., actors, producers, directors—“known for their stand against Christian values.”

Prohibited Music—Students are banned from listening to music “that includes God–dishonoring language, anti–biblical messages ... , a prominent resurfacing beat, pulsating and driving or dance rhythms, or sensual overtones in the music itself or in the performance.” They’re specifically cautioned to avoid...

Rock—Because the “lyrics may be unacceptable” and “[t]he beat of the music may become the most prominent element.”

Country—Because the “lyrics may be unacceptable” and the underlying “music may be connected to a heavy rock beat.”

Folk—As “[e]xistentialism, humanism, or hedonism may be propagated through the lyrics.”

Jazz—Since syncopation may be “extensive[ly] use[d],” and “a sensual performance style may be employed.”

Contemporary Christian—Since “a sensual performance style may be employed,” “a beat may be overly prominent,” and the “lyrics may be theologically incorrect or existential in their emphasis.”

Relationships—

“The Bible restricts sexual activity to marriage between a man and a woman. Thus, fornication, adultery, incest, sexual abuse of a minor, homosexuality, indecent exposure, sexual harassment, and other such activities are forbidden.”

“[N]o display of affection through physical contact (including holding hands) on the part of non–married couples, on or off campus.”

Dating students are forbidden from sitting together in class or chapel.

No male–female pair, dating or not, may be alone together in anyone’s home or residence, on– or off–campus.

No male–female pair, dating or not, may socialize off–campus without a chaperone, unless they’ve been at ABC for at least 4 Semesters.

Divorced students “shall not be permitted to date other ... students.”

According to ABC’s Student Handbook, all these rules apply to all students, at all times, on– or off–campus.

All in all, it’s great if Anna and Mary are attending college, even if it’s a super–duper conservative one, like ABC clearly is. The fact that they’ve possibly left home and are out there, living on their own... Crazy to even think about, given Steve’s apparent iron grip on his household. It can only be good from them to venture out on their own, even if it’s just to a slightly less stifling place.

#mary maxwell #anna maxwell

54 notes · View notes

cyarskaren52 · 2 years ago

Text

15 Guilty Pleasure Hip Hop Albums

HHGA Staff

Guilty Pleasure

/ˈɡɪlti ˈplɛʒə/

“When you enjoy a type of music but you are too ashamed to admit you listen to it to your friends or family.”

“A piece of music that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.”

Hip Hop fans, including ourselves, often exhibit snobbish tendencies. We are quick to pass judgment and dismiss albums and artists that don’t conform to our narrow definition of authenticity or deviate from traditionalist norms. We may label them as too “pop-oriented” or too explicit, making them unsuitable for listening around family, kids, or even our most die-hard Hip Hop purist friends. Nevertheless, we recognize that everyone has guilty pleasure albums, and we’ve compiled a list of 15 such albums – our own guilty pleasures – that we best enjoy in private or exclusively shared with select company. We invite you to join the discussion and share your own guilty pleasure Hip Hop albums in the comments!

Kid 'n Play - 2 Hype (1988)

Despite their debut album’s commercial success, upon its release Kid ‘n Play faced criticism and rejection from street-level Hip Hop purists who found their music too positive and sanitized. However, even with its lightweight and safe subject matter, the album remains a delightful and enjoyable experience, largely due to the infectious personalities of Kid ‘n Play themselves. Tracks like “Rollin’ With Kid ‘n Play,” “Gittin’ Funky,” “2 Hype,” “Brother Man Get Hip,” “Do the Kid ‘n Play Kick Step,” “Last Night,” and “Undercover” are undeniably great and still hold their charm even today.

2 Live Crew - As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989)

2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be is one of the first widely appreciated Southern Hip Hop albums, and a trailblazing album in many ways. Luke Skyywalker and his crew were frontrunners in the freedom of speech struggle, which in rap music was under threat from conservatives in the late 1980s. Admittedly, the subject matter of 2 Live Crew’s music was controversial, to say the least – the album is almost exclusively made up of juvenile sexual explicitness. Good fun for some, but apparently unbearable for people like free-speech abolitionists. As Nasty As They Wanna Be was the first album in history to be deemed legally obscene – all the controversy didn’t hurt the album’s popularity none of course: it eventually reached double-platinum status. Whether you like the album or not, there’s no denying the significance nor the classic status of As Nasty As They Wanna Be.

Young MC - Stone Cold Rhymin' (1989)

Young MC never quite received the recognition he deserved within Hip Hop circles for this album. Often dismissed as a “pop-rapper,” Young MC showcased his undeniable skills on his debut album. Stone Cold Rhymin’ is an all-around enjoyable experience, filled with tracks that are both radio-friendly and lyrically impressive, each song boasting entertaining bars and impeccable flows. Even today, you can listen to the album in its entirety without feeling the urge to skip a single track.

N.W.A - Efil4ziggan (1991)

After the groundbreaking success of N.W.A’s debut album Straight Outta Compton and the departure of Ice Cube, N.W.A. returned with Efil4ziggan. Reviewing Efil4ziggan is a challenge. Musically, Dr. Dre achieves near perfection on the production side. However, when it comes to lyrics, the album takes a step back compared to N.W.A’s epic debut. The authenticity and raw intellectual power found in Straight Outta Comptonare notably absent. Instead, we are left with dumbed-down and sometimes outright silly lyrics that seem more focused on shock value and controversy. The album is also marred by two rather terrible solo tracks from Eazy E and some questionable skits (did we really need “To Kill A Hooker”?). Nevertheless, even with these drawbacks, the album remains an undeniably entertaining listen—an enjoyable guilty pleasure, if you will.

Brotha Lynch Hung – Season Of Da Siccness (1995)

Sacramento’s Brotha Lynch Hung is an incredibly underrated emcee who deserves recognition as one of the pioneers of the horrorcore subgenre. Season Of Da Siccness stands as his impressive full-length debut album, and it is certainly not for the faint of heart. Standout tracks such as “Locc To Da Brain,” “Siccmade,” “Rest In Piss,” and “Welcome 2 Your Own Death” showcase Lynch’s exceptional flow, which seamlessly complements the dark and sinister beats he himself produced.

The album is filled with shockingly graphic violent stories and imagery, yet it also exhibits intelligence and occasional moments of emotional depth. Season Of Da Siccness may prove challenging to digest, but it undoubtedly deserves recognition as an all-around classic. Arguably Brotha Lynch Hung’s finest work and undeniably his most essential album, Season Of Da Siccness is a must-listen. However, it’s worth noting that the rest of his catalog is equally impressive. His concept album trilogy consisting of Dinner and a Movie(2010), Coathanga Strangla (2011), and Mannibalector(2013) is particularly noteworthy and well worth exploring. Just don’t play his music when your mom or your kids are around.

Master P - Ghetto D (1997)

Ghetto D is the sixth studio album by New Orleans’ mogul, Master P, and it undeniably represents his best work, serving as one of the flagship albums of his influential No Limit Records empire. This 80-minute masterpiece stands as a pivotal and landmark album for Southern Hip Hop. Each song features guest appearances, predominantly from the New Orleans No Limit Soldiers, including his brothers C-Murder and Silkk the Shocker, Mia X, Mystikal, Fiend, Mr. Serv-On, Kane & Abel, Mo B. Dick, and O’Dell, among others. While the subject matter may seem generic, Master P and his guests infuse it with a captivating appeal, amplified by the energetic production provided by the Beats By the Pound crew, who played a significant role in shaping No Limit’s signature sound.

No Limit Records, along with Cash Money Records, adopted a quantity-over-quality business model that resulted in an overwhelming flood of similar-sounding albums. However, it would be unfair to overlook the defining albums that emerged from their prolific output, and Ghetto D unquestionably belongs in that category. Serving as the jewel in Master P’s No Limit crown, this album has long been overlooked by HHGA due to our snobbish dismissal of anything associated with the No Limit rap factory. But the truth is, Ghetto D is an undeniable banger that demands recognition and respect.

Kool Keith - Sex Style (1997)

Following the brilliance of the previous year’s release, Dr. Octagonecologyst, Kool Keith, with the assistance of Kutmasta Kurt on production, makes a triumphant return with Sex Style, presenting some awesomely ridiculous “pornocore”. Any other rapper (with the potential exception of MF DOOM) would undoubtedly sound incredibly foolish attempting an album of this nature. However, it is Kool Keith’s unique talent and artistic vision that allows him to excel and emerge on top in delivering such a project.

Three 6 Mafia - Chapter. 2: World Domination (1997)

The breakout album from Three 6 Mafia, Chapter. 2: World Domination, propelled the Memphis crew into the mainstream, building upon the success of their previous releases. It features reprises of four previously released hits from “Mystic Stylez” (1995) and “Chapter 1: The End” (1996): “Late Nite Tip,” “N 2 Deep,” “Body Parts,” and “Tear Da Club Up.” DJ Paul and Juicy J masterfully craft dark and hypnotic beats throughout the album, complemented by cutthroat lyrical content. Clocking in at over 80 minutes, it may seem like a monster, but it never overstays its welcome. From start to finish, Chapter. 2: World Domination is an absolute banger and stands as Three 6 Mafia’s finest work.

Kool Keith - Matthew (2000)

We have a great appreciation for this album, even if it does not resonate with everyone. Kool Keith delivers a relentless display of anger on Matthew, mainly directing his venom toward mainstream rappers while handling the production himself with admittedly less-than-stellar beats. However, there is a certain charm to his anger that shines through. If you approach the album with the expectation of rough around the edges instrumentals and Kool Keith at his unfiltered angriest, you’ll find enough moments to bring a smile to your face. Matthew stands as one of the most polarizing albums in Kool Keith’s catalog. While many fans adore it, it may not be the best introduction for newcomers to his music.

Sm*t Peddlers – P*rn Again (2001)

P*rn Again is an album by the Smut Peddlers, a group consisting of Mr. Eon and DJ Mighty Mi from The High & Mighty, as well as Cage. The album’s porn-themed content delivers a good dose of humor, and the icing on the cake comes from the guest appearances of HHGA favorites like Kool Keith, Kool G Rap, and R.A. The Rugged Man.

J-Zone & Celph Titled Are The Boss Hog Barbarians ‎- Every Hog Has Its Day (2006)

Every Hog Has Its Day is not an album for the easily offended or those lacking a sense of humor. It deviates from J-Zone and Celph Titled’s individual works, serving as a kind of concept album where the duo explores something along the lines of extreme misogyny. The blurb on their Bandcamp page gives a glimpse into their intentions:

If you feel froggish, then leap. But if you feel hoggish, then creep! It was inevitable. Say no more, the Hogs are here. As a group, J-Zone and Celph Titled (aka Kenny Hoggins and Wade Hoggs) are the Bo$$ Hog Barbarian$. The two multi-talented beatsmiths/rappers/entertainers/masters of all that is rude are in the house for a full-length ride. Enter Hog Heaven, where the order of the day is foul-mouthed trash talk, funkafied beats, and a sense of humor, to the 50th power. With nearly all production by J-Zone and Celph Titled, the lone outside beat comes from none other than the legendary Mr. Walt of Da Beatminerz’, longtime Hog affiliates. On the rapping side? No guests!! Hogs don’t need em. Celph and Zone are the Jordan and Pippen of Hog Heaven, so no help is necessary. 100% pure unadulterated hoggin’. With the single, “$teady $mobbin’” b/w “Celph Destruction”, already makin noise, this album will Hog your arteries. You’ve been warned… they won’t stop hoggin’ nooooo!

Clearly intended as a comedic presentation, perhaps even as a parody of artists who genuinely embrace this style, Every Hog Has Its Day is nothing more than harmless, albeit occasionally deeply offensive, fun. It boasts funky beats and humorous punchlines. It’s the kind of album that will either be loved or hated, depending on the listener’s sense of humor and ability to not take things too seriously.

Eminem – Relapse (2009)

Eminem is one of the biggest names in Hip Hop history, boasting one absolute classic under his belt, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), and two albums that come close enough: The Slim Shady LP (1999) and The Eminem Show (2002). However, the remainder of his catalog tends to have more misses than hits. While Eminem’s lyrical abilities are never in question, many of his other albums suffer from weak beats, lackluster features, and corny hooks. Despite this, Eminem often receives an excessive amount of criticism, as his output beyond his three classics is not entirely devoid of merit.

Relapse is a prime example of an Eminem album that garnered more hate than it deserved. It notably lacks misplaced popstar features and has mostly decent hooks and beats. The dark and horrorcore concept successfully resonates, and Eminem’s pen game and lyrical skill remain unparalleled. Relapse stands as a great album and easily secures a place as Eminem’s best work, just behind his three classic releases.

Waka Flocka Flame - Flockavelli (2010)

Flockavelli stands as a pivotal album, representing the ultimate crunk experience while also playing a significant role in shaping the direction of the trap subgenre. It can be argued that everything released prior to Flockavelli can be seen as pre-trap, with everything released since classified as post-trap. While this may seem like an exaggeration, the undeniable truth remains that this album turned out to be tremendously influential, acting as a game-changer that laid the foundation for the next generation of (t)rap artists.

Waka Flocka Flame may not possess the prowess of the greatest songwriter or lyricist to have ever graced the pen and the mic, but it’s his infectious energy and charisma that propels Flockavelli to the next level. With bombastic bass-heavy beats, sharp synths, and aggressive rapping, this album offers a captivating and enjoyable experience, filled with timeless bangers that have stood the test of time.

Lil Ugly Mane – Mista Thug Isolation (2012)

Lil Ugly Mane is one of the many aliases of Travis Miller, a producer/rapper hailing from Richmond, Virginia. To truly grasp the essence of his work and the intentions behind it, one must delve beneath the surface. The album’s cover art cleverly parodies the unappealing aesthetics employed to market the monotonous rap mediocrity that used to emanate from the No Limit and Cash Money rap factories, as does its title. Lil Ugly Mane’s stage name can be viewed as a dig at the numerous ‘Lil’ rappers and other gangsta rap/trap artists who churn out repetitive, mindless projects, incessantly discussing topics such as women, money, cars, drugs, guns, and murder. While Lil Ugly Mane traverses similar territory here, he does so with a touch of caricature. Thus, categorizing Lil Ugly Mane as just another trap clone would be a grave misconception, despite initial impressions suggesting otherwise.

What Lil Ugly Mane accomplishes is a subversion of gangsta rap and trap conventions. Striking a delicate balance between silliness and dark comedy, Lil Ugly Mane consistently remains on the right side of that divide throughout the album. Through his exaggerated lyrical imagery, it becomes evident that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, skillfully ridiculing those empty braggadocious rappers who become consumed by the personas they’ve fabricated.

Mista Thug Isolation is produced by Shawn Kemp, yet another alias of Travis Miller. The instrumentals he creates are exceptional, flawlessly blending fat, 90s-inspired Memphis beats with elements of horror-core eeriness, psychedelia, and jazz. These beats serve as the perfect canvas for Miller’s tongue-in-cheek humor and biting irony. Mista Thug Isolation has cemented its status as a defining underground cult classic, an album that will undoubtedly withstand the test of time.

Travis Scott - Rodeo (2015)

Rodeo marks the highly anticipated debut album of Houston rapper Travis Scott, following his initial two mixtapes, Owl Pharaoh and Days Before Rodeo. The album boasts an impressive lineup of guest appearances, including Quavo, Future, 2 Chainz, Juicy J, Kacy Hill, The Weeknd, Swae Lee, Chief Keef, Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Young Thug, Toro y Moi, and Schoolboy Q. Travis Scott himself handles the production, joined by renowned producers such as WondaGurl, Allen Ritter, Mike Dean, Metro Boomin, Frank Dukes, and Sonny Digital, among others.

Rodeo stands out as something truly special, boldly experimenting and breaking new ground in the trap genre, which often suffers from a sense of genericness. The album’s futuristic and psychedelic vibes are captivating, while the dark and artistic production is nothing short of phenomenal. The majority of the vocal contributions harmonize seamlessly with the musical backdrops. Additionally, Travis Scott distinguishes himself as one of the rare artists who skillfully employs autotune as an instrument rather than relying on it to compensate for a lack of talent. Rodeo serves as the go-to album for anti-trap-biased old heads and other Hip Hop traditionalists willing to set aside their preconceptions and give trap a chance.

Sent from my iPhone

#Hip hop #rapper #rap music #rap #hip hop 50

2 notes · View notes

castiel2010 · 4 years ago

Text

Ugh.

People seriously.

Ok, first off let me get something out of the way. THE PAST TENSE OF “CAST” IS “CAST” NOT “CASTED”!!!

Second.

To the people worried that Pedro will be in Mando less because he’ll be in The Last of Us. 1 - it does not take the entire year to film the show. 2 - actors have before will in the future be in two projects at once as well as do multiple projects in the same year.

Third. And most importantly.

To all you trumptards saying that it’s a double standard that G*na got fired but Pedro didn’t. He compared children in cages at the border (which are BY DEFINITION concentration camps) to Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. She on the other hand compared being criticized for things she says as a conservative to Jews in the Holocaust. Those are NOT the same!! Additionally she has also posted transphobic content/comments as well as anti-vax and anti-mask content. Now who’s the sensitive snowflake...

For all you people saying that it’s cancel culture or a breach of her rights to be fired for what she says...

No, that is not a breach of her first amendment rights. That amendment protects you from the GOVERNMENT stopping your free speech, not a private corporation. Also, especially all of you who have jobs in medium or large companies, or giant corporations. I suggest you take a look at your hiring contract. Bet you that there’s some kind of clause that allows them to terminate your employment if you behave in such a way that is contrary to your company’s values, ESPECIALLY while representing said company. Of course, one big difference between average person working at these places and G*na is that the average person would really only be representing the company while on the job. BUT the following also counts: while wearing clothing with company logo even if not on company property, hashtagging company in post with bad content, etc. However she being who she is, is pretty much ALWAYS representing while she’s in their employment/under contract with them. That’s true for all of them, including Bruce Springsteen whose Super Bowl ad for Jeep got pulled because he got a DUI. Being a famous person means you have influence in ALL of your actions. So everything you do is held to account. Don’t tell me you didn’t buy X item more because X famous person was in the ad. That’s how advertising works.

That is it. That’s all I will say about this.

#pedro pascal #the mandalorian #g*ina can go fuck herself #ffs #tlou joel #javier peña #din djarin

74 notes · View notes

kaypeace21 · 5 years ago

Note

ignoring the fact that they sound like a married couple arguing, mike and will are also bickering over whether or not el and mike are still together. it was written in the script, rehearsed, performed, and kept in the final cut that will OUTRIGHT SAYS “she said she dumped your ass, that doesn’t sound like a break.” and max yells “it wasn’t!” :@;$:@/&$:&:??!?! they literally said they’re not endgame. they aren’t endgame.

i KNOW right! Based on the s4 movies I think things are reversed and it’s El who can’t accept they are broken up. A lot of films said to inspire s4 have ex gfs refuse to accept the break up -one even hits on her gay ex-bf ( ‘birdcage’ ). Similar scenario in ‘clueless’ with girl hinting on gay guy who just wants to be friends. Max in s3 having to correct El that Mike is her “ ex boyfriend” and Will saying “that doesn’t sound like a break”. And Max agreeing “it wasn’t!” is foreshadowing they never actually got back together. IT WASN’T A BREAK! But El may not accept this.

It’s similar, to the random telemarketing joke where they had Mike say on the phone “El, sorry not interested “ and hang up . It was foreshadowing.

In the films the exes constantly call . Mike telling El “i’ll call so often you’ll have to turn your walkie off” was also foreshadowing of what Mike will do to her in s4. Since ,he hung up on her in s3 when she called demanding to know where he was at 9:30 in the morning. In ‘swingers’ the guy name mike (whose friends call him ‘gay’) hangs up on his ex gf who wants to get back together . He hangs up on her so he can talk to his new love interest (Will) . Specifically, Hangs up on his ex as she says “I love-“. Then in ‘splash’ he breaks up with his gf on the phone and says “do I love you?well what about you?” To dodge the question (then yells at a family member ease dropping on the other line -Karen). And they break up on the phone. And he tells a friend later he never loved her.

2 movies the ex says they’ll get back together and their new relationships are “just phases” etc ( waynes world, high fidelity, dumb and dumber). Saying they’re still together when they aren’t (wayne’s world). Loads of movies had the crazy ex sabotage new relationships, call constantly, stalk, and flirt despite the exes discomfort and repeatedly saying it’s over (despite the ex not loving them and just be possessive and not wanting them with other people).

The exes are cray in the films (el stalking and never apologizing for spying. And mileven dancing to the song ‘every breath you take’ a song about a stalker ex who doesn’t take no for an answer -after their ex hooks up with their friend, wasn’t a coincidence). Along with El watching ‘days of our lives’ where she mimicked erica who was in a relationship with Mike roy. And it ended messy with one of them sabotaging their new relationship, stalking them, and claiming the stalking victim still loved them. (Although, they eventually accepted that wasn’t true).

El stalked Mike in s2 (all that stuff milevens found romantic- El watching him without him knowing. Mike said he was not ok with it in s3). And in s3 (like the song) she stalks him after their breakup, and when he said not to do that she just says ‘i make my own rules’. I think s4 shows just how ‘un-cute’ this behavior can get.

I’ve already talked about that awkward kiss scene to death. But i think it indicates Mike assumes they’re broken up and el assumes they’re back together.

FIrst he LIED AGAIN (the cause of the breakup)- and pretended he didn’t confess to her at the end of s3. And never said “ I love you’ back! He even tries to take the words back and says about the prior love confession “ “Oh! Oh, yeah that.Man, that was so long ago. Um…” and starts to scratch his head and says everything he said at the cabin was “in the heat of the moment stuff and we were arguing…”

They even frame the scene right before the kiss strangely, making El look larger and imposing, as she approaches. Mike feels cornered (you the viewer subconsciously are supposed to feel claustraphobic/trapped/cornered/stuck along with Mike).

We see him furrow his brows (uncomfortable and confused ) when El initiates the romantic moment, saying “I love you too.”

And cue most awkward kiss in history- where he keeps his eyes open the whole time and doesn’t kiss back. (In Will’s room, mike in front of an open closet, as el holds Will’s s1 bear.)

During the kiss, the song ‘the first i love you ‘played. The only other time they played that song in s3, was when Robin rejects Steve’s romantic confession and she comes out as gay . Interesting choice for that awkward mileven kiss/confession shown later where El says she loves Mike (and mike keeps his eyes open, doesn’t kiss back or return the ‘I love you’). It’s foreshadowing of Mike rejecting El (in the future) cause he’s gay.

We even see El’s reaction first (happy, smiling and giddy). Assuming they’re back together. But then we blur the screen to see Mike’s opposing expression. He looks confused, bewildered and even furrows his brows again.

Then we see El initiating all the romantic stuff outside.El seems to be the one trying to make it romantic- like Mike hugging el and lucas with one arm identically (hand on their upper back), but El caresses his chest.

And as Mike stops the hug El shoves his head into hers (it actually looked like it hurt honestly XD)

the byler centric ending with the Hopper monologue reinforces this theme. Mike while looking at both cars driving away was thinking of Will . They show this by having Mike be sad as Will drives away (alone) twice as Mike sadly watches him leave- this was done to show that he’s actually upset the 2 later times where Will and El leave at the same time -because of Will. I showed it in one of my vids here, at 23:11

When we first see Mike during the Hopper monologue , it continues to pan to only Mike and Will (not El) cause what he says is mostly about them. “I’ve been feeling distant from you. Like you’re pulling away from me or something” (Will does this both figuratively/literally). I miss playing board games every night (d &d)”. Then Mike looks back at the Byers house (he just lingers there and looks back as his friends leave without him) like how Will turned to watch Mike leave and hold hands with El (as the crew go up the hill without Will). “But I know you’re getting older, growing, changing. And I guess, if I’m being really honest, that’s what scares me. I don’t want things to change.”

It pans to both of them on “i don’t want things to change’ cause that’s how they both feel. Mike , ‘doesn’t want things things to change’. He doesn’t want their friendship to change as they ‘get older’ because he’d have to and acknowledge his feelings for Will are romantic and if he’s “being honest” that “scares” him (especially in rural 80s conservative-Indiana at the height of the aids epidemic). Why we see Mike trying to act like a adult while dating El, and Will trying to act like a kid- they’re both trying to escape growing up to be gay in different ways. Will reverting to childhood activities and saying he’ll ‘never fall in love’ (after his double date with lumax). And Mike trying to act like “old people’ saying “we’re not kids anymore... what did you expect that we’d never get girlfriends?” Cause he equates straight romance with being an adult and his feelings for Will as something he has to grow out of . Which he learns in the very end isn’t possible.

Right after that scene it switches from Will crying, to Mike entering his house. His face is visibly red from crying and he looks shocked (almost as if he realized something) before he hugs his mom- to mirror the time he thought Will died in s1.

And the dialogue in this scene says “So I think maybe that’s why I came in here, to try and maybe stop that change. To turn back the clock. To make things go back to how they were.” He goes back to his mother for comfort, like he did the 1st time he lost Will. But also to reverse back time, to s1, before he realized his feelings for Will are romantic. When things were simple. I think the last episode is when Mike truly realizes he’s been in love with Will this entire time and he can’t fix it and transfer his feelings for Will on to el (something he’s been trying to do all of s3). El said he loved him and he felt nothing-and he was heartbroken over Will leaving (not El). Which is why he just seems almost shocked/numb as he’s processing this fact. This whole scene only showed Mike and Will transitions- el was never there, cause Mike wasn’t upset over her.

In the last ep (in s3) Mike mirrors the scene in s1, hugging his mom, since he feels like he’s losing Will all over again. In s1 the romantic/queer coded lyric from the song ‘We can be heroes’ plays as he hugs his mom “And we kiss as though nothing could fall. And the shame.”. And during the s3 move (‘we can be heroes’) plays again! And David Bowie wrote this song and Jonathan even said to Will in his ‘being a freak is the best speech’ “who would you rather be friends with David bowie (a queer singer) or Kenny Roggers?”

It’s why finn wolfhard after s3 liked this byler pic. cause s3 was all about Will and Mike denying their feelings for each other.

Not to mention,After s1 Finn quoted the Duffers saying Mike thought of El as a “puppy’ (dart) or “et” , and then said Mileven was a “first summer love thing”- foreshadowing mileven’s downfall during the Summer (aka s3). He repeats this “first summer love” phrase 2x. Millie when he mentioned what the duffers said rightfully thought the puppy thing was “awful”, but Finn was clearly told mileven doesn’t last -very early on- and most likely the Duffers told him “it’s like a first summer love thing”.Summer love” by definition fails-as it only lasts during the summer.

#byler #byeler #anti mileven

312 notes · View notes

thxngam · 4 years ago

Note

omg share your seaborn administration headcanons?

@tunennbee came up with like half of these!

well sam would be like late fifties or something when he runs/get elected

josh as first gentlemen is...interesting

typically the first lady does some ceremonial stuff, and when the president takes private dinners with prime ministers and stuff the spouse is supposed to be charming and nice and helps the president project a family man vibe (which is sexist but whatever)

josh...does Not Do That

everything devolves into a policy debate

his press secretary is like “what can you do that projects a family man vibe?” and josh is like “...i can’t cook and I don’t think the American people want to see me yell at stupid umpires”

he’s got this weird vibe of just being a guy who likes baseball and doesn’t like the instant replay on football and also being a world class politcal genius

he likes the easter egg roll though! and when families come to trick or treat at the WH josh loves the kids

idk if sam and josh have a kid but josh likes little kids - “kids are great yknow? there’s no double meaning. if they want a juice box, they’re gonna ask for a juice box.”

people like sam as president because he’s a good speech giver and a good man but he has the same problem as Bartlet where people think he’s too smart

but then footage of sam falling over or something goes viral and people reassess

“maybe...he’s just a guy. a really smart guy who likes grammar maybe too much, but he’s also just a guy”

Republicans try to use the footage to show incompetence and sam retweets it like “my husband saw this and laughed so hard he cried. it doesn’t take hand-eye coordination to know tax cuts don’t help the poor and that we don’t need to keep endowing the defense budget when we’re not fighting a war”

josh retweets it too and is like “ive got more stories of sam being a klutz if anyone’s interested”

as a couple people like sam and josh

they’re gay icons tho

sam gives a really moving speech at a fundraiser for the trevor project and people cry

at the end of it sam goes up to this woman and there’s shaky cell phone footage of sam apologizing profusely about “oh my god i didn’t mean to make you cry? are you okay? can i get you something?” and this lady is like ‘they’re good tears!!”

josh is fondly exasperated

they light up the white house like a rainbow every june and sam actually includes gay rights on his campaign, not just a side thing bc he’s a democrat

he refuses to shuttle his relationship away - he’s the president and gay. they’re not mutually exclusive

donna is untouchable

there’s a small thing when donna becomes chief of staff

a republican senator tweets “the day we let liberal blondes with no college degree run the highest office in the land is the day our country goes to hell in a handbasket”

donna quote-tweets it with an itemized list of every time that person has dropped the ball or screwed up on something

sam gives an impassioned statement to the press - it’s five minutes of sam talking about how amazing donna is

josh laughs very very loudly when a reporter asks what he thinks and says something like “donna barged her way into my office, convinced me to give her a shot, and worked her way to where she is today. the senator is wrong about a lot of things but he’s never been so wrong as when he said donna was incompetent”

and after all this donna tweets a picture of her, joey, and their cat so people are like ‘QUEEN’

lists of her accomplishments are trending

nobody dares to say anything after that

will’s speaker of the house and josh hates him bc of the one time that sam and him hooked up when sam was running for the 47th the first time

“it happened once let it go josh-” / “never”

“josh shut up, he’s literally the speaker-”

will cannot for the life of him figure out why josh hates him

will asks just the once and sam is like “yeah, no”

this is my favorite thing tho - ainsley as a scotus judge!

sam and ainsley still disagree on everything but they’re still protective of each other

someone calls sam too preachy to be president and ainsley to bitchy to be a SCOTUS justice

sam fiercely defends her “she’s a patriot before she is a conservative. she is intelligent, capable, and strong-willed, and she’d tell you all of that herself but i suppose if she did you’d resort to throwing silly misogynistic slurs so. here i am preaching.”

ainsley marches up to a reporter and is like ‘sam seaborn is definitely not always right, but there are little other people who care so much about the issues facing our country”

she then proceeds to email him like ‘i still disagree with you on everything”

sam emails back like “yeah me too, we can call it even”

This got really long and i have no filter so. hope you like them!

#the west wing #wow this is really long im sorry #ask

18 notes · View notes

lycheej3lly · 4 years ago

Text

assorted thoughts about farewell my concubine which i watched the other day w my mom who like sparknotes’ed the movie for me as we went along. she’s my no fear shakespeare. anyway putting them on tumblr bc i find it better for archiving purposes. ty to max for talking the movie out w me after 😊

spoilers obvi

the whole "by nature i am a boy/girl" stuff reminded me a lot of the concept of sexual inversion which was like when old homophobes assigned men the action of "liking women" and vice versa. thus linking gay men w femininity bc they like men which also sees a trend just like in Society(tm). at the beginning everyone else is super happy when douzi gets the line right but there's still smth like hollow? about that scene to him. when he adopts the baby, taking on the traditionally feminine role of caretaker. and then at the end when they both get the line "wrong" but he like almost reclaims(?) himself as a boy. yeah. and ofc when leslie cheung says that thing about a good actor is androgynous in one of his later interviews

but then right after that he kills himself which could be bc he recognizes that their socially conservative society won’t allow them to be together or bc he wants to end his life w what he sees as a symbol of their love..? or maybe it just isn't more complicated than what xiaolou says earlier in the movie when dieyi asks why the concubine has to die: because that's the play!

that said it is very weird that people take that line to mean that playing the concubine made him confused about his gender and start liking men or whatever, which is smth my mom said and apparently a lot of articles online. like gd that Is the concept of sexual inversion which is obvi not how being gay works but also just narratively dieyi's feelings for xiaolou def started before he started playing that role

i also think there's a lot to do w fate, like when juxian leaves the brothel and the manager person (i know there has to be a better word for this but god i cannot think of it rn) gives the whole "once a whore always a whore" speech. and then in the end when juxian is villainized bc she used to be a sex worker

but then i’m also kind of confused bc when they first introduced the story of farewell my concubine (the opera) they said it means you only control your own fate...? hm.

also there was SOMEONE talking about karma earlier in the movie which i remembered when dieyi starts yelling about retribution at the denouement but i can’t remember who and in what context and it’s nagging at me

maybe the sword as a symbol of their struggles? it always appears at important moments in their life as almost this recurring character - douzi wanting to give shitou the sword when they were younger, when yuan and dieyi first meet (ew), when yuan and dieyi drunkenly recreate the opera scene and dieyi puts it to his neck, when xiaolou is being interrogated, i’m def forgetting some - but then it's interesting bc when xiaolou throws it into the fire, it's juxian who goes to retrieve it and returns it to xiaolou before hanging herself like she recognizes its significance

smth smth subversion bc xiaolou who is supposed to play the Man is the first to crack, whereas juxian never snitches on anyone even as she is forced into the spotlight

also think it’s weird that people don’t think dieyi’s love was reciprocated? xiaolou left juxian after her miscarriage to go find dieyi and slapped her for telling their shifu that dieyi was addicted to opium. there’s def more but those are two scenes that stick out to me

anyway i too am in love with leslie cheung and gong li. xiaolou kinnie moments

ALSO the behind the scenes vid was so fun and insightful. can’t believe the scene of juxian jumping into xiaolou’s arms and the scene of their shifu beating xiaolou as an adult were real wtf. and having to film the scene in front of the fire in 90 degF beijing weather in full opera costume omg

really appreciate the research that the actors put into their roles - like gong li reading books about sex workers in that era of china and leslie cheung’s extensive training for his accent and jingju such that they didn’t even have to use the doubles they’d hired

love love love all the callbacks throughout the movie - when xiaolou says “i’m the one to blame, hit me instead” like what douzi did at the beginning of the movie after he and laizi ran away (oh and laizi also. man.), when dieyi says the same thing to juxian and rejects smth she offers at her and xiaolou’s wedding party and after no one tells dieyi that xiaosi was supposed to replace him as concubine yu

the editing for the part where the eunuch rapes douzi was so chilling and so good - the pan to the painting and then the bell toll, and douzi staying silent when shitou asks him what happened. fuck.

also really enjoyed the scenes when dieyi and juxian would be petty towards each other for more shallow reasons lol

i have thoughts about xiaosi that have not really crystallized yet. passing down the torch gone wrong etc etc...

#farewell my concubine #i want to get into chinese cinema more but the industry kind of notably sucks #ah well. a problem for after i work my way through leslie cheung's work #if anyone wants to give me recs.... 😳#julia watches movies

16 notes · View notes

nikkywrites · 4 years ago

Text

hand in marriage prompt

Prompt: “Explain how you eldest child of the kingdom’s rulers, disguised yourself as a suitor and fought for your own hand in marriage in a competition, and won” by @writing-prompt-s

Minor spelling/grammar edits.

*****

Your father’s hands shake behind the podium when he announces the competition. It is an age old custom, one that has fallen out of practice but one that is being revived in an attempt to win back the people’s favor.

They are on the verge of a revolution, a coup. Granting people a chance at the throne is the only way to settle them, keep peace.

Disaster will strike if any of them take the throne.

You’re sitting pretty at his side, smiling demurely at the crowds before you like your mother taught you. Heat swells in your palms as you listen to the barely-even tone of your father’s voice.

The crowd cheers jovially, each hoping that they will be the one to take the throne. His speech ends and you all retreat back to the castle, your youngest brother tugging at your skirts with wide-eyes, wondering why your father’s shoulders collapsed down as soon as he was out of sight of the public.

“It’s all right, John,” you soothe him, a burning determination taking root in your chest. “I’ll fix this.”

You pry his fingers off and pass him to his caregiver, and he goes off to change out of the stifling clothes. You jog up your father with skirt bunched in your fists.

“Father,” you speak conversationally, ever wary of prying ears and slowing to match his pace. “Would it be all right if I entered a person of my choosing into the competition?”

His eyes spark like lightning when he looks at you, frowns. “That defeats the purpose,” he says, although you recognize careful royal-bound wording when you hear it. “You cannot choose your groom. It is too risky.”

“I won’t be choosing anyone,” you reply, nodding. “Stack the odds against them, if you must, but the others will be invigorated knowing that they are not the one in my favor.”

He mulls over your words, eyes running over the expansive halls. “I do not choose who makes it in,” his eyes settle forwards and he avoids looking at you. “But the Gamemaker will be having a luncheon with us the day after next.”

Being royal has taught you many things — the order of silverware, how to smile in the face of political ruin, how to word insults like compliments and how to decode the unspoken.

You stumble a step and fan your face. “I’ve been feeling a little warm, lately.” Your stride falters and fails to match his, dragging you behind as you tug at the tight wrap of your corset. “Must I be present at the luncheon?”

“I’ll make the servants aware that you’ll be retired to your rooms.”

He continues on to whatever he’s going — most likely to plan out the competition stages, speak with the Gamemaker to begin choosing eligible men. You turn and walk to your rooms, gait long and even.

There’s a hidden drawer in your closet. Hidden behind the puffiest of your dresses, there is a shelf of plainer clothes, borish pants and loose-fitting shirts. Peasant clothes. Boy clothes. A stack of caps that hide the length of your hair and the pristine golden sheen of it.

They’re not the clothes you go to change into, instead sliding into your riding clothes and tying your hair away from your face in an updo the public would gasp at the messiness of.

For appearances, you’re supposed to be regulated to your room, playing sick. You sneak into the stables and to a young guard you’ve sort of befriended who works there. He has his own horse, a gangly mare named Sandy that doesn’t compare to the royal-bred horses, but she’s sweet and she’s fast and that’s enough for her to stay.

She’s the horse you practice hard riding on. You’re taught proper side saddle riding from your tutor, but the guard has taught you how to gallop across a field while making yourself a small target. He teaches you how men ride horses.

Men like the ones who will compete for your hand in a week’s time.

After riding, you practice archery. You’re strained, and your fingers shake, but if you can hit a bullseye like this, it’ll be easier when you have a steady hand.

During luncheon, you sneak out of your room and switch a name from the jar. It’s a boy’s name, completely ambiguous and too common to pinpoint to a specific house on a week’s notice. It is one that’s carefully picked, and when they are announced at the end of the week, you don’t smile any more or less for that name than you do the others.

Thankfully, you’re not obligated to be present, and, even if you were, you have a loyal maid who is similar in feature, enough to fool anyone at a distance. You keep up your charade of sickness, while you slip on your boyish clothes, dusted brown from when you had a maid rub it in the dirt. Only those who lived in the palace had pristine white on their clothes. The leather covers it up quite well, though.

There are three legs to the completion. Riding, and mounted archery in the first, to emulate a hunt, although the targets stand still. The second leg is battle tactics, a game to test one’s strategic thinking, how they would manage armies in the face of war. The third is a fight among those who remain.

The competition is hard.

It’s supposed to be, of course, they’re competing for your hand and your father’s crown. That doesn’t make it any easier, but you have an advantage they don’t. You’ve been training, and that guard is a good teacher, or maybe you’re just a fast learner.

But you outrace and outshoot them in the first leg, grinning cockily and fighting the urge to blow a kiss to the losers.

Of the twenty men who joined, you among them, sixteen pass the first test. The war game is where many fail, underestimating a threat or losing too many troops. That one is easy for you, effortless. The number of men left is halved.

In the final part, most of them want your head. You realize that you should have held back some, in previous matches, to not make yourself such a large target, but it is too late now. It’s a bracket system where only the winners proceed and the peasants pay a week’s wage to watch (and bet on) who will become their next King.

You all fight in turns until only one is left. The sword you are given is steel, heavy and too long, unbalanced in your hand. Your first opponent — you will beat him, at the very least — seems happy to see how you struggle.

You’re the third pair to square off, and though he is bigger, you are faster. Your blades clash and you twist so your blade swings around to rest against his neck. It is over quickly.

You eye the other matches, your opponents and how you can defeat them. The one you had faced in your first match appears to not have been one of the more skilled ones. Pity.

As you step back into the ring for your second match, you become aware of the throb in your wrist. Using the wrong blade and swinging it a little too swiftly, making so you had to abruptly pull back so you didn’t chop off your opponent’s head had taken it’s toll.

You ignore the subtle pain and clench your jaw, doubling as a means to focus and a way to harden out the shape of it. You will not lose, no matter which stops you have to pull.

Even if you must rely on your family secret to save you.

It would be a dirty move to pull, knowing that they have no such talent and that if they did, they would have strategically dropped out in one of the earlier matches. It would be impossible for them to hide their non-humanness from their wife for the rest of their lives.

No. The only ones left were those who wished to take the throne of the King and you, who wanted that seat to remain empty until you decide otherwise.

You will not bow to tradition.

Invigorated, you meet your next opponent in the middle of the ring, spotting how his veins run thick in his hands, weathered from fighting. You narrow your eyes and lift your chin — needless, as you’re not much shorter than any of them there, and you were actually taller than some, something that’s a bane to a girl.

The start is called and you move swiftly. You take careful care to watch your energy levels, making sure to conserve some for your fight, the final one. The man before you, red-faced and ruddy, is merely another obstacle for you to overcome.

His cockiness becomes his weakness, him taking too-big swings that you easily dodge, sneaking in to press your blade to his throat, pressing so drops of blood swell over the edge and drip. Injuries were only frowned upon if major, this was nothing, a scratch that would quickly heal. A measure to remove doubt as you’d left your last opponent spotless.

When Kings were brought to war, when they got so desperate, there was no choice but to spill blood.

The last fight is where things go wrong.

This man is tall, corded with muscle and comfortable with the blade in his hand. His breath comes easily and he appears not to be at all winded, but he must for he won against two others.

Your flaw in this fight is underestimating him and not ducking far enough. He swipes the cap from your head and your hair is visible.

That is the moment that the winner is decided.

Rage leaps up in your throat, pushed by the fear that you’ll be disqualified, and fire rages from your hands and travels the length of your sword to meet your opposer’s arm.

He screams as he loses, dropping the heated blade in his hand, patting at the melting flesh of his arm. You stare at referee stoically, hair hanging in your face, giving him your best glare as he stutters out his results.

“The winner of the princess’ hand...” he shakes, still looking at you and hoping his words won’t cost him his head, watching crowd silent at the new turn, breaths held, “is the princess.”

There is no cheering, no booing, just echoing silence.

You match into the throne room after, loosely circled by guards and the referee. You don’t bother to change into a dress, barely bother to comb your hair out of your face.

Your father needs to hear what you’ve done.

By tradition, you wait outside the door. The referee stutters something about unprecedention, a surprise, what they should do. You can feel your father’s worry through the door.

He recognizes you when you step into the room, still boyish with your clenched jaw and narrow eyes, daring anyone to say anything about your current state of dress.

His face breaks out in relief.

Your family secret is still safe. Your bloodline not to be sullied by mortal blood. Later, your partner will be of your choosing and of your species. You won that right squarely and you will fight again if anyone challenges it.

You are coronated a moon’s phase later. You wear your hair long, some loose and some intricately braided, following tradition in every way but one. When the time comes for the crown to be upon your head, you don’t wear the crown of Queen.

The pastor coronates you with your father’s crown.

You are both Queen and King, until you decide to bequest one of the titles to another.

Until than, your kingdom is yours and no one else’s.

*****

I remember having a hard time keeping this a prompt. Still kind have the urge to do something bigger on this premise, specifically with the inhuman ruling family twist, but I don’t know if it’ll happen.

This is a good run down of how it would be, though. Still good as a prompt.

#writeblr #writblr #creative writing #writing #prompt fill #nikkywritesstories #nikkywritesprompts #my writing #this is a long prompt #but i wanted to flesh it out more #still might #repost from my old blog

33 notes · View notes

tinyshe · 4 years ago

Text

Story at-a-glance

There are 10 steps that every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10. Once the 10th step locks into place, there will be no going back

The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties

With the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, we entered step 10, where emergency powers and laws are used to strip remaining freedoms from the people, censorship is enacted and certain kinds of speech is criminalized

We must get involved and fight to enact state legislation that protects against continued erosion of freedom and reestablishes rights and liberties

The Daily Clout platform was created for this purpose. It allows citizens to lobby already drafted, turnkey bills to their legislators

This is the article in full:

Naomi Wolf, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, is a prolific author and Yale University graduate. She also received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship that allowed her to complete her Ph.D. in English and literature at Oxford University in 2015. Eight years before that, she wrote a book called “The End of America,” which is the topic of this interview. “The End of America” was published in 2007. At the end of this article, you will find a playlist of three videos in which she reads select chapters of the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.1A Prescient Warning Already in 2007, Wolf warned us of where we were headed. In her book, she points out that would-be tyrants are found on both sides of the political spectrum. We must not get locked into generalizations about political affiliations, because they simply do not give us a truthful picture of who the enemy is. While Wolf and I could be said to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Wolf being a long-time progressive while many would view me as a conservative, our views are in perfect alignment when it comes to the issues of protecting American freedom and liberty.We are [now] at Step 10. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back. ~ Naomi WolfIn “The End of America,” Wolf lays out the 10 steps toward tyranny. These steps have been followed by virtually all would-be tyrants, be they on the political left or right. They were followed in Italy in the '20s, Germany in '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Chile in the '70s and China in the '80s. “They all took the same 10 steps, and they always work,” Wolf says. “I warned people that when you start to see these 10 steps, you have to take action, because there is no way to recover once things go too far without a bloody revolution or a civil war. We are [now] at Step 10. People have said, since I wrote that book in 2007, ‘Tell us when we're at Step 10.’ I've always said, ‘Things are bad, they're getting worse, but there's still hope.’ We're literally at Step 10 now. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back.”We’re in the Final Step of the Implementation of Tyranny.The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. It may be a real threat or an imagined one, but in all cases, it’s a hyped-up threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties. Ultimately, that wasn’t effective enough.“There was still freedom in the world. People were not saying, ‘ISIS exists; therefore, I'm going to give up my First Amendment liberties, my Fourth Amendment liberties, my Second Amendment liberties and so on.’ Sadly, this medical crisis — which is now not a pandemic in many states and countries, it's an endemic; it doesn't meet the formal definition of a pandemic — was the perfect excuse for leaders to usher in Step 10,” Wolf says. The last and final step in the implementation of tyranny, Step 10, involves the creation of a surveillance state where citizens are spied upon, and critique of the government is reclassified as dissent and subversive activity. Step 10 The surveillance state is now being rolled out in the form of vaccine passports, while certain kinds of speech are said to be dangerous and freedom of speech is being criminalized. Needless to say, the mainstream press is an important part of this scheme. “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have essentially bought up the western press and coerce them, bribe them, into following the party line, brought up by the CDC and so on,” Wolf says.“Toward the end of the steps, which is Step 10, is emergency law, [which is a] subversion of the rule of law, also called martial law. We're here. I'm [in] New York State. We're under emergency law. Every 30 days, I get an email saying that tyrannical Governor Cuomo has extended emergency powers, even though in Columbia County where I live, there are only eight deaths a month with COVID, average age 85, which is older than the average American life span. It's not a pandemic where I live, but I'm living under emergency law, which means the legislature has no power. The governor can do whatever he wants. It’s the same in Massachusetts, same in California — 49 states, all states except Alaska, are technically under emergency law. This is terrifying. You get what you're seeing, which is governors deciding, or the federal government deciding, that you can't assemble, you can't worship, you have no medical choice, the coercion of vaccine passports, your child can't go to school, your young adult can't get a college education if they don't agree to an experimental vaccination. You get suspension of the right to property. You can't run your business — 110,000 restaurants have closed. You get a suspension of freedoms of speech. People are being deplatformed left and right and there are movements in Congress to criminalize what had been First Amendment protected speech. You get the invocation of martial powers and there's no end to it. Literally, with Massachusetts emergency law, I have no rights. I have no ability to lobby the governor. With New York’s emergency law, I have no representative with the power to end emergency measures. The governor has to end emergency measures, [and] he's the one who benefits from them. It's catastrophic. We're seeing a complete takeover of American rights, freedoms and bodies by Big Tech, which is up double digits to triple-digit billions since the pandemic began. China has moved in to … establish its role as the global superpower under the guise of this pandemic, buying up community groups, elected officials and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are flooding K through 12 education … community groups [and] universities with money to engage in COVID education — which means a strict party line [narrative] that is aimed at destroying what's human about us and what's free. That's it in a nutshell. It's unbelievably terrifying.”What the COVID-19 Passports Are Really AboutWolf was recently interviewed by Fox News’ Steve Hilton (above), in which she warned that mandatory COVID-19 passports will spell the “end of human liberty in the West”:2,3 In essence, they’re a precursor to the social credit system that has already been implemented in China. The vaccine passes have already been rolled out in New York, where Wolf lives. Surveillance is nothing new, of course. We’ve been digitally surveilled for years, through social media platforms, Google and all manner of “smart” technology. Since the early 2000s, Google and Facebook in particular have been data mining online users. These data, then, have been applied to deep learning computers, giving them unprecedented ability to predict the type of messaging triggers that will create the maximum amount of fear — and thus compliance. There’s also every reason to assume that this information has also been shared with people like Bill Gates, who largely controls the World Health Organization. If it wasn’t for the WHO, we would not be in this situation, because it was the central organization with the authority to declare a global pandemic, and keep it in place long past its natural expiration date. They actually changed the definition of “pandemic,” removing the requirement of mass casualties, and if it wasn’t for that, COVID-19 simply would not qualify as a pandemic. The Pandemic Is Hypothetical at BestWolf points out that COVID-19 dashboards, such as Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracking project that mainstream media keep citing, cannot tell us anything about who’s actually getting infected, or who’s dying. We don’t even know if they are showing real or made up data.Wolf, being the CEO of a tech company, builds digital dashboards based on government data, so she knows what she’s talking about. You have to have the raw datasets. Since none of the dashboards provide the raw data, nothing can be verified. “Basically, they can dial up cases, which are positive PCR tests, or dial them down,” she says. So, the entire pandemic narrative is unverified.We do know, however, that the CDC has shifted influenza and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 deaths, and tens of thousands of Americans die from these conditions every year. When lawmakers in Minnesota audited death records, for example, they found a 40% over-attribution of deaths to COVID-19. Then there’s the PCR test scandal. Not only have laboratories everywhere been using excessively high amplification cycles resulting in staggeringly high false positive rates, but they also do not account for duplicate tests. If you get a positive test, and test once a week until you test negative, each positive test result you obtain is counted as a separate “case.”“We literally can't know if there's been a pandemic, there's so much faulty attribution, inflation of numbers, and so on,” Wolf says. “Those numbers, I can't stress enough, have never been audited ... We have to do a freedom of information request in Britain to take a look at the raw data sets that are being fed into the Office for National Statistics, COVID dashboard. We looked at where the data were flowing from for the Johns Hopkins dashboard, which again, was used by every major university, every major news outlet. One of the data providers was a hedge fund! … I know something else about APIs. It is virtually impossible to, in real time, get hundreds of thousands of reports from hundreds of thousands of doctors, hospitals, CVS and Rite Aid, feeding into a live digital dashboard. I keep asking the developers to show me, ‘How did you do this? It's virtually impossible.’ There's no answer, there's crickets. Literally, we don't know if the dashboards are just dialing up and dialing down infection rates. Everyone's taking for granted that these must be real numbers, but there's no evidence that they are real numbers. I'm willing to stand corrected if there's a FOIA and we see the raw data sets. But right now, it is a hypothetical pandemic.”Collusion by Tech CompaniesTech companies have also engaged in what Wolf likens to criminal collusion. She explains:“In March of last year, for the COVID-19 response project, Zoom, NASDAQ, Nintendo, Microsoft, Amazon — all the people who benefited from the lockdown — coordinated so that wherever you go on the internet, across platform to platform, you see these alerts about COVID-19, warnings about COVID, instructions about COVID, and of course, censorship … if you run afoul of the narrative about COVID. I run a tech company. The question, when you run a tech company, is how do you get people to not do things in the real world, and do things on your platform? That's the business model. If people are gathering in churches, gathering in real school rooms, if they're going for walks together, go on picnics, having dinner parties, going to clubs, that's an opportunity lost to Microsoft and Google and so on. But if they can drive you indoors, terrify you from being around other people, or make it unlawful to be around other people through these emergency powers that restrict assembly [then they can profit] … Digital learning curriculum were turnkey, ready to go. Suddenly, it was like, ‘Oh, kids have to be at home and do distance learning.’ That's a $300 million industry for just one company that creates digital curriculums. They're not going to let go of that. I think we are in a small loop of six tech companies [and] the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, having bought legislators in China, who's up 32% while the economies of the West have crashed, and that's the fight that we have to fight.”The Legalization of Tyranny. Few people realize that dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler came to power in legal working democracies. They became subverted and rules of law were rewritten in such a way as to allow these leaders to legally take over. That's one of the primary dangers we now face in the U.S., because at the end of step 10, the leader obtains the legal authority to become a tyrant.“This is especially true of the National Socialists,” Wolf says. “They kept passing a set of laws called the Enabling Acts that are very much like the laws that are being passed now. They criminalized certain speech, created a surveillance apparatus for citizens … and they did this lawfully. They were elected, and they passed restrictive law after restrictive law. Then, once democracy was fragile enough, it really only took six months for thugs to beat up opposition leaders, union leaders, the outspoken and clergy. After that, everyone was too scared to speak. We're seeing the same thing happen now, but faster. It's very scary that China has created a white paper — the World Economic Forum has it on its website — that maps how biofascism, as I call it — vaccinations, the managing of people's bodies, biometrics and health — is being launched as a way to control civic engagement, governance, private life, assembly and every other aspect of human life, to bring about super-fast totalitarianism. That's why focusing on legislation is something I've been doing with my company DailyClout, very seriously, because if we don't pass laws immediately to make unlawful some of the things we're seeing, there will be no more hope for us.”Using the Legal System to Save the Law. One strategy of totalitarianism that must be fought through legislation is the requirement of vaccine passports. “Once these are launched … people like you and I, Dr. Mercola, will be switched off of society. ‘Oops, my vaccine passport is positive. I guess I can't go food shopping for my family.’ ‘I said something critical of biofascism on Dr. Mercola's show, so now my child can't get into school.’ Just as in Israel, people who are critics are being surveilled [and] marginalized from society. It has turned into a two-tier society. If you choose not to get vaccinated, then you're really in a marginalized minority in an apartheid state. The more we know about these vaccines, the scarier it is to have coercion that is social. It's also illegal. In America, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. It means it's illegal to even ask me anything about my medical status. You can't ask me if I'm pregnant. You can't ask me if I'm disabled. You can't ask me if I have diabetes or HIV. You cannot ask me anything. By definition, these intrusive measures are unlawful. We have to use the law to save the law, basically. In Michigan, there's an edict from the governor that 2- to 4-year-old children have to be masked. This is child abuse. Science doesn't support it. Unlawful, tyrannical laws are being passed across the country under the guise of emergency measures, and stupid people going along with it, like in Congress, I'm embarrassed to say, because I voted for Biden. We have to fight before we are living in fascist regime where every move is tracked and we're marginalized from society.”The Courts Are Our Last Hope, And They’re Now Under AttackOne area in which “The End of America” excels is helping you understand is that the United States was founded by people who had repressive societies. Their goal was to prevent such a repressive society from emerging again. The founders had to personally reckon with criminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, state sanctioned torture and even murder.So, at great personal sacrifice, they signed the Constitution. Had they lost the Revolutionary War, they would all have been executed, so the stakes could not have been higher. As a result, our founding fathers constructed a carefully balanced system to make sure no tyrant could ever come to power. We’re now facing a scenario that could obliterate that delicate balance, namely the Biden administration’s call to “pack the court,” i.e., add, in this case four, additional Justices to the Supreme Court. We’re now facing a shift in our legal structure that will allow for the legalization of tyrannical reign and “legally” override the carefully constructed governmental balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branched that has previously served to prevent tyranny in the U.S.This three-tier branch, constructed to safeguard our freedoms, is under direct attack, and this is NOT a partisan issue. Not by a longshot, and everyone needs to wake up to this fact. It’s an issue of freedom versus tyranny.“Absolutely,” Wolf says. “Sadly, this is clear. That's why I'm saying progressives have to wake up … I worry very much about the role of China in this, because I think we've seen that some people connected to the Democratic Party have close ties with members of the Chinese Communist Party. That is just established fact. I'm not saying that the tyrants are on the left. In Britain, it's Tories cracking down on liberty, holding the country under house arrest. In Australia it's conservatives, in Canada it's Trudeau, a liberal. This isn't partisan. But in America, we do have to face the fact that this administration is drunk on power and has some bad actors aligned with it, including Silicon Valley. They are crushing conservative voices, kicking them off of public platforms in addition to voices critical of the COVID narrative. They're also moving at warp speed to use their own phrasing about something else to lock in power in a way that is against everything our founders set in place — the most beautiful, delicate system of checks and balances any human beings have ever created; an ideal of people all over the world who want freedom and balanced accountable government. Yeah, packing the Supreme Court is a horrific tampering with some of the last checks and balances that we have … I can't believe I keep saying thank God for the conservatives on the bench. But these days, I have to say it, and I'm ashamed. But thank God, because they were the ones who in California said ‘No, you cannot keep people from assembling to worship. That is a violation of the Constitution.’ They're our last hope. The courts are our last hope. It is catastrophic, and I see other scary movements against accountable democracy that are being put forward by this administration. Among them, President Biden is not saying to the blue states: ‘You have to give up your emergency powers. You have to open up. You can't control people in their homes, you can't force people to have vaccinations and you can't keep people from assembling and worshipping.’ These are all violations of their constitutional liberties. He's not saying that. That's a complete failure of leadership, if not worse. My people have to rise up and face it. Conservatives have to face cleaning up their own houses … What's at stake is everything, and we all have to unite across party lines and save our Constitution and make these people accountable, whatever their party [affiliation].”Urgent Call to Action The good news is, the would-be tyrants have not won yet. That said, we have no time to spare. We have no time to remain idle, hoping it will all just go back to normal on its own. The answer is peaceful mass civil disobedience.“There's hope in mass peaceful civil disobedience … when things are really dire,” Wolf says. “My favorite story is about the singing revolution of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, in which they were under the grip of the Soviet Union, a massive tyrannical monolith. They all decided to just peacefully gather on a highway that extended the length of their three countries and sing. They kept peacefully disrupting business as usual in their cities, making it impossible for work to continue, for traffic to go on. They sat down, they linked arms and they sang. Over time, they just wore down the Soviet Union. That's a beautiful model. Same thing with Dr. Martin Luther King. His was a peaceful revolution of civil disobedience.”This strategy is time-consuming, however, so be prepared to stand your ground for as long as it takes. It can take months, years even, when you have nothing else in your arsenal. Peaceful disobedience is the primary strategy in armed countries as well. As mentioned, we must also rally behind legislation that prevents the alteration of laws that safeguard our freedoms.Join the Five Freedoms Campaign!To that end, Wolf has started the Five Freedoms Campaign, which you can find on her Daily Clout website. The campaign focuses on creating legislation to preserve key freedoms and prevent emergency laws from infringing on our freedom to assembly, worship, protest and engage in business. Legislation is also being crafted to open schools, remove mask mandates and eliminate requirements for vaccine passports.“We've had overwhelmingly high levels of support,” Wolf says. “I hope your followers will also join us. We hired a really distinguished lawyer who is drafting model legislation. She has finished the new vaccine passport bill and we've gotten state legislators in Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan to sponsor to pass that legislation. I'm sending out the request for 47 other state legislatures to adopt this model legislation. Contact me, I'll come out, I'll speak to your legislature. We'll do a rally, we'll do a press conference, as we're doing in Maine on April 27. We've got to pass these bills. Then she's going to work on an omnibus bill to make all five freedoms inviolable so that no one can pass mask mandates as they did in Michigan today. No one can force vaccine passports as they're doing in New York, so that we can get our freedoms back.”Wolf and her team are making this interactive process as easy as possible by posting good model bills on dailyclout.io, and proactively drafting much-needed bills. Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don't have lawyers at their beck and call. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that:“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we've been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’ It's a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It's why we founded Daily Clout, but it's beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It's not just for this issue. Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”Limiting Emergency PowersAnother facet that needs to be addressed is governors’ emergency powers. Some states have been locked down under emergency power for more than a year, which is insane, considering we’re not in an emergency and haven’t been for many months. These emergency powers need to be limited in some way, as they are at the heart of all this unlawful behavior. As explained by Wolf: “Emergency law basically suspends the Constitution of the United States. As I've said elsewhere, the Constitution doesn't say all this can be suspended if there's disease. We've been through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, Spanish flu, polio, tuberculosis — disease after disease, without ever having emergency law extended without review month after month. We've had world wars fought without emergency laws. We were attacked on our soil without emergency law being declared in New York state after 9/11. There's no justification for it. It's against everything we believe in. It's unconstitutional.” So, one of the five freedoms Wolf’s campaign focuses on is the restriction of emergency laws. New Hampshire has become the first state to pass a bill that accomplishes this. It reforms emergency law such that the Governor’s emergency powers cannot be indefinitely extended without review by the legislature. They also passed a bill that guarantees freedom of worship, and another bill that ensures emergency law cannot be invoked indefinitely in any future crisis.4“We've now passed along our model ‘No vaccine passport’ bill to the New Hampshire legislators,” Wolf says. “If they can do it in New Hampshire, with our help, with your help, they can do it across the country. But we need to get that model legislation out to every legislature and mobilize that grassroots movement to pass the end of emergency law. I mean, look what's happening in New York State. It's insane. Fourteen state legislators are trying to get Governor Cuomo to end emergency law. But as our laws are written, Governor Cuomo has to be the one to end his own emergency law. There're a huge amount of lobbying that has to happen for these legislators to understand that there are eyes on them, that they're accountable. I'm going to be reporting and … hopefully millions of people will be following and helping to pass these laws to get back our rights.”Daily Clout Empowers Citizens to Lobby for Freedom. To be clear, the Daily Clout is not a lobbying group. YOU are the ones lobbying your legislators. Daily Clout simply provides the needed assistance so that you can do that easily and effectively. “It's such a beautiful effort, because you'd have to come out and say, ‘The people of New Hampshire have no right to pass their own legislation’ in order to oppose an effort like this,” Wolf says. “We're not a special interest. It's just the people. It's the people of New Hampshire, people of Maine, passing their own legislation. I do hear, consistently, that Democrats won't help, that in many states with their democratic majorities, it's going to be difficult if Democrats don't reach across the aisle and add their names. I'm sending out the call to Democrats to support this legislation. I'm going to warn everyone, speaking as a former political consultant, that the party that embraces the restoration of freedom is going to be the party that wins in 2022 and 2024. There's no question about that. This is going to be a winning issue. People know something is terribly wrong, but they don't know what to do. This is a completely unprecedented assault on liberty. With my many years in national politics, I know what to do. This is why we developed Daily Clout. If you show up with a turnkey piece of legislation and some turnkey supporters, that's a very quick fix for a really catastrophic crisis that has a legislative solution. As long as there's still legislatures, we can pass good legislation at the state level. At the federal level, it's going to be harder, because there isn't any balance right now. I'm very inspired there's so many people serving at the state legislature level who are really decent citizens, who are not partisan hacks. People who really ran to help their neighbors and help their communities and who are not wholly owned by China, Big Tech or whatever, and who want to do the right thing. I could be wrong, but in two weeks [since we launched the Daily Clout site] we've already been invited to address state legislators and draft legislation for three, and that's without any marketing budget or anything but platforms like this, where I say it's available. We started Daily Clout because citizens didn't have a platform to be effective at lobbying for their own issues. This is a turnkey platform that does that for them. I designed it that way. I designed it, as a former political consultant, knowing that the way things are set up, ordinary citizens don't have a seat at the table. There is no easy way to engage in civic action.

This makes it easy, makes it digital and people are using it.”How to Use the Daily Clout Site.So, how do you get involved? First, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign.

Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.There’s also a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Daily Clout will also email you links and explain how to find your state legislator. If you provide your name and zip code, which will remain confidential, your state legislator’s contact information will be included in the email.“We're creating a widget right now to attach your name and zip code to the model bills so it goes right to your state legislator, showing that the bill already has support,” Wolf explains. “But in the meantime, you can look up any bill on BillCam. Those are bills that have already been introduced or passed. There are ‘No vaccine passport’ bills, for instance. We're showcasing them on BillCam. It's already set up, so you can just tweet it to the sponsor, tweet it to representative. You can Facebook it to your community. It already goes through social media and you can show support by ‘voting on it’ in the widget on BillCam as you share legislation with your community.”Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events. They’re also installing a widget that will allow you to meet with like-minded people in your state who want this legislation passed. Lastly, you can write to Daily Clout and ask them to draft a bill. A lawyer will then be assigned to draft it for you.“Right now, we're focused on the Five Freedoms Campaign, but there is that functionality. You can write a blog and explain the bill that you want. You can send us a video and explain what your issue is, and all of this goes to shining a light on the legislators. They're not used to having a light shone on them. That really does drive outcomes. Those are the steps that you can take,” Wolf says. We’ve already seen how effective this strategy can be, with New Hampshire passing three bills to protect citizens’ freedoms. “I never want to take credit away from legislators working hard to pass bills, but I know that we helped,” Wolf says. “I know that our lawyer has been in close touch with some of those state legislators in New Hampshire and provided language that we pay for, so that those legislators would have a turnkey bill to act on.”Hundreds of people also wrote to New Hampshire’s Governor Christopher Sununu, urging him to lift the mask mandate, which he recently did. Knowing that the Daily Clout would report on the outcome of that campaign, he not only felt the political pressure, but he also knew he had support from his constituents. So, please, use this unprecedented opportunity to get involved, in any capacity that you can. Your freedom, and that of future generations, hinge on our getting involved and fighting for it. Last but not least, to understand where we are and how we got here, I strongly recommend reading “The End of America.” In the video below, Wolf reads select chapters from the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.5

6 notes · View notes

96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

Text

According to the lawsuit filed, Army Capt. Alan Kennedy, a part-time Judge Advocate General Corps officer whose day job is in civil rights and constitutional law, faced multiple command investigations, reprimands, and other sanctions for writing op-eds in local newspapers and participating in Black Lives Matter protests while not in a duty status. Since he was not in a duty status, Kennedy should not have been prohibited from partaking in these free speech activities.

According to the Army Times, guard troops are subject to active-duty speech restrictions only when in uniform for their monthly drills or otherwise activate in a military capacity. “There’s a double standard,” Kennedy said in an interview with the outlet. He referenced another active guard who was open in addressing conservative views. “The Colorado National Guard’s investigated my participation in Black Lives Matter protests and op-eds while not investigating the op-eds of another judge advocate in my unit.”

Noting this double standard, Kennedy filed his lawsuit on March 16 in the hope of having a Defense Department Instruction created that deemed restricting the right to participate in protests as unconstitutional.

While similar cases have been filed in which service members alleged their freedom of speech was infringed on, the key difference is that Kennedy was not wearing a uniform during the protests he attended, nor was he on military orders as others have been.

As a result of Kennedy’s lawsuit, the state’s adjutant general, Army Brig. Gen. Laura Clellan, ordered an investigation into the state’s chief of staff, Army Col. Charles Beatty, and other officers for their conduct in handling Kennedy’s case.

In response to this news, Kennedy emphasized the importance of his case not taking away from the actual cause he was attending. “My fight for constitutional rights pales in comparison to the persecution of George Floyd and Daunte Wright, and countless others who have been murdered by the police,” he said.

The Colorado National Guard declined to comment on the case and its status. “Capt. Alan Kennedy’s branch of service is the Colorado Army National Guard,” 2nd Lt. Katherine Lee, the Colorado Guard’s deputy state public affairs officer, said in an email to Military Times. “Due to ongoing litigation, we cannot comment on [your] other questions.”

The Black Lives Matter protests Kennedy attended aren’t the first time he has faced scrutiny from his superiors, even though members of the military were allowed to write op-eds and other opinion pieces with disclaimers. The incident occurred during Donald Trump’s term in office in 2019; Kennedy criticized the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw American troops in the face of a Turkish military operation against Kurdish forces. At the time, investigating officers found that Kennedy did not “did not violate any prohibitions, limitations, standards, or polices with regard to exercise of political activities, use of media, or ethical standards.”

As Kennedy began to write more op-eds, including one last year detailing his participation in a Black Lives Matter protest, superior members found that to be an issue. “The police I encountered did not give any notice, any warning, before firing tear gas and flash bang grenades at marchers and journalists,” Kennedy wrote in an article, according to the Army Times. His op-ed noted that while the protest was peaceful, protestors were met with tear gas and flash bangs from Denver police.

It seems that some Colorado National Guard superiors do not care about Kennedy’s general participation in protests, but instead which protests he is involved in. By targeting those who protest Black Lives Matter and other injustices with reprimands while letting those who protest issues that support conservative agendas go, the state guard is depicting a clear bias.

Commenting on the issue, retired Army JAG lieutenant colonel and attorney at Butler Snow LLP Attorney Franklin Rosenblatt said in an email to Military Times: “The core issue in this lawsuit — the reach of military discipline to off-duty speech and association — is as old as our nation itself. The most hotly contested military justice cases in the United States’ early years concerned the accused’s status as a private citizen or militia member.”

“Historian Christopher Bray recounts a case from 1808 in which Maryland Federalist Jonathan Meredith offered a toast at a private dinner: ‘Damnation to Democracy!’ The court-martial transcript reveals that his defense was that he ‘appeared as a private citizen, and not in a military character,’” he added. “Likewise, just after the American Revolution, Thomas Bevins admitted that he called his company commander a ‘damned Irish bugger’ who was unfit to command ‘any more than my dog.’ Bevins’ defense was that the statements were made at dinner when military duties were complete for the day, ‘when as men + gentlemen, we were on the same footing.”

As the investigations into the conduct of Kennedy’s superiors continue, Kennedy is free to protest and the government has until May 17 to respond. But while Kennedy is thankful he is able to protest without disciplinary action, he believes this is not good enough. He noted that until the rule is gone altogether, more people can be subjected to the bias present in enforcing it. “As long as the unconstitutional provision of the DoDI exists, someone could decide to enforce it.”

4 notes · View notes

tisfan · 4 years ago

Text

The Right Girl

Word count 1492

01 - Handjob Tags: Handjob, shower sex, mental health, unhealthy coping mechanisms, Steve punches things a lot, anti-Ellen DeGeneres Couple: Steve Rogers/Jessica Jones (Man with an Alias)

Takes place in the Communal Kitchen AU

Steve was exactly where she’d expected him to be. Jessica Jones could say one thing about her boyfriend, Steve Rogers, and that was that he was fairly predictable.

She leaned against one of the concrete pillars that held the roof of the gym up and watched Steve whale the hell out of a super-soldier punching bag. His hips moved in perfect time with his jabs, and his ass did the most adorable little bounce every time he hit. Jessica knew that everyone thought Tony Stark had the best ass in the Avengers -- it came up from time to time in those ridiculous listicles -- but Jessica was going to have to respectfully disagree.

That was America’s ass, right there, that was.

She held her hands up with double Ls to frame it.

“Take a picture,” Steve suggested, not speaking up to be heard. He knew she was there, had known it the whole time, probably. “It’ll last longer.”

“Rather just get my hands on it,” Jessica said, coming up behind him.

He punched the bag one more time and then held out his hand flat to make it stop swinging. “Did you need something?”

Jessica didn’t wince, or pause. She already knew this was going to be bad. “Want to talk about it?”

Steve gestured at the punching bag. Does this look like my talking face?

Jessica barreled on ahead, because she never knew how to shut up, really. She was broken in all the right places to lean against Steve’s broken bits. “So, what happened?”

It was supposed to be a fluff piece; not quite talk show, live in front of a studio audience, because after the debacle with Steve saying Ellen was friends with a war criminal and therefore just as bad, their PR team never let Steve do anything aside from ribbon cutting ceremonies that couldn’t be edited later.

Steve wasn’t even allowed to do commencement speeches, which always seemed to shock people and Jessica never understood why. Did they not realize who Steve was?

Well, no, they didn’t. They had some ultra-white conservative Captain America on their boner and never realized that wasn’t the same person at all. It had taken Jessica about three hours to realize Steve wasn’t Captain America. And she didn’t consider herself to be the brightest bulb on the Christmas Tree, so what the fuck was up with other people?

“They had an interview with Peggy,” Steve said. “She was having a good day, I guess. Talked a little about us… and that stupid thing with Howard and my jealousy. And then the reporter turned the video on me and asked me what I thought Peggy would say about my being--”

“With me?”

“Yeah.”

“So, are we going to have to pay damages?” Jessica moved a bit closer and rested her head against his sweaty back, listening to him breathe. She was as strong as he was, and it always astonished her that he was so much bigger than she was. Show off.

“I didn’t break anything,” Steve admitted, sounding cranky about it.

“Is that why you’re down here?”

“Yes-- no. I-- I’m with you,” Steve said. “Peggy and I… I mean, we never knew if anything was gonna happen, you know? There was a war, and we were busy. It might not ever have come to anything, if we’d both lived to come home.”

Privately, Jessica doubted that. Peggy Carter had been the love of Steve’s fucking life. She was always going to be second to that, and she told herself she didn’t mind, that it was okay, she had him now anyway--

“Peggy moved on with her life,” Steve said, “which is what’s supposed to fucking happen, and I’m not jealous of her husband or her kids, or her grandkids or her fucking horse farm in England.”

After more than a year together, Jessica would have supposed she’d have gotten used to Steve cursing, but she wasn’t. There was always a little elicit thrill to listening to Captain America with a fucking potty mouth.

“But you’re still mad?”

“It’s disrespectful,” Steve said, “to you. You’re not second choice, or someone I’m settling for. I love you. And I don’t see why that’s anyone else’s business but ours.”

Jessica pressed her face against his damp tee-shirt. Steve loved her. She knew he did, but that didn’t keep it from being amazing, every single time. “I swear to God,” she muttered into his skin, “that I could jerk you off on national television, and they’ll still put you and Peggy’s pictures together. It doesn’t matter, cowboy. We’re together.”

Steve turned around and tipped her chin to make her look up at him. He was slightly flushed, a little sweaty, and stupidly gorgeous as always. “You could do it now,” he suggested, and that flush got darker.

“Do-- ohhh,” she said. “Well, I suppose it is another way to destress.”

“Not-- not because of them, you know. I--”

“You love me, and Peggy is old news and you need to prove it to your dumb brain before you can move on with your life, no, I get it completely.”

Steve slumped just a little, as if in relief that he didn’t have to use his words like an adult, and if Jessica hadn’t been so cross with the magazine fuck-nuggets who thought this sort of thing was okay, she might have teased Steve a little about being too immature to ask for a handie when he wanted one.

“Come on, cowboy, let’s hit the showers,” Jessica suggested, because Natasha’s wrath was mighty when she walked in on people having sex in public areas.

Jessica stopped by her locker to pick up some of the soft joggers and tees that the cleaning ‘bots left for people to change into after workouts. Everyone in the tower had several sets, they were all color coordinated for their armor colors. Tony was ridiculously silly about that, and everyone wore them, so it made Tony happy.

Jessica grabbed the pale grey tee and purple pants. “One of these days, I feel like telling Tony Stark that my favorite color is, in fact, pink.”

Steve blinked. “It is?”

“No, but he’d make an even more ridiculous face than you are right now, so I might do it anyway,” Jessica admitted.

Steve shucked out of his sweaty, filthy workout clothes, and Jessica was only a little behind him, because she tended to wear skinny jeans, and she did not tend to appreciate Steve ripping them off her, unless it was a very special occassion.

Steve had the spray going full blast, boil-a-lobster, she slid in behind him, hand reaching around his hip.

“Seems like I should be doing you,” Steve said, almost apologized, and she gave him a little squeeze to stop that line of thinking.

“I’ve seen your refractory period, cowboy,” Jessica said. “You can do me a few times later. Let’s just rub one out and get you feeling a little less murdery.”

“So romantic,” Steve grumbled, laughing a little.

“You want romance, you got the wrong girl,” Jessica said. She got her hand around Steve’s girth -- he was so fucking thick, and even though she had long fingers for a woman, she really could not wrap her entire hand around it. But it was close enough, and she had a pretty good angle behind him. She stroked, up and down, twisting her palm to put pressure in just the right places.

“I think I got exactly the right girl,” Steve protested, and if he ever did replace Peggy in his heart with her, it was when their relationship was just like this, earthy and filthy and hot and sweaty and sexy. All the times he’d taken her to bed and all the times she’d cooped a feel under the dinner table with the entire family of Avengers. All the times he’d saved her, and all the times she’s saved him.

And if she couldn’t replace Peggy in his heart, well, it really didn’t matter, did it? Peggy was ninety some years old and on a good day, sometimes she’d recognize Steve. And sometimes she didn’t. Closure was overrated, and it wasn’t like Peggy Carter wasn’t a legend in her own right.

“You’re thinking too loud, sugar,” Steve said.

She twisted her hand again and Steve groaned, pushing into it, fucking up into her fist, his hips snapping powerfully.

She nipped at his back, licking along his spine and then nuzzling right between his shoulder blades, and then Steve was coming against her hand, dick pulsing against her palm.

“Sometimes I think you’re going to be like Superman and come bullets right through the wall or something.”

Steve cracked an eyelid open reluctantly and looked at the tiles. “Nope, still no speed of light orgasms,” he reported.

“Well, that’s good,” Jessica said. “Feel better?”

“A little more relaxed,” Steve said. “Give me a second, I’ll--”

“Give me my turn?”

“Yeah, that.”

#jbbKinktober2020 #communal kitchen au #Steve Rogers/Jessica Jones #lemons

16 notes · View notes

go-redgirl · 4 years ago

Photo

GOP wrestles with role of culture wars in party's future

Court: Black man enslaved by restaurant manager should be awarded over…

Marjorie Taylor Greene Roasted for 'Loyalty to Trump' Tweet After Texas…

Republicans wrestling over the future of the party are debating whether to embrace the culture wars that helped former President Trump cement his popularity with the GOP base.

The internal rift, which involves congressional leaders and potential 2024 presidential contenders, comes as Republicans have struggled to dent President Biden's popularity and as they plot their strategy to win back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms.

While some in the GOP are eager to double down on Trump's brand of populism, others argue the party needs to return to its roots.

"I think that the long-term future of the Republican Party requires it to be some version of the traditional Republican Party: strong on national security, low taxes, limited government, limited regulation and in the broadest sense of the word, pro-business," said Vin Weber, a Republican strategist, who espouses the more traditionalist party.

But he also acknowledged, "We're at a moment when cultural issues are pushing everything else aside."

"There's no escaping that cultural issues are dominating," Weber said.

Issues that have dominated the conservative mediasphere in recent weeks include Major League Baseball's decision to pull the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of Georgia's new voting law; the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial; a company halting publication of certain Dr. Seuss books due to racist imagery; and a false report that the Biden administration would limit meat consumption as part of its fight against climate change.

The vanguard pushing the GOP to become more populist in Trump's image include Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) - two potential 2024 presidential candidates - who say they will no longer accept corporate PAC contributions.

"Starting today, I no longer accept money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues to do the same. For too long, Republicans have allowed the left & their big-business allies to attack our values & ship jobs overseas with no response. No more," Cruz tweeted on Wednesday.

That prompted an enthusiastic response from Hawley, who retweeted Cruz the following day.

"Yes! Corporate America has put Americans last. They ship our jobs to China, mock middle America's way of life, try to control our speech and run our lives," Hawley wrote. "It's time we stood up to them. I won't take corporate PAC donations & I'll fight to break up their monopoly power."

The bashing of corporations is striking a discordant tone with other Republicans at a time when they're trying to marshal a unified defense against Biden's plan to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from 21 percent, to pay for his infrastructure agenda.

"It's repudiating a segment of the American economy and the American electorate that has traditionally been very loyal to the Republicans. It's an amazing example of ideological shapeshifting to wage war along cultural lines," said Ross K. Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University and a former Senate fellow.

Trump has yet to say whether he will run for president again in 2024, but on Thursday he said that if he did he would "certainly" consider Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as a running mate. DeSantis is a staunch conservative and longtime Trump ally.

Video: Full Panel: Biden promotes progressive agenda in divided Washington (NBC News)

PauseAd 00:09 - up next "Full Panel: Biden promotes progressive agenda in divided Washington"Loaded: 100.00%Unmute0Full Panel: Biden promotes progressive agenda in divided Washington

The competing GOP approaches in the post-Trump era are also reflected in the starkly different styles of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a strong defender of traditional Republicanism, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who has tied himself more to Trump's brand of conservatism.

McConnell hasn't spoken to Trump since mid-December and denounced the former president's role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Since then, he has rarely invoked Trump by name.

McCarthy, by contrast, visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort shortly after he left office and is now working closely with him ahead of the midterm elections.

Trump on Thursday renewed his call for Senate Republicans to replace McConnell as their leader, and promised to be a force in the midterms, citing his work with McCarthy.

But the lines in the internal debate over culture wars are fluid. McConnell joined in the tough talk directed at corporate America last month when he warned CEOs to "stay out of politics." He later backpedaled after being pressed on his longtime advocacy of allowing companies to spend freely on political campaigns.

More recently, McConnell led more than three dozen Senate Republicans in calling for the Education Department to abandon plans of offering grants to schools that include The New York Times's "1619 Project," which reframes U.S. history around the arrival of the first slave ship, in their curriculum.

"This is a time to strengthen the teaching of civics and American history in our schools. Instead, your Proposed Priorities double down on divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda," the GOP senators wrote last week in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

Baker said Republicans see cultural hot-button issues as more effective in generating attention than attacking Biden, who has maintained strong approval ratings since taking office.

A Gallup poll released in April showed Biden's approval at 57 percent - 16 percentage points higher than Trump's numbers at the same point in his presidency.

"They realize that Biden himself isn't a very good target. But the one thing they can get the blood boiling with are cultural issues: the 1619 Project, Black history, Black Lives Matter," Baker said of Republicans.

Some Republicans want their party to focus less on those topics and more on the issues that unified Republicans before Trump: lower taxes, smaller government, deregulation and a strong national defense.

"I know there are these cultural issues ... that get people very worked up and exercised but I think that there's plenty on the policy agenda, lots of ammunition to debate and a lot of contrasts to draw," said Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.). "You can get distracted."

Thune called the false claims about Biden planning to ban Fourth of July burgers and similar blowups "a distraction."

With Biden looking to spend $4.1 trillion on infrastructure, raise taxes and pull troops out of Afghanistan, Thune sees a prime opportunity for Republicans to get back to what had long been their bread-and-butter issues.

"The public historically, at least, has trusted us on national security issues, I think with good reason. And I think that will continue to be a strong issue for us," said Thune. "The economic cluster of issues, taxes and spending will also be grist for a very robust debate about the future of the country."

Meanwhile, some GOP lawmakers are worried that even the party's base isn't concerned about increased government spending and the price tags on Biden's infrastructure proposals, which are shaping up to cost $4.1 trillion.

The U.S. added nearly $8 trillion to the federal debt during Trump's four years in office and the Republican Party's base is now less concerned about the deficit than it was during former President Obama's first two years in office, when the Tea Party was on the ascent.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who was the GOP presidential nominee in 2012, indicated he would prefer Republicans return to what he considered their traditional strengths.

"I'm not going to criticize other Republicans [and] the issues they tend to focus on. For me, the amount of our debt has been a concern and continues to be and I'm going to continue battling on that front," he said when asked about the recent penchant for fellow Republicans to focus on the culture wars.

Romney said traditional Republican positions on taxes, fiscal responsibility and foreign policy "are right for our economy and right for our future and will return, hopefully, to the centerpiece of our party."

1 note · View note