#inform with the intention of educating

[kartoonatic]

A year ago I took my activism outside and now I don't have patience for any Tumblr think pieces that are really thinly vieled politically charged venting. My mutuals know what my politics are and if you need to know where I stand on something and we ain't moots then block me. I'm not reblogging that shit anymore

[howmeat-lovesmeat]

Pro tip for US citizens, you can go on LegiScan and read any proposed state legislation, past or present.

Keeping up with what your representatives are actually doing with their power/authority can help you to take more informed action for advocacy!

[ourladyoftheflytrap]

People will come online fuming with hate and anger about Anything and expect everybody to instantly understand and validate them instead of being concerned about.... the genuine hate and anger. You know that behavior wouldn't fly in front of IRL strangers

[edaworks]

And while we're at it, it's For all INTENTS AND PURPOSES

NOT

For all INTENSIVE PURPOSES

...because the latter would indicate that your next point applies to SUPER HARDCORE, FIERCE, HIGHLY FOCUSED PURPOSES ONLY, and I don't think that's what y'all want out of that.

IT’S NOT ‘PEEKED’ MY INTEREST

OR ‘PEAKED’

BUT PIQUED

‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’

THIS HAS BEEN A CAPSLOCK PSA

[frizox]

Genuinely if like... The Spanish had just gone to central America and integrated with the local population and learnt their agriculture and respected their religions and cultures it would have been fucking fine. But nooooo had to murder everyone in the name of God and Gold. Colonisation is greed. It's pure, malevolent greed.

(of course, disease would have still been a problem, but in the case of accidental contamination in an age where no one knew how disease transmission worked, that's no one's fault, I don't think :/ )

The world if Europeans had been like “damn i LOVE travelling the globe and discovering new cultures that I recognise as my equal without feeling the temptation of submitting them to my obvious intellectual and cultural superiority + my greed for money and universal control”

[mckitterick]

electoral strategy for Republicans - and other authoritarian parties around the world - depends on an uninformed electorate, because if people really knew what the right-wingnuts wanted to do, most would not vote such garbage people into public office

understanding the majority of voters are kept intentionally ignorant is far preferable to believing most people are self-destructive and hateful - if that were true, we wouldn't have made it this far as a species

but how do we reach those so out of touch that - even in this media-saturated world - many somehow didn't even know Biden wasn't in the race?

now more than ever we need a true free and fair Fourth Estate, journalism dedicated to public education that somehow reaches everyone

but the nature of how people are informed these days emphasizes keeping people locked-in to billionaire-controlled social media and streaming services and hate- and fear-mongering podcasts dedicated to blindering their audience

the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

[byjove]

Look guys, it is good to engage with people you don’t agree with 100% politically on occasion. This is not me telling you to try to befriend neo-nazis. I mean, as a leftist, sometimes you’ve got to meet a middle aged lukewater democrat where they’re at and try to open a dialogue to help educate them on issues and discuss your beliefs. If someone seems receptive to listening and learning, that is a great chance to speak and teach. I know it’s fun to make fun of the libs but sometimes ill-informed but well-intentioned Facebook liberals have had propaganda shoved down their throats for 50 years and just need someone to explain the issues to them in a way that is kind and not condescending. It’s not your job but it is nice, it is a nice thing to do and it is nice to try to treat others with understanding. This is a good time to do that, there are a lot of people out there who are frightened and confused.

[daveinediting]

Yesterday I laid out a part of my story as it intersects with education and how that education informs my belief in the interplay of subconscious and conscious processes.

Interplay?

Sure. A lot of the time it's not obvious right away. Sometimes, sure. But sometimes months, maybe years later.

As brand new information and as new mental associations that point the way forward.

I said it before, I'll say it again: I was not a model student. I legitimately pissed off some of my teachers. I drove others to distraction. Even the ones who taught me things I actually use in my professional life... I gave them a hard time, too.

The Education of Me was a pretty gnarly process.

During that gnarly process, however, something in my brain held onto certain experiences and knowledge, most of which I did not consider relevant to my life at the time. In general, the categories are: performing arts, literature, and writing. And my future career was light years from my awareness.

In school, from elementary halfway through my senior year in college, I thought I'd be something about writing. By high school I'd zoomed in on journalism. By my senior year in college I thought for sure advertising.

So I was not consciously learning what I would later need to know in order to sustain a future career I was in no way preparing myself for.

Lemme give you one example of how that played out.

I was working on the music for a pretty lengthy section of a show for broadcast television. The section of show was about a humanitarian organization and some of its component parts. So I got to thinking about how the music could be and immediately my brain came back with the word Rondo.

Rondo?

Yes. It's a music form in which you establish a theme and follow it with another theme. Then you come back to the original theme. Then you jump to a new theme. Repeat as necessary. 

The themes wander about a bunch but are always anchored to the original. The form is represented as A-B-A-C-A-D-A and so on. And it's a pretty good template when you're crafting music for a thing with parts.

A thing...

With parts.

And my brain comes back at me with BAM.

Rondo.

I wasn't a very good piano student, by the way. I never practiced, really. Not seriously. Not intentionally. Not relentlessly and methodically. But I do remember sonatas and variations and, yes, rondos. Although here's the thing:

I only practiced one rondo that I'm aware of. From Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique), the third movement, Rondo: Allegro. 

I could play some of it... but not all of it. I could perform what I could already perform without practice. So yeah.

This one song, this Rondo, didn't mean that much to me.

And yet...

And yet, when presented with a thing with parts, my brain recognized the form from this one area of my life I didn't much pay attention to and applied it to this other area of my life for which I was being, you know, paid.

So.

When the sequence for which I was crafting music focused on the main organization, that was the A theme. Anytime we pivoted to one of the organization's departments, that was the B, C, or D theme.

It worked, by the way.

It worked well. 

That's, I think, my most memorable story of onboarding a lot of random knowledge as opposed to getting it on demand.

And it is how my brain works.

[chena-h]

Another factor that I think is worth considering:

It's become less safe for kids to hang out in public places, unsupervised, without a cop showing up to confront them.

If anything, I think that's one of the intended consequences of the Reagan era panics - to normalize policing children (moreso than it already was).

I'll share an article that goes into further detail on this from the NAACP's Justice in Public Safety Project

Children Arrest Incidents Show the Barbarity of Policing Kids

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[catboybiologist]

half baked morning rant

I do want to make it clear that the reason I talk about HRT and its biological effects so much is not because HRT or medicalization defines your gender.

Its because, for me personally, the interface of my biology education and my transition was mostly centered around figuring out what sex hormones do. I learned about basic biology principles like DNA organization, gene regulation, cell biology, and physiology in high school and undergrad. Taking that understanding and extending it to the mechanisms that hormones use to change gene regulation, and by extension, the rest of your body broadly, was something I did as my understanding became more complete in later undergrad and grad school. It was the key to me starting my own transition.

Why?

Because it was the first time I realized that the "basic biology" arguments of transphobes were complete and utter bullshit. From that point, it was a cascade. As in, wait, if dynamic changes in gene expression aren't considered "biological" to them, then why am I believing anything they say about anything else? When they talk about gametes, and try to include infertile cis people in their definitions of biological sex by talking about what gamete you're "intended" to make, what do they even mean? Why does my current gene expression not define that "intent"? And wait, back up, why is the brain suddenly not considered part of our biology? Why are neurological differences suddenly not "biological"? Why can we say someone's thinking patterns aren't "biological"?

Backing up even further, why does any of this matter more than psychological gender, or sociological gender? If the way we navigate society is gendered, that affects a lot of our lives, and we're just throwing that away?

Basically, being educated about how deep the biological changes of HRT really go was the first domino to fall when I worked through my internalized transphobia.

This is one of many reasons why I hate, hate HATE the concession that uninformed allies and even many trans people themselves give: "well NO ONE is saying that you can change your biological sex, sex and gender are completely unrelated, sex is binary and gender isn't!!!!!"

Well. I am saying that you can change your "biological" sex, I am saying that biological sex isn't binary, and I am saying that misunderstanding of those points has set back transgender advocacy. It makes medical decisions surrounding us less informed, it poisons conversations about how we interact with society, and it makes trans people feel like their gender and sex are less "real" than cis people's.

Not to mention the horrific way it discards intersex people from the conversation entirely.

Recently, I've seen this point enter the mainstream a little, by using intersex people and variation of sex in other species as a "counterargument" to "binary biological sex" thinking. It still doesn't sit right with me. One, because it uses intersex people as a prop for trans advocacy while not actually addressing the needs of either group. And two, because it completely disregards that your current biology and physiology is not 100% predestined from birth, and using people who were "born this way" as a prop does absolutely nothing to increase people's acceptance of trans people who change their biology later in life.

Ugh. This got away from me but yeah. That's my sipping coffee ramble for this morning. If anyone wants to add comment or correct me on discourse here, please do. Especially if you're intersex- this is all the observations of a perisex trans woman.

[the-bar-sinister]

headcanon: "i have decided that this is true about the character, and it doesn't matter to me if the canon text supports my idea or not."

interpretation: "after considering elements present in the canon text, I have decided that this might be true about the character and here's why."

subtext: "I can show you strong evidence in the text and context of the work that this interpretation could be the actual authorial intent."

EDIT: reblogs are off AGAIN, because the copy that's being reblogged around now is once again the "divine revelation" goof which is completely against the spirit of actual education the post is intended in.

Please see this post for further information:

[grunge-mermaid]

my mom's hairstylist is 7 months pregnant and I'm not sure who I feel worse for: the baby whose mother is "too scared" to learn anything about pregnancy, childbirth, or childcare because she thinks she'd "back out if she knew the truth"

or the pregnant woman who is so uninformed (self-inflicted) that she thinks that 3 hours is a long labour

[sh1-n0bu]

imagine dating an older man this, imagine dating an older woman that COWARDS🗣️ imagine being an older woman and having a younger guy astronomically DOWN BAD (for all intents and purposes, this is a joke. i am not an older woman, nor am i shitting on ppl who love aforementioned relationship dynamics, this is just a horndogged thought)

imagine being an older woman, who never really saw the appeal in romantic or sexual relationships, only focusing on what was ahead of you. the job, adventures of life, education, academic achievements and your own personal hobbies, pastime enjoyments and relationships other than the romantic or sexual ones. there was more to world and life than just that after all, even though your friends’ nagging of when you will reveal the secret guy, or when you will find someone to settle down etc rang out during nearly every night outs, surely giving you a grey strand or few. really, you just… weren’t interested at all. there were rarely anyone who caught your attention and those who did were only appealing to the eyes rather than the heart

sure, there were some boys who would saunter up to you at the bar or cafe with their smug little faces and annoying attitudes, talking some shit about how they like their women like a silver fox, talking about how you were a beekeeping age, or even the stupid ‘i like my woman who are as old as my momma’. useless little things being said as a means to get a single night stand. you’d always tell them off with some backhanded insult, sharp words or how this wasn’t the predator franchise

one thing led to another and one of your closest and longest lasting friend had downloaded a dating app on your phone for you. something something about how you were in the perfect age to settle down now and if not, at least go out on a romantic date for once rather than taking yourself out on dates or with the ladies. you decided to humor them, keeping the app and adding very minimum information about yourself, work, hobbies and what not before kicking the acknowledgement of the app’s existence into the back of your mind

many DMs and snaps were sent to you of course, the usual beekeeping age bullshit. the rare few men who would be around your age range would end up being married, had a fiancée or in an odd form of relationship. you made sure to get their partners’ phone number and name before blocking them, calling them or texting them to notify them that their partner was a cheating bastard and had a dating app. “it’s their relationship, not yours!” most would say, but ladies gotta look out for one another in your opinion. made a pretty few sweet friends that way too

it was one of your slow and peaceful weekends when your phone dinged, another DM text in that accursed dating app. though instead of the usual annoying half-assed flirts or dick pics, it was a simple compliment. ‘good eve, ma’am. i just wanted to say that you look breathtaking. have a nice night, ma’am’ was all it said, a reply to one of the pictures you had added to the app for the introduction part. surprisingly straight to the point and respectful, so with a shrug and a ‘might as well give it a shot’ thought, you messaged back with some words of gratitude. something that quickly derailed into a nice normal conversation and getting to know each other texts. checking his profile, you found out that he was basically in the same position as you. forced by some of his friends to grow outside his shell, few pictures and simple descriptions, just a few years younger. safe to say, he was your first match in that damn app

life continued on, weekdays and weekends switching in their endless circle and you and your dating app friend had gotten close. it truly did felt like he was a nice mannered young man and when he asked if you would be willing to go out on a date, you agreed. nothing wrong with putting the dating app to its original intents and purposes. he was sweet, planned nearly everything with your added thoughts and preferences and had let you enjoy a nice dinner date, all freshened up and smelling of a sweet cologne with a decent suit. perhaps this whole dating app thing was a good idea after all, even as he stuttered sometimes and tripped over his words upon seeing how gorgeous you were, you thought of him as oddly cute

one dinner date turned into a few dates, then park, movie and hobby dates and before you two had known it, the whole thing had shifted smoothly into a relationship. things taken slowly at your own preferred pace, no use of rushing or getting down and dirty. it was a good relationship and possibly the best one you had so far, you'd wager. even your sweet boyfriend - as much as you both occasionally laugh and joke how it was unfitting and even a little bit young and childish for your age - had gotten used to this shift in life, comfortable with making you breakfast in bed on the days you have a work off or just sleeping in, making your coffee just the way you like, eggs cooked to fit your needs on a crispy toast, a pancake, with an adorably whipped cream drawn smiley face. it was just perfect

but of course, there were the occasional moments when your boyfriend nearly destroyed these perfect moments — at least, in his opinion. waking up in the morning before you, and seeing your sleeping face, all peaceful and calm with the grey streaks in your hair and the laugh lines on your face did things to him. you just looked so ethereal, basking in the glow of the morning sunlight, like the reincarnation of aphrodite. and before he knew it, he had a morning wood, quickly scuffling out of bed and towards to bathroom to take care of his problem before you woke up

or when you’re showing him the latest dress you bought, or any clothes really, just peacefully showing him what it looked like on you as you twirled in front of him and gods, you were so breathtaking. all he could do was just nod dumbly like the lovesick puppy he was as a weak ‘uh-huh’ escaped his lips. oh, the little pooch of your tummy, the rolls on your sides, the love handle, the hipdip — whatever these things were called, good god, he wanted nothing more than to just slink down from the couch onto his knees and politely ask to bury his face into them. let him touch them, the little fats on your body, the rolls, the pooch. he’ll lovingly caress them and your stretch marks and everything with reverence

or when you’re testing your new lipsticks on his face, applying the newly bought make up on your gorgeous, kissable lips before smooching him on the face, turning him more and more into a painting of your doing while he drunkenly sits there on the couch with a stupid fucking smile. oh no, this one wasn’t kiss proof either, better try all of them and see if they’re kiss proof too. oh he was covered in lipstick? don’t worry, nothing big. he’s just too busy admiring you and occasionally wondering how the color would look in its perfect kiss shape on his leaking dick while you mocked him for being a horny dog

maybe he slipped up one day, instead of thanking you usually with the sweet nickname after you had done fixing his tie for him, just idiotically smiling at you as a “thank you, mistress” dropped from his lips. an immediate freeze and after a moment, his face was turning red with an embarrassed apology after apology while he hid his face into the crook of your neck. not like you minded too much, just laughing and patting him on the back, reassuring him that it was fine, mistakes happened. though, you won’t lie, it was adorable in the sexy way on how he just let that slip out

ever since that little incident, your sweet boyfriend’s longing grew worse and worse. their hands started to wander more, squeezing, pinching and pawing hopelessly against the fat rolls of your tummy or gripping at your love handles with an eagerness of a puppy whenever they came to stand behind you while you made dinner. damn near sliding towards you on their knees to help you put on your shoes before you leave the house for work and have mercy on him if you choose to wear high heels that day, placing your heel between his thighs while his other hand gently guided your leg by the ankle to slip into the heel. he thought he was being slick but no, you caught it all. of course you would, he was damn near whimpering nowadays every time you come home all exhausted and collapse onto the couch, scrambling over and getting on his knees to massage your tired feet while his adam’s apple bobs while staring at your meaty thighs, mindlessly nodding and going “uh-huh” while you ramble about your day while your pretty boyfriend just wishes he was that goddamn stockings, snug around your legs

it was during one of these days that you decided to take pity on him — how could you not? his pathetic puppy eyes had you wrapped around his fingers — moving your leg out of his hands and instead hooking it over his shoulder. pulling him closer by your leg towards your thighs while you shift down more to place yourself closer to the edge of the couch. pretty eyes blinked up at you with a stuttered, “h-honey…?”, hands placed on his knees like the good boy he is while a pretty pink color bloomed on his cheeks. you just gave a roll of your hips on the couch, a sweet smile and a “my thighs feel exhausted too. help me out?” and he was immediately nodding his head vigorously, shaky hands grabbing and gently squeezing the fat while his breath grew shaky. god, he could see the lace edges of the stockings under your skirt now! and even more, he could see your panties. god help him, he was growing hard in his boxers like some stupid teenager seeing a woman’s boobs all over again

“a little bit up” you called out, watching his reactions with the same smile, lipstick covered lips spread wide on your face. your boyfriend whined instead of following through with your words, peering up at you through his pretty lashes. his hands pushed your skirt up, enough to take in your panties and stockings in full view as he gulped down his saliva, muttering out a weak “m-may i taste you, ma’am?”. the honorific instead of your name or the usual patnames just seem to fall from his lips so easily now, eyes constantly switching from your pretty face and colored lips and to your underwear and the fat of your thighs covered by the heavenly nylon

“you wanna taste me, pup?” you hum out, voice like a sweet honey or the finest red wine and have mercy on him, the idiot merely lost it right then and there, ready to lose any sense of dignity as he nods his head with an obedient “yes ma’am, i would like to taste you ma’am”. you simply cooed at his eager words, the leg thrown over his shoulder pulling him closer to the couch, closer to the heaven between your thighs as you balance your feet on his shoulder. he whined again at how you were teasing him, refusing to give him a solid answer and just toying with him like he was a canary trapped in the fangs of a cat. but he might as well be a willing canary that flew into the jaws of the feline with the way he cutely adds a final, “please allow me, ma’am…?” and damn near cheers a loud excited whoop when you nod at him, giving him the green lights

your boyfriend lets out a stuttered breath through his lips when he pulls down your panties, even folding them sweetly and placing them beside your legs on the couch like the sweet boy he is, when he sees your pussy, covered in the same color of bush as your hair. gulping again, he trails gentle kisses up your legs, from the lace ends of your stockings and up the bare skin of your legs, making sure to kiss the stretch marks he comes across before he finally nuzzles his face into your bushy mound. weakly, he licks at your folds, as if this was his first time eating out a woman and occasionally suckling at your clit. he was just so adorable with how he tenderly kisses and suckles and licks at you, like he had never felt the touch of a woman. so when your hands grasps at his hair, scratching at his scalp once before pulling him flush against your pussy, he downright moans against you before diving in like it was his final food. slurping at your wetness and eating you out like you were his last meal while his two fingers pushed your labia open, whimpering out words of “t-thank you, ma’am, thank yo-you for letting me touch you” and “you taste mmgh so sweet, ma’am.. i aamgh l-love your pussy juice s’much”

when you do cum into his mouth after his excited tongue and finger fucking you open, he opens his mouth eagerly to taste every single drop of your sweet pussy juice, already addicted to the taste and scent of it from just a single taste. his fingers continue to massage your soft walls, thumb swirling over your clit in gentle motions while his free hand pushed down on your lower tummy, pleading you to cum again and to get his face wet with your slick like he was some pathetic toy for you. only when you patted his head at last with a “good job, pretty boy” did he pull his fingers away — albeit with heavy disappointment — as he drawled out “th-thank you, missus. i’m glad to be-be of use to my missus” with his lips and jaws dripping with some of your cum. you laughed at seeing that look on his face, pupils blown wide, cheeks flushed and his hair a mess with your slick all over his jaw. seems like your pretty boy was a messy eater

first time writing smut for my female readers, this was truly a shift in my writing ngl. as you can tell from the smuts on my blog, im more comfortable writing for a gender neutral reader, top reader and im sure most — or at least half — of my readers feel comfortable with that norm as well. but lately cough cough a bit of rp on c.ai with cod character bots with my older oc cough cough ive gotten addicted to the thought of being an older woman and having a younger man just whipped for you and decided to challenge myself with writing for a femdom reader. and by younger, i mean within a decade of years age gap, preferably within 5 years even. nothing too serious. hope you all liked this small brainrot and the dividers belong to @/cafekitsune

[call-me-strega]

Dc x Dp Prompt #23: The Custody Battle Turned Romance

A freshly resurrected Jason is found by Single Dad Danny raising a de-aged Dan and Dani who goes "surely one more kid can't hurt?" and takes him in. Danny helps him deal with his catatonia, trauma amnesia, and other side effects of being undead without the need for a Lazarus Pit.

He takes the kid to a therapist Jazz recommended and supports him thoughout his recovery. They did some bloodwork and found out pretty early on he was The Jason Todd-Wayne but then he decided not to reach out and let Jason decided what he wanted once he was recovered.

Danny, Ellie and Jordan love and treat him like family in a way he's never quite had before even with Bruce. They’re just so open and honest about their feelings and never make him feel out of place. So when Danny ask if he’d like to reconnect with the Waynes or stay with the them, Jason chooses to stay with them.

The world has moved on around them, and so has the Batfam. Jason knows about Tim (and talked through his feelings in therapy). He knows about the foundation Bruce created in his memory and the way he very publicly grieved. He witnessed the news over Nightwing nearly beating the Joker to death. He knows enough to decided it’s better to let the dead remain dead. Instead, he becomes Jason Nightingale, eldest adopted son of a mechanic in the Narrows. The family welcomes him with open arms officially accepting him as a brother and son.

Danny supports Jason to finish his high school and college education and Jason decides to be a doctor as an homage to Thomas Wayne and aspires open a free clinic like Leslie Thompkins. They get his death certificate revoked under circumstances of resurrection (which is a thing that actually exists in public documents due to the resurrections that tend to happen in the DC universe) and legally adopt him so that he can go back to school. However, Batman monitors public records to a degree and this gets flagged in the system bc it’s Jason’s death certificate.

Suspicious, but optimistic Bruce informs the rest of the family what he has found out and ask them to come as back up for when he goes to find Jason. He’s investigated and is sure that the family who helped rehabilitate Jason is clean and nice people but he wants his son back. They others also wanna see Jason but are worried if this is a good idea since Jason hasn’t reach out himself and there is paperwork for an adoption in the system. But Bruce decides to track them down anyway.

Bruce shows up as the Nightingale’s door and asks to see Jason. Danny, sympathetic, agrees on the condition Jason wants to see him. Jason is hesitant, but decided it would be good way for both of them to get closure and agrees. Bruce and Jason have a tearful reunion and a long heartfelt conversation at the end of which Bruce says “Let’s go home son”. To which Jason has to awkwardly break it to him, but he has no intention of leaving the Nightingale’s and returning to the Manor. He lets him know that he’s open to meeting the rest of the family at least once more but that Danny is his dad now and Ellie and Jordan are his little siblings.

Bruce is devastated.

He lets the rest of the family know and they all make their visits while Bruce wallows in despair. Normally he wouldn let it go, but he just can’t stand to lose Jason another time. So he decides to take Danny to court in the hopes of getting visitation rights if not split custody.

It’s one of the weirdest cases to hit the Gotham courts: two dads who were never together in any capacity but aren’t antagonistic of each other, are trying to come to a custody agreement over their adopted resurrected child in family court.

Over the course of the court case Bruce sees what a good dad Danny is and bonds with his two “bio” kids. Meanwhile Danny gets to meet Dick, Tim, and Cass (Bruce’s legal kids as of rn) and gets to talk to them about their experiences with Bruce and how much they want to form/reform relationships with Jason. They do form a healthy respect for each other, and accept each other’s places in Jason’s life.

Court case ends up working out in favor of Danny. It’s split custody but he gets custody of Jason majority of the time (as per Jason’s own wishes) and Bruce and the Wayne's still have partial custody and open contact with the Nightingales.

Over the years kids all start to see each other as siblings and both Bruce and Danny as their dads. By the time Damian shows up Bruce and Danny have been functionally co-parenting each others kids for years. They provide support to each other’s kids that the other parent may not be well equipped to, but helping each other improve.

When Damian does arrive his superiority complex is quickly curbed and Bruce puts him into counseling on Danny and Jason’s recommendation. It takes a while, but Damien slowly finally opens up and gets to act like a real kid. Ellie and Jordan, who are around the same age (maybe a bit younger?), love having him over to roughhouse and play princesses/knights/dragons (but with politics and consequences). Sometimes they’ll go out and trick people into thinking they’re triplets.

It’s actually Damien who first suggests parent-trapping Bruce and Danny so that they can be one big family. He obviously gets Dan and Ellie to agree first. Then the three of them bag Tim and Cass. The five of them approach Dick next. Jason is actually the hardest to convince but the manage to get his approval. Thus, these guys try to set up the Oblivious Danny and the Emotionally Constipated Bruce.

And for Flavor, just when it looks like they’re about to get together, one of their past love interests comes into the mix, re-entering their parents’ live just to stir the pot. (Which ex is up to your imagination: Sam, Talia, Val, Selina, Tucker, Wes, Minhkhoa, Harvey)

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[qqueenofhades]

been seeing some responses to the many many lawsuits and other actions taken against trumpet and munkfruit that fall along the lines of "this isn't enough, it's already too late, you can't fight fascism with the law, we're all gonna die." i understand the fear, truly, but i'm curious as to your thoughts on it, as to me it seems like this sort of behavior/posting doesn't do much beyond embolden the narrative that everyone actually likes these bastards and they're too powerful to be stopped.

Welp. This is the kind of question that requires me to write a long and complex sociopolitical/critical/historical/Discourse-esque analysis that will take a while and which I am trying to do only selectively, but I'm at home on Saturday morning, I don't have anything else to do right now, and it does present me an opportunity to address some things I've been thinking about. So. We'll give it a shot.

The first thing that has struck me is that in a few short weeks, we're getting a sharp empirical disproving of two common online-leftist fallacies: one, the old "both parties are exactly the same" chestnut, and two, "the only resistance that matters is Violent Glorious Revolution" (which somehow and conveniently never happens). We had months and months of "Biden is just as bad as Trump!!!" being spread as gospel truth in online-leftist circles, and then when Harris took over, it switched just as seamlessly into "Harris is just as bad as [or even worse than] Trump!" Now, as I have said before, there were plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of Biden, particularly the Gaza policy (upon which Harris notably differed). But it's quite telling that the keyboard warriors who spent all of last year howling for The Righteous Punishment of Biden-Harris (regardless that the obvious ancillary consequence was letting Trump come to power) have either disappeared completely when it comes to dealing with the results of that rhetoric, or have switched to "everything is doomed so I guess we shouldn't bother anyway." Like. Trump is now proposing to fully ethnically cleanse Gaza and either blithely hand it over to Israel or build Jared Kushner Beachfront Resort Disneyworld, and what do we hear in protest? For the most part, crickets. These are not serious people. Their opposition is not morally consistent, and it only depends on how they can make themselves look good. I thought that Trump was somehow supposed to be magically better than Biden particularly on the Gaza issue, and that was why it was worth letting him get elected? Or something? Something!?!

I'm curious as to whether those people still legitimately think that Harris would have spent her first few weeks in office dismantling USAID, signing weekly anti-trans executive orders, unleashing ICE across the country and terrorizing immigrant communities, putting the Project 2025 guy in charge of the Office of Management and Budget, letting Elon Musk run rampant with Treasury data, nominating the likes of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to Cabinet posts, trying to freeze all federal funding, stripping DEI initiatives, dismantle the Department of Education -- etc. etc. The thing is, as ghoulish as it is, none of this is a surprise, because it is literally what Trump and his people spent the entire presidential campaign loudly, openly, and repeatedly promising to do. However awful they were and are, they were not remotely secret about their intentions. That information was out in the open every time they opened their mouths. But too many people didn't pay attention, rationalized it away, decided that "he won't actually do that" (despite the fact that he launched a literal violent coup attempt on the Capitol the last time he was in office), or just made up their minds that Trump Will Reduce Grocery Prices and refused to listen to any information that countered that view. What do we get now? Trump laughing off the grocery-prices issue and insisting that it's "not a priority" and Musk managing to claim that the real problem is government spending, not corporate greed. Again, this was completely predictable, because y'all got willingly suckered. It was not hard to see it coming.

That said: if the Glorious Online Leftist Revolution is still coming, and by some lights we might now legitimately need it, where the fuck is it? Are they still out there banging the drum against Trump and his "let's ethnically cleanse Gaza" policy and anything else that they insisted, they swore up and down, was functionally equivalent or possibly even marginally better than Biden-Harris getting another term? No. They're either dead silent, offering weak excuses, or completely giving into "we're doomed there's no point fighting back through weak shitlib institutions that are obviously terrible and will fail" blubbering that makes no fucking sense. One, because they move the goalposts so constantly that there's not even any attempt to reckon with the last effects of their damaging bullshit, and two? As I said, where's the fucking Revolution magically coming to save us and install a perfect leftist utopia (which is never how revolutions have ever worked) and sweep away Government Tyranny? Is that only for when a Democrat is in office and you can have confidence that the government is not going to come after you in the middle of the night for talking about it? Now that there's an actual fascist in power, it's somehow too hard to resist at all, even in small, institutional, and everyday ways that are often far more effective at practically confounding the bad stuff instead of empty and useless online echo chambers, so guess we should all just give up??!

Fuck. That.

This is also why we have to talk about the catastrophic lack of information literacy and critical thinking skills in young leftist spaces. A good example is the recent migration of TikTok users to the Chinese app RedNote. It was sweet for a little while as there was cultural exchange and friendship and memes. But then, predictably, it dove hard into "ah, once again The Evil US Government Has Lied To Us and there are no problems at all in China!" I have seen posts float by on my dash that unironically claim this is the case and China is truly great and Americans should want to move there and clearly all that business about authoritarian control and mass repression was just a ruse by, again, The Evil US Government. If you are so utterly devoid of basic information literacy and research abilities that your standard of proof for "is the Chinese government repressively authoritarian and totalitarian" is "a random Chinese person on an app in a country where the Internet is viciously controlled and voicing the slightest criticism can make you disappear told me that it isn't," then for Christ's fucking sake, you need help. For one, it wasn't just the US government saying this. It was, y'know, Chinese dissidents, the entire nation of Taiwan, historians, academics, researchers, the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang, etc etc. If your only standard for believing or supporting anything is "the opposite of what the US government thinks," then you are perfect targets for authoritarianism. Hey, a person living under an authoritarian regime who will punish them if they speak out against it told me everything was fine! Clearly there's nothing to worry about and we should want it here in America!

Come on. Come on.

This is also the case because uneducated young leftists like to unironically label themselves "communists" or "Marxist-Leninists" as if it's cool and hip and has never been involved in anything problematic in all of history, so anything that calls itself that must be supported. Shoutout to the idiot in my notes recently who reblogged a several-year-old post just to shout at me about how historical communists NEVER worked with or collaborated with fascists, because something something The Communists Were The Pure Shining Good Guys! (Uh, nobody tell them about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.) Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party is good and beneficial, end of story, no more criticism or caution needed! Obviously, yes, official American policy toward China has often been driven by basic Sinophobia, and the determination that nobody can change American hegemony or unipolarity or its ability to call the shots how it pleases. But if that is the literally only criteria you're using, then yeah. If you're so unaware that "the Chinese people are ordinary human beings" and "the Chinese government is repressive and authoritarian" are statements that can and in fact do coexist, then apparently you've missed the situation you're in right now, where "the American people are ordinary human beings" and "the American government is repressive and authoritarian" is also the case. Because online leftism is essentially devoid of a consistent moral principle and will just blithely switch up to support Bad Things as long as they're being done by governments with the correct ideological label, here we are.

Anyway. This is getting long, but the main takeaway is that the "all resistance against Trump is doomed and I guess we just gotta die :(" line is now, somehow, often coming from the same people who were constantly yelling that the only hope was a Glorious Revolution against Biden-Harris, and it is somehow even stupider. So you'll trumpet about Gloriously Overthrowing The Government all the day long as long as a Democrat is in office, but the instant a Republican gets in there instead and starts acting like an actual fascist, welp, time to just shut up and accept our doom and not even bother to struggle? Please tell me how any of that makes sense. Especially when actively confounding the Trump/Musk Axis of Evil is already working. There is also the fact that the establishment-media types are supporting this narrative for reasons of their own; witness the fact that the entire US corporate media is owned by oligarchs who hastened to bend the knee and pledge fealty to Trump 2.0. They obviously also have a reason for inculcating hopelessness in you, and that the only recourse is to shut up, accept it, and let them continue to rob you blind. Because American democracy will never matter as much as money, power, and control for the Billionaire Bros.

The point is: this is a bad-faith narrative on all sides. Whether it's coming from the online leftists in their latest head-spinningly hypocritical volte-face, the oligarch-owned corporate media that wants to feed you constant Bad News to keep you clicking and worried and distracted and unable to resist, the Trumpist power that wants people to quit making this pesky stink about all their authoritarian fascist adventures, or anyone else. There is nobody who has your best interests at heart if they are telling you that everything is doomed and the only thing to do is lie down and take it. There is no logical reason you should listen to them. Go forth and keep resisting, in whatever way presents itself. Those cumulative small actions are far more effective than any Splendid Revolution that never, ever materializes, while the people who preach it just sit back and whine about how things are so bad now so clearly they couldn't. Shut up.

It is always important. It always matters. It will make a difference.

Courage, etc.