#this also isn't meant to be discourse about like
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riddlerosehearts · 9 months ago
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okay, i've got some things i wanna say about twst EN's translation of scarabia's story that i was originally typing out as part of a response to an ask, but then i realized i was going off on a bit of a tangent and was like "this could basically be its own post"--so now it's going to be its own post!
i'm a twst EN player, and for the most part, i do really like the localization. i don't speak japanese but i love learning about language and the process of translation and localization, so at one point after finishing books 1-5 i went and reread them all (and 6 as well, once it was fully released on EN) with a fan translation and the localization side by side to compare them. and from what i could tell as someone who isn't a japanese speaker, i honestly thought it seemed like they usually did pretty well? sure, there were a few mistakes like cater claiming to be an only child (this one, i think, has actually been fixed recently), or how in book 2 they removed a small mention of falena making it seem like he's never mentioned at all until leona's flashback and they also removed the numerous times that he said "be prepared" (at least they finally properly translated it in book 6, though!!). but i thought most of these mistakes were somewhat minor and could be forgiven... until book 4 (well, and book 5, mostly in regards to vil and epel's conflict and i'm not talking about them here, so).
see, i actually realized that something was off about the localization when i first played through book 4, because i have a weird memory and have picked up a bunch of random words and phrases from being into japanese media and reading so much about the localization process. and i also play twst with the sound on because i love to hear the voice acting. so sometimes i would hear jamil speak, i'd pick out the words "shujin" and "juusha" for "master" and "servant", and then the subtitles wouldn't include them at all. so i'd guess certain things about the actual intent behind the story based on that. take this message i sent to my friend when i was sharing my blind reactions to the game:
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and she ended up telling me that apparently, what i thought he should say essentially IS what he originally said!! according to the fan translation on wiki.gg he said this instead:
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i had wondered if maybe i was reading into things and assuming too much, but it turned out i was completely spot on! but most people who play EN would not be able to pick up on this and realize that jamil was born into servitude to kalim and has no escape, because as i later discovered almost every single mention of him being a servant at all was removed, in events and vignettes as well. which is actually really weird to me because they don't remove it entirely, they do in fact bring up the fact that jamil has to test all of kalim's food for poison during book 4 and they also left in a line where he says he "works as kalim's servant". but they only really mention these things once or twice and then they try to sort of play it off as jamil being a paid employee or something most of the time... seriously, during beanfest there's dialogue where jamil says it would be rude to refuse an order from his boss but i've read that that line was originally him saying a servant couldn't disobey his master. and in the scalding sands event he calls himself "a dedicated employee" of kalim's... what, am i supposed to assume he works as a butler by choice or something? yeah, no. also, one of his birthday vignettes, which are fully voiced so i could TELL he said, with a devious smirk on his face, that if he had a parrot the first word he would teach it would be "shujin-sama". "master". what did EN change this into?
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the person i was originally writing all of this in response to said that sometimes people's takes on jamil make them wonder if people are reading a completely different story but also that part of that can probably be blamed on the way EN completely changed the context of his situation with these translation choices. and yeah, i fully agree with that assessment: more casual fans or people who just aren't that interested in the scarabia duo could be said to be reading a different story with this whole "boss" and "employee" thing that has jamil make it sound like the worst that could ever happen to him if he got in trouble would be getting a really stern lecture from his parents.
and it makes me sad because i really do love both jamil and kalim so much and i think their dynamic is so tragic and complicated and interesting to think about. i think they're both really complex characters who are trapped in an awful situation. kalim is so kind and loving and would never wanna hurt anyone but he hurts jamil just by existing as part of the fucked up society they live in. kalim thought he and jamil were best friends, he had no idea of the toxicity of their dynamic and the pain jamil was in, and people say jamil should've just talked to him about it earlier... but jamil's first memory as a child is of seeing his parents bow to the asim family. being a servant is practically all he's ever known and he's had it drilled into his head since they were both small children that he can never be himself around kalim, can never just treat him like a normal person because he's a servant and kalim is his master. and even if he did accept kalim's offer to start over as equals and be friends, what would happen when they had to go home to their families? they won't be at school forever.
and i just. augh. i hate what the localization does with them. if you try to water them down to just an employee who's super mad at his obliviously crappy boss, or just two childhood friends who needed to communicate better or something like that, then you take away from the complexity of both characters. you also lose extremely cool writing choices like how jamil is a character who was born into servitude but has the power to make himself the master with his unique magic. i see so many takes about how jamil is just a jerk who betrayed his best friend and how kalim never did anything wrong in his entire life and i hate it but i'm sure the localization's choices are in fact to blame for a lot of this.
so anyway jamil and kalim's actual dynamic is fascinating and lives rent-free in my head, no thanks to how the EN version gutted it.
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theminecraftbee · 1 year ago
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so a thing this fandom does that remains FASCINATING to me, as a function of the fact a lot of this fandom is people's first fandom or only current fandom, is just... assume a lot of things it does is a scourge that this fandom has invented or doesn't exist outside of it? or like, is uniquely bad here? and i won't deny that sometimes mcyt fandom is a bit more intense by virtue of numbers, but like...
duo names: confusing fandom-injokes to describe duos and groups tend to be an anime fandom thing specifically for many historical reasons, but they're not uncommon. hey quick--if you haven't been in KHR fandom, can you guess what 1827 is? no? i'll give you a hint: that's actually a ship name. or, ygo fans, tell me the difference between puppyshipping, prideshipping, violetshipping, and rivalshipping. my hint is that they're all kaiba ships and two of them are actually the same ship. good luck!
reducing characters to a specific trait: have you read fic in another fandom before? i would recommend you go do so and come back to me. my example here is "sasuke likes tomatoes", for the record.
common au fanon that's confusing to outsiders: my deep cut here is "when i got into certain tv fandoms i was baffled by the existence of sentinel/guide fics", which is a slightly older tv fandom thing so many of you probably don't know what i'm on about. but trust me: in certain fandoms it's ubiquitous and unless you've watched a completely different tv show you're gonna have to entirely pick it up from reading fic. oh hey, hybrid aus and watcher!grian, nice to see your relative here,
fanon being treated as canon: did you know there's this whole bnha character, naomasa, who is treated as canonically having a lie detector quirk? did you know that, best i can tell, that's not in canon anywhere, it just got echoed through fanon enough that everyone treated it as canon? 'fanon trait becomes so ubiquitous everyone assumes it has to be there' is not a new thing. also, batfamily fans, i have been lead to understand the tim and coffee thing is also this.
characters being treated badly to make a different dynamic look better: the fact we have the term 'character bashing' tells you all you need to know, here. if anything my one complaint on this front isn't even that it's happening--it's that i wish bashing and/or "not [character] friendly" was tagged a little more frequently, haha.
characters being reduced to their family dynamics: tale as old as time. "even the family dynamic thing" yes even that. just because this fandom tended to be particularly ship-adverse in the past didn't mean it didn't do basically the same behaviors as any fandom with shipping did with those dynamics, just gen. and other gen fandoms also do that. yes, down to the "and shipping reduces them to a ship, unlike my gen dynamic, which is very in-character; why can't people just be friends?" thing. some of you have to have been marvel fans right.
characters being reduced to their ships: some of you have to have been marvel fans right.
The Discourse: yeah this is an "actively running show" fandom thing, but also a hiatus fandom thing. ask a homestuck about vriskourse sometime. as much as i hate to say it, it probably made doomsday discourse look cute.
and those are just like... some things i've seen people complain about on my dash recently. idk it just hit me there are probably fans in mcyt fandoms who are assuming that some things (like hybrid aus or duo names) are the kind of things that only happen here, so i thought i'd offer some examples of other places they happen! i also have even more examples if you'd like.
to be clear: this isn't shaming anyone for complaining about any of these things. lord knows i go complain to my friends about it all the time, just the other day i was complaining in the category of 'they keep bashing my guy'. it's more of just... a gentle reminder that maybe we're big, maybe we're loud, maybe we have problems... but these problems aren't always unique.
so uh. we're all suffering together i guess...?
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fiona-fififi · 1 month ago
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Since I'm digging myself a hole tonight, I kind of actively hate the "But I am ready for something, and I think maybe that something could be with you."
Like, my first instinct was that it was sweet and that Buck was taking back a little bit of agency there and asking for what he wanted.
But I don't know. In so many ways, it also actually feels like it feeds into a very unhealthy pattern for Buck.
I mean, I might just be projecting because I cannot imagine ever being so infatuated with someone that I'd be like "I want to try a relationship with you" after only knowing them for 30 seconds and being left on the curb after a failed first date, but I digress.
But just. I don't know. This feels like such a pattern for Buck. Have someone express interest, only to then be rejected (Abby, Taylor, Natalia, now Tommy) and then chase them that much harder.
Like, Buck. Darling. PLEASE. Your value is not defined by the people for whom you have to prove your worth.
And I don't even mean this as anything directly against these partners. But Buck gets so caught up in forcing a relationship that he speedruns things without actually giving anyone (including himself) any space to grow into it, and it just feels kind of devastating that that's still where he is with himself.
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abirdie · 9 months ago
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Gael García Bernal in Desierto (2015, dir. Jonás Cuarón)
(these gifs also feature Alondra Hidalgo)
Gifs are all 540px wide so you can click to see larger.
[other gael filmography gifsets]
#gael garcía bernal#desierto#ggb filmography gifs#desierto 2015#gael garcia bernal#this is ultimately a pretty standard thriller of the being-chased-by-an-inexorable-killer type#where the cast is picked off one by one until only the most conventionally physically attractive remain#this is good news for gael's character#on account of being played by gael#i think this one is elevated by the setting both in terms of beauty (it is stunning) and by making effective plot use of it#that apparently meant they were shooting two hours' drive away from the nearest towns with no cellphone reception etc.#which may be why we don't see more films set here#also elevated by the performances which are uniformly good#also elevated by the themes (jeffrey dean morgan's antagonist is targeting migrants crossing the border)#so we're back in the territory explored in documentaries like who is dayani cristal but this time as fictional thriller#this film came out as the trump wall discourse was hotting up and that was naturally something that got talked about in interviews#clever inclusion of antagonist's dog which effectively constrains what the characters could do to get out of the situation#so unlike in many films of this type there isn't a screamingly obvious course of action that they should have taken but unaccountably don't#still it remains a genre film sticking broadly to the conventions of that genre so the plot isn't going to astonish you#i've still avoided giffing the most spoilery moments though#tbh i suspect gael's character is still screwed at the end but then i think that's also the point (see: themes)
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anglerflsh · 1 year ago
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neurodivergency moment on my part
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kaztheghost · 1 year ago
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just discussing PvP and the issues people r having with Blue hiding !! tagged discourse and crit to be safe but it isn't intentioned with either it's just me rambling
Okay I mained bads perspective yesterday but I keep seeing people say that Etoiles and Roier couldn't find anyone to kill for nine hours--and listen . Is it that they couldn't find ANYONE or that they didn't find who they WANTED to kill, because they did see Foolish and Cellbit didn't they? Two people in nine hours is SUPER ROUGH yes but they did run into red more than once and just didn't kill them so idk I'd be more into it if they really didn't see a single player for any time whatsoever but like. Just because they didn't see bad more than once ISNT the same; I think I just mainly take issue with the fact everyone is trying to give bad a hard time for not fighting while refusing to acknowledge the entire server wanted his head on a platter, why should he 1v12?? Like that's ridiculous how is that even content when he'd get curbstomped against that many people, every time people want to fight him it's only AFTER they gather at least four to six people to take him out like be realistic if you want to 1v1 id be like fuck yea but he knows that where there's one there's the rest of y'all not too far away I just do not get it he's not a coward he's using basic common sense (plus even when people offer a 1v1 they're ALWAYS in a vc telling their team where to go to jump him) that is there's One of him and An Entire Server who wants him Dead good as he is (and tbf i also disagree with etoiles calling their fight from the other day a 1v2 because it wasn't--it started as a 2v2 and fit ran because he almost died (I'm aware of the miscommunication btw I don't blame either of them!!! It really really sucks bc I'm sure etoiles could've escaped) but regardless it WAS a 2v2 that bad didn't even Want to take on initially, it would've stayed that way if fit had stuck around because he was going to die anyways ykwim but to say it was unfair when it didn't start off that way is eh 2 me mostly bc it sounds like they jumped Etoiles off guard as if Etoiles and Fit didn't engage them first) HOWEVER saying all that I think they really should try to encourage PVP in different ways than just "everyone go hunt down this one specific player" because then it's kind of just . Like that encourages that player to just hide because why would they fight that many people? Boosting the kill percentage helps but manhunts don't imo they'll just stay underground the whole time and I don't blame anyone who does outside of even Blue--like when Blue and Green were hunting Red, of course red is going to stay hundreds of blocks away to avoid PvP it's just numbers ykwim idk it's purgatory but when you being killed will set your entire team back because there's significantly less of you then everyone else I don't blame them really and I hope the admins can come up with a different way to try and get fights going
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wreckedhoney · 15 days ago
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cant fuck with fandom takes that defuck extremist characters. blorbo set fire to multiple buildings killed dozens and will do so again. every incident is accompanied by a rant about some warped issue or pathetic self perspective and a lot of bared teeth. then enough people who watched the same thing i watched will just.. not register that this is an angry personality. objectively bad and toxic. among other things. like suddenly seeing takes about this genuine asswipe being a normal chill person. where did u see this. what happened. where is my genuinely unwell off-putting blorbo. who the fuck is this
#many such cases. no disrespect to AU stuff and hc's and the like etc but this isn't about that#specifically now i saw a poor jinx take that's just the latest thing to act like a last straw for me with this stuff lol#she is not a foil in any way to silco fellas. her freak matches his freak. they make each other worse. theyre not normal.#the dynamic is so far from sanitized and this is one of the things that fictional literalism & the moral panic that accompanies it f'ed up#it didnt use to be such an issue that characters like jinx are just Like That bc jinx is a character from a show to be played with#we dont HAVE to justify her actions through lenses that adhere very strictly to reality bc it ISN'T real#it's a narrative that in bulk conveys “hey wana see something fucked up”#but from the trajectory of purity culture we canNOT be that loose or playful bc we HAVE to look thru lenses dictating that she's Real#or real-adjacent; ie. she reflects a real person in some creeping literal sense#so now if we LIKE her then she has to in some way be more palatable in the scope of rl acceptability. its so infuriating how this snowballs#let them be Fucked Up! fuck your narratives Up!! storytelling is PLAY not virtue signaling or a morality contest ESPECIALLY in fandoms#also YES they were meant to be portrayed as romantic originally and then they toned it down but the tones are still there. LET IT BE#IT'S! NOT! MEANT! TO! BE! NORMAL! OR ADHERENT TO A SCOPE OF REALISM. NONE OF THIS IS REAL HELLO H E L L O !!#SORRY i'm tired of pretending that the perspective towards storytelling getting a massive hit from purity culture isn't rly off-putting#or outright WORRYING. and fandoms are so weak compared to how it was before radfem language inserted itself into our spaces#SORRY to anyone who wasnt around enough before to know the difference. FFN & LJ used to fuck so hard and so did tmblr#it's harder to have as much fun i think as someone who was So around for that and seen in real time how it's changed now#fandom discourse
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lesbians be dropping their opinions on the vincian flag, like their opinions actually matters 💀 
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grimark · 2 years ago
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not that anybody asked but i do think terms like "cis+" or "cisn't", which i've seen thrown around in relation to the prev post, are a bit unnecessary. to me, it just seems like excessively atomising a fairly common experience, which is the desire to not be subject to the more uncomfortable and restrictive aspects of socially constructed gender roles. and sure, it might never even occur to a lot of cis people to do this kind of introspective analysis of their gender identities, and they might therefore be lacking some of the additional perspective of someone who has, but i don't think we necessarily need need a special new category for it. when you get down to it, "cis person who has previously questioned their gender" and "cis person who has never felt the need to question their gender" are both still cis, which in theory is a value-neutral description and a perfectly fine thing to be.
#this isn't meant as a criticism of people who like those terms or find them valuable or validating#it's more just. i don't get it and i don't really see the point of them but that's fine because they're not aimed at me anyway.#if you're cis but you want to add a modifier to encapsulate your gender journey then you do you.#to me just seems a bit patronising to tell cis people they're actually cis+ or whatever#like. aww you did such a good job thinking about your gender! here is a star sticker for you that says 'more evolved than other cis people'#instead maybe we can just trust that 1. people are the experts on their own identities and experiences#if someone says they're happy to continue identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth we can probably take their word for it!#and 2. accept that we all probably have a lot more in common than we might assume#it seems like a mistake to think 'this experience (gender discomfort and introspection) is exclusively a trait of x category of person'#'so if someone from y category has experienced it they must not actually be y‚ they must be something else instead'#which allows you to comfortably continue to paint people from y group as a wholly separate other with fundamentally alien experiences#and no possible point of overlap or common ground.#i see this a lot with the eternal thorn in my side which is posts about how The Neurotypicals Do This Thing#and also with a certain flavour of ace discourse#which presumes that 1. anyone who doesn't choose to identify under the asexual identity umbrella must necessarily be allosexual#2. there is a single unifying allosexual experience which can be equally applied to the rest of the human population#and 3. no allosexual person could possibly have a complicated or fraught relationship with sex and sexuality.#or if they did have any experiences in common with asexual people they'd naturally choose to identify as ace instead.#therefore these two identities must be wholly separate groups with no experiential overlap.#like idkkkkk clearly these hyperspecific labels are useful to some people!#but to me they often just seem to generate feelings of division and othering#or they're used as a way to claim a particular experience as exceptional to one group#when it's actually a pretty common feature of the human condition.
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forgive-the-sea · 11 months ago
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i think somewhere along the line (in my experience) after 2020 reader fan fic became less about enjoying a story and more about inserting ourselves into stories and idk how to feel about that
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mint-swirl · 1 year ago
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you ever see an infodump prime for an autistic audience but it uses red and green to try and differentiate details? like bestie know your target audience
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mildlylesbian · 2 years ago
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At this point I refuse to touch any sort of online discourse with a 10ft pole because the landscape has become so toxic that people are more focused on fighting one another rather than the issue at hand, which leads to nothing happening ever.
However, scrolling through a screaming match between two people at 2am where niether of them makes any impact on the actual contriversy cause they're too busy fighting one another is so so so irratating but also so cathartic.
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stelashe · 1 year ago
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Ogni volta che becco un italiano qui è un """oppresso""" del sud(o del nord/toscana che odia se stesso e tutta la gente troppo vicina alle alpi perché lui/lei/voi è speciale uwu) che insulta la gente del nord(generale ma ovunque è Milano citylife si sa siamotuttisa*vini) a caso ....mi ricorda qualcuno.
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fiona-fififi · 5 months ago
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...
#feeling controversial today i guess#but like#i am at the point where i actively do not get the hype around tommy#like he’s just some guy#most of what people seem to like AND hate about him seems to be just based on headcanons not anything he's actually done in canon#he's had exactly zero development outside of moving buck's character forward since showing up again#like sure maybe there's potential but it hasn't actually been used at this point he's just kind of there#i do not understand having particularly strong opinions on him in eithet direction#like fanon opinions sure he's fun in fic#but like. the way people seem to be mapping their fanon versions of him onto canon to fit either a blind adoration or a blind hatred for hi#is super weird to me#like he’s just som guy y'all why is half the fandom falling out over this dude while the other half has gone underground??#he's just not that interesting#i will never understand how hard this fandom goes for side characters#who have had next to no development of their own#i didn't get it with lucy#i don't get it with tommy#like to each their own#but damn the power y'all give these random characters who frankly just aren't that interesting in their current states is#a lot#like enjoy have fun no judgment there#but can we maybe stop actively attacking each other over this guy he's just some dude come on y'all#*either *him *some#i really need to proofread my tags#*also i think i mean more controversy rather than hype in that third tag. it's not really that i don't understand why people like him#but more that i don't understand how he inspires such extreme opinions#anti tommy kinard#just in case#this isn't meant to be anti really i'm just like. very neutral about him#911 discourse
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ms-demeanor · 2 years ago
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So I've been seeing some discourse around the No Fly List leak that looks a bit like "hey everybody, we can't make jokes about this, the list is racist and there are children on the list" or "if you're talking about identity categories instead of the list you're missing the point" and I think that we CAN make jokes about a trans bi lesbian catgirl owning the US government while also appreciating the gravity of the No Fly List but what I think is troubling to me is the way that these discourse posts are treating the blatant racism and inherently fascist nature of the No Fly List as news.
It is news that Maia Arson Crimew was able to download a copy of the No Fly List from an unsecured public server.
It is not news that there are 1.5 million people on that list, many of whom do not belong on it for any number of reasons, and it is not news that there are children on that list, and it is not news that the list is a tool used to deprive people of their civil liberties. That's why the list exists.
I'm aware that I'm getting older. I'm aware that there are entire adults of legal drinking age who were born after 9/11. I'm aware that it's not super common to follow up on foreign policy or national security debacles from when you were in kindergarten, but there are people who have been mad about this shit for twenty years and if you're just now hearing about how bad the list is for the first time, hell, maybe that's on us and we haven't been yelling enough (though when I'm yelling about how the TSA is security theater meant to make us accept encroachments on our rights, this is at least a part of what I'm yelling about).
The No Fly List is a list of individuals maintained by the TSA who are deemed a threat to security for some reason or another.
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The TSA maintains the list, though they are given information for the list from the FBI, Terrorism Screening Center, and other entities. If you'd like to click this document, you can find 250 pages of FOIA'd documents about the No Fly List pre 2006. Much of this document is members of the FBI trying to justify why they need a copy of the list and lamenting that airlines have a copy of the list and they don't. This is very funny.
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There have been issues with mis-identifications and false positives for the list for as long as the list has existed. You can click here to read through an infuriating 200 pages about a Pfizer employee who was stopped at least a dozen times at airports and who retained a law firm to hound the TSA/CBP/ICE clusterfuck of interagency buck-passing for nine months to try to get the problem resolved. One of the three documents at this link includes a complaint from the president of the Terrorist Screening Center lamenting the way that the TSA would refer obvious non-matches to be detained, including infants and the elderly.
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At this point, the FBI/TSA/TSC/ICE/CBP claimed list was still relatively small, in the low thousands at most.
However a 2009 cost-benefit report by the Defense Technical Information Center found that in 2004-2005 30,000 people contacted the TSA to have their names removed from the list; 30k false positives suggests a list somewhat longer than a thousand names.
As long as the No Fly List has existed, criteria for being placed on the list has been subjective and selectively enforced.
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As the Crimew leak shows, there isn't a tremendous amount of biographical data, but there are hundreds of thousands of names and it is enforced at the discretion of the TSA in each individual airport in the US, which is how you end up with duplicates and toddlers and 100-year-old men on what is functionally a filter to keep Muslim people out of the US.
The list has expanded every year that it has existed, and has been defended by republicans and democrats alike since it became one of the tools in our arsenal to fight "the war on terror"
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And for just about that long, people have been talking about how it is unconstitutional, denies civil liberties, and also just doesn't really work.
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It has never been transparent, it has always been a tool of surveillance, exclusion, and control:
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And people have been documenting, protesting, and suing over the islamophobic nature of the list - and the security state's weaponization of the list as a threat - for two decades at this point because in the earliest days of the No Fly List it was OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGED that it was based on racial profiling and people made (shitty, cruel) legal arguments for why it should be:
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THIS isn't funny. These are not the things that people are joking about when they choose to stay silly :3 in this conversation.
But these things also aren't news. Nearly everything I screencapped here was listed as a source on Wikipedia, and what wasn't was available as simple searches on Archive.Org or easily looked up on news websites.
All you have to do is just *look* at the sources on Wikipedia to see that people actually have been talking about it for quite a long time, very publicly, and that there has been a lot of public outcry about the list as it balloons and punishes innocent people with false positives:
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And when you've been looking at stories like these for twenty fucking years it feels wonderful to say "holy fucking bingle" and celebrate that for once someone did something VERY COOL in order to shine a light on this massive (and apparently underappreciated problem).
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mr-ribbit · 9 months ago
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gonna rant again bc im seeing a lot of trans women on my dash having to carry the heavy lifting to argue for their basic respect and a lot of other queer people who want to ??? get mad about that apparently. for the record as usual: im tme, im not speaking for anyone besides myself and my perspectives, but I am trying to reach out to fellow tme people to level with y'all from inside the house.
i thought we all got past the 'calling people gendered terms when theyve asked you to stop' thing in like. 2012. i swear we were allllll on board with not calling women dude anymore, nerfing sir and ma'am, neutralizing collective terms for groups, and all of that was like, during the onceler era. that's how we got off-putting shit like folx into the mix - remember???? why are we here again.
to those who I've seen claiming that they REALLY genuinely don't want to offend anyone, and that theyre trying to understand the dude thing, and they don't want to be seen as transmisogynistic when they aren't: ok. let's talk about it. step one, stop sending that really loaded anon to a trans woman you don't know, and close that in-group hatepost with 100 replies from people name-dropping trans bloggers they don't like. try to open your mind and assume for the duration of this post that I am not cynically trying manipulate thousands of tumblr users into making Bro the next big swear word, but a fellow queer human being who thinks you're all being pretty intentionally obtuse about an upsetting trend in our community
to be clear: this post is about the issue of trans women being called bro, dude, man, etc., particularly in recent tumblr discourse about transmisogyny, and the backlash they face if they get upset about it. this is also maybe moreso about the shitty ass excuses I see tme people make for why they supposedly can't stop doing this.
so let's go through some of the things I've been seeing people say they don't understand, supposedly in earnest, about this issue
"I DIDNT USE DUDE AS A MASCULINE TERM. I CALL EVERYONE BRO. MAN IS A GENDER NEUTRAL TERM"
I'm not actually going to exhaust my list of reasons why dude/bro/man are not strictly neutral, but you should be pretty aware that all words have context. Dude might be seen as neutral in many contexts, sure, but 'woman who is frequently called a man by others' is a situation where the context adds extra meaning to your words, just like calling someone "sweetie" might be neutral in some cases, but if you've got the context of knowing that's your coworker who's half your age, it's a bit less neutral. If you're not capable of reading that context and being tasteful about when you say dude, then you need to at least be ready to respond gracefully when someone asks you to stop. This is the part I'd rather focus on.
"BUT I DIDNT MEAN IT THAT WAY. IM NOT TRANSPHOBIC"
I think you should consider broadening your perspective *beyond* your intention behind the word. people may already understand that you meant the word neutrally and therefore didn't have transmisogynistic intent, but that's not really the entire scope of what people are saying. if that's your only concern, you're just trying to clear your record, not actually listen to what they're saying.
there are lots of words people don't enjoy being called, and in most cases, when they say 'pls don't call me that', people respect that and move on. even if the word isn't a slur, if it hurts someone's feelings, we all as a society have agreed that it's pretty shitty to keep calling them that. if your friend asked you not to call them 'buddy' anymore because their dead grandparent called them that, or something equivalently personal, you'd probably respect that instead of telling them 'but I call everyone buddy!!' right? even if you didn't really understand why it bothered them so much?
there is a prominent tendency for trans women to be denied this privilege, and when they ask not to be called dude or bro, people don't seem to respect this request as much as they would in other situations. when I accidentally use a gendered word and someone tells me they don't like it, I try to respond with something like "my bad, I didn't mean it as misgendering but I can see you were still bothered by it, so I'll try not to keep saying it. sorry!" and most people are willing to accept that. when trans women ask people this favor, a lot of people get VERY defensive, and treat the request as inane or unfair, instead of just apologizing and moving on. this is why people are upset when this happens, and it's why people are calling your actions transmisogynistic
also like you might not be doing this, but a lot of people DO use dude and bro in an intentionally gendered way to make trans women uncomfortable. it's a power play bigots use to talk down to them or otherwise maliciously harass them. do you know what arguments they use to defend that behavior when called out on it? 'oh I call everyone that' 'dude is gender neutral calm down' 'dont overreact its just a word'. by acting like this, youre all just giving credence to those same arguments.
"WELL THEY SHOULDNT GET SO MAD AT ME WHEN I DIDNT MEAN ANY HARM"
they can get as mad as they want!! also, are you sure they're 'mad'? or are they just expressing their feelings about a negative topic to you, and it makes you feel bad, so you have to make them out to be unreasonably emotional? how do you think they should have phrased 'dont call me that' to better spare *your* feelings?
also like, in most cases, these women do not knowww you. if your main response to someone saying you disrespected them is to say "I didnt mean it that way, I meant it in a friendly neutral way", well that's NOT YOUR FRIEND! she has no idea what your opinions are or what you think of her!!! she has no reason to assume you only upset her in a friendly way and not a bad unfriendly way! but she did get upset, and she did the one thing she can do which is *tell you what upset her* and your response is to say "well actually you shouldn't be upset at all"??????
and another thing:
it's not just the issue of using the word 'dude', it's because you're coming off extremely dismissive of women who have asked you to stop doing something that harms them, and because your argument is basically that they just shouldn't be so bothered by it. or that they're stupid, irrational, or otherwise crazy for telling you that it bothered them at all, just because you Technically used a gender neutral word according to Your Rules. be honest, does that seem fair? If people were calling you something that bothered you enough to ask them to stop, and they responded like this, how would it make you feel?
focusing solely on your intent and what the words mean when you use them is the same thing as saying "just get over it". no woman should need to Prove to you that 'dude' is gendered for you to care about what she's saying. the fact that you're asking people to do that sucks and makes you look bad, which is why people are arguing with you and calling you a misogynist.
especially those of you who are only doing this with trans women who are actively arguing with. you're wielding misgendering as a cudgel and we can all see it, grow up please.
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