#social media marketing myths

[madhukumarc]

Social Media Marketing Myths and Reality:

Here's related information that you may also find helpful – Social Media Management vs Digital Marketing

[atlasmedialabs]

Hi, I'm Patrick. I run a website named Atlas Media, and social media platforms with the handles Atlas Media Labs.

I love provocative and unconventional, visual storytelling. Thru words, photos, video, and other forms of mixed multimedia.

It begins now.

[everything-real-estate]

Busting the Top Myths About Social Media Marketing

Myth 1: You Need to Be On Every Social Media Platform In the ever-evolving world of social media marketing, one of the most pervasive misconceptions is that you need to have a presence on every single platform. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the plethora of social networks available today, you’re not alone. In fact, a staggering 65% of users express feeling burdened by the number of social…

[white-label-blog]

Even though social media marketing is the most important digital marketing strategy globally, common misconceptions about social media persist. Well, myths are common, but some of them are harmless, while some have a great potential to negatively affect the results. Some businesses of all sizes fail to realize the maximum potential of social media because of some widespread myths.

To build an effective social media marketing strategy, it is important to know about these social media myths and get the most out of it. Here are some common myths -

My target audience isn’t on social media

Social media is only for young people

I can’t share or promote my brand content

Using as many hashtags as possible to get more reach

More followers mean more success

Social media only works for B2C 

Trends like TikTok, Reels, and Shorts are just gimmick

Relying on myths is not only unproductive, but it can also ruin long-term efforts. Now you may understand what the myths are. So, it's time to dismiss them and harness the powerful platform to drive success for your business.

[csuitebitches]

book review: Stolen focus by Johann Hari

Major learnings from this book. It basically talks about focus, why and how we’re losing it. Why can’t we pay attention anymore? Are we individuals to blame or our systems? 

There will be a time when the upper class will be extremely aware of the risks to their attention (caused by tech, social media, our current generation) and the masses, with fewer resources to resist the temptation of technology, will be manipulated more and more by their computers. 

Multitasking is a myth. What actually happens when we multitask is that we “juggle” between tasks. This results in incomplete tasks, higher error rates, less focus, less creativity and memory decreases. 

Sleep is extremely important, especially sleeping according to nature - when the sun sets and sun rises. If the whole world slept the way we are naturally programmed, we would have an economic earthquake. Our economic systems run on sleep deprived people. 

Reading online and reading print has a huge difference. Reading online creates tendencies of skimming and scanning text. This prevents our brain from focusing intently on one story at a time, which print allows you to do. You also remember and understand things from printed texts better. 

Empathy. Certain research suggests that reading fiction and novels improves empathy, because you are immersing yourself in another character’s life for a while. Empathy has played a huge role in human advancements. If a group of white people did not realise that colonisation was wrong, if men did not realise that women deserve equal rights, we would not have independent nations nor be close to gender equality today. 

There are multiple types of paying attention. Focused attention is one thing. But day dreaming and letting your mind wander with no distraction (that is, being alone with your thoughts) is equally important. Some of the most important breakthroughs in human history were because the inventors were not actively focusing on solving the problem. 

Being on social media = giving a free pass to be manipulated. No thoughts, opinions, desires that you have are original. They have all been fed into you by social media and the online world. It is by their design that we cannot focus. 

Leaked internal records of Facebook show that they are aware that their algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. 64% of people, for instance, who join extremist groups join because FB’s algorithm directly recommends too. “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” Zuckerberg eventually terminated the unit that was studying this. 

Diet and attention. The diet we consumed today is a diet that causes regular energy spikes and energy crashes. Our food does not have the nutrients we need for our brains to function well. Our current diets actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains almost like drugs.  

Be careful about reading research, especially when it’s funded by the industry itself. For 40 years, the lead industry funded all the scientific research into whether it was safe, and assured the world that it was. Lead later turned out to severely stunt your ability to focus and pay attention and that you are more likely to get ADHD. 

We define success broadly as economic growth. Economies should get bigger, companies should get bigger. Growth can happen in two ways - either the companies find new markets or they persuade the existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more or to sleep less, you’ve found the source of economic growth. It results in people working overtime, not having enough time with family, friends and themselves, stress and anxiety prone, lack of sleep and bad health, etc. 

Conclusion: use precommitment to stop switching tasks, try to focus more on intrinsic motivation than extrinsic, go off social media periodically (say 1 month at a time) and then extend those breaks; everyday spend 1 hour in walking in silence (no music, conversations or people- and if this is in nature, even better) to connect with yourself, 8 hours of sleep every night, build on slow practices like yoga, cut out processed food, take your PTO!!

[possumcollege]

NOBODY needs to be defending these people. Major publishers, studios, streaming services, Tesla, Apple, Adobe, Amazon, social media companies- there isnt a single altruistic bone caught in their teeth. Profit from the output of exploited and captive labor IS their product now. When their contacts look like the one in question, the company is clearly stating that shareholders are the customers, not us!

Why else would it be anything but a stupid idea for Amazon to just nuke the majority of Comixology's self-published titles when they consolidated their services? If our experience was really foremost in their minds, why would they repeatedly purge, censor, demonitize, bury, and delete popular accounts with robust followings if not to allay the moral brainworms of shareholders and investors?

Forfeiting rights to our IP is not a "shitty deal," it's surrendering any potential ability to make money off of your own creative work. It's selling your property to a board of accountants to pitch into a portfolio. It's theirs to trot out as long as it's profitable and bury the instant its projected profit dips too close to the cost of maintenance. Hell, we've seen services drop popular series just because their projected profits started to flatten out! Mothballing it also has the added bonus of removing it from the market to further minimize potential competition. Like how there just weren't spider man movies for ages because the owner of the property didn't think it was worth developing but worth too much to sell.

They will make more money from suing you for trying to reclaim IP they mothballed than you did selling it to them in the first place. I guaranteee their budget for lawsuits is a lot deeper than the one they pay their "original" artists from.

By virtue of being a big, profitable, corporation, "their" IP is going to have an astronomically higher value in a court of law than any individual creator. The financial "damage" will be higher for infringing on their copyrights than any amount you can claim on your own. When it becomes theirs, their connections, their infrastructure, their reputation makes it an asset with much more value than you or I can possibly claim. So if you try to steal a bite back from them it's a bite of a *potentially* multimillion-dollar series. In their eyes, they bought the totality of your work, which you agreed was worth the price they gave you. It's value becomes more dependent on who owns it than whether it's even good.

You may not have the same potential to become flash-in-the-pan, short-term succesful without their resources, but you will still own your rights to distribute, alter, preserve, promote, and negotiate your share if you still own your work. That is worth everything as a creator who is passionate about what you've made and committed to protecting it.

The most effective power we can exercise as artists is our ability to say, "no" when someone else wants to pay us a disadvantageous fraction of our worth. You may lose potentially lucrative opportunities but "opportunities" presented by companies like Facebook or Twitter, whose real product is a platform for ads and data collection, with content as bait, are not opportunities to thrive on as independent artists. This specifically is an opportunity for the company to acquire property.

The myth that the publisher's strength is something for us to exploit, without them getting the lion's share is a trap that they feed from at will.

People like the poster up top are opportunists who see the process as a pipeline towards trading low-investment content for financial treats and maybe a share of ad revive. They're stalking horses for companies to exploit more talented but less experienced artists who are facing a daunting and overwhelming market where their work becomes harder and harder to show, let alone sell. A quick deal may feel like a win but it's selling the cow to save money on bottling the milk. Artists like this serve the publisher by making it seem like signing away your rights are just a necessary part of the game. However it's a game they are playing with exceedingly cheap stakes that weren't going to succeed on their own merit. So what if Mr. Business Perspective loses rights to his sexy Mario Bros. parody to a huge company? The point was always to unload it because it's a product, a bartering chip, a trinket. He's a Business Man, so he sees tactics that maximize profits to the business as maximizing their ability to buy whatever shiny tripe he cranks out. The business is his customer, not the reader. The business is his ally, not the creative community. Fuck him and fuck anyone who tells you the exposure is worth a damn if you don't retain rights to your work.

[bewareofchris]

I've been on the writer's tag again.

Listen guys.

Nobody owes your fanfic anything. I know that you want validation and adoration and those are both completely normal things to want. But this obsessive demand for comments over kudos and reblogs over likes is A Problem.

I won't bore you with tales of yore where we literally punted our fiction into the world with no idea of how it was being perceived by others because the only way to know if anyone even glanced at it was by the incredibly inaccurate page counter on our shitty geocities page.

(But that was a thing and it's semi-relevant to my point.)

A lot of you are growing up in a era of social media and viral marketing. You are babies of the influencer age, raised on the myth that if you can just get enough attention you'll get famous for something. I don't mean 10 million followers on insta famous but famous in your specific sphere.

That will not happen for you.

Not because people aren't reblogging your shit or writing out loving comments but because it's a myth. The idea that if you shame, beg and cajole enough people into interacting with your creation you'll access some serotonin high and ascend to a greater state of being is also a myth.

Here's the truth:

Most writers do not know how the majority of their audience feels about their fics. Those very few novels that you see on booktok, X (former twitter) or wherever else you get your writing news represent an infinitesimal portion of stories written and books published.

Most writers do have writing buddies or trusted members of an inner circle that they share their writing with.

For most fandoms, fanfics are so plentiful it's like going into a mall sized grocery store that sells only apples and then demanding the customer review every apple they touch.

For those few fanfics that you see that have an outrageous number of comments there are three possible explanations: 1. that person is what we used to call a "Big Name Ficcer" and they have amassed a following through consistent production of whatever that fandom is into, 2. that is a fic so long you have to sign a waiver to start reading it and despite the fact it was started seven years ago its still getting updated, or 3. that person is writing a viral fic in a fandom that is presently on fire.

Your self worth and self esteem cannot be tied to writing and posting fanfiction. It might be a fun outlet or you might be looking for your viral moment, but either way the moment you start weighing your worth as an author or creator based on what a bunch of strangers on the internet think of you is the moment you give up on yourself.

Social media has brainwashed you into thinking that you must be recognized and rewarded for the things that you put onto the internet. Or maybe it hasn't brainwashed you, maybe you just want to get a comment because you worked super hard on something and you feel like if you can't even get one decent response then its all been wasted. (I.e. you've been brainwashed into the feeling that you need the validation of strangers for happiness purposes.)

So what are you going to do about this?

Get off the internet. I don't mean permanently. I don't even mean literally. I mean take yourself out of the spaces that reinforce the idea that you need validation from strangers to be happy. Stop going on the social media sites for a few days (or a few weeks). If you've got a friend in fandom that you share fics, headcanons, ideas or anything with start chatting with them about something you want to write. Invest in them, in what they're doing and their opinions and how they react to your creations.

Put your shit on the internet like you literally don't give a fuck about anyone's opinion. Explain nothing about your writing choices. Put warnings, no more than 5 tags and drop that shit into the world like a newborn giraffe. Then ignore it.

Teach yourself to seek validation from your accomplishments: write a slightly longer fic, write a fic in a different genre, write a fic in a different rating, write a fic in a different fandom.

Find an actual friend that you actually interact with whose opinion you know matters because you agree on the important stuff.

Stop begging strangers for compliments like a cartoon hobo shaking a cup for coins. You're better than that.

[blueboyluca]

And yet, in attempting to solve one set of problems, pit bull advocates inadvertently stumbled on a different set. "If pit bulls are so difficult to identify," Dr. James Serpell, the director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, asked me, "then how do these advocacy groups know what they are rescuing? You can’t have it both ways." Others wondered why one type of dog needed an entire social movement in the first place. Weren’t breed-specific incentives, parades, and moral crusades the flip side of breed-specific laws? Didn’t it feed into the same sort of tribalism? "I once knew someone who said that pit bull pride is worth the prejudice," Berkey told me. "But trust me, it isn’t." Some of the old negative inaccuracies about locking jaws and supernatural strength were replaced with positive untruths, such as the trope that pit bulls were referred to as "nanny dogs" in the early twentieth century. Just as the twenty-four-hour news cycle amplified 1980s fearmongering, so, too, did the rise of social media make it possible for reams of feel-good myths to circulate. Now anyone who had ever seen a pit bull could declare himself an authority and insist that "it’s all how you raise them." Additionally, some animal advocates displayed a cringe-worthy lack of cultural sensitivity by first equating breedism with human racism, then using coded racial language to condemn certain pit bull owners. A popular T-shirt read "Pit Bulls Are for Hugs, Not Thugs." This type of marketing implied that pit bulls were only acceptable pets when they belonged to upper- and middle-class white people. It allowed the specter of the "sinister other" to lurk in the background.

...

"Our job should be to put ourselves out of business," Jane Berkey once told me. Yet the paradox of "different is dead" makes this task infinitely more difficult. AFF [Animal Farm Foundation] continues to fund breed-specific initiatives in shelters around the country, she said, because "the damage done to these dogs was so great that some kind of extra help was necessary." But doing so, she acknowledged, necessitates treating the dogs "differently." That is the central conundrum of the pit bull movement, for Berkey and others: How do you know when your mission has been accomplished? And what will become of pit bull advocates when that happens? Is there a future for National Love Your Average Pet Day? "All I want is for this to be over," Berkey said. "I am ready to move on to other things." As for the charges of "pit bull lobbying" leveled against her by proponents of breed bans, she laughed. "If it were possible to simply buy a solution to this problem, I would have done it," she said. "But trust me, if it were that easy, this would have been over years ago." Her greatest hope is that the day will come when pit bull advocacy is no longer necessary, when America relinquishes its tight grip on the image and identity of the pit bull and simply lets them be dogs. "It will happen one dog at a time, one mind at a time," Jane said. "The dogs will open people’s hearts. All we have to do is get out of their way."

— Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull (2016)

[mariacallous]

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought.

Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.

Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media as well as local leaders started looking for a better story to tell.

“People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.”

Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when The Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.

The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context.

It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.

The Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million people out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.

Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in.

“The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”

Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.”

The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of 1 to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year.

The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.

It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.

Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.

“As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”

That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.

[shihalyfie]

Why do people like Saban dubbing digimon but really hate 4kids for dubbing anime?

To be honest, I don't think that's quite the case. I think most people who tend to have apologia-level worship of the Saban Digimon dubs also have similar sentiments towards 4Kids dubs. It's "my childhood", so it's sacred and you're not allowed to say anything bad about it.

That said, it is true that 4Kids is the one usually thrown under the bus to blame for radical dub changes while Saban is treated as "comparatively loyal (for the time)". This is misleading at best. If it's loyal for the time, it's by a very small margin, and certainly not enough to claim that it's "practically the same" as the Japanese version as many do.

Saban's Digimon dub looks closer to the original because all of the surface elements supposedly look closer:

They kept almost all of the names in Japanese and only gave them "nicknames", unlike other dubs that changed the names radically! (Except they functionally never mentioned those "nicknames" again after the first time, and no matter how many letters each name may share in common with their Japanese versions, that doesn't change the fact they treated most Japanese names like hot potatoes because they sound too Japanese.)

They left the setting in Japan instead of making it a fictional American city! (Except they tried to do that until the number of Tokyo landmarks made it too recognizable, and it's still something they were able to get away with because the Digital World is prominent enough in the narrative for them to not worry about it too much.)

They didn't cut any episodes! (Probably the only one that does hold legitimate water in comparison to 4Kids actually cutting entire episodes at times, but one also has to consider that Digimon is a heavily serialized narrative where dropping an episode would create serious problems for the story, whereas you could get away with a dropped episode from 4Kids' longer properties with filler episodes since more of their shows were based on manga.)

They didn't make any huge changes to the overall plot! (Almost nobody watched Adventure or 02 for the plot alone, and it's only natural that slowly changing every single line to suggest completely different characterizations from their Japanese counterparts would have a massive effect, especially on 02 where it didn't have an extremely linear in-your-face plot that offset that to some degree -- and even then, Adventure wasn't completely immune, because it didn't stop Koushirou and Mimi's Japanese characterization changes from still remaining relatively unknown in the English-speaking fandom.)

"The Digimon (American) English dub didn't change that much" is the biggest lie the fandom will ever feed you, yet it still persists to this day because people will look at these surface factors and call it a day (and even worse, because this myth persists, fewer people will be inclined to check it out in Japanese and confirm whether this is actually true or not). It's never been about how many actual changes there were; it's about how many were noticeable. Few people talk about how there's actually a significant difference in how dub changes were handled the moment Disney took over (late Tamers to Savers), because it's hard to notice unless you actually have seen the Japanese version. Fusion gets treated like a laughingstock dub just because people were actually able to watch it in Japanese first and see how much got changed later; in terms of actual changes, it's not that much worse than Adventure or 02, it's just that it happened during a time it was less socially acceptable to do that.

So because of that, Saban is seen in the lens of a localization company that did its best to be "loyal" in a market where the 4Kids method of drastic changes were more dominant, when in fact they were aggressive about it in different ways (and you can see a very fair share of derogatory, dangerously-racist-leaning comments about Japanese media, writing style, and content from people who were involved in Digimon localization, so it's frankly kind of absurd to imagine they were doing all of this because they cared so much about loyalty to the origin). On the flip side, it is on record that a lot of 4Kids' radical changes were actually requested by the Japanese side itself, because they themselves wanted to push something that would be appealing to the American market, and 4Kids would sometimes go as aggressive as they did specifically because they got the Japanese licensor's blessing to go as hard as they wanted.

(I actually personally prefer 4Kids' original music and theme songs to the Digimon ones -- they come off to me as feeling like they have a lot more genuine spirit put into them -- but that's just my personal subjective opinion, and everyone has their own music tastes. Anyway, that's a digression.)

I personally don't think it's productive to be mad at the dubs themselves. This was all more than 20 years ago, the market was very different, the attitude towards localization was different, Japanese companies had their own varying stakes in the situation, and most importantly, what happened happened and I'm not going to blame kids for watching the only thing that was accessible to them at the time and developing an attachment to it. I don't think there's any point to speculating how Digimon would have been accepted in the US/UK/etc. if it hadn't been changed so radically, because the fact is, we don't live in that alternate timeline, so we won't get anything useful out of fixating on that idea too much.

The only thing I have negative feelings about regarding the American English Digimon dub is, simply, the way the fandom still talks about it. With things like Pokémon or One Piece or Yu-Gi-Oh, where everyone already understands that 4Kids made super drastic changes, if you say you're talking about the Japanese version because what you're discussing wasn't in the dub, people will easily believe you and acknowledge you're talking about something different, but if you try to claim the Adventure or 02 dub was different enough to merit a distinction, you get called nitpicky or accused of being delusional. This is what I really wish would stop. The dub was different! I know localization discourse loves to conflate "different" with "bad", so people don't want to admit that their childhood dub changed a lot, but it did! That's reality! Please don't make this more frustrating to talk about than it needs to be!

[ichabodcranemills]

I see the Haladriel press extravaganza got antis/rival shippers sweating. Atp they’re actively choosing to live in a different reality by continuing to insist that Haladriel is just shipper delusion. Mind you Charlotte B quite literally said (more than once) that Galadriel fell in love with Halbrand + that Sauron loves Galadriel — I suppose an exec producer of the show is also delulu? “It was all just manipulation” — Charlie and Morfydd have literally just debunked that myth and the showrunners themselves have said there was truth in the deception. Atp the reading that Sauron and Galadriel are obsessed with each other - which Miv herself said lmao - is much more supported by canon than the idea that Galadriel has been actively yearning for her long-missing husband (who, mind you, has been mentioned all of once in 2 seasons). the showrunners made A CHOICE to push certain characters off screen to introduce romantic tension into Sauron and Galadriel’s dynamic. Mcpayne have waxed poetic about Charlie/Miv chemistry and said time and again that it’s the heart of the show.

“All interpretations are valid” is a political statement. At some point antis need to come to a reckoning that their read of the show/relationship does not in fact align with the creative team’s. Moreover, it doesn’t align with Amazon — the Haladriel PR has been going full throttle and it’s not gonna stop. they know full well this is what brings engagement (positive, negative, it’s all the same) and this is what’s good for business. ergo there ain’t no way in hell that they won’t milk that show-defining chemistry for all its worth (and near zero chance they’re gonna risk tanking profit to majorly shift focus onto another relationship — in the world of TV a god-honouring marriage is NEVER going to outsell forbidden will-they-won’t-they unresolved sexual tension). This is all plain to the average person with the ability to observe movements of actors/showrunners and official social media, but antis are on a level of copium that entails moving with their eyes closed.

anon, you put it better than I ever could. There was a choice made in trop and the story itself, the actors, the producers and the marketing team are being very clear about it. we know book canon, we know where all these characters have to be by the end of the Third Age. But Second Age, baby? that’s our time to shine

[neechees]

what do you think of blood quantums for tribal enrollment? I’ve heard many different opinions about it and wanted to ask your opinion. On one hand it undoubtedly filters out the pretendians, on the other it seems to keep many indigenous ppl from connecting with their communities when they are legitimately indigenous. It was also put in place by the govt so that doesn’t help it’s merit either

BQ for tribal enrollment does not filter out the pretendians, it's not ironclad. And even if it did, it's also disenfranchising people who are also ACTUALLY Native.

We (& i mean the royal "we" here) talked about this on my blog that there's a type of "pretendian" that technically does have some kind of (usually distant) Native heritage down the line, but that they use this to their advantage. If you've lived your whole life as a different ethnicity and only very recently learned of some Native lineage (esp if one is white), that Native heritage somewhere does not suddenly make you Native.

Like if I found out I had a greatx8 Chinese grandmother I would not suddenly start calling myself "Asian". Obviously that situation would be a little different since Chinese Canadians & FNMI have different histories of racialization within Canada & experiences among the diaspora, but it would still be weird for me to do something like sign up for a scholarship specifically meant for Chinese Canadians or started selling "Chinese inspired" art while marketing myself as Asian-Canadian. I would have Asian heritage yes, but I did not live my life as an Asian Canadian, and suddenly wanting something (what one could perceive as "benefits") from that experience without even trying to do ANY work in actual exploration, community building, self education & reflection, or reconnecting of that heritage would be weird & wrong.

The type of pretendians that I mentioned do the above: they might have some Native heritage, but there's a lot of people (and I mostly see White people do this), that aren't actually interested in reconnecting or building community & allyship with Native people, but want the perceived "benefits" of being Native, be it imagined (like how some people think that ndns don't pay taxes, which is a myth), financial (like applying for Native scholarships or selling "Native" products like sage), or social (like wanting to be perceived a certain way, or trying to market themselves as a Native "activist", or building a social media platform) or Fetishistic (being obsessed with the idea of Native lineage, hippies, appropriation) or literally anything else. So no, BQ laws for Native enrollment doesn't necessarily filter out pretendians effectively, because this type of "pretendian" also exists, and will and have used that heritage to get tribal enrollment for the above reasons.

And as I mentioned, it also disenfranchises other ACTUAL Natives, both those who technically have very little or no Native BQ but were adopted in & have always identified as Native their whole lives, or those who are mixed race and have what would be considered a "high" Blood Quantum as well, and even those who are "full blooded" but do not have tribal enrollment & are denied it for any number of reasons. Black Natives for example, are regularly denied tribal enrollment regardless of BQ for no reason other than that they are Black, so BQ for enrollment doesn't even necessarily work for people who are ACTUALLY NATIVE either.

BQ for tribal enrollment has a racist history in the past AND ongoing issues in the present. In other words, the system of BQ is bullshit, and was made up by White colonizers who literally did not know or care about Native ideas on Native identity, and their goal in creating BQ was also working along with genocide. BQ in enrollment was not made to protect us.

[moonieratty]

Due to mlbs nature as a kid show, it doesnt really explore the things that wouldve happened if this was happening irl. Like? Imagine the reaction to a magical butterfly terrorist? Turning people into unwilling supervillains via mind control magic?? Two random ass magical teens who are trying to fight the terrorist and the minions in question ?? Imagine the publics reaction, the panic, the conspiracy people, the public protests and much much more. So much chaos. We are talking complete shift in beliefs, magic being confirmed real, people traveling to confirm with their own eyes (literal magic tourism being capitalised on) the crowd that believes this is all fabricated, a whole group of people who now believes this is the end of the world,,, ALSO all the other heroes that appear out of nowhere?? Somewhere out there on the internet someone is CONVINCED this must be wide scale marketing for all those superhero movies. Everyone is reconsidering myths and legends.

And on top of all that. People would literally try to stalk chat noir and ladybug REGULARLY. There would be anon groups dedicated to uncovering their identities. And imagine all the false leads, all the "billionaires did this" conspiracies. People making tiktoks about how some tech company built these heroes and villains via AI or sth to profit out of it somehow.... subreddits dedicated to every clue there is for their identities, fake backstories, allegations.

Also after sentimonsters are introduced, there would be a wide spread conspiracy about how all rich people magically built their kids and how theres a huge rich people cult going on. You know the ones like that on tiktok, with the god awful "proof" images and spooky music. A bunch of people constantly comments on people like Adrien and Chloe's curated social media posts with "fake" and "made up". Theres constant international media coverage about things happening in France. There would be senti activists (felix) , people that clown on senti activists, people that make video essays on everything, people that think Alya is FBI spy or sth. The possibilities are endless. People would've reacted insane to everything the ENTIRE time tho.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Early Sunday morning, the USWNT exited the World Cup in the first round of the knockout stage, losing to an overmatched Sweden team on penalty kicks at the conclusion of a 0-0 tie. It marked the worst finish for the American women’s team in World Cup history.

Our national team has been ranked No. 1 in the world since June 2017 and for all but 10 months since March 2008. The squad has never been ranked lower than No. 2. In the Round of 16, Sweden conquered a dynasty.

Close observers were not surprised. The team has been in mental decay since Carli Lloyd retired (2020) and corporate media anointed the purple-haired Rapinoe as the unquestioned face of American women’s soccer.

For the last three years, the 38-year-old winger has used the team’s spotlight to grow the Rapinoe brand. The game, the competition, and representing national honor all took a back seat to self-promotion, virtue-signaling, so-called social activism centered around the BLM-LGBTQ-Alphabet Mafia, and expressing Trump derangement.

Rapinoe’s handlers and major corporations partnered with corporate media to cast her as “The Great Gay Hope,” the alternative-lifestyle Muhammad Ali.

Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan were all better players than Rapinoe. But none of them can match Rapinoe’s knack for drawing attention to herself for sleeping with women — her superpower, the behavior that makes her a legendary icon.

To no surprise, the strategy backfired. Rapinoe acted as a locker-room cancer. She diminished the importance of competition. Throughout the World Cup, the U.S. women failed to play with passion and precision. In four games, they scored four goals and won just one match.

On Sunday, with a chance to off Sweden with a penalty kick, Rapinoe missed the entire net wide right. She smirked and laughed in embarrassment. Two other U.S. women missed their kicks as well. But those women earned their spots on the roster. Rapinoe was on the team and on the field because of social pressure and a never-ending marketing campaign. She hadn’t earned the right to fail. The opportunity was bestowed on her.

When asked for her greatest memory of her “legendary” career, she pointed to the lawsuit she and her teammates filed against the U.S. Soccer Federation over alleged pay inequality. Gender pay inequality is a myth and a lie, no different from other popular corporate media narratives like climate change and the alleged genocidal homicide of unarmed black men.

But the truth is irrelevant in the making of an Alphabet Mafia icon. Megan Rapinoe is the George Floyd of soccer. Racism and sexism are the only things that prevented them from being president and vice president of the United States.

Or maybe Rapinoe is just another narcissistic, greedy, entitled celebrity.

Could you imagine Joe Montana or Michael Jordan summarizing their careers by referencing a contract dispute?

Rapinoe is a fraud. She’s the Colin Kaepernick of soccer. Her attitude poisoned the women’s national soccer team. Let’s hope her side effects don’t linger.

[haggishlyhagging]

“Women rise to [feminist] fame not because they are lauded as leaders by other feminists ... but because the mainstream media sees in them a marketable image a newsworthy persona upon whom can be projected all sorts of anxieties, hopes, and responsibilities,” wrote Rachel Fudge in a 2003 essay on the struggle to reconcile activism and renown. This is important, both as it relates to feminism's past and to its improbable embrace by mainstream American pop culture. On one hand, social movements need the diplomacy and charisma of people who can speak and agitate on behalf of them. On the other, the need to distill complex ideas and goals down to their most simple and quotable talking points has unquestionably done harm to those movements, feminism included. Mainstream attention has oversimplifed complex issues the wage gap, the beauty myth, the debate over decriminalizing sex work and misrepresented goals. It has attributed collective successes to one person and minimized the plurality of feminist movements themselves. And it has turned countless would-be colleagues and compatriots into foes scrapping over crumbs of access and affirmation.

Jo Freeman's Ms. article "Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood" still regularly makes its way from inbox to inbox because the anguish with which it articulates the process of being sidelined, gaslighted, and shunned—all in the name of sisterhood—is still so relevant. Freeman defined trashing as something that often masquerades as critique but is wholly different: "a particularly vicious form of character assassination" that "is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences" but "to disparage and destroy." After its publication in 1976, the piece garnered more letters than any previous piece in Ms.—"all but a few," notes the essay's current preface, "relating [the writers'] own experience of being trashed." Formerly a member of the Chicago branch of radical feminists, Freeman left the movement completely after her deflating experiences. But two of her essays, "Trashing" and "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"—the latter an outline of the idealistic, leaderless context in which trashing often occurs—still put words to ongoing phenomena.

Individual feminists are used to being insulted and bullied by people who bear an inventory of beefs with feminists in general, especially these days, and inevitably online. Trashing or its contemporary cousin, "calling out," is different and usually a lot more painful because it comes from fellow feminists. Thanks in part to social media, trashings have become more public and more frequent with participants, as feminist sociologist Katherine Cross put it, "hyper-vigilant against sin, great or small, past or present." It's possible for trashings to start out with a core of completely valid critique but spiral outward into chaos as more people pile on and context is diffused. Some are way pettier: I was once informed that I was being trashed on an online bulletin board because I hadn't posed an apparently crucial question to a screenwriter I'd profiled. Trashings might be focused on an ideal of ideological purity: "careerist," for instance, is a sneer aimed at feminists who have the temerity to want to be known (or at least paid) for their work. Other trashings might result from an opinion that's unforgivably at odds with current feminist orthodoxy.

The competitiveness that leads to trashing obviously isn't unique to feminist movements, but as many people have pointed out over the years, it's likely to thrive within them because so many women, across ages and races and classes, are socialized to see themselves as connectors and uniters rather than experts and leaders; it's even more likely to fester because of the unmended rifts of past feminist movements. The incendiary tone of trashing is also heightened because the line between one's activism and identity is often as substantive as a vapor trail; trashing someone's work becomes indistinguishable from trashing the person themselves.

-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once