#shenker

[alyssalenko]

First Line Challenge

I was tagged by @vorchagirl @hazelestelle and @kittynomsdeplume! Thanks darlings! Sorry it took me so long!

Rules: Post the first line of your WIP, the first line you worked on today, or any other “first line!”

I was literally working on three things in tandem this morning, but this is the first thing I wrote when I woke up. It's a medicinal fact that a little Kaidan/Joker/Femshep gets the heart started in the morning ;)

Kaidan’s chest pressed against her back, taking her hands in his and planting her palms against the mattress and she relaxed in his arms–there was something so comforting about being wrapped in the scent of the two of them.

I will tag @obvidalous @pikapeppa @schoute @charlatron @amarmeme @foofyschmoofer @hunnybadgerv @illusivesoul @wickedwitchofthewilds @heylittleriotact @commander-krios @heroofshield @underdark-dreams and anyone else who wants to play!

[alyssalenko]

GUYS YOU HAVE TO READ THIS ABSOLUTE GIFT!

Joker's voice is just right and it's gonna be my ot3! Like it is so well done! ❤️

Paragon, Renegade, Pilot Chapter 1

A NSFW Mass Effect fic | Joker/Kaidan/f!Shepard | Read it on AO3

Shepard and Kaidan are a gorgeous couple.

Like, propaganda poster gorgeous —  if you ignore the fact that she’s his commanding officer, and their entire semi-secret relationship is technically Alliance Unsanctioned™, which everyone does because hello. And that suits Joker just fine. Or not fine, fine, you know? But fine, alright? It’s fine. It’s expected. And he’d look ludicrous on either of their arms. Never been good at that whole looking aggressively chiseled while brooding at a vague middle-distance thing. And Joker is a realist. He’d mourned and buried his inability to look like a badass when he was about twelve.

(Joker has precisely two looks. Smug asshole and irritating goofball, and he likes to zip between the two lightning fast. You know, for funsies.)

But in the dead of night, when it’s just darkness and the soft sounds of a ship half asleep, and a hand — his own, duh — on his cock; he imagines. (Also for funsies.) Because apparently, his type is the Alliance’s best and brightest, and way way way out of his league. But Joker keeps his grip firm, wishing abstractly that he had callouses because he’s seen Kaidan’s big and blunt-fingered hands, and though he’s never been close enough to Shepard’s bare hands to tell, the Commander has never done anything soft in the whole of her life. And so, tug tug tug in the dark with a grip that’s a titch too hard and demanding to be comfortable, but it makes the bones of his hips feel like they’re made of warm syrup.

Maybe he ought to feel guilty about it; jerking off to his Commander and/or Staff Lieutenant — and let’s be honest, it’s mostly and — but Jokers had a life full of hopeless crushes and needing to look someone square in the eye and fly a ship less than five minutes after rubbing one out, and practice makes perfect, after all. So his hand doesn’t still or stutter, it surges up and down his length, like he owns it — well. Like they own it.

It takes all of not very fucking long. One hand braced against the panel of the shower stall, keeping him upright, the other standing in for Shepard’s mouth and Kaidan’s hands, which is why it’s all so quick and bright. Just a handful of strokes and he is gone.

Joker turns the shower on right after he pulls himself back together enough to manage the taps, weak-kneed, trembling, and breathing like he’d just run a mile. 

He never masturbates in Normandy’s cockpit. He does practically everything else in that chair and he’s not about to risk getting it sticky. Some things in this world are sacrosanct, and Normandy’s flight chair is one of them.

So he stands in the shower letting the water run down his neck and and his back and all the places he’d imagined being touched. He doesn’t get long to savor the post-orgasmic bliss. The water’s always hot — the whole ship’s practically one continuous loop of energy— but Alliance rationing being what it is, it’s on a timer, and if he lingers too long it’ll switch out to subsonic pulses of air that kinda vibrate the dirty right off of you. It’s the blue-balls of hygiene; deeply unsatisfying on every level, which is not how he likes to end a good wank.

(Or a not-so-good wank, which is rare, wanks being what they are.)

(Never pass up a good — or not-so-good — wank.)

So, confession time. Joker watches porn. Not like a lot, a lot. But just. Space is big and mostly empty, and the thrill of piloting still leaves ample free time, and he is a goddamn full-grown adult.

He's into your basic kinks. Threesomes. Anal. Asari in wet tshirts. But the extranet is big and weird and he's wandered into some stuff that he'd never have willingly searched for, like that drell-hanar porno with some really, really unnecessarily complex plot; 100% of all Elcor porn he’s seen; and that one-time he accidentally found Inspectreing the Booty, a porn parody about Commander Shepard steadily banging her way through the Normandy crew.

And that one was weird. Like super, terribly, irredeemably weird. But Joker’s curiosity can easily be described as morbid, so it’s not entirely his fault that several hours after finding the series he’s blown through every single episode.

Figuratively speaking.

Slightly more literally with the one that paired the Commander with her dark-haired, dark-eyed, burly, biotic Staff Lieutenant.

What there isn’t, is an episode where Shepard bangs her abrasive yet irresistibly charming pilot. Which is a little… yeah. You know. Even Wrex gets laid.

Somehow, even just in fantasy, the world knows Joker’s not meant to be with Shepard.

And that’s okay. It is.

Kaidan and Shepard have each other. Joker has the Normandy. And they have a goddamn galaxy to save.

***

Shepard starts visiting Normandy’s cockpit early on.

Not many commanding officers do that. They have the bridge for The Doing Of The Important Stuff, and that’s where he’s used to being summoned for any face-to-face conversations. 

The first time she’d done it he was pretty sure she’d only come to reassure herself that a pilot with Vrolick’s Syndrome wasn’t going to be a liability. He’d had that happen on nearly every ship he’d served — no matter that he'd had to take all the Alliance’s physical fitness assessments just to get his wings in the first place.

(He’d passed, but the Alliance had still ordered additional scans for him to ensure that he hadn’t broken anything from the stress of the tests. You know, just in case. And though no one’s actually said it out loud aside from that one flight instructor he got court-martialed; he’s well aware the Alliance doesn’t really want to employ a pilot with brittle bones. Even one who’d set every flight simulator record with every class of ship he’s licensed to fly — and a few he isn’t.)

But Shepard had just wanted to talk. And though the conversation had been somewhat impersonal and brief, Joker had sweated through his shirt because humanity’s first and only Spectre was intimidating up close, and way, way prettier than she had any right to be.

She’d kept coming back though, and their conversations had stretched. Meandered from professional, to casual, and then into personal territory.

She asks him about his time in flight school, and he tells her that the academy wouldn’t let him sit for certification on ships he hadn’t been formally trained to fly, so he broke into the simulator room and beat all the flight sim records on all available ship classes and models. Then he got stubborn and wouldn’t take the formal certifications, but the Alliance pretty much let him fly whatever he wanted after that anyway.

She asks him about his home base, and he tells her he always thinks of his ship as home, but that he’s got a tiny place on the Citadel because, although the Alliance wants their officers to be all-in all the time, they don’t want them to be so obvious about it.

She asks him if he’s got anyone waiting for him, and he lies through his teeth and says he’s got a girl in every port, and at least one desperately heartbroken Krogan out there somewhere. She laughs at that, the sound surprisingly light and bright and he is fuuuuucked. He is so fucked.

Stupid hopeless crush.

Some days she doesn’t ask him anything. She just settles into the copilot’s seat, folds her long legs up to her chin, and just talks. To him. Baffling.

Today she’s folded up like a pretzel, idly tapping through the Normandy’s feeds on a flight screen, which Joker kinda hates — he doesn’t go into her quarters and put his hands all over her guns after all — but not enough to shoo her away.

“You know,” Shepard says, “you’re the only one of my crew whose academy dissertation was classified by the Alliance. Even I didn’t have access to read it until they made me a Spectre.”

Joker chokes on a laugh. “You actually read those? I don’t even think my instructor read them. Did you read everyone's? Did Kaidan write about Canada? Or bacon? Or, wait, wait. Canadian bacon?” 

“No,” Shepard’s mouth does that weird thing like she’s trying not to smile. “He wrote about the biomechanical half-life of L2 biotic implants and why the Alliance shouldn’t upgrade them in active military personnel, as was the plan at the time.”

“O f course he did.”

“And you—"

“A Proposed Redesign of Sanitary Stations on Alliance F-Class Vessels Based on the Traditionally Varying Role of Toilet Paper in Council Species.” Joker tips the brim of his hat at her and flashes a quick grin. “Xenobiology, baby.”

Shepard blinks.

“Um,” Joker clears his throat quickly. “That’s—  xenobiology, baby Ma’am . Damn, that’s worse. Commander. Ma’am. Shepard. Sir.”

Shepard bites her lower lip.

Oh no, that’s hot.

“Uh…” He wipes sweaty palms against his jumpsuit, blundering on. “I mean the research got real interesting at one point. I even added some non-council species for extra credit. Did you know that Krogans—“

“Yeah. I read it. ” Shepard’s smile finally breaks through, and Joker legit stares because holy shit .

He can probably count on one hand the number of times Shepard has smiled — honest to God smiled, not just a smirk or that twisty grin that’s all sharp teeth and danger — and she is transformed.

And well… There’s nothing more terrifying than popping a boner in Shepard’s presence because she has a sixth sense about the world around her and Joker is just a thousand and twelve percent certain she knows.

(And speaking of percentages: it turns out if Shepard smiles there’s an eighty-seven percent chance he’s gonna get hard.)

(Give or take thirteen.)

And yep. There it goes.

Awesome.

Humanity’s first Spectre has dimples.

And Joker is completely screwed.

***

This is the part of the job Joker hates the most. 

Well, no.

He hates writing flight reports. Trying to reduce instinct and awesomeness into a neatly rational and easily defendable set of decisions is impossible at best. All the navy should need at the end of the day is crew safe, ship intact, and half the time he’s not even sure why he does the things he does.

He hates the way his dress blues always bunch up around his balls. He hates his dress blues, in general, but he hates them specifically where they are ball-adjacent. The constriction is always particularly nefarious whenever he has to stand around while some top brass does the sort of tiresome things that top brass always does— like passing out medals or giving great pilots crap for stealing a ship.

And he hates whenever some aeronautical engineering nerd slash twat suggests that navy pilots are a dying breed, and how the future of spaceflight is AI, and how [insert any installation request he’s ever made] is really a waste of valuable Alliance time and resources because he’ll be obsolete in a few years and something something something, Joker doesn’t listen to idiots.

So this is really the thing he hates fourth most.

He hates listening to the comms when Shepard and Kaidan are planetside getting shot up all to hell while he keeps his hands on Normandy’s flight controls ready to evac their asses back to safety –– but he hates the silence more.

(Fifth most? Whatever, he’s losing count.)

The team in the sky follows the team on the ground through a number of feeds: tiny blips and biometrics and bursts of data — but Joker has a direct, active comm link. But when the signal is blocked; or too scratchy to make out, even when Normandy’s computers run them through noise filters and decryption cycles; or when they’re just plain silent and there’s just dead air and tension and waiting and really unpleasant what ifs floating around inside his head. God, he hates that shit.

It’s strangely comforting when they’re actually fighting. The first spatter of gunfire always makes his heart leap, but over the months he’s learned to read the sounds of the firefight. All the Alliance soldiers carry the same base assault rifle, but Shepard’s got hers modded halfway to hell, and it has this pop to it, where every round sounds almost bouncy. Kaidan’s heavy pistol has this distinct thundering sound, kinda slow and measured and broad. Joker's even learned to identify the soft fizzy static of Kaidan’s biotics, which he tends not to use unless he needs to. But as long as they're shooting and flinging little blue fireballs, they're alive; and he can breathe a little.

But now, right now, Joker sits in the silence with a weight on his chest, hands gliding over the ship's controls restlessly, imagining all the terrible reasons it might be so damn quiet.

And it's quiet for so long.

Too long, maybe.

Too too long. Fuck, this is his second least favorite for sure.

So when Shepard’s voice finally comes through with a burst of static and gunfire, Joker’s relief is so profound he almost misses when she says.

“—us up. And make sure Chakwas is ready.”

“Dr Chakwas?” Shit. His hands are already flying over the controls. “Roger that, Commander. Bringing the Normandy in. Evac, three minutes five.”

Worry spikes through the relief, though Shepard’s voice was steady enough. Of course that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t lost a leg, or anywhere between one to three livers.

Wrex was with them today, so if he's down three, he’ll still have one to spare. The others, not so much.

Joker doesn’t like the atmosphere of this particular planet. It’s too slippery. The Normandy handles like it’s coated in oil. He’d rather a sluggish stick than one that slides around unpredictably, but he gets the Normandy down at speed and manages not to clip the side of the Cerberus research facility in the process.

The video feed switches to the hangar doors, letting in a cloud of smoke pierced with a scatter of laser fire as they open. He feels the tremble of rockets bouncing off the Normandy’s shields and resists the urge to belly-flop the ship directly on top of the Cerberus troops because how fucking dare.  

“Hurry it up Commander, they’re targeting the Normandy! There’s only so many rockets up the backside a lady should be required to take!”

He knows from the crackle of the comms switching to internal channels that they’re on a moment before the VI notification.

“Crew onboard .”

“Sweet,” Joker lifts away from the planet immediately, taking care to make sure Normandy’s burners are running extra hot, cuz fuck those guys. He hopes he melts every last one to the tarmac. 

As soon as they are out of the atmosphere and are moving into deeper space, Joker passes the Normandy off to one of the on-duty flight crew, barely waiting to be formally relieved. He dashes to the stairs — though it probably doesn’t look like dashing — and then has to force himself to take it slow. A tumble down the stairs would be the stupidest way to end his military career.

He meets the ground crew coming up from the cargo hold. The smell of a firefight hits him first. Smoke and that peculiar electric burn of spent thermal rounds are nearly eclipsed by the sharper reek of human blood and Krogan sweat.

Shepard and Kaidan are both wounded.

She’s walking easily enough, but she’s got an arm slung over Kaidan’s shoulders, and a long, vicious-looking scorch mark down her flank and across her back. As they pass, she smiles at Joker with such an easy, sharp grin that it should make him feel better about the whole thing, except that Kaidan shoots him a dark look over the top of Shepard’s head. Or at least he tries to. Joker can’t see any obvious wound but half of Kaidan’s face is awash with blood, the eye beneath, squeezed tightly shut. 

“Dodged a rocket,” Shepard explains. Her eyes are wild and a little bloodshot. Green irises eerily ringed with red.

Joker frowns. 

“Well, mostly,” Wrex says, coming up from behind them with Shepard’s helmet and assault rifle in hand. He chuckles, low and gravelly. “Didn’t dodge the explosive crate it hit, though.”

“Still counts,” Shepard mutters.

Joker frowns harder and follows them into the medbay where Dr Chakwas is waiting.

“Commander Shepard, that’s a nasty-looking burn.” Dr Chakwas pats one of the medical beds. “Hop up. Wrex, is any of that blood yours?”

“No,” Wrex snickers.

“Well done you. Now, if you’d be so good as to take the Commander’s guns away so they’re not cluttering up my medbay, thank you. Kaidan, sit down. I want to take a look at that eye.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eye,” Kaidan protests.

“Excellent. Then it’ll only take a moment.”

“But—”

“Sit. Jeff, get the Commander out of her armor.”

“Uh…” Joker hesitates, feeling oddly caught out. His shoulders hunch up around his ears.

Dr Chakwas makes an exasperated noise. “Shall I call Wrex back for assistance?”

“Not unless you want the Commander’s arms to fall off,” Joker mutters grumpily, already reaching to help.

Modern ceramic plate armor is designed to be easy enough to get into and a bit of a bitch to get out of, and Krogan’s aren’t well known for patience. The word gentle doesn’t even translate properly in their native tongue. Wrex’s idea of assistance is likely to amount to pull real hard.

Joker steps closer to Shepard. Even Spectre quality gear follows the same basic design as all Human-Asari models. Joker runs his hands across the seam at her wrist until he finds and unhooks the interlocking clasp on her gauntlet. There’s no bare skin to be found, Shepard is clad in sleek black under-armor shot through with sensors to support haptic feedback during combat. He works his way up both arms, as Dr Chakwas tends to Kaidan, hesitating only when he gets to the plating on her torso.

The front plates are nearly undamaged bar some surface-level scuffing that would likely buff right out. But the back section is melted in spots, bubbled and cracked from both the heat and sheer impact of the explosion.

Years of piloting have stripped the uncertainty from his hands. He’s as careful as can be, fingers slow and steady, but sure as he cracks her breastplate apart. This isn’t at all like any of the times Joker has fantasized about undressing Shepard. There’s more medi-gel involved, for one thing. And for another—

“You have very pretty eyes, Joker.”

Joker snorts, startled, and can’t quite brace himself for the nonsense his stomach does in response. “Look who's talking,” he mutters, ears flushing bright red.

“We’re both talking,” Shepard says, and there’s something in her voice that raises every hair on the back of his neck. She looks up at him but the green in her eyes is almost gone, swallowed by impossibly, unnaturally huge irises, and the whites of her eyes are red red.

“Uh, Doctor? Off the record? It sorta looks like the Commander is tripping balls right now.”

“Oh?” Dr Chakwas’ voice is even enough, but she looks alarmed rather than surprised.

“Um, yeah. Big Krogan ones, too. The whole quad at once.”

Kaidan tries to stand and join them, but Dr Chakwas shoots him a look of withering disappointment that has him retreating back to his corner. In another life, Karen Chakwas would have made an incredible Alliance Admiral. After all, she’s the only person with the balls to bully Commander Shepard. She only does it in the tiny dominion of her medbay, but still. That’s some Gold Star Commendation for Bravery-level shit right there.

“I can feel all of my fingertips,” Shepard says, seriously.

Joker grimaces. “Good for you. So,” he asks, turning to Dr Chakwas.

“The crate must have been near a cache of red sand,” Dr Chakwas takes a breath and shakes her head. “It may surprise you to learn that Alliance ships are not stocked with anything that might readily prevent a narcotic overdose. I can fabricate something in a few hours, of course, but…”

Joker feels something swoop in his gut, but he tries not to look too alarmed, for Kaidan’s sake. “That's too long,” he says quietly, finishing her thought.

“I don’t suppose the Alliance had anticipated the application of red sand via combat burn. I’ll have to author a medical paper — another one — on the extremely creative ways the Commander has tried to get herself killed,”  Dr Chakwas makes a thoughtful noise. “There’s no help for it I suppose. Joker, you wouldn’t mind a detour to an old friend of mine, would you?”

“Any friend of yours, Doc.”

“Friend may be a bit of an exaggeration. So might acquaintance. But I don’t think he’ll shoot at us very much. At least, not unless he knows Garrus is on board. Not a big fan of C-Sec.”

“Relatable,” Joker activates the comm on his omnitool. “Flight, this is Joker. Incoming primary coordinates from Dr Chakwas. Anticipate mild to moderate hostility. Somebody tell Garrus to go hide in steerage. Somebody else tell Navigator Pressly he’s got command of the Normandy.”

***

It turns out Dr Chakwas was right, there was a limited amount of gunfire involved in their terminus-adjacent supply run.

There was some yelling, a handful of threats, and one truly superb volley of insults that almost made Joker wish he’d been there to see the ground crew’s expressions in person.

Not for the first time, Joker wonders where Dr Chakwas picks up black market contacts in a life spent as a prim and proper Alliance medic.

Her shore leave must be wild.

Shepard survives her trip. Kaidan keeps his eye. And Garrus is removed from time-out.

And Joker has to write a stupid flight report about it all.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

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

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

KAMALA HARRIS' MILWAUKEE DEBUT: "WE'RE NOT GOING BACK!"

TCINLA

JUL 23, 2024

This is from Anand Giridharadas’ Substack “The Ink”:

I’m on an airplane as I write this. And one measure of the excitement in the country is that, as Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her first rally since the dramatic events of recent days, virtually every in-seat television screen I could see was set to a live feed of her in Wisconsin.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ debut rally was outstanding, drawing on so many lessons of persuasion that others neglect.

She very pointedly took the fight to Trump at the beginning, carving the contrast narrative of a prosecutor versus a felon, a fighter for justice versus a perpetrator of injustice. But then she pivoted and made clear that beating Trump isn't enough. Nor is saving democracy.

It's about, she said, the ability to fight for you, for your family. This is what the Harvard scholar Daniel Ziblatt calls the "bank shot" to save democracy: we have to save democracy and defeat a fascist, but not only for its own sake, but also to have the tools to make your life better tangibly.

When it came to talking about policy, she kind of didn't! Which is terrific! As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the messaging guru, says, sell the brownie, not the recipe. Policy is a recipe. She spoke instead of the human end states of policy. Having childcare, being able to live and thrive and rise. Brownies are yum.

Harris also did a great job of framing the two visions as forward versus backward, past versus future, but then, again, she made it about us. You have the choice between going forward and backward. You decide what kind of place we are. Simple, sharp, clear, empowering of us.

On a more superficial but no less important level, she was having fun up there. She would rather be up there than anywhere else. Too often, movements for progress don't embody the joy they promise to usher in with policy. She is showing that freedom is more fun than tyranny.

The pro-democracy movement has in recent years somehow allowed the fascists to throw the better party. To be the exuberant, joyous ones. To be energetic. She is reminding us that you can't just appeal to the head; you have to throw a cookout that people want to be at. Period.

We might have seen a catchphrase be born in real time: "We're not going back." Has it all: the "we," the adamant refusal, the calling out of retrograde nostalgia.

So a few core themes become clear: She and Trump are foils who have lived opposite lives. He and his extremist and rich friends aren't focused on your life, but Dems are. There is a choice between taking on the future and going back to the past, and it's ours to make.

It's one speech, and it's early days. But in recent years, a lot of very cutting-edge new thinking in messaging, such as that practiced by Shenker-Osorio, has come to light, and too many Democrats have ignored it. Today's rally marked a break. This is how you speak and win today.

[thereapernoel]

"I don't?" He let out a thoughtful hum. "Interesting. Is petit loup better? Petit chien, because you really are not so different then those kept in the kennels save for obedience, which is something you think you're above as an omega. Must be those pesky persecutory and grandiose delusions still keeping you down, no? Tell me, who is out to get you petit chien perdu?"

Dmitri seized up at the pet name, his hackles visibly raised. All sorts of people here called him all sorts of names - Puppy and Little Wolf were favourites - but Manny was never so patronising. Dmitri growled, a rumbling low in his throat, though the pitch wasn't quite what it usually was. He smacked Manny's hand away suddenly, a dark look in his eyes. "You don't call me that." His nostrils twitched, sniffing the air. It smelt like Manny, whatever it was, but it didn't behave like him. "Something's wrong."

[azspot]

MAGA is a death cult. And the sooner everyone who wants to keep living, let alone speaking, earning, retiring, learning and so on says so the quicker we can defeat it.

Anat Shenker-Osorio

[ravisurendra]

for @dmitri-shenker

The village was getting stranger now that he was beginning to recognize enough faces to watch its little dramas unfold, especially with the castle emptied out a third time. Was he ever going to get used to the parade of skimpy outfits and collars and extremely public displays? God, Soren hoped not, for no small reason because of how obviously one-sided some of the displays were when it came to interest. Euphoria was a hotbed of it and he'd learned to force himself to look away from the obvious heckling and wandering hands, knowing there was nothing he could do without getting himself knocked out cold or worse. One more beer and then time to move on.

Or so he'd told himself. Backtracking to the bar got him an eyeful of who else exactly was at the bar and what the fuck, he quickly realized, the werewitch slave was wearing. The last time Soren had seen Dmitri Shenker, the other man had been clad in the baggy, inoffensive Undercroft grays, his shape below the waist a vague suggestion underneath. Now he could see - everything. Almost everything. Soren stopped dead while his mind rebooted, mouth dry, watching the wolf leaning over the bar to nag the server for his attention.

He wasn't the only one looking. Soren manhandled his eyes away just in time to spot another leering stranger (and he too had absolutely been leering, he couldn't lie to himself) sidestepping Dmitri's way, hand already extended low and intent. Soren didn't even think about it. He shrugged his coat off as he closed the gap between them in a few quick steps, hooking the garment over Dmitri's shoulders as he forced himself between the slave and the groper-to-be. He spared the other man the briefest of hostile stares before he was turning his head back to Dmitri. "Who the hell did you piss off to get put in that?" Soren hissed, a worried gleam in his eye. His own face still felt damningly warm. The next time he'd expected to meet the other man, it certainly hadn't been dressed like that.

[magnais]

for @dmitri-shenker

Magnai had heard plenty of stories out of Krovs that might've warranted his return. One of them was practically worth making the decision all on its own -- if the varcolac had his druthers, Shenker would dead and buried already in a shallow grave, if there was nothing left to interrogate out of him. But someone liked making examples too much for that level of common sense. Magnai would see for himself how well the castle had done at taming such a poor candidate for a slave and if it was poorly... well, he'd worked with cruder material before.

He pulled the playroom door shut behind him with a heavy sound, Magnai's eyes trained immediately on the room's only occupant. He'd given Dmitri fifteen minutes alone once the guards had left the slave, the first step to any stress test: how well they responded to waiting. Magnai stood there without a word for a long moment as he gauged the smaller man, arms folding over his chest, expressionless but for the first curl of his lip at the omega's scent. The second step, and one he had a strong idea as to the outcome of: gauging how well-trained the slave was at knowing when to hold their tongue.

"Dmitri Shenker..." He growled finally, his mouth wrapping around the sounds of the name with the easy familiarity of one who spoke the same tongue, "I'll start easy with you and it'll be the last time I do. I want to know why you think you're here today."

[councillor-roland]

closed starter for @dmitri-shenker

It was fairly late, or early depending on your definition, well past midnight in any case. The party was still in full swing and likely would be until the sun came up. Roland had enjoyed himself and was rather pleasantly buzzed on the various blood and blood alcohols he'd sampled. While he'd had various tumbles and trysts throughout the evening he was in the mood for another, moving through the crowded streets and looking for likely candidates. He happened to see spot a Dalmation costume and a guard walking beside the man wearing it and grinned. Of course he was aware that there was one slave in the Undercroft who was supposed to be constantly accompanied and had heard plenty about him from Rhys besides. Now was as good a time as any for them to meet, at least in Roland's mind, so he made his way over to see the defiant pup for himself.

"I see someone's chosen to dress you appropriately." Roland mused, old fashioned heeled shoes clicking on the cobblestones as he approached, smirking. It was purposely antagonistic but Roland liked a challenge, it kept things interesting. Besides, the idea of riling the werewitch a little amused him. "Perhaps I'll hold your leash for a while and give your escort a break. What do you think of that, petit chiot?" The wig and gloves that went with his costume were long gone but he still cut a fine figure and didn't look incomplete.

[meeedeee]

Anat Shenker-Osorio's *actual* plan to beat fascism

"Create "social proof," actions, mobilize your community, stop waiting for Democrats, and start getting it DONE"

1. Social proof actions are where people start to speak out in small daily ways to let others know that they're not alone. It sounds simple but it's really powerful. Put up a sign, Make a post, write a song, respond to someone's idiotic statement. Organize an international food truck festival. Anti racism dance parties. Organize a die in at a corporate headquarters.

2. Don't wait for someone to lead. Do your own action. And show up to those school board meetings. Seriously. This is where one body can make an outsized impact

3. Contact your elected officials. Everyday. If you can't do everyday do it every week. Engage in “Mangione without murder”

In summary....

1. Pick the thing that you're most interested in (education, climate, immigrant protections).

2. Go as local as possible about that thing. School, city, county, state

3. Do something social and fun, bring along friends, organize a potluck

4. Wear your beliefs. Pull out that t-shirt, put up that sign.

5. Join a union. Support a union

6. Resistance, refusal, ridicule.

"Fabulously Fighting Fascism” 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Shenker-Osorio says the left’s enemy isn’t the right, it’s cynicism. The problem isn’t that authoritarians want to erase the division between church and state, or take away our right to control our bodies. The problem is that this minority can get away with these unpopular proposals because the people who disagree with them think nothing can be done to stop them. For Shenker-Osorio, the tonic for this is to switch from the negative framing (“abolish ICE”) to positive ones: “respect all families.” Rather than saying “end the climate emergency,” she wants us to call for “ensuring clean, safe air to breathe and water to drink.” When the right says they want to cut taxes to improve the economy, we counter with, “we’ll raise wages and increase consumption, which is better for the economy.” Shenker-Osorio proposes a three-step method for changing minds. First, identify a shared value (“people who work for living ought to earn a living”). Move on to a problem (“our divisions distract us while rich people pick our pockets and hand the spoils to their corporate cronies”). And then, the solution: “rewrite the rules so that the wealthiest few pay what they owe and all of us have what we need for generations to come.”

-Pizzaburgers: “Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great”

[valentinsocorro]

[closed starter for @dmitri-shenker ]

Heat week was a nuisance. Valentin understood why it happened but it didn’t make it any less of a headache, especially when someone who he admired was in the throes of rut. He had been content to leave things as they were until he heard chatter around the castle, because there was no hiding much private business with the staff constantly floating in and around like water. Like ghosts. Chatter that another councilman had rented out a slave infamous for his very loud opinions, a slave who believed himself higher than his second gender. When Valentin found out that Dmitri Shenker had not been rented out for ap Mouric’s own pleasure? He acted.

Ordinarily, Valentin kept to himself. He didn’t care to make himself known when it wasn’t required of him. He kept to his suites or the gym to train, sometimes rented a slave to give them some time to breathe outside of the Undercroft. Normally, he wouldn’t have cared. Considering, however, who Dmitri had been ‘gifted’ to for the week, Valentin knew he could not stand idly by. Magnai Khasar was the most alpha of alphas and he, too, was but a slave to his baser instincts. To throw Dmitri, who had his own complications, to him during this time was cruel. It was a punishment that he did not think even Dmitri deserved.

It was a handful of days late, but Valentin did not care. He could still do something, anything. He got to Magnai’s suite as soon as he could and forced his way in, breaking the very door handle. His first order of business was Dmitri but he had to get through Magnai first. As much as Valentin liked a good tussle, he did not want to waste time and let Dmitri suffer needlessly. He used his persuasion to have Magnai stand down for the time being. He’d come back to check on him later.

He found Dmitri in the bedroom. What he saw made his heart bleed for the stubborn omega. He had never seen or heard of the spirited slave be so… Broken. Valentin would have asked for his permission to take him away but he had a feeling that Dmitri was not in the right state of mind to truly answer. He bit back a sigh and scooped strong arms under Dmitri, wrapping him in the dirty comforter just to cover his nakedness for the time being. With the slave firmly in his hold, Valentin left Magnai’s suite. He’d return to check on Magnai’s state of mind once Dmitri was settled.

He brought the omega to his own suite. Valentin let them in and shut the door, immediately walking Dmitri to the bathroom. The first order of business was to get him clean. He set Dmitri on the tiled floor next to the large bath, gentle. He turned to twist the knobs and plug the tub, the water rushing to begin filling it. As it did, he took stock of the slave.

“What has been done to you is cruel,” he said, accented voice calm. “And I do not intend to make it worse. I’m going to bathe you, feed you, and allow you to rest. Is this amenable to you?”

[protoslacker]

What Democrats must reckon with is that, outside of hard partisans, most voters think most politicians lie most of the time. Post election, 72 percent of voters said Republican leaders lie sometimes or always, and 70 percent said this of Democratic leaders. This is extraordinarily beneficial to Republicans, as on-the-fence voters routinely told us that “Trump just says things, he doesn’t mean them.” And it is extraordinarily destructive to Democrats, as voters disbelieve their messages about past accomplishments, future plans, and MAGA dictatorship warnings.

Anat Shenker-Osorio at Rolling Stone. The Electoral Problem for Democrats: It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid

In the 2024 contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, voters rejected the status quo — as our polls and focus groups warned would happen

[devoted1989]

Patty Shenker is an American animal and human rights advocate.

Image found on Pinterest.

[masterxhunter]

Halloween was a night for fun and fucking and feeding, and Hunter planned to do just that once he'd captured his prey for the evening. There were a lot of slaves that caught his attention, but he needed someone.. someone with a bit more bite to them than most. Hunter didn't want someone obedient (for a change).

He was spending the evening prowling the streets and clubs, finding himself in Cannabites and spotting someone dressed as a Dalmatian. Not the sexiest costume he'd ever seen but he could deal. Approaching the stranger and wielding his axe, Hunter gave the other a grin that was bordering on dangerous and a touch psychopathic. "You got an owner, mutt? Or are you a stray?"

@dmitri-shenker