#freedom mode

[stinkek]

I just learned the hard way that if I build a base, DON'T power it up, enter it and die soon after, I still respawn in this base

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

I'm coming to Minneapolis! This Sunday (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Enshittification isn't merely a form of rent-seeking – it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers – everyone from grocers to oil companies – but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in algorithmic wage discrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

I call this process "twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Social media platforms are compulsive twiddlers. They use endless variation to lure in – and then lock in – publishers, with the goal of converting these standalone businesses into commodity suppliers who are dependent on the platform, who can then be charged rent to reach the users who asked to hear from them.

Facebook designed this playbook. First, it lured in end-users by promising them a good deal: "Unlike Myspace, which spies on you from asshole to appetite, Facebook is a privacy-respecting site that will never, ever spy on you. Simply sign up, tell us everyone who matters to you, and we'll populate a feed with everything they post for public consumption":

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876

The users came, and locked themselves in: when people gather in social spaces, they inadvertently take one another hostage. You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked you. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the collective action problem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie. Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your own site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer. As with gig workers, the digital flexibility of Facebook gave it lots of leeway here. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were being asked to post were a substitute for visiting their sites – and not an enticement – and drew down their posting to Facebook.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces. Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publishers in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "clickbait" and "malicious links"). Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's Danegeld to reach them. A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they want to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll pay to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

One reason this gambit worked so well is that it was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

For example, Facebook's product manager for its "photos" product wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to lay out a strategy of enticing users into uploading valuable family photos to the platform in order to "make switching costs very high for users," who would have to throw away their precious memories as the price for leaving Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The platforms' patience paid off. Their slow ratchets operated so subtly that we barely noticed the squeeze, and when we did, they relaxed the pressure until we were lulled back into complacency. Long cons require a lot of prefrontal cortex, the executive function to exercise patience and restraint.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man who seems to have been born without a prefrontal cortex, who has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated that he lacks any restraint, patience or planning. Elon Musk's prefrontal cortical deficit resulted in his being forced to buy Twitter, and his every action since has betrayed an even graver inability to stop tripping over his own dick.

Where Zuckerberg played enshittification as a long game, Musk is bent on speedrunning it. He doesn't slice his users up with a subtle scalpel, he hacks away at them with a hatchet.

Musk inaugurated his reign by nonconsensually flipping every user to an algorithmic feed which was crammed with ads and posts from "verified" users whose blue ticks verified solely that they had $8 ($11 for iOS users). Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.

Then came the squeeze on publishers. Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or shadowbanning their content unless they paid.

(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)

Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:

https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/

Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay. Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/05/x-twitter-strips-headlines-new-links-why-elon-musk

Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away." Publishers were advised to "post content in long form on this platform":

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/111183068362793821

Where a canny enshittifier would have gestured at a gaslighting explanation ("we're shadowbanning posts with links because they might be malicious"), Musk busts out the motto of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All this has the effect of highlighting just how little residual value there is on the platform for publishers, and tempts them to bolt for the exits. Six months ago, NPR lost all patience with Musk's shenanigans, and quit the service. Half a year later, they've revealed how low the switching cost for a major news outlet that leaves Twitter really are: NPR's traffic, post-Twitter, has declined by less than a single percentage point:

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

NPR's Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk's enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR's ability to reach those users to a negligible level. The 8.7 million number was an illusion, a shell game Musk played on publishers like NPR in a bid to get them to buy a five-figure iridium checkmark or even a six-figure titanium one.

On Twitter, the true number of followers you have is effectively zero – not because Twitter users haven't explicitly instructed the service to show them your posts, but because every post in their feeds that they want to see is a post that no one can be charged to show them.

I've experienced this myself. Three and a half years ago, I left Boing Boing and started pluralistic.net, my cross-platform, open access, surveillance-free, daily newsletter and blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

Boing Boing had the good fortune to have attracted a sizable audience before the advent of siloed platforms, and a large portion of that audience came to the site directly, rather than following us on social media. I knew that, starting a new platform from scratch, I wouldn't have that luxury. My audience would come from social media, and it would be up to me to convert readers into people who followed me on platforms I controlled – where neither they nor I could be held to ransom.

I embraced a strategy called POSSE: Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a WordPress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms – mostly social media – with links back to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There are a lot of automated tools to help you with this, but the platforms have gone to great lengths to break or neuter them. Musk's attack on Twitter's legendarily flexible and powerful API killed every automation tool that might help with this. I was lucky enough to have a reader – Loren Kohnfelder – who coded me some python scripts that automate much of the process, but POSSE remains a very labor-intensive and error-prone methodology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

And of all the feeds I produce – email, RSS, Discourse, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon – none is as labor-intensive as Twitter's. It is an unforgiving medium to begin with, and Musk's drawdown of engineering support has made it wildly unreliable. Many's the time I've set up 20+ posts in a thread, only to have the browser tab reload itself and wipe out all my work.

But I stuck with Twitter, because I have a half-million followers, and to the extent that I reach them there, I can hope that they will follow the permalinks to Pluralistic proper and switch over to RSS, or email, or a daily visit to the blog.

But with each day, the case for using Twitter grows weaker. I get ten times as many replies and reposts on Mastodon, though my Mastodon follower count is a tenth the size of my (increasingly hypothetical) Twitter audience.

All this raises the question of what can or should be done about Twitter. One possible regulatory response would be to impose an "End-To-End" rule on the service, requiring that Twitter deliver posts from willing senders to willing receivers without interfering in them. End-To-end is the bedrock of the internet (one of its incarnations is Net Neutrality) and it's a proven counterenshittificatory force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Despite what you may have heard, "freedom of reach" is freedom of speech: when a platform interposes itself between willing speakers and their willing audiences, it arrogates to itself the power to control what we're allowed to say and who is allowed to hear us:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

We have a wide variety of tools to make a rule like this stick. For one thing, Musk's Twitter has violated innumerable laws and consent decrees in the US, Canada and the EU, which creates a space for regulators to impose "conduct remedies" on the company.

But there's also existing regulatory authorities, like the FTC's Section Five powers, which enable the agency to act against companies that engage in "unfair and deceptive" acts. When Twitter asks you who you want to hear from, then refuses to deliver their posts to you unless they pay a bribe, that's both "unfair and deceptive":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But that's only a stopgap. The problem with Twitter isn't that this important service is run by the wrong mercurial, mediocre billionaire: it's that hundreds of millions of people are at the mercy of any foolish corporate leader. While there's a short-term case for improving the platforms, our long-term strategy should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

To make that a reality, we could also impose a "Right To Exit" on the platforms. This would be an interoperability rule that would require Twitter to adopt Mastodon's approach to server-hopping: click a link to export the list of everyone who follows you on one server, click another link to upload that file to another server, and all your followers and followees are relocated to your new digs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

A Twitter with the Right To Exit would exert a powerful discipline even on the stunted self-regulatory centers of Elon Musk's brain. If he banned a reporter for publishing truthful coverage that cast him in a bad light, that reporter would have the legal right to move to another platform, and continue to reach the people who follow them on Twitter. Publishers aghast at having the headlines removed from their Twitter posts could go somewhere less slipshod and still reach the people who want to hear from them on Twitter.

And both Right To Exit and End-To-End satisfy the two prime tests for sound internet regulation: first, they are easy to administer. If you want to know whether Musk is permitting harassment on his platform, you have to agree on a definition of harassment, determine whether a given act meets that definition, and then investigate whether Twitter took reasonable steps to prevent it.

By contrast, administering End-To-End merely requires that you post something and see if your followers receive it. Administering Right To Exit is as simple as saying, "OK, Twitter, I know you say you gave Cory his follower and followee file, but he says he never got it. Just send him another copy, and this time, CC the regulator so we can verify that it arrived."

Beyond administration, there's the cost of compliance. Requiring Twitter to police its users' conduct also requires it to hire an army of moderators – something that Elon Musk might be able to afford, but community-supported, small federated servers couldn't. A tech regulation can easily become a barrier to entry, blocking better competitors who might replace the company whose conduct spurred the regulation in the first place.

End-to-End does not present this kind of barrier. The default state for a social media platform is to deliver posts from accounts to their followers. Interfering with End-To-End costs more than delivering the messages users want to have. Likewise, a Right To Exit is a solved problem, built into the open Mastodon protocol, itself built atop the open ActivityPub standard.

It's not just Twitter. Every platform is consuming itself in an orgy of enshittification. This is the Great Enshittening, a moment of universal, end-stage platform decay. As the platforms burn, calls to address the fires grow louder and harder for policymakers to resist. But not all solutions to platform decay are created equal. Some solutions will perversely enshrine the dominance of platforms, help make them both too big to fail and too big to jail.

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: JD Lasica (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_%283018710552%29.jpg

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

[gundamfight]

[defiledtomb]

I got so scared of putting myself out there but. Let me tell you, even if you hit a few snags. It is so fucking worth it

[sunnywalnut]

GUESS WHAT!!

YOU CAN CLICK ALL THESE BUTTONS TWICE IN ONE DAY!!

JUST DO IT ONCE THROUGH YOUR REGULAR GOOGLE ACCOUNT, THEN ONCE MORE WHILE IN INCOGNITO MODE ON CHROME!!

I TRIED IT!!! IT'S TRUE!!

IT'S REALLY THAT EASY!!

PLUS IF YOU HAVE MULTIPLE GOOGLE ACCOUNTS, WELL YOU'RE IN LUCK, BOYO!!

YOU CAN DO IT THROUGH EACH SINGLE ONE OF YOUR ACCOUNTS AS WELL!!

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!!

AND FOR THE LOW LOW PRICE OF FIVE MERE SECONDS OF YOUR SCREEN TIME, YOU CAN SAVE A LIFE WITH THE COUNTLESS VETTED GOFUNDMES THAT CAN ALSO BE FOUND IN MY REBLOGS!! SIMPLY JUST SEARCH FOR "PALESTINE GMF" OR "PALESTINIAN GOFUNDME" ON MY BLOG PAGE!!!

WHOAAA!!!

AIN'T THAT WHACKY???

GO FORTH, MY FRIENDS!!

AND GO COLLECT THEM ALL!!!! :D

(Please check tags for context)

[brittie-frog]

UPDATED Run through of all the demon lore on Tina's 14 hour stream (and some funny moments and only half timstamped because im lazy and doing this for the second time):

- Tina flew for the first time confused, questioned if she was a god and pretended to be an angel to Etoiles

8:10:40 - started flying again and put on an echo-y voice and then a deep voice as she threatened Etoiles for diamonds but still confused why she could fly

- recklessly flying around and most times the echo voice was put on (demon voice??)

(8:35:00 Troubleshooting her demon voice and also states that apparently the flying wasn't planned and she has no clue whats happening)

8:39:40 - let the flying get to her head in that she'll be stronger and better than everyone else because she "forgot how good it feels" to be herself

(angel wings are faster than demon wings apparently)

- flew back to her house - insulting Cellbit's house and threatening him and being possessive of Bagi before realising how possessive she was being and decided not to be demon mode anymore

(Asked the updates admin not to tell others so she could keep the flying because she's a good guy)

(8:54-10:04 break of making a gift box for Empanada and just hanging around)

10:04:50 - she lost empanada and began to fly around and use the demon voice to find her and when Em questioned her flying Tina tried to move the situation on

10:18:35 - suddenly went into cinematic mode where it darkens on top and bottom with a bright spot in the middle in the shape of an eye then it kept flicking on and off and she promised not to do "it" again

- "No watchers necessary" the fuck does that mean

- a ring of fire started to form around her and Em and she begins to threaten the air and say she's has no intention of going home

- shouting that she shouldn't have spread her wings but she's not going home - is being threatened for flying and they've come to drag her back to hell as punishment

- got given a key called "you" and belives that the threat was also extended to the people she loves (Em and Bagi) so wants them to be fully protected

- mentions she has wings and is given a teared feather

- em is excited and wants to go flying but apparently its a "great sin" that comes with trauma and baggage

- "they don't like my type of flying, birds only I guess" hell linked to the federation?? Evil cuca??

- mouse can be told and Tina wants her there but BBH is a bottom of the barrel/last option because she gets annoyed by him (doesn't know if mouse fell or was born demon)

- it's a last ditch option to turn Em into a demon to survive but Tina doesn't know how to do that (if she fails to save Em "God so help [her]")

- giant fire appears on top of the hill and she comments how unforgiving and cruel they are because she's been the best (out of the demons??) And she's promised not to do it again but they're still taunting her

- chat and Tina get jump scared by an enderman

- doesn't want Em to tell Bagi but she will tell her she's a demon in either a month, year or century because she's surely awake or alive at somepoint

10:52:50 - Tina calls for a pause/cut so she can eat

10:56:56- got the shit scared out of her by the sudden appearance of a vat of acid in the lake (Em couldn't see but heard the burning)

(Em got Bad Omen for an hour and 30 and Tina fished up neptunium)

11:08:20 - a tree is lit on fire across the water and Em tells tina after it finishes but it starts again so she can see

- cinematic mode comes back and she begins to complain in demon voice to the "big guy downstairs" and doesn't know what the eye shape means questioning whether they're looking through her eyes

("Spending my Saturday night with my child" it's Thursday morning???)

- fire appears on the land across from the dock with a floating crown that then disappears before the fire

- quickly flies up a bit before settling and saying "interesting" - testing if there is immediate punishment??

11:17:42 - got the achievement "Who's da New King of Hell?" With an image of the crown from before and the step backwards and be lit on fire and tells the "dumb bitches" that she's not coming back

(Ben_Fox_ that was not the time but it was funny as fuck and you had an excuse)

- doesn't want Em to hang out with Mouse too much now - maybe doesn't know if mouse would also be contacted and how she would react?? Saving Em from more danger??

(Tina's scared that her lore could hurt Em and it can't happen because she only has one life)

11:41:15 - Em's favourite creature is a moloch and since she likes fire Tina wonders if she can live with her (in hell??? She'll have to eventually go back??)

11:50:11 - Tina mentions that Em "could be happy there" while she's staring at her Moloch pet/child - maybe if she took Em to hell she'd be safe than in the overworld

11:56:39 - tina tells Em to kill the bees' bloodline and praises her for her bloodlust and then uses her calm demonic voice to call her over to start fishing (the demon power is going to her head and its scaring her child...)

- Tina is now incredibly paranoid about everything

12:24:03 - Em disappeared and Tina immediately panicked and used her demon voice (but she just went to name her moloch Aelia) and then flew up a little - possibly to see if they would come back/she would be punished??

- started accidentally flying again while cutting trees but because nothing happened she continued to because it was easier

12:38:16 - Em tells Tina about her accidental trip to the Nether and Tina tells her not to go again because she doesn't want her to get hurt and she get get stronger if she hangs out with Uncle Bad a bit

(When Empanada goes off to put torches around Tina begins playing No More Birthdays by Sophie May and has canonically said this is how q!Tina feels about Em)

- was using her demon voice to compliment Em but then was messing around with the settings to make it high pitched

(Tina wants a lasso - take her daughter flying??? Please!!)

13:17:11 - realised that she had Speed for like 10 seconds and she doesn't know whether it's her "demon-like reflexes" or the pie but she didn't get it before so definitely demon shit

13:18:01 - accidentally flies again and then in demon voices says she's "changing" - return of her demon powers she can no longer suppress!!

(13:21:37 Met the English Bunny (his language was set to Portuguese, Xaninho/Agent 18??) That Em couldn't see and later named him Donny/Don-Don/Ronny)

13:27:55/13:30:47 - told Donny that the soul lanterns in her house weren't oil but lost souls she had collected but their not the ones of the people she's killed and used her demon voice scaring them

(Em nodding along to Tina talking about Ronny's appearance while not being able to see them and then proceed to fake sleep)

13:43:44 - Ronny finds the comments about fire and souls concerning so he questions the soul lanterns more and Tina explains they're not necessarily dead people but wandering souls kind of like catching fireflies

(Ronny tries to start shit between Tina and Bagi over the Giraffe and Tina threatens with her demon voice and is told to calm down)

14:10:48 - despite saying multiple times that she needs to only use her flying when needed she starts flying around Em again and then when Em gets her horse put Tina starts flying a few times to catch up/accidentally (really only stopping because Foolish was in chat)

[champagnemoon]

Yall be asking me questions about your men but there’s only ever two choices… go demon mode to get the change you want if you care that much or dump them and move on lmaoooo

[sixpossumsinaclownsuit]

Remember kiddos, polygamy and polyamory was only demonized for four core reasons:

Tw: homophobia, sexism, religious commentary, political commentary, oppression

1.) America wanted more taxes

Part of the legal institutionalization of marriage is that there is tax benefits for the individual parties when they get married, and financial ties/power is attorney between married people. It becomes messy when these ties extend to multiple people/marriages and the I*RS wants they tax money, and America would rather just make an entire way of life illegal than make laws and systems that accommodate people. See point #4 for more on that

2.) Puritan culture (aka thinly veiled sexism)

Puritan culture relies heavily on systems of control that villainize sex and women (that's a whole other conversation but I won't digress), and lots of marriages/polygamous marriages having sex with each other is obviously bad bad bad!! Hard to control!! Save the defenseless women from their pimp husbands! Orgies, the devil's work! And...

3.) Homophobia

Good god, women being in marriages together! Married to a man, but what if these women end up by being married to each other by extension! And having sex with each other! And what if a woman marries more than one man! Would these men become inferior to their wives? Would one of these husbands be less dominant than another? Would the men function in these complex marriages like a woman?! Disgusting! That's gay (derogatory!) Would these husbands be having sex with each other? But that's gay and gay is bad! Sex is bad! God, purge these sinners of their Sodomy!

(Surprise surprise, homophobia has very little to do with actual gay people and has everything to do with puritan culture, control, sexism and the demonization of sex, and points two and three are actually the same thing)

4.) Christian nationalism

Polygamy and nonmonogamy is normalized and integrated with several non-Christian and alternative Christian cultures going back thousands of years, like Islam, Mormonism, feudal Japanese/samurai cultures, Hinduism, several Native American cultures, etc... even in the Bible in Judeo-Christian history and biblical era cultures nonmonogamy was normalized. Banning nonmonogamy in America is banning the right to engage in non-christian religious rite and practice. It's only something criminal to post-puritan Christians and those beliefs becoming law, regardless of other religious beliefs and practices also existing in America, is the unseparation of church and state.

So before you tell a polyamorous person "oh that's cheating with permission" or "I could NEVER do that," or "I love my partner too much to do that/cheat like that," remember that these are the institutions and the propaganda you're upholding with your judgement. Supporting/ being kind about polyamory is religious tolerance, and biting your thumb at the I*RS.

Tl:dr, the dissolution of separating of church and state, puritan culture and the sexism/homophobia associated with puritan culture is why nonmonogamy is demonized and why polygamy is illegal in America.

Tone indication/post intention: satirical and exaggerated tones criticizing longstanding institutions of oppression with the intent to explain why judging, hating or criticizing nonmonogamous practices is oppressive and a result of propaganda. This post is not intended to persuade people who practice monogamy to practice nonmonogamy instead or to demonize monogamy. It is intended to advocate for breaking the stigma around nonmonogamy.

[transingthoseformers]

Hi, I just want to ask about your Shards of Star Au: En tu Brutus, what's your opinion on Prime Megatron?

Wow it's been a while since that au, and I had to scroll a decent while back to puzzle it out more again

Anyway baseline tfp Megatron a big bag of dicks in both that au and canon, but I fucking LOVE his design and personality and backstory and especially his design, and in fanon I've been won over to several different interpretations of his character. I think he's the character I'm most notorious for simping for, he's the first character who shows up in my suggested tags.

His design is gorgeous, I see so many beautiful fancam edits for him, the art is amazing, he can be such an interesting character to put in Situations™️, I think he's plain old badass for a villain. He's fascinating to me

[lesbiangiratina]

Only listened a couple times so far but aba’s new theme is soooo good they made another lgbt anthem just not on purpose this time

[thekimspoblog]

#Goals

[transannabeth]

hi. for people who saw gatsby: an american myth. do you remember mckee asking nick for lunch. and then gatsby in like the next scene inviting nick for lunch. because i remember.

[happywow]

bug cycle aka HAARP in clouds

take matters into your own hands and change the cycle yourself

[gundamfight]

[glittergroovy]

Red Red Red • Fiona Apple

[epopoiia-leblog]

Un coup de feu

Il était une fois un coup de feu. La petite fille sursauta, sa main qu’elle tenait fermée dans celle de sa mère s'y agrippa d'autant plus fort. Les gens autour d’elles criaient et s'éparpillaient dans tous les sens, sous la fumée qui montait et les bombes lacrymogènes que lançaient les policiers. Mais elle n’eut pas le temps de contempler plus longtemps ce spectacle car sa maman se mit elle aussi à courir et força ses petites jambes à la suivre en la tirant par le bras. Elles ne s’arrêtèrent qu’une fois qu’elles furent sûres d’être à l'abri du mouvement de foule et de la rue enflammée. Dans le petit recoin où elles s’étaient réfugiées, elles pouvaient encore entendre les hommes crier et sentir l’odeur de fumée qui irritait leurs narines. Serrant sa fille fort dans ses bras, la jeune mère se força à retenir ses larmes de rage et de désespoir. Tant de violence et d’agressivité, une répression folle et incriminante alors qu’ils n’avaient fait que manifester pour leurs droits. Pourtant leur colère était plus que légitime. N’avaient-ils pas le droit de se sentir offensés quand on continuait à vouloir les payer au lance-pierre alors qu’ils subissaient comme tout le monde les conséquences de l’inflation ? alors qu’ils passaient leurs journées à trimer sur leurs machines sans aucune reconnaissance et sans jamais arriver à répondre aux besoins de leur famille ? Était-ce seulement humain d’être traité ainsi ? Était-ce juste ? Comment les usines qui les employaient, comment toutes ces entreprises qui profitaient de leur main-d'œuvre pouvaient-elles continuer à se regarder en face ? La jeune mère était profondément consternée face à toutes ces injustices qui rendaient les hommes inégaux et faisaient du malheur des uns le bonheur des autres. Démunie, les yeux levés vers le ciel, si calme face à la fureur de la Terre, elle s’essaya à une prière. Pour sa petite fille, elle ne pouvait s’avouer vaincue, ni croire que le monde ne finirait pas par changer. La vie ne pouvait être un effondrement permanent, il y avait forcément un moment où la roue finirait par tourner.