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butterflyinthewell · 4 years ago

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Important online safety message to minors.

I’m almost 40. I’ve seen some scary stuff online.

It’s a sad world that someone has to tell you to be more situationally aware of creeps, but I hope this advice helps you be safer online.

🗣

You don’t have to specify your age, but make sure it’s clearly known that you are a minor if an adult engages you online.

If it makes you more comfortable, you can put something on your profile like “I am a minor, 18+ please do not interact.” Add it to your posts too if you have room (it depends on the site). One unfortunate part of Web 2.0 social media is not everyone checks a profile before they retweet / reblog / share someone’s stuff.

If an adult keeps engaging with your stuff and you don’t want them to, it’s okay to block them.

Stay away from spaces adults have marked as nsfw, off-limits to minors or unsafe for minors. Chances are there is material in those spaces that you may not be ready for, or it will shock, offend, frighten, disgust and/or trigger you.

Some adults will pretend to be minors, and unfortunately I don’t know what kind of “tells” give away that they’re lying about their age, but I’m sure someone who knows more about that can reblog this and add that info.

Now, here’s what to do if a creepy adult starts creeping.

If their profile states they’re a MAP or NOMAP, block instantly. MAP / NOMAP means Minor Attracted Person / Non-Offending Minor Attracted Person. These people are pedophiles. Some of them identify themselves with the acronym PEAR or the pear emoji. 🍐 Be wary if you see this in someone’s profile info.

PEAR stands for Pro-Expression Anti-Repression. That’s something you apply to fiction, NOT reality. Fiction can be turned off, flicked off a screen, a book closed or otherwise disengaged from the moment someone doesn’t like it. Real life doesn’t work that way, and don’t trust anyone who claims it does.

It doesn’t matter if a MAP / NOMAP claims they’re getting “help” for their pedophilia or not, they should not be engaging you in any capacity.

If you engage them and discover they’re a MAP, disengage and block.

If an adult sends you anything that is sexually explicit, no matter the form, be it art, fanwork, videos, audio, roleplays, etc, screenshot it for evidence, block that person and tell someone you can trust.

Even nudity that is not sexual (this includes furry art with exposed genitals) should be treated as suspicious if an adult knows you’re a minor and still sends it to you despite being told you’re uncomfortable with it. They might be trying to desensitize you to the sight of nudity so they can show you more and more explicit stuff. Do as above; screenshot, block and report to someone you trust.

+ Part of the grooming process is the adult tries to reach you somewhere private, like DM’s or a messenger app and desensitize you to stimuli you would normally reject by exposing you little by little to it. Think of it as a twisted form of exposure therapy for phobias, but you don’t want this exposure. They want you to get curious and will up the ”intensity” of the explicit material.

The media itself existing is not the problem (unless the adult using it on you made it), the real problem is adult using it specifically to desensitize you into thinking that kind of stuff is okay in the real world. If an adult engages you, shows you media with questionable material in it and tries to tell you “see, it’s okay because it’s being done here” screenshot it, tell them fiction is not the real world and break off contact.

Most creeps stay hidden, so their blog may not contain a trace of anything weird, but when they engage you they send you all kinds of creepy adult stuff. An adult who is engaging you to groom you will use pretty much anything to try to make you think it’s normal and okay for them to do that to you. Remember always that it’s not. Remember the line between fiction and reality.

No adult should be sending a minor any pictures of naked people (or naked furry art with visible genitals) of any age no matter how innocent it seems!!!

If an adult sends you pictures or videos of themselves in their underwear, naked, showing their genitals or showing themselves doing sexually explicit stuff, screenshot the evidence, block them and report it to someone you trust.

If an adult asks you about sex toys or sends you info about them, that is really suspicious. Screencap, block and report to someone you trust.

If an adult asks you questions about your body, like what your hair ‘down there’ looks like, or how you’re developing, or if they ask if you touch your private parts, screenshot the evidence, block the adult and tell someone you trust.

If an adult asks you questions like “do you know what a (something sexual here) is?” or any questions that are sexually explicit or makes you uncomfortable, screenshot that crap, block them and tell someone you trust.

If you’re a creator and an adult tries to commission materials with nudity or sexually explicit stuff, refuse and tell them you’re a minor. If they persist, take screenshots, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult sends you violent or gory stuff and you don’t like it, demand that they stop and block them if they don’t. Screenshot anything they say if they keep doing it, and tell someone you trust.

If an adult demands you get on camera for them, do not do it. Screenshot the evidence, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult is threatening to reveal secrets you told them unless you do what they say(ie “send me a closeup of your private parts, or I’ll email all our chatlogs and your old naked photos to your whole school”). DON’T DO IT!! Screenshot the evidence, block them and tell someone you trust.

If an adult threatens to hurt themselves if you stop talking to them, stop talking to them anyway. This is especially true if they actually harm themselves and show you pictures or videos of it. That is a classic abuse tactic and it’s not your fault if they hurt themselves. Block them.

If an adult you blocked makes more accounts to keep contacting you, or starts showing up on other sites you visit trying to contact you, screenshot all the evidence and tell someone you trust.

If an adult (or anyone)tries to smear your name because you wouldn’t obey them, use any evidence you have against them in your defense and tell someone you trust about the situation.

If you run a blog talking about your abuse or experiences and an adult engages you to ask uncomfortable probing questions about the details of your trauma / abuse, be very suspicious and block them.

If an adult talks to you like you’re their special friend, or if they say you’re their very special friend, be very suspicious.

Acting like a sole source of kindness is one way an adult can groom a minor. They want you to feel like they are the only source of good that you can trust because they want you to gravitate more and more to them.

If you tell an adult you don’t like it when they swear while talking to you privately and they stop, but gradually start to do it again, be wary! An occasional oopsie slip or typo is one thing, but slipping in swear words when they know it makes you uncomfortable is suspicious. They may be testing your boundaries.

If an adult tries to set up an in person meeting, refuse it and talk to someone you trust about it.

If an adult (or anyone) tries to tell you that you should only trust them and nobody else, expects you to behave a certain way to be accepted, or if they act as if you’ve wronged them for trusting people other than them, that is a huge abuse warning sign. They are not safe to be around and you should break contact immediately.

If an adult compliments you in ways that makes you uncomfortable, break contact. A grown adult should not be telling a minor “you’re sexy” or “you’re hot.”

If an adult makes frequent comments about how mature and grown up they think you are, be suspicious.

If an adult learns you’re trans / non-binary and asks questions about your private parts or whether you plan to get surgery, be suspicious.

If an adult asks if you’re alone at home, say no even if you are.

If an adult asks if they can come visit you, say no.

If an adult asks for your phone number, don’t give it to them, no matter how nice or tempting they may be.

If an adult is making you uncomfortable in any way, it’s okay to block them and disengage.

Do not approach an adult with nsfw stuff you made. If they run across it in public on your blog that’s one thing. Sharing it with them in private can get both of you into trouble. Don’t do it.

🗣

Note: if you, a minor, did any of the above because you didn’t know better at the time, know that you are not a bad person. No adult should take advantage of your youth or innocence to hurt you.

🗣

To adults out there:

Do not approach minors with anything sexually explicit!!! This should not need to be said.

If you send something and find out they’re a minor after the fact, apologize and don’t do it again. If you think it’s proper to avoid any more private contact, do that. If you think breaking all contact period is proper, do that.

Make sure minors know you are over 18, whether it’s somewhere on your profile or tacked onto your posts. Something like “over 18, minors DNI” is helpful. I personally have my year of birth (1980) on my profile because that’s easier than changing a number every year.

You can’t prevent minors who fake their age to see naughty stuff from engaging with your stuff, but you can make it clear that you will not engage them back. And do not engage them. In fact, if you’re worried about that, block them when you discover them.

Private conversations with minors is okay, but make sure you tell them you’re not comfortable talking about something if they mention something sexually explicit. Even if it’s fandom related stuff, keep the conversation away from anything more than talking about characters dating or kissing or whatever.

If something you ship has an underage character, do not talk about it in private with a minor, not even if the character is aged up to adulthood.

Got nsfw stuff on your blog? Tag it that way.

I use “n s f w post” for stuff I want to show up in other related tags, “nsfw post” for reblogs, and “nudity” for nonsexual nudity like mermaids with bare chests or artistic nudes. Those tags are specifically for minors to blacklist or mute. (I don’t usually reblog nsfw artwork, but sometimes I post nsfw fanfics, create nsfw text posts or reblog nsfw text posts / fanfic. If I feel it’s nsfw, I tag it such even if most people don’t think it’s nsfw.)

If it’s fanfiction, I make sure the rating is listed and that it’s nsfw, and I try to warn for triggers as best I can.

If your blog or website features a lot of adult or violent content, mark it 18+ and tell minors to not interact.

If a minor approaches you and tells you a harmless secret, fine, keep it secret. You, the adult, should never approach a minor and tell them you will keep their secrets.

If a minor is expressing a desire to harm themselves or someone else, don’t keep that secret. Tell them to talk to someone they trust irl or put them in contact with a hotline or website where they can get help. Be supportive in talking them down from immediate harm, but do not become their therapist. (It’s tempting, you see a kid in trouble and want to help, but always be careful!)

If a minor tells you they’re being abused by an adult in their life, put them in contact a website or phone number where they can seek help. Be supportive and listen, but don’t become their therapist.

If you run a role play blog, state explicitly that you will not engage in nsfw rps with minors.

If you’re roleplaying with a minor and the story takes a nsfw turn, tell the minor you will not role play a sex scene with them no matter how much they want to. Either fade it to black with a time skip or bail out of the rp.

I say this because I forgot the age of someone I was rping with on AIM a long long loooong time ago and it got explicit, and they got in trouble with their parents for it. Their parents contacted me on AIM without their teen’s knowledge and reamed me out so hard I was scared for weeks. They were right to do so! I told them they were right, apologized profusely and swore to never rp with or speak to their teen on AIM ever again, and they agreed to those terms. I kept that promise. Any contact with that former rp partner was done in public, such as via deviantart comments or LiveJournal comments. It was a major learning experience for me and it stuck because this happened almost 20 years ago.

As an autistic adult I feel more like a kid with all kinds of adult knowledge and privileges (ie can gamble, drink, visit adult places) that most kids don’t have. I relate more to people who are younger than me, but that doesn’t give me the right to assume their level of knowledge or lived experience is equal to mine.

What I’m trying to say is always be aware of the age of the person you’re rping or speaking with!

Do not commission sexually explicit or violent stuff from creators who are minors.

Do not engage with a minor who sends you sexually explicit stuff. Tell them that’s inappropriate or you’re not comfortable with getting that from them.

It’s okay to agree with a minor that an adult celebrity or character they have a crush on is attractive or whatever, but if the celebrity / character is a minor or the minor talks about wanting to have sex with that character / celebrity, tell them that’s not an appropriate topic of conversation because of your ages.

This also applies to them sharing fanworks with you depicting explicit nsfw stuff. Deflect them and tell them it’s not appropriate due to your ages.

Do not ask minor for personal info like their school, phone number or address.

Don’t do any video chats with a minor unless they’re family or it’s a group thing like a Zoom event.

‼️ TAG YOUR STUFF APPOPRIATELY!! YES, EVEN STUFF YOU RESHARE!!

‼️ USE APPROPRIATE WARNINGS!! YES, EVEN STUFF YOU RESHARE!!

#online safety #grooming #abuse #safety #predatory behavior #antis #anti antis #pro shipping #purity culture #fanpol #online grooming #online predators #internet safety #internet grooming #web 2.0 #psa #signal boost #important #MAPS and minors should not interact because its too risky

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oscopelabs · 4 years ago

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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

#killing them softly #andrew dominik #andrew dominik film #brad pitt #Jackie Cogan #james gandolfini #richard jenkins #ray liotta #scoot mcnairy #ben mendelsohn #american cinematographer #financial crisis 2008 #independent film #beastie boys #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #musings

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populus-tremuloides · 4 years ago

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Hey I noticed you linked the BLM website in a post but can you tell your followers not to donate to the organization

The donation link the website has is secure act blue and secure act blue funds democratic campaigns

So for the past 7 years all that money they collected over $1 billion probably none of that has touched the black community

Hoo boy so while I agree with the gist of this ask, there’s some misleading info here:

ActBlue is not giving BLM donations to the DNC, and this claim has been debunked multiple times by reliable sources. However, the BLM Global Network Foundation has faced questioning and controversy this year thanks to their nonprofit partnerships and a lack of transparency. I always advocate for donating as small-scale and locally as you can. I’ll put the rest of this analysis (with sources linked) under a read more, since it’s LONG (but it took me forever to put together so pls read thx ❤️).

ActBlue is an online fundraising platform that is not explicitly related to the US Democratic Party, but which only funds left-leaning and progressive candidates and organizations. It’s a tech company. It earns money by functioning as this service, so yes, your donations help fund it. Organizations and candidates pay ActBlue a 3.95% processing fee for donations, but the rest of the money donated does go to the organization or specific candidate. ActBlue is also registered as a PAC (political action committee) which is a whole can of Political Worms I don’t want to open, but that means it has to report to the Federal Election Commission/the IRS which is a positive because it results in transparency of conduit funding.

So...96.05% of the money you donate through the BLM website SHOULD go to the BLM Foundation. It does NOT go to the DNC. The person who started this rumor (from a since-deleted Facebook post which led to a viral video) is a member of a Students for Trump organization, and other conservative pundits picked up on it and posted it. It just isn’t true, and has been debunked many times.

HOWEVER there’s still a problem. It’s hard to say where the money donated to the BLM site actually goes, and that issue is directly related to tax laws and nonprofit organization status in the US. There were questions and lawsuits about this earlier this year. There is an interesting loophole in ActBlue’s policy that states that “contributions...which are not cashed or affirmatively refused will be kept by ActBlue and used generally to support its social welfare activities”. In other words, ActBlue will keep money that is not cashed by the organizations within 60 days and use it to “generally support its social welfare activities”. No, I don’t know exactly what that means--it’s probably used by ActBlue for program costs, or is reallocated to its general fund (which gives grants to nominee funds, the Flip the Senate campaign, etc) but it does mean that money doesn’t go to those organizations, even if it was donated to them, if the organizations don’t claim it. Then, in a Reddit AMA in June, a BLM Foundation organizer provided less than satisfying information about where the money they fundraise goes. It’s difficult to find that info online thanks to the way nonprofits function within American tax law.

It’s important to note here that the BLM Foundation and BLM Global Network are not necessarily associated with individual community activist organizations, protests, or the general BLM social movement. There’s plenty of discourse on this you can research on your own if you want. Google is free.

What’s important here is that the BLM Foundation operates as a nonprofit with a “parent” charity. From 2016 to this year BLM worked with Thousand Currents, which “fundraises grassroots groups led by women, youth and Indigenous Peoples”. In July they switched to a “working relationship” with TIDES, which is a “philanthropic partner and nonprofit accelerator dedicated to building a world of shared prosperity and social justice”.

I’m not going to get into my personal feelings about large scale nonprofit organizations and the oxymoron of conscious capitalism (because organizations like this are essentially venture capitalists for nonprofits imo), but personally I think the larger and more decentralized the organization (or parent organization, in this case), the less effective your donation. More on that later.

Essentially though, Thousand Currents and TIDES are organizations that focus on fundraising and infrastructure and then fund smaller grassroots groups that might not have the infrastructure or foothold to do that for themselves. This is not uncommon in the nonprofit world. I work for a nonprofit that ran though a university foundation and an established local nonprofit for ten years before we got our 501(c)(3) designation and started functioning independently. It’s not abnormal that the BLM Foundation works with an organization like that, given BLM is pretty decentralized by design and is also a fairly new organization (2013/2014).

Thousand Currents and TIDES have 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. It can be difficult for smaller and newer nonprofits (as well as nonprofits that function outside of the US but which rely on donations from the US or other countries outside of where they’re headquartered) to gain that status, so they often work under a larger organization. 501(c)(3) status means financial records have to be made public, which means anyone can access the financial records for Thousand Currents and TIDES. You can also find tax filings for the BLM Foundation, but it’s less comprehensive (the most recent I could find was Form 990 from 2017, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place). Anyone can request tax documents from 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

This is getting complicated, right? Welcome to American tax law and nonprofit organizational hierarchies functioning under late stage capitalism. i’m not trying to throw the BLM Foundation under the bus here, because honestly this is just how it goes with a lot of organizations in the US. I don’t think it means you shouldn’t support them. But it gets pretty twisted up. Maybe you made a $20 donation to BLM back in July and now you’re wondering where the hell it went. Here’s the pipeline: your donation goes through ActBlue (which takes 3.95%, or .79 cents of your donation) to TIDES, which then directs that money to BLM. They know how much money is coming to them for BLM because ActBlue differentiates fundraising campaigns--the BLM money going to Thousand Currents or TIDES is separated from the funds coming to them for, say, CLIMA or the Farm to School Network . However, Thousand Currents and TIDES probably take a cut to support their operating costs, too. I couldn’t find data on this, so this is conjecture and I’m not sure how much--this statement is just based on knowing how nonprofits and fundraising usually work.

So, the money stream from you to BLM is like this: You------> ActBlue (takes a 3.95% cut) ------> Thousand Currents or TIDES (probably takes a cut, then directs the money to)------> BLM -----> Whatever BLM uses it for. Despite that strange loophole in ActBlue’s policy, Thousand Currents appeared to be claiming the donations and directing them to BLM (as of 2018...will be interesting to see tax stats from this year since their move to TIDES after unprecedented donations).

BLM does have a huge grassroots organizing fund that began this June in response to overwhelming donations following the murder of George Floyd. The fund provides grants up to $500,000 to smaller grassroots organizations and activists, as well as educational curriculum and political platforms. Their grant campaign is supported by TIDES, which provides the infrastructure and tax-exempt funding conduit needed for such a large scale effort. I’m guessing most of the money they’re fundraising goes to that fund. A chunk definitely goes to paying employees, running their website, and funding outreach and education.

So ALL THAT BEING SAID, I would always say donate directly to bail funds, mutual aid funds, legal fee funds, and local activism organizations before donating to a larger, all-encompassing charity or organization. If you can Venmo someone you know and you know where that money goes, that’s always the best.

Venmo accounts, gofundme campaigns, cashapp accounts, paypal accounts...that’s often what smaller scale organizations and activists are using on a local level and it’s generally collected and distributed more directly. The BIPOC and COVID mutual aid funds where I live are active on Facebook and Instagram and operate based on requests for help from community members that are posted on Google documents available to the public. Here is a good example of a grassroots COVID mutual aid fund that is directing A LOT of money locally and transparently--there are similar funds and organizations like this worldwide for COVID, BLM, and beyond.

The biggest impact you can make always comes at the community level--you should do some research into figuring out what’s going on in your area. There’s almost always something nearby, even if you live in a rural area or smaller town like I do, and if there’s not, hey--you could start something! Engage in your community and put your money into that, or into other communities in need. Pay attention to stuff going around on Twitter and Instagram--a lot of community organizing is facilitated there.

I included the BLM link in the original post because the website is a good place to learn about actions around the globe, organizing basics, and has a lot of up to date news and educational materials. I advocated for donating to bail funds, mutual aid funds, water projects, and local activist organizations and I stand by that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t donate to the BLM Global Network or other larger-scale foundations, but the conduit of money to cause is usually not as direct. I still don’t think it’s a bad thing to donate to them.

But ALSO don’t spread straight-up misinformation like this ask does. ActBlue is a fundraising platform and it’s not stealing the money you send to BLM and giving it to Biden or the DNC. It’s a whole lot more complicated than that, and this is a great way to dissuade people from donating money to progressive organizations who use ActBlue because it’s an easy, accessible online fundraising platform. Funny how right-wing pundits latched onto this so quickly, huh?

Feel free to correct me or add more info. I’m white and operating within US-centric organizing circles. But PLEASE give some sources if you do have corrections or arguments and PLEASE do a google search before you spread stuff like this.

_______________________________________________________________________

TL;DR: ActBlue is a fundraising platform, it is not stealing your money and giving it to the DNC. The money you donate to BLM goes to that organization, though it is a meandering path from donation to impact. Donate to bail funds, mutual aid organizations, legal fee funds, local activism organizations, etc., over larger organizations. Invest in your own communities, and directly in black communities, and always do your research.

#us bs #BLM #mutual aid #activism #american politics #fundraising #donations #i really hope people read this i spent so long trying to write it out in a way that made sense and its so fucking long #but i rly want people to understand a) how nonprofit fundraising works because its fucked #and b) that the shit about actblue is total bs #and c) that mutual aid funds are the future #also #i hate this country #and i hate that i know this much about nonprofit tax law when fundamentally i do not believe that nonprofits are doing that much good #but that's the hellscape we live in folks #black lives matter #politics #answered asks #okay goodniGHT

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endermtheswordsman · 4 years ago

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Tidbits and Quirks on Enderm, his Tribe, and Corven!

Enderm: He often has an issue of feeling too powerful due to his spells, age, knowledge, and versatility with his magic, making him often act a little arrogant. And while it is justified in him feeling this amount of power and confidence, it still has left him in several binds where he could have benefited heavily from assistance from others. (He also has an absurd obsession with books and scrolls collecting, so bring him one and he will hug you and thank you and give you just about anything he can as compensation!) Gael: His magic, while vast and powerful, actually creates a bit of an opposite effect to what Enderm’s does to him. Gael will often times call on others to ensure success in an attempt, even if it is something that he could have easily done! Much like when he was teaching Suki, and called upon Enderm to lend a hand where he could have simply explained on his own, due to his own magical knowledge and intelligence feeling lacking in his own opinion, when he is in fact quite intelligent and well versed in the arcane arts. (He adores the hell out of magical artifacts, and loves studying them, but above that, he adores his student/adoptive daughter, Suki. So a gift for her is far more meaningful to him, than anything else, as it eases his own mind of being the only source of Wizardry Teachings in her options list.) Clax: He’s a massive brute and thick and stubborn headed as they come. His simple thought process often gets him labeled as a brute, when he actually is smarter than most would give him credit for. He doesn’t mind however, as he actually prefers people to think him a simpleton, as it amuses him to spring some knowledge on them when they don’t quite expect it. Reading may not be his strong suit, but he has a near photographic memory that helps with repeating things, which helps throw people off. (He also has an absurd love for cute and small animals and things, and has taken quickly to addressing the family he has around him, Suki, Sotsona, Skitters, etc., by a variety of endearing nicknames of the animals or creatures they remind him of. For Yuki for instance, it is “Little Dove”.) Xavier: A quite and simple man, he is not one to talk much, if ever, in the presence of those he doesn’t know. His voice is strong and demanding, but he doesn’t use it much for reasons even he doesn’t know. In reality, he has exceptional social anxiety that makes it nearly impossible to speak up when around anyone other than the select few he chooses. (He often involves himself in making the few people he knows that he talks to, feel as comfortable as possible around him, out of a nervous fear of them leaving, and will often leave them small gifts here and there to encourage conversation. Though he still kinda stinks at it.) Sarabel: She is much like Z’sophia, to a degree, where she was shunned by her original family and found a family of her own with others, though unlike Z’sophia, was fortunate enough to find that family once again among her own kind. She is quiet, but speaks up often and enjoys singing in solitude, though many of the songs she sings are bittersweet, as they remind her of her lost family that threw her out over the mottled skin that depicted her as a bad omen. (She LOVES sweets to a degree that is absurd, and much to her own shame, has openly snatched several from Sotsona when she wasn’t looking. She feels guilty, but damn goes guilt taste sweet as hell sometimes!) Arya: She is a wizened old woman of a Firbolg that adores cooking and it is easily shown by the large cauldron she lifts and carries on her back with such ease during long travels and stays at other places. She is fiercely protective of children, or those she deems as children or her own family, even extending to a rather troublesome and, originally, rude little Hangman’s tree that lives not far from her own current cabin on Sotsona’s farm. She will reprimand you for being stupid, and coddle you with a tasty meal afterwards as she lectures you on self care and being smarter than that! (Despite her love of savory, sweet, and sour dishes that she makes so often. She actually quite likes bitter-sweet foods and snacks, as they always surprise her with their strange combination of the tastes!) Valen: He’s an old leather worker that has seen centuries come and go, but still has a rather cheerful, if realistic, outlook on life. Though his gruff voice would make one think he is always being sarcastic like an old grandpa-type would be. He loves working on metal armors too, as well as leather and any other material he can get his hands on. This has created a love of making personalized armor and tools for those he meets and has fond relationships with, such as with Enderm, in constantly up-keeping his Scale Mail, and making special armor for Clax, as well as the weapons of the 3 main guards of the tribe. (He adores gifts of rare minerals, ores, gems, and monster parts that he can use to make new items, armor, and tools! He’ll often repay the person by using some of the material for a personalized item or armor piece just for them!) Kareem: A sweet young girl with a passion for normal medicine, she follows heavily in Enderm’s footsteps of loving to heal and give life to those that have been harmed or had their own taken too soon. She actually doesn’t like using magic as much as she likes to tend to wounds with her own hands, and won’t use magic unless it needs a speedy or immediate recovery, or if there is no other way she can think of. Though she will use it in the case that Enderm tells her too, as she knows his judgement on situations involving wounds often outshines her own due to his experience with this field. (She loves flowers and fancy medicinal plants, as well as gardening these plants and crops to grow. Though not nearly as well versed as the likes of Sotsona, she aspires to possibly raise a field of flowers, herbs, or crops of her own one day, and to have others stand in awe of the fruits of her hard work! Without magic of course! Cause nothing is better than good old fashioned hard work!) Sereval: Not to be confused with Sarabel due to their similar sounding names, she is a seamstress by trade, and a lovely poem writer as well, though she never has the confidence to let people judge her poems or hear them, unlike she will so readily throw fancy and custom fitted clothes and the like with the hope that they will love her work and keep it. She loves to especially give out clothes to children, and will often spend painstaking days getting all the dimensions right before giving them to the recipient. (New clothes and textiles she hasn’t seen before are an amazing thing to her, as she has rarely gotten the chance to ever truly explore her own craft outside of her own teachings and the teachings of an old book, so providing her with new books or strips of cloth and details on how to make them or weave them into something, will make her day.) Alexyz: He’s a tough and gruff old man with a rather surprisingly mid-range voice that completely contrasts his size and presence. This however makes him more approachable, which brings him joy when interacting with children, or being a silly old man with the ladies that he meets, as he, despite his imposing size, is one that adores having a good time. He loves to sing, much like Sarabel, but unlike her, doesn’t have the voice for it. Though he often will engage in helping Valen in making materials, armor, tools, and the like, he also often gets Valen and Clax to join him for singing sessions on nights that they wish to celebrate, where his voice actually harmonizes between the two of them. (He actually doesn’t have much he doesn’t like, but when it comes to specifics, heartfelt gifts always touch him, and make him teary eyed, even if the gift isn’t something he would normally enjoy, he’ll still treasure it like a very sentimental old man.) And finally!: Corven: He’s a friend of Enderm and the tribe, and is an absolute lover of tea and making business deals. Unlike many in his field, he never uses his bardic talents to lull people into an unfairly worded deal that makes him come out as the ‘winner’ of the deal, and always prefers a solid and fair deal for both parties. He often gets mistaken for a Leprechaun due to his size, choice of dress, and accent, not to mention his red tinged facial hair and hair on his head and eyebrows, but he doesn’t mind correcting them, politely of course. He’s a tad flirtatious with women his own age, but is forever faithful to his wife, and simply sees the flirting as a silly way to enjoy a non-serious conversation. He refuses to judge based upon appearances or bad stigmas against one simply for being born, as he sees it as letting the actions of the dead and gone, to dictate who the future generations could possibly be. (He loves children, but this is because he has two of his own that stay with their mother at home. And will often come to the aid of children that he doesn’t even know, or doesn’t know well, for the sake of protecting children, as he would want anyone else that is a parent or guardian, to do the same for his own children. Otherwise, strike up a bargain with him and he’ll do everything in his power to help and make sure you both walk away happy from the deal!)

#Sorry it's so long #Mun ramblings #Got bored and made this #Feel free to send starters if you feel interested in one of them #OOC #Rp Starter?

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coollyinterferes · 4 years ago

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@chinchillasinunison

//Hi there!! Thank you so much for trusting me to answer this question! I kinda suck at explaining things, but I’ll give it my best shot :D

I’ve indeed been rping for 13-ish years now (about 8 of those have been here on tumblr). Some of the things I’ve learned about rp over the years have been through trial and error while also discovering my own working patterns and learning to work with my partners, sometimes only through basic rp etiquette, while some others by talking things out with my partners. [I’m putting the rest under a read more for length reasons ;;;]

When it comes to inspiration, it can vary, and it might sometimes depend on the muse. One of the things I’ve come to find that helps me the most for both inspiration and actual writing and keeping myself focused is music. My muses have always worked as “minds of their own” (if that makes any sense?), so they tend to react to the same music in different ways than the rest of their “muse-brothers”. In Robert’s case, I usually just need some nice melodies, catchy tunes or just a tune/lyrics that catches his attention or conveys a feeling and actually makes him feel something to have him react to it, while it was different for some of my previous muses, as some would literally refuse to cooperate at all if the music was just not their type (like, say, playing ‘loud’ types of music for a muse who has sensitive ears, for example).

Reading is also another great source for inspiration, whether it is fanfiction, a book, sometimes even stuff from magazines, or historical and period typical stuff (some of the headcanons and stories and whatnot I’ve written for Robert have come from reading about stuff from his time), and so on, but it can sometimes depend on the sort of muse you have. Same happens with looking through fanarts and doujinshi, or even talking about the character(s) with someone else. I’ve seen plenty of my partners throughout the years draw ideas and inspiration for some of their AUs from a fanart they saw somewhere, or a comic they read (just make sure to ask for permission if you do this and to, at least, give proper credits to the original author!).

Another one that can be helpful when you feel like you’re losing your character’s voice is looking at their source material, whether they come from an anime, a manga, a videogame, or what have you. Revisiting their source material usually helps a lot, for you can sometimes find things you hadn’t noticed before, or see some you may have forgotten about, and so on. Studying your muse’s canon (esp if you’re aiming to keep them close to canon) and their motivations can be super helpful. If you’re aiming for something “canon divergent”, then you can use their canon as a base as to what paths not to follow and deviate from it in any way you want to and explore their reasonings and motivations in this new canon you’re writing for them.

Doing research can help too. Like I mentioned just above, some of the stuff I’ve written for Robert here and on my fanfics and metas and headcanons has come after doing some research about things from his time, and it was similar with some of my previous muses. One of them was a bat youkai, for example, so I’d often draw ideas from bats’ behavior and adapt them to his character. He was also a bandit who knew how to fight using scythes (kusarigama, more specifically), so some of the ideas and inspiration I’d draw would come from reading about a bandit’s lifestyle, especially those from his fandom/universe as well as learning about youkai behavior in his universe, as well as watching videos of people using similar weapons to his, reading about historical usage of said weapons and so on.

Developing some your muse’s already existing relationships with other characters can help too, as they can help you see and understand better some sides of your muse that you might not have considered before (though you might need to discuss this with a partner who rps the other muse involved first if you ever want to include that in a rp, as not everyone has the same hcs). Using that bat youkai muse I mentioned earlier as an example again, I’d often explore his only canon relationship he had with another youkai, thinking of the different scenarios that ended up bringing them together, their reasons and their motivations to stick together and so on. There’s very little about this muse in his canon, so there were huge gaps to fill and a lot of room for headcanons, really, and while I had my own hcs, some of the peeps I rped with had different ones, so it was always a matter of discussing certain things first so things could go down smoothly.

Speaking of headcanons, sometimes just wanting to fill “plot holes” or exploring things that just were never fully explored or explored at all in the canon can also serve as inspiration.

In other cases, you can find inspiration/motivation through different means. Sometimes even just by wanting to give a character the love and attention they need, which was the case of the first muse I ever had (he was a “not so popular” character from an already “not so popular” animanga). And it was also part of what made me swallow my sheer nervousness and anxiety when I first started Robert’s blog, too, as I’d often see all those misconceptions about his character going around and being taken as canon, so I really wanted to change that and make people see him for who he is. But, again, it really depends on each case.

Going out for walks, or even just travelling on the bus on your way home, and looking at the world around you can help get those ideas working. So I would ultimately suggest doing some trial and error with both, the things you know or feel like might help, as well as trying those you don’t have much hope in. You might end up finding they actually work for you!

As for a thread’s end, it depends entirely on the thread and the partner you have that thread with, if it was plotted or not and so on. If it was plotted, there’s a chance you and your partner have discussed the details of it, sometimes including the end of it, or where you wanted the thread to go. In that case, you will be able to tell more “easily” when the thread is coming to an end. For “wing it” or unplotted threads, there might be times you will be able to tell when the thread comes to an end since there might not be much else for the muses to do in it. It can happen after a few replies in, it can happen after several, it depends on the type of thread but, in the end, it will be a matter of having some communication with your partner. Most of them will tell you when they feel the thread has come to an end, even if it’s only through the tags. Sometimes a simple “i think this is a good closure for the thread. what do you think?” does the trick, for it conveys the idea while also requesting some input from your partner (in case they still want to continue the thread, have more ideas for it, and so on). Just keep in mind that there might be plenty of times when threads will get dropped without a notice, and this is pretty normal in rp in general, for sometimes one (or both) partner(s) lose interest in the thread, and that’s alright. The thing about rp is exploring different scenarios for the muses involved. Some will work, some might not. The key is to continue exploring new ideas, or maybe similar ideas but with different muses as this can lead to (sometimes vastly) different outcomes.

And I get you about getting burned out. It’s quite common to go through that when you run a rp/ask blog or literally any other blog that requires periodical updating, and especially through some difficult times like those we’re living in now with all the stuff going on around the world, however, you need to ALWAYS keep in mind that these blogs and rping and creating content in general is something you do as a hobby. The moment you start treating it as a job or a chore and that you “have to update” is the moment you need to take a step back before this sucks all the fun out of it. It’s okay if you can manage to reply everyday, or as soon as a partner posts a reply to your thread, but it’s also okay to take your time with things and to work and reply at your own pace. It’s okay to take some days off, just like it’s okay to just sometimes lurk in silence, or just be active ooc replying to ims and asks, or just reblogging stuff, or simply engaging in dashboard shenanigans and whatnot. Again, this is a hobby, meant to de-stress you, and it should always be treated as such so it doesn’t have the entire opposite effect.

This got a bit too long, but I hope to have answered your questions!! If you have any more, just shoot them my way and I’ll get to them asap! :D

#chinchillasinunison #;answered #;speedwagon withdraws coolly

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terfslying · 6 years ago

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Extremist Traits & TERFs

The traits are taken from (here), which is a list of extremist traits by Laird Wilcox. Most examples are from interactions with people on this blog, because I’ve got to limit myself to something.

Character Assassination

“Extremists often attack the character of an opponent rather than deal with the facts or issues raised. They will question motives, qualifications, past associations, alleged values, personality, looks, mental health, and so on as a diversion from the issues under consideration”

TERF Examples: Character attacks on Susie Green, of Mermaids UK, to attempt to imply that her motive for Mermaids UK is to force her own child to transition. & Claiming Mermaids UK was a significant part of forcing a young UK child to be trans, when in fact he was being abused by his mother and Mermaids UK only ever were contacted by phone by the mother, and were not otherwise involved in any way.

Name-Calling and Labelling

“Extremists are quick to resort to epithets (racist, subversive, pervert, hate monger, nut, crackpot, […] and so on) to label and condemn opponents in order to divert attention from their arguments and to discourage others from hearing them out. These epithets don’t have to be proved to be effective; the mere fact they have been said is often enough”

TERF Examples: "pedophile apologist”, “infertile, fat white loser”, “rapist” (all directed at me!)

Irresponsible Sweeping Generalisations

“Extremists tend to make sweeping claims or judgements on little or no evidence, and they have a tendency to confuse similarity with sameness […] they assume that because two (or more) things, events, or persons are alike in some respects, they must be alike in most respects.”

TERF Examples: “trans women are just men”; use of crimes by cis men to attempt to demonstrate trans criminality

Inadequate Proof For Assertions

“Extremists tend to be very fuzzy about what constitutes proofs, and they also tend to get caught up in logical fallacies […] they tend to project wished-for conclusions and to exaggerate the significance of information that confirms their beliefs while derogating or ignoring information that contradicts them.”

TERF Examples: “This research is reliable because I agree with it, and I don’t care that the authors have deliberately published politically motivated anti-gay propaganda studies before”

Advocacy of Double Standards

“Extremists generally tend to judge themselves or their interest groups in terms of their intentions, which they tend to view very generously, and others by their acts, which they tend to view very critically. They would like you accept their assertions on faith, but they demand proof of yours. They tend to engage in special pleading on behalf of themselves or their interests, usually because of some alleged special status, past circumstances, or present disadvantage.”

TERF Example: Refusal to criticise WoLF + Julia Beck’s association with the Heritage Foundation due to presumed good intentions

Tendency to View Their Opponents and Critics As Essentially Evil

“To the extremist, opponents hold opposing positions because they are bad people […] not merely because they simply disagree, see the matter differently, have competing interests, or are perhaps even mistaken.”

TERF Example: I deserve to “rot in hell” because I don’t agree with TERFs

Manichaean Worldview

“Extremists have a tendency to see the world in terms of absolutes of good and evil, for them or against them, with no middle ground or intermediate positions. All issues are ultimately moral issues of right and wrong, with the ‘right’ position coinciding with their interests.”

TERF Example: Willingness to use and spread sources from the alt-right with no regard for the source, since if it coincides with their interest, it’s ‘right’

Advocacy Of Censorship or Repression of Their Opponents or Critics

“They may include a very active campaign to keep opponents from media access [… or] actually lobby for legislation against speaking, writing, teaching, or instructive ‘subversive’ or forbidden information or opinions.”

TERF Example: Pressure to isolate young trans teens from media access

Tend to Identify Themselves In Terms Of Who Their Enemies Are

“[E]xtremists may become emotionally bound to their opponents, who are often competing extremists themselves. Because they tend to view their enemies as evil and powerful, they tend, perhaps subconsciously, to emulate them, adopting to same tactics to a certain degree.”

TERF Example: "TRA’s”, “libfems”, “transcult”; emulating anti-feminist tactics by joining groups like Hands Across The Aisle to directly partner with anti-abortion, anti-feminist conservatives and divide-and-conquer

Tendency towards argument by intimidation

“Extremists tend to frame their arguments in such a way as to intimidate others into accepting their premises and conclusions. […] They use a lot of moralising, pontificating, and tend to be very judgemental. This shrill, harsh rhetorical style allows them to keep their opponents and critics on the defensive, cuts off troublesome lines of argument, and allows them to define the perimeters of debate.”

TERF Example: Using the words “trans women” and “literal pedophiles and rapists” interchangeably in arguments

Use of Slogans, Buzzwords, and Thought-Stopping Cliches

“For many extremists, shortcuts in thinking and in reasoning matters out seem to be necessary in order to avoid or evade awareness of troublesome facts and compelling counter-arguments. Extremists generally behave in ways that reinforce their prejudices and alter their own consciousness in a manner that bolsters their false confidence and sense of self-righteousness.”

TERF Examples: “Peak trans”, “autogynephiles”, the bathroom & prison rapist tropes, to discredit trans women; “handmaids” and “libfems” to discredit cis women who disagree with them

Assumption of Moral or Other Superiority over Others

“Most obvious would be claims of general racial or ethnic superiority […] Less obvious are claims of ennoblement because of alleged victimhood,”

TERF Examples: Expanding real victimisation of women to include historically inaccurate concepts, such as ‘witch hunts were methods of controlling women’s knowledge’ to increase superiority; complete disownment of any moral responsibility for violence perpetrated or encouraged by TERFs

Doomsday Thinking

“Extremists often predict dire or catastrophic consequences from a situation or from failure to follow a specific course, and they tend to exhibit a kind of ‘crisis-mindedness’. It can be a Communist takeover, a Nazi revival, nuclear war, earthquakes (… etc. …) Whatever it is, it’s just around the corner unless we follow their program and listen to the special insight and wisdom, to which only the truly enlightened have access.”

TERF Example: Fair Play For Women’s unrealistic theory that if Gender Recognition Certificates were easier to get, women’s prisons would be flooded with trans sex offenders instantly.

Belief that it’s okay to do bad things in service of a good cause

“Extremists may deliberately lie, distort, misquote, slander, defame, or libel their opponents or critics, engage in censorship or repression, or undertake violence in “special cases”.”

TERF Example: Wetmeadow ‘distorting’ my post on the cotton ceiling to imply that I was saying same-sex attraction is a mental illness, to discredit me.

Emphasis on Emotional Response (and less on logical analysis and reasoning)

“Extremist have an unspoken reverence for propaganda, which they may call ‘education’ or ‘consciousness-raising’. Symbolism plays an exaggerated role in their thinking and they tend to think imprecisely and metamorphically.”

TERF Example: ‘consciousness-raising’ has a long history in extreme radfem spaces; in recent online spaces it’s more often called ‘peak trans’.

Hypersensitivity and Vigilance

“Extremists perceive hostile innuendo in even casual comments; imagine rejection and antagonism concealed in honest disagreement and dissent; […] Although few extremists are clinically paranoid, many of them adopt a paranoid style with its attendant hostility and distrust.”

TERF Example: Exposinglesphob’s entire blog

Problems Tolerating Ambiguity and Uncertainty

“[T]he ideologies and belief systems to which extremists tend to attach themselves often represent grasping for certainty in an uncertain world, or an attempt to achieve absolute security in an environment that is naturally unpredictable […] Extremists exhibit a kind of risk-aversiveness that compels them to engage in controlling and manipulative behaviour, both on a personal level and in a political context.”

TERF Example: “What do you mean, someone’s gender or sex might be ambiguous?? Woman is a biological term for adult human females, it’s simple”

Inclination towards “GroupThink”

“‘Groupthink’ involves a tendency to conform to group norms and to preserve solidarity and concurrence at the expense of distorting members’ observations of facts, conflicting evidence, and disquieting observations [… Extremists may] only talk with one another, read material that reflects their own views, and can be almost phobic about the ‘propaganda’ of the ‘other side’. The result is a deterioration in reality-testing, rationality, and moral judgement.”

TERF Example: Any source I give is bad, even if they’re genuinely trying to say that wikipedia is ‘good research’.

Tendency to Personalise Hostility

“Extremists often wish for the personal bad fortune of their ‘enemies’ and celebrate when it occurs.”

TERF Example: The fact that pretty much every person who isn’t a TERF and who discourses has been told to kill themselves.

Extremists often feel that the system is no good unless they win

“If public opinion turns against them, it was because of ‘brainwashing’. If their followers become disillusioned, it’s because of ‘sabotage’.”

TERF Example: Ex-terfs like myself either are just too dumb to understand radical feminism, or we never even existed in the first place.

#long post #the longest of posts #terfs n fascists #terfs behaving badly tag #tag for sources

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serenagaywaterford · 5 years ago

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It’s fucking crazy how in a show meant to wake the general populace up, people really do seem to hate majority of the female characters. Note it’s only the complex ones, because god forbid Margret Atwood wrote them as shades of grey and not as definitively “evil” or “good”.

I’ve been in quite a few shitty fandoms in my day but I’m not certain I’ve been in one quite as overwhelmingly tone deaf as The Handmaid’s Tale fandom. I have never seen so much hypocrisy and virtue signalling and fake wokeness in a singular fandom with source material (in terms of the original novel and S1/2 at least) that directly opposes those things. Like I was in GoT fandom for a while and holy shit the misogyny there. So, I know what it looks like. But the thing about that hellplace was that there was still a fairly recognisable and approachable faction that loudly and actively spoke out about the sheer number of issues with GoT (racism, misogyny, etc.) I feel like those people gave up on the show about mid-run, and GoT was left with a bunch of idiots and “libfems” by the end.

The thing about THT is that it appears to be 95% idiots and fake-woke “feminists” I put it in quotes cos they are NOT feminists. They just like to identify as that cos it’s trendy. They have no idea what feminism is if they centre Nick in the THT narrative, or refuse to engage with any female character other than June or Emily in any rational way and instead wish rape, violence, torture, death, and/or intense suffering on any female character (or apparently actor who plays said character!) they personally dislike because they don’t have the braincells to understand what Atwood specifically was trying to do.)

When THT becomes all about a MALE and his precious fweelings, and his uwu luv stowwy wiv Jwune and all they focus on is how “cool” June is for bullying other Handmaids into suicide, and how “awesome” she is for being 1000% selfish and self-absorbed and not caring at all about all the other women (esp. poor women of colour) she tramples on to get what she wants, that is NOT GOOD. This is a character who purposely and actively manipulated a domestic abuse victim to go back to her abusive, violent, cheater, rapist husband for June’s own ends. (And surprise, surprise that blew up in her face and people really take June’s side 100% on that cos “Serena deserves Fred” aka “Serena deserves to be beaten, raped, and abused by her husband because she’s a bad woman who has done bad things herself”. When you are saying a woman, no matter who they are, deserves to be beaten and raped and imprisoned in that situation, you are not a feminist because that isn’t justice for Serena’s crimes. That is torture.) Nothing June did in S3 was heroic. She is almost no better than the woman she hates at this point. I see very little difference between June and Serena anymore, and yet… YET fans think the sun shines out of June’s ass and Serena should be raped to death (aka “Wouldn’t it be soooo cool if Serena became a Handmaid?! Omg so cool! She deserves it! Hurr durr I am FEMINIST!!!!”).

O.o

There is zero nuance in THT fandom. It’s fine to dislike female characters. It’s fine to be critical of them. It’s fine to like male characters (I guess…). But centring men in a woman’s story and then parroting Gilead’s ideals unironically while calling yourself woke? It’s terrifying.

June is so gross in S3, and when she isn’t being awful, she’s written as some child-crazed, hysterical woman. The writers’ full sexism and internalized (or externalized lol) misogyny on clear display. And the fans just LAP IT UP with no critical thought. No complaint. Like, “Yes, this is what a woman should be!” nevermind the entire purpose of the commentary in the novel (and S1) was that women are MORE than just hysterical, overly emotional baby-machines or housekeepers. Women are not mere resources to be harvested like cattle. Women have more personality than just “ME WANT BABBY!!!” Women are resourceful and complex and not all good, not all bad. Women are conflicted and conflicting. Meanwhile, now the show presents women almost identically to how Serena Joy wrote about them, and how Gilead has identified them, and the fans are like “Yeah! This is fine! I don’t see any problems with this at all!”

And if you dare say, “Um, guys, that’s a pretty bad take. Do you understand what you’re actually saying?” you get called a “rape apologist!!! HURRRR!!!! WHAT ABUT 2x10!!!!!” And it literally doesn’t matter what you challenge these fans about, whether it’s Nick, the themes of THT, Serena, June, etc. They see you are a fan of Serena and suddenly the discourse deteriorates completely to “Nazi!!!! you’re a rapist nazi sympathizer!!!!!!!!!”

So, there’s no point in talking to any of them. Yeah, cos I’m the one saying women I don’t like deserve to be raped and beaten until they die as slaves in an oppressive fascist regime. (That’s actually you guys, jsyk.) My favourite was being compared to an MRA. Like, do you people even read what you write?

I’m not the one talking non-stop about how great Mr. Soggy Pancake Man is and how we must protect this precious bean in a story about massive female oppression uwu. “BUT WHAT ABOUT NICK?!?! MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTER!!!” I hate men, lol. I can’t count the number of times I’ve literally said, “I don’t give a shit about ANY of the men in THT. I only care about women and you people are misogynistic pigs for the way you talk about women.” yet I’m a Men’s Rights Activist?

What I hear when I go into the tags:

“All women are awful harpies and stupid or boring except this specific one cos we want her to bone the Cute Boy we’re obsessed with and she’s just basically a self-insert for our own lonely fantasies and we need to only hear about the Cute Boy, not these annoying women. If a woman character interferes or challenges my heterosexual fantasy OTP in any way, that woman must suffer and die, and I’ll laugh and cheer as that happens, especially if she’s beaten by her husband or loses her mind/commits suicide! They deserve it! Also, who really cares about all those other women’s stories elsewhere in the world. BORING! My white saviour self-insert main female character can do no wrong because I am perfect! I’ll even go out of my way and actively search out people who aren’t doing anything to me, aren’t talking to me at all and just keeping to themselves, and send online threats, hate, and insults to anybody who doesn’t agree with me about how great Mr. Stale Bread is and they’re Nazis for not agreeing with me.”

And I’M the MRA? I’m the crazy one?

No self-awareness at all. No nuance. No critical thinking skills. And a HELL of a lot of projection that they don’t even seem to know they’re making. There are grown ass women (like 40 YEAR OLDS!) who worship Nick Bland’s ugly dick, online bullying literal minors who don’t subscribe to the Serena-Hate groupthink. It’s a cesspool. THT fandom fucking SUCKS. I’m gonna guess it’s these same morons who wished that Yvonne would lose her baby cos you hate SERENA. Like, if you don’t think this is disgusting, I don’t know how else to get it through to you that something is VERY WRONG with the vast majority of online THT fandom.

99% of this fandom doesn’t seem to give a fuck what Atwood was trying to say in her novel, or what the show intentionally set out to do challenge and prove. Anyway, anon. I feel ya. I hate this fandom which is why I never check the tags anymore, never go on Twitter, unfollowed the Insta, don’t go on FB, and stick with my very wonderful small group of non-crazies who also appreciate the complex, difficult character of Serena here – and block everyone else I can because I just don’t have time for that kind of constant drama and aggravation from ignorant people.

Wow. Okay. Sorry. Rant over.

#the handmaid's tale #tunglr dot hell #Anonymous

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96thdayofrage · 6 years ago

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A Threat To The Free Press

Make no mistake, this not just about Assange or Wikileaks—this is a threat to all journalism, and the public interest. The press stands in place of the public in holding the government accountable, and the Assange charges threaten that critical role. The charges threaten reporters who communicate with and knowingly obtain information of public interest from sources and whistleblowers, or publish that information, by sending a clear signal that they can be charged with spying simply for doing their jobs. And they threaten everyone seeking to educate the public about the operation of government and expose government wrongdoing, whether or not they are professional journalists.

Assistant Attorney General John Demers, head of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, told reporters after the indictment that the department “takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it,” and that it’s not the government’s policy to target them for reporting. But it’s difficult to separate the Assange indictment from President Trump’s repeated attacks on the press, including his declarations on Twitter, at White House briefings, and in interviews that the press is “the enemy of the people,” “dishonest,” “out of control,” and “fake news.” Demers’ statement was very narrow—disavowing the “targeting” of journalists, but not the prosecution of them as part of targeting their sources. And contrary to the DOJ’s public statements, the actual text of the Assange Indictment sets a dangerous precedent; by the same reasoning it asserts here, the administration could turn its fervent anti-press sentiments into charges against any other media organization it disfavors for engaging in routine journalistic practices.

Most dangerously, the indictment contends that anyone who “counsels, commands, induces” (under 18 USC §2, for aiding and abetting) a source to obtain or attempt to obtain classified information violates the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793(b). Under the language of the statute, this includes literally “anything connected with the national defense,” so long as there is an “intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” The indictment relies heavily and repeatedly on allegations that Assange “encouraged” his sources to leak documents to Wikileaks, even though he knew that the documents contained national security information.

But encouraging sources and knowingly receiving documents containing classified information are standard journalistic practices, especially among national security reporters. Neither law nor custom has ever required a journalist to be a purely passive, unexpected, or unknowing recipient of a leaked document. And the U.S. government has regularly maintained, in EFF’s own cases and elsewhere, that virtually any release of classified information injures the United States and advantages foreign nations.

The DOJ indictment thus raises questions about what specific acts of “encouragement” the department believes cross the bright line between First Amendment protected newsgathering and crime. If a journalist, like then-candidate Trump, had said: "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the [classified] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," would that be a chargeable crime?

The DOJ Does Not Decide What Is And Isn’t Journalism

Demers said Assange was “no journalist,” perhaps to justify the DOJ’s decision to charge Assange and show that it is not targeting the press. But it is not the DOJ’s role to determine who is or is not a “journalist,” and courts have consistently found that what makes something journalism is the function of the work, not the character of the person. As the Second Circuit once wrote in a case about the reporters’ privilege, the question is whether they intended to “use material—sought, gathered, or received—to disseminate information to the public.” No government label or approval is necessary, nor is any job title or formal affiliation. Rather than justifying the indictment, Demers’ non-sequitur appears aimed at distracting from the reality of it.

Moreover, Demers’ statement is as dangerous as it is irrelevant. None of the elements of the 18 statutory charges (Assange is also facing a charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) require a determination that Assange is not a journalist. Instead, the charges broadly describe journalism–seeking, gathering and receiving information for dissemination to the public, and then publishing that information–as unlawful espionage when it involves classified information.

Of course news organizations routinely publish classified information. This is not considered unusual, nor (previously) illegal. When the government went to the Supreme Court to stop the publication of the classified Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court refused (though it did not reach the question of whether the Espionage Act could constitutionally be charged against the publishers). Justice Hugo Black, concurring in the judgment, explained why:

In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

Despite this precedent and American tradition, three of the DOJ charges against Assange specifically focus solely on the purported crime of publication. These three charges are for Wikileaks’ publication of the State Department cables and the Significant Activity Reports (war logs) for Iraq and Afghanistan, documents which were also published in Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Le Monde, and republished by many other news media.

For these charges, the government included allegations that Assange failed to properly redact, and thereby endangered sources. This may be another attempt to make a distinction between Wikileaks and other publishers, and perhaps to tarnish Assange along the way. Yet this is not a distinction that makes a difference, as sometimes the media may need to provide unredacted data. For example, in 2017 the New York Times published the name of a CIA official who was behind the CIA program to use drones to kill high-ranking militants, explaining “that the American public has a right to know who is making life-or-death decisions in its name.”

While one can certainly criticize the press’ publication of sensitive data, including identities of sources or covert officials, especially if that leads to harm, this does not mean the government must have the power to decide what can be published, or to criminalize publication that does not first get the approval of a government censor. The Supreme Court has justly held the government to a very high standard for abridging the ability of the press to publish, limited to exceptional circumstances like “publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops” during wartime.

A Threat to Free Speech

In a broader context, the indictment challenges a fundamental principle of free speech: that a person has a strong First Amendment right to disseminate truthful information pertaining to matters of public interest, including in situations in which the person’s source obtained the information illegally. In Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court affirmed this, explaining: “it would be quite remarkable to hold that speech by a law-abiding possessor of information can be suppressed in order to deter conduct by a non-law-abiding third party. ... [A] stranger's illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern.”

While Bartnicki involved an unknown source who anonymously left an illegal recording with Bartnicki, later courts have acknowledged that the rule applies, and perhaps even more strongly, to recipients who knowingly and willfully received material from sources, even when they know the source obtained it illegally. In one such case, the court rejected a claim that the willing acceptance of such material could sustain a charge of conspiracy between the publisher and her source.

Regardless of what one thinks of Assange’s personal behavior, the indictment itself will inevitably have a chilling effect on critical national security journalism, and the dissemination in the public interest of available information that the government would prefer to hide. There can be no doubt now that the Assange indictment is an attack on the freedoms of speech and the press, and it must not stand.

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ncfan-1 · 6 years ago

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ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S4 EP122, ‘Zombie’

Well, it turned out that I was wrong, and that the first episode of Season Four did not take place in medias res, though I still think the teaser with Martin they dropped on us took place before ‘Far Away.’ Anyways, we have another parallel for Jon, another warning about just how bad things can get if he doesn’t get a handle on himself, we have the messy and ambiguous question of just what is it that separates a human from a monster, and we get the news that unspecified Bad Shit went down in the Archives while Jon was in his supernatural coma.

Come hear my disorganized thoughts on The Magnus Archives!

- It would seem that Georgie did indeed recognize Oliver as an avatar of the End; I really do think this is a matter of like recognizing like. The fact that Basira didn’t press her further when Georgie replied to her “How do you automatically recognize an avatar of the End?” with “That’s really none of your business” is about the only moment we had with Basira that didn’t worry me on some level. That she didn’t follow up on this with demands for more information, badgering Georgie until she told her what she’d once told Jon, shows that she isn’t yet so deeply entangled with the Eye that she would feel compelled to follow that thread until she’d reached the source. But throughout the rest of the episode, Basira seems… I can’t tell what it is, if she just seems very disconnected from everything going on around her, or if she’s just on her guard with Jon, because she can’t yet tell if Jon still is Jon.

There’s apparently been a lot of bad stuff going on at the Archives in general while Jon was in a coma. Basira doesn’t seem to be doing so great herself.

- It’s unclear if Oliver brought the tape recorder Georgie found, or if it just materialized out of thin air. Given how increasingly overtly paranormal the tape recorders are, the latter explanation wouldn’t shock me.

- We’ll find out later that there’s something up with Melanie (same as there is with everyone, really), but that Basira intercepted Georgie’s attempts to make contact with Melanie, and seems to have refused Georgie access to her, suggests that there really is something seriously wrong with Melanie. Basira’s seemed protective of Melanie for a while, and I get the impression that she didn’t want to expose Melanie to anything that might… “destabilize” her. I worry that Melanie’s pre-existing pull towards the Slaughter might have intensified over the past six months: her anger feeding its hold over her, its hold over her feeding her anger, a vicious cycle that just goes on and on until she’s too constantly furiously angry and erratic to cope.

- …And they’ve found another tape recorder on the floor, possibly under the bed.

- Jon decides to let Georgie and Basira know he’s awake… by scaring the crap out of them. Or scaring the crap out of Basira and startling the crap out of Georgie, anyways. Oh, Jon.

- That Jon recovers so quickly from having been in a coma, “everything but brain dead” for six months really isn’t natural, and Georgie, at least, loathes the implications of it. So do I, to be honest. I knew Jon finding the impetus to wake up would come with a price, except the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet. Listen carefully in the episodes ahead, everyone.

- “Jon, is it still you?” That is the question of the century, isn’t it? Because Jon still sounds like himself, and you can make several different arguments for his lack of deep, emotional reactions to all the news he receives over the course of the episode. You can argue that he’s still very weak from having been in a coma for half a year and can’t dredge up emotions. You can argue that he gets hit with so much bad news at once that he just can’t process most of it, and the reason the only thing he really latches on to is what’s happening with Martin is because he actually has something resembling a concrete idea of the danger he’s in. You can argue that he just doesn’t want to run away with his emotions, since when he does that, bad things tend to happen.

But what gets me is his relative lack of reaction when Basira mentions Melanie being in a bad way. Unless I am very much mistaken, Jon freaked out when he first learned Melanie had been shot in India, and their only relationship back then was that of two people who occasionally met up to shout at each other. I’m worried that his knee-jerk protective reaction to the news that Peter Lukas is doing something with or to Martin was just due to the influence of the Beholding, making its avatar respond to a threat to another of its adherents.

And what else gets me is his apparent lack of concern for Basira herself. I do think there’s a chance that Basira is just refusing to drop her guard around Jon, since it’s at best highly unclear if he’s still himself and the monsters around these parts can seem very human, up until the moment when they open their mouth and let all their fangs show. But she spends the episode sounding very zoned out, very distant. To me, it sounds like the Beholding has definitely been having an effect on her, and Jon? Just doesn’t seem to care very much. And the worst part is, that can’t automatically be taken as a sign of Jon having changed, because Jon has always been the Asshole in Charge at the Magnus Institute. For as long as we’ve known him, he’s always been that guy who has a hard time understanding other people’s emotions and remembering why he should care about them. He was the guy who had no problem telling Naomi Herne to her face that she probably imagined everything that happened to her, the guy who had no problem constantly bad-mouthing Martin when he had to have known there was a chance Martin could listen to the tapes and hear him saying all this horrible shit, the guy who didn’t see anything wrong with stalking Tim, the guy who early on had no problem dismissing every last thing a statement-giver said as hallucinations or lies unless it was something related to his trauma. Jon’s always been a bit of a self-centered asshole, so him being a bit of a self-centered asshole now doesn’t necessarily indicate anything.

After finding out that Basira just happened to grab a statement on the way out the door of the Institute, after discovering that Jon’s first impulse upon waking up is to go ahead and feed the beast (I see that addiction is still running strong), and finding out that Jon no longer calls himself ‘Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute,’ but simply ‘The Archivist,’ all very reassuring signs (how long before Jon stops even sticking his name in before ‘The Archivist?’), we get into the statement.

- Lorell St. John provides us with another parallel and potential foil for Jonathan Sims. From the beginning, she is positioned as such, as a person who is disconnected from other people, has a hard time thinking about and visualizing their feelings, and is fond of animals. She’s someone who acts like other people don’t exist, or matter, which does sound a bit like Jon.

- There’s something St. John says about the difficulties of making sense of the world and the universe, saying that [paraphrased] “it’s all rubbish, people trying to think the universe into making sense,” feels like commentary on the Powers. Was it Jonny Sims who said that anyone who thinks they know what’s going on with the Powers is dead wrong?

- St. John is introduced by a friend (I entertained the possibility that Danielle was St. John’s girlfriend, but to be honest she sounds so disconnected that I can’t see her as being able to put in the work required to maintain a close relationship with anyone) to the concept of the “philosophical zombie.” The philosophical zombie is someone who appears outwardly human, but inside is empty; they have no inner life, they can’t feel anything, and any attempt to pretend otherwise is all just an act. It is, as Danielle says, just a thought experiment, but St. John becomes obsessed with the idea, and eventually becomes convinced that an increasingly large number of the people around her (by the time she gets to the Institute, it seems to have spread to everyone around her) is not a real person, but is in fact one of these zombies: an empty thing that apes humanity, but can only ever pretend to be a person.

Eventually, this delusion seems to have attracted the attention of one of the Powers, which sent an agent out to harass her. @centaurianthropology thinks it was the Spiral; myself, I’m torn between the Spiral and the Stranger. Visual and auditory hallucinations are definitely part of the Spiral’s purview, but to me, there’s the matter of St. John’s specific delusion, the thing that drew this agent to her. Her delusion was that the people around her weren’t actually people, but inhuman, uncanny things that pretended (in her opinion, badly) to be human. To me, that has the Stranger written all over it. I think what complicates it is that there is potential for the two Powers to bleed into each other when it comes to St. John’s delusion, so really, it could be either one. The fact that the agent doesn’t really do anything, just keeps repeating the same phrase over and over again, seems more indicative of the Spiral to me. I think an agent of the Stranger would have actually tried to do something to her.

(And personally, something about the agent, the changing colors of his shirt, I think, reminds me of the coffee billboard from ‘Fatigue,’ and that was definitely a Spiral statement.)

- The cruel experiments St. John carries out on her roommate whom she had become convinced is a zombie, slicing him with a knife and later killing his pet, which she feels no remorse for because she feels that he is not real, serves as a warning for Jon, of where he could end up if he doesn’t try to remain engaged with humanity, doesn’t keep reminding himself that other people do matter. I personally interpret it in a very particular way, based on my own experiences.

I am someone who does not have the easiest time interpreting my own emotions, let alone the emotions of others. I have thoughts, but I don’t automatically connect them with emotions. I have physical reactions, but I don’t automatically connect them with emotions. I have to work at figuring out and understanding what other people are feeling, and though I do try to figure it out, sometimes they’re just incomprehensible to me. As you might have gathered, I have issues with cognitive empathy.

St. John exhibits a lack of both empathy and sympathy with how she engages with the world, neither understanding people’s feelings nor caring about their feelings, and to me, the latter is a lot more inherently dangerous than the former. It’s one thing to not understand how other people feel, to have difficulty putting yourself in their shoes. It’s another thing to either be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes with no difficulty, and decide that you just don’t care about their feelings, that their feelings don’t matter to you at all, for no other reason than because you can.

For Jon, there’s a lot more danger to not caring than not understanding. And I think he may be on the verge of falling down that rabbit hole now, and never coming out.

- When the question of what separates a human from a monster is raised, we aren’t given an answer—and to be honest, I’m not sure there’s any answer that can neatly delineate humans and monsters in a way that completely separates the two from each other. We hear of many people in the real world whom we consider monsters, but in the universe of The Magnus Archives, are completely human in makeup. You have people deeply entangled with the Powers showing signs of caring for others, to a certain extent. The child Agnes Montague saved a boy she barely knew from becoming a spider egg sac. Gertrude may have treated the people around her as pawns, to be used and discarded at will, but she cared enough about the world in a general sense to want to keep it from being warped and mutilated by the ascension of any one of the Powers, including the one she was tied to. We see Distortion-Helen grappling with feelings she doesn’t recognize as guilt. There is no one overwhelming criteria that makes someone human, or a monster. In a world where humans are capable of doing horrific things and monsters are capable of feeling guilt, you can’t point to any one thing as being the thing that absolutely 100% of the time separates them.

And I don’t think we have any real answer for the question of at what point a human is no longer a human, and has become completely monstrous. Because that is a completely internal measure, and none of us have a hotline into anyone’s minds but our own. I think that Jon is still recognizably human right now, but that he’s less human than he was before he left to stop the Unknowing. And I think that, if Jon is no longer human by the end of the series, if he has become completely monstrous, we’ll all be at a complete loss to pinpoint the exact moment that it happened. After all, at what point was Jane Prentiss no longer Jane Prentiss? Was it when the worms had eaten her eyes and her tongue and she could only see because of the Filth’s influence, only speak because of its influence? Was it when she thrust her arm into the wasp’s nest and the worms first burrowed into her flesh? Was it when she fell under the sway of their song? Or was it when she was a grade schooler, listening to one of her classmates talk about how a blackhead is a hole in your face that you have to keep clean, or else it will spread and your whole head will rot?

A final note in all of this: Jon’s voice becomes considerably stronger over the course of reading the statement. At the beginning, he’s hoarse and weak, but by the end, he sounds as if he was never in a coma at all. Just something to chew on.

- As I mentioned up above, we have it from Basira that Bad Shit has been going down at the Archives. It seems that having Peter Lukas in charge has not been good for the Institute or the people working in it, though we don’t have any specifics as of yet. Apparently Martin’s been engaging in off-the-books work with him, and again, no specifics, though I can’t imagine it’s anything good. The ‘Martin is a secret Lukas’ theory might be gaining increasing amounts of traction this season, might even be confirmed. Melanie’s not doing well. Tim is confirmed dead and people think Daisy is dead as well, though I personally think Basira might know more than she’s letting on as regards to Daisy, and doesn’t trust Jon with the information.

And something happened to the change of clothes Jon keeps in the Institute that rendered them unwearable. It’s been an action-packed six months. I personally wonder about that. There’s a lot of people in the supernatural community who’d have a lot of reason to have a grudge against the Magnus Institute. Learning that Elias is in prison and the Archivist who replaced Gertrude is out of commission might have made them decide the Institute was too vulnerable a target to be ignored. I suppose we’ll find out next week.

#ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives

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cicadacreativemag · 4 years ago

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Proctoring software is a nightmare for students. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Jay Serrano, Editorial Director

As you all know: COVID. In response to the lack of in-person interaction, many colleges and universities have begun to use proprietary software to ensure students do not cheat during exams, most often ProctorU, Proctorio, and ExamSoft. I take 3 issues with this development:

1.) This is spyware.

When you require students to install software that quite literally watches them, that is spyware.

“Spyware describes software with malicious behavior that aims to gather information about a person or organization and send such information to another entity in a way that harms the user; for example by violating their privacy or endangering their device's security.” (Wikipedia)

Modern tech’s propensity for obsessive surveillance has become increasingly difficult to combat and virtually impossible to avoid. However, one would hope higher institutions would advocate for things like data privacy and personal agency. Instead, the director of academic testing services at Utah State University lightheartedly described Proctorio as “sort of like spyware that we just legitimize.” (Washington Post) The University of Arizona’s assistant director of technology insisted students don’t mind because “they know this is an expectation because their professors put it out there.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the student body says otherwise. (The Verge) Additionally, the chief executive of Proctorio reflected on the situation with a dystopian, “we’re the police.” (Washington Post)

I could spiral into a separate tangent about how the US obsession with policing and instinct to punish accelerates the meritocratic rot of late stage capitalism under collaborative neoliberal and fascist rule, but suffice to say that no academic software should ever be comparing itself to law enforcement. That’s how dystopian horror movies start. Putting aside this horrendously inappropriate take, violating student privacy is a pattern—schools force us to engage with abusive proprietary software every day. Whether it’s opting us into a relationship with Google via school Gmail accounts, forcing students to have accounts with Adobe Creative Cloud as a requisite for even being able to engage with a course, or holding office hours via Microsoft Teams, there is an insidious drip of our data that is all being funneled through people who want to profit from it. All of these companies have been revealed to be astonishingly abusive with data. Google alone would take an entire new post to cover (4 lawsuits and counting).

I don’t expect universities to be a beacon of free and open-source software, especially given how frankly inconvenient most FOSS is. But I also don’t expect them to gleefully make it worse. Proctor software requires a webcam to view (and, usually, tour) a student’s living space and often uses biometrics to track their physical motion; it often features facial recognition and eye tracking. It also records the event and human proctors may be able to remotely control the student’s machine. (Washington Post) It seems almost absurd to have to explain the Orwellian nature of this type of surveillance, but in case this wasn’t clear: allowing for-profit companies to record and monitor students in their private living spaces because they might look up a Calculus formula is absolutely unhinged.

2.) It isn’t an effective measure for cheating and does not account for students with disabilities or, really, the majority of people.

One of the most infamous features of this type of software is that it tracks eye movement and physical motion. These are, perhaps, pretty easy behaviors to latch onto as signs of academic dishonesty. But, as is often the case, the easiest path is also the laziest and least thoughtful. The assumption that darting eyes and excessive motion are indicators of dishonesty is a lazy one that perpetuates ableist beliefs and assumptions. Students with ADHD may have a difficult time sitting still or staring directly at the monitor. Students with anxiety may need periods of time to readjust, perhaps closing their eyes to re-center. A student on the autism spectrum may need to stim during an exam. Students with chronic pain and/or fatigue may need to take breaks to stretch or struggle with uncomfortable seating (hi, that’s me.) As one student reported, she struggles with tics, particularly in stressful situations (such as exams), which puts her in a situation where she is being recorded in a vulnerable moment as she struggles with her disability, which she describes as embarrassing.

Even neurotypical students often fidget (clicking a pen, shaking a leg, etc.) It’s a very normal response to stress and hyper-concentration. Several peer-reviewed studies indicate that motion can be an effective tool to aid memory retrieval and clearer cognition. There is no reason to flag this as a suspicious or negative behavior, either in person or virtually. The only reason to discourage this behavior is for their benefit--it is much easier to identify any behavior other than the strictly prescribed one than it is to actually prioritize all students’ learning. Conventional academic settings are notoriously unfriendly to neurodivergent students and are often directly detrimental to the professed goals of teaching and learning. This is very much an institutional problem. It is just even more glaring and naked when distilled in this way--when given the choice between letting students learn comfortably (requiring some recalibration of course material) and forcing disabled students to be recorded by a software that is trained to view them as inherently suspicious, universities chose the latter.

To refocus and summarize: This software strips students of effective coping tools to take a test and hinders their academic performance.

So far, we’ve identified two ways this software works to the detriment of students and have identified zero ways it works to our benefit. At this point, we must ask: “Who does this serve?”

3.) This is a byproduct of institutional laziness that does not value its undergraduate students.

We have access to all the information we could ever need to perform our tasks competently, rendering many old testing styles archaic and impractical. Of course, we should have some working knowledge, but most of us will not be in situations where we have 2 minutes to recall the types of fault lines of the North American plate.

It demonstrates a broader issue: universities take their undergraduate students for granted; they fleece us for money we don’t have under the pretense that good education costs good money, then refuse to intervene when they do not deliver on that promise. We’re forced to spend inordinate amounts of money on textbooks—an 88% increase between 2006 and 2016 (Vox)—and additional equipment like clickers (which are usually just used to take attendance). We have little recourse when our professors (especially tenured professors) implement abusive practices. But we make these institutions run. Without undergraduate students, every single one of these universities would go under. The institutional arrogance and entitlement seems to grow every day, becoming harder and harder to ignore. But we--and more importantly, they--know college is the single most important tool for upward class mobility. As the casualties of late stage capitalism’s death rattle, we have no choice. It’s why they do it--they know they’ll get away with it. They know we have nowhere else to go.

In this specific context, I understand the burden of reconfiguring a course is not an easy one to shoulder and I do not expect professors to suddenly have all the answers. However, by introducing this software, the professor shifts this burden to this student--again. It is not our burden to bear--again. We’re struggling as well—there is no need to make it worse.

Where do we go from here?

Some of my fellow Cicadas pointed out I left this on a fairly depressing note. Although I am determinedly cynical, I don’t think there’s any harm in sharing some ideas.

Proctoring software is generally used for summative assessments, which evaluates student learning at a given benchmark, like a midterm or a final exam. These are high stakes, which means there is a high incentive to cheat, hence the proctors. Formative assessments are lower stakes, things like a quick summary of a lecture or a mini-quiz. Formative assessments aid learning and summative assessments measure learning. Conventional wisdom says both are necessary. A trickle of research has indicated that this may not be the case and this teacher makes a very compelling case as for why summative assessments might not even be necessary anymore.

That in mind, the most logical way to resolve this proctoring issue would be to eliminate time-based, closed note summative tests. There are many ways to achieve this

Solution #1: More (formative) testing.

I think almost everyone can identify with the “cramming for a test” experience. You sit down at 11:00 PM to engage with the material for the first time before your 8:00 AM exam. If you’re like me, maybe you’re only just now reading the textbook (oops). You open Quizlet and stare at the screen till your eyes hurt. Is it too late to email the professor a clarification question? You sleep for 3 hours, remorsefully wobbling your way through the test as you desperately chug the dregs of your coffee. You leave the room and feel overwhelming relief. You pass the test and learn almost nothing.

Henry L. Roediger III, a famous cognitive psychologist known for his research on memory, asserts the following: fast learning leads to fast forgetting. Cramming is popular because it works. At least, long enough to get through the test. His study reveals that self-testing is an incredibly effective tool for learning, but that it is not leveraged in a productive way. He elaborates on a concept known as the “testing effect” and studies better testing practices, all of which you can find here.

Basically, he asserts that one day of intense formative assessments was so effective for learning that it enabled the student to survive a summative assessment. In other words, many times, a cramming situation occurs because the formative assessments either did not happen or they were not effective,

How to implement/Examples:

Quizzes can be embedded into lecture videos using Canvas. Every lecture could be split into multiple videos, each one with graded, embedded quizzes.

This could be a weekly quiz that goes over lecture material. Maybe this quiz has 2-3 attempts and records the highest score.

Solution #2: No memory-based testing.

If summative exams are really necessary, there are other ways to measure mastery of the material. One could argue that assessments such as recitals and other performances require a component of memory, but generally, performance-based summative assessments are an accumulation of all you’ve learned and retain the pressure of a traditional exam without requiring a proctor.

Have you ever taken notes so desperately you didn’t actually absorb what was said? Have you ever just listened to a lecture and been surprised at how much you absorbed? Our fear of not remembering something we’ll need on an exam can be extremely distracting. However, if you can focus on the lecture completely without being distracted, you can have a more meaningful recollection of the material. Maybe you don’t remember Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, but you do remember that it was published in a serialization for 12 months in the 1800s.

How to implement/Examples:

Essays take the place of traditional exams. Instead of a time-based hunt through the treasure trove of young adult memory, a student can take their time to sort through the information they’ve been presented and create a unique response. This does, of course, have its own host of challenges and should be treated carefully, but essays could just as easily measure mastery.

Perhaps a class could be conducted almost entirely through discussions and direct engagement. After every single lecture, you post a summary of what you learned with 3 questions. This is a type of formative testing that could replace mini-quizzes and other memory based assessments.

#jay

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