#normalise the outrageous

[verschlimmbesserung]

[anetherealpoetess]

funny how the outrage around pairings like haladriel or other heroine x villain relationships highlights society's striking hypocrisy toward women and boundaries.

we live in a world that has normalised the transgression of women's boundaries. yet, when women express enjoyment of stories that explore any sort of boundary crossing, we are vilified--branded as immoral, accused of romanticising abuse, and further condemned.

the double standard is clear: women's boundaries can be transgressed in real life with little to no drama, and fandoms that are prominently male can enjoy transgressive stories with little to no drama, but when women enjoy transgressive fiction, it suddenly becomes unacceptable.

so, you see, the issue isn't the act of transgression itself; it's women deriving enjoyment from it, a privilege the world wants to reserve only for men.

[gendiebrainrotreceipts]

Presented without comment 🫥

They do realise that the intention of pride was to normalise homosexuality? Not to show off your extreme and weird fetishes? It’s almost like homosexuality is too vanilla for them now, they just wanna be as edgy and outrageous as possible. Who cares about how this will hurt gay people in the long run ig

[envolvenuances]

"The real issue was never Lily Phillips, the woman at the centre of this. It’s the men who participate, consume, and profit from this.

Many have asked why a woman would do this while avoiding the responsibility for the culture they have helped create. And now many are now speculating as to the mental health of Lily, but still refusing to look at the platforms like OnlyFans who created this culture and profit from it’s ‘creators’.

With the sentencing of Gisèle Pelicot’s accused just a week away, the unsettling image of men queuing up resurfacing in this film, draws a disturbing parallel to another story of exploitation. Whether it’s the men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot or those lining up to participate in Lily Phillips’ controversial challenge, the common thread is a culture that normalises the objectification of women while shielding the men who exploit it.

These aren’t nameless, faceless monsters; they are "ordinary" men from all walks of life who justify their actions, deflect accountability, and rely on societal narratives that too often shift the focus onto the women involved. What drives so many to step forward, unhesitating, to participate in harm? And why is our outrage so rarely directed at them?

It's easy to focus on Lily, viewing her as the protagonist of her own objectification. However, in doing so, we miss the larger, more complex issues: the commodification of women’s bodies, the men who control platforms like OnlyFans and fuel the pornification of women, and the toxic demand that drives their exploitation.

This documentary should not be a spectacle of Lily Phillips, but a deeper exploration of the structures men created that enable such behaviour. Until we shift the conversation from individual women to the broader systemic forces, real change will remain elusive. Until we confront the men in these queues who drive this system, women will continue to be caught in an exploitative cycle with no way out.”

[rollerska8er]

This is kinda old news at this point but I can't stress enough how weird people were about Aabria Iyengar in the first season of Misfits and Magic.

To wit: There is a scene, which was made into a YouTube Shorts clip, in which Brennan Lee Mulligan's player character, Evan Kelmp, is overheard by another character who says "Hey, I can hear you!" Brennan, as Evan, responds "No, no you didn't." To which Aabria, in character as the NPC, responds "You know what we aren't gonna do? I'll whoop your ass. You're not gonna gaslight me." It's a funny scene and played off well by Brennan who is clearly blindsided by Aabria's response (which, again, is in-character).

There is no way to describe the reaction to this moment other than "bizarrely racist". The comments on the YouTube Short paint a picture of Aabria as a crazy person who is unnecessarily aggressive to poor sweet Brennan, just because he said no, the poor lamb. These people read Aabria's in-character reaction to Brennan's joking, in-character refusal to yes-and as an actual accusation of gaslighting from Aabria to Brennan.

People then go on to be outraged that she refused Brennan a deception check (which he did not ask for, and also isn't really possible in the narrative-driven system they're playing because guess what, not all TTRPGs are D&D). The implication is that Aabria is a nasty, unnecessarily aggressive GM who creates an uncomfortable, abusive and oppressive atmosphere around her table.

Except, of course, this isn't what is happening in the clip at all. Aabria is smiling throughout, as is Brennan. Nobody is visibly uncomfortable. Brennan's character becomes flustered by the interaction, but he is supposed to be socially awkward. Did any of these armchair critics bother to learn the context for the scene before making a snap judgement about the GM? Of course not.

Why do I make the racism accusation? Well, because Brennan has also been known to react to PCs goofing around with the same kind of stern, in-character finger-wagging. See Emily Axford-as-Fig's interactions with Goldenhoard and other authority figures, for example.

Were the roles reversed, and Aabria tried to blatantly lie her way out of an interaction with one of Brennan's NPCs only to be told, in-character, "You're not gonna lie to me", I have a feeling the reaction would not be quite as strongly negative.

It is impossible to read the reactions casual viewers had to this moment as anything but specifically racist and misogynist. These people saw a black woman even in roleplay assert a boundary and concluded that she was being aggressive to a white male player for no reason.

I'm just thinking about this now as the second season of Misfits and Magic is currently being released. Of course, it's clear that Brennan and Aabria are good friends and have GMed for each other on and off camera. But I just keep thinking about how fucking uncharitable people were to Aabria two years ago and it does really concern me how normalised this is in TTRPG spaces.

I hope the production team are taking steps to care for their talent because honestly, a small but vocal minority of D20 fans and quite a lot of wider casual actual play fans can be really fucking horrible at times.

[lecruee]

i hate reposting tiktoks on here but i came across this and genuinely it ruined my day. she’s basically gleeful at the fact that he could have rendered her reproductive system entirely dysfunctional.

the comments are even worse, first screenshot are the top comments:

this is what pornography does. this is what the normalisation of “kink” does. these are the same type of injuries that rape victims sustain. if in any other capacity a man hurt his partner so badly she had to get emergency surgery (e.g. domestic violence) people would be outraged. genuinely i couldn’t only find a few sane comments in the sea of men and women joking and laughing about this.

this is exactly what liberal feminism loves!! i wish i could articulate myself better but i’m completely floored. 1 million + likes btw!!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Hamas appears to have three goals corresponding to the short, medium and long term. In the short term, Hamas appears to have taken over 150 Israelis captive, and reports suggest around three quarters of those are military or security personnel. These hostages, Hamas hopes, will act as a shield against Israeli counterattacks and a bargaining chip to be traded for some of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails and in the ongoing neverending negotiations over the blockade on Gaza. In the medium term Hamas hopes to intervene politically in Israel, both domestically and within its surrounding network of relations with Arab states. Netanyahu’s bluster has correctly been judged to be lying on shaky foundations – his civil power grab has deeply polarised Zionist opinion both within Israel and internationally, and his alliance with far right provocateurs has not been universally welcomed. In fact that alliance may well become untenable now that Israel has suffered serious military losses while its troops were off chaperoning a bunch of fascist goons. There are echoes here of the 2006 attack on Lebanon when Israel found to its cost that soldiers accustomed to brutalising teenagers in the West Bank were less impressive when up against a rooted, disciplined and equipped resistance militia. Moreover, part of Netanyahu’s domestic political appeal within Israel is the promise of the so-called Abraham Accords, treaties normalising diplomatic and trade relations with the Israeli state signed so far by UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – but not, as yet, Saudi Arabia. This process had already been overshadowed by China’s surprise intervention earlier this year in brokering a treaty between Saudi and Iran to end the war in Yemen. And the reactions of the Gulf states have been noticeably cooler towards Israel than one might have expected. These peace treaties, for what they are worth, now seem dead in the water. But it’s the third long-term goal of Hamas’s intervention that is the most important. The ongoing and seemingly neverending humiliation of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel has been responded to. Hamas statements at the outset of the conflict, relayed on Al-Jazeera English (which has been invaluable – no wonder Israeli snipers murdered Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year), emphasised that this was a general call for Palestinian resistance, and invited other groups and factions to join. This echoes Hamas’s earlier, much smaller, rocket attack on Israel in May 2021, which came in response to Israeli police outrages at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. As with this time, Israel was caught off guard when Hamas retaliated: its assumption had been that al-Aqsa was not in Gaza, therefore Hamas would not strike back. What we saw that year, flickering briefly, was a three-pronged Palestinian resistance movement comprising Hamas in Gaza (which has an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim population), assorted militant groups in the West Bank, as well as Palestinians within Israel’s borders itself, who organised and delivered a one-day general strike. These glimmers of a new Palestinian resistance movement come as the old order, represented by Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas are despised, discredited and in their senescence. They have at best proved impotent at protecting Palestinians in the West Bank and at worst actively collaborated with the Israeli occupation. A new Palestinian resistance movement will need a new leadership, and Hamas are positioning themselves at the head of that.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“I read my colleague Hadley Freeman’s column in The Sunday Times this weekend in a growing state of shock. Hadley described how, on three occasions, a man had choked her in bed. I then read the section in Escape, the book she references, written by another journalist, Marie Le Conte. Le Conte writes that choking during sex was “mainstream” among those under 40. “If I were to rank it,” says Le Conte, “I would say it sits somewhere around the light spanking mark . . . not so out of the ordinary that you would mention it to someone.”

Readers around my age, 58, will appreciate how I felt. Never mind incorporating strangulation into sex, we belong to a generation where the “light spanking” Le Conte references is itself regarded as a bit weird, a bit pervy, a bit “why would you want to hit someone, or be hit by someone, in bed?” As regards throttling a partner, a phrase I am shocked to find myself writing, that belongs in my mind to the realm of bullies, abusers, thugs, misogynists, rapists. Very niche. Very sinister. Very illegal.

I would regard even pretending to strangle a partner as an outrage. If a male friend told me such behaviour turned him on, that friendship would end. If I contemplated doing it myself, I’d get therapy. And let’s be clear, the choking under discussion, which a study last year found almost 60 per cent of female students in the US had experienced, does not refer to play-acting, but actual hands round the throat, pressure on the windpipe, possible-loss-of-consciousness suffocation. WTF?

When I got to work yesterday morning three younger female colleagues — in their forties, thirties and twenties respectively — confirmed how widespread the practice is. I suppose when Men’s Health carries idiotic articles headlined “how to do choking safely, according to experts” I should have known asphyxiation-as-foreplay had become, if a long way from normal, then at least normalised. All three women said they had encountered it, along with being slapped, hair-pulled and spat on (eh?!) by male partners. None had welcomed any of these actions.

I should emphasise that these were not super-traumatic encounters with evil psychos, but otherwise consensual acts with otherwise normal blokes. Not pleasurable in any way, but not, I gathered, a massive deal either, such is the extent to which formerly minority, hardcore aberrations have entered the everyday bedroom experience.

The youngest colleague told me several of her female friends did enjoy the experience. I’m sceptical about that. I fail to see how partial suffocation by someone physically stronger, someone you don’t necessarily know well, with no help at hand, can be anything other than terrifying. I find it more likely that some young women, not yet fully confident, have been persuaded that being choked is not only not weird, but now a standard aspect of sex to which they ought to submit. Human beings are hard-wired for self-preservation: oxygen deprivation is something we desperately strive to avoid, not embrace. I’m in no doubt that the vast majority of women subjected to choking do not like it, to put it mildly.

What shocks me is why men, so-called normal men who aren’t sadists who ought to be locked up, would want to strangle their lover in the first place. Of course the easy answer is the malign influence of protracted youthful exposure to pornography. Such exposure has, it is argued, normalised sexual behaviour previously thought extreme. And yet it is possible to view porn without going anywhere near clips of men choking women.

A correctly socialised teenage boy in receipt of the correct moral guidance would shut down such content in a cold sweat should his cursor so much as inadvertently hover over a link. Yet evidently lots of boys and young men blithely consume the dodgy stuff, presumably not knowing it is dodgy. They then expect to mimic it when their sex lives begin to encompass people other than themselves.

Therefore, older people, parents, specifically fathers, are not doing their job properly. Shame on them. They should be telling their sons that all sexual violence is despicable, full stop. We’re not in groovy, liberal, “each to their own” territory here. We’re not talking dress-up or role play. We’re talking about actions which are at best distressing and degrading, and at worst deadly. This behaviour should not be up for discussion. It’s just plain wrong.”

[ssaalexblake]

So i follow this woman's sports team okay, and a couple of years ago a woman on the team blew the whistle that the coach was very abusive in private when he got the athletes he decided he didn't like alone. There were also other signs that would have been publicly noticeable as well, but not necessarily things that people Not educated on very specific red flags would notice as red flags bc they're very normalised (especially in men) in society as Just Things Men Do.

And a situation was created where the coach was an upstanding, great man to half the team and an abuser to the other half. Naturally, when the allegations hit the press, the people whom he was kind, supportive and a brilliant person to were outraged that this good man was being slandered in the press by some teammate's deciding to lie and ruin his life.

Meanwhile, the ones who were his victims are. Well. Left to deal with that response.

And it's driven me up the wall since right, because the coach was ditched (as he should have been) and since then i've not seen his name mentioned for a Long time, but you see people being awful and horrifying to these girls who never named themselves as a victim on a weekly basis, sometimes a daily basis in some circles. Not even just the ones who spoke in his defence. Just if you happened to exist on the team coached by an abuser and not state definitively that you were a victim, you've now a couple years down the line become more of a pariah than the actual abuser. And Yikes. Because it was very much indicated by the whistleblower that there Were other victims on said team at the time, it's just nobody knows who.

And look, where this post is leading is me saying that you all Need to stop letting these abusers manipulate you into thinking You're the terrible one because they Deliberately Groomed you to like them in such a situation where somebody reported the abuse.

These people groom their own defenders as well, they groom bystanders by being nice as pie, so when the victims come forward it discredits the allegations. It's not Passive. They do it on purpose. They are manipulating people into thinking they're kind as a shield that will take most of the heat instead of them if it ever gets out. They have no Actual care for the people they didn't abuse, they don't help them after They take the heat for them, they're just tools.

Now, a few of the women on that team Did say awful things in defence of their coach, that shouldn't be excused, but That is when they started being bad, not before when they just happened to like their coach. But i think people could use a real refresher course on what the concept of grooming actually is because so many people seem to view it as Only an abuser grooming a victim when that's very reductive.

There will have been other girls on that team who were groomed to defend him that Didn't. Which is to say, you can like somebody for how they choose to make themselves out to be and then just Stop doing that when it becomes obvious it was a lie, and all that happened was some shitty ass abuser manipulated you into liking them, which is of no fault of your own.

This is to say, sometimes you will find out somebody you like is actually just a shitbag, or maybe even a monster. Maybe, instead of immediately crucifying yourself over liking them, ask instead whether they deliberately and maliciously manipulated you into liking them before trying to infer if you have some gross character flaw instead of them.

You can only judge somebody by what they show you.

This is very much bread and butter behaviour for abusers. And while you Can go on to be terrible (like some of the girls above and what they said), the baseline fact that an abuser duped you does not make you a bad person or reflect on you in any way at All. Be far more weary of how you choose to react to it.

[verschlimmbesserung]

[fanfiction-artist-prototype]

Apparently Elon Musk wants to donate the largest political donation ever in UK history to Nigel Farage (apparently it'd work out around £78 million) and quite frankly, I hope someone fucking steals it. I hope it bankrupts twitter - since he legally can't give it to him as a person and would have to do it through the British branch of twitter- even more and that Farage and his slimy twat cronies do a switch-aroo and rob him fucking blind. They've already admitted that they had to have family and friends run for them last minute because they were so under-fucking-prepared in the general election; I so SO hope they continue to be that unprepared about everything.

Farage is an utter disgrace to politics, his party stands for nothing but the opening of a door for white supremacist groups to be normalised - especially since he's had to say before that some of his fellow party members OUTRAGEOUS claims are just 'normal down the pub' opinions when speaking about how a party member believed the UK shouldn't have fought AGAINST Hitler! Like wow, like of course Musk is a twat of epic proportions but he really wants to start putting his grubby little right wing fingers in all the international pies doesn't he? He's not content helping fuck up the country HE lives in, he has to try and fuck everyone else up as well.

[mariacallous]

The sun shone brightly on 6 January 2021. The birds chirped, children frolicked and thousands of unarmed patriots gathered peacefully in Washington DC for a “day of love”. It was a beautiful gathering in support of US democracy. In the words of incoming president Donald Trump, “nothing done wrong at all”.

Perhaps that’s not quite how you remember the scenes of violent mobs storming the Capitol that were broadcast around the world four years ago. Perhaps that’s not how you, personally, would characterise an event in which more than 140 police officers were viciously assaulted and four people died; a furious riot in which crowds chanted “hang Mike Pence” and set up a makeshift gallows. But it’s certainly how a significant number of people seem to remember it: 6 January seems to have been alarmingly normalised – a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published last year found about seven in 10 Republicans think too much fuss is being made about the event and that it is “time to move on”.

Other polls also show that, as the years go by, Republicans are less likely to believe 6 January participants were “mostly violent” and that Trump bears responsibility for the attack. A collective amnesia appears to have set in. Across large swathes of the US, a brazen coup d’etat seems to have been successfully recharacterised as a protest that just went a teeny bit awry.

To be clear: when I say “coup” I’m not talking solely about the events that unfurled on 6 January. One of the key reasons, I suspect, that Trump’s insurrection attempt is not taken as seriously as it should be in some quarters is that still, there is too much focus on the riot itself, rather than the broader scheme that it was part of. And the riot, while violent, can easily be characterised as a haphazard, almost absurd, affair. One of the poster boys of 6 January, after all, was Jacob Chansley, AKA QAnon Shaman, who ran through the US Senate chamber sporting a horned headdress, face paint, and a bare chest. (After being arrested he also famously demanded an all-organic diet in prison.) It’s tempting to look at him and think: “bunch of weirdos who got out of control”, rather than “complex insurrection attempt”. But, again, the riot at the Capitol wasn’t the coup attempt: it was just one part (albeit the most dramatic part) of a broader campaign by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election via misinformation, intimidation and a number of complicated legal manoeuvres. Rather than being spontaneous chaos, 6 January was part of a calculated plan.

The seeds for the coup, you could argue, were planted the moment Trump won the 2016 election, when he insisted (with zero proof) that he would also have won the popular vote were it not for people voting “illegally”. Trump continued to baselessly warn of voter fraud throughout his presidency, reinforcing the idea in his supporters’ minds that his enemies were intent on undermining him. When Trump did lose the 2020 election, he immediately cried foul and complained that the election had been stolen. Then the more serious shenanigans began: according to a New York Times analysis, Trump put pressure on state and government officials to overturn the election results in more than 30 phone calls or meetings, starting in mid-November. He also memorably asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” 11,780 votes for him, and tried to persuade justice department officials to open investigations into election fraud.

While all this was going on, the “fake electors” strategy was unfurling. After the 2020 election, a group of 84 people in seven states won by Joe Biden signed false documents claiming to be electors for Trump. The idea seems to have been to create the illusion of a contested election so that on 6 January, the day a joint session of Congress was due to convene to formalise president-elect Biden’s victory, vice-president Pence would have an excuse to block Congress from recognising Biden as the winner, or to delay the ceremonial vote count.

As the critical date of 6 January approached, Trump started focusing his efforts on pressuring Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes for Biden and block congressional certification of Biden’s victory. On the morning of the 6th, when it seemed clear that Pence wasn’t going to play ball, Trump upped the intimidation tactics by urging his supporters to converge on the Capitol building. As the riots got under way, Trump kept tweeting, suggesting Pence was a coward who “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country”.

The rioting delayed the certification process, but Trump didn’t quite pull off his coup that day. At around 8pm, the Capitol was secure and the Senate reconvened. Pence returned to the dais, saying: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win.”

That may have been true in the moment. But four years later, it’s hard to agree with Pence’s assessment. Trump’s insurrection attempt has not touched him politically: he’s now the (legitimate) winner of not just the electoral college, but the popular vote. Meanwhile, many of the “fake electors” from 2020 were nominated by state Republican parties to serve again as Republican party presidential electors last year. As for the rioters? While about 1,400 people were charged with felony or misdemeanor crimes for their alleged roles in the 6 January attack, Trump and his allies have recast them as martyrs who were unfairly persecuted. Many of the insurrectionists are now anticipating pardons. Some have even asked courts for permission to return to Washington on 20 January to attend the inauguration of president-elect Trump.

Not only have the insurrectionists seemingly won, the “big lie” persists. On the 2024 campaign trail, incoming vice-president JD Vance repeatedly refused to say whether or not Trump had lost the 2020 election. Nor is the idea that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him the only lie to stubbornly endure. The moment that the riots kicked off, very deliberate revisionism from certain media outlets and individuals began. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson used selective security video from the riots to portray it as a peaceful gathering that was, in Carlson’s words, “neither an insurrection nor deadly”. The violence that did occur, the likes of Fox News and uber-influential podcaster Joe Rogan insinuated, may have been instigated by leftwing activists, or been an FBI-led false flag designed to undermine Trump. Those conspiracy theories (or “alternative facts”) spread so successfully that, according to the Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released last January, 25% of Americans say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. Among Republicans, 34% said the FBI organised and encouraged the insurrection. And a full 39% of Americans who said Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organised and encouraged the 6 January attack.

Trump is a unique political talent. His shamelessness is a superpower that lets him get away with things lesser mortals could not. I’m not sure many other politicians could have pulled off a 6 January then gone on to reclaim power. (Jair Bolsonaro certainly failed.) Still, the way this has all panned out isn’t just about Trump’s talents: it’s all about misinformation and a fragmented media ecosystem. We may all exist on the same planet, but the way we see the world can be very easily manipulated. That has happened. That is happening. The 6 January coup drama happened four years ago, but it’s so much more than history – it also serves as a lesson for our future.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emma Graham-Harrison at The Guardian:

Israel’s defence minister has ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit, after Donald Trump suggested the US take over the territory and resettle its residents in other countries. A Hamas official attacked the proposal as a “declaration of intent to occupy” Gaza, as Egypt, which Trump named as a possible destination for Palestinians, launched an intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign to block it going further. Cairo’s envoys warned the US and its allies that it would resist any attempts to move Palestinians across the border, and said the plan threatened its decades-old peace deal with Israel, a template for later regional normalisation deals. Inside Israel, mainstream political reactions to Trump’s comments have ranged only on a spectrum of approval, from delighted celebration among the far right, to the opposition leader, Benny Gantz, saying Israel had “nothing to lose” from the proposal, and Yair Lapid describing the press conference as “good for the state of Israel”.

Their positions reflect popular opinion inside Israel. Eight out of 10 Jewish Israelis support Trump’s call for the “relocation” of Palestinians from Gaza, although only half think it is a practical proposal, according to a poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute. The only strong opposition to the plan came from a handful of politicians on the far left of Israel’s spectrum; some relatives of hostages still held in Gaza, who said they feared the project could derail the ceasefire deal; and some activists and journalists who echoed international warnings against ethnic cleansing. “If there were a true opposition in Israel, one with a conscience, a worldview and even some sort of plan for the future, it would’ve raised a loud warning: don’t drink Trump’s potion,” Gur Megiddo wrote in a column for Haaretz. “The idea of clearing an area of a specific ethnic group, even if it’s a bitter and ruthless enemy, is a concept that Jews – especially the sons of Holocaust survivors like Lapid and Gantz – must never support, no matter the circumstances.” The announcement by the defence minister, Israel Katz, of orders to the military to prepare air, sea and land options for Palestinians to leave Gaza appeared more political than practical, even if any wanted to go, because no countries have offered to host them. “The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration,” Katz said in a statement on X, although it was clear the journeys would only be in one direction. Before the war, Israel’s tight controls on movement in and out of Gaza made it difficult for Palestinians to travel internationally. Restrictions got even tighter after the conflict began; and after Israeli troops began operating near the Rafah crossing last May it was impossible for Palestinians to leave.

An agreement to allow medical evacuations from Gaza was part of the ceasefire deal, and the first group of sick children left on Saturday, although two died before they could be taken out and others had become too sick to move. Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” caused international outrage, including a warning from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing”. Forced or coerced displacement is a crime against humanity, illegal under the Geneva conventions, to which Israel and the US are signatories.

Israel Apartheid State Defence Minister Israel Katz tells the IOF to prepare ethnic cleansing plans for Palestinians to leave Gaza.

[sneezemonster15]

Okay yeah this. Gotta share this. So I love watching cute animal vids like all the other thousand people per square mile, and recently I stumbled onto this one. And of course it reminded me of them, like duh, look at them.

Also now look at the comments and how not so eerily similar they are to the dialogues that go on here. @teddywiththumbs is the op, owner of the cats.

Now just to be clear, yeah cats can be gay. Along with most other animal species. Homosexual behaviour and courtship has been widely documented across species. And yeah, there is the issue of anthropomorphism (the attribution of human-like qualities to animals) as well. But I just can't help but notice how people like the commenter simply don't see what they are actually responding to when they get offended with a woman, the owner of the cats, simply stating a fact about the cats she owns. They don't see it so they think they aren't being homophobic but they are.

This is a response that I am sure some of you will relate with.

Hahahaha. No seriously, this is the case isn't it?

Sometimes when I see these posts made by SNS fans here, and in spirit they read like the creation of bards of the yore who crooned graphic songs of eternal, fantastical love about two boys who once were and were made for each other.....and I wonder if the term shipping came from 'worshipping'? Maybe it did.. Heh.

They are talking about the love, the absolute spectacle of the romance of Sasuke and Naruto, aren't they? But all that is reduced to an outcome of the mental illnesses that plague these fujoshis and dirty lesbians. What this says is, this kind of bias doesn't exist just in fandoms, it is simply a reflection of the larger society, fandoms are made of the same people. This gives us a look at how people generally think of homosexuality, fandom is simply one of the many microcosms.

Hehehe accurate. Or friends, brothers, comrades, etc.

No seriously, just to see how quickly reactive people become when it comes to homosexuality, like what a potent trigger it is. How easy it is for people to be so upset at something that is simply natural, a fact of life. And this is just cats they are talking about, but how well it translates to other things...

Like the outrage, the desperate need to explain it away in a 'safe way'......they really harassed the op for talking about her own cats. Like no one even waited a second to google how it is possible for animals to be "gay", just like some fans here who could have saved a lot of trouble if only they had used the internet for things other than reading het smut.

What I am saying is, look how similar the narratives are. It doesn't matter if it's cats or humans, it's not about that. It's about ingrained homophobia. It doesn't say so much about cats and love, it says how uncomfortable it makes people to even consider normalising homosexuality, that seeing it so clearly portrayed or documented in media really triggers their prejudices so unquestioningly, so unerringly, so insidiously, so organically, that they don't realize what they are actually reacting to and how deeply biased they are. Good thing the op was quite insightful.

It really says a lot about people's attitudes and sublimated prejudices. The op knows homosexuality makes people deeply wary, feel deeply wronged, they feel as if they are entitled to their outrage. It results in reiterating the "natural order" of things and showing righteous indignation at what they think 'maligns' it. It is the same blueprint, settings may differ.

[maxdibert]

That poster is mistaken. While it was a more casually violent society in many ways than it is today, stripping someone naked in front of a crowd for a laugh was not a culturally acceptable thing to do in 1970s Britain. Boarding schools had earned a reputation for being hotbeds of sexual assault, but this was seen as abhorrent, not normalised. Bullying usually took more insidious forms - stealing possessions, false rumours, ostracism, othering. Not so much physical and especially not sexualised assault of the person - the most common physical act of bullying was flushing someone’s head down the toilet, and this was seen as a terrifying warning shot to anyone who’d stand up to the bullies, not an amusing daily occurance. Snape’s Worst Memory is a visceral shock to the system for your average British reader. I vividly remember my mum being outraged by it when the book came out. It was meant to be a gut punch, not your average 1970s Tuesday. James is not culturally recognisable to British people as the typical American ‘jock’ that ‘hazed’ and ‘pantsed’ kids so regularly that’s it seen as normal and teens find it funny. Those aren’t terms that exist here. He’s culturally recognisable to British people as the sort of upper class privately educated sociopath that ends up failing upwards until they’re running the country because they’re smooth talkers. Think David Cameron or Boris Johnson. In the UK in the 1970s a real life James would probably have to be more worried about people calling him gay if he stripped another boy in public.

Australia and the United States might be fellow Anglophone countries, but their cultural contexts are different and some of the responses to your post seem to be applying their own contexts or misapplying aspects of British authors they’ve read to excuse behaviour as ‘just British culture’. It absolutely was not.

Well, since they just implied in Greek that I can’t talk about class issues or do any global contextual analysis because I’m Spanish and Spaniards are colonizers, I’m not really taking it too seriously. In any case, since I wasn’t raised in a British context, I don’t feel I have the authority to speak about the situation in schools during that social context. Still, it sounded quite odd to me that it could be so normalized because, although bullying was common in certain contexts not too long ago, James and Sirius’s behavior reaches extremes that threaten the lives and physical integrity of their classmates. But, well, this person replied again, insisting that in Great Britain, it was normal at that time to sexually assault your classmates. I’m not going to argue, just in case they think I’m trying to bring back the Spanish Armada or something, you know?

[hana-ane]

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."

Apathy contributes to normalising horror. The lottery of being born or living in a safe environment shouldnt silence our outrage and condemnation of these mounting Israeli war crimes visited on a helpless trapped population. Our politicians are complicit but we shouldn't let these injustices go unspoken.

Speak up!

Don't accept horror!

Stand up for the helpless!

Help!

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