#instead of immediately being labeled a cop

[ugly-anarchist]

I think there needs to be some kind of bridge between "do what you want forever, labels are made for you not the other way around" and "these labels mean something and the community around them might get hurt if you don't treat them with respect and also some specific experiences deserve their own specific labels"

Like, I get wanting to be accepting of everyone but at the same time treating queer labels like they actually mean nothing and anyone who tries to say "oh hey maybe don't do that" is just a cop who wants to exclude people isn't great.

Like obviously exclusionism is bad and people who just hate anyone who isn't like them shouldn't have their opinion respected but at the same time it's like... These words are important and the people being like "they're just words who cares" clearly don't respect the history and community effort put into them.

[foone]

AAA games? Pfft. Indie games? Double pfft.

I only play games from the alternate history where Hillary Clinton was elected in 2008 and banned all video games. You can only imagine how weird their underground gaming scene is. People like to call unlicensed games "bootlegs" but they've got actual bootlegged games! I've played games about helping your grandmother in hospice care realize she's a lesbian by reading Sappho to her, at 2am in a speakeasy in Baltimore. The cops raided it the next night, hundreds of Gamers were arrested. They posted pictures all over Friendster of the Baltimore PD destroying the arcades with axes.

I nearly got busted once because I was imaging old disks from a 386 and someone tipped off the gaming cops that there was a copy of Commander Keen in there. I had to prove that I didn't know it, I was imaging the disks blind and then indexing them later, and I would of course turn over any contraband to the proper authorities.

I was already on a watch list because I'd been known to have some gamedev-related activities pre-ban. They can't arrest me for making games back in 2007 when it was still legal, but they do want to keep an eye on me since I have the skills to break the law.

Anyway that universe's bootlegs are mainly PC games. Can't really have console games if there hasn't been a console release since the Wii/PS3/360 era. At one point Nintendo threatened to release the Wii SDK so game devs in the US could make unlicensed games, but that didn't happen as there were quickly no functional Wiis left in the US, except for very rare holdouts that never move. PC games are easy to distribute samizdat and hide on a USB stick or CD-R labeled "nickelback".

Japan's games industry is still going, so the later Nintendo and Sony consoles still exist, but Microsoft got out of the business of course. They sold the franchise to Sega who were hoping to release the 360 successor (the Xbox One in our universe) as the Sega Phoenix but it never materialized, either through their own financial incompetence or because of pressure from the US. There's a lot of international treaties that the US has pushed "and this aid only goes through if you ban games" clauses into. That would have been an official UN resolution if the USSR hadn't vetoed it. For once, thank God for the security council, eh?

I mainly get my gaming news through Japanese gaming sites (through a set of VPNs, since they're blocked at the border firewall), and some tor onion site run by a weird guy in Minnesota who is obsessed with documenting all the underground US games.

There's a lot being worked on, but it's always a tricky trade off. Too much attention and the police might be able to track down the creators, and it's basically impossible to fund underground games, as the VISA/PayPal etc funds get seized immediately. There's a whole task force for that.

Anyway one of the weirdest differences between our two time lines is that they've gone back and edited out gaming from a bunch of movies. Those that they can, of course. War games was just banned because they couldn't remove the tic tac toe ending. The Net just removed the scene at the beginning where she's playing Wolfenstein 3D, by recording some new screen footage and a new voice over. She's fixing a spreadsheet in the new edition.

(Yes, I've seen The Net from this alternate timeline. On Laserdisc, of course. I'm just that kind of person!)

They even edited Star Wars. You know that scene where R2-D2 is playing holochess with Chewie? They edited it to be a board game instead of holograms, because that made it too "video gamey".

Technically it's not illegal to show gaming in a movie, but it needs to be an 18+ film and you have to show the deleterious effects of gaming and/or the gamesters coming to a bad end.

This has affected films less than you'd think, to be honest. They were never great about showing video games even before they banned them.

Anyway, go have fun playing your AAA games with hundred-million-dollar budgets. I only play indie games made by people under a constant threat of arrest for their art.

[sepublic]

I remember hearing that Dana was inspired by True Crime, amongst other things and people IRL, when writing Belos. And it seems that contrary to the notoriety of True Crime fans, she actually understood the assignment.

Because she opted to demystify the serial killer as this dark, unusual psychology that operates outside of societal borders and rules, disturbed by some secret reason, and instead literally pull off the mask to reveal he’s just some white manchild who hates women and minorities to a violent degree, because he feels threatened by them and their ability to say No in his entitlement. There’s nothing special or unique about his motives.

He’s no exception to the status quo, he is it unmasked of the veneer of civility, he’s the lynch mob and the cop (all of whom inherit the violence of white supremacy and colonialism) and fittingly a lot of serial killers were clocked by women and PoC as dangerous, but cops —largely white men— dismissed their claims because look at this dude, he seems like an upstanding citizen! And that’s really how he got away.

And because his victims were people the system was less likely to believe because they both operated on the same biases, you see why a lot of cops who commit brutality are drawn to an institution where they’re given violent power over brown and/or queer communities who are labeled as ‘suspicious’, because they enjoy easy targets they know the system doesn’t care about, and are enraged by body cams and accountability.

It doesn’t matter if they’re intentionally bigoted, their support of an inherently bigoted institution makes them the same; Internalized biases and “I don’t see race” and all that. You see how Philip wanted to be a witch hunter —the prototypical cop who is not exclusively violent towards women but still has a clear slant— or colonial savior so bad, because his violence could be legitimized by the authority of the state.

He leans into it hardcore when he feels threatened by the presence of an outside girl who challenges the Christian narrative of Gravesfield, to the point of violence; It’s a position that validates killing anyone who doesn’t agree with him in general, hence Caleb and the Grimwalkers, but of course his and society’s biases slant towards women and PoC. And while it ultimately doesn’t matter whether he’s intentionally racist/misogynistic, it’s worth addressing that he very much does have the intention due to his blatant Conservative backdrop.

And seeing how charming Philip is and the portrayal of him as a little kid playing games in his youth, a perception Caleb might’ve still had which led to his death, I can see the direct line to families who find out their sons are school shooters and are in disbelief because he was such a nice kid! While ignoring the obvious Red Flags because white men are allowed to express these without being immediately scrutinized by the community, by having it brushed off. On some level cops don’t suspect him because he’s the same type of guy as them.

Part of that denial comes from the fact that he’s not an “unfeeling sociopath” who’s wired differently. Philip can feel empathy and guilt like anyone else, but he’s still a hateful prick and these aren’t mutually exclusive; Not when people can be perfectly selective about who they extend these feelings towards, or even do things in spite of these feelings, because other ones —anger and pride and hatred— exist and they choose to prioritize those. There’s an assumption that empathy and guilt inherently make you a good person, but they don’t; That ultimately comes from what you do about it, not how you feel.

You could even say Dana and the other writers wrote him too well, because true to life, we have a similar issue but on a micro-scale via the abstraction of fiction regarding a very dedicated fan base who loves to romanticize him and his actions, attributing his issues to some secret trauma in childhood, a young man failed by society! While also scrubbing him of his racism and misogyny and reliance on the status quo, to make him ‘apolitical’ and you can see the same not just with fans but also in society.

Because society doesn’t want to acknowledge serial killers as just the truth behind their white sons and the system that absolved and encourages them, because that would require them to admit their guilt in how they’re structured. Rather, they’ll say these men reflect some dark truth inherent to humanity, and don’t exist within a certain sociopolitical framework.

And so he was a ‘loner’ whose problems can be pathologized via mental illness, his trauma can be traced back to a specific incident in his youth he just couldn’t get over. So you see how school shooters are made into victims, how serial killers are also made apolitical and even alien to distance them from the status quo.

And then you can lean into how unusual they are by writing characters like Dexter or Hannibal Lecter, you can not just defend the system but feed into it via the commodification of their violence as entertainment and consumption, and thus fuel the white supremacy train by letting their violence towards women and minorities be praised as something fascinating and interesting and conveniently clean of bigotry. This is the dichotomy of the hypothetical, romanticized Fantasy Serial Killer, and the banal IRL Serial Killer.

Thus we have the same cycle of white men’s violence being praised and validated by the system, and white men feeling entitled to this fame as a delusional fantasy. Because you’ve never heard of a black serial killer; Because black people are violent, that’s just the way they are, right? But if white men are violent, this is sensationalized as somehow unusual and fascinating and worth dedicating countless books and shows and movies towards. Obviously.

And even going back to witch hunters, sometimes I wonder about the constant consideration of, What if witches did exist? What if they were evil? Things like The VVitch or The Conjuring series, which have some framing of the Salem Witch Trials’ IRL violence towards women as legitimate in another universe, because of Satanism’s genuine predatory threat towards women, and how evil women sacrifice theirs or others’ God-given gift of a child, and now threaten another white Christian family.

And again there’s the the demystifying of the real life witch hunter too when we have a historical reenactment declare verbatim that IRL witch hunters were motivated by economics and other banal factors, not by any genuine belief in the dangers of demons; And even in a setting where the demons were real, they were not the predatory threat IRL witch hunters made them out to be, and so their very real biases and ulterior motives still apply in cumulative insincerity.

Hence, the Titan correcting Luz by explaining Belos as someone who only cares about being the hero in his own delusion; The fascist wet dream of a hidden invader here to corrupt even young white men, an outside monster to vanquish and whose destruction justifies the state, when in reality the monster IS the state, and before he was even presented as a witch (much less the human truth), his system’s destruction was called for.

Ultimately, a lot of True Crime and similar narratives are criticized for focusing more on this apparently inevitable mystique behind the perpetrators, who warrant far more attention than their victims. So when the villain is an example of True Crime, it’s worth noting how the show is so much more focused on the ‘weirdoes’ he targets, on women and/or PoC. The lives of Luz Noceda and her friends, them getting along and their psychologies, are just so much more important, and it really isn’t about that guy, who is informed as much as he needs to be.

But again, the True Crime fans dilemma; People genuinely salty at the show for not focusing on their favorite serial killer and his troubled backstory, his tragic motives and Puritan repression. The framing of his murders and motives isolated through the lens of his violence on undeserving white men, and not on the out-group he is specifically targeting and has committed much more violence on, esp if you look at the narrative’s actual framing of his impact on our protagonists, but also other victims who are witches or demons, and even his own self-professed motives; Hence, ‘Fratricide Georg’ as a joke depoliticized of his colonial violence, a violence that is not just adjacent to but fulfilling racism.

Because he hallucinated only those white men out of guilt, but that’s his biased perspective and priorities; And so you see how this is contrasted with a refusal to empathize with people like the Collector or Luz, who are put into the same situations as his white male victims via shared cinematography, yet are just as rejected. Luz is only put into this situation as convenient to Belos’ narrative, the closest replacement to a white male human he can get, but again if this girl of color says No, he tries to murder her and even does.

Yet again, people take genuine, personal insult at the creator for finding Belos to be her least favorite character to write, while ignoring that she still found him necessary to the story she was trying to tell; She just found the framing and focus should’ve been shifted to his actual victims’ deep and meaningful lives, how they matter. So people hate that S3 cares more about Luz Noceda’s relationship with her parents of color, as well as her female mentor and demonic brother, or her queer relationship with her girlfriend, etc.

And even when they get a bone of white boy Hunter, it’s still not enough; Fans inevitably gather themselves into an almost frenzied state of personal victimization, rallying into harassment of PoC who criticize their portrayal and discussion around their colonial serial killer fave, organizing dedicated trends and months to giving their white men the focus they ‘deserved’, because this is just White fandom in general.

Look at the entitlement campaigns regarding Ben Solo or Billy Hargroves deserving better, these young white men violent to women and minorities. It’s just the same thing but on a micro-scale, at least filtered via fictional characters. But Jesus you see how internalized biases bleed into everything. You’ve never heard of a black serial killer and fandom doesn’t fight for characters of color.

[13keithxpidge13]

NO HOLD ON abt your punkflower au.. imagine how hobie would feel about prowler miles,,, was the miles in his universe also prowler but more vigilante style?? like imagine it being exactly mirroring how uncle aaron died as prowler from the first movie <//3 or for a more added flavor neither knew each others identity under the mask and was protecting each other the whole time

i blame you for giving me sad infectious brainworms

Hobie was long from completely healing from Miles' death but, had gotten a better hang on his emotions when it came to talking or thinking about him for too long. So, when Miles from Earth 1610 showed up, he had hoped he hadn't come off as overly excited and clingy. He just-he looked /so much/ like his best friend/first love. Acted like him too. Wanted to help people no matter what and was almost a little shy when it came to new people. Hobie hated himself for it but he was growing attached to this new version of Miles and couldn't help but wish that the Miles in his world had been bitten instead of him. Maybe he'd still be alive.

Miles was a good guy back on Hobie's world too though. He had gone by the name "Prowler" and while the government had condemned him and labeled him a criminal against the dictatorship, Hobie saw him for what he was, a true genuine good person that would do whatever it took to help another person in the fucked up world they lived in. It was what made Hobie so attracted to him to begin with. They had similar goals and similar ways in how they handled things. He didn't have any super powers like Hobie but could hold his own. He designed all of his own gear and even sowed some of his own designs onto Hobie's vest, painting badass doodles on his guitars and shit. It was the only thing Hobie had left of him after he died.

He didn't exactly approve of Miles going out there without Hobie by his side but, he had never been one to stop his friend. But, Hobie was nothing if not selfish. Often, he'd be found right by Miles' side and their friends used to tease that they were attached to the hip. Hobie had only wished that were true because, if it were, he could've saved his best friend from being murdered.

He didn't see Miles get shot but, his spidey-senses had warned him only seconds before and by the time he had turned around, Miles was on the ground clutching his chest while the child he had saved was wailing beside him.

Hobie had never lunged for anything so fast and he was immediately at his best friends side, ripping off their masks as Miles wheezed and gasped for air.

"No," Hobie shook his head. "No, no, no. Miles, mate? Miles, love, come /on/-"

"Hobie," Miles croaked. "It's gonna-it's gonna be-"

"Shut up, shut /up/!" Hobie yelled, feeling tears well in his eyes. "Just-why did you do that? /Why/ didn't you let me handle those guys, why would you-?"

Miles laughed breathily. "Because," He whispered, voice fading. "Someone's...someone's gotta look out...for the little guy...right?"

Hobie's breath hitched and he sobbed.

"Miles-"

"Hobie," Miles interrupted and shakily raised a hand to his cheek, fingers bloody. "I'm gonna...take a nap."

"No," Hobie shook him. "Miles, no-"

"I love-" Miles coughed again. "I love...you..."

His hand fell and with it, Hobie's entire world had shattered.

Sometimes, other Spider-Men will ask why his laces are blue and he'll say he kicked the snot out of some bad nosed cops. But, in reality, he had went on a rampage that night and killed over eleven officer's at the scene of Miles' murder in a desperate attempt to avenge his first friend and the love of his life.

But, in the end, it did nothing to erase all the pain and grief he had suffered thereafter and nothing ever would.

[artsy-hobbitses]

Just finished watching X-Men 97 Ep 7 (I love having a series to look forward to on a weekly basis again! Excited to get a good dinner and sit down for half and hour of getting WHIPLASHED by all the new reveals and emotions. It's such a nice thing to look forward to inthe mid-week slog as well)!!!

Thoughts and spoilers below!

They REALLY went all out with Gambit's funeral, and it was nice seeing Nightcrawler carrying out priest rites for the brother-in-law he could have had. Jubilee's anguished anger at Rogue not being there HURT

Holy shit ROGUE. VERY Rogue-centric episode, and it's pain pain PAIN evbery other minute. Her absolute disdain for Captain America not wanting her to be on his team to check out Gyrich because of the tense situation/'optics' is 100% understandable, I stand by women's rights and Rogue's Wrongs in this case. Also her backhanding him with the "America's Top Cop" label, she taking no prisoners this week.

Beast gently but sternly calling out Trish the reporter about how 'tolerance' simply isn't enough anymore and it was a low bar to set for mutant-human relations to begin with, and how he's aghast at the idea of having to give a calming/professional sound byte or something to try and quell mutant protests and demonstrations worldwide after what happened, after MILLIONS OF THEM DIED is. Very relevant. To certain current events. He's been trying SO HARD to be the sweet, professional one, but he is tired and he is sad and he doesn't have it in him to ask for the bare minimum anymore or tell his people they don't have the right to feel the way they do.

We get Diamond Emma! No clue as to whether the massacre has changed her outlook on life since her appearance was during a brief rescue moment where Cyclop's hopes that Madelyne could have survived (Jean said she could feel a telepath under all the rubble) got crushed, but hopefully that'll be answered in the next ep!

Sunspot finally coming clean to his mum about him being a mutant! She seems like a very sweet lady who clearly loves him and takes it VERY WELL, but immediately she's like "Our family is established and in the spotlight, your father's business can't afford this sort of publicity. The world won't accept you, especially given what happened, so we have to find a way to hide this from the public, and that includes cultivating a list of people you can associate with". Which feels like it could be relevant to today's queer acceptance where it's like "On a personal basis I love you and accept you for who you are, BUT..." as an evolution from the X-Men movie's "Have you ever tried... not being a mutant?"

There is a LOT of talk about 'optics' in this episode, which feels VERY TIMELY. And VERY POINTED. How President Kelly apparently wants to send aid to Genosha, but doesn't do it to the fullest extent because he's worried about the political optics from 'normal humans' who are now afraid of an all out human-mutant war, and argues that he's doing his best here and that he needs suppport to stay in office to ensure a 'worse' person for mutant advocacy doesn't step in (I'm not going to lie. Very Democrat argument for why their man should stay in office---look at the boogieman who might be there if they aren't, instead of dealing with issues head-on) . And Cyclops's civil but seething rage at that because this is NOT a time for subtleties or politicking MILLIONS OF MY PEOPLE ARE DEAD.

Nightcrawler comforting Rogue and letting her just bawl openly in his arms during Day of the Dead ;; My heart.

Rogue kills a man. Or, helps him to his death, I'm not sure how you categorize this when Trask was already attempting to jump off a building out of guilt anyway, and she stepped in to stop him, only to let go when he said he had no other info for her (she had initially told him to help them to redeem himself). Again, 100% understandable, I support Rogue's Wrongs, and I LOVE how dark they're taking this, watching our girl step closer and closer to the abyss from her rage and grief and just plunging into it. Also her screaming that Trask deserved it for killing a great man, "MY MAN!!!!!". Whoof.

KNEW Mags wasn't dead. Going to be fun seeing WHAT Bastion plans to do with him now.

Again, STELLAR episode, a good 9/10 from me!

[crystallizedtwilight]

Hey! Do you have a personal timeline for Sprace getting together in relation to the strike? I'm still trying to figure out mine and I'd love some inspa

Also... could you pretty please draw a little jatherine? Your artstyle is so awesome ansmd pretty, I just want more content 😭

Sure, I can do a sprace timeline below the cut!

Racetrack Higgins, orphan, grows up in the Manhattan lodging house and sells there until his teens.

Once in his teens he discovers the Sheepshead Races and starts to bet there, just now and then, when he can afford to.

Throughout his mid teens (15-17) he starts to bet there more and more frequently, earning him his name.

He realizes that if he can sell papes at Sheepshead he can be there DAILY, so by 18 he makes the commute every single day.

After a two weeks of daily selling at Sheepshead, Spot gets word that a Manhattan Newsie is selling daily on Brooklyn turf. Houses don’t necessarily have to sell on boroughs, but since this has become a daily occurence, Spot investigates to make sure that this claiming of a prime selling area isn’t hindering his own boys in any way.

Spot puts Race on probation for one month, checking on him daily.

They develop a rapport and after Race’s probation is up Spot allows him to continue selling there.

Spot continues to check on Race, even though he has no more reason to, and Race takes this as a positive sign. One week later, Race kisses him, and Spot kisses him back.

They continue this way without any labels or deeper admissions, just meeting now and then to kiss under the stands for another month.

THE STRIKE HAPPENS

Jack asks “Who wants Brooklyn” and Racetrack ducks his head. He’s the obvious choice to go and everyone knows it—Mr. Sheepshead Races. But his relationship with Spot, starting from the general understanding that they’re attracted to each other, is still relatively new at just a month old. He isn’t willing to use Spot’s affection for him as leverage. He’s also terrified that same affection had a limit which fell just short of saying yes…and then he’d lose so much more than just the strike.

Race doesn’t show up to Sheepshead that day. Instead, Jack does. Jack asks Spot to Join the strike, which Spot declines without proof that Manhattan won’t fold, which is the responsible thing to do. It makes sense that Jack asks him, not only because he began the strike, but out of respect to converse leader to leader, Manhattan to Brooklyn. However, when Jack relays the news, it guts Race because Spot knows full well that Race is loyal to Manhattan and still declines.

Pulitzer’s goons and the cops attack the newsies for striking and Race is injured. Race understands that his fate to either be thrown in the refuge or killed in another fight is sealed because he knows there’s no winning this without Brooklyn. Despite this, he cheers the other boys up with “King of New York" because he believes in the cause, is loyal to Jack, and knows it's the right thing to do.

Immediately afterwards, he goes to Brooklyn to tell Spot goodbye. Race, believing Spot never felt the same way as he did, prepares himself to go down with the strike. Before Spot can recover from being dumfounded and respond, Race has hopped another carriage back home.

“Newsies Stop the World” headlined be damned. Seeing Race injured is all the motivation Spot needs to join the strike.

Spot sends a kid over to tell Manhattan “Next event you can count on Brooklyn”.

The next time they see each other is at the theater rally and Race has never been so relieved, never so elated, never more in love. But they don’t have time to talk much in the chaos of Jack betraying the cause. Race retreats to the house with Davey to help calm the Manhattan boys and Spot returns to Brooklyn to regroup.

After Jack is back on board they then catch glimpses of each other in Pulitzer’s cellar as they help distribute The Children’s Crusade.

And by the time Race is looking up at Pulitzer’s window and Spot is staring down at him from it victoriously, neither of them have any doubt in their mind that they’re absolutely in love.

The first time they actually get a chance to speak privately is once the Newsies are celebrating at the Manhattan lodging house. They speak in the back alley and, for the first and only time in his life, Race cries in front of Spot, finally allowing himself to admit just how stressed and scared he was throughout the whole ordeal. Not just terrified that he’d lose the strike but that he’d lost Spot along with it. Spot assures him that as soon as he knew Race was committed to the strike, he was coming to help him win it. Racetrack tells Spot he loves him and Spot says it back.

That same night, Race goes home with Brooklyn after the Manhattan house party under the guise that they’re simply going to keep the celebration going. No one in Manhattan bats an eye because of course he was likely to make friends there given his selling location. But the truth is neither of them can be parted from each other right now, and once they’re back safe and sound in Brooklyn, Spot admits that he feels guilty for not joining the strike sooner, but Race never blamed him in the first place.

The same day that the Newsies won the strike, Pulitzer had offered Jack an illustration job. Race heads back to Manhattan to see if Jack will take it because, if so, Race will need to fill Jack's place as Manhattan’s leader. During this week, Spot extends the offer to Race that he can move into the Brooklyn lodging house, but Race tells him he has to wait to see what Jack is going to do as it will determine his own course of action.

Jack takes the illustration job. Race briefly becomes Manhattan’s leader so they boys don’t feel like they are scrambling, but Race actually takes this time to start training another trusted newsie to take over the house. Over the next three weeks, the transition is made smoothly, and Race finally feels that his duty to Manhattan is complete and can therefore follow his duty to his heart. The Manhattan house throws him a farewell party.

Race moves in to the Brooklyn lodging house that night and is welcomed with open arms. Together at last!

[thesinglesjukebox]

SAINT LEVANT - "SEE YOU AGAIN"

Not a Miley Cyrus cover Not a Wiz Khalifa cover Not a How Many Times Are We Going To Do This Joke Cover with thanks to Taylor for suggesting this multilingual magnificence...

[7.18]

Rose Stuart: Saint Levant has been one of my most listened to artists of 2023, and "See You Again" is a great example why. The wistful, dream-like instrumentation is the sonic exemplar of yearning, kept grounded by a beat reminiscent of a ticking clock. Saint Levant's laid-back flow maintains the airiness of the song, but where in "Nails" it was effortlessly confident, here it almost sounds pained. The seemingly simple flow only serves to highlight his masterful wordplay, and the easy switch between languages emphasises the double meanings of the song -- a regretful love ballad, and a mourning for the past (what past is left only hinted at, with references to the "war in [his] room" and the EP being titled From Gaza, with Love). It feels like a disservice to Saint Levant to say, but "See You Again" is what Drake was trying to achieve -- dreamy and melancholic, self-flagellating without ever being pathetic, brutally honest in all of its emotions. I only hope that Saint Levant sees some of the success Drake has. [9]

Taylor Alatorre: "PTSD back from '05." In 2005, Marwan Abdelhamid was 4 years old. A diagnosis originally used to describe shell-shocked soldiers returning from World War I is here used to denote the earliest memories of one's childhood. This daunting revelation is tucked away at the tail end of Saint Levant's EP From Gaza, With Love, a release which largely focuses on the second half of that title -- "Lover Boy Levant," he calls himself at one point, a bit of Drake mimicry that's disarming in its blatantness. Knowing this, it may not seem immediately logical to view "See You Again" as a more elegiac, pessimistic version of Kanye's "Homecoming," with Gaza swapped in for Chicago. There is no big "if you don't know by now" reveal to spell it out for the listener, and one could easily write the song off as a less horned-up take on the rapper's default pose as the globe-hopping heartbreaker. It's only by taking in the EP as a whole, and specifically its title track, that the more political interpretation becomes unignorable, if not undeniable. Prior to that track's groanworthy verse about Bella Hadid, there's these two crucial asides in the background, like intrusive thoughts made manifest: "but I'd feel like a tourist if I even went back," and "if they had it their way we would never go back." The first of those has an entire other single written about it, but it's the second that's more relevant here. I've no desire to turn this into an essay about the right of return, and Levant doesn't either -- though I will note that I am writing this on the date that UN Resolution 194 was adopted, and that Levant's record label, 2048, is named after the 100th anniversary of the Nakba. "See You Again," while rooted in this history, is more of a quiet inventory of personal losses and regrets than a rousing expression of national aspirations. He may use an unnamed "auntie" as a stand-in for his homeland, but he resists the temptation to cast his atypical refugee story as the avatar of an entire diaspora. Just as crucially, despite the forward-looking stance of the song's title, it spends far more time dwelling in the irretrievable past than in planning for a future that it intentionally leaves vague and undefined: "Two years and they flew by... I left you when I needed you." The production style, archetypically yet suitably intimate, is devoid of tricks or gimmicks, save for one which works incredibly well. When the lower end drops out of the mix in the second verse, leaving only the piano and a few lonely drum pads, it makes the repetition of the lyrics seem like a mournful meditation instead of a cop-out. He could say more, and he has in other songs, but does he need to here? Is it not right and just to simply pause and take stock of what has been lost, of what once was and never can be again, before taking one more uncertain step forward? [9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: There's so much subtext here -- from Saint Levant's birth during the second intifada, to the way that he effortlessly weaves French, Arabic, and English together, to daddy issues, to the way that the object of his affection seems to both be a person and a place currently experiencing the worst genocide of the 21st century -- is it bad that my biggest takeaway is just how insanely sexy Saint Levant sounds? [8]

Ian Mathers: There's so much going on here that I'm kind of mad at my brain for refusing to focus on anything other than "remember when Drake was actually an appealing presence on a song?" (I'm not sure I do, but Saint Levant makes me feel like I could understand it.) [7]

Micha Cavaseno: French remains one of the worst languages for rap. There's maybe two times I've heard French spat on a beat and not been repulsed; one time by some guys attempting fake Three Six Mafia stuff in a Salem mix (so already extremely niche circumstances) and the other from MHD's career (now potentially over as he's currently facing incarceration!). Saint Levant is not achieving that by doing the warmed over Migos triplet cadence married to Stormzy-level saccharine nobility through the trials and tribulations we all must go through... and yeah, this man has a certain amount of genuine tribulations. But he's abandoning that for generic platitudes that muffle and muddy whatever he's trying to express. He needs a new flow, new style, whole new everything. And please, please, don't rap in French to me. Nobody deserves that, not even the French! [4]

Nortey Dowuona: I don't know why Buddy Cademi went super hard on the piano, but I hope he reaps a significant amount in royalties for carrying this damn song on his finger -- not his back, his fingers. Absolutely beautiful. Oh, and "PTSD back from '05" is a great line. The tenderness which Saint Levant sings "I really hope I see you again" with the unknown female vocalist is beautiful. Wish I could find her name though... [5]

David Moore: Warmed-over, if pleasant, modal rap that gives a lot of space for a (the-)dreamy synth and piano bath I associate with an era of sing/rap I personally found a bit less one-note (well, four-note, technically). Can I give it an extra point for heartbreaking geopolitical resonance? Yes. [6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: It's elegant in its restraint. Saint Levant doesn't drag it out at all. The chorus acts as a bookend for his plaintive cry, not even begging but hoping that he can see the addressee again. The piano becomes more prominent throughout until Saint Levant trusts it to end the track on its own, embodying his feelings just as much as the words did, the tiny modulations playing on hope, not fear. [9]

Brad Shoup: The last playlist I made was of songs from 1998; I always love doing the years with rap but the Continental stuff tests me. For like 15 years, the predominant strains were, in reverse order, "German frat guys" and the grimmest boom-bap imaginable. So yes, it's a balm to hear Drake-style emotional rap, especially with celestial synths and piano lines that move like parted curtains. [6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Drawn back to this again and again for the moment two minutes in when words fail and a truly gorgeous passage of piano unfurls itself. It's one of the most arresting moments in pop this year -- a moment of rupture and relief from the deep and messy feelings of the rest of the song. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: "See You Again" recalls the electro quietstorm of 2010, with its brooding synth wash and expressive piano. Inescapably for a 2023 album called From Gaza, With Love, the heartbreak runs through multiple channels. [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[thecatfarm]

So. I have some opinions on some recent discourse. (tw: rape, assault, violence)

Here's the thing:

I decided very early in my life that I was against the dehumanization of anyone, no matter their crime, yes, omg, of course including murderers and torturers and rapists, including everyone, that's the entire point.

But.

Most people who I've seen defend this position? They usually argue about the misuse of the dehumanisation -the "if you kill pedophiles, every queer person the state wants eliminated will be labeled a pedophile, if you castrate rapists, every innocent minoritiy the state wants purged will be labeled a rapist"

And I was of the opinion that we should be focusing, instead, on the fact that nobody is inhuman enough to have their bodily autonomy taken away.

That nobody is an absolute monster, that nobody should be seen an ontologically evil, that nobody should be treated as absolutely iredeemable.

Nobody.

But I've also sometimes thought to myself "well, you know, that's romantic and all, and, I know you say that now, but dude, you were never properly raped, and I don't know if you can correctly extrapolate from your limited experiences, maybe, if you live through a violent one, where you scream and beg and cry, you might feel differently"

And then it happened.

An acquaintance visiting from France beat me up and then raped me while going through an uncontrollable episode. It destroyed my life for a very long time. It still destroys it sometimes. I lost a few friends, and I almost lost my job, and it was in the best case scenario, where people believed me.

And, yes, I do now feel differently.

I now feel enraged by the dehumanization. I'm even more convinced it's a mistake to view people as monsters, if the thing they do is bad enough.

Because, see, he didn't mean to do it

"wtf are you talking about, how can you rape someone and not mean it, what is this bullshit rape apologetics"

Well, say, for example, you're having an episode after at least a week of no sleep and a day long sobriety streak after a month or so on a variety of uppers.

Three things are happening at you at the same time: a. Your crush is overdosing, and you need to help them, your phone isn't working so you can't call an ambulance, you try to give them a cold shower b. You are flirting with your crush while making shure they're eating, my god, you're finally having sex with them c. Somebody beat up your crush and left them in the bathroom, they are bleeding, and screaming.

And as your perception shifts rapidly among the three things, you don't realise that you tried to foce feed them, that you started hitting them to open their mouth until they passed out, that you dragged them to the bathroom, that you fought to get them into the bath, that you raped them, that they escaped, that you ran after them-

-that they never wanted you,

that they never consented to any of it-

"Cool cope" you'll say, I know. "How can you know that's what was happening?"

Well, because, as I tried explaining to the court, to no avail (they decided I was being protective), he did things that pointed very directly at his motives.

He tried giving me food, and water, he frantically looked for his phone to call an ambulance and then swore when he remembered it was dead, he looked for mine and didn't find it, he tried to shock me with cold water to wake me up, he tried stopping me from hitting on furniture, he didn't hurt me when he fucked me, he stopped raping me as soon as I turned around and he saw I was bleeding, when he caught up to me as I was banging on my neighbor's doors, he started knowcking and screaming too

And, okay, sure, it could have been an act. Except the French guy isn't a good actor when he's stressed. And he was hella stressed

He was, immediately, labeled a monster.

The cop who came over to pick up his stuff made fun of his clothes (for being too queer), his hair style (which was my work), and his mental state (the thing I was most worried about), to make me feel better.

Because, he was a monster, no?

But I think that, if there's a balancing scale here, if I have to use that label, what makes one a "monster", if anything, is intent.

A 40 year old child molester who blackmails and teases his victim certainly knows what he's doing -but a drunk 16 y old virgin whose knowledge of sex is a box of rapey metaphores, coercing his girlfriend until she says yes? That guy probably has no idea there's something wrong.

And, like, the most in-character "monster" of all my encounters was still that professor who grabed my boobs once, and who paid me back for the slap he got with a monthly delay of my scheduled animation shoot. Because he meant to pray on me, and meant to hurt me for retaliating.

The French guy didn't.

Yes, he did the most damage to me, physically and mentally, but his intentions were, at worst, extremely confused, and, at best, actually pure.

And yet, the malicious professor is a good guy (if a bit of a dick), and people don't believe me when I tell them, but the guy who needed help?

He's disliked by most people who meet him, because he's neurodivergent in the uncomfortable way: he's erratic, overly passionate, gets loud when frustrated, and extremely stubborn and sometimes verbally agressive when he suspects he's being insulted.

He's a prime candidate for dehumanisation.

Lo and behold, suddenly, people were capable of believing me instantly -and, rhetorically, offering to murder him.

Or worse.

And, this person expressed it in a way that made my various thoughts on it finally click:

I am now even more insistant on my "there are no monsters" rhetoric, because I've seen how the agressive distrust of victims is an attitude stemming, sometimes directly, from that rhetoric.

Like, you're likely to believe your best friend with the anxiety disorder spent his youth stealing cigarettes from his mom sometimes, because that doesn't challenge the "he's a good guy" rhetoric - but if you were told that he raped a couple of people through coersion, while they were both drunk?

Well, if the fact he raped someone means, by default, that he is an iredeemable monster -and your friend is, you know, a good person, then it's likelier you won't believe that he did it. And, if you witness him trying again, you'll probably rationalise it and not interfere.

It also makes it likelier you'll distrust the people accusing anyone you think is beyond reproach, because, if you believe in monsters, you're likelier to also believe in saints.

And victims will be less likely to come forward, if they suspect their rapist is well-liked and respected by their community. This applies to any crime that is percieved to be "the domain of inhuman monsters": If the act makes you a monster, then, to accuse the saint, you have to convince people they're a monster first.

This permeates almost every disagreement about consent I've seen.

A very tame example: I had *severe issues* explaining to a girl why she should stop touching my ass, especially after I've asked her to stop. You see, the moment I complained, she started protesting that she's a "not a monster" who would "do such things as violate someone". How I should ask around, that people know she's a good person.

I couldn't persuade her that her being a good person was irrelevant: She, unmaliciously, missunderstood my boundaries, and broke them. Me telling her was information about my limits, but she saw it as an indictment of her character.

She tried proving to me she was "a soft person" by touching me again, and started having a panic attack when I completely recoiled and left.

See, if the narrative was that assault and rape are things that good people can do on acccident (and is not only the domain of fully aware, malicious monsters), then, maybe, the soft girl would have had a short converation about boundaries and a couple more beers, my professor would have been reprimanded and maybe given some counceling instead of touching every big boob he saw, and my rapist would have been helped before he fucked up so bad he ended up in jail -as people wouldn't have felt the need to cover up for his other, more minor transgressions, because he was, actually, a good guy.

And maybe it will make mental healthcare better, and the solution, for a lot of people isn't "put the rapist in jail so he gets raped in turn"

And, maybe, hopefully, finally, people who are on a track to act on their worst compulsions could actually volunteer to get help before they hurt themselves or anyone else, without fearing that they'll forever be a monster for things that are -as of yet- just in their heads.

And, like, I get it if you fantasize every night about your rapist exploding theatrically (like putting too much air in a baloon!) -and I'm not taking that from you.

Your thoughts, even the most violent, overt, or weird ones, do not make you a bad person, and I'm not saying you should stop, or not share them. You must process all of your emotions, honestly and at your own pace.

But it's destructive to demand revenge becomes policy.

I wish we could find a way to stop dehumanising people -no matter their crime. But, maybe for now, let's just not call for purge-by-eugenics against people commiting sex crimes, and then calling it leftism. Or, at least, stop saying it's "for the victims", as if we were of one mind about this.

Cuz, if it wan't obvious from this book of a post, I'm ready to haunt this hill forever

[psychotrope777]

i think i have my life plan figured out. ill work mostly odd jobs doing whatever i need to make money and dedicate my free time to cartooning as a hobby / side hustle. maybe write a kids novel or two. my works will have a relatively small but dedicated fanbase, ill get to do what i love while still maintaining relative anonymity, and ill do that for most of my life before abruptly deciding in my 50s that i want to be a general surgeon and using my money from sales and royalties to get into med school. people will find my sudden radical change of career pretty weird but ill regardless be well respected for my skill and professionalism that is until my property gets raided and the cops find the shed on the corner of my property where i keep jars of formaldehyde containing various tumors and growths from patients that ive secretly smuggled out of the hospital instead of incinerating. each jar will be labelled with a name and birth date as if they were my human children. i will immediately lose my medical license and everyone who used to read my work will feel incredibly uncomfortable and a little bit violated. i will be shunned out of the public eye before suddenly being found dead, shot in the head by an unknown assailant. the case will go cold and once the media storm dies down people will forcibly eject me from their minds for the next ten or twenty years until some unfunny content creator makes a series about me that will get a few hundred views

[nocturne-of-illusions]

wrt this post

[cw disability trauma, health scares and lack of care, family shit. also, rambler's curse hit me, sorry in advance.]

i'm gonna be so open for the few ppl who follow me here and care abt this shit lmao -- i'm more of an "if someone asks or if a post involving my illnesses comes up i might say something, but i won't otherwise just bring up specifics in convo" type, but that post made me emotional in Some Way and i want to vent AHA ;; i generally sequester this shit to my private twit so. curse be upon ye.

anyway. recently i was tested due to concerns about possibly having lupus... and when i was told the potential treatment involves taking immunosuppressants, i knew that would be my cause of death. immediately. i knew i'd be dead by the end of the year, if not within a couple of months. def more than weeks, but beyond that? that'd be up to my family.

the family who stopped masking after 1 year, knowing they live with an immunocompromised person who has been labelled as such by several docs (which. aha oho. lead me to getting covid and long covid and my disability becoming 3x worse!!! yippie!!!). who refuse to mask anywhere, even when i wear mine, unless it's at a hospital and there's been a recent outbreak. who've stopped being on top of their hand washing and counter wiping and general sanitary actions. who visit with long-time "friends" who are anti-vax and anti-covid.

who GET MAD when -I- quarantine IN THEIR PLACE bc THEY REFUSE TO QUARANTINE after TRAVELING (A WHOLE THING IN AND OF ITSELF)!!!!!!!!!! who are OFFENDED and SAD that i would lock myself in my room during all hours of the day -- except when i need food -- to make sure i don't catch anything they brought home, because OOOHHHH THEY WANT TO WATCH THIS SHITTY HISTORICAL COP DRAMA WITH THEM OUGHHHHHH THEY JUST WANT MY COMPANYYYYY 🥺🥺🥺 girl you can't stand when i even express a vanilla opinion that contradicts your own vanilla opinions, let alone anything of substance i have to say. you don't want me there, you want to know you can control me and my time.

and i'm supposed to believe that if i went on immunosuppressants THESE FUCKING PEOPLE wouldn't kill me? wouldn't play nice for 2 weeks and then go "i'm tired of this, nothing bad will happen, your doctor was exaggerating" and kill me???????

(in the end, the doc decided i'm gucci -- some results were Funky but like "hmmm inch resting" funky instead "OH FUCK???", yknow? if i had lupus, we would KNOW™ after this many years, so. thank fuck for that ig.)

i genuinely think the culture of "i'm over this" that surrounds people in 2024 covid era would kill me if i ended up in that kind of situation. and that isn't even getting into the "if i go to the hospital bc my family fucked up, the hospital might not waste resources on me bc i'm disabled and chronically ill" bit. it's such a scary fucking time and the anti-mask ordinances will only make it worse.

and i don't even have the choice to "ERMMM IF YOU"RE SICK JUST NEVER LEAVE YOUR HOUSE" bc we can't really get delivery around here in the middle of nowhere. i have to get food somehow. in conservative country. in covid conspiracy country.

the mundanity of the trauma is so nauseating.

[vapeman]

Very confused about your tags on that Kendrick Lamar post. Mind elaborating?

I'm saying that witness testimonies and solid evidence (phone calls, texts, photographs) are a crucial part of effectively exposing someone as a rapist, pedophile, domestic abuser etc in a world where these sorts of things are readily accessible. In the old days, word of mouth was the only way to do this, but not anymore, now we need to put respect on technology for being a means to find the truth, and the truth hasn't revealed itself when it very well should've by now. If he'd committed an act of pedophilia, that victim would have all the incentive to come out about it now, nearly secured backing from the public because everyone is already convinced it’s true and disbelievers are clowned on in rap circles both online and irl. Pedophilia is a coercive and exploitative phenomenon, and this is a good opportunity to prove that anyone can engage in this under the radar, but nothing under the radar has been cited, just an act at a concert (in front of many people) and a few sus bars.

Plus making claims for the sake of clout and moral high ground (possibly the MOST effective tool utilized in the 21st century) trivializes the testimonies of real flesh and blood victims of the past present and future who have gathered and will gather the bravery to step up and speak on their own real accounts (in the cases of Bill Cosby, Kodak Black, R Kelly, etc). I also don't think that pedophilia should be used as a prop for reputation or a "gotcha" in the case of a beef, especially not when it's repeated all flippantly by audiences as a slick bar instead of a recount of someone's trauma like it was in the video I reblogged. Pure dismissal of how serious the issue is, it's reduced it to a meme.

I said that it's weak to come for someone over an unbacked rumor because it is, in the face of the current reality that misinformation runs rampant and everyone is so eager to spread it if it's scandalous about someone popular and can be made into an amusing talking point for pundits who thrive off of cattiness and drama. Labeling Drake as a "certified pedophile" because of some (very real but still unbacked as a tangible pattern of behavior) creepiness towards minors is super lazy, like I said, a cop out for an actual diss on his actual behavior in the real world. Diss tracks always have been so effective because they call out messed up behaviors and events oftentimes with details and names that were previously unknown to the public (think Pusha T's The Story of Adidon for a fantastic recent example), and this one doesn't. I'd be all for the diss if it reflected some tangible actions, but it doesn't, so it's dissatisfying to me that the beef ended on something that has the possibility of being pure slander that's not immediately possible to prove wrong thus becomes a fact. Hope this clears it up.

[stupidcupid06]

I think we have a problem with thinking in labels. Labels are (usually) invented as a way to simplify something and make it more palatable to someone who is not a member of a given group. They take some aspect of people, and make it easily definable.

Black: a person whose skin is dark. Trans: a person whose gender does not match their sex. Disabled: a person whose body impairs their ability to function in “normal society.”

And… these are all kind of nonsense definitions? They don’t really make much sense. It’s very subjective what level of dark makes one black, what counts as a gender that’s “different enough” from your sex (doubly so if you’re intersex), and what sort of impairment makes you “disabled enough.” Like, they very obviously don’t make much sense. What these definitions do, is allow people that are not of these groups to easily distinguish from “ins” and “outs” of a group. This isn’t necessarily a problem, because it does help them decide who they should listen to, but it leads to our first problem: outsiders gatekeeping a group they aren’t in. Lesson #1: don’t do that! If you aren’t a member of a group, the label is there as a shortcut, not a rule for you to enforce. (and while you’re at it, go kill the cop in your brain).

Significant problems come when members of these groups start to think in labels. What I mean is, trans people selecting who is a trans person based on “how different” their gender is from their sex. This becomes a problem quickly, leading to exclusionary communities which don’t include all people who suffer from the oppression directed at their own group.

Thinking in labels isn’t all bad, to be clear. There’s a good reason why things like microlabels have been created in the queer community: they help people find others with similar experiences to empathize with them. And communities do need some way to avoid bad actors who aren’t members of their own marginalized group, after all.

But I think that we need to stop thinking in labels and start thinking in descriptions instead. Descriptions aren’t terribly longer or more complicated than labels. When you say, “this is a community for lesbians,” does that mean women who are attracted to women? Enbies and women who are attracted to women? Anyone who identifies with the lesbian label? Or something else? You don’t have to spell it out immediately, but it’s important that you’re clear. Labels, being the broad-strokes brushes that they are, don’t catch many who slide between the cracks. Descriptions, clear and concise, are much kinder to those around you.

[whalerrat]

three legged

chapter 2 of my magnus archives au

tws: blood, paranoia

ao3 | reach chapter 1

Statement of Alex Quackity, regarding the strange behavior of an old roommate after a peculiar purchase. Original statement given August 2nd, 2019. Recorded by Eret, Head Archivist of the EsEmpi Institute.

Statement begins.

I’m a student at at a local college. I came here because, well, you guys take care of weird things, right? Aliens and stuff like that? No? Whatever.

Have you ever gone hunting? I haven’t, but it always seemed cool. My roommate was big into hunting. His family’s pretty well off, so they even have those pointer dogs. The ones who always know where the blood is coming from.

Seeing weird stuff around any college apartment is pretty normal. Big boxes of old swords or maps were common. All from different wars, used. You could still see the blood on some of them. But everyone’s got their hobbies, so I left them alone. This was temporary housing, after all. He wouldn’t be my roommate forever.

One day, we received a small brown box. Looked like any other package. I was expecting a new mug, as my previous one had gone mysteriously missing. So I opened it.

I should have checked for a label.

The corners were wet and decomposing. Blood was leaking out of the box, leaving a small red print on the table. When I lifted the box up, it dripped. Red ran down my arm.

I immediately dropped the box. Old artifacts are one thing, but a bloody box? A literal bloody box?

I should have called the cops or something. Should have called them multiple times, because it only got worse.

Instead, I left the box on the table. I wasn’t about to move that thing. I texted my roommate, telling him to be more careful when ordering things online or something, and left for class.

I usually walk to class. It was just turning fall, the air sharp and fresh. It wasn’t raining or anything, and the trees were still green. Overall, a nice day out. No reason to take the bus.

The entire time, I kept feeling like I was being watched. I could see a figure in the corner of my eye, dancing at the edges of my vision. Whenever I looked back, it was gone.

The figure wasn’t of a person. It was short. Its shadow had a long snout and short legs. Four short legs. Definitely an animal. Like a hunting dog. I could feel its sniffing on my ankles, a wet nose pushed against my shoes. There was no physicality to it, though, no actual animal following close by. But I could hear it so loudly.

In class, I sat near the back. Can’t have anything behind you if there’s a wall there, right? I spent the whole class watching the room. Service dogs are a thing, I could have just heard one of those. I tried to pay attention to the lecture for a bit. Try to get my mind off of this feeling. It was boring, as usual.

Was I losing it? I know college is stressful, but I’ve managed everyone pretty well so far. Nothing weird happened in class. It was like whatever followed me wasn’t allowed into the building.

As soon as I stepped outside, I could feel it. I couldn’t see it, but my chest tightened and the hair on my neck raised. Why was I so afraid of a stupid dog?

At home, the box was gone. Well, not completely gone. It was opened, its contents missing. The inside was filled with white styrofoam, shaped to fit another box. Its cracks were drenched in blood, the cardboard around it now disintegrating on the countertop. Bits of something soft and pink hung off of the edges, having fallen out of the smaller box. At first glance it looked like a plant, maybe a grapefruit or, what’s it called? A lychee? Yeah, that. It looked like that. But it had this sort of sheen on it that suggested it wasn’t natural. Or at least, not a plant.

The whole room reeked of rot. Not sweet, like rotting fruit. It was heavier, more sour. Almost metallic. Like an infected wound, all yellow and red with death. Whatever was in that box was once alive. It had a heartbeat. It was bleeding all over my counter.

The figure was back, standing right by the hallway. Separating me from my room, from my roommate. It was staring at me. I stared at the box. I stared at that box for what felt like an hour, praying for the figure to leave me alone. It wasn’t hurting me, but it felt… this is gonna sound weird, okay? But I swear it felt hungry. That it was sniffing for food. That it thought I was food, and if I moved, it would go for the kill.

The next thing I know, the box was on the floor, and my roommate was in front of me. His eyes were too dark for me to separate the pupil from the iris. His hands were pressed against the counter, like he had slammed them down. He asked me if I had opened the box. I said no. He asked me again, teeth clenched. Listen, I don’t get scared easily. It’s kind of hard to scare someone who lives in the same apartment as ten used swords and a small collection of high-end kitchen knives. But he could have killed me. He would have. I don’t doubt it.

So I backtracked. I said that yes, I had opened it, but it was weird and not my package, so I didn’t look inside. I thought it was mine, and as soon as I realized it wasn’t, I stopped, okay?

He seemed to relax. And I relaxed And then I fucked up. I asked what was in it. And he… he really didn’t like that.

He lunged for my wrist. His nails stabbed between tendons, tearing through the skin. My blood gathered under his nails. His teeth seemed sharper, his eyes wider. And he wouldn’t let go. I apologized, over and over again, telling him that I wouldn’t look, that I didn’t look, that I was sorry for asking. And he just kept digging in. Locked on his prey.

His other hand was still on the counter, curled in on itself. It looked ready to go for my throat. He could rip it apart as easily as he was ripping apart my arm. Blood was flowing freely down my arm, curving around his knuckles. I watched his other hand, hoping he had forgotten about it or had enough restraint to keep it there. I knew he was staring at me. I wasn’t about to stare back.

His phone alarm went off. He dropped my arm and- you know what he did? He left. Just, walked out the door, as if his hand wasn’t dripping with my blood, as if I wasn’t rushing over to the sink and crying in pain as the water seeped into the wound. One moment, he’s about to kill me for opening a package I thought was mine, and the next, he has to maintain a perfect attendance.

I tried my best to avoid him the next few weeks. My friends had a place I could move into once my lease was up, and the semester was almost over anyway. Yeah, he almost killed me, but it left a cool scar, and gave me a cool story. Everyone wants to hear about the weird roommate, you know? So I figured I could bear living with him for a short time.

The figure didn’t go away. If anything, it was more persistent. Its silhouette became a fixture in my vision, the fear a more natural state. I was always on edge, my chest permanently tight. I got used to looking over my shoulder and double-checking the locks.

I did notice a couple things about the figure. I think these realizations only made it worse. I’ll explain. The figure would follow me everywhere- to class, to the store, to a friend’s- but it had vampire rules, you know? It was only there when I was outside or in a public place, lurking behind trees or bookshelves. It was like a real person. It wouldn’t go into my room, unless I happened to leave the door unlocked. Then it would stand by the door, watching.

That’s all it ever did, too. Watch. It never seemed to move or smile or anything. Just watch. If I thought about it for too long, the scars on my arm would hurt. But that’s probably just a coincidence, right?

The last thing, probably the worst thing, was that it wasn’t a dog, and it didn’t have four legs. It was a pig, and it had three. The shadows around it would make it look like four legs, but it was just three. One of the front legs was missing. I could tell it was a pig because it was fat and had that snout, you know? And I know pigs don’t hunt, but they do eat meat. They’re known to eat human corpses.

Last I checked, I was still alive.

I moved out a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen the pig, or my roommate since. And before you ask, no, I never broke into his room to see what was in the box. But I can take a pretty good guess.

Statement ends.

Quackity was right. An odd roommate does a great story. Sapnap went to his new place to ask for a follow up, apparently he still lives at the same address, and Quackity was more than happy to show him the scars on his arm. He does deny seeing any pigs, though, which is fair. If anything would ruin a story, it’s making the antagonist a farm animal.

George somehow got his hands on a copy of the lease. His roommate is named Technoblade. Why Quackity chose to keep him anonymous is a mystery, but if this is the same Technoblade we already have on file… Well, we might have to keep an eye on Quackity for a while. If his roommate truly was Technoblade, these events are far more believable. I hope we won’t have to bring him in for another statement, but we will if we must. He is the last person to know his whereabouts. And with a man like Technoblade, the Institute could use all the help it could get.

[thegirlwhobrokeintothetardis]

Tricked Into It (Greg Gerwitz x Reader)

Word Count: 1,957

Pairing: Greg Gerwitz aka Mouse x Reader

Summary: Ever since your last breakup with someone who cheated and abused the love you had for them, you have been wary of dating. And it doesn’t help when your friend Kim Burgess won’t stop pestering you about some cute techie guy at the 21st District.

Warnings: talk of bad relationship (cheating, emotional abuse, PTSD from the relationship), descriptions of what might be an anxiety attack (I described feeling anxious but it ended up bordering on what could have almost been an attack.)

A/N: So I am working on a Kelly Severide Imagine, but I’m a but stuck on it so I came up with the idea that I take the last imagine I wrote, the other Mouse Imagine and make it into a little series of one shots, mainly cause I wanted to explore the relationship of Mouse and this librarian!reader. So this is a sort of prequel to the first Mouse imagine, how they first met which is talked about in the other imagine.

HERE is the first Librarian!Reader fic if you want to check it out!!

If you want to be added to my tags, just ASK!!

“Kim, I swear to god!”

You slammed your book shut with a snap and looked up at the Chicago police officer, aka Kim Burgess aka your best friend, in front of you. She looked almost as annoyed as you felt, rolling her eyes and sitting down on your couch across you in your reading chair. Kim had come over after her shift at the 21st District ended, and only after a couple of minutes of peace, Kim started up on her latest crusade; your love life.

“Y/N...”

“No! I get that you care, believe me, but I don’t need you trying to set me up with someone.” You said with a heavy sigh. 

Kim scooted closer to you and leaned forward, trying to catch your eye which was avoiding hers, “Hey,” She paused and waited for you to look her in the eye, “I just want you to be happy. And I think this guy is a good match for you. Much better than -”

“Don’t say their name.”

“...Fine. But Mouse is so your type!”

You were about to start arguing again when her words actually registered into your head, “His name is Mouse? There is no way that this cop’s name is Mouse.”

“Okay one, he isn’t a cop. He is a tech expert that works with Intelligence, a civilian hired by the unit and the department. And two, Mouse is just what everyone calls him, its a nickname from when he was younger.” Kim explained.

“Tech guy?” 

“Yeah, crazy smart when it comes to hacking and stuff like that. He got the job after hacking into Voight’s cell phone in like a couple of seconds. And he was in the Rangers with Jay, plus he is pretty funny and cute.”

You looked away from Kim as you thought it through. Clearly Kim was just looking out for you, but there was no way this guy, this super-smart-tech-genius-ex-ranger, could ever be interested in someone like you. You were just a simple librarian at Chicago Public Library, living alone aside from your cat companion, Geraldine. You hadn’t done anything extraordinary with your life, and as your thought process started to spiral in an anxious tizzy, you started to shake your head.

“No, no I can’t see this guy. He wouldn’t want to get stuck with some boring librarian.” You said, your body shrinking in on itself as your self confidence crumbled. All the comments your ex significant other made to you while you were still dating came popping up into your mind one after the other after the other. Comments on your weight, your looks, how you were boring and that was why they stepped out and cheated on you any chance they could. Tears were misting in your eyes and you tried blinking them away, not wanting to cry in front of Kim.

“Y/N-”

“I mean it Kim. Drop it.”

Kim looked you over and saw how you had retreated into yourself, clearly looking uncomfortable with the topic. That’s when she sighed and nodded, forcing a small smile on her face, “Okay.”

                                                        ---

A week has passed since the confrontation with Kim about that techie guy, and you were slowly trying to purge the whole instance from your head and get back to your quiet life. Every once in a while, the conversation would slide to the forefront of your mind, along with your anxiety-fueled spiral about your ex, and you would try and shake away the ordeal. It had made you feel small and disgusting thinking about your ex and how your self worth was diminished because of them, and you never wanted to go back to that place again. Even if that meant never being in another relationship again.

On Friday, you had gotten a text from Kim around midday about having a girl’s night and heading out to have a drink at Molly’s, this pub which had become pretty popular with the cops of the Intelligence Unit. You had been once before, and one of the owners, Gabbie Dawson, was really nice to you when Kim introduced her. So you agreed, excited to go out and hang out with Kim. 

Once you got out of work around 6, you got back to your small one bedroom apartment and fed Geraldine before retreating to your room to figure out what to wear. You settled on a pair of slender black pants and a long sleeved dark green blouse matched with a pair of green heels. Once you showered, dried and got your hair the exact way you like it, added a little makeup and got dressed, it was time to head out and meet Kim at Molly’s. You drove to the neighborhood where the pub was, some cars already lining the streets letting you know that Molly’s would probably be busy.

You parked, and hurried to get inside, pulling your winter coat around you a litter tighter as a gust of wind tried to chill you to the bone. The November night air was lung chilling and while you weren’t dressed like those young twenty-somethings with short dresses and no coats, you still did not want to waste another second with the wind chill. Once you got in, you saw that your assumption about the pub being busy was right, many people scattered around the bar, others in groups were seated or standing next to tables against the other wall. You looked around, trying to catch Kim’s face in the crowd but having trouble with how crowded. You pealed off your coat and made your way to the bar where you saw an older man behind the counter, cleaning off a glass. 

“Excuse me?” You said, slipping into the space in front of the bar, and accidentally grazing your arm against the guy sitting down to your right, “Oh sorry.” You said quickly to the guy, not really looking in his direction so you didn’t notice when he started staring at you in awe.

“What can I get ya?” The older man said as he put the glass down and gave you his full attention.

“I know this is probably a long shot, but my friend comes to this bar a lot and I was just wondering if you’ve seen her tonight? Kim Burgess?”

“Ah! I know Burgess. From the 21st District?”

“Yeah! Yes, that’s her.”

The man smiled before turning around and grabbing something from behind the bar and then turned back to you, “I haven’t seen her, but she called about 5 minutes ago saying that her friend would be stopping by tonight. She also said to get her a vodka cranberry on her and to give her this.”

He handed you a napkin and then turned away, most likely to get your drink ready. You looked down at the napkin with a rough note written on it, reading out loud the note, “Hey, something came up super last minute, have a drink on me and enjoy the night. Sorry, --Kim.”

“Sorry about that, kid.” The man said as he returned with your drink, giving you a warm smile that also had a hint of pity in it. 

“No problem. It’s not your fault.”

With one more smile he headed towards the other end of the bar, leaving you with your drink. You let out a sigh and brought the drink to your lips, trying to figure out what you were going to do next when a voice from next to you started speaking.

“You’re friends with Burgess?”

Looking over, it was the guy you had apologized to earlier. Now that you weren’t in a rush to find Kim, you got a good look at him. He had brown hair, you could almost consider it floppy-like if it didn’t also have a clean-cut feel to it. The man’s eyes were bright blue, and they looked at you with a mix of intrigue and surprise. He was wearing a blue button-up which matched his eyes, the first few buttons undone.

“Yeah, do you know her?” You asked. He nodded and looked down to his beer bottle, his fingers anxiously playing with the paper label.

“I-I work with her at the district.” He explained. “Are you one of her flight attendant friends?”

“No, god no. I’m a librarian at the Chicago Public Library.”

“Oh, that’s cool.”

“You don’t have to lie. I know it’s boring..”

“No! I genuinely think it’s cool. I-I mean I’m not a huge book guy myself but-but I did read a lot of Shakespeare in school and that was really cool, especially the-the one about the guy who dressed as a woman to hide from a mob or something and everyone thought he was a witch?” The guy rambled, his face flushing as he tried to save himself. You smirked at the clumsiness of his words and took a drink of your cocktail.

“The Merry Wives of Windsor?” You offered, and the guy snapped at the name.

“Yeah, yeah. The whole play now that I think about it went over my head at 16. But I was too interested in the Blackhawks and code. Like-Like the game that happened the other night, I was invested until that left winger from the Rangers totally checked Hartman and they put-”

“Hartman in the penalty box! Yes!! With only 3 minutes left on the clock and the take out the best right winger on the ice.” You jumped in, a smile growing on your face as the topic of hockey came up. “If he was still playing the Blackhawks would have got at least 2 more points and would have won instead of losing to the worst team in the league.”

The guy sputtered his drink and starts laughing, and immediately think its cause you had embarrassed yourself and he was laughing at you, not what you said. That was until he smiled at you and nodded his head. 

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

You felt a small fluttering in you chest when he smiled, something about him not making you nervous or anxious which was a change. With a smile on your own face, you put your hand out to him, “I’m Y/N by the way. Y/N L/N.”

“Greg Gerwitz.” Greg took your hand and shook it, lingering for a couple extra seconds before pulling away. “Or you can call me Mouse.”

You froze as he said that, your eyes widening in shock. He seemed to see your reaction and frowned, “Or not?”

“No, sorry.” You said quickly, trying to recover. “It-Its just that Burgess has been trying to set me up with you for the last few weeks.”

“Wait...oh! You’re that librarian! Burgess has been telling me about you too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, says how you are the best person ever and that I would like you the minute we met.” He chuckled. Greg smirked and turned more towards you, “And she wasn’t wrong.”

You flushed, feeling the heat of your blush against your cheeks as his smirk widened. It was quiet between the two of you as the pub continued with it’s noise like it wasn’t watching the start of something amazing. Greg then spoke up, getting your attention again, “Hey, I know this might seem fast but I really like talking to you.”

“I really like talking to you too.”

“Really?” He asked, his face getting red again as his smirk melted away into a nervous smile, “Well, what would you say about a date? Maybe the Blackhawks game tomorrow?”

It took quicker than you thought, but all your anxiety from the week before seemed like a long lost bad dream and you just wanted to spend some time with Greg Gerwitz.

“I would love to.”

ONE CHICAGO TAGS: @carnationworld​ 

NORMAL TAGS:  @l4life​ @ithoughtiwasflying

[random-thought-depository]

Tangent from my last post: reading over this and thinking about it, I’ve pinpointed a disagreement that I think reveals a fundamental disagreement I have with the ideas I was responding to there.

Seph’s essay talks about liberal sexual consent practices as requiring a shift toward a more Culture A style of social interaction; requiring a willingness to actively assert your own interests instead of engaging in Culture B accommodationism. And that’s true, but I immediately recognized that it’s incomplete in a way that I think fundamentally distorts what’s happening, though it took me a while to think out exactly how. Saying “no” involves a degree of Culture A type assertiveness, but respecting that “no” and pro-actively making sure your partner is enjoying things involves an attentiveness to feelings, an accommodationism, and an attentiveness to maintaining harmony that’s more Culture B.

Like, if you drew up two columns, one labeled “Macho Republican Dad Boomerpost Stuff” and one labeled “Softy SJW Stuff,” and started sorting things into those columns by which group they’re more stereotypically associated with (bacon, guns, capitalism, Christianity, complaining about “cancel culture,” and calling people sissies as an insult into the Republican Dad column, tofu, queerness, feminism, socialism, veganism, accusing people of microaggressions, and being a Wiccan into the SJW column, etc.), I think liberal sexual norms placing a high premium on explicit consent would definitely stereotypically belong in the “SJW” column. And in this context I think that’s revealing.

I think what’s happening here is fundamentally orthogonal to Culture A vs. Culture B. I think, like a lot of left vs. right divides, it fundamentally comes down to hierarchy vs. egalitarianism. Liberal sexual norms emphasizing consent are a rejection of the pecking order method of simply resolving sexual conflicts of interests in favor of the person with more power, whether that power is social status, physical strength, emotional intelligence, or just being more willing to press for their interests. Culture A vs. Culture B is fundamentally orthogonal to what’s really going on here; trying to understanding this issue through that lens is at best like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between different types of Christianity (you may get some genuine insights, but you’ve mistaken the fringes of the conflict for its core), and at worst like trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of doctrinal disputes between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Actually I think the “trying to understand the US Civil War through the lens of Christian doctrine disputes” may be a good analogy, because I think this does tie back to the “the left/liberal side of the culture war is waging a war against Culture A” hypothesis in a way that reveals how that idea is not exactly wrong but misses an important dimension of what’s happening. I think what’s happening is that hierarchy is more explicit and explicitly enforced in Culture A, and therefore as society becomes less like a pecking order hierarchy tends to assume Culture B characteristics.

Culture A is where you find the human hierarchies that look the most like actual pecking orders, which are maintained by literal physical pecking. It’s where you find the openly brutal world of bosses screaming “the leads aren’t weak, you are!” into a cringing subordinate’s face, cops quietly taking an uncooperative suspect into a convenient alley and roughing him up a little to “teach him to respect our authority,” gangsters beating somebody up for being insufficiently deferential to them, some 6′3 250 pound guy in the grips of road rage punching some 5′7 150 pound guy in the face over a smashed bumper, teachers disciplining students by giving them hard blows on the palm with a ruler, a swaggering thug threatening a woman with physical violence because she had the effrontery to object to him groping her, and jocks having some fun inflicting casual physical abuse on the nerds in the locker room and on the playground. Hierarchies in Culture A are often maintained by physical violence and the threat thereof and put-downs and other explicit verbal bullying. When somebody in Culture A thinks you’ve gotten a bit above your station and wants to put your in your place, they’re likely to either actually use physical violence against you, explicitly threaten you with it, or explicitly insult you. Abuse in Culture A tends to look like our stereotypical picture of some swaggering thug openly terrorizing somebody who has some sort of vulnerability.

By contrast, hierarchies in Culture B tend to operate under more polite fictions of relative egalitarianism, cooperativeness, and non-violence. Enforcement of Culture B hierarchies tends to be less overtly violent. Culture B hierarchies are more likely to be covert and legible only to somebody with inside knowledge (e.g. you’ve ostensibly got a group of equals, but some are more equal than others because of advantages that mostly aren’t explicitly acknowledged). Culture B tends to have more of an ideal that coercive power can only be legitimately exercised for moral reasons, while Culture A tends to have more of a “master morality” culture where power is seen as worthy of respect in itself (Culture A is what gave us “Chad” and “alpha” as aspirational ideals), which is why bullying in Culture B tends to have a moralistic and fearmongering nature (see: Tumblr call-out posts) while bullying in Culture A tends to follow a more “master morality” logic of “our victim is weak and aesthetically displeasing to us, and that in itself makes them deserve punishment” - though much like “Culture A rewards strength and technical skills, Culture B rewards social skills and popularity” that’s a dichotomy that can easily be overplayed; most human hierarchies come with a hefty dose of community-minded moralism (even if the community is a pirate ship or criminal gang or something like that), and social skills and popularity are hugely important in almost any culture. Culture B is for people who wouldn’t dream of doing anything so barbaric as yelling at you or punching you because they’re mad at you; they’d complain to the human resources department who’d force you to spend a Friday evening listening to somebody lecture you about the need to “make our store a welcoming environment for our valued customers.”

An archetypal abusive Culture A authority figure is the macho thuggish “respect mah authoritay!” cop. An archetypal abusive Culture B authority figure is the gaslighty Nice Lady Therapist. The former is more-or-less open about the fact that he sees himself as above you in the pecking order and if you dispute that he’ll be delighted to enforce the pecking order in approximately the way chickens do it. The latter pretends to be your friend (and perhaps believes themselves to be that), and expends a great deal of effort tailoring their pecking order enforcement to not look like pecking order enforcement - significantly, they might like to be as openly brutal as the “respect mah authoritay!” cop is, but in strong Culture B that social strategy just doesn’t work; their social strategy represents a compromise with socially influential ideals of egalitarianism and non-violence, a tribute that vice pays to virtue (less charitably, it may simply reflect playing to different strengths and trying to minimize different weaknesses, e.g. the thuggish cop may have chosen that social strategy because he’s a physically powerful but not particularly socially intelligent Biff Tannen type, while the Nice Lady Therapist may have chosen that social strategy because she’s a socially intelligent and Machiavellian but physically feeble 4′10 woman).

In short, Culture B tends to both meaningfully soften the blows of pecking order enforcement and obfuscate them. It follows that as equalizing movements gain ground and explicit pecking order logic becomes more taboo, hierarchy will increasingly take on Culture B characteristics. In 1700, if you angered your boss in some petty interpersonal way he might have whipped you, which was his right as your master. Today, if you anger your boss in some petty interpersonal way she might think a little about how to get revenge on you in a way that doesn’t risk blowback if you take it up with the union, and then find some excuse to arrange for you to have to attend some mandatory HR remedial training that isn’t officially a punishment but let’s be real, totally is. Maybe in 2200 you won’t have a boss because you’ll work in an officially egalitarian syndicalist union, but there will be some union members who are “more equal than others” because of personal connections or charisma or some combination of both, and if you anger one of them in a petty interpersonal way they might through whisper networks arrange a quiet campaign to make sure the union votes against your requests for your favorite foods on the workplace lunch menu.

I guess I’m staking out a position as a hedging kind-of partisan of Culture B here. There’s a lot of talk about how Culture B gets an undeserved good reputation and can be just as unfair and cruel as Culture A but in a more insidious way, and I’m sympathetic to that and I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but, y’know, if I had to choose between pecking order enforcement that has to maintain a plausible veneer of being something else and just open undiluted sadistic pecking order enforcement, I think I’d prefer the former. I think even just adding in a requirement of hypocrisy improves things, because it forces pecking order enforcement to optimize for plausible deniability instead of sadism and effective tyranny. Admittedly, as somebody who finds this very relatable I have a strong personal bias here.

An illustrative personal anecdote: the usual stereotype of high school is that bullied kids (or at least bullied boys) suffer a lot of casual physical abuse, but I noticed that in my school there was a lot of verbal bullying but mercifully little physical abuse; the worst that was likely to happen in terms of physical violence was somebody tripping you up or throwing a box of kleenix at you or spitting their drink at you or something like that. I suspect the reason was that blatant physical violence was pretty much the only form of bullying the school administration would reliably punish (though they’d likely punish the victim right along with the perpetrator), and that’s why it usually wasn’t done. I suspect what happened is that stereotype of chronic casual physical abuse reflects what schools were like when the baby boomers were growing up (and boomers then wrote fiction etc. that reflected that experience that shaped the pop culture stereotype), but then anti-bullying reforms came along and by the late ‘90s and early ‘00s they’d achieved one great success: mostly eliminating that schoolyard culture of casual physical violence. And that was a very incomplete fix, just addressing the tip of the iceberg of the problem and probably often redirecting bullying into psychological abuse rather than actually reducing it... but, y’know, I’m really glad my middle and high school experience didn’t conform to that pop culture stereotype of the school dweeb getting regularly beaten up by four or six bigger kids. I had an awful time in middle and high school, but judging from pop culture stereotypes it could have been so much worse, and if suspensions for kids who punched other kids is what created that difference, then I’m profoundly grateful for that reform.

I think the left is kinda-sorta waging war on Culture A as a side-effect of its war on pecking order culture, in which high-status people enjoy the advantages of Culture A while low-status people labor under the disadvantages of Culture B. It’s not an accident that Culture A is associated with men and Culture B is associated with women. Accommodation (sometimes to the point of self-harm) is a survival strategy for low-status people in a social structure that resembles a pecking order; if you’re going to lose the fight, it often makes sense to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the interests of the stronger person (often to the extent of trying to anticipate the stronger person’s wants, performing even the brain work of figuring out their preferences for them). Competitiveness is a social strategy for upward mobility in a pecking order society or defense of a place near the top of the pecking order (it also has more pro-social functions so we probably want to keep it around in some form, but social competition is very much part of its function). Women tend to be reluctant to openly advocate for their personal interests because for much of history a woman openly advocating for her personal interests was likely to provoke status-guarding retaliation from men. Men tend to be reluctant to show vulnerability and see doing so as feminine because for much of history other men were likely to perceive a vulnerable man as an opportunity to increase their own social status by lowering the vulnerable man’s social status, and as a rule of thumb to lower a man’s social status was to give him a social status more like a woman’s. In the context of a pecking order society, a lot of Culture B makes sense as social strategies for people at the bottom of the pecking order with little realistic shot of escaping its lower levels, and a lot of Culture A makes sense as social strategies for people at the top of the pecking order and people at the bottom or middle of the pecking order who have a realistic shot at using high-risk high-reward social strategies to move up in the hierarchy. I think there’s some complicating factors around reproductive dynamics that explain why this is a gendered thing instead of just a class thing, but I won’t get into that here. So it makes sense that as society becomes less like a pecking order that process will involve shifts toward Culture A in some areas and shifts toward Culture B in other areas, because those cultures are probably both somewhat maladaptive in a more egalitarian social context.

A relevant example is that for much of history vigorously advocating their own sexual interests was often very risky for women, so Culture B primes women to pre-emptively accept a settlement that favors the man’s sexual interests, so liberal consent norms work better if women develop more assertiveness about their own interests, which looks kind of Culture A-ish. At the same time, women now have more leverage to effectively demand that men perform pro-social Culture B behaviors of accommodation, empathy, and consideration for the feelings and interests of others in the context of heterosexual sex.

----------

Tangential aside: I think thinking of hierarchy as the fundamental tension point of the left vs. right conflict illustrates a way that post I was responding to might be kind of too meta and you might get an illuminating perspective by stepping back from all that meta-level theorizing about fundamental epistemological differences and looking at the object level.

If you analyze left-wing “cancel culture” at the object level, what does it look like it’s trying to do? It seems to me that it’s trying to lower the social acceptability of what leftists perceive as defenses of hierarchy. Who are the stereotypical targets of campus “cancel culture”? They might be a “race realist” who’s very eager to tell you about how he thinks certain human groups have lower IQs or other congenital traits maladaptive to modern society and darkly hint about political implications. They might be a business libertarian economist who wants to stump for the gospel of the free market. They might be somebody who has a habit of delivering the academic equivalent of boomerposts about kids these days with their coddling and their trigger warnings and their genders. They might be some principled “free speech” type who seems to spend a lot of their energy white knighting for neo-Nazis and other far-right types. They might be somebody who you’d think would be relatively unobjectionable to leftists but who’s said something that can be uncharitably interpreted as bigoted at some point. Besides raw factionalism, the obvious common point is something that can be reasonably interpreted as a defense of hierarchy. The “race realist” at least implicitly says “some groups are smarter or otherwise better than others and may therefore be rightfully deserving of privilege.” The business libertarian economist at least implicitly says “if you’re poor because you can’t get a job or can’t get a job that pays well, that’s basically your problem and the system working as intended; a society with great inequalities of wealth and status may not be ideal but it’s at least better than all the realistic alternatives.” The academic boomerposter at least implicitly says “some people struggle in our education system because of personal emotional sensitivities; their weakness is their own problem and us more functional people have no obligation to accommodate it, if that harms them it may be regrettable but it’s basically the system working as it should to weed out those unfit for it.” The principled free speech proponent at least implicitly says “wanting to kill the Jews and re-enslave the blacks and have white Sharia should be a tolerated opinion in our society, at least insofar as it should not be legally persecuted, and I am willing to devote considerable efforts to defending that principle.” The basically unobjectionable liberal who happens to have a dodgy comment or three in their social media record at least implicitly says “I don’t think I should get too much blowback for once implying that [insert group of concern here] maybe deserves the jackboot to the face.”

And sure, you can dispute the fairness of such judgements, but the over-arching project outlined by these targets seems fairly obvious: to raise the social costs of what leftists perceive as defending pecking orders.

And, like, yeah, there’s some meta-level differences about the role of tolerance and debate too, but I suspect a lot of the disagreement is really more object-level, over how objectionable certain opinions actually are, e.g. a lot of the dispute over “cancelling” the business libertarian guy is probably going to be over 1) how objectionable defense of hierarchy actually is, 2) whether libertarian beliefs are actually defenses of hierarchy.

[ausetkmt]

Opinion | The Root Cause of Violent Crime Is Not What We Think It Is - The New York Times

"There is a prevailing narrative about crime that positions bad people as the problem and toughness — in the form of police and prisons — as the solution. It’s emotionally powerful, enough to make politicians allocate money for more cops and more prisons in order to avoid being labeled weak or, worse, pro-crime. The recent decision by Mayor Eric Adams of New York to get more homeless mentally ill people involuntarily committed — which shocked even the N.Y.P.D. — is just the latest example.

But policies like this have little, if any, effect on violent crime, in part because they do not address what causes the problem.

The 2022 midterm elections, in which the Republican Party poured considerable sums into a tough-on-crime message and did far worse than expected, offer hope that change is at last possible. Candidates with the courage to do so can run — and win — on a promise to reduce the causes of violence, addressing it before it occurs instead of just punishing it when the damage is already done.

If throwing money at police and prisons made us safer, we would probably already be the safest country in the history of the world. We are not, because insufficient punishment is not the root cause of violence. And if people are talking about how tough they are and how scared you should be, they care more about keeping you scared than keeping you safe.

The tough-on-crime narrative acts like a black hole. It subsumes new ideas and silences discussions of solutions that are already making a difference in people’s lives. And it provides bottomless succor to politicians who are more interested in keeping themselves in power than keeping people safe.

I have seen the message of “strong communities keeping everyone safe” open the minds of Republican voters, Democratic voters and many in between. It is backed up by science. Academics, government commissions and even many police chiefs have agreed with the substance behind the message for decades. And there is evidence, including the results of last month’s midterms, that it can work politically on a larger scale.

Local successes can be harder for national and statewide candidates to take credit for. But they are still better off telling a story about solutions than trying to outpunish their opponents. Senator-elect John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, often advertised his efforts to eliminate shooting deaths as the mayor of Braddock.

In contrast, many New York State Democrats defaulted to a defensive posture. In the closing weeks of the midterms, Gov. Kathy Hochul cut an ad highlighting stricter bail terms and trumpeted increased police presence in New York City. The powerful Police Benevolent Association spent half a million dollars on ads attacking Representative Sean Patrick Maloney’s opponent in the Democratic primary (though it later endorsed his Republican challenger). While Ms. Hochul survived an unexpectedly close race, Mr. Maloney lost his seat, as did other Democrats in the state.

Even in areas that have doubled down on punishment, the police are finding it exceedingly difficult to solve crimes. This is particularly true of homicides. In New York City, by contrast, the decision to end the unconstitutional tactic of stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of mostly young Black and brown men did not lead to a spike in crime.

Local policies that get closer to the cause are showing results. Dozens of communities are demonstrating how to ensure safety and, in many cases, save money along the way. In Austin, Texas, a 911 call from a person reporting a mental health emergency used to get directed to the police. Now, if there is no immediate danger, dispatchers have the option to transfer the call to a mental health clinician. In the first eight months after the program’s 2019 start, 82 percent of calls that were transferred were handled without police involvement, which resulted in savings to the taxpayer of $1,642,213. By the 2021 fiscal year, the program was involved in almost 2,000 calls. In Brooklyn, young people who completed an alternative program for illegal gun possession had a 22 percent lower rearrest rate than peers who went to prison. In Olympia, Wash., a new unit of the police department that, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center, provides “free, confidential and voluntary crisis response assistance” has responded to 3,108 calls since 2019, all while minimizing arrests and with no injuries to responders.

Communities that have adopted these approaches have not done away with enforcement; they have just required less of it. In Denver, a five-year randomized control trial of a program that provides housing subsidies to those at risk of being unhoused found a 40 percent reduction in arrests among participants. These kinds of results are why localities from New Jersey to New Mexico are restructuring their local governments to invest in the social determinants of health and safety.

And yet, as I have learned over more than two decades of work in this field, the black hole narrative cannot be changed by statistics alone. If you want policies that actually work, you have to change the political conversation from “tough candidates punishing bad people” to “strong communities keeping everyone safe.” Candidates who care about solving a problem pay attention to what caused it. Imagine a plumber who tells you to get more absorbent flooring but does not look for the leak.

Because the old narrative is so ingrained, candidates often assume that voters agree with it. But common sense and recent polling show that a majority of voters are concerned about crime and also supportive of changes in how we keep communities safe. This has fueled thousands of local innovations across the country. City governments, community groups and nonprofits are comparing notes on what works. And organizations like One Million Experiments are tracking innovations aimed at producing scalable solutions that do not rely on punishment. Reducing crime and reducing reliance on punishment seem incompatible only if you accept, as the narrative black hole dictates, that police and prisons are the only solution.

Voters know the status quo does not work. In the run-up to 2024, for the sake of public safety, candidates need to give them real alternatives. That is the only way to get out of the black hole and into the light.

Phillip Atiba Goff is the chair and a professor of African American studies and a professor of psychology at Yale University. He is also a founder and the C.E.O. of the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit that focuses on making policing less racist, less deadly and less pervasive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/opinion/crime-policies-cities.html#:~:text=There%20is%20a,Subscriptions