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literaryvein-reblogs · 1 month ago

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Writing Notes: Tactics of Persuasion

Phantom dreams

Story-telling

Tailored pitches

Source credibility and authority

Social consensus and social identity

Scarcity

Information control

Self-generated persuasion

Commitment

The rationalization trap

Phantom Alternative

An option that looks real, is typically superior to other choices, but is unavailable (Pratkanis & Farquhar, 1992).

The key to selling a flimflam (i.e., the selling of pseudoscience, fringe science, and other questionable claims) is to sell the phantom as real and possible and something that can be obtained with the right belief, effort, and, of course, money, but, in reality, it is a false dream.

The sale of a phantom begins by creating ostensible solutions to satisfy our most basic needs and desires.

As such, phantoms often purport to provide things such as:

Health (quack cures, diets, “healing” rituals, mental health pseudoscience, psychic surgery, faith healing).

Wealth (get-rich-quick schemes, lucky lottery numbers, investment fraud).

Social popularity (weight loss regimes, love potions, dating and romance fraud, becoming an “expert” with “secret” knowledge about UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, and the moon landing).

Fear of death and the end of our existence (séances, life-after death claims).

Reduction in the anxiety of life’s uncertainties (advice given by horoscopes, astrology, psychic mediums, and other means, phrenology, psychic detectives, conspiracy theories that “make sense” of the world and the desires and feelings of those who spread them).

It is relatively easy to create a phantom since it does not actually need to solve these needs, but just appear to do so.

Compounding the problem, it’s often difficult to spot the real from the fake course of action without the needed knowledge, expertise, and critical thinking skills.

Although a phantom dream is imaginary, its impact on our behavior is quite real.

Story-Telling: The Invented Ruse

To allay our concerns, the seller of flimflam invents a ruse or story to make the fake look real (Bell & Whaley, 1991; Clark & Mitchell, 2019)

A good narrative:

helps to guide our thoughts (e.g., the cure is natural and traditional),

determines the credibility of information (e.g., as a natural cure, this makes sense), and

ultimately directs evaluation and choice (e.g., it works for Native Americans and Quakers, why not me?).

As such, stories cement information in our mind and tend to persist even in the face of strong, discrediting information (Anderson et al., 1980; see Pratkanis (2007) for the use of stories in influence).

Tailored Pitches

Fake healers can use the technique of pre-show to gather needed information.

For example: Before the healing event, attendees can fill out prayer cards with their healing requests and other information.

During the service, the fake healer can call out names and appear, by purported divine intervention, to know the person’s illness and personal life story.

Typically, the fake healer will “cure” shills (plants who fake illnesses) and those with painful health problems for which the pain can be overlooked in the excitement of the moment. The prayer cards (along with Googling and social media) provide the needed information.

Source Credibility and Authority

Two of the most robust research findings in social psychology are as follows: (a) we tend to listen to those who are credible (expert and trustworthy) sources (Hovland et al., 1953); (b) we tend to obey authorities (Milgram, 1974).

The merchant of flimflam leverages these 2 basic human tendencies by creating a persona as a credible authority and then using that persona to hawk a phantom.

Social Consensus and Social Identity

Flimflam merchants will use our social relationships to sell their phantoms by employing the influence tactics of social consensus and social identity.

When we see other people doing something, we are more likely to do the same through the conformity created by social consensus – if everyone is doing it, it must be the right thing to do.

Social consensus engages 2 psychological processes that promote conformity (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955):

information or social proof (“if other people are doing it, it must be correct”; Cialdini, 1984) and

normative influences or social pressure to agree or go along with the group (“I don’t want to be different from the group”; Asch, 1951).

The seller of flimflam will manufacture a false consensus (or take advantage of an apparent one). Quack remedies, astrological readings, unproven Covid treatments, get-rich schemes often feature testimonials of people who speak to the “value” of the product.

Once we become engaged with a flimflam, it can provide us with a desired social identity or a sense of who we are based on our reference group memberships, whether they be real or aspirational (Abrams et al., 1990; Kelley & Volkart, 1952; Tajfel, 1981).

Scarcity

Another social influence tactic to make a flimflam look desirable is to make it look scarce (Cialdini, 1984).

Given that phantoms are generally rare, this is rather easily accomplished.

As an effective social influence tactic, scarcity:

plays on a rule in our head, “if it is rare, it must be valuable”;

creates a sense of urgency and panic that we need to act now and feeling of frustration (reactance) when we do not obtain the phantom; and

inflates our feelings of uniqueness and self-worth when we obtain something that is rare (Pratkanis, 2007).

Information Control: False Accusations, Projection, and Doubt Campaigns

The sellers of flimflam often encounter scientists, journalists, magicians, lawyers, informed citizens, and other “do-gooders and crusaders” who use evidence and reason to point out false claims made in selling the phantom.

If left to stand, these criticisms can cut into sales and deflate the entire scheme. As such, the flimflam merchant needs to control the information environment and can do so using at least 3 techniques:

First, the peddler of a flimflam can falsely accuse the critics. Such attacks can be effective because it can result in a negative impression of the target of attack, undermining their reputation (Wegner et al., 1981). In addition, such allegations set up a chilling, coercive effect as others may become fearful of speaking out.

A second information control tool for the flimflam merchant is a variant of the false accusation known as the projection tactic – accusing others of the misdeed you are doing (Rucker & Pratkanis, 2001). In research, we find that a projection attack: (a) focused attention on the accused and away from the person making the accusation, (b) increased the blame placed on the target of projection, and (c) decreased the culpability of the accuser, making the accuser look good and moral for raising such issues. The effects of projection persisted despite attempts to raise suspicions about the motives of the accuser and providing evidence that the accuser was indeed guilty of the deeds.

A third approach to controlling the information environment is through a doubt campaign (Michaels, 2008; Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The purpose of a doubt campaign is not to convince someone of something (say, the value of the flimflam) but instead to raise doubts and confusion about the facts with the goals of (a) making it difficult to know the truth, (b) creating the impression that there is a controversy (when there is little or none), and (c) forestalling any action until the “controversy” is resolved. The doubt campaign was pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s by tobacco companies seeking to dissuade consumers that their products were harmful, but now is used to create doubt and confusion on such issues as climate change, the efficacy of vaccines such as those preventing childhood illnesses and COVID-19, the value of masks for limiting the spread of COVID-19, and evidence against various conspiracy theories.

Self-Generated Persuasion

One of the most effective means of influence is to have the target generate arguments in support of a position and thereby persuade her- or himself (Boninger et al., 1990; Lewin, 1947).

Self-generated persuasion is effective because in essence it asks the target to think up good reasons for a proposition and to refute any counter argument.

This self-generated message comes from a source that is considered credible, trustworthy, respected, and liked – ourselves.

Commitment

In order to establish continued advocacy and use of a flimflam, the seller needs to secure a commitment, especially a public one, from the target.

With a public commitment, a person is linked to a behavior or course of action – in this case, advocating for and using a flimflam.

Breaking this binding produces a negative tension of not living up to one’s promises and a concern that one will look inconsistent and untrustworthy (e.g., a need to save face). As such, securing a commitment increases the likelihood that the target will comply and perform that behavior (Brockner & Rubin, 1985; Salancik, 1977; Staw, 1976).

Commitments are strongest when the behavior is public/visible, irreversible, and perceived to be freely chosen.

One method for securing a commitment is through the use of the foot-in-the-door tactic (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).

Flimflam is rampant on social media, and we can easily see why.

Social media, with its emphasis on engagement (liking, reposting, posting, commenting, posing, arguing) provides many opportunities to make public, irreversible, and freely chosen commitments (as well as to allow those commitments to be used to create the appearance of social consensus as to the value of the flimflam).

While making a commitment increases compliance, it also results in perhaps the most important ingredient in selling a flimflam: setting a rationalization trap.

The Rationalization Trap

Once a person is sold on a flimflam, and especially when he or she comes to purchase and publically advocate for the phantom option, it changes the way a person processes information.

No longer is the goal “to find things out” but instead to defend and justify the beliefs and actions in what can be called a rationalization trap (Festinger, 1957; Pratkanis & Shadel, 2005; Tavris & Aronson, 2007).

When a person holds 2 discrepant thoughts, what social psychologists call cognitive dissonance, it results in an aversive tension state with painful implications for the self.

In such a state, we are highly motivated to reduce the dissonance.

Of course, one way to reduce the dissonance is to admit a mistake – I was wrong about the cure – and to take responsibility for one’s actions by alerting others and rejecting or, at least scrutinizing more carefully, the source of the disinformation about the quack COVID-19 treatment.

While a mature response and what science requires (Feynman, 1985), it is often difficult to take this route to dissonance reduction, especially when we have made public commitments, self-generated arguments, and linked our social identities to the flimflam, in this case, the quack cure.

Admitting a mistake often is taken to mean – to ourselves and to others – that we are not a good and capable person.

After all, we were unable to see through the deception and then told others to do something that might damage their health.

Unfortunately, an all-too-often course of action is to dig in our heels further and to rationalize and justify our behavior.

Some common ways to do this include:

deny the evidence (“the data showing the ineffectiveness of the cure is made-up”),

take some irrelevant aspect of the disagreeable research and pretend that it is damning (“the study was only done in New York”),

derogate the source (“that’s from the biased media and the doctors’ union”),

derogate others who expose the quackery (“nurses and doctors don’t care about people”),

perform a selective information search (search out and spread any study or claim no matter how unreliable that supports one’s position),

keep repeating discredit research as if it is true, bolster one’s own self and one’s intuition as a way of knowing (“I can see through the media; I did my research unlike those duped by big pharma”),

derogate other forms of knowing, particularly science and reason (“science is a limited way of knowing unlike my intuition”),

use whataboutism (“what about the time Fauci might have said something wrong”),

seek external justification (“a cure that might work is better than having to wear a mask”), and, perhaps worst of all,

self-censorship of putting ourselves in an information bubble where we only hear agreeable information and anything disagreeable is either not heard or ridiculed.

Obviously, a rationalization trap is a very effective means of selling a flimflam.

Once we are in the trap, we will continue to buy the flimflam and advocate for the phantom option in an attempt to justify ourselves in the face of failing evidence.

A key component of being an active truth-finder is to have a plan for evaluating and making decisions about claims.

When we do make a mistake, the honorable thing to do is to admit the error and take responsibility for our actions.

Source ⚜ Reading Scientific Articles ⚜ False Claims ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

#persuasion #psychology #writeblr #writing reference #literature #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #dark academia #writing prompt #creative writing #science #communication #writing inspiration #writing resources

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transmascpetewentz · 1 month ago

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Genuine, good faith question, I'm just clueless and looking for input

I see a lot of pro Palestine/anti genocide people saying that Zionism is inherently bad and bigoted and supportive of the genocide. Meanwhile, other people (like you) say that that's not true and that, while terrible people who are Zionists do exist, that Zionism is not inherently bad like some people claim.

Now I'm just very confused and don't know what to think. I don't want to risk being antisemitic, but I also don't want to risk supporting genocide. :( Can you perhaps help explain this to me, if it's not too much trouble? I keep hearing conflicting information and I don't know what to do anymore

there are a couple of things happening here:

israel's war crimes have attracted disproportionate international attention compared to other countries doing the same or worse currently because israel is the only jewish state. while it's important to point out all countries' war crimes, the fact that the focus is solely on israel is because of antisemitism. this is a systemic issue and is basically impossible to point out on an individual level.

there are multiple types of zionism. political zionism, labor zionism, revisionist zionism, evangelical christian zionism, etc. these all have different definitions of zionism and different reasons for holding the positions they hold. labor zionism, which is the type of zionism i follow, holds that jews should have the power of self determination in eretz yisrael (think landback in america but for jews) and that they should use that power to seize the means of production. most labor zionists support palestine's right to self determination as well.

the non-jewish non-palestinian american hamasnik crowd has 2 different definitions of zionism. on paper, they'll conflate zionism as a whole with revisionist zionism or kahanism. kahanism/revisionist zionism is a deeply racist extreme right wing ideology that conflates jewish connection to the levant with social conservatism at the expense of primarily arabs, but also women, gay people, trans people, and every other type of minority that exists within every ethnicity. hamasniks will say that this is their definiton of zionism and that anyone they call a zionist follows this specific ideology.

however, when they are finding criteria to call someone a zionist, this is not the definition that they use. hamasniks will use very loose, liberal criteria to put someone in the zionist box. mostly, however, they will call any jew (zionist or not) a zionist and any non-jewish zionist a zionist sympathizer. in this context, "zionist" = jew and "zionist sympathizer" = ally to jews.

so essentially, hamasniks will call someone a zionist based on very loose evidence, but because their on-paper definition of zionism is kahanism, they will claim that someone they called a zionist due to, say, having an israeli cousin, is actually a kahanist.

that's essentially the deception. so you can be a zionist without supporting genocide (but i'm not sure what the current consensus in on non jews (i assume) calling themselves zionists, so i would stay away from it). i'm of the opinion that anti zionism isn't inherently antisemitic, but acting like zionism is some otherworldly monster ideology is.

#asks #i/p #antisemitism #jumblr #long post #sorry about the yapping but this is important

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mesetacadre · 6 months ago

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any thoughts on left unity? saw the term in the bio of some Solarpunk blog

The most pressing matter to determine in regards to left unity is, in my opinion, what is "left", more than determining what "unity" is. Also, of course you'd see that in a solarpunk blog, they're all about labels that look good and progressive.

Are we talking about just marxists? Include the anarchists? councilists? eurocommunists? social-democrats? DSA types? anyone to the left of free market conservatism? I am aware in most cases, when people call for left unity, they generally mean communists of all stripes, anarchists, and maybe the left-most currents of social-democracy. But this illustrates the first issue with the term, and that's that leftism is not a coherent category and that it's based on vibes and a general undefined notion of "progress".

The left-right axis in politics comes from the first bourgeois democracies, in which there was a "left", free-market, or "progressive" party, and a "right", protectionist, "conservative" party. They represented the two main fractions within the newly in power capitalist classes. When other parties started to emerge, such as the first social-democratic parties (SPD, PSOE...), they kept with the left-right axis and positioned themselves to the left of the main "left" party, they claimed to represent the common man, that sort of thing.

Fast forwarding through a lot of history, these labels and the vast set of beliefs they categorize have stuck to today. But they are still labels based on the "centrist" consensus of the bourgeois parties. So it is both inappropriate and very hazy. To find the rest of the limitations of this "left" category, let's look now at the "unity" part of this slogan.

Which kind of unity and under which pretenses are these leftunitarians calling for, exactly? Are they talking about a united front kind of strategy? That has historically been proven to be ineffective and harmful. Any appeals to a common goal are nonsensical, an examination of the objectives of the currents these people pretend to "unite", reveals fundamental differences not only in end goals, but in the conception of specific tactics and ways to work.

In my offline experience organizing in a "united" way with "leftists", there has been, some times, an unsalvageable conflict in matters of tactics. For example, my marxist-leninist party prioritizes the security of its members, and if a given action is considered too dangerous in relation to the context, it is not done. However, anarchist and trotskyist groups place security on the back burner, displaying an admirable but very dangerous boldness when it comes to placing themselves and others in harm's way, for the sake of achieving the flashiest thing that will look good on twitter. How, exactly, is unity achieved in these situations? We would gladly collaborate if the others agreed to place more importance on security, but I'm sure the others have the same perspective on us placing more importance on their concerns. Experience also shows our approach is reliable in moments of high tension and danger, and theirs isn't, this is not a matter of opinion.

And this is the other and largest issue with the "left" category. There is close to no common characteristics besides opposition to the current system and a hazy agreement that people should be treated better, only the latter condition separates this category from fascism. Opposition to a common enemy does not make a sufficient condition for any kind of substantial cooperation. Actual, practical efforts are materialized through an understanding of what you want the alternative to be, not through an opposition to what's already there. This last sentence in itself is a matter of contention within the "left".

Left unity is a superficial slogan, so superficial that some can find it just as easy to cooperate with fascists, or to side with imperialists and genocidal settler colonies.

This is not to say cooperation in general is impossible. Like I said in the example from my experience, those differences only become unsalvageable in some cases. Especially in countries where the "left" category is characterized by fragmentation, collaboration with other currents is inevitable and necessary. What's at issue here is the elevation of this occasional cooperation to a defining principle of one's activity. Left unity is superficial and dysfunctional, cooperation within the "left" in some contexts is necessary.

#ask #anon #seriousposting #especially proud of how this one turned out #good question!

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imagine-darksiders · 11 months ago

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Thank you to the marvellous @humboltsquid for commissioning a fanfic with pregnant Reader attempting to hide said pregnancy from the Horsemen because she fears they'll buy into the social rhetoric surrounding single mothers who don't know who the father is.

TW: Vomiting, morning sickness, drinking, Pregnancy, briefest allusion to sa, no actual sa took place, everything was consensual, both parties were drunk, Reader remembers most of the night except the guy's face and name. Horsemen are predictably angry about someone touching their little sister.

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Porcelain, cold and consolidated, bites into the sensitive skin of your palms as you grip the edge of the bathroom sink, your arms locked like overheated pistons just to keep yourself standing upright in defiance of how your legs seem determined to collapse out from underneath your weight.

To your right, the loo gurgles noisily, flushing away any traces of the meal you’d spewed up into it only moments ago. At least the sound helps to drown out a voice thundering at you from the other side of the door.

“Let us in!”

Fumbling with the tap for a moment, you bend down, spooning a palmful of fresh, cooling water into your mouth. As you do so, you spare a baleful glance down at the loo again, and the food lost to its pipes… Perfectly good rations… all gone to waste.

Five years on from the Great Resurrection and Earth’s agricultural efforts are finally on a steady incline. While the food situation isn’t anywhere near as desperate as it was when Humanity woke up to a world without excess, that doesn’t mean you’re particularly pleased to see precious rations wasted because you couldn’t hold them down.

And now that you’re supposed to be eating for two…

Groaning, your expression twists into a look of remorse, and you place one hand gently on your stomach, roaming a palm over the bump that lays hidden beneath the baggiest jumper you could find. You’re only too aware that it won’t be so easy to hide the swell in another couple of months.

You barely manage to bite back another miserable groan as a colossal fist hammers against the door so viciously, you almost wonder if the wood will splinter and break, which starts to seem more likely when seconds later, a familiar voice booms out, “If you don’t open this door, I’m tearing it from its frame!”

Ah… That’ll be War; youngest of the Four Horsemen, an armoured, muscle-bound colossus who also just so happens to be one of your very dearest friends.

A friend who has been growing rightfully suspicious of you over these last couple of months…

There are only so many excuses you can fall back on to explain away your frequent and unexpected dashes for the nearest bathroom. You can only thank the Creator that neither of the Four seem all that well-versed on the more delicate biological functions of humans.

Swiping a wrist over the back of your mouth, you lean away from the sink and assess yourself in the mirror, doing your best to ignore the taste of vomit still sitting like a layer of fuzz on the roof of your mouth.

‘How long are you going to keep this up?’ you pose to your reflection, her sleep-stained eyes bearing back into yours as if she too has had the same question.

It’s been like this for a few weeks now, ever since the dreaded Morning Sickness wrapped its hands around your guts and wrung them with a relentlessness that leaves you scrambling for the closest bathroom at least twice a day.

It wasn’t this bad in the first trimester… Now entering your second, things are getting a Hell of a lot harder to manage. To hide.

Slowly letting your eyes slip shut, you exhale through your nostrils in exasperation as a different voice accompanies the first. “Kid? I uh… I think he means it. We just wanna make sure you haven’t drowned in there.”

Strife… The humour he tries to inject into his quip is overshadowed by his hand rattling at the doorknob. He’s worried. They all are. You wouldn’t have thought it possible, if you didn’t know them personally, though each Horseman will swear up and down they don’t ever feel such trivial, human emotions.

Actions, however, speak louder than words.

Their sister, Fury, has hardly left your side ever since Mrs Gaffe tutted at you from across the hallway and you immediately retreated into your apartment, leant back against the door and wept into your hands. She didn’t know… She didn’t know Mrs Gaffe who lives on your floor is also a chemist, and she’s also the very woman who sold you your pregnancy test… and the subsequent tests you went back for when the first came up positive. You’d spent over an hour convincing Fury that, no, she doesn’t need to defend your honour by besting old Mrs Gaffe in combat. Though you let her know you appreciated the gesture.

You try to think the best of your neighbours. And you certainly didn’t like to think of Mrs Gaffe being a gossip, but judging by the curious and frequently disdainful glances other people in the building sent your way, you soon came to realise your secret was not such a secret after all.

You’re pregnant. And the father is nowhere to be found.

You only hope word doesn’t get back to the Horsemen somehow. You don’t think you could bear it if their gazes turned sharp and pointed as well.

Outside the bathroom door, you hear War grunt at Strife to move aside, and at last, you decide you’ve stalled enough.

Shoving yourself off the sink, you spin around on a hell, regretting the action as a wave of dizziness threatens to knock you back down to Earth, but it’s soon dispelled with a deep breath and a second to gather yourself, calling, “Okay, okay, I’m coming out.”

Someone – Strife, you think – grumbles, “Finally.”

Grabbing the handle, you pull the door towards yourself and tilt your head back, blinking up at the two, immense shapes blocking the entire width of your hallway. If it weren’t for the space between your bedroom and bathroom being meagre at best, you imagine you’d have the remaining two behemoths cramped in there as well.

“When did you guys get to be so clingy.”

War’s ice-blue eyes glare down at you from beneath a crimson hood.

You start to edge past them, feeling like a fish trying to squeeze between a pair of grizzlies. Just as you make it past and put your back to them entirely, you hear Strife announce, “All right. That’s it.”

“What’s it?” you ask hesitantly as he advances on you, his heavy, metal boots thudding on the carpet. Before you can react, the Horseman suddenly slings a bulky arm around your waist and hoists you off your feet, tucking you into his side. You’re forced to fold almost in half, bent over Strife’s uncomfortable gauntlet with most of the pressure bearing down on your stomach.

“STRIFE!” you exclaim, horrified.

“I’m not lettin’ you go until you tell us what’s been goin’ on with you,” he huffs, clomping into the living room with War bringing up the rear. By the window, Death twists his bone-mask towards the commotion, his shoulders flattening, unimpressed. “Brother…” he warns.

Fury too, tosses Strife her own disparaging glare from the sofa and barks, “Is it truly necessary to manhandle the human?”

You, however, hardly pay attention to a word they exchange. Your mind is utterly and wholly on the point of your stomach that’s digging into the Horseman’s gauntlet. You can cope with the discomfort, but it isn’t just you anymore.

There’s no thought to the cry you let out, just a plea borne of a desire to protect the little life growing inside you, by any means necessary. “Strife!” you exclaim, smacking your palms against his armoured thigh in a bid to relieve some of the pressure around your gut. “Put me down! The baby-!”

No sooner has the word left your lips than you find the arm restraining you springing open, letting you tumble to the floor. A jolt shoots through you as your hands and knees strike the carpet, but all you can celebrate in that moment is that the strength of a Horseman is no longer curled around your vulnerable stomach.

You don’t look up at the Horsemen until you’ve pushed yourself back to your feet, patting down your jumper. When you do happen to glance up, your face immediately falls.

Death has shifted from his position by the window and now stands several, jarring feet closer, he and Fury both, in fact. The latter has somehow leapt from her seat on the sofa in the time it took you to gather yourself up off the floor.

But more disconcertingly, they’re still. Utterly motionless as if they’ve been caught in a pocket of frozen time.

Gulping, you tentatively twist your head over a shoulder, only to find War and Strife are in much the same state.

Strife has backed up to stand next to his brother, his liquid-gold eyes round beneath his visor, neither one of them twitching so much as a single muscle. It’s… eerie. You don’t think you’ve ever seen them so still before. Death, maybe, but not the other three.

It only occurs to you then that you might have let something slip.

Then, at last, just as you wet your lips to call out to one of them…

“What did you say?” Fury breathes, cutting neatly through the heavy blanket of silence draped over the room.

Blinking owlishly, you turn back to face her, your mind scrambling for an adequate response.

“What… what do you mean, ‘what did I say?’”

Feigning ignorance it is.

You actually leap several inches off the ground when the Horseman suddenly explodes back into motion, storming forwards in your direction and exclaiming, “What baby?!”

“B-baby?” you double down, backing away from her until your spine collides with a solid torso – War. “Who said anything about a baby?”

“You just did!”

“Did I?”

“Y/n…” Death utters in a slow and cautious tone as though he’s afraid you’ll bolt at the slightest provocation - Hell, given the furtive glances you keep swinging around his side at the door to your apartment, he might be in the ballpark. His voice alone carries enough authority to silence his sister, and more than enough to make you clamp your jaws shut painfully tight. “You’re with child?”

It’s strange, but despite the inflection on his last word, you get the impression he isn’t asking you if you’re pregnant, but merely whether you’re ready to admit to the fact.

The hopelessness of it all dawns on you when you meet his enduring, gilded stare.

He knows.

And if Death knows, there’s little point in continuing your efforts of duping the other three. In spite of outward appearances and their frequent, often frightening disagreements, the Four Horsemen have a bond stronger than tungsten. So, with a head that suddenly feels weighed down by months of secrecy and deflection, you lower your gaze to the floor near his boots and give a slow, sombre nod.

It’s as though your little confirmation is all that they needed to lift the veil on any and all doubts.

The shadows they cast on your carpet suddenly start to tremble as an overhead light flickers, strobing on and off until it sputters weakly back to life and holds steady, albeit dimmer than it had been before.

The Horsemen seem to grow in size, muscled shoulders bulge like raised hackles and four sets of eyes flare with an ethereal light as they shift their weight, bearing down on you like toppling monoliths.

“I’m gonna kill ‘em,” Strife mutters venomously under his breath, “I’m gonna kill whatever bastard laid a finger on-”

“-W h o t o u c h e d y o u?” the eldest Horseman’s growl cuts him off. It’s guttural and animalistic, so much so that you can’t withhold a flinch. You could count on one hand the number of times Death has outwardly lost his temper, which makes it all the more alarming to witness.

Stumbling over your words for a beat, you keep your eyes fixed to the floor as the Old One stalks across the meagre living space towards you, his ominous shadow growing along the carpet to swallow you whole. When it seems he’s right on top of you, you finally blurt out, “N-Nobody!”

In hindsight, that wasn’t the most logical answer.

Fury – her vibrant hair whipping behind her like angry, coiling snakes - scoffs, tucking her arms firmly across her chest. “Nobody?” she parrots, “I’m no expert, but don’t these things usually involve two parties?”

“Great! Now she’s lying to us,” Strife barks, pacing back and forth behind you and throwing a hand up to rake the fingers of his metal gauntlet through his stiff, black hair, “I don’t believe this, we go off world for two weeks-!”

“Were you hurt?” War’s voice, though less jagged than Death’s, is pitched low enough to rumble through you until it resounds inside your chest. You can feel his presence behind you, too close for comfort, the living embodiment of rage and violence.

You suddenly fear for the man whose face and name you can’t recall.

“I… no,” you protest, hugging your elbows close, “It wasn’t anything like… like that. It was an accident! We were out drinking, and I-“

“DRINKING!?”

Your mouth snaps shut as Death lurches towards you, and you’re finally forced to tear your eyes off the carpet when his sinewy fingers slide around your biceps and he hauls you a foot off the ground, holding you up to his mask and subjecting you a shout that’s rife with unparalleled urgency. “You know what that does to a human’s inhibitions!” he demands.

His hands are gentle, neither hurting nor bruising the delicate skin on your bare arms, but the power behind even his gentlest grasp is frustratingly insurmountable.

You’ve never liked how easily he can manhandle you. “Yes, Death! I know what alcohol does!” you snap back, kicking your legs and trying to twist out of his grip, “I’m not a kid anymore, stop treating me like one! And put me down!”

You’re aware that your point is all a matter of perspective. For the Horsemen, there’ll always be some small part of them that continues to see you as a youngling. You’re human, after all. A hundred years wouldn’t even see a Nephilim out of adolescence. Not to mention that the Horsemen have all but declared you as one of them… One of theirs - an unconventional, human sibling they’ve taken into their fold.

It's not so easy for them to simply stop seeing you as their little sister, no matter how much you might wish they would sometimes.

As your retort fades into silence, Death blinks, recoiling his head slightly with wider eyes, and it will only occur to you later just how rare it is to make Death falter.

The other three, although their bodies still quiver with barely contained adrenaline, have fallen quiet whilst you stare down their eldest until at last, he lowers you gingerly to the floor, setting you safely on the carpet once again and retrieving his hands.

You’d never dare to say it aloud, but in that moment, something like shame flashes over the dark sockets of his mask.

“Why didn’t you tell us, kid?” Strife asks, the crux of his question tinged by badly concealed hurt.

“This, Strife,” you sigh, throwing your arms out towards he and his siblings, exasperated. Fury with her face set into a thunderous scowl. War’s metal gauntlets curled into bludgeoning fists. Even Strife is idly tracing a finger on the stock of Redemption in its holster, and Death – especially Death – whose ancient magics are still causing the lamps in your room to fade in and out…

Heaving another, immense sigh, you continue, “This is why I didn’t tell you.” Well. It’s one of the reasons, but at this point, it’s a fairly vital one. “I mean, look at you!”

Each Horseman shares a glance with one another.

“You’re all raring to go on a manhunt to find a guy who didn’t even do anything wrong!”

“Didn’t do anything wrong?” War grunts, teeth still bared despite following the lead of Death and reeling in his temper, if only slightly, “He mated with you-“

“Oh, hell, War, don’t say it like that,” Strife complains, grimacing under his visor.

“-and now you carry his child, and he has abandoned you both?”

Biting at the soft flesh inside your cheek, you withhold a frustrated groan and remind yourself that War’s sense of Honour is vastly inflated. The ‘father’ of your child’s ignorance won’t excuse his absence, not in War’s eyes.

Even so, you try to dissuade any ideas of retribution before they can gain traction.

“He didn’t abandon us, War. He probably doesn’t even remember I exist! Goodness knows I can hardly remember that night…” You trail off, lowering your gaze to the floor.

Death’s eyes are suddenly the hardest to meet. You recall your first introduction to Lilith; the self-proclaimed mother of all Nephilim, and subsequently the Horsemen themselves. You know of the demoness’s… reputation. You also know firsthand how much the Eldest Horseman despises her. You’re terrified Death will see something of Lilith in you, that you’d be so liberal with your own body as to end up with a child.

The inside of your eyelids start to burn. “And now everyone is gonna think I’m just some skank who went and got knocked-up by a stranger and… and-… They’re always gonna look at my kid and wonder who the father is. I don’t even know who the father is.”

There are tears prickling at your eyelashes, but you force your hands into fists at your sides, refusing to wipe them away lest your draw attention to them. The Horsemen see anyway.

Light blooms back to its full power across your apartment, your lamps stop trembling, and a pale finger crooks beneath your chin, tilting your head back until you’re peering up at a stoic mask of bone.

Death’s ebony hair falls in curtains around his face as he bends a little to speak to you in a hushed yet urgent tone. “He didn’t…” Hesitating, he draws in an unnecessary breath to fill dead lungs and alters his trajectory. “You were not forced…?”

You wish you didn’t know why that question is so important to Death, why the concept of consent means more to him than it might the others.

“No,” you reiterate miserably, “That’s one thing I do remember. I wanted, uh… it, at the time, a-and so did he. He didn’t know this would happen any more than I did.” You pause to lay a hand over your stomach, furrowing your brow as you give it a pensive stare and missing the way Death’s shoulders slump with relief. After a second or two, you hesitantly raise your chin to look him in the eye again, hoping that what little determination you can inject into your voice will hold strong. “… Look, I’m not proud of it, but it happened. I can’t change things… and… I’m keeping them. I’m sorry, but I’m keeping this baby.”

You hold your breath, expecting arguments, expecting a rebuttal or perhaps even a scoff or two.

“Why would you be sorry for that?” Strife pipes up instead.

It throws you off kilter. Pulling away from Death, you swivel around to frown uncertainly at War and his brother, fiddling with the hem of your jumper’s sleeve. “Well… I mean… I-I’m having the baby…“

When you don’t say anything further, War raises a hand and pulls down his hood, exposing the full extent of his wispy, white hair. “Yes?” he prompts, the unspoken ‘and?’ ringing clear as a bell.

“I’m having the… baby of a… of a man I don’t… know?” you finish slowly, glancing at each of them in turn.

“Big deal!” Strife announces so abruptly, you have to do a double-take, “You don’t need him to help you raise a little human! You’ve got us!”

Nodding her head, Fury adds, “Far be it from me to agree with Strife, but… in this case, he may be right.”

War grunts his own agreement, and when you throw an incredulous look at Death, you’re floored to see him dipping his head in concurrence as well.

“You’re…” Darting your tongue out to wet your dry lips, you squint at the eldest Horseman, asking, “You’re not angry?”

He’s quiet for some time, contemplative even as his gaze roves lower until it comes to a stop on your torso. Then, gently, he replies, “The only qualm I have is that you’ve been trying to bear this weight on your own two shoulders. And while I wish you had told us sooner, at least now we know how to help you.”

“Help me?” you utter, voice cracking.

Death’s eyes dance with a sudden fondness. “Well,” he replies, “As I’m sure Strife has told you repeatedly-“

“- you’re one of us,” said brother butts in, expertly finishing Death’s sentence and stepping up beside you to lay a heavy palm on your shoulder, “We take care of our own. Same goes for your kid.”

You’re too late to stop a choked noise from escaping the base of your throat, but before you can say anything, War steps forwards, towering over you as he pounds a solid, metal fist against his chest, directly over his heart in a show of allegiance.

“You and yours will always have the protection of the Four,” he proclaims.

“You… you don’t have to, you know,” you sniff, swiping a few fingers beneath your eyes, “I signed up for this baby, you guys didn’t. It’s okay if you don’t want to get involved because -“

“-Oh, don’t talk such nonsense,” Fury gruffly interjects, “You’re sorely mistaken if you think either one of us will be leaving your side for the foreseeable future.”

“Fury,” you laugh wetly, aiming a wobbly smile at her, “You mean that?”

The surly Horseman’s lip curls but she merely shrugs and retorts, “I may not care much for children, but someone will have to stick around to teach our youngling how to fight.”

Our youngling…

Your heart squeezes appreciatively, even if she might not have noticed the slip.

“That’s just her way of sayin’ she cares about children if it’s yours,” Strife’s voice murmurs in your ear, and with a gentle nudge at the small of your back, he pushes you towards the sofa his sister has vacated. If Fury hears him, she doesn’t dispute his words.

As you’re herded to sit down, War, ever the more practical of his siblings, is busy casting a rather dissatisfied look around your apartment, making a quick mental note to ramp up fortifications. He’ll have to schedule watches between himself and his siblings too…

“I can’t believe it,” you mutter, half to yourself, half to the Horsemen, sinking down among the cushions of your sofa and shaking your head, “I’ve been so worried about telling you guys I’m pregnant, and you’re just… okay with it.”

“As if we’d be anything else,” Death sighs, roving a quick look over you from head to toe. Squinting slightly, he adds, “Hmm… I’m not, however, okay that you can’t seem to keep food down lately. I take it that’s why you’ve been disappearing so suddenly of late?”

Giving him a sheepish nod, you shuffle to one side, allowing Strife to flop heavily onto the sofa next to you, his enormous thigh squashing you up against the arm rest. “I’ll go for more rations in a bit,” he announces, eager to provide.

“I can go,” you say, “They are for me, after all.”

Burly shoulders bristle in a display of faux authority as Strife instantly argues, “Nuh uh. You’re stayin’ right here where it’s safe.” He grumbles a nonsensical sound, then begrudgingly admits, “Hate you leavin’ at the best of times…”

Despite the niggle of exasperation that begs you to remind them you’re not helpless, just pregnant, you offer him a warm grin and bump your shoulder against his side, saying, “You’re going to make a great uncle, Strife.”

To say the Horseman’s mask almost flies off as he whips his torso around to face you would be an understatement.

You have to lean back, as though pushed away by the sheer intensity of his blazing stare. “What’d you say?” he breathes.

“I… oh, I, er…” Realising you may have overstepped, you swiftly attempt to backtrack. “I mean, that’s not what you have to be called, I was just-“

“-Uncle... That’s the brother of a human’s parent…” His eyes shine like the sun as they bore into you across the sofa. “Right?”

Uncertain, you quirk a brow at him. “Uh, yeah?”

He contemplates that for a second before he asks in a far smaller voice that almost doesn’t sound as if it belongs to the boisterous Horseman you know, “I’m your brother?”

“Of… course?” you blink, surprised that he’d need to even ask that question, “Of course you are. You said it yourself, I’m one of you. Sorry to say it, but that goes both ways. You’re my brother Strife. A-and if you’re okay with it… I’d like you to be this baby’s uncle.” Tearing your eyes off the sharpshooter whilst he none-too subtly coming apart at your side, you send a tentative look up at War, peering at him from under your lashes. “You too, big guy. But! Only if that’s okay with you? I just… want them to grow up knowing who their family is…”

War coughs into a mighty fist, hoping to hide the tiny smile that’s trying to bloom at the sides of his mouth, “In that case, it would be an honour to be acknowledged as the child’s ‘Uncle,’ until my dying breath.”

Always so serious. Giving your head a fond shake, you flash their sister a knowing look and call, “What about Aunt Fury? You on board?”

“Hmph, well,” she shrugs one shoulder, turning to glare at the wall, “It… has a nice ring to it, I suppose.”

You’re not fooled. The way she’s keeps having to wrestle the corners of her lips back into a terse line speaks volumes.

“Of course, I haven’t forgotten about you, Death,” you say, at last addressing the Reaper who is watching the proceeding with a calm, reserved expression. At least until he catches the little smirk lifting your cheeks. “Or should I say, Grandpa Death.”

At once, the Nephilim’s expression flattens, unimpressed. “If you introduce me to that child as ‘Grandpa Death,’ perhaps I won’t be sticking around.”

“Ah, you love it, Gramps, don’t try to deny it,” Strife teases, leaning in to stage-whisper in your ear, “Look at him, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the miserable bastard this happy.”

You have to stifle a snicker for Death’s sake. True to form though, while his eldest brother’s fearsome scowl persists when it lingers on Strife, it soon grows soft again upon turning back to you.

And in that one look, shared between a human and the eldest surviving Nephilim, you realise categorically that Death is with you. All of them are. They aren’t worried about your reputation. They won’t concern themselves with the idle gossip of your neighbours.

They’re family, as is the small spark of life steadily growing inside your stomach.

And father or no, your child is still going to grow up under the watchful eye of the Universe's most diligent and protective guardians.

#Darksiders #darksiders 2 #darksiders 3 #commission #found family #pregnant reader #hiding pregnancy #fluff #hurt/comfort #protective horsemen #allusions to SA

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konigsblog · 6 months ago

Note

I’d like to direct those sending hate to people simply writing dark content to holding adult video sites accountable if they want to achieve some kind of moral victory.

There have been multiple instances of sites like 🌽 hub taking genuine footage of rape/SA and refusing to remove it even when requested multiple times by the victim. Some of their heavier ‘consensual’ bondage vids etc have been said to involve deliberately pushing expressed boundaries by female actors that have do things they didn’t originally agree to for fear of loosing their job. These are real people- their experiences are REAL and have a lasting physical, social and mental effect.

Ghost, König etc are not real. Y/n, is a reader insert of course, but you are never in genuine danger. Everything you ‘put yourself’ into in these fics, can stop at the press of a button. You can hate it, hate the author and never interact with them again- problem solved (If only y’all would do that). In real life? A SA/rape survivor has lived through it, suffers from it forever and might have the disgusting burden of having to see their assaulter in the flesh at work, home etc.

To insinuate that a piece of fanfic that can be ignored, that you CHOOSE to engage with is as equally abhorrent as the real act is disgusting. It’s downright offensive. It’s a great discredit to us victims and shows you don’t actually give a damn about us at all.

You’ll be silent when it’s time to hold a harmful industry accountable/silent in the face a thousand men saying that 🌽 actresses ‘deserve it’ but will continually send hate to what is a largely femme community for typing words on a screen that you could avoid so easily. Yeah, I know why, there’s a word for it starting with M :)

On that note, most of these people are dead silent on other fandom issues which proves it’s vendetta, not justice based. They don’t actually care about making it a ‘safe place’ (which is impossible, that’s no one else’s responsibility but your own). Not a peep about racism, for example- can’t be assed making fandom more accessible and less exclusive to POC, gotta go out of their way to harass authors though!

You don’t have to like dark content, or even the authors. You can have limits, disdain bad tagging practices, question respectfully why someone might want to read/write such content, but don’t you dare use victims as a scapegoat or insinuate that you are in any way justified if you choose to harass or bully. Do better; focus your energy somewhere actually productive and deserving of criticism, or shut up and move on.

I agree with absolutely everything you said. These are the same people that consume pornography via porn sites, then sit and complain about people having rape fantasies and consuming dark fiction (key word: fiction). They care more about people's kinks and fantasies and decisions in the bedroom (where both parties have consented beforehand), then they do about the REAL rape tapes on porn sites. It's not just rape either, there's a lot of incredibly fucked-up, illegal, and sickening things on these sites that I won't get into. People have their trauma published, profited off of, and are violated for money, and these sites never take these videos down either.

They care too much about their comfort character being portrayed in a way they don't agree with to focus on the poor souls who have had their trauma uploaded online – and to make money off! Are the COD characters real, or am I missing something? They're fictional characters. Just because you don't agree with a headcannon doesn't mean that everyone else also disagrees. It doesn't determine their morality. And honestly, do I really think these hateful and spiteful people are victims of some form of assault? No, I don't. Because victims of SA/rape (who cope differently) filter things out to prevent themselves from getting triggered. I don't think that these hate anons are actually triggered by the content I upload and just want to judge others for coping differently. They just want to seem more moral – as if your mortality depends on your coping mechanisms/fantasies are. If you don't want to watch a video, you wouldn't choose to watch it anyways. You wouldn't force yourself to watch the entire thing, then come to the comment section and cry about how you're not interested in the topics featured in the video. You watching that video was a decision you made, a choice. You wouldn't take a kid to a horror film that's clearly 18+, then scream at the film directors for creating it in the first place. If you're not the intended audience, then don't stay. There is an audience of people who do enjoy dark fiction, and just because you don't, doesn't mean that it can't exist. The world doesn't only revolve around you. It's selfish and small-minded.

You get taught about fiction and non-fiction in Primary school, and yet here we are, have to tell adults (or at least people who claim they're 18+) the difference between the two. If you can't draw a line between fantasy and reality, then you shouldn't have access to the internet. That's irresponsibility. It's people wanting to be saviours, act as if they have the moral high ground because they disagree and think that it makes them a better person, when it doesn't. If anything, them constantly harassing innocent writers is worse than what they try to portray us dark content writers as. These are the same people wishing rape, death, and doxxing towards writers who have done nothing but be respectful and give out warnings before a story. Dark fiction writers have more empathy and sympathy than these puritans who think they're on top of the world for coping differently, because we actually understand that there are different mechanisms to cope after being sexually assaulted.

I will never apologise for writing what I write. I refuse to walk on eggshells around these anons simply because they can't act mature and manage their own triggers. These people won't bother reading the articles that I've linked countless times, or listen to this entire post. Because they're narrow-minded, that's what narrow-minded folk do. They don't hear other opinions or think for a second, that maybe, just maybe, they're being disrespectful. They claim we're romanticising rape by writing it, but don't bother learning what romanticising actually is. I've said countless times that rape is a disgusting, violating crime that deserves years of punishment. I don't describe what these characters do as IDEAL or something to WANT, if anything, I describe them as horrible people because that's how I see them. They're in the military for God's sake...

When they send hate to an author's askbox, do they think for a second about the effect it'll have? Victims go through years of self hatred and disgust after being traumatised, and when they find a coping mechanism, do you think they want to be told that they deserve to be raped again, or that they're disgusting, or that they're supporting the vile crime? Of course they don't, because they don't support victims at all.

These people are too illiterate to read this entire post. If anything, it'll go right through them. In one ear and out the other. Am I also responsible for the media they consume? As in, horror films? Will I hold their hand and cradle them, rock them to sleep because they don't want to take responsibility? That's life. You have responsibilities. You can't just drop them because you feel like it and then put it on a writer's shoulders because YOU weren't thinking.

And sure, I can see how dark fiction can possibly affect reality. But, that's not my responsibility. If someone is has the urge to rape someone, that's an issue on their behalf, caused by mental illness. I can't control what people do, just like how film directors can't control the effect that their work will have. If people get themselves off to my content, that's not my responsibility. Writers and film directors aren't responsible for the effect it'll have on others, because there are a plethora of factors that can change a reaction towards certain content, like mental illness, for example. Mental illness plays a huge factor.

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kremlin · 1 year ago

Text

An earnest call for your support: Help me determine if there is a gas leak in my house.

for a long time now, I have been reading and hearing about This Guy on the news, and have been reading all the articles and stories about him:

Above: Sam, tenting his weird-ass fucked up fingers like a real Wall Street Guy might do in a movie he saw

Yep, you already know this guy, his name is Sam, I'll be referring to him as Sam, as that is his first name, and not by his initials, which is what I imagine a pod person might do in an attempt to emulate human behaviour. Whatever. You already know him and what he did, I won't waste your time. Listen. Pay attention. This is not a post about this guy or what he did. That shit is boring as fuck. This is a post about a potential gas leak in my house. We'll get to that in just a bit. Remember.

I've read all the articles and all the op-eds and everything. About Sam. Let us explore the entire spectrum of media coverage of Sam and Sam's Big Ass Problem, starting from the bottom, with the worm-food-tier jackasses: What do people like Jim Cramer and Shark Tank Guy have to say about him?

Above: CNN's "Mad Money" Jim Cramer also doing a weird hand gesture while he tells your alcoholic cable-news-addicted uncle to put his money in some dumbass shit

Above: I think this is the Shark Tank guy? I don't remember his name. Could have sworn his suit had dollar signs and not question marks (?)

I'll summarize their conclusions: "Sam is a boy genius who is super duper smart and can move objects with his massive brain due to knowing about Tech, FinDom FinTech, and computer money, specifically Money Coding. Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court".

Moving on from the worm-food-tier to the mediocre-tier: The totally nameless basic bitch journalists at the New York Times or Bloomberg. What do these assholes have to say?

Above: Jim Fuckface, associate financial correspondent for Bloomberg. Jim enjoys winding down on a Friday afternoon by sipping a Bud Lite Lime and wearing his baseball cap backwards, which bears the logo of his local professional sports team.

Above: Kate Fuckface, columnist at the New York Times. Kate enjoys spending her time chatting and interacting with her friends on Social Media Platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as purchasing items on Etsy

I'll summarize their conclusions: "Displaying the characteristic awkwardness of incredible technical and financial genius, it was clear to me during our interview that Sam's depth of knowledge truly knew no bounds. Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court."

Finally moving on to the people that might actually have a clue about what they're talking about. Sam Levine and Michael Lewis:

Above: Matt Levine, author of a comedy email newsletter named Money Stuff that is 95% financial information by weight and somehow still usually funny as fuck.

Above: Michael Lewis, author of a bunch of really good books you haven't read that were made into pretty decent movies you have seen: Moneyball and The Big Short.

I'll summarize their conclusions: "Sam sure is a smart kid and seems to know a whole lot about economics and this digital currency, and I mean a whole lot, and even more about business, accounting, and finance. Bright kid! Unfortunately Sam committed massive fraud and will get his ass fucked in federal court."

A pretty goddamn clear consensus across the board on both counts.

I listened to the interviews the entire spectrum of people listed above conducted with him -- the ones during which they unanimously concluded how smart he is. I listened to many hours of ad-hoc, unscripted Twitter Space calls he participated in, where he fielded questions about his fraud and his business with complete strangers. I listened to them very carefully. And here is my problem! I came to a different conclusion!

Sam is a fucking moron. I am not talking about solely his intellect, or solely his decision-making abilities, or any specific criteria. I am talking about all of them.

There are two possibilities:

(A) I am correct and, somehow, literally everyone else is incorrect, most of whom know vastly more about these topics than I do

(B) There is a fucking gas leak in my house and I have completely lost all cognitive abilities, suddenly and unwittingly, and exist in a cartoon reality inside my skull that would allow me to reach such a wildly different conclusion from the same evidence.

The likelihood of (A) being correct is very nearly 0%. I mean, come on. I am not fucking around when I tell you how troubling this is for me. I wrote earlier that this isn't a post about Sam or his bullshit. This is a post asking for your help in determining whether I have lost my god damn marbles.

I'll give Sam one thing -- he has some nominal ability to bullshit. If he's writing a Tweet, or making a short statement, he can finesse his words that, on some level, mask how much of a dimwit he is. He absolutely can't do that through about six hours of unscripted interviews. Listen to that shit. Listen.

I am going to go check all the joints in the gas lines in my house as well as the ports on my stove and heater. I'll come back and write a follow-up post on outlining exactly why I think homeboy is an idiot. While I do that, please, go listen to the interviews and tell me what you think.

#words

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spacelazarwolf · 1 year ago

Note

if you want to answer (and i totally understand if you dont), who do you think bombed the hospital in gaza? ive seen a lot of different people talking about it and blaming different people & organizations and you seem like you know a lot aboit i/p

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: i am not a news source. i am some guy with access to the internet. please follow the links in this post, as well as doing your own research. please do not use social media posts exclusively as your source of news, and please continuously read and compare several different accredited news sources. keep on top of new sources and evidence that are being put out to ensure that you have the most up-to-date information.

it's not really about who i think did it. i feel like that centers me in a thing that is very much not about me. but i'll give it my best shot.

we still do not have confirmation of how many were killed or who is at fault for the bombing. there are a lot of numbers and opinions floating around online, but as of 4pm on october 19th there has not been a consensus on either of these things from any accredited organizations.

that being said, here are the statements that have been put out as of the time i'm responding to this:

statements about death toll:

the gaza health ministry estimates between 200 and 471 dead

the director of al-shifa hospital where people were brought from al-ahli estimates 250 dead

an assessment from the us director of national intelligence estimates between 100 and 300

an analyst with the center for naval analysis, after viewing photos and video, said the death toll was closer to 50

statements about fault:

(taking these directly from the article)

J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the ground explosions appeared to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead. Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire. Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine whether the projectile struck its intended target from the footage he has seen. He adds that the flashes in the sky likely indicate the projectile was a rocket with an engine that overheated and stopped working. Valeria Scuto, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline, a risk assessment company, notes that Israel has the capacity to carry out other forms of air strike by drone, where they might use Hellfire missiles. These missiles generate a significant amount of heat but would not necessarily leave a large crater. But she says uncorroborated footage shows a pattern of fires at the hospital site that was not consistent with this explanation.

Visual evidence from the blast site The BBC was able to match details of buildings and the layout of the Al-Ahli hospital site with publicly available satellite imagery, to establish the hospital was the scene of the blast. Based on available evidence, it appears the explosion happened in a courtyard which is part of the hospital site. Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings. What the images do show are scorch marks and burnt-out cars.

where the explosive came from

so far, israel, hamas, and palestinian islamic jihad have all denied responsibility

channel 4 news reported that palestinian islamic jihad had uncovered a warhead but they have not produced it

in a since-deleted tweet, hananya naftali, a social media advisor for netanyahu, claimed that it was an israeli airstrike that hit the hospital. he followed up by stating that he had shared incorrect information based on a reuters headline that refered to an israeli airstrike

tentative conclusion based on sources:

what i gather from what i've read is that the blast was likely caused by a misfired rocket originating somewhere in gaza, and the blast was exacerbated by the fuel in the rocket. BUT, as i stated before, new information is always being put out. there could be evidence released tomorrow that it was an israeli air strike. there has been no conclusive evidence yet.

and perhaps the most important section:

what you can actually do to help

if you are in the us, call your representatives and urge them to support the resolution for a ceasefire

check out this list of verified aid groups (if there is not a ceasefire as soon as possible, it won't matter what aid is sent to them and if they cannot get the supplies into gaza, so refer back to the first bulletpoint)

send a donation to your local synagogue(s) and mosque(s) to help them offset the rising costs of security

take a moment to be a human. don't think about the numbers. don't think about the politics. think about the human beings who lost their lives, and the people who are mourning them. the mothers who will never see their children again, the children who will grow up without parents. what did they have for breakfast? what was their favorite song? when was their birthday? were they afraid? were they in pain? what can we do to ensure this does not happen again?

#ask avishai #i/p

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sophie-frm-mars · 2 years ago

Text

trans rights

The basic claim of trans rights isn't that trans people exist (a non-negotiable human fact) but that trans people deserve everything available to cis people, in the same way that the original feminist claim was not that women exist but rather that they are equally as human as men.

The shift in material terms (what opportunities we have, how we are treated and so on) as well as societal understanding of us is that we are not implicitly sexual objects, the same as the original feminist push for change.

Along the way to explaining this to people we have to divorce the notions of sexuality and gender, which many cis people still do not understand as distinct, but although they are divorced, sexuality and gender are not completely alienated from one another. Gender and sexuality are friends with benefits.

Trans people put a lot of labour into their gender.

(Please read Wages for transition if you haven't)

The labour that trans people put into their gender is quite visible in ways that the labour that cis people put into their gender is not. For many cis people this creates an implicit impression that trans people by existing are claiming that their gender is more valuable than cis people's. This exists quite comfortably in a society that never talks about trans people unless it acknowledges their existence as sex workers or fetish objects, but not in a society that would treat trans people as equally human. Therefore a push for social and legal equality for trans people is, in the minds of those cis people, a push for a society in which it is broadly accepted that some people's gender is more valuable.

However, we already live in a society where it is broadly accepted that some people have more valuable gender than others. "Hot" people, many of whom put a significant amount of labour into their gender, are also treated as having more valuable genders than others. I'd like to draw attention to the obvious similarity between transmisogynistic rhetoric and ideology and the rhetoric and ideology of incels. Incels believe in a sexual hierarchy which essentially treats "more sex" as better and reflexively indicative of a more valuable person, rather than a uniquely communicated and negotiated consensual connection between two or more people.

(We could also draw a parallel between people's reaction to nonbinary people and people's reactions to vegans, i.e. "so you think you're better than me?")

Under patriarchy, women are treated as responsible for the reproduction of society, which is often essentialised as an inherent (biological) quality of women. Trans women, assumed by people who are not trans women to not be burdened with a disproportionate share of reproductive labour, are treated by transmisogynists as getting to enjoy all the aspects of being a woman (implicitly under patriarchy being a woman is doing more gender than being a man) without paying the price for being a woman.

When we say that we are gender abolitionists we simply mean that we are feminists, and that we wish to abolish societal hierarchies based on gender and allow people to self-determine and fully control their own gender without it having implications on their social status. Naturally the relations between genders are not abolished unless they are hierarchical because gender is frequently constructed through gendered relations. This, again, is why sexuality and gender remain close despite the fallout from their earlier codependent relationship. We should, in fact, want a billion squillion kajillion genders because allowing people to treat gender as a multifaceted social performance instead of an inherent characteristic rigidly attached to sex, we support implicitly the abolition of cisheteropatriarchy.

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kaybreezy3000 · 1 year ago

Text

Bad Things (Five Hargreeves/Reader)

~Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, the inability to distinguish between right and wrong, poor behavioral controls, and behaviors that contradict social norms which then commonly result in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.

Enter, Five Hargreeves, everyone's favorite little psycho.

(Chapter Three Post)

---If you need to go back to read the summary and the first two chapters first, hit the link below.

Link to Chapters 1-2

Warnings and tags: Mental disintegration, psychological trauma, effects of isolation, masturbation, non-consensual voyeurism, explicit sexual content, bondage, POV altering, touch starved, obsessive behavior, inanimate object love, and many other sexually deviant themes all mixed with a lovely twist that you will hopefully enjoy...

---In this chapter, we start the POV switches, and they will be made clearer by large page breaks in-between.

Chapter Three: Creep

Running through his options, Five makes the quick determination that after what he just did, he can’t stay here. He needs to get the girl back inside her apartment, then he will get Dolores and together they will run.

Thanks to his fake ID, nobody knows who he really is, but as soon as the girl can, she’s going to call the police and have them search the apartments across from hers. His family will figure out what he’s been doing, and Five can already hear them going on and on about how disgusting he is.

Everyone already thinks he is a psycho, and this further proves it. His siblings may not throw him under the bus because doing so would obviously tie him to them, but it’s still possible that someone could figure out that the once famous missing boy Number Five Hargreeves is not dead like the world thought and he is not at all the person he was before he disappeared.

The possibility of the whole world knowing about the monster he has become is only adding to the heartbreak that the people he has cared about and fought for his entire life will hate him more than they already do. All this has Five questioning everything.

They were all he lived for, and he lost them, and now this.

“You really screwed yourself this time you sick asshole,” Five angrily curses as he starts hauling the unconscious girl across the parking lot towards her building.

As if all that isn’t bad enough, Five realizes that he just ensured himself a lifetime of running from the law. This means no more trying to pretend to be a part of something he’s not, but it also means that he will have no other option but to resort to other, much less legal means of surviving.

He failed at life again and there’s a big part of him that just wants to throw in the towel and let them lock him away. But the same part of him that wouldn’t give up for the last sixty years is still there in the back of his mind screaming at him to keep fighting.

Committed to his plan, Five is about to start crossing the short distance to the girl’s building when a man in a janitorial uniform comes out the back door. Being taken off guard by his sudden appearance, Five inelegantly drops to his knees behind a parked car with the girl folding down with him on the dirty cement.

As the man crosses the lot, Five does his best to calm his heavy breaths to a more manageable level. He hasn’t had the chance to let his racing heart slow down since his extremely drunk sprint down the stairs.

Not being his usual stealthy, in control self and not being able to easily blink himself out of this situation is enough to make Five’s mounting panic much worse. The fact that he just heard the door electronically lock after the guy closed it isn’t helping either. It didn’t even occur to him that her building might need an entrance code.

“God, damnit!” he quietly hisses.

He could slip in behind someone, but that’s not likely at this hour, and not with the girl passed out in his arms. Hitting random buttons in the hopes that someone will buzz him in will get the police called or it will wake the whole building, so that’s a big fat no.

As the other man pulls out of the lot, Five makes a split-second decision based on his most recent plan being blown all to hell. He does not want to leave the girl outside lying on the ground, especially in this neighborhood. He’ll have to leave her in his apartment. He’s screwed one way or the other. It really doesn’t matter where he puts her as long as it is safe. He’ll grab only what he has to, and he’ll be gone before she fully comes to.

Five pushes his back against the car, using it to help balance him as he gets them both upright again. Then swooping the girl up in his arms, the alcohol gets the best of him and Five accidentally stumbles backwards into the car before moving forward towards his own building.

“I am never drinking again,” he declares, weaving with each step he takes. Five is trying so hard to push past how dizzy he feels, but drunk is drunk and it’s getting worse.

After the girl blew him off tonight, Five had the grand plan of passing out in a super sloshed stupor. The whiskey he tried to drown his sorrows in is catching up with him by this point and he’s realizing that finishing the whole bottle was just one more bad decision to add to the many others he’s made tonight.

When Five opens the lower-level door to his complex, he can see that no one is in the shabby hallway that leads to the elevator, and it seems like his shitty luck is changing because the thing is working, and it’s already on the ground floor.

There’s no way he would have made it up the stairs at this point. Heavy feet scuffing along across the worn tiles, Five moves inside, throwing his elbow against the button for the seventh floor.

As soon as the doors close, he woozily drops his weight back on the wall, and sets the girl down, keeping one arm around the girl’s waist to hold her upright and the other angled across her chest to keep her from tipping forward.

Five can hardly grasp how quickly he just fucked everything up. A few minutes ago, he was in the throes of personal passion, about to blow his load all over his costly dress pants, and the next he sealed the deal that he was completely ruining his already ruined life.

Five is being consumed by his deeply depressing thoughts about himself as the old elevator doors close and it groans to life. The girl’s flowery smelling hair is rubbing up against the side of his cheek, and he can feel the heat of her body pressing back against him in a very tormenting way considering his self-self-absorbed cock brain hasn’t caught up to speed yet that he is not sitting there in his kitchen with his hand on his dick about to destroy his own lap with jizz.

His partial erection from that sad whack fest is wedged right between this girl’s warm cheeks, and it’s just like he was imagining positioning himself on her Monday night.

Now that Five has the girl’s body pressed up next to his while he’s holding her in what many would think looks like it’s a very loving embrace, the truth that he has actually been violating her by watching her and getting his rocks off is impossible to ignore.

You can’t imagine something if it’s right in front of you physically touching you. The entire fantasy he’s been creating in his head just completely disintegrated.

Now things just got very real and it’s not in a good way.

“I am so sorry I am doing this to you,” he hotly breathes, his forehead falling even more against the girl’s shoulder as he forces down the growing sickness in his stomach.

With extreme sadness, Five thinks about the trauma he just inflicted on this girl. Five knows trauma and his own experiences with it is what resulted in him being unable to put himself out there to have anything worthwhile in his life.

He had wanted nothing more than to know what it was like to passionately hold someone he cared about and who also cared about him, but the horror of how it’s happening right now is unbelievable. It seems like this must be happening to someone else.

Five is so tormented by all this, and intoxicated, that he doesn’t realize he hasn’t been holding any pressure on the girls’ neck since he carried her inside. Her knuckles make unexpected contact, hitting the bridge of his nose. Five eyes instantaneously pinch shut to the intense sensation of shooting pain that makes everything in his face burn and his eyes flood with tears.

The girl’s furious screech reverberates inside the elevator. “Get off me!”

Taking Five’s momentary inability to function, her other arm wiggles free from the arm he has around her waist. She pulls away, maneuvering her fist back and down at the same time, nailing him right between the legs.

“Ff-ah-ckkk!”

Five’s sudden high pitch yelp comes out just as loud as the girl’s cry, but unlike her, his verbal alarm ends in a very hushed groan followed by a whisper of a wheeze as he frantically fights not to double over and also maintain his hold on the back of her sweater.

Five gags down his vomit that is threatening to make this even worse, and while he is immersed in the sensations of pure agony, she comes at him again.

Somehow, Five manages to move his head back just in time, narrowly avoiding another jab to the face. Her hand hits his upper sternum instead and just as fast, her fingers find their way around his silk tie, yanking his head forward with it.

Five instinctively retaliates by violently twisting his arm around her neck.

“St-ooo-ppp,” he splutters as they choke each other.

“Let go!” she piercingly shrieks before she’s completely deprived of the air to do so.

Dropping her weight as her fingers dig at Five’s arm doesn’t have the desired effect of getting him to let go, so she digs her heels into the floor plowing backwards instead.

Her reverse attack makes Five’s dress shoes slip out from under him on the grimy floor. The impact of Five’s head as it swings back into the metal wall makes a cracking sound that leaves the wall vibrating.

Totally in shock and seeing the brilliant scattering of stars filling his vision, Five’s free arm swings out, searching for the railing behind him, but he misses. He starts to lose consciousness. All at once, his full body weight is hanging on the girl’s neck as darkness begins swallowing up his remaining vision.

The girl lets out a helpless sounding whimper as they start to fall.

Beyond faint and feeling equally helpless, Five inadvertently squeezes his arm tighter, using the girl to pull himself upright again. To his relief, her fingers suddenly release the sleeve of his dress shirt and her arms flop down limply at her sides.

DING!

At the same time the doors rumble open, the girl’s legs give out and Five almost drops her.

Unable to think let alone function like he normally would, Five hoists her back up then unsteadily stumbles out of the elevator with the girl’s feet dragging between his legs.

Light-headedly glancing both ways, he is beyond grateful that no one is out there looking to see what all yelling was about.

Beaten and bloodied, Five makes it inside his own door a few seconds later and his first move is getting them both over to the bed because he still feels like he may fall flat on his face.

Five hastily drops the girl down next to Dolores, then he moves towards his kitchen, swaying as he navigates the short distance.

After getting the shit beat out of him, he is quickly processing the fact that he needs to adjust his original plan to drop her and go. He is going to need to shake at least some of his drunken and concussed brain fog before he can walk even remotely straight. If he doesn’t, he may pass out in the street or his own hallway with his face smacked down in a pile of his own puke.

The idea of the cops finding him like that, with the addition of Dolores lying next to him, is enough to push along Five’s new approach to make this all still work out in both their favor. The most important thing he figures right now is that he needs to keep this girl quiet for a little while before he is functioning enough to leave.

Five throws open the utility cabinet, his unfocused eyes landing on the hook with the wound-up nylon rope hanging on it. The apartment’s previous other weirdo occupant had left many things behind, but unlike the loads of old stuffed animals, this was one thing that Five didn’t throw away being it had many practical uses. In this case, tying someone up.

“They are right, you are a psycho,” Five mutters to himself as he digs around finding nothing else useful.

Next, opening the first drawer next to the refrigerator, he grabs his switchblade and his revolver. It had been Five’s norm to always carry both these weapons, but he stopped when he figured out that there were no field operatives from The Commission coming after him in this new world because there was no more Commission.

Klaus was right, he thinks. He was better when he had an evil taskmaster to keep him in line.

Staggering a little as he turns around, he sets the gun on the kitchen table and tucks the knife into the waistband of his pants. Next, making it back over to the bed with what he figures will be enough to keep the girl safely detained till he is more composed, Five is surprised to see that she isn’t waking up yet.

He says her name.

Nothing.

Five throws the rope on the bed, then picks up her wrist, checking her pulse. He doesn’t feel one, so his trembling fingers move to her neck, pressing against her throat instead. The girl doesn’t react to him touching her, and Five still can’t feel anything.

“Oh, no, no, NO, NO !” He says the girl’s name a few more times, and again he gets nothing. “Dolores, I didn’t mean to- Shit, shit, fucking SHIT!"

Feeling like he’s losing what’s left of his mind, Five doesn’t know what to say, and even though Dolores is right there, she doesn’t respond to his terrified ramblings.

Even though his mind is spinning out of control, Five’s years of training kick in. He jumps on the bed, rolling the girl on her side. Then he lifts her chin, putting her in the recovery position that you are supposed to do for someone when trying to revive them after being fully choked out. The maneuver makes the girl’s mouth fall open and Five checks to make sure that her airway is not blocked, or that her own tongue didn’t slip back in her throat.

Everything is normal. She should be able to breathe, but for some reason she is not, and she is not waking up.

Kneeling over her, one hand on her back, Five starts rubbing. “Come on, breathe! You’re strong, you just showed me how strong you are. Breathe damn it!”

He knows very well how this works, and giving her CPR will do nothing because this is not happening to her because of cardiac arrest.

Lifting her legs so that more blood moves to her brain is not that effective at helping to revive someone in this condition, and it’s sure as hell not going to work if she’s already gone. Five could stand her on her head and no amount of blood running to her brain will bring her back if she is dead.

“Come on! NO! You can’t die!” he angrily pleads, even as both his hands keep at it, one now methodically trying to massage life into her cold legs.

Counting the minutes in his head, Five can’t really say how long he would have been squeezing tight enough to fully deprive her of oxygen. He knows that all it takes is a matter of a minute like that and someone can face permanent brain damage or death.

They were in the parking lot for only a minute or so after she swung the bat at him. He knows he let up on her throat enough during that time because she woke up a little when they were crouched behind that car. She was moving in his lap, and he heard soft moaning sounds coming out of her. Then as soon as the car pulled out of the lot, he carried her in, not choking her at all.

In the elevator, he fucked-up big time and he let her wake up completely. Five is sure that she was never completely out more than twice and for no more than about thirty seconds at a time.

Right?

From where Five has himself positioned next to the girl, one of his knees is pressing against Dolores’s hip and with glistening eyes he looks from the girl to her.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” he insists.

Again, Dolores says nothing to calm Five or reassure him like she normally would. His watery eyes plead with her, but he gets nothing.

“Oh my God, thank you,” Five cries, with his head swinging back to the girl. His hand on her back slowly begins to rise and fall as she comes back to life. “That’s it. Keep breathing, it’s going to be okay.”

The girl slowly begins to move her legs and Five puts his hands under her side, sliding her small body up closer to the headboard. She makes a small sound of complaint at being handled, but he still needs to restrain her hands, or she’ll be trying to fight him again the second she’s aware of what is happening.

Mechanically, Five flips open his long switchblade so he can quickly cut the correct lengths of rope with it. Then just as fast, he makes tight loops around both of her wrists. Seeing that he’s at least not totally fucking that up that lesson he learned over and over as a child, and that her arms are snuggly secured above her head to his headboard, he risks looking over at Dolores again.

“I think she’s okay. I know how this looks, but you know that I didn’t mean to do this. I was never going to go near her. It was only supposed to be just me waahh-"

Five can’t finish that one, and that is because saying that it was only supposed to be him watching the girl doesn’t make it okay. None of this is okay. His eyelids lower and he rubs the area between his eyes.

“Please talk to me, sweetheart. I don’t know what to do. I think something is very, very wrong with me. I need you,” he pleads, winching in pain as the trickle of blood from his nose continues to drip down over his upper lip.

Five gets nothing back, and right now, he needs his trusted voice of reason more than ever. In his head, he can only imagine that Dolores is not acknowledging him because she is questioning why he is tying this poor girl up like this if he supposedly didn’t mean to do this.

To him, she is probably thinking that he is going to hurt her even more than he already has and that makes Five spiral even worse.

“Please don’t hate me. The only reason she’s tied up is because I need to stay here long enough to make sure she’s going to make it, and I can’t leave like this. I need time to clean up,” he tries to explain. “I will get us out of here. We can start over,” he promises.

His blurring eyes dart from Dolores to the girl, then back again.

With tears starting to run down his face, Five gasps out a devastated sob, “Dolores, I need help. Please, talk to me!” Again, she doesn’t react, and his reddened eyes fearfully widen. “Dolores!” The quiver in his voice matches the quiver in his bloodied hands.

Nothing.

Five just drug in the near lifeless body of the very real girl from across the alley, placing her in the bed next to his beloved. Now, having them both laying there opposite each other, all he can see in the mannequin’s normally devoted expression of limitless acceptance is the actual lifeless object she is.

Just like in the elevator with the girl right there with him, now Five is finding that he can’t pretend anymore.

Dolores’s face stares out blankly, the matte finished paint of her sky-blue eyes will not meet his.

In Five’s entire time with her, this has never happened.

As Five moves himself down the girl’s legs, snaking the nylon around her ankles, he does so with the shock of knowing that Dolores finally left him.

Now he really has nothing to live for.

Feeling totally out of it, liquid dribbles from your slack mouth. You feel the softest tickle as the hair that’s stuck to your cheek pulls away.

“Wha thhh-ah," you start to mumble, but you are so groggy that at first you can’t even complete a thought let alone string two measly words together.

It feels like you are in bed, but you don’t remember going to bed.

In your jumbled thoughts, you recall going on a blind date with a guy from a stupid dating website. That obviously turned out to be a very bad decision. You should have known this guy was bad news when he showed up early and he somehow snuck inside your building instead waiting down in the parking lot.

At the end of the night, the douche monger insisted on walking you to your door, and then he really upped his creep factor when he jumped on you.

You remember feeling extremely unhinged and completely repulsed by what he did. As such, you figured that it was a excellent idea to educate the prick on what would happen if he ever tried that date rape shit on anyone again.

As this all comes back to you, your eyes start to flutter open, but the room is dim, and your vision is badly distorted.

More liquid slips inside your parted lips.

“Please, wake up,” the softest male voice worriedly whispers.

Hearing that, you immediately try to move, but like the voice, everything feels wrong. It feels like your arms and legs aren’t working right.

You feel a warm hand on your back slowly moving back and forth.

That’s when you remember that strange man in the parking lot.

“No,” you croak out, as you remember the unmistakable shape of his firm manhood pressing up against your ass as he cut off your air supply with the constriction of his arm around your already bruised throat.

It feels like something is still wrapped around your neck but whatever it is, it’s not painful and tight, it’s cold.

This doesn’t make sense.

Your mouth quickly shuts, your eyes flying open, as you try to sit up. Adding to your horror, you find that you can’t. Your arms flex and pull but they won’t give in to your request. Your chest and bottom rise off the bed only to immediately get pulled back down.

As your vision clears, you realize that someone is sitting next to you.

Dark hair dangles over pale green colored eyes.

The expression on his face is empty, not at all the way it was when you first laid eyes on it. Then, this lunatic appeared harmless. He even looked greatly concerned for your well-being. His eyes were conveying such open sorrow that it threw you off enough to let him approach.

He was acting like he knew you. He called you by name.

You open your mouth to scream but he quickly covers the sound with a thick fold of fabric that a second ago must have been around the cold pack that is now on his lap. His eyes narrow as his hand firmly presses the towel against your face.

As air wheezes through your partially blocked nose, he says, “Don’t. Do. That. Again.”

Every word out of his mouth is filled with warning.

Even if you weren’t already completely scared stiff, just the look in his eyes has the sound of your own blood thrumming in your ears and your heart feeling like it’s going to burst out of your chest.

This can’t be the same voice you just heard speaking so compassionately.

Looking for help, your eyes try to take in the room behind him, but you don’t see anyone else.

Angling your chin backwards, you see someone illuminated by the small bedside lamp, but your own eyes grow even wider when you realize that the woman lying there next to you is not alive.

It’s an old, full body mannequin like you would normally see at a dump or in a second-hand clothing store.

You try to scream again but he pushes his hand down harder, completely muffling it.

“I said, DON’T!” he growls as you yank at the ropes binding your wrists. They won’t budge and that’s because you are tied to a very heavy-looking wooden headboard.

Trying to move your legs again, you realize that each ankle is tied much like your hands, then fastened by extended lines of rope to opposite bed posts at the foot of the bed.

It dawns on you that this is his bed.

This perverted asshole saw what your douchebag date did to you. He has been watching you for who knows how long, and now he has abducted you. Your legs are spread wide, and your skirt is pushed up so high from your floundering that you know he can see right under it from where he’s sitting.

You can’t believe this is happening, but it is.

Again, you remember feeling this fucker pressing himself on you. He was hard.

This guy was turned on by squeezing the life out of you, and he has a plastic woman in his bed!

Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!

This is so bad.

As you mentally lose your shit, his eyes never leave yours. One of his thighs is pressing against your side and he’s still holding the bottle he must have been feeding you with, but from the way he is sitting at the edge of the bed, you can’t tell if he is still aroused.

You want to scream at him to let you go but you can do nothing. You are entirely at his mercy.

The only reasons you can come up with for why he is doing this aren’t good, but you force yourself not to go there. You have to focus.

Since he’s not actually touching, touching you yet, you try to concentrate on the rest of your surroundings, looking for some way out of this.

There is an old looking electric stove in a small kitchen area across the room, with an equally old looking refrigerator next to it. A small beat-up looking table sits under one of the only two windows and it has an empty liquor bottle on it and something black that looks like a revolver of some kind.

Great.

You remember smelling the strong scent of booze on his breath in the elevator. He is clearly shit faced. Your eyes flit back to his. He hasn’t moved at all.

Oh my God, you are going to die.

Looking out again, you see that in front of the bed, there’s a very battered looking recliner. Other than the basics, there is nothing someone would have that would give signs that they lived there. There are no pictures on the walls. No TV, no shelves full of personal belongings. Next to the recliner, on the floor, you can just make out that there is a stack of books, but that is it.

You see what must be the door to get out, and one that is narrower and has slatted vents in it, meaning it’s a closet. Behind you, when you tilted your head back to look at what was holding you from moving your arms, you saw what appeared to be a tiny bathroom.

At first glance, you see nothing that can help you. It’s just some psycho guy’s shitty shoe box sized apartment.

His indifferent reaction as you look around his home is jarring. The flawlessly smooth skin on his face gives the impression of youthful innocence, but what he’s doing proves he is far from it.

You’re betting this fancy dressing Ted Bundy has got piles of bodies under his bed and body parts galore in his freezer. Now you see it; he’s totally the type!

SHIT!

His expensive looking three-piece suit didn’t make sense in this neighborhood. Now splatters of blood stain the sleeves of his white dress shirt. He clearly used the cuffs to wipe his nose based on the numerous red smears.

You wish so badly that you’d hit him hard enough to break his whole stupid face.

You risk looking at more of him, and you see that he is missing the tie he had on before, and you can only assume that is because the first chance you had, you latched on to it and tried to strangle him with it.

He is clearly not taking any chances of that happening again.

Uselessly trying to wriggle away from him, your arms pull down on the ropes and the heels of your bare feet slide across his rumpled bedding.

He took off your shoes!

Your stomach sickens with the realization that he has already been touching you when you were unconscious.

Again, you notice how high your skirt is, but he isn’t looking there, his cold eyes remain fixed on yours.

You can’t help it when you scream under his hand, but that only makes him even more scary looking. His features contort ominously.

“This is not what I wanted. I-” He suddenly pauses, a line forms between his eyes as they run over your face, down your body and back up again. “You never should have lifted that bat.”

You try to tell him that you don’t care what he wants or that he didn’t want his head bashed in, but your words are totally stifled by the persistent pressure of his hand.

“You kept fighting me. I had no choice but to do what I did,” he scolds, like this is your fault rather than his.

He reaches over to the bedside table, setting the bottle of water down, then he picks up another length of rope off of it. The moment he removes his hand from your mouth, he forces your lips apart, jabbing the cloth inside. His other hand is already behind your head, pushing it forward as he works the rope between your lips.

As he ties the ends at the nape of your neck you realize it’s to keep the gag in. Your mouth is so full of fabric that not even the roaring animalist growls coming out of you are even remotely loud enough to get anyone’s attention.

Your teeth bare down on the nylon fibers as you glare at him in blind hatred.

Eyes darting away from yours, he slowly starts to sit up, but he abruptly stops when you let out a pathetic mewing sound. Those green eyes of his give the faintest hint of something as he watches the burning hot tears rolling back into your hairline.

His hand comes up brushing his dark chocolate colored hair out of his eyes before tucking it behind his ears. His eyes close so sluggishly it is like it pains him to take in the very deep breaths he is all of a sudden taking.

The heavy fringe of his lashes sweeps his cheeks covering the dark hued skin under his eyes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but the faint bruising that is starting to form is also from when you hit him, and it only seems to be showing at all because of how fair his skin is.

First, sexual assault and now you are finishing your fabulous Friday night off being this crazy prick’s new and improved sex doll.

Is this really going to be your final fate? Live a subpar existence scratching to get by, working meaningless jobs to pay the rent, then die because some crazy asshole across the alley from you decided to remove you from the world for his own sick satisfaction?

You would laugh at your ridiculously bad luck if you weren’t crying and if you could actually laugh.

He’s going to kill you. There’s no other way out of this.

“Just let me go,” you beg him. It comes out of you, but with hardly any sound though saying it makes his eyes dart back to yours anyway.

His face is one of those that you’ve seen that can express the most heart wrenching emotion if he lets it. Right now, it seems it’s more of failing to hide it than intentionally showing that he’s not as cold as he is pretending to be.

His prominent jaw line seems even more dramatic as you notice him clenching his teeth. It makes the dimple on his cheek stand out even more. He looks so sad, and that reaction is baffling because a moment before he looked like he felt nothing and didn’t even have the tiniest amount of remorse or humanity in him.

You swear you see his hand closest to you trembling.

That has to mean something.

You try to plead with him again, but hearing it, he steels his expression to nothingness again, he stands, preparing to walk away from you.

Christ! Even crazy vagrants on the street don’t have the gift to emotionally turn off and on as quickly as this guy can, and that’s no matter how long gone their minds are.

If you could just get through to him somehow, then maybe you’d have a chance, but how can you do that if he is mentally all over the place.

As he moves, you can see his entire body more clearly. He has straight shoulders, but he is hunching them forward in an odd way that doesn’t match his young age. His chin is angled down to the floor like he simply can’t stand looking at anything else.

His trim waist is defined even more by his tailored vest. He’s one of those guys who has that V-shaped torso that comes from having zero body fat. He’s all lean muscle and bone. Add the fitted black dress pants enhancing the slim look of him and you’d think he’s nobody to worry about, but you know already that he is not weak. Under this misleading appearance is hiding the very dangerous man that just took you.

Your eyes follow his every move as he travels over to the other side of the bed. Again, you swear you see the look of pure agony in his face as he lifts the mannequin and sets her down a few feet away over by the window on what has to be a stand because the thing is standing there dressed all pretty like she belongs in a 90's department store not this freak job’s apartment.

He goes ghostly still with one of his hands resting on the form of its narrow waist.

You hear him softly talking to it and it’s almost exactly the way you heard him speaking when you were coming to.

“Dolores, please… I love you,” he pleads. He is looking at the dummy like he is expecting it to answer him.

When you look to the window beyond him over there having this extremely bizarre moment with his plastic girlfriend, you see the flowers dangling from your own flower box blowing in the wind.

He was right across from you the whole time.

You look over again at the single chair pulled up at the small table next to the window. You can just imagine him sitting there in the dark, finishing off that bottle, watching you.

Being an opportunistic perv that gets turned on by peeping on others is one thing, but this guy was getting off by watching you get attacked and he was clearly also turned on by attacking you.

He’s a sexual sadist and while he rapes you, he is going to do his best to make you suffer even more!

Animalistic sounds of pure desperation erupt from your chest, and they get even louder when he abruptly turns away from his one-sided conversation with the mannequin and comes back towards the bed.

You see his expression change to something fierce and dangerous. His entire body seems to thrum like a bowstring drawn taut. You can almost feel the carefully restrained violence about to explode all over you.

His gaze is so intense that your whole body shudders and his voice comes out so achingly low that he sounds like a different person. “If you have already done the worst things a human could do, would it matter if you sealed it that the devil owns you?”

You do not like where this is going. You shake your head side to side, denying him. You refuse to draw the parallels he is trying to make in justifying what he’s going to do.

“I lost everything. There is no point in fighting anymore,” he whispers.

Even though you don’t want to give them to him, tears trickle down your cheeks again. Seeing them, the faintest trace of a sound comes from somewhere deep inside his chest.

There is something. Something inside all that coldness. He looks sad. You are the one tied to his bed, and he looks sad…

What?

After another minute of him seeming to consider something, he begins to hungrily study you, or at least it appears that way to you in that slow, languid way his eyes roamed over your body. When they hover over your chest, your breath hitches, and you think you hear his hitch too.

“Go fuck yourself, asshole!” you frantically cry, adding every curse word you know and even adding some new ones specially invented just for him. It comes out garbled, but you are sure he is getting the gist.

He reaches for the bottle of water on the nightstand, his eyes roll back in his head, and he almost falls down as he proceeds to pound it.

After stumbling and then tossing the empty bottle on the floor, he moves across the bed, crawling on hands and knees towards you. The mattress sags beneath his weight as he bends down on top of you.

His weight hovers over you, and your fingers curl into fists. Your arms pulled down but to no avail.

Reactively, when his hand comes towards your face, you pull back as much as you can. He stops for a second, dark brows furrowing like he doesn’t understand your reaction.

“Sweetheart, no, please. You know I'd never hurt you,” he slurs, then his long fingers gently run across your skin to wipe your tears away.

You shudder.

He still has that look. You know it even though you don’t know him. It’s the look of misery.

He brushes your tangled hair back and the frown on his face deepens. Those pale cheeks of his suddenly flush with…

Arousal? Shame? Murderous rage? You have no idea until you look between your bodies, and you see that his crotch region is definitely tenting in a way it wasn't a few minutes ago.

Very slowly, he traces the bruises your date left on your neck with a finger. The sensation makes you shiver in fear, and you see him shiver too. You are sure he’s about to lower himself on you but then he rolls off, staggers to the bathroom, and then slams the door behind him.

Entering his bathroom, Five’s body falls forward over the small counter. He clings to the edge holding himself steady, while hoping he will be able to think clearer now that he is away from the girl.

Five is completely overwhelmed with unimaginable levels of sorrow and gross intoxication, but the worst of it is the very demanding reaction his body is having over seeing the girl laying under him on his bed. As bad of shape as he is in, Five can’t even link together any coherent thoughts other than that when he looked at the girl, he was seeing Dolores.

“Dolores, no,” he breathlessly cries in pure unfiltered agony over the gut-wrenching loss he feels.

Wanting to stop the pain and unable to operate on anything but pure brainless need, rather than hurt the girl because he has completely lost his mind, Five desperately begins to hurt himself.

He lowers his head even more, panting out panicked gasps for air as one of his trembling hands starts to rub the front of his pants.

“Please. Fuck. Help me,” he moans, meaning much more than the words can convey as his other hand fumbles to get his zipper down.

Once he has himself free, Five is quick to start jerking himself with an intensity and cruelty that only makes his head spin even more than it already is.

“Nahhhh-nnnn-” His instant moans of pleasure are followed by the top of his head accidentally banging up against the oval mirror hanging above the sink.

Pumping his hips, Five rams the hand he is using to grope his tight balls, jamming it abusively right up against the edge of the counter. His angry touches feel so damn good despite the punishment that the combination only makes him moan even louder.

His knees bang over and over against the cabinet as he finds every way possible to inflict pain on himself while also giving in to that heady desire trying to consume him.

Five winces as his knuckles begin to split after making contact too many times with the hard surface, but he doesn’t stop doing it. He wants this sweet torture to drown out the rest of his unbearable suffering.

Hair falling in his eyes and his skin feeling like it’s on fire, Five’s other hand continues taking care of the rest of his shaft. His fingers are circled around the end of the hard length, and they are moving up and down so fast that when he peers down at himself, all he sees is a violent blur.

“Yessssssss!”

Mouth hanging open, Five’s come begins to spurt out of him. The near iridescence of his release is somewhere between a milky white and a purely clear watery fluid, allowing it to blend in almost seamlessly into the fake chalky colored marble of his chipped counter. With a dazed expression, Five’s body twitches repeatedly as he watches it drip down into the bowl of his sink.

As the waves of ecstasy all too quickly abandon him, Five’s bloodshot eyes turn up to the monster in the mirror.

All at once, his fist slams into the face staring back at him. The glass shatters, raining down sharp blades of Five’s reflection, scattering his hatred at his feet and all over the counter.

As if what just happened when he was suspending his body over you isn't appalling enough, the sounds coming from the bathroom are making you really lose your mind. You yank at your constraints hard enough to make your quickly abrading skin begin to bleed.

It's very clear what he is doing in there; you don't need to see him to know that he took your advice and is actively fucking himself. The only good thing about this is that he is not trying to fuck you and he is in there and you are out here.

When the sound of glass breaking and things hitting the floor abruptly comes after a another one of his guttural groans, you are pulling so hard on the headboard to break free that it's banging against the wall behind it.

Not more than a minute later, the bathroom door swings open and he's back at the side of the bed looking down at you with those empty eyes.

“I need you to be quiet a little longer." His words don't sound mad or even scary even though he just busted you trying to break free. He sounds very meek but that makes sense considering what he did in there.

You can't help your eyes from moving right from his to his fly, and sure enough, Mr. Psycho's Mr. Happy seems to be momentarily tamed.

Just when you are thinking you might be safe, he shifts himself over on the mattress where the mannequin was.

Just the act of laying down looks like it hurts him. His moist looking eyes open and shut like he can hardly hold them open as he lets out a very pained moan that makes him sound like a child that needs his mommy very badly.

You can see his hand is freshly bleeding but not bad. He doesn't even seem to notice.

“I am going to let you go. I just need to clear my head for a few minutes, and I am cutting you loose and leaving. This will all be over soon,” he hushes when the bed moves from you trying to wriggle away from him.

As he settles into the blankets and his eyes droop closed, his black vest pulls up as he stretches out and you immediately notice that he has some kind of knife tucked under his waistband.

After a minute or two of laying like that, eyes closed still, he rolls over and his arm flops down over your chest, his hand landing way to close to your neck again. You try to shake him off, but you have nowhere to go, and he remains as is.

This guy can say what he wants about letting you go, but him lying next to you, hand on your throat, with this fuck mannequin watching him resting up enough so that he can brutally rape you doesn’t have you feeling any less terrified.

The only reason you are not screaming anymore is because you don’t want to set him off now that he is this close.

Less than a minute later of you laying there thinking this is it, his chin slides down the arm he has folded under his head, and as it happens, the choppy looking fringe of his hair falls over his face.

Holy shit… You cannot believe it, but he just passed out.

His heavy breathing immediately starts to relax.

Whether he was lying or not when he said he wasn’t going to hurt you and that he was also going to let you go, you have no idea, but it doesn’t matter. Seeing your chance, your arms begin pulling again. You twist and torque your wrists, working the ropes.

The sound of loud vibration startles you and you go stark still, your eyes darting to the kitchen table as your heartrate flies through the roof.

You can’t be sure, because it’s so dark, but you think there is a cell phone lying there next to the gun. Just as you start to wriggle your wrists again, the phone vibrates again and at the same time, he lets out an annoyed sounding grumble. “Leave me alone, Klaus.”

Klaus?

The third time the phone buzzes, his upper leg moves over, locking down over one of yours.

You close your eyes, willing your mind to take you anywhere but here.

Stupid phone and fuck you Klaus person whoever you are.

“Don’t wake up the psycho, I am about to shiv his ass! ” your mind yells at the offending electronic device.

Not long later, the hand at your throat begins to move away, but as it retreats, your crazy cuddle buddy snuggles his body even closer to yours. This new intrusion on your personal space seems to make him happy enough at first, but then all of a sudden, he must decide that he is not warm enough. He reaches back and flips the bed spread over you both and in doing so, the cuff on his right arm pulls up and something catches your eye.

He has a tattoo on the underside of his wrist. It’s the silhouette of a black umbrella with a circle around it.

What the hell?

You’ve seen that symbol before. You were a little too young when the superhero kids that belonged to the infamous money mogul Sir Reginal Hargreeves were all the rage, but you have heard of them. They all supposedly disbanded when they came of age, and from what you remember hearing, one or two may have even died before that.

They all were born with different unimaginable powers and were often seen in public as children stepping in here or there during major emergencies to show off their extraordinary skills.

You’ve seen old posters with them, but none of their faces are coming back to you except the girl named Allison, and that is because she has been in the news over the years for different movies that she has been in.

They were all exactly the same age, and this guy looks like he could be ten years younger than her.

He can’t be one of them…

Can he?

Whether he’s one of them or not, just like with your date tonight, as soon as you get free, you are going to show this sorry sack that he may think he knows you and you are just going to lay here and let him treat you like his little play thing, but he got it all wrong.

He picked the wrong girl to fuck with.

If this loser was one of the Umbrella Academy kids, you haven’t seen any signs of his powers, which might be because you recall hearing that they all lost them at some point. If he is one of them, it appears he lost even more than that, and he is in luck because you are about to help him lose even more.

The rope painfully digs into your skin. You are so close. A few more twists and the ligaments holding your thumb together will slide, letting your bones pop out of place. Then you can grab his knife and it’s go time fucker.

Someone is getting a knife through the dick and it’s one hundred percent Mr. Umbrella Academy Tattoo!

The phone lets out another long buzzing sound then stops. He doesn’t say anything this time, but the disturbance must have disturbed him again because you feel his hand slowly start surveying your upper leg, his fingers gently tracing a line northward.

You begin to struggle. Your nasally whines of protest have him swiftly changing course, instead clamping that same hand at your waist. He pulls you closer as he presses his face against your neck.

“I am sorry, Dolores…” he whispers.

He is so close. Everything suddenly feels very hot.

His lips part then they start feather lightly, sweep along the coating of moisture he’s creating on your skin. When the heat of his pelvis moves tight against your hip, you are shocked that he isn’t hard again over violating you.

This guy doesn’t make any sense. You thought that was part of the whole thing he was into, but when he popped a woody from touching your face and neck, as soon as he noticed it was happening, he took off like he was scared shitless.

Maybe right now he is just not recovered enough from his last weirdo whack session or...

Is it possible that he really doesn't want to hurt you. Maybe he wasn’t planning on it when he reached out like he did in the parking lot?

Maybe you had it all wrong in thinking that he was enjoying watching you nearly getting raped. He had clearly been doing something by way of enjoying himself prior to sprinting out into the parking lot, but…

All of a sudden, it dawns on you that he actually looked very upset by what he saw happen. He sounded very upset by it. It was like he was so distressed by it that he ran down there planning to do something about it.

He looked like he wasn’t expecting you to be there. He actually seemed very confused by it.

Was he coming after your date?

At the moment, you didn’t see all that, but now…

Well…

What the fuck?

He is obviously very messed up, but maybe not in messed-up in the ‘I’m going to violently rape you and murder you’ kind of way.

He did abduct you, but he just said he was going to let you go. He said that he was going to leave.

For some bizarre reason, he seems to be very in love with his mannequin and you are almost certain that right now he thinks you are her. He is so delusional; he probably can’t even tell the difference.

Again, your feet dig down into his mattress as he nuzzles your neck and makes one of those super soft whimpering noises.

This does not feel like he’s trying to hurt you. It feels like he is trying to do something else entirely.

Something is not adding up other than he is most certainly off his rocker.

He said that he has done the worst things a human can do, and you have no idea what he meant by that, but when he could have raped you while you were out or even now, he didn’t. Besides tying you up, the things he was doing before taking off to take care of his boner problem were all in an effort to help you.

Add all this up and what he said about letting the devil own him, may not have been implying what you originally thought. The more you think about it, it seems like he could have been talking about killing himself, not giving in to raping and killing you.

You can’t see his entire face, but you can tell that his eyes are still pinched shut and it’s in such a way that looks so miserable.

You have no idea what is going on with the guy but it’s clear that something is very wrong with him, and it’s not just that he is mega wasted.

As your mind is putting all this together, he lets out a throaty sound that almost sounds like a sob before he begins placing soft kisses along your bruised neck while vibrating his next words across your skin. “Please don’t leave me.”

His hand at the narrowest part of your waist slips under you, tenderly massaging circles against your lower back. His warm fingers very subtly dig in as if he’s trying to comfort you.

You can’t help it when a similar sounding whine comes out of you as your heels dig in across the bedding again.

He is all over you and not in the hurtful kind of way.

This is not what you’d expect from a sexual sadist who gets their jollies off torturing people.

As he kisses just below your ear in that very sensitive space that makes your toes curl, he does so like he has done this maneuver about a million times, and he lets out the most contented sounding sigh when your body involuntarily shudders from it. This has got you starting to think that you may have read this crazy perv all wrong.

He’s a perv but maybe not the type you thought.

What he’s doing is so unbelievably tender and loving that it has you trembling from head to toe and incidentally not just from fear.

“Dolores, please forgive me.”

Again, he’s not talking to you, that much is very clear.

After saying that, he stops with the kisses, his body motionless as he clings to you like his life depends on it.

After a few minutes of nothing but the sound of his steady breathing, you know that he is fully out again.

To the feel of his chest rising and falling against your side, you start to work your wrists free again.

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

Thanks for reading.

Link to Chapter four

Master List Post to my Five Centric Stories and Art

KayBreezy | Archive of Our Own

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mariacallous · 1 month ago

Text

When Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano resigned over a sex scandal on Sept. 6, Alessandro Giuli was appointed in his place. Giuli had very little experience in politics, but like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in his youth, he was a member of a neofascist party called the Italian Social Movement. Soon after her election, Meloni appointed him as the director of MAXXI, an important museum in Rome.

In a way, Giuli was part of Meloni’s vision years before she appointed him as a minister. She has long considered him one of the most suitable candidates to carry out a project that she cares about: building right-wing cultural hegemony.

Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to explain why the worker’s revolution that Karl Marx predicted had not yet happened. He theorized that it was because the ruling class controlled social institutions—from schools to the media—and used them to spread its ideologies, shaping the population’s belief system and, thus, its actions. In other words, controlling culture meant controlling political and social outcomes.

Meloni is not a communist, but she is convinced that the Italian left has succeeded, since the end of World War II, in dominating cultural institutions, such as the arts and academia, creating a situation which she has described as “power hegemony” against the right. Now that she’s in power, she’s determined to reverse that imbalance.

Giuli couldn’t agree more—and he’s turning to Gramsci for a road map. In a book that he published in May, aptly titled “Gramsci è vivo” (Gramsci Lives), he outlined his vision: “Today, especially on the right, there’s the mother of all battles: shifting from a mentality of exclusion toward a mentality of System, which means perceiving oneself as a ruling class with a vision, a perspective of society.”

What he was trying to argue in the book is that the right, which until recently was excluded by polite society in general—and more specifically, in the realm of culture—must embrace Gramsci’s vision of cultural hegemony. In other words, to become a true ruling class, you cannot rely on political power alone; you need to establish a dominant narrative to maintain consensus through a system of shared values and take hold of cultural institutions, something that the left has traditionally been better at.

The Italian right’s fascination with Gramsci is not an isolated case: Other European right-wing groups have taken inspiration from the communist philosopher as well. Martin Sellner, an Austrian who is a prominent figure among the German-speaking far right, cited Gramsci in his book Regime Change from the Right: A Strategic Sketch. Among the right-wing admirers of Gramsci outside of Europe, there are former White House strategist Steve Bannon and Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian conservative ideologue who died in 2022.

But what sets Meloni apart is that she has both the vision and the power to make it happen.

The first right-wing thinker to appropriate the communist philosopher was the French philosopher Alain de Benoist, who did so in the mid-1970s. According to Francesco Germinario, a historian at the Luigi Micheletti Foundation who specializes in researching the far right, de Benoist decontextualized Gramsci and stripped him of his Marxism, focusing solely on the idea of cultural hegemony and the importance of winning battles on the cultural front to gain power.

This reinterpretation is particularly successful in postwar Italy, where the right—still licking its wounds—found itself marginalized and embraced a defensive, victim mentality: “Since the postwar period, the right has mainly tried to defend itself,” Germinario said.

Then, when Italy’s left underwent an identity crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, the right found itself in the position to counterattack, but it hadn’t developed the intellectual ammunition. And so, “Lacking its own points of references, the right looked for cultural inspiration from the left,” Germinario added.

To be fair, the perception that the left ever exercised total cultural hegemony in Italy is mostly false. The Christian Democrats, the centrist but socially conservative Catholic party that ruled the country between 1948 and 1992, did hold a strong grip on some cultural institutions, especially schools and television. And the Communist Party maintained a strong influence on book publishing and cinema.

Yet at the same time, right-wing politician Silvio Berlusconi, who ruled as prime minister on and off between 1994 and 2011, notoriously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over television. Even so, he did not exercise his power on other cultural realms, despite the fact that he owned two major book publishing houses (one of which, Einaudi, leans strongly to the left).

Berlusconi wasn’t interested in high-brow culture and never made a secret of it: “He had an utilitarian conception of culture—he understood ahead of his times the crisis of newspapers and of a world of intellectuals linked to newspapers,” said Giorgio Caravale, professor of modern history at Roma Tre University and the author of the book Senza Intellettuali (Without Intellectuals). “To Berlusconi, it was all about TV,” Caravale added. “He cared more about what showmen were saying in front of the camera than about hundreds of op-eds in newspapers.”

In Italy, television has a central role. After World War II, it contributed to the country’s literacy and spreading Italian (as opposed to regional dialects) as a shared language. Italy has an older population that mostly relies on TV as its main source of information and entertainment. Newspaper and book readership is low, compared to other highly developed nations.

Meloni’s right has a different approach. “When she came to power, she thought: We must do what Berlusconi has not done in 20 years: Invest in culture and take it back from the left,” Caravale said. When she became prime minister in 2022, she allocated most of the cultural positions to trusted people, many of whom had a past in the Italian Social Movement (MSI).

Giuli’s predecessor, Sangiuliano, also came from the MSI. In an interview with the New York Review of Books, he also expressed his intention to overturn what he perceived as a cultural hegemony of the left, saying, “The radical-chic spirit of certain Roman salons tried to transform culture in Italy into something that spoke only to a small circle.” Sangiuliano added that he hoped to give “the national cultural panorama a wider horizon.”

Sangiuliano made a point of weaponizing literature. He has tried to reinterpret Dante Alighieri as an icon of the Italian right and produced a much publicized exhibit in Rome dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, an author particularly beloved by the post-fascist right in Italy. (Between the 1970s and 1990s, the MSI hosted youth camps called “Campo Hobbit”). He also relished announcing the planned creation of new museums, such as a museum of the Italian language, a museum of the Italian culture, and a “museum of the foibe,” to remember the war crimes of Yugoslav partisans during World War II. None of the museums has actually been built.

Meloni has also appointed another former MSI member, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to be the president of the Biennale di Venezia—the influential institution that oversees Venice’s glamorous film festival as well as the city’s renowned architecture and art festivals. Buttafuoco is a famous journalist and novelist who is well known for his ultraconservative views.

Meloni’s government has been particularly active in shaping the culture of Italy’s state TV network, or RAI, to the point that in the past few years, it has been dubbed by critics as “Tele-Meloni.” The effort is more aggressive than in Berlusconi’s era and, despite her success, Meloni seems scared that someone might speak badly of her. As a result, the bad news is often censored and the good news celebrated—even if it’s only a pro-Meloni headline in a foreign newspaper.

RAI’s general director, Giampaolo Rossi, is also a former MSI activist, hailing from the same party chapter where Meloni started her political career as a teenager in the Roman neighborhood of Colle Oppio. Under Rossi’s leadership, RAI has produced and aired many historical miniseries, including one glorifying the occupation of the Croatian city of Rijeka by Italian nationalists and another about the last weeks of the fascist regime in 1943.

The moment where Meloni’s grip on RAI became most apparent can be pinpointed. In April, Antonio Scurati, a renowned progressive author best known for writing M,—the monumental, and highly critical, fictionalized biography of Mussolini that has inspired the Sky TV series of the same name—was scheduled to perform a monologue on the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism, on April 25. But it was canceled at the last minute—for “editorial reasons,” according to an internal communication from RAI that was leaked to the press—possibly because Scurati’s speech included criticism of Meloni, whom the author accused of belittling the historical significance of anti-fascist resistance.

Meloni’s efforts to establish cultural influence stem not only from ideology, but also out of necessity. As the head of government, Meloni finds herself in the unfortunate position of having to push policies that clash with the wishes of her voters in order to maintain good relations with Europe. In foreign policy, she had to side with Ukraine, despite her base being pro-Russian; on the economy, she had to cut spending on health care and local government funding, a highly unpopular move among her base.

This has put Meloni in a vulnerable position. Unlike Berlusconi, she does not own a media empire that would defend her image no matter what. In this situation, appointing loyalists in key media and cultural positions is necessary to ensure positive coverage.

The fact that Meloni has a clear vision on the need to establish cultural hegemony and is actively pursuing it doesn’t mean that she will succeed. Some critics argue that despite the eagerness, the right’s influence over culture is still thin: “Meloni and the Brothers of Italy [her political party] seem more interested in occupying positions of power than in creating a real cultural hegemony,” said Mario Ricciardi, a columnist for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto.

Meloni’s policies have been often described as right-wing at home and moderate in the international arena. Domestically, she has passed a law that cracks down on protest and strikes, but her foreign policy has been friendly toward the United States and the EU.

When it comes to ideology, she’s hard to pin down: While she has voiced some fascination with nostalgic, identitarian ideas—such as clear gender roles and the Christian roots of European culture—she can hardly be described as a Russian President Vladimir Putin or a Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Ricciardi argued that Meloni has, for the moment, failed to build a coherent worldview: “She has a clear idea of who are the enemies—the left and the so-called radical chic; she is attached to the idea of a motherland; but besides this, it’s all too vague to even try to appeal to citizens.”

To push an ideology, Ricciardi said, you first need to build one: “Eventually, to have a consensus, you have to put down roots.”

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