#or they should be in jail because that's still true about them; but they also attempted murder in a real stupid way

[medicinemane]

You know, I'm never letting those fucking cops who parked their car with a lady in it on the train tracks and it got hit by a train live that down (thankfully she lived)

Anytime I see train tracks I tell whoever's with me that they need to pull over to the perfect parking spot, that they need to think like a cop

I will never stop making fun of them for it, not even because it's funny, but because fuck them, they were so stupid they nearly killed someone and it's only good fortune that saved her from them. I legitimately don't know how they manage to remember to breath while being that stupid

[morganski-19]

part 1

The next day, there’s someone new to visit Steve. Making Wayne stop in his tracks on his third coffee run. The rumors were true, the Chief isn’t as dead as he was a year ago. Just lost what looks to be half his body weight and all of his hair. Looking gaunt and malnourished. 

But he’s alive. That has to count for something.

Wayne wishes the Chief was there to see him. Give him the key to unlock the chain around Eddie’s wrist. So he’d be able to wake up to a clean slate. That his record will be clear and he won’t get carted off to jail as soon as he’s stable. So Wayne will be able to bring him home. 

Once he has a home to go to. Not just a shitty hotel room that costs more than it should for a night. But it’s right next to the hospital, so Wayne can be here in five minutes if something happens. When his boy wakes up. He has to wake up. 

It’s been five days since Eddie was brought in. Twelve since Wayne saw him last. All he wants is to hear his obnoxiously loud music blaring down the hall while he’s trying to sleep. Or the laughter that could make him smile even when he didn’t want to. Wayne wants his Eddie back, the boy he watched grow all of these years. He’s not ready for the day Eddie wakes up and the light is gone from his eyes. 

Because it will be. Wayne’s seen enough people come back from combat a completely different person. With the scars that are sewn into Eddie’s torso, up his neck, one on his cheek. There’s no doubt that he’s been through something unimaginable. Life changing. 

As much as Wayne wants Eddie to wake up. He’s not ready for him to wake up changed. 

There’s a knock on the hospital door before it opens. Wayne’s expecting a nurse to check Eddie’s vitals, tell him the same shit they have for days. That all is good and he’s progressing. It should be any day now that he wakes up. If the damage to his body wasn’t too much for him. Those words of hope lack their meaning now. 

But instead of a nurse walking through the door, it’s the Chief. 

“Can I sit?” He motions to the chair next to Wayne.

“I suppose.”

The Chief sits next to Wayne, not looking at him. “I hear he’s been in a coma for a few days now.”

Wayne nods, not much in the mood for talking. Civilly at least. Push the right button and the volcano is about to burst. 

“I’ve known a few people who’ve been in medically induced ones like this. They all wake up in the end.”

“I’d like for the cuffs to be off his wrist when he does,” Wayne snaps. Knowing that the Chief has the key to unlock them. “That way he can recover as an innocent man. Like he should.”

The Chief takes a deep breath. “I’m not fully reinstated yet. I don’t have the authority to do anything about that. Even if-”

“Even if what?” Wayne looks at the Chief. Anger filled his voice. “Even if he’s innocent. I know he’s innocent. My boy, my boy could barely hurt a fly, let alone a living, breathing person. He was kinder than people gave him credit for. This town gave him so much shit that he didn’t deserve. Still is. When I’m afraid he might never wake up the same again. So I’d like the cuffs off, so he knows that some part of this town sees him as something other than a villain.”

Finally looking Wayne in the eyes, the Chief takes a second to think. Nodding his head in thought. “You smoke?”

Wayne scoffs. “That really what you're thinking of right now?”

“Answer the question.” Something about the Chief makes Wayne believe there’s more to his words. 

“I do.”

“Great,” he stands, waiting for Wayne at the door. “Come on, let’s go.”

Wayne gets up, mainly because he doesn’t really have a choice but also because he wants to see where this is going. They pass Harrington in the hall, talking to someone on the phone. 

“Yeah, I’m free tomorrow. Can’t wait to sleep in my own bed. No don’t do that. Cause I don’t think it’s time to throw a party yet, not while.” He makes brief eye contact with Wayne as they walk by. Before turning away. “Just won’t feel right without all of us.”

Wayne has no clue who he’s talking about, but it’s probably not Eddie. Hopes it isn’t. He still doesn’t know how he feels about this kid, even if he knows Eddie’s innocent. Doesn’t forgive him from his past, if rumors are true. And knowing who his dad is, Wayne wouldn’t be surprised if they all were true. 

The Chief leads him to the side of the hospital, where there’s no foot traffic. No one around to hear. Wayne suddenly understands what this might all be about. Something not for wandering ears. 

“What I say does not leave this conversation,” he starts, handing Wayne a cigarette. Lighting his own before passing the lighter to Wayne. “Got it?”

Wayne nods. 

“I know Eddie’s innocent. But there’s some weird shit that was happening around then that I cannot tell you about it. All you need to know is that the Feds are involved, and they’re looking for a fall guy. And I’m trying my hardest to make sure that the fall guy isn’t your nephew. So while it might not seem like it, some progress is being made. Your nephew will be a free man when he wakes up. I give you my word on that.”

“I don’t even know how to start processing what you just said.” Wayne takes a long drag from the cigarette, letting the smoke blow out into the alleyway. 

The Chief laughs. “That was all of us the first time this happened. I’d say it gets easier but it really doesn’t.”

“The first time?”

“There’s a lot more to this town than meets the eye.”

“How do I know your word is any good?”

The Chief considers this for a moment. “You don’t really. But who else do you know who can fix this?”

With that, the Chief nods goodbye and heads to the parking lot. Leaving Wayne with more questions than answers, and a little flame of hope he’s wishing won’t get put out.

part 3

I don't know how many parts this will be but I do know they will be posted sporadically whenever I have time to write them. So, no promises of consistency.

also, tag list. I tagged anyone who asked/seemed interested in a part two. please let me know if you would like to be added or removed: @the-they-who-nerded, @insteviewetrust, @croatoan-like-its-hot, @jettestar, @tinyplanet95, @steddie-as-they-go, @slv-333, @littlecelestialmoth, @thatonebadideapanda, @fandomsanddeath, @marismorar

[trans-axolotl]

content note: this post talks about eugenics, incarceration and institutionalization, and violent ableism

tangent from that post because i didn't want to start writing an essay on someone else's post and this is about a conversation i had irl this month, not intended as a reply to that post. but i actually feel very complicated about the idea of whether or not we should be pushing for more "accessibility" in jails and prisons and psych wards and institutions. i put that word in quotes because i don't think there is ever a way that being incarcerated is actually accessible to our bodies and minds; it is a disabling experience on so many levels. i'm not going to list out all the reasons why on this post; i've made so many posts talking explicitly about the harms of institutionalization before and i don't want to do that again right now. Talila Lewis has given several interviews about ableism, incarceration, and disability that are really worth reading and go more in depth into what that violence looks like. Liat Ben Moshe has also given another interview about disability and incarceration that goes over many of the same topics. given that these places are intense sites of violence towards disabled people, it feels difficult for me to claim that they could ever truly be accessible in any meaningful sense of the word.

what's also true right now is that institutions and prisons are incredibly inaccessible for physically disabled people in particular. i've been arrested with a wheelchair, i've been institutionalized with a feeding tube on top of that as well, i've been held on medical floors for psych treatment before, and i know very well exactly how bad it is. i've watched myself and so many other physically disabled people almost die in these places because of sheer neglect. i have physically disabled neighbors who were killed in these places. it is so dangerous for physically disabled people who are locked up in these places, yet at the same time, often psych wards are so inaccessible that physically disabled people just can't even be admitted because wards refuse to take people with mobility aids, medical devices, specific types of medication or care needs, if you have some kinds of terminal illness, and on and on and on.

what's also true is that when these places are so inaccessible that many physically disabled people are excluded and unable to even access them in the first place, it doesn't mean that we then somehow access other types of care instead. it just means that we're also discarded and left to die. this also is a really similar dynamic for a ton of other marginalized groups that get excluded from psych care--many of my comrades who are people of color have also experienced this same type of denial of care. initially i think that can seem like a confusing contradiction--how is it that psych wards are locking up some people up against their will but refusing to take in other people? but when you start thinking about the underlying logic at the core of these systems, it makes sense.

psych wards operate under this idea that madness must be cured by any means possible, up to and including eradication. institutions are a way of disappearing madness from the world--hiding us away so that we don't disturb a sane society, and not letting us free again until we either die in there or are able to appear like we've sufficiently eradicated madness from our mind. preventing physically disabled people from accessing inpatient treatment is operating under the same assumptions--except that this particularly violent convergence of ableism is happy to just let us die, both because it eradicates madness from the world and because they view our lives as unworthy of living in the first place. eugenics is still alive and well in the united states and it's still fucking killing us; both inside institutions and outside of them.

i would never tell someone that they're privileged for getting institutionalized--i think that would be a cruel thing to say to someone who has just survived a lot of violent ableism. and at the same time, our current systems of mental health care are set up in a way where not being able to access inpatient care can be a deadly logistical nightmare. there are some partial hospitalization programs that have such a long waiting list that you can only really get in if you just got an urgent referral because you're getting discharged from inpatient care--how the fuck are physically disabled people supposed to access those programs? if you need meal support for your eating disorder 6 times a day and the only places that offer that are residential treatment in a house with stairs, what the fuck are you supposed to do? if noncarceral outpatient forms of treatment like therapy, support groups, PHP programs, peer support funding, etc etc etc are often prioritizing people who have recently been discharged from inpatient care, how are you supposed to access any type of mental health care at all? (to be clear i know that not all forms of outpatient care operate in this way, but a lot of state run/low cost programs that accept Medicaid/Medicare operate in that way, and i've seen it cause enough barriers that i know this is a very real problem.)

so when i think about what it would take to actually ensure that physically disabled people can access mental healthcare, there's a lot that comes up for me. on one hand, so much of my work is about tearing down institutions and ensuring that no one is forced into these places to face that type of violence. on the other hand, so many physically disabled people need care right now, and we have to figure out some way of making that happen given the current systems we have in place. i will never be okay with just discarding physically disabled people as collateral damage, and any world that we're building needs to be one that embraces disability from the beginning.

i keep thinking about the concept of non-reformist reforms that gets talked about a lot in the prison abolition movement. the idea behind non-reformist reforms is that usually, reforms work to reinforce the status quo. they're usually talked about in liberal language of "improvement" and "human rights", but when it comes down to it, they're still giving more power to harmful institutions and reinforcing state power. an example of a reformist reform is building a new jail that is bigger and has "nicer" services. or when the cops in my city tried to get funding for more wheelchair accessible cop vans. these are reformist reforms because when it comes down to it, it's still giving more money and legitimacy to the prison system and increasing the capacity to keep people locked up--even when people talk about it using language about welfare for prisoners, that's not actually what's happening. having more wheelchair accessible cop vans would be dangerous for the disabled people in my city--it's helped us out a LOT that it's so difficult for the cops to arrest multiple wheelchair users at once.

non-reformist reforms are the opposite of that--they're reforms that work to dismantle systems, redistribute power, and set the stage for more even more dramatic transformations. They're sort of an answer to the question of "what do we do right now if we can't go out and burn down all the prisons overnight?" Examples of a nonreformist reform are defunding prisons, getting rid of paid administrative leave for cops, shutting down old prisons and not building new ones, etc. they're steps we can take right now that don't fully abolish prisons, but still work to dismantle them, rather than making it easier for the system to keep going.

so, when we apply this to the psych system, what are some nonreformist reforms that could help make sure that all disabled people are having their needs met right now? Some ideas I'm having include fixing the problem of PHP/outpatient care requiring referrals from inpatient, increasing the amount of Medicaid/Medicare funding for outpatient mental health care, building physically accessible peer respites that allow caregivers to stay with you if needed, increasing SSI/SSDI to an actually liveable rate, creating more disability specific mental health resources, support groups, care webs, and a million other things we'd probably need to actually get our needs met. non-reformist reforms for people in psych wards right now might look like ensuring everyone has 24/7 access to phones and internet, ensuring that disabled people have access to mobility aids in these spaces, making sure that there's accessible nutrition for people with dietary restrictions and/or feeding tubes, and more.

when i see people saying that we need to ensure that psych wards or prisons are made accessible it makes me feel nervous. i worry that the changes required to do that wouldn't actually provide care to disabled people, i worry it would just make it easier for increasing numbers of disabled people to get locked up and harmed all while people claimed it was a success story of "inclusion." i worry that it would just continue to cement carceral treatment as the only option for existing as a disabled person, and that it would make it harder for us to live in our communities, with the services and adaptations we need. when i think about abolition, i'm always thinking about what can we do right now, what do disabled people who are incarcerated and institutionalized need right now, what can we do right now to ensure that everyone is surviving and getting their needs met. i'm not willing to ignore or discard my incarcerated disabled comrades in the moment because of my dreams for an abolitionist future, i'm always going to support our organizing in these places as we try to survive them.

overall i guess what i'm saying is that i think making inpatient psych care accessible would require dismantling and fundamentally destroying the whole system. I can't imagine a way of doing that within the current system that wouldn't just continue to harm disabled people. and that as a psych abolitionist i think that means we have a responsibility to each other right now to fight for that, to understand that physically disabled people not being able to access mental health care is an incredibly urgent need. I refuse to treat my MadDisabled comrades as disposable: our lives are valuable and worth fighting for.

i'm also going to link to the HEARD organization on this post. They're one of the few abolitionist organizations that does direct advocacy and support for deaf and disabled people in prisons. if you or one of your disabled community members ever gets incarcerated in jail/prison, they have a lot of resources. donate to support their work if you can.

[kyumisyumi]

Something something something eldritch Nikto something something something

I've sifted through so many ideas for this because I didn't wanna just pick a random eldritch creature from my box of horrors and slap Nikto's name on it. But also I don't feel like I have enough info about him(ironic, considering I write about him so much) to craft him into a creature. I watched some documentaries on eldritch horrors, dived into Russian cryptids and still drew blanks but here's what I managed

Rating: E for everyone who loves Nikto

Eldritch!Nikto x F!Reader

Word count: 1

Part 2

~Taking requests~

You weren't running from the consequences of your actions, more like briskly walking in the opposite directions. Looking forward all the way because backwards held the sounds of large dogs and angry men. Their boots cracking every twig and foliage along the way, voices interrupting the once peaceful ambiance of the woods. You could hardly tell whether the growling was from the hounds or the men. And really, who wouldn't want to run away from such a thing? Not run; walk. Quickly, very quickly. You were being smart, not cowardly.

No, never that.

You weren't cowardly when you snuck into that guardsman's post. You weren't cowardly when you tried to steal the gold he confiscated from the Miller's wife, the only woman that kept you fed while the streets were your home. You weren't cowardly when you defended yourself once he caught you. And you weren't cowardly when you accidentally bashed his head in with a clay pot. He should've worn a helmet, really. A guard should always have their helmet on! What was he thinking? Now look at you, running for your life and deluding yourself as if it would change the actions of the past.

Running.

You ran your mouth, ran your mind, but no matter how fast you moved, you couldn't outrun hunting dogs. Your fault, really, for trying to do so while wearing the long, ugly skirt you stole from someone's unattended clothesline. You should've maybe stolen the guard's old pants, you knew he had some because he mentioned wanting to give them to his nephew who was in combat training. Instead you dashed out the home the moment you realized he wasn't breathing, panicked by your first time taking a life. What were you thinking?

"I wasn't-" you spat a thick glob of blood out your mouth, it's red color staining the putrid black floor. Tears staining your vision and pain plaguing your mind. "I didn't mean to." You said it over and over again but it was little defense against men who'd lost a comrade because of you. A good man. A good man who stole from widows and bullied the elderly? It's weird how two people can look at the same person but see someone different. But that train of thought was halted by a kick to your stomach. And when one of the men took the final hit, the force of it sending you against the edge of the pit, you finally felt that feeling in your stomach. The one you hid away behind conversations with yourself. Locked away behind a naive expectation that things will either go your way or go away. Your first taste of true regret. Because you got a glimpse of where that attitude has lead you. That attitude that kept you going when your parents had left you. That attitude that kept you alive when your survival was in your own hands at an age where other children were being coddled and sung to. That attitude that protected you in the harsh village slum, now had you staring down into hell. 'The pit'; a giant hole defacing mother earth's perfect form. It's surface covered in black ichor, you couldn't tell whether the walls were moving or you'd been hit so hard your vision was thoroughly fucked. This was considered a punishment worse than death. Jokesters and troublemakers got a stern talking to. Thieves and crooks got jail time. Murders and adulterers got death. But the truly damned got the pit. The punishment didn't match the crime but judging by the hate filled glares of the men surrounding you, they didn't much care.

Or maybe they did care, they cared about you as much as you did yourself, these days.

That was a more comforting thought, maybe? Maybe not. Either way, thinking about it felt a whole lot better than thinking of the weightlessness you felt as you fell. Your vision quickly losing the greens and yellows of a gentle forest to being plunged into darkness. A darkness beyond description. One that surpassed what's seen when you close your eyes for the night. That surpassed the unconsciousness of sleep when dreams escaped you. A darkness that felt like death yet was somehow alive.

The walls were moving, they shifted uncomfortably as they felt the presence of another. Voices that whispered of uncertainty and conflict. Voices that yelled intruder and ones that yelled fodder. But one voice just hummed in curiosity at seeing the source of blood and spit and tears it tasted. He had consumed many of your kind but what little it had of you ignited interest rather than hunger. So it did not eat. Didn't wrap you in its tendrils and rip you apart into easily digestible pieces to be absorbed by its mass. The tendrils held you, confused by their many intentions and wants, before simply bringing you lower into the pit. To the very bottom that no other creature has ever seen. No other creature would ever be allowed near. Far too close to it's more vulnerable organs. But you wouldn't hurt it, would you? Wouldn't hurt them. Not with those blunt nails and teeth, not with those little limbs and severed ties to the natural order. You were weaker than it's weakest points yet you fought against his tendrils like you believed you could win. Struggled and resisted as if you had a fighting chance. 'Hush, little human.' It thought as it strangled you, only enough to render you unconscious. Give it enough time to build a prison home inside itself for you. Then build a form for himself more perceptible to your primitive eyes, he'd tried once before but the human face was so hard to mimic. There was so much anger inside you, more for yourself than for him. And Nikto couldn't understand it. There is only one 'you' inside that tiny, fleshy form. How can one be angry at their own/only self? That would be one of the first things he asked. He felt there was nothing a creature like you could teach him yet he had so much he wanted to ask regardless. Maybe once he had his answers he could finally consume you in peace. Maybe then the voices that called for him to spare you will quiet down. And the ones that screamed for him to bond with you will stop. Your body couldn't handle the things he desires... Could it?

Regardless, he has time. All the time in the world and beyond.

Silly human, getting yourself thrown down here, what were you thinking?

All in all, I didn't want to forget the eldritch and just make a monster.

[milolunde]

So, Sonic Forces! … again. Posts like this will be put under Forces!RW from now on, just so I can keep things together.

Following this post, I’ve been thinking about my reimagined Sonic Forces a lot. It’s high up on my list of things to rewrite, but… that list is quite long and is made up of stories that, for the most part, will live exclusively in my head. However, I had so much fun making my last post that I wanted to make another.

I wanted to touch on an aspect of the Phantom Ruby: how it’s able to make hordes of copies at Infinite’s will.

In my mind, the Phantom Ruby makes clones with the same attributes as any other illusion. Those made to witness the illusion will be unable to control feeling, despite reason, what they are witnessing is real. This enhances the Phantom Ruby’s powers, making its illusions able to affect the world as if they were real.

However, copies are different as they can perform most of the abilities their source can, but only if Infinite has a solid grasp on what those abilities are. For example, Chaos remains in his base state because Infinite does not understand his evolution, but he does understand chaos energy and chaos manifestation, so Shadow’s copies is able to harness Chaos Spear (though its nowhere on the scale of a true Chaos Spear. It gathers available chaos energy and turns it into a weapon, but without an emerald the copy has to draw upon the natural chaos energy around it). This is also one of the reasons Zavok is so… lame, for lack of a better word, and why Infinite resigns his copy to being Sonic’s jail keeper.

Why, then, would Eggman have Infinite stop at making copies of Zavok, Chaos, and Shadow? Of course, it’s because he finds them worthy allies as they have all put Sonic in close life or death situations and all have beaten Eggman himself at least once. If they worked together, they would undoubtedly be able to take Sonic out without the need for more manpower.

But… why not copy Sonic himself after his capture? Eggman chooses to copy Metal Sonic so, with Sonic himself imprisoned, having Sonic’s speed and agility on Eggman’s side would be a valuable resource.

————

vvv Continuation + Close Ups/Textless Art vvv

————

Eggman told Infinite they should make copies of Sonic to torment the world they were conquering. Having their precious hero, or at least his likeness, working with Eggman would destroy their moral… Infinite proposed, instead, not only was it too soon to show their cards in Infinite’s full abilities, but that tormenting the world with their hero acting against them would be nothing compared to the psychological play of allowing the world to believe Infinite, a hand in the Eggman Empire, had taken him out for good. Letting a likeness of their hero wander around could work against them, influencing people to gain a “hope against all odds” approach.

While Eggman agreed, it wasn’t until after he had Infinite show him the Ruby could, in fact, make a copy of Sonic. Despite not wanting to, having the copy ended up working in Infinite’s favor. After commenting on the pest Sonic was, the Doctor agreed that, yes, looking at that hedgehog for too long was giving him a migraine; he didn’t want to imagine what having hundreds of him would do… Good. Because Infinite thought Sonic was too annoying to waste his power forging copies of him, anyway.

Infinite looked at the copy. He could appreciate the hedgehog’s indomitable spirit and his ability to ruin things. He could even acknowledge that, yes, he was enough to be the world’s hero.

Until now.

————

Five, closing in on six months after Sonic’s defeat, Tails found himself miles from his live-in workshop, the last one left after Eggman’s takeover. He managed to gather supplies before his home was invaded and made it out by his scruff on the Tornado, but she hadn’t gotten them out without taking severe damage. Still, she flew, and she landed, and Tails could start repairing her to the best of his ability. He didn’t need a plane since the sky had been put under lockdown, but the Tornado was Sonic’s. He’d hate for Sonic to find out he had wrecked the Tornado and done nothing to fix it.

While sorting out the damaged parts, Tails heard something scuff behind him… He tensed before he moved, much too caught up with the Tornado to remember he should defend himself first, worry later, when his eyes caught the source of the sound.

Impossible.

Tails didn’t think it was possible, but he tensed more at the sight of his brother, his big brother, the sight of Sonic walking idly past him. Something slipped past Tails’ lips, maybe it was supposed to be words, but he didn’t know which ones. His big brother stopped. And turned towards him…

————

Gotta cut myself off from my more story-writer way of telling this before I get carried away. Apologies! But, if I’m able to work on this more, maybe there will be a full scene in a full chapter in a full story for this? Perchance…

Shadow would appear and, before Tails could process it, would be fighting the copy down the street. Shadow’s been dealing with Phantom copies since day one of Eggman’s invasion, and he knows Sonic well enough to be able to spot a fake from anywhere.

Tails would, of course, chase after them, leaving behind the Tornado and all of his supplies. As far as he knows, it was Shadow who helped take Sonic down in the first place and he’s ready for answers as to why, and answers on how Sonic got back, and why they’re fighting again, and…! Well, a lot of answers!

By the time Tails gets there, Shadow would have already taken the copy down; it’s on the floor, lifeless, and starting to disappear. Tails would launch himself at Shadow, claws and teeth bared, kicking and scratching out of everything he’s thought and felt about Shadow for the last five months, but Shadow would easily subdue him. Tails is tired, and hungry, and most of all he’s devastated.

Once Tails is able to hear anything Shadow tries to tell him, he would tell Tails about the fact Eggman is generating copies. Shadow has a certain soft spot for Tails, especially in his current situation, so while the scene would be to get information about the Phantom Ruby to Tails, it would also serve to give him the comfort he needs, and closure that no, Shadow didn’t hurt Sonic and, no he’s also not looking for him but, if he hears anything, he’ll let the kid know.

————

I don’t know if I’ve said it, but I’ve got a biiiiig list of media I’ve rewritten entirely in my head for fun and that usually means I have the most barebones chapter layout for them and even some ‘first drafts’ for certain chapters; like this hypothetical chapter!

That’s it, really. I had fun talking about Forces and showing how I would do things! I tend to get carried away a lot when I’m writing about the things I like. I really didn’t plan to write this post out the way I did. Hopefully the difference between my presenting the concepts and writing them out for a more entertaining read of what I would do wasn’t too confusing.

[thrashkink-coven]

Okay here’s the hard part.

I think a lot about that guy, so called Jesus, and his philosophy of radical forgiveness and empathy. For a long time I thought that was just a line abusers use to force their victims to forgive them (AND IT IS)

But! I also think about Lucifer and the things he taught me regarding the concept of hell. If I was the ruler of hell and I had to manage all these terrible people, what would I do? Torture them? Give them endless suffering so they feel guilty? Do to them what they did to others so they can understand how bad it feels?

Latinos who voted for Trump, oh you disappoint me, but no, I don’t want you to be deported. Women who voted for Trump, *sigh*, no, I don’t want to see you get an ectopic pregnancy or carry your dead baby. No I do not want all those conservative gays to lose their right to marriage. And no, I don’t even want all of those fucked up fascist nazi racists to die.

It would be SO satisfying to see them get what they deserve, right?

God, I’m so sick of being apart of a species that loves to conquer. We bleed, they win, they bleed, we win. I’m sick of patching wounds. All I see is hellfire.

My friend Taylor Mcnallie is facing fraudulent charges because of an altercation that happened while she was protesting in Calgary. The bitch of a cop who assaulted her not only received no punishment, she got a fucking promotion. I remember during one of Taylor’s speeches someone said something like “I hope she gets arrested and goes to jail,” and Taylor said, “I don’t hope she goes to jail. Jail shouldn’t exist. I just want her to get fired and apologize. That’s all I want.”

Pacifism, true pacifism, like the kind that guy preached about, doesn’t mean laying down and accepting every terrible thing assholes do to you with a smile. It means taking away their ability to harm without harming them yourself. Eliminating the evil without becoming evil. Punching nazis does not make you a nazi, but praying for the death and destruction of people, human beings, because you hate them as much as they hate you? *sigh*

The hardest part about this whole radical empathy thing, is the fact that I cannot even wish harm upon those who want me dead. Isn’t that funny? That literal neo nazi, yeah, I hope he has shelter. Fuck I hope that rapist still eats tonight. I hope he feels shame until the day he dies, but I don’t hope he gets raped in prison. I don’t even want him in prison to be honest, I want him to be cared for, and I want his ability to do harm stripped away.

“Even if he hurts a child?”

God damn it, yes. I can’t add more suffering into the world, even if it is inflicted upon the people I’d love to hate most. I want to take away his power to do evil, I want everyone to know what kind of person he is and the terrible things he does so they can keep themselves safe… and then I want him to be safe.

I want all those terfs to have clean drinking water. I know they hate my guts, ugh, it is what it is. But praying that they experience the pain they’ve caused me, hoping that they die or suffer only makes me more like them.

WHICH SUCKS. This way of thinking is NOT satisfying AT ALL!!! Being vindictive and petty is FUN and it FEELS GOOD!!! That’s why it’s so fucking easy, and that’s why we keep eating each other over and over again.

Having said all of this, we should definitely bring back the guillotine lmao. I’m not saying that we should be super nice to people who are trying to kill us, do fight back. If the people need to kill their oppressors to be free then, hey, I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong for that. This isn’t a “we should all hug and sing kumbaya together! Kindness is always the way!!!” take. If the only way to bring death to the empire is to bring death to its owners, then so be it. Do so in the way that produces the least amount of degradation to your soul.

But wishing natural disasters on Texas, hoping that that racist woman’s parents get deported, out of spite and hatred… what are they doing to you? What are you doing to yourself?

Humanity is disgusting, truly truly abhorrent. I want to be able to look at us and embrace us with acceptance of that. Every single fucking terrible person on this earth deserves liberty, life, and freedom. Even when you spit in my face and hurt the people I love, damn it, I won’t hurt you. I see you as a rabid animal that needs to be sedated and slowly acclimated to compassion. And I will keep trying, even if you never learn. I can’t give up on humanity.

This is the most important and the hardest part. I’m not telling you to forgive, forgiveness is for you. If it doesn’t serve you, don’t forgive. But don’t let people without humanity kill the humanity that exists within you. Don’t let hatred fester in your soul. You’re allowed to be mad, hell, you should be furious. Let that fury keep you warm, but do not become a monster too.

To all you stupid fucking fascist pieces of shit, I hope you get exactly what you deserve. And what you deserve is not death, pain or suffering. It’s self reflection and growth, guilt and humility. As much as I would enjoy seeing you hurt, I refuse to become like you. And damn it I love you, I love every human being on this planet. I love you so much that I cannot become you. I love you so fucking much that I will continue to fight for your rights even when you’re trying to take mine away. and I hate that I love you like this, but I can’t stop.

So I will stop you.

- James Baldwin

[into-september]

Haven't watched the London special but have two observations on when we'll see Adrien learning the truth

DIEGETICALLY: The butterfly miraculous is still lost by the time Alix is in her twenties

ON THE META LEVEL: People talk a lot about Adrien being denied the truth about his dad but I haven't seen anyone bring up Cat Noir being denied the truth about Hawkmoth's demise.

Between "your dad was the supervillain who wanted to change history so your mum never died" and "your dad spent his last months in agony and died by literally rotting to pieces because of the magic that it was your job to use responsibly", we all know which is the worse news. The Movie showed us the first being overcome even after said dad had laid Paris in ruins; the NYC special showed us Adrien's collapse after less than half of that happened to a stranger and then was fixed.

From the way people are posting about the London special, I have the distinct impression that it was also not the part of the problem that the writers were interested in milking for angst. The real focus of this episode should've been Plagg, Alix and Tikki dealing with the aftermath of "Destruction", but instead the fandom is here discussing whether or not we should absolve Marinette for being used to strip the flooring after the writers painted themselves into a corner. The show asks us to pass our judgment on Marinette's choice, but claiming that this is Marinette's choice to make is a fallacy.

Let's be clear on this: "Destruction" exists because there had to be an in-story explanation for why the show won't deal with Adrien learning Hawkmoth's identity. There is a pretense of discussing the morality of Marinette's decision to heed Gabriel's wish above Adrien's autonomy, but per the genre and the tone and the focus and the target audience, there was no other option.

Because here is the truly wild part of this whole debacle: Marinette isn't even making an informed decision. She doesn't have an inkling of what Hawkmoth's identity would do to Adrien. Only when The Reveal happens will she know the gruesome extent of the tragedy that is Adrien Agreste and the true weight of the secret she opted to keep; if she hadn't decided to hide the truth on her own, Plagg/Tikki/Alix would be forced to interfere. Yes Marinette's actions are terrible horrible no good very bad, but if stopping Cat Noir from activating his cataclysm in the wax museum would inevitably lead to Gabriel reviving his angelic wife (which was somehow a worse ending than him reviving his supervillain secretary???), then the solution should be to go back to "Origins" and make sure Master Fu gave Plagg's miraculous to literally anyone else than his son. The real question left by the S5 finale isn't "should Marinette tell Adrien", it is why it was a cosmic necessity that Gabriel Agreste was killed by his own son when Ladybug's team has access to the miraculous who could prevent that tragedy.

There is no universe where the thematically coherent and narratively satisfying climax of the story about Cat Noir and Hawkmoth is "Adrien confronts his girlfriend about lying", and the bitter comfort is that it won't be. If the truth of Hawkmoth's identity ever were to reach Adrien, his girlfriend lying about it would be the least of his sorrows, because those sorrows would be so grotesque that there is no way the show will ever acknowledge them; closure to this storyline was made impossible the moment it was decided that Gabriel would take his death at Adrien's literal hands. When "parents go to jail" was too dark for the networks, I somehow don't think they'll be interested in doing the first ever production of Oedipus Rex for the 4-10 audience.

[goodomensjail]

HUGE SPOILER: SCENE 1 SEQUENCE TO THE BEST OF MY 2 FREE DRINKS IN MEMORY:

We open in a dark space before creation. There is a pre-fall “Crowley” with white robes, white wings, and short curly red hair (no snake eyes). He is struggling to hold his plans straight so he shouts to the void for some help from what appears to be a falling star, which then takes shape into an equally white robed and winged Aziraphale.

Angel Crowley asks for this (apparently lesser) angel to help him create a nebula by holding his plans for him. Angel Crowley then uses a hand crank a la Bentley from season 1 to spin into existence a beautiful nebula. Angel Crowley explains eagerly and delightedly that it is a star factory; Aziraphale is delighted and compliments him and tries to introduce himself by name, obviously hoping Angel Crowley will do the same. But Angel Crowley actually is barely paying attention and misses the opportunity to introduce himself and we do not get his name (which is either a. important because when we DO get his real angel name it will be a MOMENT [Raphael?] or b. this provides the explanation for WHY in the garden of eden Anzirphale didnt know Demon Crowley's name).

Aziraphale then tells Crowley that though this nebula is beautiful, it apparently is planned to be destroyed in 6000 years, which upsets Crowley. Azirpahale also says Earth and “people” are about to be made and that the purpose of the stars and nebulas is for humans to gaze up at them in wonder. This also upsets Crowley who feels these star systems should exist for some greater purpose than humans to just look at.

Angel Crowley decides he may need to give some suggestions to God, to which Aziraphale cautions him to be very careful about giving too many suggestions to the almighty ("its not like she has a suggestion box or anything") or asking too many questions of the great plan. “How much trouble can I get in for a few suggestions anyway” says Crowley, as a shower of stars begins. Angel Crowley opens his wing to shield Aziraphale from the falling stars of his new nebula.

OPENING CREDITS

**Note EDIT: I have been told by others directly in messages who were at the screening that YES Crowley says something to the effect of "arent you gorgeous" and Aziraphale thinks he is speaking to him for a beat before realizing its about the stars I do not recall the spoiler going around that Crowley says “aren’t you gorgeous” to a star and Aziraphale mistakes it for complimenting him. Though it fits with the general shy and adoring vibe from Aziraphale in the scene and the Doctor Who-ish wonder of Crowley for his nebula. Me not noting it or remembering it now doesn’t make it not true tho I coulda missed it cuz I was happily giggling to much

***Note 2: I thought Crowley had David Tennant’s normal eye color NO SNAKE EYES for sure, but I have seen some from the screening say his eyes were purple. I didn’t note that but I don’t want to go as far as say they are wrong

***NOTE 3: apparently im still in tumblr jail and cannot respond to comments even on this added blog.... The falling stars/meteor shower is NOT the fall from grace of the angels, it appears to be a normal star shower caused by the Nebula and it mirrors the rain scene; Crowley uses his wing to shield Aziraphale from the falling stars.

[ms-hells-bells]

Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. “He needs a long penitentiary sentence,” the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.

I’d been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years — all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison.

The most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of the state prison population.

When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: “She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow,” which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America’s racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary “13th,” which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and “Just Mercy,” a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn’t know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, “I need to tell you something.” We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

My mother’s words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word “rape” along with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.

The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother’s world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.

We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I’d never sung any further.

Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn’t persuade that audience that her experiences as a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.

Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. “I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me,” she said. This mattered for Harris because of the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. “I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death,” she said.

Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a Black woman’s doing this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she’d told her colleagues: “So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.” She continued: “You know that music you were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my car right now.”

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, about their sons. “The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them,” Harris said. “And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish.” They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. “My son is being treated like a statistic,” they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in this country: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe.

Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about Black people’s needing protection from us — from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.

Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by Black directors — “New Jack City,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood” — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that “we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear that they might be arrested” and “go to jail for the rest of their natural life.” Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court; and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions.

Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.

Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same. And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word “patina” and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board’s office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.

Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free, they’ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.

In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.

I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us — beyond that we’d served enough time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing that he should be free.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory.

I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.

After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” The host asked my mother about going to court for her son’s trial when he was facing life. “I was raped by gunpoint,” my mother said. “It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself.” I hadn’t forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating.

On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, “That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.”

Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Harris praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, “should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time.”

Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to “unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of being inhumane”; criticized the bail system; and called for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.

In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate “in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,” countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was not about to start telling them “about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country.” Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that “the very serious function of racism” is “distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: “As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd go to jail?” My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.

“In the criminal-justice system,” Harris replied, “the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’ and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individual who was arrested.” Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable. And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I’d represented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d be representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their freedom?

“We need to reimagine what public safety looks like,” the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. “Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don’t have a system that’s reactive?” The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills development, education funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started Back on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. “ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out,’” she said people told her.

It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men around them — to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — do far too much time in prison.

And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital; tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything.

The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in the city I called home raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should ever contact victims and their families.

Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target. But if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.

In light of Harris being endorsed by Biden and highly likely to be the Democratic Party candidate, I thought I would share this balanced, understanding of both sides, article in regard to Harris and her career as a prosecutor, as I know that will be something dragged out by bad actors and useful idiots (you have a bunch of people stating 'Kamala is a cop', which is completely false, and also factless and misleading statements about 'mass incarceration' under her). I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be criticised or that there is nothing about her career that can be criticised, but it should at least be representative of the truth and understanding of the complexities of the legal system.

[elbiotipo]

Was thinking about the whole owl fiasco in New York (which is funny because we find wild animals around here every day but if it's it in New York it's international news)

And well, that owl was (apparently) freed by animal rights activists who wanted it to be free and stuff. They argue something on the grounds of "well MAYBE that owl died crashing into a building and spent the last weeks in a stressful enviroment eating rats full of poison but at least he died FREE". Which is of course, dumb.

And then some other people argue that it's wrong to free random animals from zoos and anthropomorphizing their freeddom, which is correct, but then they go all the way to the other side. I read someone posting that "owls in nature live 15 years, this one was going to live 60" and "animals in captivity don't want freedom since they are pampered" and while that's not untrue, animals in captivity do get a life that would be considered good and they get so used to it that many don't want or most often cannot be released... it's a poor argument. We really don't know if animals, among being pampered, don't desire more. One argued "owls love to sit in the same place and be fed" and are you sure? That does not sound like bird-like behavior to me.

And what's more, it's anthropomorphizing in reverse. The animal rights activists say "we cannot jail animals they want to be FREE" and these people argument back "no, no, they're living the good life, it's good that they are in captivity actually". Fine, what about of all the owls who live in the wild. Don't they deserve to live 60 years of pampering too? Current zoo animals shouldn't be freed, that's true. What about taking more, why not give them all a good life?

My response about this is that it's never about a single owl. We don't protect individual animals because of their own individual lives but because of what they mean for an ecosystem. When great pains are taken to protect charismatic megafauna such as pandas or whales, for example, it's because they're in danger of being lost forever. But also, because protecting them means protecting everything that supports them, the entire landscape (umbrella species). So the quality of life of a single owl in a single city is missing the point. We should instead asking, what's the quality of the ecosystems that support that species, and many others? The Eurasian Owl is a widely ranging species that has adapted to many enviroments, so it's not in danger of extinction anytime soon, but it's still good to ask: wouldn't it better to try and save the enviroments where it lives instead of a single owl in New York City? No animal is an isolated being, and both the animal right activists and their counterparts miss this. If we have animals in zoos, it must be for them to be safe enough so they can be reintroduced to their natural enviroments, which are the ones that truly need to be protected, as a whole. There is no point in arguing about a single bird when there's a whole forest of them.

[altf4d3lete]

Wednesday series takes itsef far more seriously than the movies. Murder is a serious thing in the story. Here we won't find a poor girl cooked inside a cake and get a "C'est la vie!" joke. While W herself is proud of having of mutilated Dalton, seeing it as a rightful retribution, it's clear that she despises senseless murder, or killing for pleasure. EG when Enid tells her she's sorry for Xavier, W answers, without regrets, that he was a liar and a murderer, implying he deserved to be jailed.

BUT she accepts murder as a mean to protect others or themselves. When Enid and W see eachother again after the battle, for what W knows, if E is alive that means she killed Tyler. W saw what a Hyde is capable to do, and doesn't know that the Sheriff shot his own son, so the only conclusion she can reach is that if Enid survived then Tyler is dead, or so mauled that he's dying. So, Enid killed somebody, yet Wednesday reciprocates the hug. The emotional climax of the show was never about Tyler, it was for Wednesday to open completely to the girl who constantly offered her friendship without losing hope. And Tyler's final battle wasn't in the story for him, but to make Enid shine. The writers willingly wrote that.

If they really wanted to depict Tyler as a victim, I'm sure they would have been perfectly capable to write him as a victim, not as a willing participant.

EXACTLY ‼️‼️‼️ THIS RIGHT HERE.

First paragraph: this! Wednesday is shown to be morally strong in this show, in her own weird sense. She doesn’t like people who murder innocents, she doesn’t think people should be in pain if they don’t deserve it. She actively goes out of her way to be nice (as she can be) to Enid and Eugene. She only messes with people once they mess with her. If she was the way that Weylers see her as, she wouldn’t have bothered with the piranhas. She just straight up would have finished the job and killed dalton and probably killed Eugene’s bullies as well. She doesn’t like murder unless it’s justified in her eyes. And there doesn’t seem to be a lot that justifies it. Even when she found out Tyler was the Hyde, she wasn’t going to kill him. And that says a lot about her character I think. It’s also weird that people think that she’d forgive him because he was forced to do those things while she was under the impression that Xavier was the Hyde (and forced to do things) and didn’t care. Straight up threw him in jail 0 qualms about it.

Second paragraph: I already talked a little about the first half so I’ll focus on the second! this entire thing is so true. Her arc was with ENID, not Tyler, and I think that says a lot about the direction the writers want to take the show. It was never about her opening up romantically, it was never about her being shipped with Tyler or finding love. It was about her and ENID, and it always will be about the two of them, whether they end up romantic or not. It was purposefully set up that way, and the writers have already said that they’re the center of the show. Whether Wednesday ends up with Enid, someone else, or alone, no one will ever be as important to her as Enid is and that is just *chefs kiss*.

Paragraph 3: if they wanted to depict Tyler as a victim, they would have made it WAY more clear that the Hyde is a split personality or that they really have no control over their actions. Iirc, there was even talk of a Hyde who offed their master, so it’s not looking good for Tyler. It’s looking more like he has SOME sense of Will if he really tried to fight it, but he gave into the murdering and enjoyed it rather than showcased himself as an actual good guy. He didn’t look all that sad to be killing Wednesday in episode 8. By that point he would have remembered the things he did/had control over himself and he tried to kill his dad, too. Crazy that people still think he’s good. He’s a tragic villain, but he’s still that: a villain

[damnfandomproblems]

https://www.tumblr.com/damnfandomproblems/766170542212513792/the-end-results-and-consequences-are-the-same?source=share

Words have meaning but they also evolve to encompass more than the initial thing they were used to describe when the behavior has spread.

It's no coincidence that the majority of antis are American and that they spout similar distaste for all things "degenerate" that the evangelicals did. They learned at evangelical knees.

"purity culture is specifically a term for the religious/spiritual sex-based culture frequently used to dehumanize, abuse, and be traumatized, primarily women for being sexually impure. "

Is this not exactly what Antis are doing when they call fan fiction writers and artists (still a predominantly female medium) degenerates and pedophiles, incest supporters and every other foul thing they do? Is this not exactly what they're doing when they tell rape victims that the rapist should have killed them too because they're "such a disgusting person"? Over a fucking story.

Twice religious homophobia was mentioned while ignoring the fact that it is let in the door by the idiot antis clamoring for censorship because someone dared to ship step-siblings or had story accurate Aunt-fucking in a game of thrones fic. Antis aren't the tip of the purity culture spear by any means. They're the tape on the loc of the door that let's the actual societal damaging parts of purity culture in.

Purity culture absolutely applies to them. Because they are using each and every one of its tactics to shame groups and hobble creativity through aggression and cult tactics. Papers have been written about this.

Salmon Rushdie (aside from being a simple Google search away) is an Indian transplant to Britain who has authored several famous books, including The Satanic Verses. This book, a simple book that utilized Islam to explore the main character's self discovery, angered Ayatolla Khomeini of Iran so much he put a price on the author's head that is still in effect today. A moral objection to fiction. It's the extreme end of the spectrum of extreme reactions to fiction true, but considering I have seen Antis call for people to be jailed or die for fiction it seems pertinent to add to the narrative.

In short, yes Antis are propagators of Purity Culture. Just because they're effectively trivial does not make them less so. If anything it makes them the first weak viral load for a much greater cultural infection.

Posting as a response to a previous ask.

[25shadesoffebruary]

10 BL BOYS I WANT CARNALLY Redo

I have a few people tag me @firstkanaphans @negrowhat in this and when I originally did it I only put Phaya from the sign but I started thinking and I said yeah I got more so here are the others.

1. Phaya from the sign

Idk if it’s the way that Billy plays this character or what but Phaya has my heart. He’s just so annoyingly cute and playful but so smart and curious and he does not like to be ignored and so passionate, it’s endearing really idk.

2. Mork from Last Twilight

This man is so warm and kind and loving and caring and loyal and and and I could go on and and on I love him so much. Like that man went to jail because his friend decided to put his woodpecker into another birds tree and he fought for his ex girlfriend trust. I’m sorry that man is so fucking warm.

3. King from Bed Friend

I love this man and his big brown cow eyes so much. He’s just a walking green flag and he so sexy. He is just thoughtful, caring, loving, warm. I want him on every level. Love him

4. Akk from Enchantè

He a little slow on the uptake but that man is so romantic and kind. And truly was a green flag. And truly just wanted the best for Theo even if he had to put himself on the back burner.

5. Jeng from Step by Step

JENG WAS A MAN (no pun intended) That man was a CEO of his own business while trying to manage another business that he hated. He was self sacrificing and so kind. I love that tired his best to change when it came to Pat. He made some questionable decisions but I believe he did that because he thought that was best for him. He was loving and caring a I count him as a green flag.

6. Mark from Love Mechanics

That man went through so much for love. But I love how he was true to himself. I love how self aware he was and I love how he stood up for himself. Mark knew who he was and also knew what he wanted but he also knew that he was fucked when it came to Vee. I would have treated him right.

7. Ayan from The Eclipse

That man was a menace. But I love how fiercely loyal he was. I love how kind and thoughtful and loving this man was. He just wanted Justice ( and for the school to burn to ashes and for ashes to go the dumpster never to be seen again) for his uncle, he was a heartbroken boy who has lost his one close person in his life and was spinning around lost like a broken compass but he found his north in Akk and I love that for him.

8. Phayu from Love in the Air

Is this really a surprise to anybody. I mean come on now. That man knew how to stand on business. He knew what he wanted and made sure he got it. Made sure the person he wanted was also on their business. He wanted them to be successful together and love a man that is ambitious. Very loyal and protective but was also completely a simp.

9. Boeing from Only Friends

This man was wicked for no other reason then the fact that he could be. I was fascinated. Came to ruin lives and almost succeeded to if it hadn’t been for RayMew and them being like ahh back the fuck up off my man. I still think RaySandBoeing threesome should have happen. I would have like to see Boeing and Top kiss but also BoeingTopBoston would have been interesting to see. And I think Boston would have loved it there to be honest but we talking about Boeing here. Anyway that man should have had more screen time so he could fuck up more people lives.

10. Kinn from KinnPorsche

Listen Linda, that man was most definitely not a green flag and a very dark pink flag but I don’t think he was a red flag. He was just dumb. He’s complicated. But he was kind and thoughtful in his own way. And he tired to be fair to people. But Porsche was on that man mind 25/8 and it’s hard to think when someone is occupying your mind like that. But is he very loyal to a man that did not deserve it. He was caring for his people and was a big simp and I love that for him.

Tagging: @respectthepetty @smittenskitten @spicyvampire @chaos0pikachu @icouldhyperfixatehim @omarandjohnny @piningintrovert @pondsphuwin and anybody who wants to do it

[stormblessed95]

https://x.com/kmgoogiemini/status/1750998991217590499?s=46

How do these people lie so much and honestly believe their ship is real Stormy? How many things are even correct here? As far as i can tell the only correct thing is that Jk said Tae listened to Seven first. Everything else is either a straight up lie, mistranslation or something taken out of context. These are the things that taekookers believe to be true and somehow jikookers are the jokers?

Let's just do some super quick fact checks and correcting misinformation with links to proof to backup all my sources here:

"Jungkook said I want to join the special forces"

True! (comes from the last live before military service)

"Jungkook said Taehyung is my safe space"

False! Jungkook said that Tae was his common ground (comes from festa 2020 profiles is where they mistranslated that one from)

"Jungkook said my relationship with Taehyung is not for the cameras"

False! Made up by shippers in 2014, Proof here

"Jungkook said that the first person to hear the song Seven was Taehyung"

True! From Seven Spotify Interview

"Jungkook is the first person to hear Taehyungs album and record it in his house"

True! JK was the first to hear some of Tae's songs. And Tae did record A singular song at JKs house/studio. The whole album though wasn't mentioned specifically (but that might still be true) and only one song was recorded at JKs place I believe. Comes from JKs live and Tae's You Quiz interview

"Jungkook has a song he always sings to Taehyung"

False! I think they just made that up. I did a little searching anyway, lol but yeah no....

"The members said Taekook will never separate"

False! The members made a fortune teller joke where one said "so you guys can never be apart then?" As a silly joke about the color shirts they were wearing. Proof here

"the members said that if you want JK, call Taehyung (and vice versa) because they are always together."

False! The only thing said about JK was that he didn't like answering his phone and basically never did. Everything else was made up. From MBTI labs

"They went together to show the movie and were wearing identical clothes with strong lesbian expressions about their relationship."

(lmfao what) Sort of true.... (?) They did go to the movie premiere together! And Tae wore an Morrissey/Oscar Wilde shirt (openly gay and put on trial for being gay) and JK wore a jacket with scripture about two men being jailed for their practices and one of which many people believe to be gay/queer coded and a shirt with references to Taylor Meed's poetry (openly gay and wrote for a gay newspaper). Idk what the rest of that was about though lol

"Taekook in a luxury hotel dancing RUN BTS together and spending the night!"

True, they were in a luxury hotel and danced RUN BTS!

And also False, they spent the night. No one knows, we just saw them do a TikTok dance. They made the rest up lol maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Can't make facts outta assumptions though!

Taekooks picture from their date that jokers said was OT7 but boom turned out to only be a date

False! Boom.... Was an OT7 dinner.... Lol Proof Here

And Bam that Tae raised and the photos he posted

True since Tae DID post a cute photo of him with baby Bam and made a joke about raising him. As did every BTS member with Yeotan.... Lmfao False due to weird exaggeration though

Taekook and their seven dance together

True! Tae danced Seven with JK on his encore stage!

Jimin said: Tae and JK love forever

True! He wrote their names in a heart in the sand in BV1 and that's the quote he said (sorta)

Jimin said Tae and JK share their music and everything and do not share it with the members.

False! I cannot prove a negative but the lack of proof of this quote anywhere ever should be enough. Lol they made this one up. Should've stuck with the tangible evidence that they shared their music with each other in these latest albums first instead of trying to take it one step too far and starting to lie lol

"they are the two closest members and they have special trips and a lot of real dates and like to spend all their time together and they like to stay up all night and watch the sunrise together and they share everything."

False! Lmao the more you read the more it becomes like fanfiction rather than evidence based facts

"Jungkook said he didn't know Jimin's number and hasn't seen him in weeks and months."

False! JK said he couldn't remember a GC nickname, he also mentioned during a different live that he didn't have Jins number saved. And JK clearly had been seeing Jimin at various points as they were signing up for buddy service in the military which takes a lot of prep time.... Lol but he still never said that, but he did say "I miss you" a lot, but that's not "I haven't seen him in weeks and months" lol Proof about the numbers here

"Jungkook will always choose Taehyung to spend private time with, a true relationship"

False! Wasnt said anywhere by anyone, just an opinion from a shipper lol

"Your ship is 0 without the company and the cameras and this is the truth, and in the solo era Jungkook spends all his time with Taehyung"

False! They spent lots of time together, but this is just a shipper fighting other shippers.... No facts, no ship or friendship in BTS will ever be zero either

And just more of that shipper fighting nonsense to finish it off. Sucks since they started off relatively strong with Taekook appreciation only to just degrade into shipper bullshit.

Anyway, this was fun. I wouldn't mind more true/false games in the future 🤣🤣🤣

[sapphic-agent]

I think one of my main annoyances in Hori writing is him trying to redeem every villain and hero that some of them just doesn’t deserve that redemption.

Like; it’s reminds me too much of Naruto. But the difference is Naruto isn’t being held by modern standards since it set in a fictional world with ninjas while bnha is set in 200+ years in the future in modern japan.

I absolutely despise Endeavor and how he abused his family as a whole; in modern society he would have been put in jail, and yet he still gets a redemption arc. It’s feels like it’s cheapen all of the todorokis trauma.

And shoto being bakugo friend is another thing, since bakugo is so much like endeavor… like, if I had a classmate that act so much like my abusive parent that I absolutely despise I wouldn’t be close to them at all.

It’s gave me bad feeling how Hori just brushes all of the trauma the characters have from the actions of other characters selfish acts.

When I started reading the manga in 2015 I thought the concept is really good and having a main character with anxiety and socialization problems (in the start) made me hooked, because I had those things too. But looking at it now 8 years later I just feel so much dissatisfaction and disappointments..

You have a great point about Naruto. I mean, I'm not a fan of Naruto because of reasons, but it's the same concept as to why I like Vegeta better than Bakugou despite Vegeta technically being a worse person. Because MHA and DBZ are two very different shows. One is about becoming stronger and being able to face any threat to the world no matter what, the other is trying to push a narrative about morality and being a "true hero." The Z Fighters do have their own moral compasses, but it varies between every character. So there's no overarching theme that's beating us over the head.

Someone described this problem with MHA perfectly; it's constantly preaching about morality while willfully being tone deaf about its own overlaying issues. And that wouldn't even be so bad if so many of these issues weren't set up in the beginning to be addressed later.

I talk a lot about Bakugou, but I think we should focus on Endeavor like you mentioned. Not only are they similar in nature (temperamental, overzealous, dangerously ambitious), they're also two characters who benefit the most from the system in MHA.

...And it's barely ever acknowledged.

I mean sure, Dabi calls Endeavor out and it leads to the public losing faith in heroes. But not only does the family he abused and/or neglected choose to help him (I can't get over Fuyumi and Natsu taking blame for Touya when they were LITERAL CHILDREN wtf, not to mention Rei), why he was allowed to do this is never addressed. People knew he wasn't the kind hero All Might was, and it was something his fans admired along with his strength. Because as long as you have a strong quirk, you're admired in the MHA world and allowed to get away with whatever you want. Yet this is overlooked so easily.

(I like Hawks (because of Zeno Robinson mainly), but him dismissing this is so weird?? Why on Earth would Horikoshi go out of his way to introduce a character with an abusive father and make him an Endeavor fan? With no moment of clarity either?? There's something really off about that)

Bakugou's apology (one day I'll make a post critiquing this scene) is a little better in this regard as he does acknowledge that he was enabled because of his quirk. But again, it's really just skimmed over and only referenced to give Bakugou an excuse.

And the people who do question society and its system are either villains who are use it as an excuse to cause destruction and hurt people (the LOV and Overhaul) or bloodthirsty murderers (Stain). I would have loved for Horikoshi to introduce a group of vigilantes or anti-heroes who work outside of the HPSC and call out how discriminatory their system is.

Someone's talked about this before, but the Todoroki and Bakugou "friendship" was so forced and unnecessary. Bakugou has, at every turn, been completely unsympathetic towards the fact that Todoroki was abused and yelled at his sister for talking about it in her own home (but sure, let's call Bakugou an abuse victim I guess). Todoroki should have at the very least remained indifferent towards Bakugou like he was in the beginning.

Izuku deserves so much better than how Horikoshi treats him. He's either used as a tool to make Bakugou better or he's shoved into the background of his own show. He was so relatable in the beginning of the series only for the plot to suck his character dry.

[matan4il]

Hey, I just felt the need to vent and see if you or your followers had any advice for me because I feel so stuck.

I don't have any relatives or friends in Israel so sometimes I feel I have no room to talk on the conflict. I'm in the US, I'm 'safe', my family is safe, but I still feel so hurt and the grief from everything happening to 'my people'

I was talking to a friend and I know we have conflicting opinions on everything happening. I just feel so heart broken by him as we were discussing things and he cuts the conversation when I said "Hamas is a terrorist organization". I don't know how I can trust him anymore when he can't even see that. I love him so much. He's essentially my best friend. It hurts so much and I don't know what to do. At this point I just keep quiet but there is resentment building and I hate it.

Any advice would help. Sorry for rambling. I'm just emotional.

Hi Nonnie! I totally understand, you're being legit in how you feel, and I'm sending you many hugs!

I believe I've answered a similar ask at some point since the war, I'm just not sure how to find it, because Tumblr's search option sucks. Maybe through the ask tag, IDK. If anyone's better at handling this site, and can find it and link it in the comments, I'm sure the anon (and definitely me) would appreciate that!

I think that ask was more generalized though, so here I'll refer more specifically to yours.

First of all, if you're Jewish, you have family in Israel. All Jews are one big family, one tribe, and I consider every Jew a part of my extended family. That said, there's actually a good chance that, given enough genealogical research, you'll find that one, two or three generations ago, the family tree split, and there's a branch where people returned to Israel, so you have distant relatives you weren't even aware of here. If you're interested in looking into this, a good place to start is to contact the Anu Museum, which delves into the history of the Jewish people, and also keeps extensive genealogical records for Jews.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, that's not an opinion or debate, it's a fact. People tend to claim that resistance can be seen as terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on one's opinion, and it's true that at times the term "terrorists" has been abused, but there's actually a very simple way to figure out the matter. If an organization intentionally targets civilians with violence, including lethal violence, for the sake of achieving some sort of a political change (and that includes political change in service of an extremist religious cause), then we're talking about terrorists. The differentiation between a regime as a legit target for a struggle, and innocent civilians who should never be targeted with violence, that's the difference between freedom fighters (whether we agree with them or not) and terrorists.

The exact date of Hamas being established as a terrorist organization is not known, most believe it was Dec 1987 (it announced it was joining the First Intifada on Dec 15, when it started on Dec 9. Hamas escalated it considerably, as it did the Second Intifada), while the son of a Hamas founder (Mosab Hassan Yousef. He was repeatedly jailed by Israel for terrorist activity in the service of his dad's organization, but as a teen in prison saw how Hamas was torturing Palestinians. He decided to flip and help Israel in order to save his own people from Hamas) says it was actually slightly earlier, in 1986. Either way, by the end of 1989 (just two years after its first public statement), Hamas was already so brutal and violent, that it was outlawed here. Soon, especially as it started carrying out extensive suicide bombings (the very first one was on Apr 16, 1993), it was also recognized as a terrorist organization and outlawed by multiple governments (including the UK, the US, Jordan, the EU, Japan, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Australia and Paraguay).

Not only is Hamas clearly a terrorist organization since its very first act of terrorism, after Oct 7 it is also one of the most successful ones ever (second only to Al-Qaeda after 9/11, though if you look at the number of fatalities per population size, then Hamas have surpassed Al-Qaeda as well). To not recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization is to not recognize terrorism, and that it is fundamentally wrong, because nothing ever justifies killing civilians to affect a political change, and THAT is an incredibly disturbing position to take.

On top of that, Hamas is Islamist, it wants a world ruled by an Islamist regime, and sees the eradication of Israel as a first step on the way there. It will only condemn other Islamist terrorist organizations for digressing from this plan of eradicating the Jewish state first, before taking on the rest of the world. Hamas is also genocidal towards Jews. Its founding charter declares this explicitly, that Judgment Day will not come until all Jews are exterminated. Its leaders have continuously and repeatedly expressed themselves in similar ways, calling upon "true believers" to kill Jews everywhere around the world, and in fact since Oct 7, several Hamas terrorist cells have been exposed as operating against Jews outside of Israel.

Someone who can't even admit Hamas are terrorists will likely not recognize the genocidal, antisemitic and extremist Islamist nature of Hamas, either. If you're Jewish, what that means is that your "friend" is willing to turn a blind eye to the declared statements of those who wish to kill you simply because you're Jewish. And if you ask me, that's not a friend at all. But even if you're not Jewish, I think the willingness to allow Hamas' genocidal antisemitism by denying the nature of this organization is morally despicable. I would kind of get it if your friend lived in a non-free country, where he can't get the true info on Hamas. But if you live in a free society, and your friend can get online, and go to one of the sites that share info on Hamas, especially the footage from Oct 7, but he's still denying what this terrorist organization is really like? I think you're very right to be upset by that.

At the end of the day, how you deal with it is up to you. It sounds like this person is really important to you, and I get it. At the same time, it sounds like you're having a hard time living with his views of Hamas, which is beyond justified. If your friend is willing to overlook this, what else is he willing to allow? I guess the question is whether you feel like you can have a talk with him, where you put this all on the table, not just Hamas being a terrorist organization, but also the genocidal, Islamist and antisemitic nature of it, and explain to your friend that it is personally distressing to you, that he can act as if Hamas is a legit organization? Do you feel like you can talk to him, and if he understood what it means to you, he might be more willing to listen? If you don't talk to him about this, do you feel like you can live with his views?

I'll be honest, I personally would not want such a person as a "friend." I would never feel like I could trust him. That doesn't negate all of his other good traits and what he can and does give you as a friend, though. I get that. I understand that it is a loss, if this ends your friendship. And that's why I say that it's up to you. It's up to what you feel is in the best interest of your well being. Do you still trust him to have your back despite his views? Do you think you'd be worse off to lose everything else about your friendship? Or do you think he values your friendship enough to listen? Do you feel like the distress of knowing what he supports is too much, and is bad for your well being? At the end of the day, only you can answer these questions.

Just know that no matter what you decide, you're not alone. There are others who feel like you do, and who would accept you, all of you, anti-Hamas views included, and will be true allies and friends. You def have a friend here. I'm wishing you well with whatever you decide to do, and if you feel like sending follow up asks, please don't hesitate to! Much love, Nonnie. xoxox

(for more of my posts regarding Israel, click here)

If this is a person who you define as your best friend, but they're cool