#mar 14 2021

[liatkolink]

For people still in denial whether Israel has committed war crimes, here is a comprehensive list of war crimes Israel has committed both before and after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the list being taken from the Wikipedia article of war crimes with some notable missing examples being the usage of chemical weapons, famine, disease and apartheid. The 7th of October attack did not occur in a vacuum, but is the product of decades of Israel not being held accountable for its war crimes.

Killing civilians:

Israel/Palestine: Unlawful Israeli Airstrikes Kill Civilians by Human Rights Watch on 15/Jul/2014

‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza – The Guardian on 2/Apr/2024

Israeli attack on Rafah tent camp kills 45, prompts international outcry by Reuters on 27/May/2024

Intentionally killing PoWs:

Israel’s Hush-Up Machine in Action: Denying Story Israel Executed Egyptian Prisoners by Washington Report on Middle East Affairs on 8/Apr/2010

Torture:

Israeli government report admits systematic torture of Palestinians by The Guardian on 10/Feb/2000

Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests by Amnesty International on 8/Nov/2023

Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured by Human Rights Watch on 26/Aug/2024

Taking hostages:

Infographic: How many Palestinians are imprisoned by Israel? by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2022

The thousands of Palestinians Israel arrests, tortures, holds even in death by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2024

UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture and mistreatment by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 31/Jul/2024

Unnecessarily destroying civilian property:

Israel destroys Gaza tower housing AP and Al Jazeera offices by Reuters on 15/May/2021

Israel targets infrastructure in Gaza to ramp up civilian pressure on Hamas, report claims by PBS News on 11/Dec/2023

Widespread destruction by Israeli Defence Forces of civilian infrastructure in Gaza by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 8/Feb/2024

Deception by perfidy:

Israeli soldier gives 74-year-old Palestinian woman water then shoots her in the head by Middle East Monitor on 20/Jan/2015

Israeli special forces disguised as doctors kill three militants at West Bank hospital by The Guardian on 30/Jan/2024

NBC News investigation reveals Israel strikes on Gaza areas it said were safe by NBC News on 26/Apr/2024

Wartime sexual violence:

Stripped, beaten and blindfolded: new research reveals ongoing violence and abuse of Palestinian children detained by Israeli military by Save the Children on 10/Jul/2023

Israel/oPt: UN experts appalled by reported human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 19/Feb/2024

‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape by AlJazeera on 9/Aug/2024

Pillaging:

The Biblical Pseudo-Archeologists Pillaging the West Bank by The Atlantic on 28/Feb/2013

Jewish Soldiers and Civilians Looted Arab Neighbors' Property en Masse in '48. The Authorities Turned a Blind Eye by Haaretz on 3/Oct/2020

Israeli soldiers boast about looting from Gaza by AlJazeera on 14/Feb/2024

Any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings:

Netanyahu incites violence by casting protesters as clear and present danger by Middle East Eye on 30/Jul/2020

Israeli minister's call to 'erase' Palestinian village an incitement to violence, US says by Reuters on 1/Mar/2023

Netanyahu cites 'Amalek' Theory to justify Gaza Killings by Times of India on 29/Oct/2023

Database exposes 500 instances of Israeli incitement to genocide in Gaza by TRT World 4/Jan/2024

Genocide:

The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective by Center for Constitutional Rights on 25/Aug/2016

Genocide Warning: Israel & Palestine by Genocide Watch on 21/May/2021

A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is 'plausible' but does not order cease-fire by npr on 26/Jan/2024

‘Reasonable grounds’ to believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, UN rights expert says by CNN on 27/Mar/2024

Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza? New Report from BU School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic Lays Out Case from Boston University Today on 5/Jun/2024

Ethnic cleansing:

UN Human Rights Council: ‘Israel engaging in ethnic cleansing’ by the European Union Parliament on 23/Mar/2011

Israel's ethnic cleansing in Palestine is not history - it's still happening by Middle East Eye on 22/May/2019

UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 14/Oct/2023

‘Plan for ethnic cleansing’: Israel’s north Gaza siege sets off alarms by AlJazeera on 22/Oct/2024

Granting of no quarter despite surrender:

White Flag Deaths Killings of Palestinian Civilians during Operation Cast Lead by Human Rights Watch on 13/Aug/2009

Investigators: Israel fired on Gaza civilians carrying white flags by The Electronic Intifada on 28/Jan/2015

3 hostages killed by Israeli soldier in Gaza were waving a white flag, Israel says by npr on 16/Dec/2023

A group of Palestinian men waving a white flag is shot at, killing 1 by NBC News on 24/Jan/2024

She was fleeing with her grandson, who was holding a white flag. Then she was shot by CNN on 26/Jan/2024

Two brothers shot by Israeli forces in Khan Younis, white flag ignored by AlJazeera on 29/Jan/2024

Conscription of children in the military: First one where I couldn't find anything. Way to go, Israel!

Flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity:

Israel violates the principles of necessity, proportionality in its attacks on Gaza by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on 13/May/2023

Enough: Self-Defense and Proportionality in the Israel-Hamas Conflict by Just Security on 6/Nov/2023

War Crimes and Accountability: The Case Against Israel’s Military Operations in Gaza by JURIST News on 5/Jul/2024

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

On 7/31/2019 Trump has a private meeting with Putin. On 8/3/2019, just 3 days after his private meeting with Putin Trump issues a request for a list of top US spies. By 2021 the CIA reports an unusually high number of their agents are being captured and/or being murdered. During the search executed at Mar A Lago the FBI find nore documents with lists of U.S. informants on them.

A Timeline

• FBI wiretapped Russian gambling ring headquartered at Trump Tower for two years - March 21, 2017

• Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador - May 15, 2017

• Trump, Putin Meet For 2 Hours In Helsinki - July 16, 2018

• Rand Paul Goes To Russia And Delivers Letter For Trump, Marking Our Era Of Irony - August 9, 2018

• Following the Money: Trump and Russia-Linked Transactions From the Campaign to the Presidential Inauguration - December 17, 2018

• The US extracted a top spy from Russia after Trump revealed classified information to the Russians in an Oval Office meeting - September 10, 2019

• Trump’s Loose Lips Force US to Extract Spy From Kremlin - September 10, 2019

• Was Mar-a-Lago Trespasser a Tourist or a Spy? A Judge Said Her Story Didn’t Hold Up. - November 25, 2019

• Trump downplays massive cyber hack on government after Pompeo links attack to Russia - December 19, 2020

• Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years, former KGB spy says - January 29, 2021

• There was Trump-Russia collusion — and Trump pardoned the colluder - April 17, 2021

• Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC - September 20, 2021

• Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants - October 5, 2021

• Files Seized From Trump Are Part of Espionage Act Inquiry - August 12, 2022

• Ex-Clinton aide implies 'President of France' file found at Trump's home during Mar-a-Lago raid could be valuable to Putin as 'kompromat' - August 13, 2022

• Inventing Anna: The tale of a fake heiress, Mar-a-Lago, and an FBI investigation - August 22, 2022

• Russians used a US firm to funnel funds to GOP in 2018. Dems say the FEC let them get away with it - October 30, 2022

• Trump makes shocking comments about trusting Putin over US 'intelligence lowlifes' - January 31, 2023

• Russia's Prigozhin admits links to what US says was election meddling troll farm - February 14, 2023

• GOP operative sentenced to 18 months for funneling Russian money to Trump- February 17, 2023

• Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources - October 5, 2023

• 'So appalled': What witnesses told special counsel about Trump's handling of classified info while still president - April 24, 2024

🤔🤔🤔

[matan4il]

On this Yom Ha'Zikaron Le'Chalalei Ma'rachot Yisrael (Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen Soldiers and Terror Victims), I figured it's important to remember that Israeli victims did not exist solely on Oct 7. We have lost loved ones before and since. Here's a list with just one random victim to represent each year. Please scroll down the list to see how far back it goes.

(part 1/5, all parts in the reblogs)

2024: On Jan 7, we lost 19 years old Shai Garmai

2023: On Oct 7, we lost 28 years old Osama abu Madiam

2022: On Nov 23, we lost 18 years old Tiran Faro

2021: On May 12, we lost 5 years old Ido Avigal

2020: On Aug 26, we lost 39 years old Shai Ochayon

2019: On May 5, we lost 49 years old Zaid al-Chamamda

2018: On Dec 12, we lost Amiad Israel Yish Ran, who was murdered in his mother's womb

2017: On Nov 22, we lost 21 years old Hodaya Nechama Assoulin

2016: On Oct 25, we lost 14 years old Rami Namer abu Amar

2015: On Feb 17, we lost 4 years old Adelle Biton

2014: On Oct 22, we lost 2.5 months old Chaya Zissel Brown

2013: On Dec 24, we lost 22 years old Salech al-Din abu al-Atayef

2012: On Jul 18, we lost 28 years old Yitzchak Idan Kolangi

2011: On Apr 17, we lost 16 years old Daniel Aryeh Viplich

2010: On Feb 26, we lost 52 years old Netta Blatt Sorek

2009: On Apr 2, we lost 13 years old Shlomo Nativ

2008: On Mar 6, we lost 26 years old Doron Trunach Mahareta

2007: On Jun 17, we lost 85 years old Meir Cohen

2006: On Aug 10, we lost 4 years old Fatchi Assdi

2005: On Jul 12, we lost 16 years old Nofar Horvitz

2004: On Sep 29, we lost 2 years old Dorit Massarat Binsan

2003: On Sep 9, we lost 20 years old Naava Appelbom

2002: On Nov 10, we lost 4 years old Noam Levi Ochayon

2001: On Dec 12, we lost 42 years old Ester Avraham

2000: On Nov 21, we lost 19 years old Itamar Yefet

1999: On Jun 24, we lost 34 years old Tony Eliyahu Zanna

1998: On Dec 2, we lost 41 years old Osama Moussa abu Aisha

1997: On Mar 13, we lost 13 years old Natali Alkalai

1996: On Feb 25, we lost 57 years old Yitzchak Elbaz

1995: On Jul 24, we lost 60 years old Zehava Oren

As Tumblr limits a post to 30 images... part 1/5 - the next parts will be posted in the reblogs momentarily. Please check out the full list.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[henrykathman]

The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion

From the same artform that brought you Coraline and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, comes three stories that evoke the existential fear of art.

Original Music by Molly Noise

Bibliography below

Atrocity Guide. “The Animators Who’ve Spent 40 Years on a Single Film.” YouTube, 9 Oct. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=73hip3pz0Xs&pp=ygUMdGhlIG92ZXJjb2F0. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Brubaker, Charles. “The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass.” Cartoon Research, Jerry Beck, 14 Apr. 2014, cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/.

Bute, Paris. “Introduction to “a Rankin/Bass Retrospective from a New Perspective.”” Citizen Jane, Stephens College, 19 Nov. 2021, www.citizenjane.org/home/cwwicd2ucb2fvs64kgfaocfykjhaum. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Crome, Althea. “Coraline.” Althea Crome | Micro Knitter, 2012, www.altheacrome.com/coraline. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Harold Halibut. Directed by Onat Hekimoğlu, Slow Bros., 16 Apr. 2024.

Hekimoglu, Onat, and Gabriel Schmitz. “Unite Berlin 2018 - Harold Halibut and Making a Stop Motion Game.” Unity, YouTube, 6 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/9usssSQc0wQ. Accessed 6 May 2023.

Jon "Sikamikanico" Clarke. “The Making of Harold Halibut.” XboxEra, YouTube, 21 Mar. 2024, youtu.be/WMyxM9t3o7A. Accessed 19 June 2024.

LAIKA Studios. “Sweater and Gloves: Knitting Coraline by Hand.” YouTube, 11 July 2017, youtu.be/zUvkfcGR-7U. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Mad God Productions. “Phil Tippett’s “Mad God.”” Kickstarter, 17 May 2012, www.kickstarter.com/projects/madgod/phil-tippetts-mad-god/posts.

Olson, Mathew. “Report: Michel Ancel Accused of Abusive, Disruptive Practices on beyond Good & Evil 2.” VG247, 25 Sept. 2020, www.vg247.com/report-michel-ancel-accused-of-abusive-disruptive-practices-on-beyond-good-evil-2. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Ono, Kosei. “Tadahito Mochinaga: The Japanese Animator Who Lived in Two Worlds.” Animation World Network, AWN, Inc, 1 Dec. 1999, www.awn.com/animationworld/tadahito-mochinaga-japanese-animator-who-lived-two-worlds.

Orland, Kyle. “Claptrap Voice Actor Accuses Gearbox CEO of Assault, Underpayment.” Ars Technica, 7 May 2019, arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/claptrap-voice-actor-accuses-gearbox-ceo-of-assault-underpayment/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Pilling, Jayne. A Reader In Animation Studies. Indiana University Press, 1998. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/40033.

Prehistoric Beast. Directed by Phil Tippett, Tippett Studios, 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlaXIRTjNfo

Randles, Jonathan. “VFX Studio with Star Wars, Jurassic Park Credits Goes Bankrupt.” Bloomberg Law, 1 May 2024, news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/vfx-studio-with-star-wars-jurassic-park-credits-goes-bankrupt. Accessed 19 June 2024.

Shanley, Patrick. “Gearbox Software CEO Accused of Contempt in Latest Filing.” The Hollywood Reporter, 27 Aug. 2019, www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/gearbox-software-ceo-accused-contempt-latest-filing-1235064/. Accessed 19 June 2024.

The Making of “Jurassic Park.” Directed by John Schultz, Amblin Entertainment, 1995. https://youtu.be/8r01mk6F_Pk

The Making of Mad God. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2021. https://youtu.be/sfUOHh0xmwc

The Tale of the Fox. Directed by Irene Starewicz and Ladislas Starevich, UFA GmbH, 10 Apr. 1941. https://youtu.be/Us_Pn6Q1dBQ

Wikipedia contributors. "List of films with longest production time." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of media notable for being in development hell." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "List of Rankin/Bass Productions films." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 Jun. 2024. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wikipedia contributors. "Tadahito Mochinaga." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Nov. 2023. Web. 19 Jun. 2024.

Wilson, Josh. “Phil Tippett: 24 Frames per Second < the Fabulist Words & Art.” The Fabulist Words & Art, 5 Nov. 2021, fabulistmagazine.com/24-frames-per-second-the-phil-tippett-interview/.

Worse than the Demon. Directed by Maya Tippett, Shudder, 2013. https://youtu.be/ghKqvDNRe4c

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The antitrust case against Apple

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Apple, then, is said to be a virtuous company because its behavior is disciplined by market forces, unlike its spying rivals, whose ability to "hack our dopamine loops" immobilizes the market's invisible hand with "behavior-shaping" shackles:

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Apple makes a big deal out of its privacy-respecting ethos, and not without some justification. After all, Apple went to the mattresses to fight the FBI when they tried to force Apple to introduced defects into its encryption systems:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say

And Apple gave Ios users the power to opt out of Facebook spying with a single click; 96% of its customers took them up on this offer, costing Facebook $10b (one fifth of the pricetag of the metaverse boondoggle!) in a single year (you love to see it):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/facebook-makes-the-case-for-activity-tracking-to-ios-14-users-in-new-pop-ups/

Bruce Schneier has a name for this practice: "feudal security." That's when you cede control over your device to a Big Tech warlord whose "walled garden" becomes a fortress that defends you against external threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

The keyword here is external threats. When Apple itself threatens your privacy, the fortress becomes a prison. The fact that you can't install unapproved apps on your Ios device means that when Apple decides to harm you, you have nowhere to turn. The first Apple customers to discover this were in China. When the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove all working privacy tools from its App Store, the company obliged, rather than risk losing access to its ultra-cheap manufacturing base (Tim Cook's signal accomplishment, the one that vaulted him into the CEO's seat, was figuring out how to offshore Apple manufacturing to China) and hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-vpn/apple-says-it-is-removing-vpn-services-from-china-app-store-idUSKBN1AE0BQ

Killing VPNs and other privacy tools was just for openers. After Apple caved to Beijing, the demands kept coming. Next, Apple willingly backdoored all its Chinese cloud services, so that the Chinese state could plunder its customers' data at will:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

This was the completely foreseeable consequence of Apple's "curated computing" model: once the company arrogated to itself the power to decide which software you could run on your own computer, it was inevitable that powerful actors – like the Chinese Communist Party – would lean on Apple to exercise that power in service to its goals.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese state's appetite for deputizing Apple to help with its spying and oppression was not sated by backdooring iCloud and kicking VPNs out of the App Store. As recently as 2022, Apple continued to neuter its tools at the behest of the Chinese state, breaking Airdrop to make it useless for organizing protests in China:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Here's the thing: even if you believe that Apple has a "corporate personality" that makes it want to do the right thing, that desire to be virtuous is dependent on the constraints Apple faces. The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells – the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware – represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.

"Constraints" are the crux of the enshittification hypothesis. The contagion that spread enshittification to every corner of our technological world isn't a newfound sadism or indifference among tech bosses. Those bosses are the same people they've always been – the difference is that today, they are unconstrained.

Having bought, merged or formed a cartel with all their rivals, they don't fear competition (Apple buys 90+ companies per year, and Google pays it an annual $26.3b bribe for default search on its operating systems and programs).

Having captured their regulators, they don't fear fines or other penalties for cheating their customers, workers or suppliers (Apple led the coalition that defeated dozens of Right to Repair bills, year after year, in the late 2010s).

Having wrapped themselves in IP law, they don't fear rivals who make alternative clients, mods, privacy tools or other "adversarial interoperability" tools that disenshittify their products (Apple uses the DMCA, trademark, and other exotic rules to block third-party software, repair, and clients).

True virtue rests not merely in resisting temptation to be wicked, but in recognizing your own weakness and avoiding temptation. As I wrote when Apple embarked on its "curated computing" path, the company would eventually – inevitably – use its power to veto its customers' choices to harm those customers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Which is where we're at today. Apple – uniquely among electronics companies – shreds every device that is traded in by its customers, to block third parties from harvesting working components and using them for independent repair:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on those parts and uses these as the basis for trademark complaints to US customs, to block the re-importation of parts that escape its shredders:

https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/

Apple entered into an illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to prevent used and refurbished devices from being sold in the "world's biggest marketplace":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

Why is Apple so opposed to independent repair? Well, they say it's to keep users safe from unscrupulous or incompetent repair technicians (feudal security). But when Tim Cook speaks to his investors, he tells a different story, warning them that the company's profits are threatened by customers who choose to repair (rather than replace) their slippery, fragile glass $1,000 pocket computers (the fortress becomes a prison):

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

All this adds up to a growing mountain of immortal e-waste, festooned with miniature Apple logos, that our descendants will be dealing with for the next 1,000 years. In the face of this unspeakable crime, Apple engaged in a string of dishonest maneuvers, claiming that it would support independent repair. In 2022, Apple announced a home repair program that turned out to be a laughably absurd con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Then in 2023, Apple announced a fresh "pro-repair" initiative that, once again, actually blocked repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Let's pause here a moment and remember that Apple once stood for independent repair, and celebrated the independent repair technicians that kept its customers' beloved Macs running:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

Whatever virtue lurks in Apple's corporate personhood, it is no match for the temptation that comes from running a locked-down platform designed to capture IP rights so that it can prevent normal competitive activities, like fixing phones, processing payments, or offering apps.

When Apple rolled out the App Store, Steve Jobs promised that it would save journalism and other forms of "content creation" by finally giving users a way to pay rightsholders. A decade later, that promise has been shattered by the app tax – a 30% rake on every in-app transaction that can't be avoided because Apple will kick your app out of the App Store if you even mention that your customers can pay you via the web in order to avoid giving a third of their content dollars to a hardware manufacturer that contributed nothing to the production of that material:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Among the apps that Apple also refuses to allow on Ios is third-party browsers. Every Iphone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps – apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Last month, the EU took aim at Apple's veto over its users' and software vendors' ability to transact with one another. The newly in-effect Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up both third-party payment processing and third-party app stores. Apple's response to this is the very definition of malicious compliance, a snake's nest of junk-fees, onerous terms of service, and petty punitive measures that all add up to a great, big "Go fuck yourself":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

But Apple's bullying, privacy invasion, price-gouging and environmental crimes are global, and the EU isn't the only government seeking to end them. They're in the firing line in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-wins-appeal-in-apple-case

And now, famously, the US Department of Justice is coming for Apple, with a bold antitrust complaint that strikes at the heart of Apple exceptionalism, the idea that monopoly is safer for users than technological self-determination:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

There's passages in the complaint that read like I wrote them:

Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.

After all, Apple punishes its customers for communicating with Android users by forcing them to do so without any encryption. When Beeper Mini rolled out an Imessage-compatible Android app that fixed this, giving Iphone owners the privacy Apple says they deserve but denies to them, Apple destroyed Beeper Mini:

https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward

Tim Cook is on record about this: if you want to securely communicate with an Android user, you must "buy them an Iphone":

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.

Even where Apple tries for security, it sometimes fails ("security is a process, not a product" -B. Schneier). To be secure in a benevolent dictatorship, it must also be an infallible dictatorship. Apple's far from infallible: Eight generations of Iphones have unpatchable hardware defects:

https://checkm8.info/

And Apple's latest custom chips have secret-leaking, unpatchable vulnerabilities:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

Apple's far from infallible – but they're also far from benevolent. Despite Apple's claims, its hardware, operating system and apps are riddled with deliberate privacy defects, introduce to protect Apple's shareholders at the expense of its customers:

https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy

Now, antitrust suits are notoriously hard to make, especially after 40 years of bad-precedent-setting, monopoly-friendly antitrust malpractice. Much of the time, these suits fail because they can't prove that tech bosses intentionally built their monopolies. However, tech is a written culture, one that leaves abundant, indelible records of corporate deliberations. What's more, tech bosses are notoriously prone to bragging about their nefarious intentions, committing them to writing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Apple is no exception – there's an abundance of written records that establish that Apple deliberately, illegally set out to create and maintain a monopoly:

https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-doj-build-antitrust-case/

Apple claims that its monopoly is beneficent, used to protect its users, making its products more "elegant" and safe. But when Apple's interests conflict with its customers' safety and privacy – and pocketbooks – Apple always puts itself first, just like every other corporation. In other words: Apple is unexceptional.

The Cult of Mac denies this. They say that no one wants to use a third-party app store, no one wants third-party payments, no one wants third-party repair. This is obviously wrong and trivially disproved: if no Apple customer wanted these things, Apple wouldn't have to go to enormous lengths to prevent them. The only phones that an independent Iphone repair shop fixes are Iphones: which means Iphone owners want independent repair.

The rejoinder from the Cult of Mac is that those Iphone owners shouldn't own Iphones: if they wanted to exercise property rights over their phones, they shouldn't have bought a phone from Apple. This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for distraction-rectangles, and moreover, it's impossible to square with Tim Cook's insistence that if you want private communications, you must buy an Iphone.

Apple is unexceptional. It's just another Big Tech monopolist. Rounded corners don't preserve virtue any better than square ones. Any company that is freed from constraints – of competition, regulation and interoperability – will always enshittify. Apple – being unexceptional – is no exception.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

[anarchywoofwoof]

i'm running low on political takes, but i have one more regarding an important topic.

for everyone who is talking about the climate and dooming regarding the future of a world where we won't stay below 2C, i really need you to understand that was never going to happen anyway.

rather than try to explain it myself, below is a comment from reddit that mirrors my thoughts and expertly breaks down the timeline over the last 4 years with sources and dates. long post below.

I see that it is once again time to remind partisans, apologists, and deniers in this subreddit that they should not blame leftists, immigrants, young folks, disengaged folks, migrants, or whatever outgroup. Place the blame solely on the party that was supposed to run Joe as a one-timer in the name of stability before ponying up a progressive leader. Instead they spent four years jerking off fossil fuel companies. By laser focusing your attention of identity politics - intersectionality without critical analysis esp class struggle - they accomplish ghoulish feats such as drastically expanding fossil fuel extraction and juicing the military industrial complex. No, the democrats aren't better or even less bad with respect to the environment.

Somehow, absurdly, this timeline has produced a political party that denies climate change, but through their own ineptitude is less accomplished at greasing the wheels of business. On the other hand, the party that softly acknowledges climate change has produced outcomes that are significantly, horrifically, catastrophically worse for the environment. Biden's presidency saw massive fossil fuel expansion despite his explicit promise not to. Harris promised to continue that and expand fracking. Please read below links carefully and ask yourself what job you're going to do in very near future economy: soldier or field laborer

2020

Aug 6 - While campaigning for the presidency, Joe Biden promises to ban the expansion of fossil fuel exploitation on federal lands as part of his $1.7 trillion climate plan. "This plan will commit money towards renewable infrastructure development and tax incentives for individuals and industry while establishing governmental agencies tasked with battling climate change."

2021

Jan 20 - Biden takes office

May 11 - At Cop 26, Biden promises to transition out of fossil fuels, calls climate change an existential threat to humanity.

Aug 30 - Biden admin to resume drilling auctions, immediately reversing campaign promises and dealing a huge setback for climate activists.

2022

Jan - Biden administration approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year

Feb - Russia invades Ukraine

April 27 - US Energy Dept approves increased LNG shipments from terminals in Texas and Louisiana.

March 22 WH Nat Sec Advisor Jake Sullivan announces plans to boost and redirect LNG to Europe in response to Russian invasion

US energy Sec J Granhol announces significant increase in domestic oil and gas extraction.

Aug 16 - Biden Signs IRA $18bn over ~10y which includes preventing leasing any federal waters offshore to wind until first making 60 million acres available for oil and gas. WHAT.

Aug 16 Federal government resurrected two previously canceled sales to meet this requirement. Go IRA?

Oct 1 - Biden admin & US Army Corps of Eng approves repair & restart of CA pipeline which caused disastrous Huntington Beach incident.

Dec 14 - US Energy Dept changes carbon capture budget to now be inclusive of fossil fuel ‘enhanced oil recovery’ at request of Manchin, Sinema

2023

Jan 24 - Biden admin approves 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling

Mar 29 - Biden admin auctions 1.6 million acres of gulf lease to fossil fuel companies

May 12 - Biden breaks G7 promise, approves $100m financing for Indonesian oil refinery

Mar 13 - Biden admin approves controversial Willow drilling project. The project (extraction period) will span 30 years , pump 600 million barrels of oil, and produce 258 million mm/t CO2 into the atmosphere. Equiv of ~57mm cars, this damage outpaces all our other climate promises and actions twice over

April 14 - Biden admin approves exports of LNG from Alaska LNG pipeline. It is being framed as a competitive move against Russian LNG due to the war in Ukraine (Europe’s dependence on Russian LNG)

May 24 - BLM land auction in New Mex, Okla, Kansas. (still researching details, cannot find PR)

May 25 - SCOTUS rules against EPA regarding definition of ‘wetlands’, limiting EPA authority in key locations

Jun 26 - BLM oil and gas lease in NoDak nets $2.4m (19 parcels ~8061 acres)

Jun 29 - Biden admin leases over 100k acres of federal land in Wyoming for fossil fuel exploitation

Jul 27 - US DoI issues rejection of calls to phase out fossil fuel use on public lands

Jul 27 - SCOTUS rules in favor of Mountain Valley Pipeline. Project moves forward

History of MVP issue:

Apr 21 - Biden Sec Energy sends letter to court in favor of MVP

May 16 - Biden admin grants key permit for MVP

May 30 - WH officials frame the MVP deal as inevitable, washing their hands of blame despite vigorous efforts moving the project forward.

June 2 - Senate passes debt ceiling deal, inc MVP approval

Jul 21 - US Solicitor Gen (DoJ) files amicus brief in support of MVP

(End of MVP)

Sept 20 - Biden launches Climate Corps

Sept - Biden to skip UN climate summit

To be continued ...

Hot take / Summary

Using the war in Ukraine as an excuse, Biden WH does a complete 180 on environmental campaign promises, becoming an extremelly pro-oil admin

A conservative scotus came in hot with TWO wins for a liberal administration contending with leftists activists and lawers.

A dysfunctional and gridlocked congress was unable to pass meaningful legislation, watering down key portions of the IRA

The emissions from ONE single project (2023 willow pipe, above) will outpace ALL of our other climate pledges by 200%, rendering them pointless/performative.

The items outlined also present a disturbing example of the executive abusing congress and the judiciary, resulting in three branches that collude together rather than operate as checks and balances.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Bengiyo's Queer Cinema Syllabus

Hello! After a holiday hiatus, I am returning to @bengiyo's queer cinema syllabus. We will be ringing in the new year with Unit 4: Heartbreak Alley, the totally light-hearted, definitely not agonizing section of the syllabus where I get to watch countless acts of violence be committed against queer people. That fuck I have Lesbians waiting for me at the end of this unit. The films in Unit 4 are: Bent (1997), Strange Fruit (2004) [cannot for the life of me find this film], Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Parting Glances (1986), Philadelphia (1993), The Living End (1992), Holding the Man (2015), Jeffery (1995), and Boys on the SIde (1995)

Today I will be writing about 

Brokeback Mountain (2005) dir. Ang Lee

[Run Time: 2h 14 min, Lang: English] 

Summary: “Ennis and Jack are two shepherds who develop a sexual and emotional relationship. Their relationship becomes complicated when both of them get married to their respective girlfriends.” -imdb

Cast: * Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist *Heath Ledger as Ennis del Mar (Rest in Peace)

__

Okay, so unsurprisingly Brokeback Mountain is one of seven of the movies on this syllabus that I had seen before I embarked on this project. I watched it for the first time in 2021 and walked away from it with two images in my head: Jack and Ennis’ reunion kiss and Jack getting his face bashed in with a tire iron. This film is in Heartbreak Alley for a reason and that’s because it is fundamentally depressing as fuck. Jack and Ennis are stuck in unhappy marriages, lonely all their lives, struggling to carve desire out of a life that does not let them have it. Ennis ends up alone, and Jack ends up dead and these things are important. Ennis slipped out of his role as attentive father and doting husband the second Jack walked back in to his life, Jack kept breaking his own heart by daring to dream of the life that he wanted. 

A life he was denied. 

I want to mention these tragedies up front because I want primarily to talk about something else in this film. But i do not want to just push past the violence here. This is probably something other people have heard, it was definitely something I was told by the person who recommended this film to me the first time. But the way Jack dies, the way Earl dies, these are both similar to the way that Matthew Shepard died. Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, pistol whipped, tortured, and tied to a fence in Wyoming for being gay and was so brutally beaten his entire face was covered in blood. Jack was beaten to death with a tire iron on the side of the road, Earl was brutally tortured and left in a ditch. These men are not just killed, but brutally, violently, torturously murdered for being queer. 

That said, this movie felt so different to me the second time I watched it and I am so amazed to see how much I truly missed my first time around. I was younger, freshly queer, and did not have anywhere close to the extensive queer media viewing history I do now. It is wild to me to see how I have grown in my engagement with media after spending a year writing about body language. Because this film is so fucking brilliant, like legitimately intelligently crafted in it’s displays of gay politics. Maybe this is stuff that I picked up on subconsciously the first time through because I never found the movie boring despite it being rather slow. But this time? My brain was buzzing at how expertly crafted the dialogue and body language was around trying to be safe while being queer. 

I am thinking of the way that Jack sizes Ennis up at the beginning, Jack’s posture as he leans against his truck the first time they meet. I’m thinking about the line “Mr. Augirre’s got no right making us do something against the rules” when you consider that queerness is very much against the rules at that time and in that place. The way Ennis refuses to let Jack be gentle with him at first, tending his own wounds, staying distant and quiet, until he doesn’t.

Maybe it’s just because of how much I’ve watched The Sign drift further away from the hyper-masculinity aspect of their story, but I could not stop thinking about the delicate dance that is required to navigate the growing feelings and sexual relationship between these two extremely masculine men. I started looking and I think there are about three times in the entire movie where Jack and Ennis are soft with each other. The first is on Brokeback the second time they have sex, and Ennis is struggling and just rests his head on Jack’s chest before going in for a kiss. The second is when they are cuddling in bed at the motel after their first reunion. The third is the scene after Ennis tells Jack he won’t be able to see him again until November. That’s it. Otherwise they aren’t touching, or when they are touching they are rough, rough housing, rough kissing, rough fucking it doesn’t matter. 

Ennis says he isn’t queer and Jack says he’s not either, but they fuck and then they are drawn to one another for the rest of their lives, because there is no one who could get it like they do. Ennis isn’t lying when he tells Jack that is the most he’s spoken in a year. Ennis is a lonely man. Ennis is a rural, hyper-masculine rancher he does not have emotions, not anymore, if he ever did. Whatever conscious or subconscious queerness he had undoubtedly shriveled and died the day he was shown Earl’s body. And that, I think, is part of why Ennis is just constantly drawn to Jack, why his face lights up when he sees Jack, why he throws such caution to the wind upon their first reunion. 

Ennis does not need words for Jack to understand him. Jack is also a rural, hyper-masculine rancher. He gets it in a way that Alma never will. The violence they bestow upon each other, Jack understands why Ennis would lash out. The need to escape in to the mountains, Hack understands why Ennis needs it. It’s just so smartly written. Ennis so unmoored from his own feelings that his body physically rejects them when he and Jack separate for the first time. The way he has to suck it in, suck it up, pretend like he’s unfazed, unaffected, until the minute he has a chance to be out of eyesight, and then he just collapses retching, sobbing, punching walls. 

And then he’s able to separate himself from his emotions once more, he marries Alma, he stays lonely, he does his duties, until Jack comes calling. I think I remember a story about how the first kiss that Heath and Jake have when Ennis and Jack are reunited, their faces slammed together so hard one of them almost broke a nose. And that is how 90% of Ennis and Jack’s relationship is. Those emotions come back and then Jack is leaving again, and Ennis just starts to crumble. 

I could not stop thinking about the dialogue in this film Mr. Aguirre’s carefully chosen words when he is telling Jack exactly why he isn’t hiring him for another season, the way Jack tries to suss out if the man sitting next to him at the bar after the rodeo is queer and down to fuck, how that man picks up on it, rejects him, and how quickly Jack gets the fuck out of the bar afterwards. The inherent understanding of what being invited to the cabin means in that conversation with David Harbor’s character. GOD, it’s just so well done. 

Favorite Moment 

To continue on the subject of incredible code work in this movie, my favorite scene is when Ennis goes to visit Jack’s parents to try to get Jack’s ashes so he can spread them on Brokeback Mountain. How without ever saying anything directly, Jack’s parents are able to convey that they know the reason Jack died, what Jack and Ennis were to each other, and that they accept Jack and accept Ennis was just beautiful. The way she lets Ennis go up to Jack’s room, Ennis finding the shirts, stained with blood because that’s what it is to be queer, Jack’s mother letting Ennis take those with him, Jack’s father saying: “We’ve got a family plot. He’s going in it.” as Ennis is about to walk out the door, Jack’s mother saying: “You come back and see us again” and not have either of those things feel like a threat or a trap? It was incredible. 

Favorite Quote

Hmm, I know we have the two famous quotes, but it’s hard to pick a favorite line because there is so little dialogue in this film considering it is over two hours long. I think I am going to go with the last line of the movie:

“Jack, I swear”

Cause it made me cry. Alma Junior pays a visit to her father to let him know she’s getting married, and she drives away forgetting her coat, and Ennis opens his closet (intense staring at the visual commentary) and he buttons the top button of Jack’s shirt, and he swears to Jack and to me that feels like a wedding vow. 

Score 

10/10 This film is gorgeous, just utterly beautiful all around. The cinematography, the script, the commitment and the care the actors give to these characters, to the subject. I am so glad this was on the syllabus so I had this opportunity to revisit this film. I got a whole lot more out of it as a result.

[wrestlezon]

Best Friends & Orange Cassidy vs Miro & Kip Sabian and Penelope Ford Feud (Oct 2020 - Mar 2021)

Hey, I finally finished putting this together! (its just tv stuff, i missed any twitter tweets)

I've supplied (brief) summaries, hyperlinks, and timestamps for each show, mostly to fite/triller where you can directly watch them if you have an AEW+ sub. If you don't, I tried to include some youtube/twitter alternative links where applicable. I've also left the bilibili video ids from before I got fite/triller, they're in blue.

(My advice: feel free to skip straight to Jan 06 2021.)

It's a looooong post, so its under this readmore. You can also find it as a separate page on my tumblr here. if i end up hosting it anywhere else i'll edit the original post and put a link here as well maybe

by zon :)

-----------------------------

OCT 14 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-anniversary-show-live-results-four-title-matches-322571

The feud begins. The first match of the show is Best Friends vs FTR. Kip and Penelope are… playing… on an arcade cabinet in the arena. Trent accidentally destroys the cabinet while fighting FTR. Kip and Penelope to run off. After the match ends, they return with Miro who beats up Chuck and Trent. After a commercial break, Miro/Kip have a tag match (squash) against Lee Johnson/Sean Maluta and then do a promo about the broken arcade cabinet.

0:16:21 arcade break | 0:20:00 Miro Appears | 0:26:00 Miro/Kip/Penelope postmatch promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-42-20/2p88b/ BV1Rp4y1r7y9

(later on in this show, Orange has a match against Cody for his TNT Championship.)

-----------------------------

OCT 28 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-live-results-world-title-eliminator-semifinals-323741

Returning from supporting Orange Cassidy in his lumberjack match, Best Friends bump into Miro, Kip, and Penelope (MKP, if you will) in the halls. MKP are pretty chill about the whole broken arcade thing and offer them some presents and halloween treats. Chuck and Trent are unamused. MKP then reveal that it was merely a halloween trick™ and beats them up.

1:17:00 best friends + MKP backstage promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-44-20/2p8ac/ BV1j5411L7GM

Also, Orange has a rematch against Cody for that TNT championship since their last match ended due to the time limit. This time its a lumberjack match. Best Friends are present and also take part in the chaos.

54:28 Orange’s match entrance | 57:50 Cody’s entrance (and the rest of the match)

-----------------------------

NOV 2 2020

Excalibur interviews Trent and Miro ahead of their upcoming match on Wednesday over webcam. It’s 6 minutes long, and mostly Excalibur bearing witness to Trent and Miro arguing. Gonna give a shout out to their distinct webcam setups, lol (Trent is using workout earbuds and sitting in what has to be a large dim empty room, Excalibur is in his bedroom, and Miro is in his gamer office with a headset)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1SZTP8ywc

-----------------------------

NOV 4 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-live-results-full-gear-go-home-show-324296

Trent vs Miro. During the entrances they show a clip from the interview from Nov 2nd. Orange and Chuck are hanging out ringside, as well as Kip and Penelope. Eventually Chuck runs off stage while fighting Kip. Dark Order appear to beat up Orange since hes fighting John Silver at the upcoming Full Gear. Miro scares them off and then defeats Trent with his submission hold. After the match, Miro puts Trent back into his Game Over submission and Chuck runs in to save him. Kip was following close behind. Chuck and Trent get both of their asses kicked. Orange attacks MKP and the two sides split off.

0:23:25 Trent vs Miro | 0:28:00 Chuck leaves | 0:31:00 Dark Order appears | 0:37:23 Match Ends | 39:40 Postmatch ends

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-45-20/2p8cy/ BV1wV41117E7

-----------------------------

NOV 6 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dark-results-daniels-vs-sydal-taylor-vs-johnson-324511

Chuck Taylor fights Lee Johnson on AEW Dark. Nothing MKP-related happens, but at the start Excalibur briefly brings up the ongoing feud Best Friends are having with Miro/Kip/Penelope. Plus its a fun match for AEW Dark.

43:56 Chuck Taylor vs Lee Johnson

https://youtu.be/S_ShrIJ4hVQ?t=2636

-----------------------------

NOV 7 2020

www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-full-gear-live-results-five-title-matches-omega-vs-page-324571

Full Gear! Orange has a match against John Silver. Later on, he gets interviewed by Dasha alongside Best Friends. MKP interrupt the interview– Kip’s mad that Orange’s beef with the Dark Order caused them to show up at the Trent vs Miro match, and that they could’ve hurt Penelope. He asks for an apology from Orange and then immediately slaps him anyway. Best Friends get mad on his behalf but Orange casually says everythings cool and walks with the two of them offscreen. Everyone is confused at how chill he is.

3:09:53 Backstage Interview

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-full-gear-2020/2p83a/ BV18K4y1E7uE

-----------------------------

NOV 11 2020

They play the segment from Full Gear on this Dynamite and announce Kip vs Orange for next week.

1:36:45

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-46-20/2p8ef/

-----------------------------

NOV 18 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-live-results-pac-returns-world-title-contract-signing-325391

Kip Sabian vs Orange Cassidy. Best Friends accompany Orange for his entrance, but return to the back. Miro’s on commentary calling Trent his Young Boy. JR brings up Kip and Penelope’s upcoming marriage. After Orange wins the match, Miro sprints from the commentary table to punch out Orange. Best Friends show up immediately after and MKP run off.

0:26:53 Match Start | 39:50 Match End

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-47-20/2p8ft/ BV1jK4y1j79q

-----------------------------

NOV 24 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dark-results-dark-order-vs-janelakiss-vs-chaos-project-325946

Trent vs Michael Nakazawa Chuck and Orange are hanging around ringside. Not necessarily MKP-related, but Excalibur mentions their feud. The Wrestling Observer article says that Nakazawa sabotaged Trent during his match against Miro way back when, but I’m not sure where that’s specifically mentioned. It’s really just in service of facilitating this goofy comedy match.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1mr41FoLQ&t=1123s

-----------------------------

NOV 25 2020

Miro & Kip’s game livestream is interrupted by OC. Its a trap by the Best Friends!

twitter.com/AEW/status/1331783338214961153

or:

1:11:03

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-48-20/2p8h6/

-----------------------------

DEC 1 2020

Best Friends have an AEW Dark match against Sean Maluta & Adam Priest. Unrelated to the feud, it seems? https://youtu.be/oLW9pywcIYI?t=2722

-----------------------------

DEC 2 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-winter-coming-live-results-moxley-vs-omega-326461

The show starts off with the Dynamite Diamond Battle Royale, and it has Orange Cassidy in it. It comes down to him, Wardlow, and MJF, and Orange eliminates Wardlow to end the match and qualify for the dynamite diamond ring match next week. Best Friends come out to pick him up congratulate him. Orange flops to the ground like a sack of potatoes. MKP come out to antagonize them and are held back by every referee.

13:45 Match End | 15:03 Postmatch End

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-49-20/2p8i3/ BV1KK41137KR

-----------------------------

DEC 9 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-live-results-sting-interview-omega-title-win-fallout-327116

The dynamite diamond ring match! Best Friends accompany Orange and hang around ringside along with a group of others to even out the odds as MJF has the entire Inner Circle backing him up. This is a pretty fun match. At the end, Miro comes out to knock Orange out while the ref is preoccupied by ringside chaos, and then MJF takes advantage of this to pin Orange for the win. Best Friends fight with Miro & Kip, but the refs get them away. Miro proceeds to kick the shit out of every security guard.

1:43:36 Orange’s entrance + match start | 1:57:35 Ringside Chaos + Miro Appears

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-50-20/2p8jf/ BV1QK41137mb

unrelated, but MJF has a short promo against Orange at 14:40

-----------------------------

DEC 15 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dark-results-best-friends-vs-chaos-project-shida-vs-king-327711

Best Friends vs Chaos Project fight on this episode of AEW DARK. Miro comes out at the end to yell at them, but the refs keep him away.

1:42:00 Match intro | 1:53:00 Miro Appears

https://youtu.be/7_xHd64xeeQ?t=6171

-----------------------------

DEC 16 2020

https://www.f4wonline.com/news/aew/results/aew-dynamite-live-results-omega-vs-janela-no-dq-match-327716

(trent had a fight against jericho earlier, and had a staredown with ortiz/santana…)

Best Friends do a promo– They’re unhappy about Miro sabotaging Orange Cassidy, and hear that Kip and Penelope’s wedding date is being announced next week, and warn that they’ll also be at that show.

1:41:20 Promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-51-20/2p8ka/ BV1bt4y1k7SC

-----------------------------

DEC 23 2020

Wedding date reveal segment. Best Friends’ intro starts, but its just a prank. They then show Trent being loaded into ambulance.

1:11:00-1:14:55

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-52-20/2p8l5/ BV115411H7PA

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

JAN 06 2021

Chuck and Orange give an update on the status of Trent’s injury, Miro and the gang show up. Miro tells Chuck that he needs to stand up for himself instead of hiding behind his friends, or better yet be Miro’s friend and do all his chores. Chuck challenges Miro to a match next week, and Miro accepts with the stipulation that if Chuck loses he’ll have to be his young boy/rookie. Chuck agrees just to get this stupid beef over with faster.

0:24:27-0:26:18

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-01-21/2p8ne/ BV1c54y1s71A

-----------------------------

JAN 13 2021

chuck vs miro. we know who wins– obviously. how would there be a butler segment otherwise?

0:15:20 chuck entrance | 23:02 match ends

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-02-21/2p8oj/ BV1xh411y7XX

You can also just watch the last 3 mins of the match on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRsizDs838

-----------------------------

JAN 21 2021

We get the Charles Taylor butler reveal during Leyla Hirsch vs Penelope Ford. Orange is in the crowd, rather unhappy. After the match, Miro commands Chuck to enter the the ring and bosses him around. He then forces Chuck to look at Orange in the crowd and say into the mic that Miro is his best friend now.

1:25:22 Penelope Ford Entrance | 1:34:55-1:37:33 Postmatch Promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-03-21/2p8pk/ BV14v4y1f7tr

-----------------------------

FEB 03 2021

Miro and Kip have a short backstage promo about being excited for the wedding. Chuck is standing next to them, miserable. Vickie Guerrero then fetches them for the big wedding.

Miro gets Chuck to bring the champagne, then drinks Chuck’s glass cuz he is working. Miro gets mad at the person sized present hanging round the ring. Chuck says its a wedding gift from him. Miro is on to him, and trashes the gift. Chuck cuffs Miro's leg while he isnt looking, then Chuck turns on them. Orange also appears :)

1:00:12 Wedding Stage Setup | 1:00:56 Backstage Promo + Wedding | 1:12:08 Wedding… Ruined | 1:16:23 (segment end)

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-05-21/2p8sj/ BV1vU4y1x7E8

-----------------------------

FEB 10 2021

Recap of last week’s events.

47:35-49:24 MKP's promo, then Orange and Chuck

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-06-21/2p8tp/ BV1ur4y1N7Fd

-----------------------------

FEB 17 2021

Orange Cassidy vs Luther on dynamite. Chuck and Serpentico are ringside. Neither Miro nor Kip Sabian make an appearance.

-----------------------------

FEB 24 2021

Tony Schiavone has an interview with MKP. They’re very very mad about the wedding. Miro wants to beat up Orange. He says he likes Chuck Taylor and wants him to come back and be a butler for him again. Someone gives tony a note. Its one of those little “will u wrestle us at revolution? y/n/maybe :)” asking-someone-out-in-highschool kind of notes. Miro gets mad and says its childish and that Orange Cassidy is such a bad influence on him. But if Chuck comes home he’ll teach him how to be a man. Miro then crumples up the note and eats it, and then spits it back out at Tony.

37:13-39:35 Promo Segment

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-08-21/2p8w5/ BV1cp4y1H7Qv (0:37:25 ?)

alternatively: https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1364752741889900545

-----------------------------

MAR 03 2021

Revolution 2021 Miro + Kip vs Chuck + Orange match announcement, plus a short backstage promo from Miro.

1:43:26 Miro Promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-09-21/2p8xm/ BV1MK4y1D737

-----------------------------

MAR 08 2021

The Match At Revolution. feat. a lightly bloodied chuck

1:21:54 Marvez backstage interview w/ Chuck and Orange (that leads into the rest of the match) | 1:33:26 Match End

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-revolution-2021/2p8rn/ BV1Pf4y1t7GL

-----------------------------

MAR 10 2021

Chuck and Orange requests a rematch. Arcade Anarchy!

31:30 Promo Start

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-10-21/2p8zg/ BV1rN411Q7c2

alternatively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SGY6GgdLJU

-----------------------------

MAR 17 2021

Marvez interviews Miro about how Chuck and Orange challenged them to a rematch. Miro’s not interested, says he is over it. Kip interrupts and says he super isn’t over it, and is mad that Miro doesnt care and also hurt his wife! Kip accepts the rematch.

1:33:27-1:35:01 Backstage Promo

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-11-21/2p90p/ BV1Cf4y1s7uv

-----------------------------

MAR 24 2021

Video package about the upcoming Arcade Anarchy match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwRMbFy4SU8

-----------------------------

MAR 29 2021

AEW DARK miro shows up at the end of orange/chuck’s match. :O https://youtu.be/d2hjXKRuHVY?t=94

-----------------------------

MAR 31 2021

The Arcade Anarchy match! By pinfall or submission only.

1:39:29 Match Intro / Miro + Kip Entrance | (commercial break) | 1:43:34 Orange + Chuck Entrance

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-13-21/2p93m/ BV1yf4y1x7Kq 1:26:40 (?)

supplemental material for the arcade match lol: https://twitter.com/callmekrisstat/status/1377705137792290821

ah damn wtf hold on the tweet’s deleted. here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210914041200/https://twitter.com/callmekrisstat/status/1377705137792290821

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

what happens later?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

APR 07 2021

Best Friends interrupt Death Triangle's in-ring promo and start shit up with them (again):

15:18

https://www.trillertv.com/watch/aew-dynamite-episode-14-21/2p94w/ BV16K411w7Ug 0:16:00 (?)

-----------------------------

APR 14 2021

Kip Sabian is nowhere to be found, which Miro finds pretty annoying! He just wants to talk, cmon. Well, since he can’t find him, he’s moving on to challenging anyone in the company holding gold. https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1382498000484851713

-----------------------------

APR 21 2021

miro promo again: https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1385035045799448585

-----------------------------

APR 26 2021

Kris Statlander started feuding with Penelope Ford, too. Here’s a Road to Dynamite where Chuck, Trent, and Orange support Kris through a promo video package. It’s one of my favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYScNUG1ego

-----------------------------

APR 28 2021

Kip goes to see whats up with Miro :) https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1387583461939101698

-----------------------------

Over the course of 2022 you’ll occasionally see a guy in the crowd with a cardboard box on his head. That’s Kip Sabian, out of kayfabe he was dealing with recovering from a shoulder injury? It lasted a while and when he recovered he came back as a my chemical romance lookin’ dude who may or may not have thought the cardboard box was controlling him? The gimmick didn’t get over so it got dropped pretty fast. He also had a short feud again against Orange Cassidy in 2023 when Orange had the All-Atlantic Championship– he got under Orange’s skin so bad! Anyway thats neither here nor there. Thanks for reading!

[adrianfridge]

Time for my yearly count of Stiles-ship fics on AO3 (As of Mar 18, 2024)

Some limitations to consider:

"OTP TRUE" refers to a search filter on AO3 that only counts fics tagged with that singular ship, meaning it excludes fics tagged with any additional platonic, polyam, and secondary/background ships (I was excited to try the extension "AO3 Primary Ship Search" on Firefox ["AO3 First Tag Search" on Chrome], but while it's far more lenient than "otp: true", it doesn't actually provide the NUMBER of filtered fics so I can't use it for stats T-T)

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all possible Stiles pairings

I’m only counting fics tagged using AO3’s canonical relationship tags

The numbers do include restricted fics, so you would see a smaller number if you’re logged out

Here is where I cry about the lack of tables on Tumblr as I try to give you some raw numbers...

Stats without any filtering

ship / total # fics (change since 2023)

sterek = derek / 73,396 (+2,783)

steter = peter / 11,665 (+955)

stydia = lydia / 4,911 (+87)

sciles = scott / 3,898 (+136)

stackson = jackson / 1,953 (+123)

stalia = malia / 1,467 (+42)

steo = theo / 1,422 (+83)

stisaac = isaac / 1,360 (+45)

stargent = chris / 921 (+31)

stanny = danny / 866 (+20)

stoyd = boyd / 645 (+16)

stallison = allison / 459 (+15)

starrish = parrish / 418 (+19)

sterica = erica / 347 (-4)

steucalion = deucalion / 317 (+14)

stora = cora / 283 (+4)

stiam = liam / 196 (+14)

stira = kira / 85 (+4)

Stats with OTP TRUE filter

ship / net # fics (% out of total)

sterek = derek / 50,040 (68%)

steter = peter / 7,665 (66%)

stydia = lydia / 2,157 (44%)

sciles = scott / 1,809 (46%)

stackson = jackson / 1,012 (52%)

stalia = malia / 313 (21%)

steo = theo / 751 (53%)

stisaac = isaac / 592 (44%)

stargent = chris / 318 (35%)

stanny = danny / 388 (45%)

stoyd = boyd / 383 (59%)

stallison = allison / 201 (44%)

starrish = parrish / 183 (44%)

sterica = erica / 85 (24%)

steucalion = deucalion / 170 (54%)

stora = cora / 89 (31%)

stiam = liam / 39 (20%)

stira = kira / 22 (26%)

Interpretations based on the data:

Compared to the stats I collected in 2023, the order of ships has not changed Stoyd and Stargent are no longer showing significant growth for their tier Steo continues to see a growth that's not typical for its tier and is on track to surpass Stalia Stydia's seeing smaller growth than its tier though it has a safe place in the top 5 While most ships saw at least a slight boost in numbers overall, Sterica lost 4 fics, something I also saw happen in 2021. I have no idea what it is about this ship in particular that causes it to suffer in a way that other ships don't Now that I'm also tracking "otp: true," I can say that, on average, half the fics posted use a singular ship tag. Sterek and Steter are above average for OTP tagging, with Stoyd also being significantly high. Stargent and Stora are below 40%. And then there's Stira, Sterica, Stalia, and Stiam that are all below 30%, with Stiam hitting the lowest at 20%

[bubbloquacious]

Effortpost registry

The general linear group as a Hopf algebra; 31 oct 2024

Zariski topologies; 14 oct 2024

On integer multiplication and endomorphism algebras; 2 sep 2024

Recommendations for learning category theory; 28 mar 2024

The hairy ball theorem and stably free modules; 11 feb 2024

Topological connectedness and generalized paths; 24 nov 2023

Graphs as presheaves 3: subobject classifiers; 19 oct 2023

Effortpost registry; 18 oct 2023

Graphs as presheaves 2: limits and colimits; 11 oct 2023

Hydrogen bomb vs. coughing baby: graphs and the Yoneda embedding; 7 oct 2023

Extending the D ⊣ U ⊣ I adjunction sequence; 23 sep 2023

The Riemann rearrangement theorem and net convergence; 18 sep 2023

Thoughts on the axiom of choice; 18 feb 2023

Topological spaces and simple graphs as neighbourhood spaces; 15 feb 2023

What is a space?; 10 jan 2023

The exponential function applied to sets; 24 dec 2022

On nilpotent eigenvalues; 23 dec 2022

But IS the empty space connected?; 11 nov 2022

Monads monads monads; 8 nov 2022

Calculating what the triangle identities mean for a bunch of adjunctions and being amazed when it works every time; 7 nov 2022

Defining the Lebesgue integral as a net limit; 27 jul 2022

Rambles about describable sets; 28 oct 2021

Functions with cycling derivatives; 30 aug 2021

Why the rationals have zero length; 31 may 2021

An infinite cardinal valued random variable; 30 may 2021

A field-based functor; 20 mar 2021

Generalized sides; 13 mar 2021

Rambles about metric convexity; 22 feb 2021

Wiggle function convergence; 28 jan 2021

Rambles about infinity; 5 sep 2020

Generalized golf; 24 jun 2020

Rambles about continuousifying series; 10 may 2020

Rambles about being closed under exponentiation; 7 may 2020

Rambles about the groups that come with fields; 3 may 2020

A compilation of donutified functions; 17 mar 2020

Rambles about arithmetic functions; 24 jan 2020

Graphing real functions on a torus >:); 29 nov 2019

[siennazhou]

☤ ༄.° 𝓈𝒾𝑒𝓃𝓃𝒶'𝓈 TIMELINE

a trajetória de Sienna Zhou: antes do acampamento, sua a vida como semideusa e os acontecimentos atuais.

༄.°  antes do acampamento

2000: 23 de outubro; sienna nasce, filha de mãe solteira, em Manhattan, NY. 2009: sienna perde a mãe; por um ato impulsivo, sua mãe perde a vida e sienna carrega essa culpa até hoje;  2009 – 2014 (09 - 14 anos): após a morte da mãe, sienna é enviada para um orfanato da cidade de manhattan e frequenta (e é expulsa) algumas das escolas públicas da cidade; aqui ela começa a aprender que suas mãos leves lhe são extremamente úteis e que ela é muito boa em adquirir o que quer; 2014 (14 anos): após tentar (e falhar) roubar dracmas de ouro do bolso de um sátiro rastreador, sienna e outro meio-sangue são levados até o acampamento;

༄.°  no acampamento

2015: foi reclamada por Hermes e se tornou oficialmente uma moradora do Chalé 11;  2015 – 2017 (15 - 17 anos): saída em missões e treinamento no acampamento todos os verões; elevação de nível I para nível II e aperfeiçoamento de seu poder (teletransporte); 2017 – 2019 (guerra contra gaia; 17 - 19 anos): teve participação ativa na preparação para a guerra contra gaia; durante a guerra, combateu inimigos corpo a corpo e auxiliou os irmãos Stoll no posicionamento correto das armadilhas. 2019 – 2023 (período de paz; 19 – 23 anos): elevação de nível II para nível III e total domínio de seu poder, usando-o a seu favor e do acampamento; (2021) sienna se torna instrutora de lança no duelo com armas especializadas e após receber acesso à sua herança, deixa o acampamento para viver em Manhattan, trabalhando como artista plástica e vendendo seus desenhos para marcas (estampas), galerias e afins.

༄.°  eventos atuais

DEZ/23 — O INÍCIO: ao receber o chamado, sienna imediatamente arruma suas coisas e usa seu poder para se teletransportar para o acampamento e descobre que não consegue usar de suas habilidades para deixar o local; DEZ/23 — CELEBRAÇÃO DE NATAL: apesar de sua mãe nunca ter sido religiosa, ela e sienna sempre celebraram os natais juntas e poder fazê-lo no acampamento, junto de sua nova família, trouxe acalento ao seu coração e aliviou, momentaneamente, todas as preocupações e incertezas acerca dos acontecimentos recentes; JAN/24 — O ATAQUE: sienna toma parte do ataque e ajuda os demais semideuses contra o manticore e a quimera; foi ferida e envenenada pela última, o que lhe rendeu alguns poucos dias na enfermaria, onde pôde observar de perto Petrus, ainda em seu estado irresponsivo, enquanto esteve por lá. FEV/24 — A FESTA DOS LÍDERES: sienna, junto dos demais filhos de hermes, ajudou a espalhar a notícia da festa e, portanto, marcou presença na mesma, o que não foi surpresa nenhuma para quíron (ou qualquer outra pessoa). FEV/24 — O SUBMUNDO MANDA UMA SURPRESA: após o incidente com petrus e a abertura da fenda, sienna suspeita do filho de hades, mas não verbaliza nada para ninguém além de seus amigos mais próximos; sua curiosidade sobre a fenda é grande e sempre que possível ela ia até o limite da barreira mágica para poder observar. MAR/24 — UM DEUS INTERROMPE O JANTAR: sienna não foi escolhida para nenhuma missão por zeus, tampouco integrou alguma equipe; limitou-se às suas tarefas e obrigações dentro do acampamento. ABR/24 — SEGREDOS REVELADOS: após as informações serem divulgadas, da mesa de hermes é possível ver sienna dizendo "eu sabia que tinha Algo Esquisito sobre ele", mas apesar de vitoriosa, ela também se compadece pelas memórias roubadas e a forma como ele parece estar intrínsecamente envolvido nos últimos acontecimentos. ABR/24 — ELIMINANDO O MONSTRO: sienna tomou parte da caçada ao cão infernal e, no bosque, ajudou a eliminar os escorpiões que saíram da fenda; JUL/24 — UMA DEUSA NOS CONVIDA A RELAXAR: sienna aproveitou e muito sua estadia na ilha de circe, mas isso não significa que não trabalhou; foi uma das voluntárias na criação, desenvolvimento e posicionamento estratégico de armadilhas na ilha, conforme solicitado pela deusa. AGO/24 — FECHANDO A FENDA: durante o fechamento da fenda, sienna ajudou no combate a Campe e, apesar de ter se ferido, sua curta estadia na enfermaria foi devido ao uso exaustivo de seu poder.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson and Geoff Laughton

Published: Mar 23, 2024

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells the story of a jet fighter pilot who was practicing high-speed maneuvers. As Willard puts it, “She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.”

What if we were flying upside down? But let’s go further. What if an entire generation was flying upside down–flying through fog and danger, unable to see either ground or sky, and the well-intended adjustments pushed on them by “experts” were just bringing them closer to catastrophe?

That’s the lens through which we interpret Abigail Shrier’s New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.

There’s no denying that the youngest generation is in crisis. As the Addiction Center notes, members of Generation Z “run a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups.” A 2015 report found that 23.6 percent of 12th graders use illicit drugs. The American Psychological Association reports that just 45 percent of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51 percent of Gen Xers and 70 percent of Boomers. A concerning 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60 percent take medication to manage their mental health.

It gets worse. The rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300 percent from 2001 to 2019 (before the pandemic). According to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.

Well-meaning therapists, teachers, and school counselors are trying to help the next generation to rise up. But what if everyone involved is upside down? What if, like the fighter pilot that Willard describes, what they think is rising up is actually bringing them into deeper danger? Shrier makes a strong case that that’s exactly what’s happening.

Lots of educators encourage kids to spend more time checking in with their feelings. In the 2021-2022 school year, 76 percent of principals said that their school had adopted a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Common SEL practices include: asking students how they’re feeling at the start of each day, teaching that students should be more aware of how they’re feeling in any given moment, and encouraging students to use activities like writing and art to express their feelings.

The problem is that all of this obsession with feelings can actually make students feel worse. As Yulia Chentsova Dutton, head of the the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, says, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them.” “Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions,” she explains, “can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” Or to put it another way: when we ask kids over and over again how they’re feeling, we’re subtly and accidentally encouraging them to feel bad.

The reason is that, as psychiatry professor Michael Linden explains, most of us don’t feel happy all the time. Dealing with life involves ignoring a certain amount of moment-by-moment discomfort: I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m sore from sitting down all day, I’m a little worried about my mom. When we encourage kids to check in many times per day on how they’re feeling, we’re tacitly encouraging them to bring to the surface–and then dwell on–all the things going on in their minds that are not “happiness.” That’s why, as Linden puts it, “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”

But it gets worse.

Obsessing over our emotions can actually prevent us from doing the things that might make us feel better. Anyone who’s spent too long wallowing after a bad break-up knows this; at a certain point, you have to shelve your unpleasant emotions so that you can get on with your life. Psychologists describe two mental states that we can occupy at any given time: “action orientation” and “state orientation.” “State orientation” is where you focus primarily on yourself (e.g., how you feel about doing the task at hand, whether your wrist hurts or you’re starting to get sick, etc.). “Action orientation” is where you primarily focus on the task at hand. As a study published by Cambridge University Press notes, only the latter is actually conducive to pursuing and accomplishing goals. “State orientation is a personality that has difficulty in taking action toward goal fulfillment,” the authors warn. By encouraging young people to focus so much on their feelings, we might be hurting their ability to adopt the mindset necessary to accomplish goals in life. If so, that would make them even more unhappy. 

But the dangers posed by well-meaning “experts” telling students to fly in the wrong direction–towards the ground instead of towards the sky–go well beyond encouraging unhappiness and depression. Rates of suicide and self-harm for young people are skyrocketing. But in their attempts to cope with the spike, well-meaning administrators might be making the problem worse. Here are questions from the 2021 Florida High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to students age 14 and up:

During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing your usual activities?  During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?  During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?  During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?  If you attempted suicide during the past 12 months, did any attempt result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?

A survey authored by the CDC asked students “During the past year, did you do something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” Another survey offered this question to Delaware middle schoolers: “Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?”

Administrators may be asking these questions with the best of intentions, but the end result is to normalize suicide in young peoples’ minds. If you were 12 years old and taking a survey like this along with all of your classmates, you might reasonably conclude that suicide, or at least suicidal ideation and/or self harm, were pretty common at your school. Otherwise, why would everyone your age have to take such an exhaustive assessment about it?

One reason this is so dangerous is that, as Shrier writes, “The virality of suicide and self-harm among adolescents is extremely well-established.” Following the release of Netflix’s TV show 13 Reasons Why, which some said valorized a fictional girl who killed herself, several studies found a spike in teen suicide rates. The CDC agrees. In a post warning about the dangers of “suicide contagion,” the CDC said that journalists should avoid things like:

“Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.”

“Reporting ‘how-to’ descriptions of suicide.”

“Presenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” (i.e., as a “means of coping with personal problems”).

But this is most of what the surveys described above are doing. They are deluging students with repetitive and excessive discussion of suicide. They are describing different methods for killing yourself (e.g., cutting or burning yourself). One survey, which asks students who have considered killing themselves why they did so (possible answers include “demands of schoolwork,” “problems with peers or friends,” and “being bullied”) is a textbook example of presenting suicide as a “means of coping with personal problems.”

The authors of these surveys seem to at least recognize the risk that students are flying upside down, and that these surveys might take them closer to the ground. One survey concludes by telling students, “If any survey questions or your responses have caused you to feel uncomfortable or concerned and you would like to talk to someone about your feelings, talk to your school’s counselor, to a teacher, or to another adult you trust.” The survey also includes links to different hotlines.

Communicating to kids that suicide is normal and a possible solution to their problems might be the worst way that some schools are failing kids, but it’s also far from the only way.

Schools are increasingly lax about standards, willing to let almost anyone get away with almost anything. Some accommodations do make sense: for example, it makes sense to give a kid with dyslexia more time to complete the verbal component of the SAT. But Shrier argues that standards are falling for perfectly healthy students too. “School counselors—students’ in-school ‘advocates,’” Shrier writes, now “lobby teachers to excuse lateness or absence, forgive missed classwork, allow a student to take walks around the school in the middle of class, ratchet grades upward, reduce or eliminate homework requirements, offer oral exams in place of written ones, and provide preferential seating to students who lack even an official diagnosis.”

Shrier documents stories of students who have been allowed to turn in work late because they were having a “tough Mental Health Day” or because “I was having a rough day and dealing with my gender identity.”

The problem with this is that one of the primary things that children and teenagers do is try to figure out the boundaries of the world. When a child throws a tantrum, it’s not malicious–they’re trying to understand this new world and figure out what they can get away with. As Jordan Peterson writes in Twelve Rules for Life, young children are “like blind people, searching for a wall.” “They have to push forward, and test,” he writes, “to see where the actual boundaries lie.” What’s true of young children is also true of older children and even (to a lesser extent) adults. All of us are trying to figure out the rules of life–that is, what we can get away with. If well-meaning teachers and counselors tell students that one of the rules is that you don’t have to do your homework on time if you say that you’re having a rough day, then we shouldn’t be surprised when more young people seem to manifest rough days.

But this is the opposite of what students need–especially the truly disadvantaged students who so many of these efforts seem to be aimed at helping. In his memoir Troubled, clinical psychologist Rob Henderson writes that, “People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards.” But, he warns, “this is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.”

So kids are depressed, anxious, and poorly behaved. Educators are trying to help them by encouraging them to tap in more to their feelings, by asking them more questions about suicide, and by trying to accommodate their difficulties even more. But all of this is backwards. Educators are encouraging students to do what they think will take them higher–away from the ground and back to the safety of the sky. But both kids and educators are upside down. And every adjustment that the “experts” are telling kids to make just brings them closer to the ground–and a catastrophic collision.

Now’s a good time to emphasize that this isn’t all schools, all teachers, or all administrators–not by a long shot. There are heroic educators working every day to help students to rein in their problems, stop taking advantage of accommodations that they don’t need, and develop the emotional resilience to deal with the problems of adolescence. But the problems documented above do represent a trend. And while it’s not every school, the trend is too big to ignore.

What will happen if this trend continues–if an entire generation keeps going “up” until they crash into the ground? Most severe and most damaging is the harm to the generation itself. Shrier tells the story of Nora, a 16-year-old girl who helps put a human face on all of the brutal statistics described in the introduction to this piece. Nora describes her friends as going through a litany of serious mental health problems: “anxiety,” “depression”; “self-harm” (as Shrier notes, “lots of self-harm”) including “Scratching, cutting, anorexia,” “Trichotillomania” (pulling your hair out by the roots); and more. As Shrier writes, “Dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette’s belong on her list of once-rare disorders that are, among this rising generation, suddenly not so rare at all.”

But the dangers can also ripple out beyond just one generation. The full danger may be nothing less than an imperiling of our democracy.

As Shrier notes, many kids in school are almost constantly monitored. Her own kids have “recess monitors” at their school–“teachers who involve themselves in every disagreement at playtime and warn kids whenever the monkey bars might be slick with rain.” On the bus home, they have “bus monitors.” Better that kids know they’re being observed by an adult at all times than that one kid push another to give him his lunch money.

One of the most pervasive forms of monitoring is what are called “shadows”—ed techs or paraeducators whose job is to cling closely to one particular student so that they don’t have any issues. The original intention certainly made sense. If a child had autism, a shadow could help the kid to integrate into the main classroom rather than being sent to Special Ed. But, as Shrier notes, scope creep has been substantial. “Today,” she writes, “public schools assign shadows to follow kids with problems ranging from mild learning disabilities to violent tendencies.” Nor is the problem restricted to public schools: “private schools advise affluent parents to hire shadows to trail neurotypical kids for almost any reason.” Shadows monitor and guide almost every interaction with their chosen student, from when to raise her hand to how long to hug a fellow student.

As Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College and an expert on child development, puts it, “Kids today are always under the situation of an observer. At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”

But when kids spend their entire waking lives being monitored by an adult, they start to think that kind of monitoring is normal. Worse, they start to think that they need it. If a child gets constant guidance from an adult, what are the odds that she’s going to cultivate her own independence? If she expects authoritarian adults to monitor and run every aspect of her life already, what is she going to think of a liberal democracy that more-or-less leaves people free to handle their own affairs?

No wonder just 27 percent of Americans age 18-25 strongly agree with the statement that “Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government” (compared to 48 percent of Americans as a whole). 

So what’s the solution? If our kids are upside down and getting lower to the ground, then the only thing that makes sense is to help them reverse course. Is there something that’s the opposite of always asking them about their feelings, telling them that life is too much for them or their peers to cope with, and constantly telling them that they’re too fragile to do their homework if they’re having a rough day? Yes. That something is called antifragility.

Antifragility is the idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Greg Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, kids are naturally antifragile. That doesn’t just mean that they’re tough. It means that “they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” Not letting a kid hand in homework late doesn’t just teach them to do their homework on time; it also teaches them that they can deal with a 0 in class and not die. They can pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and even earn an A in the class overall if they bust a sweat for the rest of the semester. Telling a kid who’s having a “tough mental health day” that you’re sorry to hear it but they still need to take today’s test doesn’t just teach the kid that low-level excuses don’t fly; it also teaches them that a hard day isn’t enough to stop them. It teaches them that they’re stronger than whatever negative emotions they’re currently experiencing.

It’s time to remind kids that they are strong–before it’s too late.

All quotes not otherwise attributed come from Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy.

-

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a Contributing Writer to FAIR’s Substack and the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneer Performance Partners and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has more than 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies. He blogs at The Undaunted Man’s Substack.

Geoff Laughton is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the founder of The Undaunted Man. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA’s Perseverance Rover to Begin Long Climb Up Martian Crater Rim

Aug. 14, 2024

After 2½ years exploring Jezero Crater’s floor and river delta, the rover will ascend to an area where it will search for more discoveries that could rewrite Mars’ history.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will soon begin a monthslong ascent up the western rim of Jezero Crater that is likely to include some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. Scheduled to start the week of Aug. 19, the climb will mark the kickoff of the mission’s new science campaign — its fifth since the rover landed in the crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”

Two of the priority regions the science team wants to study at the top of the crater are nicknamed “Pico Turquino” and “Witch Hazel Hill.” Imagery from NASA’s Mars orbiters indicates that Pico Turquino contains ancient fractures that may have been caused by hydrothermal activity in the distant past.

Orbital views of Witch Hazel show layered materials that likely date from a time when Mars had a very different climate than today. Those views have revealed light-toned bedrock similar to what was found at “Bright Angel,” the area where Perseverance recently discovered and sampled the “Cheyava Falls” rock, which exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area contained running water.

It's Sedimentary

During the river delta exploration phase of the mission, the rover collected the only sedimentary rock ever sampled from a planet other than Earth. Sedimentary rocks are important because they form when particles of various sizes are transported by water and deposited into a standing body of water; on Earth, liquid water is one of the most important requirements for life as we know it.

A study published Wednesday, Aug. 14, in AGU Advances chronicles the 10 rock cores gathered from sedimentary rocks in an ancient Martian delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment that formed billions of years ago at the convergence of a river and a crater lake.

The core samples collected at the fan front are the oldest, whereas the rocks cored at the fan top are likely the youngest, produced when flowing water deposited sediment in the western fan.

“Among these rock cores are likely the oldest materials sampled from any known environment that was potentially habitable,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and member of Perseverance’s science team. “When we bring them back to Earth, they can tell us so much about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether some organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have taken place on that planet.”

Onward to the Crater Rim

As scientifically intriguing as the samples have been so far, the mission expects many more discoveries to come.

“Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history,” said Eleni Ravanis, a University of Hawaiì at Mānoa scientist on Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument team and one of the Crater Rim Campaign science leads. “This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”

Reaching the top of the crater won’t be easy. To get there, Perseverance will rely on its auto-navigation capabilities as it follows a route that rover planners designed to minimize hazards while still giving the science team plenty to investigate. Encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees on the journey (rover drivers avoid terrain that would tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees), the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet (300 meters) in elevation by the time it summits the crater’s rim at a location the science team has dubbed “Aurora Park.”

Then, perched hundreds of meters above a crater floor stretching 28 miles (45 kilometers) across, Perseverance can begin the next leg of its adventure.

More Mission Information

A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

TOP IMAGE: This panorama shows the area NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will climb in coming months to crest Jezero Crater’s rim. It is made up of 59 images taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on Aug. 4. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

CENTRE IMAGE: One of the navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this view looking back at the “Bright Angel” area on July 30, the 1,224th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

LOWER IMAGE: This map shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will take (in blue) as it climbs the western rim of Jezero Crater, first reaching “Dox Castle,” then investigating the “Pico Turquino” area before approaching “Witch Hazel Hill.”   Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

[omegamusings-writigs]

[HC] Being Alpha!Koga’s Omega and Inuyasha’s Sibling

Masterlist

Originally posted: Mar 14, 2021 Slightly edited: Dec 22, 2022

mentions of injuries/getting injured

you were the youngest of your father’s children and a full-blooded demon

you are closer to inuyasha than to your oldest brother, mainly because you are closer in age 

koga met you when you were both still young

he was not the leader of the pack back then but merely another alpha in it

so, of course, when he met you, he did a lot of grandstanding

he would brag to you about all the prey he had hunted and the enemies he had slayed and he would also ask his friends to fight him so he could prove to you how strong he was

you pretend to be indifferent about it (being tsundere runs in the family ig)

but you’re obviously as entranced by him as as he is with you 

i mean how could you not?

still, you’re not gonna just make it easy on him

he almost gives up on it too

you went hunting together for the first time and as a sort of last-ditch effort, he goes to fight the largest animal he can find

this does not end well for him as he is impaled by the tusks of a boar the size of a horse

luckily for him, he was hunting with you

as the boar is distracted by the alpha, you manage to kill it

then drag his ass back home and nurse him up

he’s even more into you now

luckily for him, seeing him wounded like that, made you realise how foolish it was to hold out on him like that

so you confess to him

he’s so happy his tail is literally wagging like that of a dog’s lmao

the two of you worked yourself up through the ranks of your pack over the years

you were a nomad when you met him, intending to only stay with the eastern yokai-wolves for a short while but this had changed when you became his omega

many years after you joined the pack, koga comes to the cave you’re currently living in with a screaming human omega hanging over his shoulder

the strangest part about this for you is not that she can apparently sense jewel shards but that she smells heavily of your brother inuyasha

before you get to talk to her, there’s another confrontation with the birds of paradise

enter inuyasha

after saving his omega from the clutches of the evil wolf yokai, he finally realizes that you’re with them

cue yelling match between two immortal siblings who haven’t seen each other in like a century or so

cue your mate trying to defend you to your mutt of a brother

cue you brother tearing your wolf mate a new one

original note: i haven’t finished inuyasha so i’m leaving it like this for now until i’ve seen more of the show and of koga

editing note: still haven't finished inuyasha lol

[jesse-eisenberg-interview]

A list of Jesse Eisenberg's writing

I made a list of Jesse Eisenberg's writing.

2009

NOV 30 Manageable Tongue Twisters.

2010

FEB 24 Marxist-Socialists Jokes

2011

JUL 21 A Post Gender Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar

DEC 07 ACTOR & PLAYWRIGHT JESSE EISENBERG ON THE THRILL OF THE STAGE

2012

JAN 25 Courage Is Just an Act

FEB 15 Jeremy Lin Has Helped Me Through Some Pretty Tough Times

MAR 12 Jesse Eisenberg on His Lifelong Aversion to Youth Culture

MAY 24 Sushi Nozawa

JUN 06 Masgouf

JUL 09 The Whiskey Blue Bar at the W Hotel

AUG 01 TCBY

AUG 20 Robert Frost Elementary School Cafeteria

OCT 02 Organix vs. the San Gennaro Street Festival

NOV 21 Thanksgiving With Vegans

DEC 11 Body Rituals Among the Lauxesortem

2013

FEB 22 Matthew’s House

MAR 17 Marv Albert Is My Therapist

APR 15 The League, Passed Down

APR 17 I Didn’t Win Any Pulitzer Prizes This Year

APR 25 A Marriage Counselor Tries to Heckle at a Knicks Game

JUN 03 Fuddruckers and an Unreliable New Friend

JUN 24 Separation-Anxiety Sleepaway Camp

AUG 06 A Crawfish Boil and Dad’s New Family

SEP 09 A Bully Does His Research

OCT 02 A Post Gender Normative Woman Tries to Pick Up a Man at a Bar

OCT 07 Final Conversations at Pompeii

NOV 01 The Museum of Natural History and Making Compromises

NOV 12 Alexander Graham Bell’s First Five Phone Calls

DEC 12 The Ashram and Mom

2014

JAN 20 If I Was Fluent in . . .

JUN 10 Carmelo Anthony and I Debrief Our Friends After a Pickup Game at the Y.M.C.A.

2015

MAY 25 Men and Dancing

SEP 01 My Nephew Has Some Questions

SEP 09 My Spam Plays Hard to Get

NOV 22 THE GUY WHO HATED NOW YOU SEE ME, A SHORT STORY

NOV 23 An Honest Film Review

2016

JAN 27 What Do You Do When Your Mother Won’t Shut Up at The Ballet?

FEB 04 Act Like You Know

FEB 12 Why I Broke Up with the Little Mermaid

MAY 19 My Cousin Recently Became A Realtor

NOV 04 SELF-DEPRECATING HEROES

DEC 11 LOW TALK IN HIGH PLACES

2017

JAN 23 YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW

JAN 25 My Very Good Friend

FEB 01 发现肉——致中国读者

MAR 04 HAVE YOU DINED WITH US BEFORE?

NOV 14 Mongolia

2018

JAN 15 Sad Stuff on the Street

MAR 20 Thanks, Giving

MAY 14 My N.B.A. Knowledge Comes In Handy

MAY 18 One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism: The Natural Order of the World Depends On It

MAY 31 Jesse Eisenberg on the Relentless Work Ethic of Philip Roth

DEC 05 The Cast Members and Their Crew

2019

JAN 03 MY SISTER PUSHES THE LOBSTER

NOV 21 My Two-Year-Old Requests Just One More Song Before Bed

NOV 23 Jesse Eisenberg: Recommends four contemporary plays

2021

MAR 02 Writer Courtney Zoffness and Jesse Eisenberg on the Radical Compassion of Art

2022

NOV 07 Content Warning

2023

FEB 20 A G.P.S. Route for My Anxiety

[borrelia]

SUDDENLY HAD A FLASH OF A MEMORY FROM 14 YEARS AGO. of a restaurant that had CRAZY theming like you were on mars. but the food sucked so bad. looked it up. it was apparently called mars 2112 and we DEFINITELY went there bc of the name.

here's a eulogy written for it in 2021. for some reason no one makes the connection that our family definitely did between the name and the popular rush song 2112? theyre just like "oh it's a year in the future. when we're on mars." IT'S THE NAME OF A PROG ROCK SONG ABOUT "WHAT IF IT WAS LITERALLY 1985. BUT IN SPACE"