#sullivan

[mandatorybear]

Another day in the Sullivan household

[sasha042]

Delkira.

[luxthestrange]

WTDSIK Memes#6

Kalego*Face palming seeing the gift Sullivan brought to his son*...WHEN I SAID YOU CAN BRING ONE GIFT-I OBVIOUSLY MEANT SMALL!?!

Balam*Happily positioning baby Iruma next to his new teddybear*He seems to like it~

Y/n*Trying to calm down your husband*Calm down 'Lego! your gonna have another panic attack!

Kalego: I AM CALM!?!

Balam & Y/n*Both hug Kalego and pat his head and back*There there~

[thebladeblaster]

WTDSIK Incorrect Quotes

[mostlysignssomeportents]

David Enrich’s “Murder the Truth”

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

David Enrich's Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful is a brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/murder-the-truth-david-enrich

Enrich is a veteran business reporter at the New York Times; he's reported extensively on high finance and sleaze, and has a knack for piercing the Shield of Boredom that protects finance crimes from scrutiny. His 2017 book The Spider's Web manages the nearly impossible trick of making the LIBOR-rigging conspiracy – which involved trillions, but in ways that were so baroque that hardly anyone noticed – comprehensible:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/24/the-spider-network-a-novelistic-account-of-the-mediocre-rich-men-who-robbed-the-world-with-libor/

In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.

As such, Enrich's writing is extremely cautious, sometimes comically so, but always intentionally, in a way that highlights the absurd chilling effect his subjects are attempting to induce in all of us.

The book primarily concerns itself with the effort to overturn Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court case that established protections for media outlets that report on public figures and commit minor factual errors, provided that the errors were neither negligent nor malicious.

Since Sullivan, media outlets have held the upper hand when reporting on public figures. While Sullivan isn't a license to simply make stuff up about celebrities, politicians and business leaders, it does mean that if a reporter makes a minor misstatement, it's on the subject of the reporting to prove that the error was negligent and/or malicious.

Before Sullivan, most defamation litigation happened in state courts, and southern courts allowed lawmakers and cops to sue newspapers that reported on racial terror campaigns during the civil rights fight. The judgments involved were so large that many media outlets simply gave up on reporting on the intimidation, violence and murder taking place in the Jim Crow south.

True to form, Clarence Thomas has led the charge to dismantle a law that was key to the struggle for rights for Black people and other disfavored minorities. In Enrich's telling, Thomas's animus for Sullivan started during his confirmation hearings, when Anita Hill described his relentless sexual harassment of the lawyers who worked for him, including Hill. Being the subject of a media firestorm that painted him as a disgusting, cruel sex-pest seems to have inspired Thomas in a decades-long campaign to find a case that would let him tear down Sullivan, so that wealthy people could once again intimidate reporters into silence. Of course, Thomas's hatred for Sullivan only grew when Propublica revealed that he had taken numerous "gifts" from wealthy "friends" who had business before the courts, revelations that will forever make Thomas's name a synonym for corruption.

Enrich's cast of characters includes a clutch of whiny, ultra-rich axe-grinders, who finance (often in secret) lawsuits that are designed to chip away at Sullivan. Some are international looters or corrupt ex-Soviet oligarchs, but others are ideologues, committed to the principle of impunity for the powerful.

He also introduces us to the lawyers who wage these battles. As you might imagine, the kind of lawyer who sits up at night figuring out how to help wealthy, powerful people destroy their critics is often a crank themselves, with "colorful" personal relations that Enrich reports on with meticulous prose, including the many denials and non-denials his subjects sent when he sought comment.

As with his LIBOR book, Enrich does yeoman duty here unpacking complex matters that would be dull in a lesser writer's hands. The litigation strategies devised by Sullivan's enemies are always convoluted and are sometimes clever, much like the litigation strategies used to kill campaign finance limits (Citizens United) and abortion rights (Dobbs). Indeed, many of the financiers, think-tanks and lawyers behind those plots are also would-be Sullivan slayers.

The best of these legal gambits are actually rather clever – locating innocent people who've been genuinely wronged by Sullivan (as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law") and then using them to undermine Sullivan, without actually helping them in any way. It's positively fiendish.

We're in a moment when a lot of powerful people are getting far more powerful, and abusing that power to commit wildly corrupt acts. The only way we'll know about this is if the press can freely report on their misdeeds. Murder the Truth is a vital guide to the next Citizens United, the next Dobbs – a campaign to take away your right to know about the next assault on your rights that plutocrats will launch.

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://www.harpercollins.com/products/murder-the-truth-david-enrich

[nizzybean]

The actual answer to the "do we catalogue birth sex or do we catalogue gender for medical purposes" problem is to give patients a checklist of body parts that they can tick off rather than reduce things down to just "sex."

I should be able to simply mark down that I have breasts and a prostate and receive checkups for both.

The sex you were born as is completely immaterial, what matters most is the needs you have based on your body as it exists in the present.

[deadmotelsusa]

The former Snell's Restaurant of Sullivan, Missouri operated as an antique mall before being abandoned and eventually, demolished.

[biby-24k]

Sieglinde Sullivan Nail Design

[chernychnyi]

returning to the tower

[riotgrrrlnat]

I'm your narrative parallel? I guess I must be gay then.

[fallinblossoms]

Sieglinde Sullivan & Wolfram Gelzer

Black Butler: Emerald Witch Arc - Episode 1

[madmarchhare]

My heart, I love them so much.

[sasha042]

Oyasumi Iruma-kun.

[pondofwonder]

Awww grandpa is all alone 😔

[thebladeblaster]

This chapter so sweet that it could give you diabetes

Finally, they have been reunited with their son. They’re so happy. Opera’s tail constantly wagging is so funny.

I’m so happy to see the Boku Alliance reunited

He deserves all of the happiness. I love this second image so much. His little wavy smile is adorable.

Purson lol

His face is so funny

Iruma got so caught up in helping the Many Ears that he forgot the Scala🤣

Iruma and Kerori look so concerned

This detail is so funny

Their little straps are cat paws👀. Opera is always ready to attend to the smol. S tier butler. These pajamas are amazing and I want them.

Despite the wholesomeness I suddenly have a bad feeling. Like everything is almost going too well and something horrible will happen soon. It feels like a last fun moment with everyone before a storm. Human deportation act👀.

[raziiyah]

hey! this is actually something i've thought about quite a lot before so here's how i see it:

since monsters are so diverse in the monster world, there are a vast amount of factors that are considered beautiful. some monsters may like 1 eye, some like 3 eyes and some like 8. some like feathers, scales, or fur. it just comes down to preference. but for monsters, generally, scary = beautiful

firstly, for the teeth thing, i imagined that just like human beauty standards, monster beauty standards can change. perhaps yellow teeth used to be the standard, but then it was discovered that whiter teeth made them more visible and gave them a scarier appearance. also, maybe they discovered that poor dental health caused monsters to lose their teeth sooner, which is a problem if you rely on them for scaring. proper dental care allowed you to stay healthy and kept your teeth in good condition, keeping you in the scaring career for longer. like when sulley is brushing his teeth in mi, mike really emphasizes getting rid of plaque

this change could also be why randall's teeth in mi are visibly whiter than they were in mu

as for female monsters, i see it sorta like how jessica rabbit from who framed roger rabbit is in toon town. she's regarded as very beautiful, but not as desireable or successful (to other toons) as roger rabbit, someone more cartoony and goofy looking

so though the more humanoid looking monsters could be considered beautiful, since being a scarer is known as the biggest achievement a monster could have, if you're scary, you're considered beautiful on a whole other level.

another idea i had is that scaring could be considered as a male dominated career, so the scary/beauty standards for female monsters aren't as scrutinized as much as male monsters. this could be why there are more female monsters that aren't necessarily as "scary looking"

this could also play a role into why the pnk's are so cutthroat- with a more conventionally beautiful appearance, they might not be considered the most successful in monster society. sure they could be models and movie stars

(though i can still see """scary/conventionally unattractive""" monsters being just as viable as models and moviestars in the monster world, maybe even more so),

but since scarers are the creme de la creme, "prettier" monsters could sometimes be seen as beautiful but maybe not typically the image of someone "successful" or "desireable" (my oc lia is a scarer and has a body type similar to the pnks so i made this an insecurity of hers hehe)

but monsters can combat this by showing their scariness through their glowing eyes, teeth, claws, etc. this could be valuable as well as there's a scary/surprising factor to appearing "innocent" at first, which could be advantageous in scaring, if you know how to use it (like the pnk's in the toxicity challenge or terri and terry in the scare simulator)

also considering the movie poster seen in maw; it's about monsters in space, likely referring to aliens. humans could be considered aliens/alien-looking to monsters because they come from another world, and heather has a more humanoid appearance

on the other hand, hss is more favored as "one of the most powerful, scary monsters in campus, and they have a more traditionally "scary" appearance. and in monsters at work, of the female monsters in the mu sororities, rosie levin was the one who made it to the same scare/(laugh) floor that sulley/(mike) are/(were) on, at monsters inc.

so really i think beauty is subjective in the monster world since everyone is so different. conventionally beautiful monsters are still beautiful, maybe even some monster's preference, but scary monsters are generally favored most, because of how much monster society is centered around scaring. after all, "scariness is the true measure of a monster."

@moonlight-monster @randall-simp-nadt88