#idea that some censorship is good actually

[marshmellowtea]

it’s actually insane to think about how fast getting the fuck away from anti ideology helped alleviate my pocd specifically. like, obviously it didn’t cure it, i still have intrusive thoughts of that nature from time to time, but constantly being vigilant that i was consuming fiction in the “wrong” way was so detrimental to me and unlearning the idea that reading or writing a damn fic was the same as actually abusing a child helped me out SO much when it comes to csa related intrusive thoughts. like, i’m no longer a panicking suicidal mess when i have them because i think i’m doomed to hurt a child, and that’s a good thing.

[girderednerve]

"The process of classifying books can be somewhat inconsistent. Books usually get an initial designation from authors and publishers. Then, professional book reviewers usually weigh in with their own age-bracket recommendation, and distributors and booksellers can do the same. But ultimately, local library staff make the final call about the books they buy and where they should go.

[Co-founder of Idaho group Parents Against Bad Books, Carolyn] Harrison wants to change that process by giving parents a voice in that final decision, along with the library staff. But she says libraries are resistant to the idea.

"They've told us here that 'Oh no, you can't have parents involved. You must have experts choosing books for the children,'" Harrison says. "That makes no sense. Parents are the primary stakeholders for children."

....Others around the nation are trying another tactic.

A proposal in Washington state would require libraries to use a universal book-rating system, like the one voluntarilyused by the movie industry to designate films "G," "PG," "PG-13" and "R."

"We're not asking for anything unreasonable," says Lewis County Commissioner Sean Swope, who proposed the plan. "This is a tool to provide parents to be able to tell whether this is appropriate book for your child. I mean, that innocence, once it's gone, it's gone."

Under Swope's proposed plan, librarians would be required to rate books according to criteria that he would set."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jason Wilson at The Guardian:

In a December 2023 speech, JD Vance defended a notorious white nationalist convicted over 2016 election disinformation, canvassed the possibility of breaking up tech companies, attacked diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and talked about a social media “censorship regime” that “came from the deep state on some level”.

The senator’s speech was given at the launch of a “counterrevolutionary” book – praised by the now Republican vice-presidential candidate as “great” – which was edited and mostly written by employees of the far-right Claremont Institute. In the book, Up from Conservatism, the authors advocate for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, for politicians to conduct “deep investigations into what the gay lifestyle actually does to people”, that college and childcare be defunded and that rightwing governments “promote male-dominated industries” in order to discourage female participation in the workplace. Vance’s endorsement of the book may raise further questions about his extremism, and that of his networks. The Guardian emailed Vance’s Senate staff and the Trump and Vance campaign with detailed questions about his appearance at the launch, but received no response.

‘Congratulations on such a great book’

Vance’s speech was given in the Capitol visitor center in Washington DC last 11 December, according to a version of C-Span’s subsequent broadcast of the event that is preserved at the Internet Archive. The occasion was the launch of Up from Conservatism, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh, the executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. In his introductory remarks on the day, Milikh said the book “maps out the right’s errors over the last generation … on immigration, on universities, on the administrative state”.

The book, however, appears more directed towards supplanting an old right – seen as too accommodating – with a “new right” focused on destroying its perceived enemies on the left.

In the book’s introduction, Milikh writes: “The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy, not merely an opposing movement, because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice … the New Right is a counterrevolutionary and restorative force.” Also in that piece, Milikh offers a vision of the new right’s triumph, which has an authoritarian ring: “We like to say that one must learn to govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule.” In his speech, Vance first offered “congratulations on such a great book, and thanks for getting such a good crew together”, and then warmed to themes similar to Milikh’s. “Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” Vance said, later adding: “Isn’t it just common sense that when we’re given power, we should actually do something with it?”

Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, a critical account of Christian nationalism and the host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, said: “Vance, many Claremont people, including some folks in this volume, and especially the ‘post-liberal’ conservative Catholics that he hangs out with, have advocated for a form of big government that will wield its power in order to set the country right.” He added: “And you may think, well, OK, that doesn’t sound so bad. But here the common good is rooting out queer people, making sure non-Christians don’t immigrate to the country and outlawing things like pornography that are currently a matter of personal choice. “You end up with this conservatism that promotes an invasive government conservatism rather than a small government.”

[...]

‘Free our minds … from the fear of being called racists’

In the book, commended by Vance, a series of authors take reactionary – or “counterrevolutionary” – positions on a number of social and economic issues. In one chapter, John Fonte writes of disrupting narratives of civil rights progress: “The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups. Thus, our history is one of liberation: first of Blacks, then of women, then of gays, and now of the transgendered.” Fonte retorts: “Not only is this narrative false; it will take us further down the path of national self-destruction … On the questions of slavery, American Indians, and racial discrimination, the progressive narrative is not a historically accurate project designed to address past wrongs, but a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization.”

Like other authors in the collection, Fonte offers policy recommendations. He proposes heavy-handed federal intervention into education: “[T]he US Congress should prohibit any federal funds in education to support projects … that promote DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) and divisive concepts such as the idea that America is ‘systemically racist.’” In his chapter, David Azerrad tells readers: “We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists.” The assistant professor and research fellow at rightwing Hillsdale College, and former Heritage Foundation director and Claremont Institute fellow, also claims that conservatives have been too conciliatory on race: “For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks … yet blacks continue to vote monolithically for the Democratic Party and progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism.”

Azerrad continues with white nationalist talking points on race, crime and IQ, writing: “It is not racist to notice that blacks commit the majority of violent crimes in America, no more than it is to incarcerate convicted black criminals … There is no reason to expect equal outcomes between the races … In some elite and highly technical sectors in which there are almost no qualified blacks, color-blindness will mean no blacks.” Elsewhere, Azerrad writes: “[C]onservatives will need to root out from their souls the pathological pity for blacks, masquerading as compassion, that is the norm in contemporary America … This is most obvious in the widespread embrace of affirmative action (the lowering of standards to advance blacks) and the general reluctance to speak certain blunt but necessary truths about the pathologies plaguing black America – in particular, violent crime, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, nihilistic alienation, and the cult of victimhood.”

[...]

‘Do not subsidize childcare’

Helen Andrews, meanwhile, offers “three things we could do right now that would put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists for the last forty years about women and careers”. Her first proposal is to “stop subsidizing college so much”, since, according to Andrews, in the 22-29 age group, “there are four women with college degrees … for every three men. That is going to lead to a lot of women with college degrees who do not end up getting married.” “Second,” Andrews continues, “the Right can do more to promote male-dominated industries. Reviving American manufacturing and cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices isn’t just an economic and national security issue; it’s a gender issue.” Her third proposal is “do not subsidize childcare” – since the fact that “many working moms are struggling” with childcare costs “might actually be good information the economy is trying to tell you”. Andrews is the print editor of the paleoconservative magazine the American Conservative and has previously written sympathetically about white supremacist minority regimes in Rhodesia – renamed Zimbabwe after white rule ended – and South Africa.

Scott Yenor claims in his chapter that before the 1960s, America lived under a “Straight Constitution, which honored enduring, monogamous, man-woman, and hence procreative marriage. It also stigmatized alternatives”. Yenor is a political science professor at Boise State University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute. He then claims: “We currently live under the Queer Constitution”, which “honors all manner of sex”, and under which “laws restricting contraception, sodomy, and fornication are, by its lights, unconstitutional”. Yenor claims: “These changes in law are but the first part of an effort to normalize and then celebrate premarital sex, recreational sex, men who have sex with men, childhood immodesty, masturbation, lesbianism, and all conceptions of transgenderism.”

Yenor says the state should intervene in citizens’ sex lives: “In the states, new obscenity laws for a more obscene world should be adopted. Pornography companies and websites should be investigated for their myriad public ills like sex trafficking, addictions, and ruined lives. The justice of anti-discrimination must be revisited.” In a separate essay co-written with Milikh, the editor, Yenor advocates in effect destroying the current education system and starting again. The essay includes a recommendation for school curriculums: “Students could start building obstacle courses at an early age, learning how to construct a wall and how to adapt the wall for climbing … Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals.”

The Guardian reports that Trump VP pick and Ohio Senator JD Vance promoted far-right extremist views from Arthur Milkh’s Up From Conservatism essay book.

[renthony]

hey!! i am genuinely curious about how the catholic church helped implement the hays code, would you be able to tell me more/do you have any good reading material about it? thanks so much!!

This has been sitting in my inbox for aaaaaages, because I want to do it justice! It's actually a big facet of my research project that I'm going to go into much, much, much more depth on, but here's the short(er) summary:

The foundational text of the Hays Code was written by two Catholics: a Jesuit priest named Father Daniel Lord, and a man named Martin Quigley, who was the editor of the Motion Picture Herald. They grounded their guidelines in Catholic morality and values, based on the idea that art could be a vehicle for evil by negatively influencing the actions of those who view it.

The original list of guidelines written by Lord and Quigley was adapted into the Production Code, popularly known as the "Hays Code" after William Hays, the president of the Production Code Administration that enforced it. As president of the PCA, William Hays appointed a staunch Catholic man called Joseph Breen to enforce the code. Breen enforced it aggressively, confiscating the original reels of films he deemed inappropriate and against the Code. Many lost films from this era are only "lost" because Joseph Breen personally had them destroyed. Some were rediscovered later, but many were completely purged from existence.

When Breen died in 1965, Variety magazine wrote, "More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American moral picture." He was a very, very big deal, and was directly responsible for censoring more films than I could even begin to list here.

In 1937, Olga J. Martin, Joseph Breen’s secretary, said, “To an impoverished country which had become religious and serious-minded, the sex attitudes of the post-war period became grotesquely unreal and antedated. The public at large wanted to forget its own derelictions of the ‘gay twenties.' The stage was set for the moral crusade.”

In 1936, once the Code was being fully enforced on filmmakers by Joseph Breen, a letter was issued by the office of Pope Pius XI that praised Breen's work, and encouraged all good Catholics to support film censorship.

The letter read in part, "From time to time, the Bishops will do well to recall to the motion picture industry that, amid the cares of their pastoral ministry, they are under obligation to interest themselves in every form of decent and healthy recreation because they are responsible before God for the moral welfare of their people even during their time of leisure. Their sacred calling constrains them to proclaim clearly and openly that unhealthy and impure entertainment destroys the moral fibre of a nation. They will likewise remind the motion picture industry that the demands which they make regard not only the Catholics but all who patronize the cinema."

Basically, this letter was a reminder from the Papal authority that bishops and priests are supposed to stop people from engaging with "lewd" or "obscene" art. That meant supporting things like the Hays Code.

So, to summarize: the original text of the Hays Code was written by two Catholics, including a priest. The biggest and most aggressive censor under the Code was a Catholic man, who had the full support and approval of the Pope at the time. Good Catholics were called en-masse to support the Hays Code, because it was intentionally written to line up with Catholic teachings.

There's a lot more to say on the subject, and if you're interested in reading more on your own, I recommend the book "Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934," by Thomas Doherty. There are plenty other sources I can recommend on request, but that's a solid place to start.

(And if I can toot my own horn, I'm intending to do a video lecture series all about American film censorship and the Hays Code. Pledging to my Patreon helps keep me fed and housed while I do all this damn research.)

[salvadorbonaparte]

How to set up a research journal

This is just one way you can set up a research journal but it's helping me tremendously so maybe it also works for you. My set-up is partially inspired by this video by Answer in Progress and I suggest you check out their curiosity journal.

Preparation

First you need a notebook. The trick is to find a notebook that you're not afraid to "ruin". We all want a really neat, aesthetic research journal, but the reality looks more like hasty scribbles, but that's okay, that's where the research breakthroughs happen.

I personally bought a cheap lined notebook from Søstrene Grene that I thought looked cute and put a sticker on it. That way I feel good about using it but I also don't mind when my handwriting gets messy because it was only like 3€.

You should also stock up on pens you like writing with. Different colour highlighters and post-its are also a good idea but not a must. Keep it cheap but comfortable.

Title Page

Here you should put down all the really important information: year, title, deadlines, word count, supervisors. Maybe add an inspirational quote to spice it up but keep it simple and relevant.

Key

This should either be your next or your last page. I personally use the last pages of my journal so I can add thing and find it easier. Your key is there to list abbreviations and symbols.

For example, I have different symbols for statistics, dates, new terminology, questions, breakthroughs, important notes and abbreviations for the most important terms in my field. It's shorter to write T9N than Translation.

The trick here is to have enough abbreviations and symbols to save time and effort but not so many that you constantly have to look back and forth between your page and key. They should be memorable and not easy to confuse.

Topic Mind map

If you hate mind maps you can skip this of course or use a different method but what helped me is to visualise all the topics that connect to my research project in a mind map. I then colour-coded the main groups of topics with my highlighters. It helps me to keep an overview on how many topics I need to do research on.

Proposal

If you're writing a thesis/dissertation it can be helpful to have a page set aside for your proposal and take some bullet point notes on methodology, chapter structure, research context, aims and objectives and think of some titles. You can also do this for your lit review and a list of works to include.

Hypothesis and Question Pages

I set aside four pages for this but you can adjust this to your needs. The first page is my hypothesis. It doesn't have to be fully formed yet, it can just be bullet points with five question marks. You can always revise and update it but it is important to keep an eye on what you're actually trying to find out.

The next idea is basically just stolen from Answer in Progress: a section for big questions, medium questions and little questions. These aren't necessarily hypotheses you aim to answer but questions you have about your topic that might be good to look into (maybe they lead somewhere, maybe they don't).

Research Notes

Now comes the big, fun part. Research notes are allowed to be a little messy but you should have some sort of system so you can actually find what you're looking for afterwards. I'm currently just looking at books and articles so that's what my system is based on. You can totally adjust this to include other forms of research.

What I do is that I put down and underline the author and title of my source. Underneath that I use my highlighters and mark the topic of the paper based on how I colour-coded them in my mind map. You might have to do this after you've finished reading. For example, if a text talks about censorship and dubbing in Germany, three of my topics, I will draw three lines in light blue, dark blue and red, the colours I chose for those topics. This way you can easily browse your notes and see which pages are talking about which topics.

When it comes to the actual research notes, I include the page number on the left and then take bullet point notes on whatever is relevant. These are often abbreviated and paraphrased but if something is especially important I will write down a full quote.

As mentioned earlier, I have a key of symbols I use so I can simply put down a '!' in order to differentiate a research breakthrough from a normal note. You can insert your own thoughts much more easily when you know you'll be able to tell them apart later on. At the end of each article, book or even chapter I write down my main takeaway.

Other Notes

This is your research journal and you can do with it what you want. I also added lists of films that might be relevant for my research, a list of databases and publishers to check for papers and tips on research strategy.

If you're working with interviews or surveys you could write down your questions. If you're nervous about your research you could include a list of reasons why your research project is important or why you're doing it. You can include a to-do list or a calendar to track meetings with supervisors. Anything that helps you with your research.

[thrashkink-coven]

Genuine Red Flags in Spiritual Books, Grimoires, Occult Teachers or Mentors

Very often I see folks talking about things they consider to be red flags for beginners when entering witchy or occult spaces. Here are a few of the things that I’ve noticed over the years that will immediately make me put down a book or step away from a practitioner.

1. Claiming they know every thing about every sect of spirituality / occultism or witchcraft

Simply put, there is no one person who knows the deep inner workings of every craft, of every philosophy, of every practice. The guru that claims to know everything from Reiki to Jewish Mysticism to Native American Spirituality to Voodoo to Acupuncture to Chakra Healing, Tarot, Herb Wizardy, Alchemy, etc etc etc. No. They are lying. Even the most dedicated and wise practitioners devote years into understanding a philosophy or spiritual practice. And especially in regards to closed practices, it is impossible for one person to have read and done it all. Either they are straight up lying or presenting brief skimming over texts or conversation as “years of experience and practice”. No.

2. Constantly trying to convince the reader that they are a God, deity or some inhuman creature like a cosmic elf, mermaid, or angel

Now I don’t mean to confuse this with the idea that some Luciferian or Satanic spaces may adopt that all humans are gods in their own right, or you are the god of your own existence. I’m talking specifically about books that try to convince you that you’re actually a lost race of alien who has been trapped in a human body, or has been mistaken into believing they are human. I’m not going to get into my opinions on star seeds or deity ancestry, what I will say is that very often, and I mean uncomfortably often, these ideas are intrinsically tied to supremacist or xenophobic rhetoric You do not have to be an angel to be special and cosmically significant. You don’t have to be an elf to explore herbal magic, people who push these ideas are very frequently praying on those with delusions of grandeur or other dissociative mental disorders and that’s not cool.

3. Using pseudoscience to push miracle remedies. This includes denying things that are provable to push a narrative, like the fact medication can help the mentally ill.

My dears, please fact check what you read. Please see what educated people have to say about these authors before you take everything they say at face value. As many problems and rightful distrust as there is in the medical industry, usually, if a concoction is commonly dismissed by 99% of medical professionals, it’s usually not because they’re trying to cover up the holy grail, it’s because they know it’s… probably not that good for you or simply doesn’t do what it claims.

4. Trying to convince the reader that with enough practice, willpower, and a donation of $9.99 per month, you too can obtain some incredible power that will allow you to airbend, waterbend, firebend, and basically defy all the laws of physics in general!

The point of most occultism, spirituality and witchcraft is not to defy the laws of physics or to obtain some godly power. There most certainly exists the belief in many sects of spirituality that one can influence their reality through training, but I promise you, anybody that is promoting that they can walk on water is trying to make a fool out of you

5. Inability to disagree, contest, or dissent from the opinions of the mentor, teacher, high priest(ess) or leader

This is how cults form, guys. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. If the presentation of different ideas or even questions are met with harsh backlash and censorship, you need to get the fuck out of there.

6. Them automatically making the assumption within a very short time of meeting you, usually presented as psychic intuition, that you are suffering and have a “deep sadness” or energy blockage in your soul that only they can fix.

I understand that damaged people often seek mediums and whatnot for help, and sometimes it genuinely brings them ease, that’s fine and good. But so often I have been approached by people online that claim that “the angels have a really important message for me that they can only give after they’ve received an epayment of just a few dollars”. These are obviously scams, but often people who have been trusted for a reading or service in the past will fabricate these stories to trap a costumer in a loop of service. Some of these claims may be genuine but I guarantee you most are not.

7. Sprinkles of Fascism

No you are not superior to other people because you’re spiritually “enlightened”. No you should not separate groups of people or decide who should and shouldn’t procreate. No mainstream society is not being being deceived by the devil, and the devil is not more prevalent in any one group of people, sex, sexuality, gender, or race. You are not the only enlightened one in a world full of lost people. Mentally ill folks are not demons and trans people aren’t energetically unaligned. You will not inherit the Earth while everyone else dies. Uuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shut the fuck up.

8. The claim that ancient societies of people were aliens. Presenting hoaxes and proven scams as evidence of a conspiracy.

This includes things like using documented hoaxes as evidence that aliens built the pyramids. I’m going to be so for real with you guys rn. This is just racism. It’s insane to think the Egyptians were smart enough to build the society they literally lived in, but nobody doubts the validity of the Roman Empire. Crazy concept but maybe Indigenous people of color aren’t savage idiots. And maybe white people aren’t the only ones capable of having societies and interesting architecture. The thing about this that annoys me the most is that… Egyptians still exist today, and the ancestry that dates back to ancient Mesopotamia and Canaan still exist today too. These were human beings, just like us. The alienation of black and brown people proves how little some people see us as normal people.

9. The promotion of practices that are directly harmful. Self mutilation, disorderly eating, or rituals that can induce psychosis or states of mania.

Guess what you actually don’t have to sit on a mountain naked and eat nothing but sunlight to be enlightened. You can definitely do religious or devotional things like fasting within a healthy degree, but I so so often see people promoting things that will very obviously lead to mania and hallucinations just by design. Starving yourself for two weeks while constantly blasting mantras and doing a bunch of psychedelics isn’t enlightenment… it’s a manic episode. While some devotees may feel comfortable offering blood to deities, this should always be in very small ways, a needle poke, not self mutilation.

10. Trying to do business with minors or promote occult topics to children specifically

Just no. I really dislike the idea of selling spells or promoting deity communication to kids still in grade school. They’re trying to manipulate a young mind into believing their dogma or spending their parent’s money. If a parent wants to share their craft with their child, that’s cool, but people who specifically target a younger audience are suspect to me. This isn’t to say spirituality isn’t for kids, it’s just that content that is created for kids is often created to be surface level and profitable in the algorithm.

11. Shitting on New Age Spirituality

Yeah I said it. This to me feels very much like a let’s hate on anything women, especially young women enjoy. Let’s delegitimize their experiences and paint them all as ditzy girls just clanging their crystals together.

There are some things that New Age Spiritualists do that I’m not a fan of, all of the things in this list. However, that doesn’t make this form of spirituality and witchcraft any less legitimate just because it’s somewhat trendy right now. Go fucking howl at the moon and have bon fires with your besties while you do tarot and talk about angel numbers, I don’t give a fuck.

New Age spiritualists aren’t inherently doing anything wrong or different than what ancient cultures have been doing for centuries, it’s just trendy and profitable now. But anything that young women enjoy will inevitably be exploited by the capitalist machine and that is not their fault. Wicca is still a legitimate form of spirituality and witches are not inherently doing anything wrong by being young women. So much of the criticism against NAS is literally just misogyny.

“I’m not into new age spirituality I’m a REAL witch”

omg please shut up

[anonymousredactedconfessions]

Let's have a talk, shall we?

Major Trigger Warning for rape, false accusations, and mentions of child sex crimes

I let you guys get away with a lot of shit. I let you be a little bitter, or mean spirited, or pissed off. I let you guys vent and let out grievances and complain for the sake of complaining. And i do all of this because it is important to have a space that you can do so without fear of judgement, it is unhealthy for you to bottle up negative emotions. I provide this in a public space because with the way this fandom is, if I didn't many of you would be pressured into not doing so at all. This fandom has a habit of ostracizing those who have differing opinions and interpretations, those who wish to critique the art they consume, those who have unpopular opinions, and all of it is done with the utmost aggression and vitriol. The things that have been said to some of the people in this fandom genuinely makes me lose faith in humanity if i think about it too hard.

This blog exists explicitly to counteract that. I refuse to encourage or enable it. What you are doing is actively dangerous, and I won't be having it in the space I curate within this fandom.

If you haven't noticed, this is one of my rules:

It means that you are not allowed to come in my inbox and accuse people of serious harm over this fiction.

You will not come and accuse people of something as egregious as rape apologia in my inbox. You will not accuse people of rape, abuse, assault, or child abuse/rape/exploitation in my inbox.

These are serious real world issues, and the reason they are bad is because they cause direct harm to real living people who can feel pain and can be violated. Your disgust holds absolutely no ethical weight. At All. You should have the mental, emotional, and intellectual capability to understand the ethical difference between allegories for rape, stories with/about rape, erotica of rape, and actual real life people being raped. Making accusations of this weight over make believe is abhorrent, and as a matter of fact, it shows that you don't treat these tragedies with the weight or gravity that they deserve. If you believe that it is appropriate to accuse someone of violating another person like so because of the creation of or opinions about art, then you have some serious learning and growing to do as a person if you wish to navigate these topics with any level of maturity or respect towards victims.

There is no good that comes out of accusations such as these. They only ever serve to:

Demonstrate to victims that the tragedy of their abuse is as trivial as fanfiction/art that you deem nasty (but is ultimately ethical), or even something as inconsequential as someones' love for a fictional character.

Shame those who love these characters, or this art, or creating, into hiding their opinions for fear of harassment and serious accusations when they have done zero harm by enjoying it.

Stifle creation and participation in fandoms.

Limit the spread of ideas, interpretations, critique/criticism, and general opinions in the fandom, which just turns fandoms into boring echo chambers devoid of variety and creativity.

Encourage actual censorship and moral policing. (More on that on this reblog by @escapedaudios on a post of mine. Thank you Escaped for your two cents, they are much appreciated 💖)

Spread the incredibly harmful idea that people are defined by the art they enjoy. You cannot accurately judge a person’s values or morals based on what tropes and themes they enjoy in fiction. You create an environment and culture incredibly dangerous for vulnerable individuals (like minors) when you tell them that they can know who is safe to trust based on whether they consume "the good kind" or "the bad kind" of fiction. This makes it so very easy for predators to virtue signal about fiction to lure in potential victims to abuse.

The majority of you are very good and well behaved when it comes to this, but the amount of people i have had come into my inbox and accuse others of being rapists with no evidence other than "they made X" or "they like Y" is not zero. And i will not be satisfied until it is.

This is all i have to say about the subject.

[hello-vampire-kitty]

Servamp chapter 136 spoilers

I only read the chapter once so I haven't understood some parts because I haven't looked up the meaning of some words, that's what I'll do when I get to properly translate the chapter, but in the meantime, I'm just going over a few pages so you can get an idea of what's going on.

Oh my God, this chapter reveled so much!

I haven't talked about this, because I still have a few chapters to work on, but the previous one ended with Lily saying that everything was done in order to make the revived Count become the 9th Servamp with Mikuni as his Eve.

If that's the plan, could it mean that Mikuni will break his contract with Jeje or will it be possible to also keep him too?

Lily reveals to Misono that initially he wanted to put Kuro in Mikuni's path, but that would have been a great risk if Tsubaki went after Kuro, so instead he chose Mahiru.

"As someone from a family of magicians that could be easily monitored and who didn't posses the combat skills of a magician...And most of all, he was the son of a certain man"

Lily tells Misono about Touma being Mahiru's father, who was a hindrance because Touma was close to the realization of the Count's reincarnation. Lily thought that if Tsubaki would target Mahiru, Touma would be dealt with if he tried protecting Mahiru.

Lily didn't think that Touma would try shooting his son, but he was wrong.

"Love is the most difficult to read."

Lily tells Misono about his mother and what we knew about her was a lie. To start off her name was Tatsunami Hokaze which is so weird and perhaps it was a mistake because it happened before that some character's name were misspelled, like it happened with Pisca (it was even brought up by Tanaka on Twitter) and I recall one time where Tsurugi's name was written Rurugi xD

So, I looked up Hokaze (歩風) and it seems to be a boy's name and I have found the readings Ayuka or Honoka for girl names, so maybe one of those is actually her name?

Well, if it won't be mentioned by Tanaka if it was a misspelling, for now she will be called Hokaze.

Moving on, I noticed that in the first panel on the left, if you look closely at the book she's holding, it most likely "Jane Eyre" written on the cover, so we have a literary work that's associated with her.

Alright, so she was one of the orphans Lily brought to the Alicein house, like Dodo and Mitsuki.

Lily described her as ambitious woman and he encouraged her to get into Mikado's good graces. If she became his mistress, she could control him from the shadows.

The letters from his mother that Misono read were censored by Mikuni and crafted a beautiful story. In Japanese it specifically says検閲 which means censorship, so that seems to imply that he didn't fabricate the letters entirely, some things that were written in them might have been left unchanged.

Poor Misono :((

Man, the drama of this family...

So, we get to see Lily's past and I'm assuming (because it doesn't say) that he was selling his body? That's the impression I get from that image with the old guy who's giving him money...

Alright, moving on to Kuro's fight against Tsubaki!

It's awesome how Kuro made the candlestick into a sword! It looks cool!

Tsubaki says that demon Kuro was apparently sensei's "something", that he called things such as friend or brother and the demon was sort of like a familiar.

Kuro wants to hear from Tsubaki why is he obsessed with the Count, but Tsubaki isn't reluctant to tell him.

Kuro uses "Elpsis" to try looking into his memories and it's so cool that he can use Mahiru's ability, like he even changed the sword into a staff like Mahiru's!

Tsubaki had a little sister :(

So, apparently the reason he wanted to revive sensei isn't because he cared about him. He wants the ritual to be fulfilled because he awaits what comes after. Tsubaki made a promise with sensei, the latter telling him that he would make his little sister happy.

What could that mean? If she's dead, could it mean that he will bring her to life? It doesn't mention what happened to her...

Oh boy, so, I feel sorry for Misono because of how much he was deceived and we also find out that Tsubaki wasn't actually looking forward to be reunited with sensei because they had a deep bond or something, he even admits in this chapter that he's probably just a means to sensei's objective to be united with Kuro, because sensei was only interested in him.

So yeah, that's about it. I want to end the post by saying that I thank you for the patience with the scanlations, I still have three more chapters to finish until I start working on this one.

[olderthannetfic]

Opinion on the comments in some of the the @ao3topshipsbracket polls: a wildly popular ship is not the same as one that had an actual impact on fandom history. Most popular ships have little to no impact outside their own fandom. Which isn’t to say that ships can’t have impact on their own fandom history, just that they don’t have much impact on general fandom history as a whole.

I understand that the polls aren’t actually measuring fandom history but this got me thinking about what has actually and I think these are the ones:

Spirk - origin of slash fandom shipping and laid the groundwork for fandom/shipping in general

MSR - responsible for the term ‘shipping’ and was the driving force behind the beginning of fandom/shipping on the internet and the creation of fanfiction.net

BTVS - (unfortunately) gave rise to the idea of being ‘anti’ something and ship wars

Harry Potter - most affected fandom on livejournal by the censorship which led to the creation of ao3

Thoughts? I couldn’t think of another fandom/ship that has huge impacts outside of their own fandom.

--

Strikethrough made people more eager for AO3, but the original inspiration was a for-profit fic archive made by venture capitalists.

The X-Files' big archive was Gossamer. Was MSR really influential in the creation of FFN? I don't remember that.

What ships have a big impact really depends on era and how you're looking at things. K/S and MSR are the obvious ones from long after the fact, yes.

Starsky/Hutch was what really split Media Fandom from literary SF fandom. Star Trek started the split, but it was people getting into a buddy cop show that made it clear that fanfic zine types weren't just about science fiction anymore, not even "mass media" SF in place of book SF.

Bodie/Doyle was the moment people stopped being media fans and started being Slash Fandom specifically. The US fandom had barely even seen the show: they were there for the slash zines.

Jim/Blair fandom gave us sentinel/guide AUs. The Sentinel as a canon sure as fuck didn't.

Ranma fandom set the pattern for every dumb "which girl will he end up with?" fight in anime fandom forever after.

IDK if we can blame 1x2 as opposed to Gundam Wing fandom for inspiring people to many other incomprehensible math equation ships in every anime fandom with dumb number names.

Popslash popped a bunch of prudes' RPF cherries, then LOTRiPS did, then J2 did, then hockey did, then BTS did.

Free! and then Yuri on Ice started the long slide from anime fandoms mostly refusing to leave FFN to newer anime fandoms being on AO3. YOI also lured a lot of people into anime for the first time.

Wangxian got a bunch of "Ewww, no anime ever! Western fandoms 5eva!" people into Asian fandoms at long last. (Whether this was a good thing is a matter of opinion. Hahaha.)

--

I really think it depends on frame of reference.

[crispycreambacon]

Ending April with a small parting gift. I’m gonna miss this.

Anyways, an announcement of my own.

The short of it

I’m leaving the Watcher fandom. Don’t worry, I won’t be unfollowing anyone, but I will be ceasing the creation of art for Watcher and interaction with the community at large. Thank you all for this short but meaningful ride. Feel free to unfollow me if you were here for Watcher art, and for those who stick around…

Thank you :]

I hope to not disappoint with this new era of mine.

The long of it

It’s been a couple of days since a certain channel dropped an announcement that imploded its fandom. It was… a mess. A lot—and I mean a lot—of us didn’t handle the news well, and we made that known to everyone. The impact was so massive that YouTubers, who are nowhere near the niche that Watcher operates under, covered the situation, and some of them explained very well why the decision went over so poorly. Meanwhile some of them made fun of the situation, and some were just there for the clicks, but that’s the cycle of YouTube drama for you.

With the amount of ears waiting for even a peep out of their mouths, Watcher couldn’t ignore the backlash any longer and released an apology video three days after the announcement. By all accounts, it was a pretty good response. The reception was mixed, but it was definitely more well-received than their first video, and they actually listened to their fans who gave them valid criticism over the sudden shift to a streaming service.

However…

For as much as I appreciate their response, I still can’t find it in myself to continue following Watcher. I really mean it when I say this disaster soured any enjoyment I had for them. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch them again for a long time without thinking about this situation or remembering the people they have hurt, even if unintentionally, through their poor execution of a business decision.

Do I believe they could’ve pulled off moving their content to a streaming service? Absolutely. However, so many factors doomed this decision and their announcement from the start from them believing that $5.99/month was “affordable to everyone” (seriously?) to them insisting that this was for the fans even though the fans have vocalized that they were never there for the high production value. They were there because the three guys who run Watcher were enjoyable!

I feel like if they had been honest about the fact that the TV quality they are aiming for was more for themselves than anyone–hell, it’s the mission statement in their About page, and, I don’t know, considered the idea that $6 is not cheap, especially for international fans, people wouldn’t have gotten so angry at them. Now, there are still numerous issues plaguing this business model, but to go through all of the arguments would require a separate post, and I’ve already expended too much energy on this situation. Needless to say, Watcher has burnt their bridges, and it will take a while before they can build them back up again, let alone get people to trust them enough to cross them.

On the other hand, I can’t blame Watcher fully for my departure. Despite my heavy disagreement with their initial decision, I understand why they thought this decision was a good idea in the first place as YouTube is a very unstable career path, and it would rather hurt its creators with its relentless demonetization, censorship and restrictive guidelines than give up just a tiny amount of its profit. Besides, they’re in control of their content, and they could do what they want with it even if their fans disagreed with them.

Speaking of the fans, my god. The situation revealed a side of the fandom that I never thought I would see, but in hindsight, I should have seen it coming. To see fans resort to anti-Asian racism and death threats so quickly was extremely heartbreaking, and as an Asian person, it made me feel very unsafe and unwelcome in the community.

Moreover, using Steven as a scapegoat to absolve Ryan and Shane of any wrongdoing was unfortunately a very common response. Yes, he is the CEO, and yes, his series being centered on traveling and eating expensive food really doesn’t paint him in a positive light, but need I remind you that RYAN AND SHANE ARE GROWN ADULTS. They’re the founders of Watcher, and they both have to agree to the initial plan for it to be implemented. You can’t assume that Steven was a boogeyman terrorizing your precious little boys just based on a 15-minute video. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.

All of this to say that the initial announcement combined with how the community reacted violently to the announcement really nipped my interest in Watcher in the bud. It was a shame too because I really did love Watcher, and I still do. Had it not been for the time I invested in following them, I wouldn’t have made great friends, regained the joy in creating art–even reviving a hobby/skill that I assumed was long dead, and had a reason to be able to laugh or smile even in terrible days. I truly am grateful for Watcher, and I do not regret ever getting into them at all. However, I think it’s time for me to go.

Thank you all for this weird and wonderful ride, but at some point, you’ll have to hop off. I just didn’t expect to hop off it so soon.

[kooldewd123]

so there's a big element of the david trilogy that felt really apparent to me as i was reading it that i haven't seen anyone else discuss before. these books, especially 22, really feel like a critique of censorship in children's media. i mean, it's a common joke how network censors give us stuff like the shadow world in yu-gi-oh, where it's apparently more humane to trap people in a dimension of eternal torment rather than just allowing people to die on a kid's show. animorphs takes that concept and runs with it. david gets sent to the shadow realm instead of being killed, and those two hours of screams are just as much torture for rachel as they are for david. when he eventually comes back, he's begging for death because at least the comfort of an end would be more merciful than a life of constant agony.

and the idea that it's better for our protagonists not to become killers falls apart instantly when you take a step back. just look at how everyone acts throughout this arc. this is rachel at her most violent, jake at his most utilitarian, cassie at her most calculating, and marco at his most paranoid (ax and tobias get off a bit lighter, largely due to not getting their own narration). it's hard to argue that the choice not to kill david makes them look good when the three books preceding the decision have them all at their worst. in fact, it's especially bad seeing it play out through rachel's eyes. the entire book, she's been both raring to kill david while also afraid of being seen as a killer. it's clear that sending david to the shadow realm does not actually resolve this. she's just repressing it, bottling it all up for later so that she can take that pent-up anger at david and direct it at some poor yeerk instead. and let's dive into that for a second...

sure, it's fine to have our characters mow down alien monsters, but a human is where they draw the line, right? because even though the aliens are also portrayed as having their own thoughts and desires, and many of them are just innocent bystanders caught up in all this, they're not people, and so it's fine to kill them, as far as the censors as concerned (to be clear here, i'm not saying animorphs was necessarily censored in particular. i'm saying this as a critique of the censors around children's media as a whole). but then when you look at david's killing spree in comparison, it ends up becoming both a dark reflection of the animorphs and and a weird stand-in for the censors. he'd never kill another human, but he has no qualms about taking out a hawk or a tiger (never mind the fact that they're still human inside). it's all about appearances, not the truth of the matter.

appearances are all that the censors really care about. sure, you can try to discuss serious topics, but it needs to be hidden behind metaphor and euphemism. there's one line in particular that really stood out to me and got me down this whole line of thinking. after david "kills" tobias and nearly kills jake, rachel says this:

I was going to hunt him down and destroy him. No, not destroy. That was a weasel world. Vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him.

i don't know how to read this line other than as a specific callout of every censor that won't let creatives use the word "kill." every '90s superhero cartoon insisted their heroes were going to "destroy" their villains, but rachel animorphs is going to kill david.

[abyssal-author-and-artist]

okay so here's a random brain thought about billford

I like it. Like just in general. I like Ford worshipping Bill like he's a god. I like Bill being obsessed with Ford. They're adorable in a fucked up sort of way and I want to watch them be so bad for each other. They deserve to crash and burn and fucking die in each other's arms, strangling each other to death as they kiss with their last breath.

Or something. idk i'm only a fanfic writer who is starting a new facet of his gravity falls obsession.

"Oh, but why don't you write fanfic about them then-" I don't own the Book of Bill, for starters, but more importantly, I'm new to the fandom. Like. I finished watching this show like three WEEKS ago. My first fic in this fandom was posted on the 19th. Like I'm brand spanking new to this fandom and I have no idea what's going on. (By some divine intervention I have read Dipper Goes to Taco Bell and I still have nightmares about it.) I know the base show and a few human Bill designs from just passing them but that's it. Oh, and video essays.

Billford was canon to me before I even knew it was basically canon anyways. It BAFFLES me how people look at them and don't see toxic old man yaoi. Seriously, like, they're so stupid and gay and horrible for each other. I'm fucking consuming these Billford posts like I'll die if I don't. They're so good. I love toxic horrible old man yaoi, I love Billford, I'm reading the Book of Bill by osmosis at this point.

And SURE, it's a Disney show and Disney censorship is pretty famous at this point. Pretty much nothing is gayer than Disney censorship. So of course you can't actually get it from the show, but like. They're so gay. So old man. So yaoi. You feel me? Am I even making sense anymore?

My point is, keep making Billford content because I love it. Stay tuned for trans Dipper rants in about an hour if I don't go to college first.

[beatrice-otter]

I'm so confused by your perspectives. So if you joke about right wing politics you could potentially normalize it to yourself or to others so just don't talk about it, but you can't do that with what you read on ao3, it's "just fiction." Make it make sense

One of my problems with antis who want to censor stuff is that having to fight back against censorship means it's hard to talk about the nuances of what a person chooses to read or say or write or watch, without it being twisted into "and that's why nobody should be allowed to do it and everyone who wants to is a pedophile so we should control what people are allowed to say and read!" So here's some nuance.

All words matter and affect the people who read and say them.

How they matter and how much they matter varies dramatically from person to person, and in any individual case you can't tell what that impact is going to be or control it.

The things that have the most impact are pretty much always going to be the things with a large driving force of the dominant culture behind them, or a complete social circle that you can be absorbed into advocating for those things both in fiction and in real life. In other words, while the things you read and say affect you, the people around you affect you a lot more.

"I said this" is much more effective at training your brain than "I read this."

"Pay attention to how you joke about things that our society counts as normal" is very different from "nobody should ever be able to read/write about certain topics."

Here's an example. When Jaws came out, people were terrified of sharks. The amount of shark killings--sharks killed by human beings--skyrocketed, and remained high for years. People saw a movie about a scary shark, and generalized it to "all sharks are bad and should be killed." Which was broadly in line with the message of the film. But note that it didn't result in a similar backlash about the other message of the film, the ways in which people are endangered by politicians and businessmen who care more about profits than people's lives. Why? Because "sharks are bad and dangerous" was already part of the larger culture, and "politicians and businessmen endanger people" had a lot of cultural weight both for and against, so there were cultural forces preventing people from taking that aspect too far.

Here's another example. Finding Nemo also had a huge impact in real life, but in that case the impact was inspiring people to do the opposite of the message of the movie. The message of the movie is clear: keeping fish in aquariums is cruel and evil, and something only a villain would do. But a lot of people saw that movie, went "wow, tropical fish are cool!" and completely ignored the message and went out to buy an aquarium with tropical fish in it. There was a huge spike in pet fish sales. Why? Because keeping fish in aquariums is a normal thing to do, that a lot of people find interesting, and there is no widespread cultural idea that keeping fish is bad, and so most people who watched the movie did not notice the messaging, and if they did notice it, they shrugged and ignored it because it didn't fit with the way they saw the world.

When we talk about problematic things in fanfiction, we are not (by and large) talking about things that our culture has normalized. Like incest or the Hydra Trash Party. You could read three incest fics a day for the rest of your life, and write one a week, and unless you had real-life friends who actively talked about how incest was good, you would be vanishingly unlikely to change your opinion about it.

When we write and read fiction (whether fanfic or not) about things like incest, it's very rarely about "incest is good, actually!" It's usually either "wow, incest is a fun kink to imagine in a safe space where there's no chance of it happening in reality" or "this is a thing that happens in real life, and it's devastating and awful, so let's explore that." Or even just "wouldn't it be fucked up if ..." The human brain is complicated. It's common to have fantasies about things that you absolutely would NOT want in real life. Fiction exists partly because it's a safe space to explore those things. Yes, that has an impact on the person reading it and the person writing it ... but that impact is usually catharsis or getting off or something, and not inspiring you to be more approving of that in real life.

Even if you're reading it on a fairly surface level and not engaging with the themes or stuff like that, it's still usually long and complex enough that the act of reading it requires at least a little bit of thought and nuance. It takes time. There's a lot there to notice, and the things that stick out to you--the things that affect you--might be totally different than what someone else might expect. You can't predict how any given individual will react or what they're going to take away from it.

Jokes, on the other hand, tend to be short and pointed. There doesn't tend to be much nuance. Either you find it funny, or you don't, and if you find it funny you're a lot more likely to have your hindbrain normalize it, because it is shorter and simpler.

What you say impacts how you think much more than what you read does. There's a reason that when people try to brainwash prisoners of war or whatever, they don't require them to read propaganda, they require them to write and say it. Because the brain is not good at compartmentalizing "I said X" from "I believe X." You may know on an intellectual level that X is wrong, but if you are saying it, and also hearing it from the people and culture around you, your gut is likely to accept X as true.

Right-wing jokes have a lot of cultural weight to them in real life, and a lot of people genuinely believe that they are true. If anything is going to slip through your defenses and affect you, an "ironic" right-wing joke is much more likely to do so than a Hydra Trash Party story on AO3.

Note that I am saying "hey watch out, this is a thing," and not "people shouldn't be allowed to do it" or "people who do this are secretly all fascists deep down."

I'm not calling for censorship, or harassment. I'm asking people to be wary of a larger trend in our culture and letting them do with it what they will.

[maklodes]

I feel like I barely have the right to get into “Star Wars would be so good if it were good” posting given that I haven’t actually watched VII-IX, but I keep thinking about the myriad plots and subplots that could follow VI, after the fireworks stop, all without slamming the reset button.

Like, as of Episode VI’s end, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader, and Grand Moff Tarkin are all dead, but much of the rest of the Imperial bureaucracy and military are still intact. Maybe there’s a legal chain of succession that establishes who’s next, but probably it’s pretty weak, because tyrants generally don’t like saying “you know who would benefit greatly if I were to ‘accidentally’ drink poisoned blue milk and die? That guy!” So there’s a likelihood of power struggles, different factions emerging among moffs and admirals. How would the Alliance respond to two moffs waging a brutal war against each other, extorting civilians to death for supplies, bombarding civilian population centers that are not logistically accessible enough for their side to extort but that they think the other side will, etc? Can the Alliance afford to intervene to help the innocents suffering in this conflict, or is it best to just let their enemies weaken themselves and clean up afterwards?

Meanwhile, some moffs and governors see the writing on the wall, and are approaching the Alliance and saying “Yes, I was a high official in the Empire, but I was one of the good ones, working within the system to make it as humane and decent as possible. Now I am preparing to join the New Republic, and preparing to hold free elections on my planet(s) (supervised, of course, by the erstwhile-Imperial bureaucracy under my control – who else is around that could competently manage such an affair?) Yes, there are a few incidents during my reign that can be classified as atrocities, but I can assure you that if anyone else in the empire had been in charge, they would have been more numerous and severe (anyone harsher than me would’ve been worse, and anyone gentler would’ve been force-choked to death by Darth Vader and replaced), so let’s just leave those in the past and work together toward a better future.” Can the Alliance accept such a defector on those terms? Can the Alliance afford not to?

At the same time, former members of the senate – dissolved at the beginning of IV – are saying “Alright! With that tyrannical emperor gone, we are ready to get back into the action and help rebuild the Republic,” while more radical members of the Alliance are like “no, FUCK those old senators. Those were the guys who elected Palpatine chancellor. Then they kept giving him more and more emergency powers. Then they voted to make him emperor. Then they stuck around as a rubber stamp Imperial Senate for like fifteen years legitimizing the Empire, before the emperor finally dissolved the senate. A few of them may be okay, but they are all on probationary status in the politics of the New Republic at best, and many of them should be charged with corruption/oath violation/etc and barred from politics and maybe incarcerated/executed.”

Some people might even question the whole idea of One Galaxy Government going forward. Sure, there are advantages to having a singular Republic/Empire coordinating things, but there are risks. Maybe local control – with the risk of the occasional local dictator, or local border war – is safer than putting all eggs into one basket? Coordinating the resources of a galaxy has proven useful in destructive massive scale projects like planet-killer battle stations. Is there a more productive use case for that much broad scale coordination? 

As more systems democratize and lift censorship and restrictions on holonet, you get paranoia and rumors going around that this or that office-seeking politician is the Next Palpatine. When a planet’s leading candidate for senator faces rumors of being a Dark Sider, the runner-up currently polling at 48% clears her throat and says “The threat of the Dark Side is too serious to be turned into a political issue, and unfounded rumors and partisan smears do nothing to help us re-establish our still-fragile democratic norms. At the same time, any credible allegations of Dark Side influence merit a thorough and independent investigation. After all, recent experience has shown just how destructive the Dark Side can be: whole inhabited planets got destroyed! Once we establish a transparent, impartial process to examine these claims, we can move beyond all this baseless speculation about my opponent (and the baseless speculation that the first anonymous rumors were traced to a holonet account belonging to my campaign’s chief of staff).” You could have HUAC / McCarthy hearings type shit.

You could have some genuine (aspiring) Dark Side guys – no one who knows the true Sith teachings, but maybe some force sensitives who see the force as a Will To Power thing. (The Jedi haven’t been abducting children who show force potential for decades, and the Sith had no room beyond two, so I guess force sensitives have mostly sorta been figuring out what they could of this stuff themselves for a few decades? Most of them are probably pretty weaksauce compared to trained Sith/Jedi like Yoda or Palpatine, but maybe they can influence weak minds and shit) You could have any combination of actual Dark Side influence and rumors: have some people correctly accuse real Dark Side guys, have Dark Side guys spreading false rumors that their innocent opponents are on the Dark Side, have two different candidates both being Dark force sensitives, spreading rumors about each other (or one spreading rumors, being a down and dirty political fighter, and the other refusing to stoop to that and going for the Stately Above the Fray vibe, but secretly being comparably ruthless), or (perhaps most common) rumors of Dark Side influence being spread in politics when no one involved is actually even Force sensitive let alone in touch with the Dark Side.

You could go a little deeper: some people in the aftermath of the Empire might think  that the Force – both the Dark and Light sides – has held the galaxy kind of kind of technical and moral cul-de-sac, accounting for the ways in which the whole setting combines backwardness and advancement:

Why is it that in spite of having overcome the light barrier many millennia ago and being able to build small planet-sized battle stations, they seem to have made negligible progress against senescence and death generally? Because the Force provides a frame in which you either embrace the Dark Side, in which case triumph over mortality is a personal achievement to be hoarded and lorded over your inferiors, or you adhere to the Light Side, in which case you reject the “unnatural abilities” of Dark immortality. Progress against mortality at a collective, civilizational level doesn’t make sense from either of those perspectives.

Why is it that in spite of apparently being fully sentient in many cases, droids are still treated as chattel property without rights? Why is it that they still seem to have widespread animal agriculture? Maybe because the Force doesn’t notice forms of sentience that have no or negligible midichlorian counts or force sensitivity or whatever. Obi-Wan could probably walk past a droid refurbishing facility where droids are getting reset to factory settings, or a slaughterhouse, and not feel any “disturbance in the force, voices crying out in terror and suddenly being silenced” etc, and when the Light Side is treated in some respects as the moral arbiter of the setting, and when a big part of the Light Side is “trust your feelings,” and when the “force feelings” don’t really apply to beasts or droids, they don't get a lot of consideration.

Why is it that the only visions of authority are somewhere on a spectrum from “centralized, despotic autocracy” (the Empire) to “decentralized, semi-feudal oligarchy” (the Republic, with a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-style weak senatorial authority, proliferation of local nobles like counts and princesses, etc, and, perhaps to an even further extent along that spectrum, the Confederacy of Independent Systems)? Maybe because it reflects  how the Force tends to structure itself: the Dark Side tends to concentrate power in the hands of a couple of megalomaniacs. The Light Side tends to distribute it across a broader order of Force-wielding elites, but still very rare as a fraction of the  population.

You might say that these ideas don’t really get to the essence of the core appeal of Star Wars, which is more like stuff like starfighter battles and lightsaber duels and such, but I’m not saying these themes would necessarily be debated in great detail to the exclusion of action and stuff. They just could be the reason for the lightsaber duels and starfighter battles and such. Consider: in Episode I, the pretext for a lot of the action was a dispute over tariffs. Stated baldly, I think that’s drier than anything I mentioned.

[proshippers-against-censorship]

UWU stop interacting with antis. If you’re anti-censorship then act like it, you can’t stop people from having opinions <3 coming from someone who isn’t pro or anti ship because I’m not a 15 year old porn addicted gooner

This is a discourse blog. A discourse blog that speaks quite a bit about sexual topics. If a 15 year old was running this blog, I would have concerns, in all honesty, because they really shouldn't be interacting as publicly and openly with NSFW content.

However, your comment alone helps to display why, while I'm perfectly fine running my discourse blog as a discourse blog, this may not be the place for you. So let's break this down:

• No adult with any desire to be taken seriously by anyone uses the term 'gooner' unironically. That being said, you give off the red flags of being a younger teen, and interacting directly with NSFW content easily breaches the boundaries of adults.

• If a 15yo was regularly interacting with porn to the point that this is easily known, their parents can be held liable in multiple states. You could try reporting me to the police for being a 'porn-addicted minor'. Unfortunately, you will come off as a laughingstock, because I'm not a minor and I also just...don't watch porn. Unlike you, presumably, I am in a lovely relationship with a significant other who can handle those desires.

•The APA and DSM-5 do NOT classify porn addictions as real, and therefore, they aren't a thing. Multiple studies, as well, have disproven the existence of the 'porn addiction'. This idea can be traced back to - wait for it - Christian Puritanical anti-sex culture. Now, as much as church needs to be better separated out of everything, the Christian God does not run my life nor most countries, and so his religious anti-sex ideals are irrelevant.

• I'm guessing you just, don't read (shocker), but if you check out that beautiful intro paragraph that is pinned on this blog, you'll notice that I welcome opinions shared in a civil way, even if they oppose my own, and am in fact quite stern on the idea that you shouldn't lock yourself in an echo chamber. Hearing contrasting opinions can help strengthen or even change your core beliefs. But that whole idea leans on the idea that neither side is pissing their pants over discovering that their ideals don't extend to everyone, which is what you appear to be doing here. I am welcome to conversations on why you think what I'm doing is stupid, but I'm not going to bother with you unless you put on your big boy pants and be a mature person.

• You aren't 'neither', you're an anti. You scream it throughout your whole message. So if this account bothers you, why don't you do yourself a service and block it instead of being annoying in my DMs?

• This point is just here to see if you have the capacity to actually read things, since you obviously know nothing about this account despite the big ole pinned post. Go have some tea, get in a better mood, and then feel free to come back for a more progressive, civil conversation. It'd be good for you.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Worried by Florida’s history standards? Check out its new dictionary!

As always, Alexandra Petri is spot on in satirizing the right-wing censorship and educational nonsense happening in Florida. This is a gift 🎁 link, so you can read the entire column, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post.

Below are some excerpts 😂:

Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida. Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees. Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons. Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible. American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about. Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state. Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president. Black history: (entry not found) Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas. Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine). Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough. [...]

[See more select "definitions" below the cut]

Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house. Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us. [...] Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again. [...] DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies. Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind. [...] Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win). [...] Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach. Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden. [...] FOX: News. Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk. Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes. [...]

Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol. King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.” Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty). Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind. [...] Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant. Queer: (entry not found) Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come. Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program. Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete. Trans: (entry not found) United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes. [emphasis added to defined words]