#i still think they are women i also think they are still white and still think they have some masculine invincibility to criticism

[daddyd0nt]

I can be patient with an afab person who doesn’t realize she’s complicit in their own oppression I have no patience or civility for Amab people who want me to accept a less safe world to spare their feelings and validate them. I never said the BIGGEST threat to afab people was trans women but that does not mean they don’t still pose a threat. There is no way to tell for sure who is a “good one” and who is a predator and like I said the safety of even one single woman on the planet earth is not worth risking to spare Amab feelings or be “fair”. Patriarchy isn’t fair. The fact that I can get pregnant from rape and an Amab person couldn’t isn’t fair. The fact that no matter how I present I won’t be safe but an Amab person couldn’t isn’t always take off the dress and cut their hair and regain their full Amab privilege if things get too scary/hard isn’t fair. I’m not obligated to be fair, I’m trying to be SAFE. Sad Amab people even devistated Amab people is a small price to pay for afab physical safety. True biological sex is 100% real, GENDER is fake/made up/a construct.

My anger and fear is not misdirected, all Amab people are privileged and all afab people are oppressed under patriarchy regardless of how you identify. You might not be more privileged than cis AMABs but you still have privilege over afab people. Our movements can even work together on 99% of issues but I will not be spoken over by an oppressor trying to infiltrate afab safe spaces. Birth sex privilege is immutable the fact that you experience oppression for not being cis does not mean you face the same oppression AFABs of any gender face.

Make. Your. Own. Spaces. Afab people had to fight for ours drop the entitlement and do a single step of your own fucking legwork. Also SA statistics across the board show Amab people of any gender commit 96% of sex crimes. Also the statistic for violence against Amab trans people shows when dissected that almost all trans women killed are killed by cis men and most of them are full service sex workers of color, white non-FSSW actually have a significantly lower rate of attack than cis women with the same qualifiers.

Womanhood is not for Amab people who “failed out of” manhood that’s disgusting to say and shows you think of afab people as inferior. Women are not failed men. And what you described is still literally male socialization afab people aren’t privileged to get to cry or do girly things we are allowed to do those things because they are considered degrading/training for subservience and afab people are considered weak by default. Also boo hoo you got called some names I was raped for the first time before I was out of diapers and grew up being called a “fat dyke” for not fitting into patriarchal femininity again the hardship u faced for not being cis is not worse than what afab people face for being afab let alone if you are non-cis on top of it.

Are you delusional about how bottom surgery works? A trans man can’t impregnate me. Putting birth sex markers on ID would be a perfectly easy solution.

Trans women are a risk to AFABs in afab prisons. I don’t care what happens to them in Amab prisons, a single afab person put at risk to protect an Amab one is patriarchal and unacceptable. If you don’t like how ur treated in Amab prisons once again demand for and fight for your own spaces like afab people did. The source on the sex crimes statistic was a 2018 MOJ study showing half of trans Amab prisoners had committed one or more sex crimes. Studies behind The Equality Act of 2010 came to the same conclusion.

Ellen is a narcissistic oligarch with ties to human trafficking so of course no right minded political activist wanted to back her but this literally isn’t about gay women, gay AFABs pose no statistical threat to other AFABs in these spaces? But yeah like I said all these spaces started integrated and had to be made separate because of the high rates at which Amab people sexually abused afab ones. I’m not talking about capitalism or the rich or the PIC I’m talking specifically about patriarchy that is the axis this conversation is about idgaf what other privileges you don’t have and if being told you don’t belong in a space you don’t belong in causes you to manipulatively threaten suicide you need to be in a hospital until you sort that out and can cope with a world that isn’t specifically catered to your validation at any cost to more marginalized people.

IDGAF who is “at bat” for feminism supporting a movement does not mean entitlement you to the resources of that movement that would be like me complaining that the NAACP doesn’t cater to me and should because I’m anti-racist. Once again your problem is entitlement. Idgaf about “outnumbering” you literally should not be extracting a single resource from the feminist movement to serve Amab people. If you actually support feminism you will continue to support it despite this.

Gender oppression does exist as an extension of the intersection of patriarchy and homophobia.

“You are like the white people who harassed Ruby Bridges or the cops at stonewall” could you be any more self important or obsessed with making yourself the victim? You are not Ruby Bridges for telling afab people we should sacrifice our physical safety to indulge your feelings/identity expression. You are a whole-ass entire AMAB oppressor throwing a tantrum about Afab people prioritizing our physical safety over your emotions. You are not the ally you think you are.

"OP is a terf" is a thought-terminating cliche meant to keep you from questioning the status quo and keep you afraid of being labeled a heretic should you come to your own conclusions about anything.

[hemipenal-system]

anyway if you're like me and you are going to keep shinigami eyes (at least for a bit longer):

some people are manually flagged but a lot aren't, they're just subject to public opinion afaik. you are the public

go in and start changing people's markings. someone says some shit about trans men or trans women or intersex people? take their green away. make em white names again. you can do that

someone's doing some good allyship and promoting community solidarity and sharing resources, but they have a white name? make them green! you can do that too!

everyone you see on red you should look at. sometimes they're a terf and sometimes they're a random person who posted intersex stuff. if they're a terf leave them obviously (terfs aint got no friends lol) but if they're obviously a trans person who got flagged for advocating for transmascs or intersex people, go ahead and un-red them

there's really two outcomes here:

the devs realize this is pissing people off and stop doing it

the devs do not, and double down on this shit and start manually changing people. i think this one is a bit more likely myself, but we can still make it absolutely hellish for them to have to flag everyone themselves and *then* jump ship

you should also go to the extension page for shinigami eyes in your browser and leave a one star review, detailing why you're doing so and that you just want the developers to stop manually flagging trans people who disagree with them

[marzipanandminutiae]

would you have any reading suggestions to learn more about the earrings are evil era??? I've never heard of that aspect of fashion history and I am curious

Oh man, it was wild

you saw the first stirrings of it in the 1890s, when you started to get (mostly white and middle-to-upper-class) proto-feminists arguing that ear piercing was barbaric- keep an eye on the racist undertones there; they will come up again-and forcing women to suffer for fashion. I cannot emphasize enough that, until that point, ear piercing had been pretty much normal for this race/class/gender group. For centuries. You see criticism of the practice here and there, but nothing that really stuck.

The objections slowly increased until roughly the mid-1920s, when everything reached a tipping point and pierced ears became largely taboo for most white Americans and Brits of northern/western European descent. If that sounds HIGHLY specific, it is- communities from southern and sometimes eastern Europe retained cultural practices of ear piercing, to the point where it was often used as a point against them by mainstream society. It was also associated with Latino people, Black people, and the Romani, which. Yeah. I don't need to tell you how that went down.

It also developed associations with sexual immorality and/or backwards thinking. One newspaper letter I read came from a teen girl in the 1940s, wondering why she shouldn't pierce her ears if her very respectable grandmother had piercings. The response was something like "well, they did all sorts of things in the Bad Old Days that we shouldn't do now." True in many ways, or course, but...piercing your ears? That's the hill culture decided to die on as far as antiquated behavior that we should leave behind? Apparently yes.

Earrings themselves never went out of style, which led to the birth of clip-ons and screwbacks. Ironic that the "don't surfer for fashion" crowd was so eager to embrace screwing tiny vices onto your ears, but there we are. My own mother (born 1953) remembers her mother (born 1926) always taking off her screwback earrings immediately after getting home from a party, literally in the foyer of their house the second the door shut. There had been adaptations for unpierced ears before- Little Women, published in 1868, describes Meg March hanging earrings from a flesh-colored silk ribbon tied around the base of her ear -but they'd never caught on like this before.

However, the pendulum was soon to swing back. After just 40 years of Piercing Panic, in the 1960s, girls began piercing their ears again in droves. As piercing moved from the slumber party or summer camp back to the professional jewelers whose families had been early professional piercers in the 19th century- and to befuddled doctors who had no idea what they were doing yet still received piercing requests -cultural commentators had no idea what to make of it. Some decried the new trend while most took an air of bemused neutrality. My personal favorite article expressed surprise that "Space Age misses" were adopting these "Victorian traditions."

(In 1965, my grandmother took Mom to the anesthesiologist down the street who was offering to pierce his young daughter's friends gratis, and got it done. My grandfather had strongly disapproved of the idea, but in the end it took him a week to notice the new earrings.)

As to sources...honestly, I've just gone to Google Books, specified a time frame, and typed in "ear piercing," "pierced ears," "pierce ears," etc. Tons of primary sources at your fingertips, though I'm not always great about documenting or saving what I find. There's not much written about it formally, I've found- no books or scholarly studies. It may just be too close in history to attract much academic attention, though I find it fascinating.

This little blip where something that's been normal for most of western history suddenly became taboo for a hot second.

Also my ear piercings just turned 20 five days ago, commemorating the date that I was taken with much ceremony to Piercing Pagoda (and that horrible gun; it's a wonder I didn't get keloids) to get me out from underfoot while the Thanksgiving feast was being made. Grandma got hers pierced on the same day, at age 78. Happy Birthday, Marzi's ear piercings!

[dayas]

This post contains spoilers for Wicked (2024) and the Broadway musical!

A word on Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in Wicked: Phenomenal.

In regards to the critique that she plays her too timidly: in my opinion, she plays her exactly as she is meant to be played. Watching Elphaba navigate Shiz University was so clearly a parallel to how Black women have to operate in Predominantly White spaces. Every single time her powers went out of whack, she was labeled as dangerous, and at the end, the Wizard and Madame Morrible immediately painted her out to be monstrous, vicious, and angry. Seeing her poster produced a visceral reaction in me — not because it was terrifying, but because it reminded me of those old fashioned racist posters 💀 which! Isn’t a bad thing, I think it speaks to the larger message of making Elphaba out to be the Wicked Witch, despite her only crimes at that point (that we know about) being attempted Animal Liberation and further Civil Rights movements. To me, watching Elphaba at Shiz was watching another Black woman try to fit in despite knowing she will never truly be like those around her, and to not draw any more of their ire and to not fly off the handle and be labeled as ‘angry’ or further outcast. When she sings I’m Not That Girl, it hits harder having been in that position and truly understanding what it means to not be desired or considered pretty or beautiful by anyone around you while your friends are. Honestly, it adds more in my opinion. I think Cynthia Erivo’s performance carried an excellent nuance that speaks specifically to Black women and our experiences. While it is perfectly okay to have a differing opinion, it would be a major disservice to overlook that very intentional lens painted by the film. As many have noted, having Elphaba be played by a Black woman adds so much depth to the character. It also shifts and adjusts how she presents herself when her Broadway and Book counterpart may be considered bolder (which begets a whole other essay on White Women, oppression Olympics politics, and needing elements of Whiteness to appear in oppressive narratives for the sake of ‘relatability’ despite them coming off, in my opinion, more disingenuous than not). All of this to say: Elphaba is still fierce in her own right. She stands up for herself, sets her own terms, but she does so within the realm of what is socially acceptable for a reason. I’m gonna need y’all to think a little more critically ❤️

[i-am-baechu]

✎ᝰ. I Feel Pretty ⁞ J. Jungkook

Summary: Jungkook takes Y/N to try on wedding dress as a surprise date

Caution: Profanities. smut warning. make outs, and Blowjob

Part of ‘ His Fan Girl universe

It's been awhile since Y/N saw Jungkook and she wouldn't say to him but she missed him. She knew he was busy with his release of his album and promoting but she missed her boyfriend fiancé. She still used to calling him her fiancé, it was crazy to think about it. She was just a normal person engaged to someone like Jungkook. It was just a crazy feeling that she didn't know how to explain.

Y/N was in her work office sending an email when there was a knock on the door. She glanced at her clock and raised her eyebrow, Who could that be? "Come in." When the door opened, she jumped out of her chair when she saw the familiar figure with roses in his hand, "Kookie.~"

He set the flowers on her cabinet and opened his arms, "Y/N."

She wrapped her arms around his waist as they went back and forth, "Jungkook, you didn't tell me you were coming over."

"I wanted to surprise you. It's been awhile since I've surprised you."

She pulled away and smiled at him, "I needed this surprise. I was getting bored at work if I'm being honest."

Jungkook raised his eyebrow at this, "You getting bored at work? That never happens."

She glanced at his eyebrow pricing and looked down at her shoes, "Anyone can get bored at something...it happens."

"Well, I'm here to save you."

She looked up with a confused look, "What are you talking about? I have two hours-"

"I already planned everything out." He grabbed her bag on the back of her door and glanced at her jacket on her chair, "Hurry and get your things. I have another surprise."

She shook her head at him but she couldn't stop the smile from forming, "Always full of surprises..."

The two quickly made their way through the private part of the office and headed to Jungkook's car. She sat in the car and looked at him with a curious look, "Where are we going?"

"That would ruined the surprise."

The car was filled with soft music as Y/N was drifting off and Jungkook couldn't help himself from glancing at her. She looked like an angel with the way sun hit her face. He was actually nervous about this date. Y/N has mentioned to him multiple times that she hated her body. Something he didn't understand. She was beautiful with every stretch mark or rolled, she was his everything. The most beautiful women (besides his mom).

He parked the car and shook her leg gently causing her to moan, "Babe, we're here."

Y/N wiped her eyes gently and let out a small yawn out, "That took a long time. Where are we?"

"For an appointment."

"An appointment?"

Here she was standing in the dressing room surround by white dresses that were so delicate that she was scared to touch them. Jungkook was right, this was a surprise. She touched each tulle skirt and she glanced at the mirror with a blank expression. She wasn't sure how she was feeling at the moment. It was a surreal moment to be in this room with fabric that symbolize love and so much more.

There was a knock on the door and a worker came in with one more dress with a smile, "I got a dress that I think you would like."

Y/N nodded her head with a nervous look, "I-I'm not looking for a dress...I guess-"

"Don't worry. He already told us that you just wanted to get a feel of wedding dresses. There's no pressure on picking out the right dress, have fun with it.

Y/N nodded her head and she looked at the dress with wide eyes, "Th-This is so pretty."

The worker smiled at this and nodded her head, "Jungkook picked this out for you. He thought you would like it."

Jungkook was wrong, she loved it. It was a embroidered tiered ballerina dress that had crystals throughout out the skirt. It was a simple dress but when you go closer to look, there was so much more. Her fingers gently touched the embroidered and looked up at the worker, "Can-Can I try it on? Also can you get Jungkook?"

The worker walked outside and smiled at Jungkook who was on his phone with a bored look, "Mr. Jeon."

He sat up and looked at the worker with a confused look, "Where's Y/N?"

"She wanted you to come inside the room."

"Is everything okay?"

"She wanted to show you the dress in private."

The worker took him into her room and when he opened the door, his world stopped. Y/N was smiling at herself in the mirror and she looked like she was having fun. Her fingers touching the edges of the skirt as she twirled in the mirror. She turned and saw Jungkook. She stopped twirling and smiled at him, "I feel pretty."

Jungkook closed the door and slowly walked towards her, "Say that again..."

She looked down at her socks and then back at him with a soft smile, "I feel pretty."

He slowly walked towards her and she stood there with a smile that screamed pure happiness. She looked up at him and he couldn't help myself with her innocent eyes. He leaned down and placed his lips on hers causing her eyes widened but she accepted the kiss. He slowly walked back to the mirror and picked her off from the ground. She wrapped her legs around his waist and let out a small moan when he kissed her neck, "Jung-Jungkook, we can't do this."

"I just want to focus on you. It will be quick." He gripped her ass through the dress and she bit her lip to stop her moan, "My wife feels pretty and I need her to remember this feeling."

He went back to her lips and she wrapped her arms around his neck. He couldn't stop himself, seeing her in this dress was making him go crazy. This was his future wife. No one told him that he would experience this feeling but he was glad he was figuring it out with Y/N.

He finally moved away from Y/N and he wished he had a camera. Her lips were shinning under the light of the dressing room and she was out of breathe, everything about this was perfect. He pushed some hair away from her face and kissed her forehead, "You have to be quiet."

"I-I...I can do that."

"Just pull my hair if you get uncomfortable."

He went on his knees and went under the skirt with a smirk on his lips. He pulled down the white cotton and was met with the wet mess that he created. He leaned forward and started sucking at her clit. Y/N leaned her head against the glass as she let out a small moan, "Jung-Jungkook."

He gripped her ass as he was sucking and licking her pussy, it was as if he was having his last meal. She gripped his hair as he continued, "W-We need to stop Jungkook. I-I can't get this dress dirty."

He lifted the skirt higher and blew on her warm hole making her shudder at the feeling, "Hold the skirt higher."

She nodded her head and now she was completely bare for anyone to see. Usually she would feel embarrassed but at this moment she couldn't care who saw her. She spread her legs apart and Jungkook couldn't help but smirk at her movement. He brought his right hand up and two fingers entered her as she shuddered at the feeling. He looked up at her and he didn't even notice that she took her scrunchie out of her hair and put it in her mouth. It was hot.

He moved his fingers at recored speed as his tongue continued to tease her clit. She felt her whole body get hot and the scrunchie fell from her mouth as she let out a louder moan, "Jung-Jungkook I'm about to come-Oh my g-god."

He took this as a sign and gently bit her clit making her eyes widen at the sudden joyable pain. Jungkook continued to do what he was doing but he was shocked to see Y/N like this. His only ever made her squirt once and he wasn't sure how he did that in the first place. He sucked all of the juice that he could suck up, this was everything he wanted.

Her knees buckled and he quickly moved to catch her. She was breathing heavily in his arms and Jungkook kissed the side of her head, "Baby, are you okay?"

She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a tired smile, "I-I'm o-okay."

He glanced down at the dress and smirked, "The dress is dry."

She let out a laugh and shook her head, "What came over you?"

"Seeing you in a wedding dress, I just can't wait to marry you Y/N."

They both locked eyes and they leaned forward for a quick kiss. She looked at the door and looked at him, "Jungkook, we need to leave...we can't get caught."

"He kissed her forehead, "We need to get dinner."

"I have to clean your mess."

Her face got red and she smacked his shoulder, "S-Shut up."

"Can you say it one more time?"

"Say what?"

He kissed her shoulder and smiled at her, "You know what."

"I feel pretty."

[quarterlifekitty]

I wanna hear more about huntsman!Konig, if you have anything

I’m always waiting for someone to ask about my fucked up little AUs

Also, why do I keep making reader inserts that lack social skills? No….. it couldn’t be….

König leads a fairly isolated existence. Far away from the village center— it’s hard to trap animals in a place that carries the noise of humankind. So, in that way, it’s not so different from where you lived before.

But god… it’s so much warmer. He always has a fire going in the colder months. Every piece of furniture is covered in pelts. And of course, sleeping in a bed next to him… it’s like a dream.

He delivers the pig heart in a jewelry box to your stepmother. It seems to satisfy her, for the moment. But König still makes his trips to town alone, even though you no longer wear the veil. Like stolen goods, he’s afraid you’ll be discovered and repossessed, or worse— coveted by an even more depraved thief.

He’s surprised by your utility. For a princess, you have quite the work ethic. Though you aren’t a tanner, you do know the bare basics of gutting an animal. Time in the kitchens, and all that. He discovered this by surprise when he set a rabbit down in the kitchen, walked away, and came back to you slicing a neat line down its soft belly. Maybe it’s because you dressed in white when he first saw you, but he thinks you look quite pretty with a splash of red on your hands.

In the original tale, Snow White’s on a journey through her own subconscious in a sort of coming of age tale. She’s accompanied by representations of ego as she reckons with her existence being placed in the context of gender— the conclusion to her journey is acceptance of the male “other”, of seeing and being seen by the opposite sex. At least, in some interpretations.

So I imagine you as Snow White in this scenario to be going through something similar— albeit at a slightly older stage.

König is the first man you’ve ever truly known besides your father. Many of the servants in the castle were women, those that were men were mostly older, and most all of them were forbidden from speaking anything more than cordial necessities to you.

König has known the company of women, but never one so innocent as you.

He promised to keep you safe, which one would think means he cannot prey upon you. At least, he tells himself as much. And yet…

You have no idea what to do in the company of a man. Or perhaps the company of anyone. And it shows. But the huntsman really isn’t any better.

You bathe together. He isn’t comfortable with you going alone, and being out of his sight. And you’re not even socialized enough to feel the shame of it when he can see your bare skin.

The first time he touches your skin is when he has your hand gently pinned to some paper— he’s tracing it to make a pattern for his leatherwork. You’ll need a pair in the cold weather.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

Since the election, a number of readers have asked how worried we should be, and what we should be looking for in the weeks and months ahead. My general answer: pretty worried! At this point, I see little reason to think that Trump won’t at least attempt his most authoritarian and destructive campaign promises. Whether he succeeds will depend on how much resistance he gets from the courts, Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the rest of us.

Trump’s nominations to cabinet positions so far are a clear indication that he’s dragging his party further into a nihilist cult of personality. It isn’t just that so many of them are unqualified, corrupt, or destructive (though it’s also all of those things). It’s that they’re uniquely unfit for the specific positions he has appointed them to hold. He’s daring someone to stop him, and learning from what follows.

The Matt Gaetz pick for attorney general was bad, but it wasn’t even his most dangerous. Appointing crank conspiracy theorist and Trump/Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard to the most sensitive national security position in government is a direct threat to national security and a reflection of Trump’s own fondness for authoritarians. Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth has never led more than a dozen or so people (the one small nonprofit he did lead, he ran into the ground). As a National Guardsman, he was barred from working security for Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo common to white supremacists. He lobbied Trump to pardon war criminals who had been reported by their own platoons, and believes the U.S. military should ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Then there’s the fact that the leader of the QAnon party, a man himself found responsible for rape and credibly accused of sexual assault or misconduct by dozens of women, appointed four — four — cabinet level officials accused of engaging in or covering up sexual misconduct. There’s Gaetz, of course. RFK Jr. has also been accused of sexual assault (he didn’t exactly deny the accusation). The sexual assault allegation against DOD nominee Hegseth are particularly credible. And Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Department of Education, was accused in a lawsuit of covering up a ringside announcer’s sex abuse of a boy while she and her husband ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

None of this is all that surprising, given that Trump’s party keeps nominating and electing sex creeps up and down the ballot. Nor does it seem to bother Trump’s congressional supporters. Instead, they’ve decided to single out and bully the first trans woman elected to Congress, barring her from using the women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill . . . because she’s a “threat” to women. (We’re still waiting to hear which bathrooms male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump will be permitted to use.) Trump is also refusing to subject his nominations to FBI background checks, and his campaign says he won’t release the names of donors to his transition. Both are clear signs that he has no intention of making himself accountable or transparent to anyone. Nearly everything he’s done since the election points to a president who not only intends to buck every norm, convention, and check, he won’t even pretend to try. It’s just open defiance.

In the coming days, I’ll look at the free press and the First Amendment, immigration, and crime and criminal justice. But today, I’ll focus on Trump’s openly-stated plans to weaponize the government against his critics and enemies. I fully expect to see Trump follow through on his promises to seek retribution against people like Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Anthony Fauci, and countless others. Whether he’ll do it by ordering the DOJ to make sensationalist arrests and criminal charges or use subtler though still pernicious tools like IRS audits, subpoenas, or parading people before Congress for public ridicule, is hard to say. But investigations alone can ruin lives and careers.

Let’s start with the DOJ. I’m not sure that the Gaetz debacle provides much instruction on whether Senate Republicans have the backbone to provide any real oversight. (It did show us, however, that House Republicans were willing to remove their spines, gift-wrap them, and hand-deliver them to Trump.) I suspect Gaetz’s tendency to anger and insult members of his own party hurt his nomination more than his extremism, sex pestery, and utter lack of qualifications.

Trump’s new AG nominee, Pam Bondi, is less abrasive than Gaetz, but every bit the devout MAGA loyalist. As Florida Attorney General, Bondi was at one point set to join other states in suing Trump University (Florida has more “alumni” than any other state). Shen then mysteriously pulled out of the class action after Trump made a $25,000 donation to her PAC — a donation that came from Trump’s “charity,” by the way — and then held a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago. (Bondi has a long history of that sort of pay-to-play.) Bondi quickly became a full-throated supporter. She’s not only a 2020 election denier, she was part of Trump’s legal team in his bid to overturn the election. She actually stood next to Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Bondi has also already made clear that she fully supports Trump’s plan to weaponize the agency he has nominated her to lead.

[...] We’ll see an important test of Trump’s power shortly after he takes office. He plans to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel, a vengeful loyalist wholly unqualified for that position. The FBI director is supposed to serve outside the political influence of individual presidents. It’s why the position comes with a 10-year term, and why an FBI director can only be fired for cause. Remember that when Trump fired James Comey, Jeff Sessions considered it a serious enough abuse of power to appoint a special counsel. We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s power grabs that it’s now just widely expected that he’ll fire Wray for pretextual reasons and install an unqualified lickspittle like Patel — a guy who has vowed to imprison journalists and critics. If the Senate allows that to happen, I fear dark days lie ahead. (Trump is also reportedly considering appointing Patel to a position that doesn’t require Senate approval, but which could still give him the power to act as Trump’s retributive hammer.)

[...] Trump is also already planning to devote DOJ resources to “uncovering” evidence that he won the 2020 election, and to prosecuting state officials who resisted his attempts to coerce them. Expect to see a full-throttle effort to rewrite history about that election, only this time Trump will have more power to force federal agencies to provide faux credibility to his bullshit fraud conspiracies. Watch to see which agencies fall in line.

[...] The Post and other outlets have since reported that one of the key architects of Trump’s plan to purge federal agencies of institutionalists is Russ Vought, Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the most powerful under-the-radar positions in government. Vought was also a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a Trump II administration so deeply unpopular that Trump repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he had nothing to do with it. That of course was a lie: last week, Trump nominated Vought back to his old position.

[...] Finally, one particularly pernicious pattern we’ve seen from Trump officials and MAGA pundits is the targeting of not just politicians and public officials, but everyday people they see as representative of their enemies — at which point the MAGA faithful swarm with threats and harassment. We saw Trump-loyal publications repeatedly try to dox whistleblowers who exposed corruption and abuse. We saw them upend the lives of people like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, along with countless other 2020 election workers who signed up for the sort of nonpartisan positions necessary in a functional democracy.

They did it to doctors and nurses during COVID, healthcare workers who treat trans people, and of course to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield — along with any local residents who dared to defend them. The Libs of TikTok account on X run by Chaya Raichik basically exists solely for this purpose — to sic an army of online followers to heap hate and invective on people she has deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture war. Trump’s “co-president” Elon Musk has been particularly eager to weaponize the social media platform he bought for this sort of targeting. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, he selectively released emails, internal documents, and other private correspondence to a few hand-picked “journalists” to create a dubious narrative about public-private censorship. While there were certainly some examples of improper government pressure on Twitter, most of the claims were wildly overblown. More worrying, the whole project — along with the complicity of Republicans in Congress — led to harassment and death threats against former Twitter employees, whistleblowers, misinformation researchers, and others caught in the crossfire.

Radley Balko wrote a great piece on how the incoming Trump Misadministration seeks to weaponize government agencies to be sharp tools to help his authoritarian masturbatory revenge fantasies.

[applestorms]

hello apple. the common folk ask for your fervent musings on Naomi Misora!!

:3c oh goodness, naomi thoughts huh… let's make a list for this one:

i will forever Love the LABB murder novel for expanding naomi's characterization and backstory, it is forever So tragic that she died so quickly in the series. her back and forth with both L and beyond is fantastic in that book, and the additional lore set up about all those characters really adds to the canon of the series in an interesting way.

i knowwwww people (justifiably) hate on raye for all the "You'll be happy when you don't have to be an intelligent woman and can just be a Mother :)" bullshit, but naomi as a kind of mother figure is genuinely a notable aspect of her characterization and i kinda wanna Talk about it. particularly in conjunction with that one image of her in the anime opening where she is the stand in for mary holding jesus like in the pietà and also the fact that LABB murder canon sets up the idea that she dropped out of the FBI due to her inability to shoot a child (?? should double-check this but i'm near Certain). she often comes across as quite harsh, and for good reason since she's quite Brusque with the people we see her interacting with the most (light, beyond, L, even raye to some degree), but there's an intriguing Softness to her also that is a big part of what makes her an interesting character to me. it's the Contrast of it all, y'know.

(and yes, some of this may be included purely bc ohba is a sexist writer and doesn't know how to see women as anything other than "fuck object" or "mommy." even with that in mind, i still think this is a point genuinely worth consideration... though i'm not gonna forget that either askldfjsldkf)

naomi and matsuda both are kinda weird actually in that i always Struggle to really place their ages. they both just come across as so Young, despite the fact that they're older than even L by a couple years. i suppose both of them are also often quite underestimated by the people around them, which perhaps contributes to them coming across so green.

speaking of... it seems like quite notable, if somewhat under-utilized lore that naomi was a japanese woman working in the american FBI. again, LABB murders goes into this a Bit, what with naomi struggling to connect with her (presumably largely white, male) coworkers. the fact that her true first name is written entirely in katakana (usually used for foreign words/names) too... i'm assuming she's a first generation immigrant, since they're visiting her parents in japan? but it does give her that pulled-between-cultures kinda feel. i find it quite relatable, actually, as an asian american myself.

there might be an interesting connection there too with regards to how that might influence the ways in which her and raye's relationship functions. i suppose we can't really assume raye's background or race in too extensive detail, particularly since he is presumably speaking fluent japanese throughout the series (???), but i also can't help but see how the "american man with a non-japanese name in a relationship with a japanese woman" might be of note in terms of the particular kinds of sexist assumptions/views he exerts onto her (or even that she applies to herself...)

i've said this before, but i think it's a combination of both that and her more Maternal tendencies that gets her so on board with both L and light, two characters who are both decently younger than her and Take Her Seriously. the fact that she explicitly states seeing L in light, and that she is one of the few characters, really the only person outside of the japanese task force, to actually meet L in person is also. fascinating.

speaking more on the FBI though, i can't help but wonder about what naomi's motivations were for joining the FBI in the first place. or even what her motivations were for leaving japan at all, if she really was the first in her family to immigrate. clearly the american dream did Not live entirely up to expectations, from what we can see of how hard she was putting all her stock into this marriage with raye... but i also desperately wonder what she was Going Through post-beyond incarceration/L-meeting and pre-KIRA. that seems like a particularly juicy time period fanfic-wise, especially considering how beyond himself dies... sigh. onto the wip list.

actually. considering both birthday massacre and raye, it's kinda fucking funny to consider the fact that light killed both of naomi's main love interests. even L, if you go for that. not to mention naomi herself. RIP girl, she must've been frothing at the fucking mouth in that grave putting all the pieces together. first person to kick light's ass in the nothingness afterlife fr.

anyways, in conclusion: naomi fucks hard, best girl, desperately underrated character in the series that i will love forever. there's probably more that i could add to this but my brain is all blissed out on thanksgiving food so ig that's it for now. hell yeah naomi👍

[iamthemaestro]

Oh boy. I have a lot to say on this. I 1000% think that one of the biggest issues in AWI reenactment is the failure to reach the younger generation and I also wish the article had talked more about this and how it intersects with the inclusion of historically marginalized groups within the hobby.

I’ll put it this way: as of 2024, the BAR has an article in their constitution that prohibits women in ranks. As a young, non-male, and only sometimes white-passing reenactor, this has caused me issues in the past. People from the BAR have complained about me—a young, fairly new, dedicated reenactor—being on the field as a musician. Now, I’ve had the good fortune to be part of a unit with significant influence in the hobby, who have gone to bat for me in these instances and allowed me to feel relatively safe coming to these events, but I still can’t take up a musket at a BAR event if I want to. Over the past year I have become acutely aware that if it weren’t for the fact that I do music and not hat company, I would not be able to interpret at these events in the way I have repeatedly proven myself capable of doing.

So you have the primary overarching association responsible for organizing large-scale AWI reenactments literally denying interested, dedicated people from the younger generation the opportunity to participate in the hobby. And this is just one official organization—this is to say nothing of the culture. At the end of the day, sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia is rampant in these environments. I do think the culture is slowly improving with time, but still, there are spaces where I do not feel safe in the hobby, and I spend a lot of time considering what my future as a reenactor might look like if I ever decide to medically transition, for example. My love for this hobby means I put up with a lot, even within my own unit, but I cannot fault other people who take one look at this mess and decide it’s not worth it. Of course there are going to be less reenactors. If individual units and the overarching organizations are going to actively resist a new generation of young living historians, interest in the hobby is going to waver.

I also think there’s an important distinction to make between so-called “progressive” units and a broader sense of historical accuracy, because ultimately reenactment is a hobby. I strongly believe that no issue of historical accuracy should take precedent over actual issues of discrimination (if we were going to really pursue historical accuracy, we would be excluding probably 90% of the reenactment community as it is!). But I also believe that the spirit of this hobby is one that is educational and authentic: second to having fun and staying safe, of course, I think the priority should be pursuing as accurate of an impression as you can in the meantime. “Progressive” units often get kind of a bad rap but ultimately I think they have the right idea. They’re what’s going to keep this hobby relevant as an educational tool and pursuit, as opposed to just being a bunch of grown men running around playing war with each other. Progressive units are, in my opinion, the future of this hobby. And yet a lot of more conservative units have this weird resistance to this philosophy simply because they don’t… want to have to adapt to what it means, I suppose. But I really do think that if that philosophy prevails, we won’t have educational reenactment—it’s possible we won’t have much in terms of reenactment at all. Ultimately I want to believe this, too, will improve in time, but the fact that we have to violently contest, for example, whether British soldiers had to shave (which they did) just because some reenactors desperately want an excuse not to… does not bode well for garnering interest from historians and enthusiasts in time for the 250th.

Anyway, that’s been my experience. I should probably stop talking about this because I think about it constantly and could go on forever. But that’s my (admittedly rather scathing) two cents on why this is the case.

Who has Wall Street Journal access I heard there’s an article about 250th reenactors and I need the tea

[dykedvonte]

I think depictions of Anya being cruel to Curly or drawing out his suffering are artful and chilling but completely miss the point of the story and her character.

I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to have that "I told you so" moment with him but not in something callous or cold. Even if that is how it happened, she'd immediately feel guilty cause at that point she's not tormenting her tormenter or even the person truly at fault. She's doing something cathartic, similar to how Jimmy likely hits Curly to release rage he can't against the rest of the crew. She'd see herself as no different when she'd come back from the moment and see Curly cowering at her. She wants someone to take responsibility but how does being cruel to the defenseless help? Why would she want the power Jimmy has over her over Curly?

The idea of her extending someone else's pain is just so against the struggles she already faces and how she can't even bring herself to cause someone pain even to help them. Her very desire is to release herself from her own suffering and I doubt she'd even fine some sort of guilty release in being cruel to another.

[averlym]

fairest of the fair

[kouhaiofcolor]

I really miss the natural hair community & watching natural hair content generally. That was so good for Black Women; we were thriving at it, too. And as rapidly as it rose to popularity, it’s crazy how dead the whole concept is now. I think it had more to do w all the division created over routines around maintenance than anything else. Everybody was entirely too pushy w trying to make what worked for them personally a staple for taking care of textured hair in general — & that shit walked so that colorism, featurism, texturism & misogynoir could run. Now the same ppl who was riding the wave a few years ago & swearing by all these products, brands, sponsors, wash day & styling methods have put natural hair away as a concept entirely.

Also, why the hell did we waste all that energy prefacing everything w, “Stop doing this and do these things for your hair to grow to tailbone length overnight🤡” — just to go right back to weave and perms? All that researching for what? All the dedication to disproving antiblack/misogynoir notions about Black hair for what? All the redefining of protective styles for what? All the trying to unlearn the belief structures around the colonization of Black hair for what? What did we teach ourselves fr? How did we make things any easier for Black Women and little Black girls? It’s tragic af. The Natural Hair Community/Movement is dead, it seems like. I don’t think we fought hard enough to prevent what happened to it honestly :\

[awkward-but-nice]

obnoxious disney adults are hating on rachel zegler, because she said that they... *checks notes* added other aspects to snow white that doesn't revolve around falling in love and getting saved by the prince...

[eliotquillon]

just finished the rwrb movie and although i really enjoyed it (and was kicking my feet giggling the whole time) i do have a couple of major criticisms, some of which i think aren’t really the movie’s fault because they had to fit a whole book into 2 hours, but some of which left me kind of disappointed:

-i feel slightly icky that bea and nora got their screentime SIGNIFICANTLY reduced even after june got cut entirely (which i was upset about, but did understand). i loved zahra and adored her on screen but i do think it’s very odd that she is pretty much the only major female character in this movie since bea was nonexistent and nora got permanently spirited away to pez’s bed or something sometime during the second act

-it felt like a lot of the internal conflict in alex and henry’s relationship was very unbalanced and henry heavy - alex’s neurodivergence was erased, his bi epiphany was barely even an epiphany, and him not being explicitly kicked off the campaign after ellen finds out about him and henry essentially killed his whole subplot about realising he doesn’t need to have everything achieved at thirty and deciding he wants to apply to law school instead. which wouldn’t have been terrible but on the flipside it felt weird that we didn’t see very much of henry’s family considering how much they affect and shape his fear of being outed and his feeling of being in a glass cage - e.g bea’s treatment by the media during her active addiction (which was entirely erased), the extent of the tension between him and philip. felt like henry’s pov scenes were a super wasted opportunity for that and we were mostly just being Told about all of these things

-i am not actually that mad about oscar and ellen still being together lol but i felt like in the scene with oscar smoking the cigar on the balcony they were kinda building up to there being significant strain in his and ellen’s relationship that just wasn’t explored. especially since it’s clear oscar would never be able to be president because he’s not a natural born citizen + the sacrifice of his career for ellen’s is so much bigger now that he’s first gentleman in this version

-pacing in general was a bit off but the worst offender was the fact that there was a complete time skip between the alex henry confrontation/reconciliation and the outing. so much of the tension and desperation from that outing scene comes from the fact that the risk of it happening was slowly increasing throughout the book and it felt almost inevitable (the elevator cctv being leaked, henry having to fake date june) and honestly making it so abrupt weirdly reduced a lot of its impact for me

-similarly i actually completely understand why the richards plot / rafael luna plot was cut (i suspect republican election interference hits a bit too close to home after 2020) but my god was miguel a lame fucking villain and him being queer and hispanic erased a lot of the original commentary about racism and homophobia that the richards plot lent itself to. like in general this movie was a lot lighter than the book which is fine! but for a movie where the main subplot is a presidential election So Much of the political themes were heavily neutered or cut to the point that it seemed like the pressure on henry and alex’s relationship was disproportionately coming from henry’s side when in the book it was more balanced

again on the whole i really really loved this movie and i knew going in that certain changed were going to be made. and i hope more movies get made like it! these r just my Thots and i may change my mind when i rewatch it with my friend tomorrow

[girderednerve]

so i've been watching the olympics!

i ideologically reject the olympics & they should not be held. however, it is fun to watch sports on television, especially if you, like me, are a fan of weird sports that aren't televised often (equestrian sports!).

there are a lot of problems with equestrian sports, mostly that they're capital-intensive, which is to say that they're inaccessible & elitist. the big controversy this olympics relates to animal welfare, though. there have been scandals in the past, but this year, right before the olympic games, charlotte dujardin, a very famous & celebrated dressage rider, withdrew from competition pending an investigation for animal welfare by the FEI & british dressage federation after the release of a video that is at least two years old (age contested) of her repeatedly striking at the legs of a client's horse with a long whip during a training session. i will note that she has previously had to withdraw from an international competition after blood was found on her horse (they check bits & spurs every round). charlotte dujardin is famous & celebrated because she has had incredibly good, record-breaking results in international competition, despite her relatively young age (gold medalist in her 20s, when people remain competitive in this sport into their 60s). she also competed in international dressage wearing a riding helmet, which was not at all conventional in the 2010s, although it is now in part because of her influence. when she won her gold medals at the 2012 olympics, she was riding at home & was met with a massive swelling of national pride by british viewers.

international dressage competition was dominated by german riders (isabell werth is like, the queen mother of dressage basically), and there had just been a huge controversy about animal welfare centering on the practice of rollkur, a training method in which the horse's head is pulled in very close to their chest, which is a very unnatural way for a horse to move & involves a lot of force exerted on the bit(s) in the horse's mouth. i strongly agree that rollkur is bad and should not be done, but the public discussion about it immediately became extremely messy, because a) some fans were looking for a reason to discount german records & decry german horsemanship and b) we couldn't agree what rollkur actually is! the FEI said that you can't do rollkur, but that it's fine to use a "deep & round" training frame, which is, um, different, because it's not mean? which is nonsense, or at least very difficult to enforce by eye, but sort of understandable; i myself have spent plenty of time on a horse (my beloved friend, strudel the pony) who habitually ducks behind the bit & carries his head low & behind the vertical. while it's straightforward to identify & sanction extreme cases (e.g., patrik kittel's blue-tongued horse), it can be much harder to agree on other instances, keeping in mind that you only see a very small piece of a rider's general practice in competition. judges are supposed to penalize movements in which the horse's head is behind the vertical, but in practice they spent years penalizing carriage in front of the vertical more sharply & consistently (this has begun to shift in the last couple years, but the rollkur stuff was happening in like, 2010). this sport is an old, strange, slow-moving patchwork of styles, full of people who are deeply particular, territorial, & aesthetically conservative. there's also a huge variation in how horses themselves behave; they have character, personality, & preferences. none of which lessens the burden of responsibility on riders & people who work with horses to make sure that they are cared for well, but does make adjudicating an individual case complicated. of course, it's also intensely emotionally charged, because we are, & ought to be, outraged by animal abuse.

anyway the thing i'm trying to get at is that we don't have a cultural consensus on what animal welfare in equestrian sports ought to look like. i realize that sounds like rank apologia, which i am not trying to do; i have not watched the video of charlotte dujardin in the training session, because i don't have the stomach for it & am not interested in trying to argue about this one case. the bigger & more interesting issue to me is that i think there's a general cultural shift, in the sport & beyond it, around what we think is appropriate to ask from a horse. like i said, people have long careers in this sport, & it's culturally conservative on its own; i rode a couple times with a celebrated british rider whose father was responsible for determining which horses to care for & which to put down during world war ii (!!!), which obviously accompanied an extremely different attitude towards horses & the labor we expect from them than anything you might find in a modern barn. many of these determinations about equine welfare are being conducted on the public stage, by people who have never spent significant time around horses; the video of dujardin hitting a horse aired on good morning britain. there's also a vibrant, very opinionated amateur community, who have spent time with horses but aren't professionals. i do think there's a meaningful difference between having a horse who is your buddy & spending all day working with horses, having sort of done both; i don't think it's particularly edgy to say that you treat an activity differently when it's your job than when it's a thing you're doing for fun & stress relief.

when i was taught to ride, i was told (& of course believed!) that it's fine & appropriate to punch a horse with my stupid seven-year-old fists if they knocked me around with their big horse faces, which made me feel weird when kim raisner was banned from the german pentathlon team for same, but then she obviously was not seven. i'm not quite sure what i think about it; the argument in favor of smacking a horse is that they're big & dangerous if they don't have manners, & in my experience they didn't really care. i feel some shame & conflict about this now that i am years away from working with horses, but i also recall trying to make sure that the horses i was around knew me & weren't afraid of me. we had solid working relationships from my perspective, but of course i can't go back & ask the horses. increasingly, i think excellent animal welfare is probably just not compatible with large-scale competitive sport, or, perhaps, with a capitalist environment. hot take, i guess!

one thing i think about a lot is that while there obviously is money in dressage, there's not nearly as much money in it as there is in horse racing, which is, from my perspective, a hugely destructive & cruel industry for horses & for people. horses die racing. people die caring for them, almost all of them undocumented barn workers. dressage defines itself in opposition to this approach—many amateurs pride themselves upon the differences—but i'm not convinced that the kinder ideas we have now of how to coexist with animals scale with revenue-generating industry, even outside of racing.

anyway, it makes people uncomfortable, and it makes me uncomfortable too. i think we'll see some comparatively rapid change in the next five years or so. the future of equestrian sports in the olympics is in question, as the olympics desperately try to stay relevant & interesting to younger generations (do kids like, uh, breakdancing? skateboarding? metal bands???). there's also an image crisis more broadly. the olympic ideal has shifted over the years, but a lot of the people involved in planning the games have self-aggrandizing ideas about what they're doing & the utopian potential of sports. equestrian sports have a martial history, which commentary generally elides, but is revealing in its way about the historical purpose of the olympiad. if the public conversation is focused on how this sport, which is expensive to put on & pulls low viewership numbers, is a harm to horses (&, in the popular mind, is not so much a sport as an exercise in expensive sitting, cf. the comedy around the romney-owned dressage horse), then the whole facade is crumbling. i guess it's better for the IOC for us all to worry about charlotte dujardin's heavy whip hand than it is for us to ask why israel is competing, or how well the unhoused people of paris are faring during these expensive spectacles, but surely they'd rather we set aside those conversations to talk about how inspiring the whole games are.

[ignorantsanonymous]