#it's about the Ego of Men

[shinobicyrus]

Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.”

It’s not just Texas: A similar proposal is presently being workshopped by the Republican Party of Louisiana. The Nebraska GOP has affirmed its belief that no-fault divorce should only be accessible to couples without children. At the Republican National Convention in 2016 — the last time the party platform was overhauled — delegates considered adding language declaring, “Children are made to be loved by both natural parents united in marriage. Legal structures such as No Fault Divorce, which divides families and empowers the state, should be replaced by a Fault-based Divorce.” (It’s unclear whether the party’s twice-divorced nominee for president weighed in on the debate at that time.)

[formulanni]

Can we PLEASE make the f1 drivers do Mutton Bustin it would be so peak guys hear me out

Cmon. I know yall want to see Yuki Tsunoda and Charles Leclerc doing this it’s a southern tradition

[gravehags]

curator reader seeing a photo of primo in his middle aged, long haired prime: YOOOOOOOOO

copia: amore stop

primo: no let her speak please :)

[spn2006]

ultimately the problem with supernatural is that the writers were really mad that they had a cult fandom of weirdos instead of a big following of macho straight men, so they would endlessly make fun of the cult fandom of weirdos in-universe, without realising that that would just make the fandom cultier and weirder. and that the endless appeals to macho straight men just made them look more and more gay

[weabooweedwitch]

"Democrats lost because they didn't appeal to enough men and made them feel isolated" ah yes, such as compared to the Republicans who constantly go out of their way to be quite vocal about their respect and admiration for women and trying to appeal to them, right?

[superbellsubways]

big shot spam is soooo handsome to me 😭 my life was changed ever since that air freshener was revealed

[juliakristeva]

not a girl's girl in the tiktok sense but a girl's girl in the sense that as soon as a woman speaks out against a man, i immediately and unequivocally believe that woman no matter how much i may have liked the man in question before said allegations. many such cases of people who could stand to be a girl's girl in this sense and not the other one

[distortedclouds]

I think Jean's "proper gentleman" upbringing would come back to bite him when he's super conflicted about being into Pieck because she's a few years older than him

Armin easily solves it for him by goung "do it :3 Jeanbo. It's great, actually! Trust me bro 😈"

[axolotlclown]

I suppose I'm a little late to the party, but I needed time to collect my thoughts.

Here's the thing, everyone's caught up on Caiti's age and whether she consented. To me, that isn't anywhere near the point. Her being so young is certainly creepy and strange, but not the point.

Here's the first thing, though less important than the next. As an adult, it is blaringly clear how irresponsible these "adults" were. Two grown ass men supplying alcohol to underaged girls in a hotel room. They were up drinking until 6am. They were one noise complaint away from getting the cops called.

Second thing. While underage drinking in the US is fairly normal, 18 is still pretty young here. Also, publicly admitting to supplying alcohol to an 18 year old is crazy, but not the point.

18 year olds can't compete with grown adults when it comes to alcohol. They don't have the same tolerance. There never should have been any "one upping."

No one should have gotten that drunk. The fact that there was a girl leaving, vomiting in her hand is fucking ridiculous. When someone, regardless of their age, is drinking too much too quickly, you cut them off and give them water. This is how college parties are run. Once you start wobbling a little too much, your speech is slurred, and you stop being a person, someone gives you water and walks you home.

And nobody walked her back to her hotel room?? Two grown men. I don't give a shit how tired you are. You always walk a girl home. Who the fuck raised you??

I am an adult man in college. I have been around a lot of different men. I have hung around men that behave like this. Let me promise you this: they got those girls drunk like that on purpose. They both wanted something. When they didn't get it, they just let the girls go. They were never interested in their safety. They were never interested in who they were.

And let me promise you this: there's never just one girl. And any well brought up man would have cut them all off and sent them on their way. There is way more to this situation than lets on.

And of course George never asked for her consent. It was never a question. They brought those girls back to that hotel room with the thought that they'd get something out of it. To George, he heard 18 and thought, "oh cool, she's legal."

I see this happen all the time in college. Usually men don't grow out of all of it, but they usually grow out of begging like a shitty dog in some random girl's DMs. To hear a grown ass man, 26 years old, behave like a fucking 19 year old sophmore in college is pathetic. I'm not interested in giving pathetic men any more time.

Also, love and light to Caiti, she looks like she's 16. "I didn't know she was 18!" First off, doesn't matter. Second off, I would've guessed she was a minor, so I know you checked first. Or else you're even dumber than the fucking college kids. Damn.

[batsplat]

casey's story breaks my heart. im reading your post about amatriaín and jorge now as well and i just........ these were only kids :( this isn't to assume that all parents/caregivers/people in their lives are negligent and/or abusive but i always wonder who is protecting child/teen/younger adult riders and drivers esp when they are in the highest levels of their sport at such a young age. it seems like, especially in years gone past, there was just so much scope for these kids to be abused. although i remember a couple years ago that clip of a young rider getting hit by mechanics so that kind of stuff isn't even in the past rly.

yeah not much to say really, I mean honestly it's... I'm not going to say every guardian of a professional athlete is abusive because that'd be a crazy thing to say, but I would say that the process that makes these kids so good at what they are does also in many, many cases not reflect particularly well on the parents. tbh a lot of the safeguarding has to be taken more seriously way before these kids even get to a grand prix paddock, but that also isn't easy to do... I can only speak to my own experiences, but as someone who spent a lot of my teenage years hanging around tennis clubs, it is pretty horrifying how normalised parental abuse is in sports circles. it's just something you see all the time - and this is obviously still only the public stuff, the gossip you hear, where you can read between the lines. though honestly, a lot of the times you really don't need to be reading much between the lines. the most extreme example was when a father of a kid I trained with went so far he had the cops called on him when they were at a tournament, but again. obviously this is only the extreme. even a lot of the public abuse is tacitly accepted, and there's a lot of parental behaviour that might not qualify for the 'abusive' label but sure isn't in line with what I view as acceptable. and that's just the parents - you essentially get a lot of cases of them outsourcing this stuff to the coaches, who often get a carte blanche to do with their kids what they please. obviously I'm only familiar with this stuff personally on the juniors circuit, but unhealthy coaching relationships is also a recurring and troubling talking point on the pro circuit. especially in women's tennis you get some pretty horrifying stories. the whole thing just feels pretty rotten

ideally what you've got to do to at least TRY and stamp this stuff out is having a zero tolerance policy - whether it's in clubs or in paddocks. a system of consequences in place where physical or verbal abuse comes with repercussions... I know the risk is you just take this stuff behind closed doors, but to me the starting point problem is that it's also the culture of juniors sports - where if anything treating your kid like absolute shit is almost celebrated at times. you have to make this stuff more shameful. I have no clue to what extent motorcycling juniors clubs look like what I was accustomed to, but in all honesty I reckon you'd see a lot of the same behaviour from parents/mentors - and that at least you've got to address. but obviously that doesn't just like. fix the problem. with someone like jorge, you very obviously did need someone else to step in... but if you don't have very visible, obvious abuse, then how do you enforce that? talent spotters like amatriain have immense power within the system - jorge's father was practically begging this bloke to take jorge on, jorge wouldn't have thanked you for getting rid of him until towards the very end of their partnership, he very likely wouldn't have the career he did without the guy. and it's one of those jobs that (like sports parent) tends to attract the exact type of person you really don't want to give power over kids. again, I'm not saying they're all like that, I wouldn't know, but so many of these managers just have so many stories that raise an eyebrow... even when it's not actively related to how they're treating children, but the fact that so many of them have a history of being aggressive to reporters? the thing is, if they're being awful to these kids in all likelihood we'll never hear about it - but reporters are obviously way more likely to tell people about it. which means that every time I read one of those stories, my main takeaway is that these managers are blokes who will get aggressive when things don't go their way. also not ideal

and below that is a layer that becomes increasingly impossible to even begin to address. I mean, look at casey. I have no reason to accuse his parents of being abusive towards him. I'm not trying to make it sound like I think they're horrible people. and I do think we do always need to be clear here - like yes, I'm talking about a general concern I have here about the relationship between mentor figures and the kids in their care, but obviously that covers a very wide variety of sins. I am not drawing any equivalences between them. there's 'being a bad mentor' and then there's 'having a restraining order filed against you'. so with that massive caveat in place... I agree with you, anon, that I also feel sad about casey's story, and yeah, it makes me uncomfortable

casey does think his parents pushed their dream onto him and ensured that his future would always lie in motorcycle racing... which, I mean. god. if you read him saying it was always his parents' dream side-by-side with him saying they always put pressure on him to work for his dream, then it's just one of those parental dynamics that read as achingly familiar - kids who have been convinced they're doing this for themselves and are then made to feel guilty when they're not living up to their parents' standards. we've sacrificed everything for you, right, you need to make it worth it... casey was told that this was his dream, and the stakes for success and failure were horrifyingly high. he had his entire family's livelihood on his shoulders from age fourteen... his family invested everything into him, told him it was all for his sake- and ensured that he would feel like he was letting them down every time he didn't perform. by some miracle, he had the talent to make it through the system, but think about how precarious his journey was despite being perhaps the most talented motorcycle racer in the history of the sport. how many turning points in his career easily could have gone the other way. for every casey, there are so many more kids who won't make it, and will somehow have to live with the consequences of that failure. and these dynamics... again, I'm not going to label them outright abusive, but think about the kind of stress they place on the parental relationship. idk. it might be a reality of professional sports... parents do often have to sacrifice a lot for their children's career - and given how early kids need to start out to succeed these days, inevitably quite a bit of that desire and drive will come from the parents. but it isn't a reality that sits comfortably with me

so, what do you do about any of this? well, again, I do think you need to do the bare minimum and not tolerate clearly abusive behaviour in sporting environments. which feels like stating the obvious, but this is a low bar that often just isn't being cleared. and yeah - that recent example within the motogp paddock of a rider being assaulted by a team member... definitely not going to be a one-off. just feels inevitable that this will be happening behind closed doors, especially when you get to the lower rungs where the competitors have less power and are less likely to be willing to risk anything (+ are also generally younger)

there's other safeguarding measures you could put in place, but it probably won't happen because people just don't care enough. first off, you need a riders' union - an organisation that's there solely to listen to riders' problems and act on them, advocate on their behalf etc. a big reason why young riders simply are not going to report any abuse is that this will almost certainly cost them professionally. you are essentially asking them to cut off their already limited support network, often the people providing them direct financial support or even employing them. if you cannot build up trust by having the mechanisms in place to take action against the abusive party (through cooperation with the series organisers), as well as provide support to the rider, then the reality is that basically none of them would ever come forward. secondly, you simply need stronger regulation of the career ladder. there's too many of these big name talent spotters who just coast through the paddock by having accumulated influence over the years, with zero reason to believe they have their charges' best interests at heart... often former riders themselves, but that's not exactly a pedagogical qualification. look, it's tricky to regulate because the exact roles these blokes play in riders' lives is so malleable and comes associated with all kinds of job titles - maybe you're a rider coach or manager or team boss or something else entirely. but ideally you want a system where certain privileges - like even entry to certain areas of the paddock - has to come along with accepting a certain level of regulatory oversight. make these blokes directly accountable and force them to uphold a professional code, in line with what you'd expect of any other professional who hold power over a vulnerable population. make it clear to them that they're being watched. I also don't think it's crazy to suggest that if you let minors race in a grand prix paddock, you should have some sort of system in place where the series organisers directly and regularly check in with the minors in their care. there will be a lot of behaviour that children do not themselves see as abusive - obviously it's very plausible that they just won't tell you the truth, but you have to start somewhere. motorcycle racing does actually have an advantage over many other individual sports in how centralised it is, how everyone is constantly going to the same location. they would have the power to enforce some of these standards

thirdly, and this is even less likely than the others to gain any traction. ... man, you've got to make sure these kids have options. this is becoming worse and worse the more professionalised sports become, the more they all chase their youthful prodigies... but, y'know, think about how early so many of these children drop out of school, how it's increasingly unlikely they've had the time to foster any sort of other interest (another theme of casey's account, "I don’t know if I was allowed to have any other attraction"). how motorcycle racing is the only thing they've ever known, how it's their whole world. you're raising a group of young people to whom leaving that world would basically feel like dying. it makes the stakes of everything so enormous, it twists these parental relationships, and it also ensures that certain figures have so, so much power over these kids. obviously nobody is forcing them at gunpoint to race - but in reality, it feels like they don't even have the option of walking away. again, this is obviously a massive problem to address that no sport has entirely sorted out, and the series organisers can rightly say it's not their responsibility to make kids go to school. honestly, my first step would be to just... do something about these age limits. they're too low! too many of these kids are too young for grand prix racing! a starting point is to try and make it so that kids aren't being actively penalised for attempting to pursue an education. this feels another area where you'd really want to have an actual union - even to just have someone to talk to. and again, as long as the series organisers let children race, then I do think it's actually also some of their responsibility to look out for them. realistically, a lot of these kids don't actually want to walk away from racing - however you get to that point, it is also very much their dream. but anything you can do to lessen the influence of the worst people in their lives, anything you can do to at least remind them they can walk away... idk. it's the right thing to do. especially for the kids who aren't succeeding, help them on their way out

now look, this isn't a detailed manifesto. I do know that some other sports have implemented similar-ish measures to the ones above but I couldn't give you a breakdown without some research. I'm not an expert on preventative measures for child abuse, and I'm sure some of these could come with unintended consequences I'm unaware of. I also know all of these things range from 'desperately unlikely' to 'never going to happen'. and even if you did, it's really only taking a pickaxe to the tip of the iceberg. or something. to reiterate what I said at the top, I don't want to make it sound like I think all parents of athletes are abusive. I also don't think the mentors are either. I do think a lot of them are... and even beyond that - the way sports is structured, the way the ladder to professional sports is structured, you are going to see a lot of unhealthy dynamics involving very young people in vulnerable positions. and I don't think that's in any way easy to address... but y'know. sometimes it'd be nice if somebody were at least trying. the sport is doing less than the bare minimum. and for every story we hear, there's going to be so so many more where we'll remain entirely ignorant

[butterflysnowflake]

new Wolf thoughts just dropped

so something that occurred to me last night- in the wedding scene, after being unfrozen, Wolf offers a selfie with Lydia and Astrid and poses and everything, only to look a lil disappointed when they don't seem interested (and why would they be? Lydia was a Mario Bava stan and cop movies were probably the last thing she'd ever watch). The poster behind his desk in his office is very heavily implied to be the one from the movie he died making, based on the foreboding tagline, the suit he's wearing on it (same one he's wearing in the afterlife) and, as @one-fancy-flapjack pointed out, his pose showing the non-injured side of his face.

Going off the design style/fonts it's very likely from the 1980s, which puts his death date way before the existence of smartphones or even cell phones.

So the incredible implication I'm getting here is that 1. there wound up being in universe, a whole Frank Hardballer fandom, whether genuine or ironic, well into the 2010s, which makes sense! either people watched them on TV, were introduced to them by their parents, or had cult midnight movie sessions, 2. big enough that people coming into the Afterlife during the smartphones era ran into him with their skullphones or whatever the punny term for them there is and begged him for a selfie and 3. at some point, someone (probably Janet bless that patient woman's soul) had to explain the concept of a selfie to him for the first time.

and this old dork LOVES it and will offer one any chance he gets because he's nothing if not good to his fans. it's really sweet the fact he must have a decent ongoing fandom in the afterlife and the knowledge that even after he left the world of the living, people were enjoying his movies.

[ladymirdan]

I think the post provocative 40k opinion ive ever had (in the sense it has started the most arguments) is that the only person I think can play a good, convincing Roboute Guilliman, is Gunde Svan.

He is Roboute for me, accent and all.

If youre Swedish you know:

(translation:

Voice: “what is a preconcived notion people have about you?”

Gunde:”that I eat porridge every day.”

Voice:”do you?”

Gunde:”yes” *silly laugh*

[catboy-a-day]

Catboys 272 and 273

[wuxian-vs-wangji]

Today is a really weird day... I have to work 16-17 hours, but I'm supposed to pretend I'm not there.

Next week I am out for vacation, which my boss has known for 2 months.

She booked shoots for the only other producer all week, plus editing deadlines that means he cannot touch any other work.

And then a major political debate came in.

She is on her last legs for gross mismanagement and laziness, so she can't pull the other producer and miss his deadlines because supposedly her best friend she hired is a producer.

But he isn't, and has failed every opportunity they tried to create for him. And God knows SHE can't be expected to return to her editor/producer roots because that is beneath her.

So I had to train THREE people to handle different aspects of my work, ranging from how to produce and handle the debate to how to produce my show, and a separate person for handling the show-day producing.

All of them failed their training last week for different idiotic reasons, so today each is separately running through their work.

I gave each a detailed checklist of their job, with each item on the checklist thoroughly explained in bullet point form.

So my job is to sit there and pretend I am not there, then they will get me when they think they're done and I will check, explain AGAIN what they fucked up, remind them they have a checklist, and turn my phone off while they're doing the job so I don't get calls.

Last time I took vacation, it was only my show going on. I had 24 calls and 13 texts. And that was the one TRAINED producer and editor covering for me. Not the Three Morons.

I'm being paid to do 10 minutes of work every 5 hours or so, and spend the rest of the time playing games. My orders are to act as if I am on vacation, so they have to prove they can do it when I'm not here to check on them.

Imma write smut and play animal crossing.

[motherfuckingbrad]

me when poppy li grew up feeling like she had to impress people in order for them to love her so now she chases success but at the same time her success is actively making the most important person in her life hate her because ian only values her as a tool to him and not as her own creator …..

[holysaintscathedral]

Sure, priests can be hot up until they actually start talking and stating their out-of-touch and bigoted opinions on people and things.