#this is about corporations ruining everything by making EVERYTHING about profit

[sga-owns-my-soul]

hey can we like. can we go back to celebrating things when they actually happen instead of 4 months in advance. i've been seeing halloween shit for a month and a half. halloween hasn't even HAPPENED yet and now im seeing christmas stuff. they got the back to school stuff out the second week of july

im just. im so sick of getting holidays and events shoved down my throat for months and then there's not even any time to enjoy it bc the next fuckin thing is being shoved down your throat. can we just go back to actually celebrating holidays when they happen. pls

[fatfemmefreaquency]

you guys all get that trump is intentionally tanking not just the US economy but also the global economy in order to create the conditions for large corporations and their primary stakeholders to buy back stock and take over more businesses, right?

this is about wealth redistribution—when economies fail or even falter the rich get richer and the poor get poorer

hell—it’s even beneficial for many billionaires/ millionaires to have the stocks they own decrease in value—yes, temporarily they lose wealth. but if they can leverage the lower stock prices in order to acquire more stock they then gain a higher amount of control over a company and a larger share of the profits going forwards

elon musk has, quite famously, intentionally tweeted things that caused a reduction in tesla’s stocks so he could buy back shares—he was investigated for this by the IRS and FBI because it is technically fraud (if provable)

i know it’s easy to joke about how stupid these men are “haha trump doesn’t know what tariffs do”

and yeah—these are not particularly clever men. they have more or less one skill set (business, fraud, con artistry) and they are fairly good at that while being terrible at everything else (to be fair, it is not hard to be good at business or being a con artist. it’s pretty damn easy actually—you rely on other people to behave in good faith while you rob them blind. that’s it)

i’m not saying this is some brilliant or genius move

what i am saying is it is such a basic, nakedly obvious maneuver with very clear intent and results

(many others have made similar moves. tanking the US economy in order to consolidate wealth and power in the ruling class is practically an all-american pastime at this point. but they usually at least try to hide what they’re orchestrating and what their motivations are)

they are counting on you seeing this as pure chaos born from ignorance rather than “controlled chaos” or whatever stupid shit republicans and ultra wealthy finance and policy wonks are calling their malfeasance these days

“haha trump is making america isolationist and ruining the economy there”—yeah. no fucking shit captain obvious. that’s the goal

isolationist economies don’t hurt billionaires and capitalists that much in the long run, though they may take a hit intially—they just make them the biggest fish in a small pond—allowing them to make the smallest fish in that pond with them suffer more than they were to begin with

[96z]

this is the last thing i'll say but honestly, to me this situation is just another glaring example of how hybe's greed has poisoned the entire kpop industry. like, seriously, the way they’re running things is insane and it’s honestly destroying what once made kpop special.

hybe's unchecked dominance has become a poison in the industry. they’ve not only swallowed up smaller companies but have also monopolized platforms and resources, leaving a massive footprint that stifles diversity and creativity. remember when kpop felt like this vibrant, diverse world full of different sounds and styles? now it’s just a hybe-centric machine, churning out cookie-cutter idols and soulless hits, all for the sake of squeezing every last cent from fans.

it’s not just about the music anymore—it’s about the bottom line. and hybe’s obsession with profit has shifted the focus entirely. their approach seems to be about creating a product rather than nurturing genuine talent, and it’s showing. we’ve got groups and artists who are more brand assets than actual musicians, and the whole industry is losing its soul.

and let’s talk about their grasping at every single opportunity to make money. it's overcharging for albums, it's the insanely priced concert tickets, hybe has set a new standard for squeezing fans dry. it’s not just about supporting your favorite artists anymore; it’s about participating in a system designed to extract as much as possible.

the rise of hybe has shifted the entire narrative of k-pop. we used to see variety and innovation, but now it’s all about the same glossy, over-polished products with no room for real experimentation. it’s like they’ve drained the life out of the industry, leaving us with this homogenized, corporate-driven shell of what kpop used to be.

when i'm talking about how kpop isn’t the same, it’s not just nostalgia talking. it’s about how a single company’s greed has changed the entire landscape. and honestly, it’s a shame. we’ve watched as the heart and soul of kpop has been slowly eroded by hybe’s relentless pursuit of power and money.

and let’s not forget the utter lack of accountability for idols, especially the biggest names in hybe’s roster. it’s almost as if these idols are untouchable, the way their fans clear searches, flood the socials with ‘__ we love you’ and ‘apologize to __’ posts is maddening. why are these grown adults are allowed to hide behind their fanbase and evade any real responsibility?

it’s a disturbing trend where serious issues are brushed aside because the fans are doing the dirty work of cleaning up their mess. idols can act without consequences, knowing that their fanbase, and if not their fanbase, their company will do everything in their power to shield them from backlash. the lack of accountability is staggering—these idols can get away with anything because their fanbase’s loyalty means they never face the repercussions of their actions.

at the end of the day... it’s okay to criticize and question the things we love. because if we don’t, we’re just letting this monster ruin everything we cherish.

[lunarbard]

I legitimately think that the first three borderlands (as in 1, 2, & TPS) are good dystopian satire, despite their questionable writing at times. A game/series that took itself more seriously could highlight this better, but Borderlands would lose a lot of its edge if it did.

Handsome Jack isn't just some charismatic villain that garnered a lot of affection from players by some fluke, but rather an excellent personification of the dystopian elements of Borderlands' background setting that make it engaging.

If you look at Borderlands 1, for all its effective lack of plot, the game is about these megacorporation's disregard for the human lives they ruin and their self-defeating obsession with attaining power and control (as seen with Commandant Steele's death). Borderlands 2 took that premise and swapped out the corporate antagonist, but it's not just a new coat of paint/roster of enemies: the motivations change while following similar themes as implied in BL1, now personified in Jack.

In BL1, the Atlas Corporation believes it owns Pandora, and everything (and everyone that primarily DAHL brought), on it is unrealized property they have free claim over. They believe the vault and its contents are owed to them, and it falls on the vault hunters showing up in the nick of time to remedy the potential resulting calamity.

Handsome Jack, meanwhile, has that similar belief that Pandora is "his," just that it's his to "save." He's Hyperion's current CEO because he is willing to do whatever it takes to get what he believes he is owed, one of which is respect as a hero of the people. The people he hates the most are those who deny or deprive him of those things: see his treatment of his daughter, after "what she did to her mother." His ego and disregard for the humanity of basically anyone else, treating them as a character in his story to be stepped on and/or discarded reflects an attitude of the megacorporations that makes the backgrounds of Borderlands so dystopian. I 100% believe that the system that makes a person like Handsome Jack could have produced nearly anyone in a similar mold.

Meanwhile, the Borderlands 1 vault hunters in 2 stand in stark contrast to not just Handsome Jack/Hyperion but also DAHL. Unlike Jack, they don't care about the aesthetics of heroism; they're just trying to protect as many people as they reasonably can from the horrors of Pandora. Unlike DAHL, they didn't abandon the planet and the survivors still there when the thing that brought them in the first place didn't pan out.

I think there's also something to the crude city of Sanctuary supporting plenty of residents versus the pristine city of Opportunity that's almost completely vacant of anything except instruments of war.

Of course, Jack's fall is thematically different from Atlas. Atlas gets defeated when it's claimed "property" slaughters the military sent to claim it; Jack gets defeated by watching his notions of heroism fall apart as the vault hunters cut down the calamity he summoned to "save" Pandora.

Then you get to Borderlands 3, which understood nothing but the aesthetic of the preceding series.

The only difference between the corporations you ally with and those you fight is the former have some friendly franchise blorbos (Rhys, Zer0, and Hammerlock). The corporations aren't fundamentally flawed factions that drive the terrible conditions of the setting for their lust for profit, they're just sometimes headed by someone evil and/or incompetent who maybe wants a merger (The "merger war" between Atlas and Maliwan is a good idea in theory, but it's ruined by going "this one is good" rather than focusing on helping those caught in the crossfire).

Meanwhile, the twins don't present a coherent threat as an element of Borderlands' underlying dystopia. They're just bad guys with lore things (derogatory) and their streamer gimmick. What I think is most insulting about them, though, is that they're just an excuse to use bandits everywhere with no though for an underlying point. The bandits of Pandora are the people DAHL left behind on that desolate rock of a planet, many of whom never wanted to be there in the first place. The twins could have shed some light on how receptive the bandits are to promises of salvation by whatever means because they have no hope otherwise.

I feel like a game that was trying to be more thematically coherent with previous entries would have flipped the villain script: the twins should have been misguided/tragic figures actively striving for a new, redeemed life for Pandora, while their corporate allies use them up and discard them.

[leafytaffy]

Why do people complaining about mascot horror always miss the fact that it's NOT entirely for kids??? It's only "for kids" in that it's taking advantage of a periphery demographic, what makes mascot horror so marketable is the mascot part attracting kids while the horror part attracts older teens and adults.

also why does nobody mention the corporate conservative sanitization of the internet in the "everything is a kids space now and kids don't have their own sites anymore" discussion?

Porn bans along with sites for kids being shut down (and replaced entirely with kids toys shopping sites hmmmm) is a result of capitalism and Puritanism all in one.

They force kids and adults into the same spaces because it generates revenue.

And what I see going wrong with all these anti-kids horror things is people attack the kids and parents instead of the corporations responsible instead. Their whole argument for it being bad being "kids are ruining horror content and rotting their brains!!" Just reeks of nothing but cringe culture and feels like it's comically missing the point to me. Have people not heard of Goosebumps before? Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark? Kids NEED ways to explore and learn about darker aspects of life. 

It's capitalism and the far right. The kids are just exploring sides of the world they are rarely allowed to, who's really at fault is the adults that want to sanitize the world to profit off it forever.

[purplepixel]

One of the top 5 most obnoxious people I know just went on a whole rant about how Thanos was right and the world was better after the snap, and also how the Avengers bringing everyone back was the real problem that ruined everything. So uh. I don't know enough about Marvel to understand the exact implications, but this is a massive red flag, right?

(please be gentle if I've entirely misunderstood everything ahaha)

Ok short answer. No, whoever this is, is WRONG and would be a huge red flag, but only if the person still believes that after being presented with what im about to explain. Bc on the one hand, i do understand where this persons line of thinking is coming from and im gonna try to take them in good faith for the time being.

If you take the thought and motive of thanos' problem and solution as presented by the mcu, then its simply one big trolley problem. Would you flip the switch to save a majority of people if it means sacrificing some? The conflict of infinity war is this: thanos' home planet was destroyed seemingly from overpopulation and lack of resources. The solution? Killing half the people so that the rest can survive. Thanos then saw other planets and decided to extend this to the entire galaxy as a way to save everything.

So taking this info at face value, this person is arguing the trolley problem. Is it ok to sacrifice a few to save the rest? If society is already doomed, is it ok to snap half the population to save the remaining population? Which, you know, can be debated, just like how the trolley problem is debatable.

Theres just one teensy little problem. The second you think critically on thanos' plan, the SECOND you apply it to real life, is the moment you realize thanos was WRONG and his plan MAKES NO SENSE if you use in universe rules and real life parralels. Bc unlike the thought experiment of being granted only two choices, the overpopulation problem presented by marvel does not have a this or that solution.

The narrative of the film WANTS you to think theres only two choices (kill half save the universe, or let everyone be doomed), bc THATS what will make a fun thought experiment and a compelling story and quite frankly create marvels BEST villain. But to quote tony stark in the first avengers film when asked a this or that question, "I think Id just cut the wire", there is always another way around the problem then what is presented. And for thanos, it all comes down to this--

Why did thanos choose to snap half the population, when he couldve doubled the universe's resources instead?

Having possession of all six infinity stones grants you the power to pretty much do anything you want. Time, space, reality, mind, soul, power. Its how he was able to destroy. Why couldnt he create? (Bc thatd be a bad story).

But lets say he couldnt. Or that it wouldnt fix the issue. Hypothetical. Even being unable to snap resources in, THE REAL LIFE ISSUE OF WORLD HUNGER IS NOT OVER POPULATION TAKING UP RESOURCES.

IT'S CAPITALISM AND THE INABILITY TO DISTRIBUTE SAID RESOURCES WITHOUT DISRUPTING THE STATUS QUO.

Unless theres some real world famine Im not aware of effecting THE ENTIRE EARTH, then no. We are capable of feeding the entire population many times over with the amount of resources this planet has. The real issue is the complications of distributions, labor, corporate greed, making a profit etc etc. (Thinking of all the corporations that choose to throw out perfectly good food or lace it with poison, instead of giving it to shelters/homeless) So thanos' problem and solution is inherently flawed. He saw a problem and came to the wrong solution.

Uhh also the russo brothers shot themselves in the foot by saying in a tweet that animals also got snapped. (I think they did it to make people sad without realizing the implications itd mean in universe). But if we take their words as canon then NOTHING CHANGED. THANOS DIDNT DO ANYTHING CUZ HE CUT HALF THE RESOURCES ON TOP OF THE POPULATION. So really, he screwed everyone over on top of killing all the people that died from proxy of the snap. The person having an operation whos surgeon got snapped? The kid on his way to a soccer game but his mom driving him got snapped? The swimmer drowning bc the lifeguard got snapped? The pilot flying a commercial airline? And so on. So many people died that were not randomly selected to be snapped. Its actually horrific when you think about it. More then half died from the snap.

Oh boy. The comment on the avengers making things worse by bringing everyone back. That out of everything is the biggest red flag to me. Because you can excuse the other points as someone taking the story at face value and not thinking a bit more critically in real world context. But there is no way that the avengers made it worse on an economic factor or a moral one. The mcu was left devestated in more ways then one post snap. Humanity survived, but we saw evidence of how horrible everything was at the beginning of endgame. And if you look at any real world disaster that wipes a population. Things arent better bc of it.

I wont lie, snapping everyone back also creates its own horrors and complications but...are we really gonna say its worse then leaving things how it was? Heres what i hear anytime someone says the avengers were wrong for bringing the people back--

"I would rather have these people dead then have my life inconvenienced"

Cuz unlike thanos snapping, nobody DIES in being brought back. The new status quo does get shaken up again, but NOBODY DIES. Unless you think the world was in immediate threat of dying from no resources. Which wasnt remotely true. It is in no way "the actual problem". The actual problem was thanos being stupid enough to think he'd solve world hunger by killing half of everyone. This is all thanos' fault and you cant blame the avengers for trying to fix it. Is someone really gonna tell me if given the chance, you wouldnt bring back everyone taken by covid? (Hm yes thats right. There is a real world equivelant to this dilemna. Funny. We are also 5 years post 2020)

Having said that, i do like how in universe there ARE people who also think thanos was right. Theyre wrong, but it does make the mcu feel a bit more realistic. People are not immune to blaming their problems on the wrong thing.

So ya. Tldr: Thanos was wrong about snapping everyone bc his issue shouldve been with capitalism instead of lack of resources. The world was not better post snap, bc everything was halved. The avengers were right to bring everyone back bc its the morally right thing to do.

Infinity war and endgame are still amazing films despite all that. Its just the second you make a serious claim that the villain is right, is the second I have to sit you down and tell you how very wrong you are.

[simonjadis]

Jesus christ. I'm scared to ask but... what the hell happened with The Watcher fandom?

I don't even go here, but here's my understanding

Several years ago, Shane and Ryan left Buzzfeed to launch their own company, teaming up with Steven Lim. Watcher has grown, producing multiple shows. Initially, people were supporting them on Patreon (for discord + early access) and YouTube. both of these are increasingly notorious platforms that take cuts from profits. YouTube payouts are massive if you're just 1-2 people getting a million views per video and a new successful video every week. but it doesn't cover a growing company's needs

To be blunt, for Watcher to continue as a company, they need cut out "middleman" services that both regulate their content and take a cut of their earnings. That means moving off of YouTube and it means changing the Patreon to just be for the podcast.

So, on Friday (April 19) Watcher announced that they're launching their own streaming model. Everything that they'd already shared would remain on YouTube, but future content was coming out on their own service for a $5.99 sub. Which in turn would be lower than or about the same as anyone subscribing on Patreon, and would also be without the horror of YouTube ads

(Again, I don't go here, but I will not watch advertisements voluntarily, least of all on yewchube. I have ublock origin/firefox and when it comes to streaming, I have the ad-free subscription or I don't watch it at all)

To be clear, they made this announcement well in advance of launching, and were making sure that international viewers would still be able to view (something that some major corporate streamers have not done). They also emphasized that they're unbothered by profile sharing, so that $5.99 per month could come down to $2 per month for three friends, or just (as I often do) one person buying it and sharing the login with friends.

Also you can gift subs. All of this is unfortunately moot, and it seems that many of the people reacting to the announcement did not learn or care about any of this.

The reaction to this news was, to be blunt, unhinged. Obviously, it's normal for some people who cannot afford $5.99 per month to feel disappointed. And any change can be unnerving for a fandom. But the vitriol (some of it, like the person who accused them of "ruining Taylor Swift's day," was admittedly very funny) was pretty vicious.

I think that a lot of it was disinformation based (unclear on where the idea that they were removing old content from YouTube originated, as it certainly was not from their announcement video) and a lot of it was (predominantly younger) viewers looking for social media clout by coming out with the coveted "worst new take" to impress their friends.

And so, SO much of it was racism. For some reason, a lot of people have invented a narrative where Shane is being held hostage by the other two co-owners, and desperately wants to release content for free to the detriment of his company, but Ryan and Steven have somehow conspired to make their company profitable so that they can continue to (evilly) pay their employees.

From what I can tell (again, I don't even go here), the bulk of the backlash ended up targeting Steven. People in the fandom are already weird about him and have an ugly tendency to invent mean things about him (a couple of years ago, some of these same ill-behaved "fans" decided that he was homophobic, not because of anything that he did or said).

So this was an excuse for these vicious little beasts to let loose. They were leaving abhorrent comments on his loved ones' Instagram photos -- some from months ago.

On the less overtly racist front, backlash included people saying that they just want Shane and Ryan sitting in a room talking about stuff. It is unusual for creatives to not care about the quality of what they make; of course Shane and Ryan and Steven care about production quality, about being able to film ghost-hunting and other shows. They're not 23-year-olds scraping by, they're artists and storytellers and they are also employers.

I don't know these men and I don't generally feel sorry for men, as a rule, but it must have been pretty devastating to find out how many of their most vocal "fans" seem to despise them, feel entitled to their art for free, and will rage against them like this.

Which leads to Monday's grim announcement, which as I understand it was that they're going to put new Watcher content up on YouTube with a delay. I'm not saying that it's a bad policy; I'm saying that it means that they remain tethered to YouTube for what content they can include, and it's showing these rancid trolls that their cruelty works.

I'm not going to say that this is "letting the terrorists win" because I'm not trying to victim-blame Watcher here. But I worry about what these rotten little beasts will do now that they've felt the rush of victory.

I cannot emphasize enough that I do not even go here. plenty of people very much go here and have written at greater length and in greater detail than i have. I'm just horrified. I don't even go here

[sureuncertainty]

so as a former employee of RMS Titanic Inc, I have some thoughts I need to get out about this whole current situation, or I will literally explode.

for context, I worked for RMST Inc. for a year and a half as a tour guide and artifact specialist. The company owns the salvage rights to the wreck site, and partners with Oceangate and other companies to retrieve artifacts. the artifacts are used for educational purposes only, in the museum that I worked at, although they weren’t above selling little bits of coal from the Titanic in stupid little tchotchkes like snowglobes and hourglasses.

i dedicated so much of my life and passion to that company and that museum and was treated like absolute dirt lol. and I didn’t even get the worst of it, I had friends and coworkers whose safety and wellbeing was consistently disregarded for the sake of profit, fighting desperately for corporate to stop pretending to care about the legacy of Titanic when all they really cared about was making money

so despite my initial shock at reading about what was going on with the missing submersible, I can’t say I’m surprised. This is what fucking happens when you cut corners and put profit over everything else. If only there was some big historical event that we could look to that would show us just exactly how dangerous that can be...  oh wait.

Jack Thayer, who was 17 when he survived Titanic, said that “the world woke up on April 15, 1912″, which pretty much sums up how SURE people were in 1912 that they would never make those same mistakes again. They realized had gotten complacent and swore things would be different. They enacted safety laws, pointed fingers at survivors, created conspiracy theories to try to explain what happened, all out of fear of it happening again. And yet, history always repeats itself

and now people are fucking OBSESSED with the Titanic, they find it fascinating,  they won’t fucking leave it alone, and the company I worked for, and Oceangate, and others, capitalize on that because they’re greedy and want to make money off of it. all they care about is how to profit off of it. they PRETEND to care about Titanic but they don’t. They never did.

I also actually have a personal connection to one of the five members of the team in the submersible. I met P.H. Nargeolet at the event our museum did commemorating the 110th anniversary of the sinking, I spoke to him and heard firsthand some of his accounts of dives to the wreck site, I even took a picture with him. He cared, he cared so much about Titanic and its legacy, and so do I and so did so many of my friends I worked with. The company we worked for took advantage of our caring, it took advantage of how passionate we were about it in order to line its executives’ fucking pocket

I’m horrified, I’m devastated, I’m vindicated.

on the one hand, I hope this ruins them. i want to watch the company die. there’s a satisfaction in that. but the shitty thing is how much suffering has to happen for things to change. i just wish good people didn’t have to die to make change happen. I wish people cared first, before tragedy strikes. I wish our world wasn’t so fucked up and shit like this didn’t happen. But it did. And it does. And money won’t save any of those people any more than it saved John Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim, or any of the other rich greedy assholes who died on Titanic. I’m not celebrating their deaths. But I won’t ever forget who suffers the most. The coal trimmers and the stewards and the minimum wage guest service associates at the museum I worked at.

I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. But some of my best friends still do. And I don’t want them to suffer more because of this. All I can hope is that it enacts meaningful change that actually lasts. But I know that’s just wishful thinking.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A business model for bankrupting the oil companies

Today (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

Tomorrow (June 7), I’m keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin.

Thursday (June 8) at 8PM, I’m at Otherland Books in Berlin with my novel Red Team Blues.

When a giant company wrecks your life, what are you gonna do? They can afford more and better lawyers than you can, and they have people whose full time job is fighting off lawsuits — are you really gonna beat those people by pursuing your grievance as a side-hustle? Do you really wanna be a full-time, professional litigant?

For some people, the answer is yes: some people are angry enough, or sufficiently morally offended, to make suing a giant company their life’s mission. Sometimes, they succeed, and force companies to cough up gigantic sums of money. Obviously, this makes the plaintiff better off, but it can also make things better for the rest of us. Money talks and bullshit walks, and once it becomes clear that 300% of the profits from harming people will be sucked out of the company by a lawsuit, shareholders will revolt and force the company to clean up its act.

Shareholders don’t invest in companies that ruin our lives because they are committed to an ideology of cruelty. Ideology only gets you so far: the pursuit of profit incentivizes far worse conduct than mere sadism ever can:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers

Incentives matter. Companies above a certain size become too big to fail and too big to jail. They capture their regulators and ensure that any damages the government extracts are less than their profits — a fine is a price.

Juries, on the other hand, can and do really whack a company for its bad conduct. They understand that incentives matter. They understand that a company that saves $1,000,001 by cutting back on workplace safety can’t be driven to improve its behavior by a fine of $1,000,000 after it kills a bunch of workers. If profit outstrips penalties, penalties aren’t effective.

A dirty $1m profit needs to be met with a $100m judgment. As the Untouchables MBA teaches us, this is just sound business: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZ6eaL3S2E

But suing these giant companies is hard. They can tie you up in court for years — decades, even. They can outspend and outwait you. The more profits a company has racked up through its evil deeds, the more claims it can fend off. Incentives matter, so if you’re gonna commit corporate murder, you’d better do a lot of it to build up the cash needed to scare off your victims and their survivors.

However: the bigger a company is, the more cash it has, the more money there is to extract from it if you can prevail in court. If the company has genuinely injured you, and if you can mobilize the capital and resources to pursue it to final judgment, there’s a huge payoff at the end of the process — and a lesson for all the other companies contemplating their own course of action.

That’s the Voltaire MBA: “you have to execute an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others.”

For hundreds of years, rich, powerful people have observed their colleagues’ abuses and thought, “They only pull that shit on peasants — but if they did it to me, I could sue them for everything!”

This led to an obvious course of action: strike a bargain with the mutilated, ruined peasants to finance their suit against the toff that so abused them, in exchange for a (large) share of the proceeds. Medieval courts called this champerty; today, we call it litigation finance: investing in other peoples’ grievances against deep-pocketed monsters, in the expectation of reaping huge cash payouts.

On paper, litigation finance seems like a neat solution to a messy problem. The bigger a company is, the worse the abuses it commits — and the more it can be made to pay for its sins. The normal economics of litigation are turned upside-down: rather than avoiding the largest companies, you pursue them. This is the Willie Sutton MBA: “That’s where the money is.”

Litigation finance is a large and growing chunk of the finance sector. For about a decade, hedge funds and private equity have been bankrolling law-firms that represent people who’ve been mangled by corporations, keeping the money flowing through whatever delays and entanglements the target throws up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/should-you-be-allowed-to-invest-in-a-lawsuit.html?smid=tw-share

Litigation finance can be thought of as the no-win/no-fee “ambulance chaser” business on steroids. While a local lawyer can make a tidy living going after slip-and-falls and fender-benders, splitting the proceeds with their clients, a firm backed by a huge investment fund can do the same to companies with billions in the bank and hundreds of millions on the line.

Litigation finance is also closely related to impact litigation, which is when a nonprofit uses charitably raised funds to chase corporations and governments through the courts to establish precedents that overturn bad laws or pave the way for future judgments. Impact litigation can be thought of as the trailblazer for litigation finance: for-profit lawsuits are risk averse and stick to pursuing cases that have a high likelihood of eventually succeeding, while impact litigators are a kind of legal entrepreneur, advancing new, uncertain legal theories in the hopes of making new law. Once that law is created, litigation finance can drum up thousands of similarly situated plaintiffs and sue tons of companies on the same theory, citing the new precedent.

Litigation finance’s first big scores was going after med-tech and pharma companies. A lax regulatory environment allowed medical companies to market deadly products that maimed or killed people wholesale — think Vioxx, vaginal meshes or metal-on-metal hip replacements (a doc about this, The Bleeding Edge, will give you persistent nightmares):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bleeding_Edge

Suing the companies that killed your family or permanently disabled you is a slow and ugly process, but it’s a lot more certain than asking Congress to patch the loopholes the company that hurt you exploited, or hoping that a future President will appoint an agency head who gives a shit, and that the Senate will confirm them. And since money talks and bullshit walks, corporations that can’t pay dividends or do stock buybacks because they owe all their cash to their victims will suffer in the stock market, and their rivals will clean house and tread carefully.

Which brings me to the latest turn in litigation finance: climate litigation. As more and more money has sloshed into ESG funds that are supposed to make money by investing in ethical, climate-friendly businesses, the idea of suing giant oil companies and other wreckers has grown more attractive. 18 months ago, Businessweek covered the nascent-but-growing phenomenon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/09/grievance-factory/#champerty

That growth has only continued. With more and larger ESG funds chasing returns, there’s a lot more money available to represent, say, poisoned indigenous people in the global south whose ancestral lands have been rendered an uninhabitable hellscape by a mining or petrochemical company. The returns from these cases aren’t correlated with wider economic trends: whether the market is up down, it makes no difference to the size of the judgment or settlement that is extracted in the end.

A new piece in the Financial Times by Camilla Hodgson does an excellent job rounding up the state of play in litigation finance, starting with the oil giant PTTEP paying $102m to 15,000 Indonesian farmers to settle claims stemming from a massive, ocean-killing oil spill in 2019:

https://www.ft.com/content/055ef9f4-5fb7-4746-bebd-7bfa00b20c82

The firm that financed the suit is Harbour Litigation Funding, and they paid for a lot of shoe-leather lawyering, sending reps on off-road motorbikes to each of the farmers’ plots to sign them up. The case cost more than $21m, and Harbour creamed $53.5m off the top of the settlement from PTTEP — about 40% of the total.

Those numbers are pretty compelling investment story: there aren’t a lot of opportunities to make a >100% return on a $21m investment in 15 years — let alone investments that let you claim to be bringing justice to poor farmers who’ve been abused by rapacious corporate murderers.

Other cases are still ongoing: mining giant BHP is facing a £36b class action case over the 2015 collapse of Brazil’s Fundão dam, which released poisoned mine-tailings into waterways serving millions of people. 700,000 plaintiffs are in the class, and the investors, Prisma Capital (Brazil) and North Wall Capital (UK) have already fronted £70m pursuing the case.

There is a vast inventory of cases like these, just lying around, waiting for someone to stake a claim. One barrier is that most of the world’s large law firms are conflicted out of pursuing these cases — they represent these same companies in other actions. But a new sector of specialized, un-conflicted firms is growing up, and tackling more and more of these cases.

These firms are chasing relatively easy claims, but there’s an even bigger fish out there, waiting to be caught: class actions against carbon-intensive companies, especially coal and oil companies, for their knowing contributions to the global climate emergency. These corporations are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars, and they have inflicted trillions in harms. There’s gold in them thar wildfires.

The FT cites experts who predict a massive wave of litigation finance climate suits in the next 2–3 years, and notes an increasing tempo of shareholder motions demanding that big oil and mining companies disclose their litigation risks in their investor reports. This is a very compelling idea, a kaiju boss-fight in which we recruit monsters to fight other monsters. It’s such a fun idea that I actually wrote a novel about it, 2009’s Makers, in which corporate misconduct that has not yet reached the statute of limitations becomes the new oil, prompting a huge investment bubble:

https://craphound.com/category/makers/

But is the answer to a bad guy with a law firm a good guy with a law firm? There are certainly some ways this can go very wrong (many of which end up in Makers). Back in 2015, Cathy O’Neil published an excellent critique of litigation finance in the context of vaginal mesh cases:

https://mathbabe.org/2015/09/01/litigation-finance-a-terrible-idea/

O’Neill’s point is that incentives matter. The incentive for a litigation finance fund is to extract settlements, not win justice. Time and again, we’ve seen how a financial tactic can be severed from a societal strategy — like how GDP can be goosed to spectacular heights without improving national prosperity.

There’s even a name for this phenomenon: Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The finance sector is spookily good at decoupling positive societal outcomes from positive investor outcomes. The real answer to medical companies that mutilate women with vaginal meshes, or destroy the planet with CO2, is criminal sanctions and regulation, not private lawsuits.

That said, I think there’s a case for the one leading to the other. Right now, climate wreckers devote very large sums to preventing effective action on climate. Suborning regulators and politicians all over the world isn’t cheap. If we take away the money they’ve saved up for this project through stonking, eye-watering judgments, and if we convince the capital markets not to give them any more money lest it be immediately extracted to pay for more redress of a litany of grievances, then perhaps we can deprive them of the capacity of corrupt our political process.

One way to understand whether something is a genuine threat to a company’s power is to look at how viciously the company attacks it. If you doubt that unions could do good for workers, just take a peep at the all-out violent blitzes that Amazon and Starbucks mount in the face of union drives. I mean, imagine if the Democratic Party took unions half as seriously as the GOP!

The corporate lobby exhibits the same terror over plaintiff-side lawsuits as it does over unions. A massive, decades-long campaign to villify plaintiff-side lawyers has convinced many of us that corporations are the victims of the legal system, rather than its masters. The PR campaign is surprisingly effective, despite its reliance on lies about the “McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit” and other urban legends:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Corporate plunderers are terrified of being dragged into court by their victims, and devote titanic amounts of blood and treasure into making it harder and harder to do so. On the “the more scared the are, the better” metric, litigation finance is a slam dunk.

But winning a case isn’t the same as getting a judgment or disciplining a firm. When Steven Donziger won a landmark judgment against Chevron on behalf of indigenous people whose lands and bodies had been permanently poisoned, the company struck back:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#free-donziger

Chevron bribed a judge in Ecuador to claim that Donziger had rigged the case, then brought a case in the US against Donziger for racketeering, judge-shopping to get judge Lewis A Kaplan on their case. Kaplan is a former tobacco industry lawyer who never met a corporate criminal he didn’t love, and when the SDNY prosecutor declined to press charges against Donziger because the case was absurd, Kaplan appointed a private lawyer — whose firm also acted for Chevron! — to act as prosecutor. The case against Donziger was obviously trumped up — the Ecuadoran judge who accused him of corruption later recanted and multiple countries’ Supreme Courts upheld the judgment Donziger won against Chevron. Nevertheless, Kaplan got Donziger locked up under house arrest for years, and even got him banged up in Riker’s for a time. Donziger’s lost his law license and his clients are still awaiting judgment.

This is the best law that money can buy, and Chevron has a lot of money. The massive expenditures needed to railroad Donizer were a pittance compared to the $9.5b judgment Chevron owed its victims in Ecuador.

The lesson of Donziger is that these companies won’t go genrly to their graves. They are enormously, unimaginably wealthy and act with the ruthlessness born of greed, which makes mere sadism pale by comparison. Litigation finance is exciting and promising, but it’s only a tactic — and it’s a tactic that’s always in danger of being turned against the goal it nominally serves. The people funding litigation finance don’t want to save the world — they just want to get rich. They can and will change sides if someone can make the business case for doing so.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/06/thats-where-the-money-is/#champerty

[Image ID: A mirrored office tower bearing the Exxon logo. One face of the office tower is a graffiti-covered ATM. Before the tower is a giant pile of bricks of oversized US $100 bills in paper wrappers. The ATM screen depicts a smouldering Deep Water Horizon oil platform.]

Image:

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Joe Shlabotnik (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2299501806/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[super-hero-confessions]

I think...I think I believe Beau DeMayo. At least for the most part.

I'm not necessarily saying he didn't do anything skeevy. He does give me that vibe and he has an air of arrogance and self-importance, but I doubt anything he did was "egregious". I do believe he was difficult to work with, but only because he stood up to the higher-ups to maintain his artistic vision, and, as a fan himself, deliver the kind of show that they really wanted, not what Disney wanted. I'm skeptical that the next seasons of X-Men '97 will be as of high a quality with him gone. I agree with the argument that he wasn't the only creative on staff that made the first season of '97 as great as it was, but I do think he was the only one who stood up to Disney to make that happen. Now, going forward, others are even less likely to do so with everything that's happened. Call me pessimistic, but I think we are most likely getting conservative, Disney-approved, watered-down drivel from now on. (But I'm praying that I'll be proven wrong on this point! I WANT to be wrong.)

As a result of DeMayo's insubordination, I believe the folks at Disney/Marvel are absolutely engaging in a smear campaign against him. They, a conservative company notoriously run by white men, are perfomative allies to the LGBTQ+ community and POC. I think people forget that Disney is a massive, all-powerful corporation that doesn't care about anything but their own interests (usually profits and maintaining that family-friendly image) and operates like a mafia. If you don't play by their rules, you will be punished. A simple Google search will reveal how disgusting and shady Disney are. More people should pirate their content, and I encourage them to do so!

Finally, I think one of DeMayo's biggest mistakes (beyond pissing the wrong people off and possibly being skeevy) was believing HR could help solve the "hostile work environment" problem the X-Men staff were working in. It only put a target on his back yet again and gave them another reason to try to get rid of him.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that would come for me for 'defending' (for lack of a better word.) DeMayo, hence me posting this anonymously. But I believe the majority of those people are overlooking the bigger picture. They are playing right into Disney's hand, and focusing solely on the alleged sexual harassment claim Disney put forward and jumped on the bandwagon, dragging his name online. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? If what he says is true, that he was fired because of a SFW OF and posting fan art, and that's what Disney is referring to in their reasoning, then I think that's a pretty weak argument. If he was sending dick pics to random co-workers or whatever "insiders" have claimed, then fuck him. That's absolutely grounds for firing.

None of us can say with any certainty what happened but I think it's important to put Disney under the same level of scrutiny and approach their credibility with a healthy dose of skepticism given their history. I doubt they are completely innocent in this situation. But I guarantee their army of lawyers will win any case brought to court regardless of the truth, and Beau DeMayo, knowing this, has balls of steel to continue to fight them, even if it ruins him.

I've probably forgotten some other points I wanted to make, but this turned into a pretty long rant, so I'll leave it there for now. Looking forward to getting dunked on in the comments!

[sundae-meringue]

The Old Web part 1: Neocities and Geocities

Today I discovered the Old Web movement.

As a 2003 kiddo I was not an internet user in the late 90s and early 2000s when the "old internet" was at its height. But I recently discovered that there lies a place beyond our Twitters and Instagrams of the present. Deeper into the internet there is a thriving community of personal, amateur-coded, not-for-profit websites, many of which are hosted on Neocities.

But before we can really get into neocities, we must talk about it's ancestor geocities. Geocities was created in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Reznor to be a website-hosting service and a way to discover people's personal websites. In 1999 it was bought out by yahoo! (the destroyer) at a time when it was the third most popular website on the whole internet. Yahoo! changed a bunch of shit, forgoing the "cities" aspect of grouping together websites of a certain theme so that people can discover websites related to their interests. Yahoo! instead wanted to focus on using the person's yahoo! usernames in the URLs. This is one of the first of MANY times that corporations will ruin things on the internet for the sake of profit.

Yahoo! eventually decided geocities wasn't profitable enough, even after the website had added advertisements, paid premium benefits (which screwed over people who didn't pay), and a geocities watermark on every website it hosted that you couldn't remove. Geocities was killed by yahoo! in 2009.

Shortly after the website was announced to be shutting down Internet Archive (bless them) and a few other groups made it their mission to archive the geocities websites that would otherwise be wiped from the internet forever. These campaigns were widely successful.

After geocities was gone, there was now a niche to fill. Neocities sprung up four years later, taking its place. In 2023 it boasts over 600,000 websites being hosted on its platforms. It has links to people's personal websites, a webcomic where a cat teaches you HTML, and many guides to making your own website.

The community of custom website owners is alive and well, equipped with HTML knowledge, friendship, a healthy dose of nostalgia, and their own manifesto. They believe in the idea that the internet was better before everything was dictated by profit, algorithms, and efficiency. I'll get more into the community aspect in part 2.

[paleoleigh]

thank you for saying you feel a bit guilty because I’ve also been feeling it and didn’t know if anyone felt the same.

realistically, I should know that some zoomer on the internet calling me a zionist racist genocide apologist does not make me one, especially since those people don’t know jackshit about me as a person. like sorry I’m not constantly posting definitive proof of my irl activism for palestine on my fandom account??

but I’m embarrassed to admit that it gets to me. it really does. getting accused of being all these monstrous things while having extremely poor self-image does not mix well. I’m very stede-coded in that way I guess. I just wish I had more faith in myself to ignore these people and remind myself that yes, I can care about multiple things at once and no, random people on the internet making absolute, final judgments about a person’s moral integrity are not the arbiters of truth

I understand 💕 it's hard not to feel guilty and upset when people are essentially saying you're a bad person. And they're real people, even if they're trolls, so it feels bad! But the fact that you sometimes feel that way means you DO care about the tougher issues.

I think something that's hard for people to understand is how much OFMD means to us in terms of representation. Not just queer rep, but rep of hope, kindness, acceptance, community, and finding yourself at any age. I'll be real for a second - I've considered myself pretty unlovable for most of my adult life. And I see myself in Stede, a weird, goofy, sometimes misguided but earnest person who feels unlovable. And seeing him be loved by basically the coolest guy on the planet so earnestly in return? I can't tell you what that means to me.

So I'm going to fight for the pirate show. Because it's more than a show to so many of us - it's a community. It's representation. It's hope. And it's not just this show we're fighting for! It's almost this wider area of pushing back against ALL terrible CEO decisions made for pure evil profit purposes. I'm pissed at capitalism and corporate greed ruining everything and it's cathartic to scream at the executives about it.

Keep doing what you're doing, and if you need to talk about it more my inbox is always open 💕💕💕

[lilsnowpea93]

Dude AI injection into every corner of everything is so f*cKing ANNOYINGggggg .. like doesn’t need to even be said but.. no I don’t want to try gemini. Google search is shit now. I don’t want to “imagine”, meta I want to imagine u not existing and how the world would probably be better off. Fricking co pilot dude don’t get me started. Ppl being tricked by slop as critical thinking erodes. Zuck freaking hearted the challah bread horse. Even worse , governments trying to use it and trying to fight wars with it. That is literally dystopian yet the ppl who typically would cry dystopia 1984 at any progressive change, seem to somehow not be agitated by this? Even though we’re DAILY reminded of every tech company we interact with wants us to use AI. Tech in general likely wastes a lot of energy, but all the computing power wasted for like, really silly mundane shit we can do without it? Scientific computing and helping disabled people are like, that’s fine and helpful, I support that use. But injected into every corner, constantly talked about, praised as this amazing novel thing. Everyone using it to make shitty graphic design. Still can’t do fingers or words right. Every time some text input feature tries to guess what word I want to type next or what the end of my sentence will be.. it’s SO BAD! It’s NEVER close. In a lot of cases, if I sent what it recommended, it would be slightly inappropriate for the situation and read as strange. Why is it even there. Why!!!! It’s constantly so clear that a world that puts profit over people, is directly harmful to the people and planet. We could be having a better time, we could have peace and resources for everyone. But instead we get this horrible slop and war and whole generations becoming “anti woke” pilled. This is like the worst parts of the human condition put on steroids. And it could and likely will get worse, it’s citizens against billionaires/corporations and most ppl don’t have the time/energy to care or notice? I’m sounding so conspiracy brained rn but like, I’m pretty sure this is truly a thing and truly a problem. At very least, use AI intrusion to shut ur stuff off. Know when the tiktokified fyp hell is trying to suck u in, and say fuck you, fuck off. Your ads all suck anyway, fuck your products. I’m not buying things I don’t need. I’m constantly the product, fuck u for that, etc. Live real life idk. It’s just constant and so annoying, all these tech companies kinda ruined the world (or at least what I can first/secondhand understand of it.) It just so doesn’t have to be this way and that’s unfortunate ya know.

[sourcreammachine]

REFORM PARTY "MANIFESTO" 2024 SUMMARY

they say it ain't a manifesto even though it is. they're tryna pretend they're not politicians even though they are. their reasoning is that they know they won't be the next government, so this is what they'd push for as opposition members - just like in the manifestos of the greens, SNP etc. but anyway, this "contract" of theirs is scant and they're running a vibes-based campaign. you don't need to see any actual policies, no no no. you already know if they're for you or not. oh, and if you think they're for you - just like all far right parties, they ain't: they're for capital, they're for vested interests, they're for cruelty. they're for the classic quasi-accelerationist burnout cycle that'll weaken the base of society and the economy and ruin fucking everything. but hey, at least there won't be no immigrants. i'm so sorry if you see them as the future: they're taking you for a ride just as you've been used time and time again, because there is no clearly accessible political solution to improving your material conditions as current politics stand, i'm sorry - that is, within the paradigm you know - there're answers just outside the tunnel-vision you've been forced into. why not take a look sometime. who knows, you might find some hope.

i'm not shitting you, though. the manifesto is not long. go read it. see for yourself the draconian horror they advocate, and will push for these five years, and will endorse with the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Short Money coming their way after they get into parliament. this isn't a 2015 UKIP moment, a single-issue agenda that'll flame out. even if they fail in their 2029 campaign with no votes against the tories to count on, these ideas and their influence are here to stay for the medium-term now. even if we remove the rosethorn it'll keep bleeding and bleeding and bleeding

yeah, on account of the scantness, these policies are vague. they're much more like ideas rather than proposals. the general nonsense of them has been fact-checked time and time again so i won't bother. here's just a summary of their rambling ephemeral suggestions

💷ECONOMY

revoke benefits after four months, MANDATORY acceptance of the second job offer on pain of benefit revocation, make all eligibility capability assessments in-person, mandating medical assessments, to catastrophically reduce disability benefit entitlements

raise the personal allowance to §20k/a, cutting individual taxation by §1600/a. raise it to §25k for the married

raise the second band of income tax from about §50k to §70k cutting an ABHORRENT amount of tax from the upper-middle class, far far far far far more than the tax cuts on §20k-earners

leave the World Economic Forum, plummet corporation tax from its already international tax-haven low levels, abolish any business tax for "high-street based" small businesses to create a new class of fat cat burghers, VAT refund for businesses making under §150k/a profit no matter what it is they're flogging

revoke european trade agreements and collapse trade with the mainland

massive tax breaks for defence contractors

'frontload' the child benefit system, plunging it after the child turns four

pour money into giving tourists a full refund on VAT

surge the inheritance tax threshold to §2m BUT "allow the money to be donated to charity instead" (ie allowing massive loophole scams)

massive deregulation, including on the regulation of business and employment laws as "we must make it easier to hire and fire". the manifesto also whines about "6700 eu laws" that still stand, but whines and moves on, implying a mass unbounded deregulation of industry

🏥PUBLIC SERVICES

abolish the NHS and replace it with a private voucher system

catastrophic austerity: every government department to be removed of a 5% of its funding that it must account for itself, reducing spending across the board without central planning or oversight

catastrophic statecapture: abolish civil service leadership and replace them with politicised government appointees "from the private sector"

catastrophic hike on university entry requirements and mandate many be cut to two years

catastrophic privatisation of the remaining public healthcare with surge in outsourcing and contracting, 20% total tax relief for private healthcare

statecapture the BBC with full nationalisation

comprehensive curriculum audit to impose "patriotic education": mandate "any teaching about a period or example of british or european imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-european occurrence of the same to ensure balance", teach children about "their heritage"

public inquiry on "the harm of vaccines"

leave the WHO

end the exemption private schools from the 20% VAT. wait, wait no hang on i've got that wrong. oh right yeah, that's labour's policy, sorry. reform says to impose a 20% TAX RELIEF ON PRIVATE SCHOOLS. sorry peasants, your tax money is funding Eton now

🏠HOUSING

catastrophic tax breaks for small landlords

revoke the renters reform bill

abolish stamp duty (the tax on the buying of homes) under §750k and plummet it above that mark, allowing obscene wealth transfers, massive property buyup, catastrophic housing supply saturation, and the annihilation of first-time buying

🚄TRANSPORT ?

ban and abolish low emission zones

ban and abolish low traffic neighbourhoods

ban and abolish all 20mph zones except outside schools

lower petrol tax

👮FORCE

abolish the human rights act

abolish the equality act

leave the european convention on human rights

freeze "non-essential immigration", and they do not elaborate what they mean or what the policy definition is to be. so they're just gonna be rambling about ephemera to kingdom come. that's the game they're playing

10% HEAD TAX ON IMMIGRANTS via additional national insurance charge

REVOCATION OF CITIZENSHIP FROM IMMIGRANT UK CITIZENS COMMITTED OF CRIMES, without specifying whether or not this applies only to dual-citizens, meaning reform supports the mass imposition of STATELESS status, A GRAVE AND ABHORRENT CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

invade france. i'm being serious. they'd intercept and arrest small-boat crossers and 'take them back to france', violating french territorial sovereignty on both land and sea via the use of force, gravely violating international law against our neighbour

FORTY THOUSAND new police in five years, around 25% more, massively prioritise pipelining ex-military officers and enlistees into the police, abolish PCSOs and make them regular broken-windows police

labour camps for young offenders

create a US-style coast guard and begin routine patrols for migrants or foreign fishers

surge armed forces funding by the highest amount proposed by any party

"stop Sharia law being used in the UK", ie draconian monitoring of mosques, muslim community organisations, the palestine movement, and any muslim

absolute prohibition on asylum applications from "safe countries", sentencing desperate seekers to political persecution and death by mere categorical definition

increase stop-and-search powers, mandates and centrality in policing tactics, pursue broken windows policing,

MANDATORY MINIMUM OF LIFE for second violent/serious offences or ANY drug dealing, new offence for 'substantial possession of drugs'

catastrophically demolish the legalised definition of hatecrime to de facto prevent its use for any prosecution

mass prison building, convert disused military bases into prison camps

bad internet bill: massive inquiry into 'child social media use' (under their watch requiring catastrophic restrictions), renew the online safety bill as "social media giants that push baseless transgender ideology and divisive critical race theory should have no role in regulating free speech"

abolish the northern ireland framework, seemingly unilaterally, paving the way for a hard border and blowing the starting whistle on The Troubles 2

speaking of which: exempt the armed forces from human rights law

catastrophically plummet the number of student visas and prohibit international students with dependents

end funding for european defence programmes. sorry estonia looks like you're lost. oh also "the west provoked putin" so there's that

require the licensing of foreign trawlers in the eez, beginning a cold war with iceland

halve international development / foreign aid funding from its already tiny budget, with specific mention of "global quangos" (literally how many centuries has it been and antisemitism is STILL invoked by these pillocks)

🌱ECOCIDE

repeal every penny of green investment

abolish all emissions targets including for all public services

abolish all renewable energy subsidies

mandate the use of fertile land for farming, ban natural england from protecting 'farmland' land, end and ban all rewinding programmes

abolish environmental levies

catastrophic surge on oil/gas licensing and open new lithium and coal mines, and support biomass/biofuel

🗳️DEMOCRACY ?

begin trumpist restriction on the ability to vote

abolish all postal voting apart from the elderly and disabled

keep voter ID

"legislate to stop left-wing bias and politically correct ideology"

proportional commons and elected senate

🏳️‍⚧️REACTIONARY AGENDA not otherwise covered

for all transgender schoolchildren who have not been permitted a gender recognition certificate: prohibit the use of correct pronouns by any teacher, prohibit the recognition of social transitioning by any teacher, and require mandatory outing to their parents

ban all unisex toilets

"cut funding to universities that undermine free speech", with no clarification, meaning they get to bully anyone they chose

abolish the public health observatory on racial health disparities

look, yeah. the manifesto is short, their purview is open. the door is not shut. everything is on the table. their one, two, three or more MPs are going to be using your tax money to advocate anything and anything that harms migrants, queer and trans people. nonwhite citizens and any annoying political movement can and will be fair game for total attack and political annihilation. wherever the transphobic tornado goes next they will join in. it is going to be a dangerous time for us. they are going to push for absolutely anything they can to harm trans people. your country. your money. your responsibility to fight them. that is what democracy is

[alarrytale]

Sony Music and Sony Entertainment are owned by the same corporation and it would reflect badly on all of it. I’m not saying that there’s no shitty business practices, or even that they’ve done unethical things, but the things that are being claimed Sony Music has done to Larry I don’t see how Louis and Harry could not easily sue over that. I’m no lawyer so I can’t fully but it is doubtful to me they can’t sue for say, being forcibly closeted or trying to pressure Louis into signing a birth certificate, etc. Coercing someone into doing these things is one thing and a whole other conversation, but doubtful to me they’re legally bound to do them.

Hi, anon!

I don't think i agree. I don't think people will stop going to a Sony produced movie, not buy PS5 or buy a Sony TV because Sony Music Entertainment forcibly closeted Harry Styles. They're all separate companies with the same owner, Sony. It's not like Sony is putting extra pressure on Harry if they don't sell enough TVs.

I've said many times before why H and L can't sue. They willingly signed a contract that states that Sony can do whatever it takes to make them big and earn them money. Sony own the names, likenesses, voices and personal histories of the 1D guys and everything they do while under a Sony contract, forever. Sony can use that material however they want, even if it's false, embarrassing or damaging. This is not illegal, as long as the guys signed it knowingly and willingly, and as long as Sony does it with the intention of furthering their careers and make them money. Sony's first right of refusal clause in all their recording contracts makes it so that Sony won't let anyone leave if they can match the offer from another label. They will never let Harry leave as long as they can control him like they already do and as long as he's profitable.

So if Sony says, Harry we're going to give you a womaniser image to make it look like you have sex appeal and make you attractive to women, and at the same time make people think you're straight, because out gay men don't appeal to het women who wants to marry you, Harry can't do shit about it. If they say, Harry you have to pretend to date CF to make you look like a womaniser and to create buzz for txf (she's under the same contract ans probably had little choice herself). People will watch the show if there is a scandalous relationship between you and CF, there is nothing he can do to say no. If he refuses he's in breach of contract, that he willingly signed, and will probably be banned from the music industry forever. Sony is powerful enough to do that. If he refuses they can ruin his image more. More damaging stories in the press. All press is good press. As long as it gives them attention and make people aware there's an album out, they can drag his name through the mud along with all of his family and friends.

If Sony says Louis, we will create a baby scandal around you to get attention on our new 1D album, make you look straight and make it look like you're not in a relationship with Harry, there is nothing L can do. Both L and H can try to bargain and trade off and say, no i'd rather fake date that person or do that instead, and Sony can say yes or no. Sony can also say, if you refuse to do this or that Louis we'll make Harry get engaged. Louis might then say, alright i'll do the baby scandal. Sony might later say, oh btw. Now that it's out that you're going to be a father, we've actually signed with that family and a baby is being born that you'll have to pretend is yours. And Louis will be shocked and in disbelief. It's already out that he's going to be a father, but he probably thought it would all end with a DNA test when the kid was born. Pretty sure he didn’t think he signed up for 10 years of playing a fake dad back in 2015, and how damaging that would end up being for his own solo career.

As long as Sony can prove that H and L signed these contracts willingly and that it's the best course of action to advance their careers and make them money, H and L won't have a case. It's not about right or wrong, it's about what's legally allowed or not. It's a corporation and Sony is treating H and L like corporations. They're a brand that needs to be protected. They've invested in said brand and expect returns on their investment. Using their control over their images, they indirectly control their closets and their public lives.

H and L (and the rest of the 1D guys) are legally bound to this contact saying Sony can do whatever they want. They signed it. Sony has played their cards so well that H and L are backed into a corner. Even if L isn't with Sony anymore, he isn't free of the consequences of what Sony made him do. He isn't getting radio play, he's still saddled with a fake baby and his boyfriend is still under Sony. I honestly think all of 1D are still under Sony, since they're on hiatus and not disbanded. I think Sony still controls their images, either directly under the 1D contract or indirectly though the image clause.

It's fine if you believe this isn't possible, but i think you are too unimaginative about how Sony can go about making this all happen and resulting in what we're witnessing today. I also think you are too hung up about things being illegal or legal, instead of looking at it as Sony having certain powers within the contract and them forcing H and L's hands by backing them up into a corner. If you think Sony is powerful, multiply it with ten.

[hexxluck]

Reading more on this BioWare drama and my god it’s so similar from my last job countless restructures only to go back or redo how we worked, cut hours and people cause oh we have to make budget but also the manager took big fat cuts from doing that. All of us stressed cause the place is so short staffed while each personal doing the job 3 more, while people coming complaining and sending complaints none stop cause can’t help or get anything done to point everyone did bare minimum just to get shifts over. Many of us left while others got themselves fired etc. and it was all management and corporate fucking around when they didn’t care for our sanity just profit; majority of us left or fired the place tanked with the management and corporate bs that the location was closed down cause of resource losses. This is very much what Ea did with BioWare and signs were there all they with inquisition’s. I still loved the products they released but from my own experience this very much corporate influence and management issues cause everyone to crash out and creativity killed; Busche came in and wrangled it up it seems with articles I’ve read and the council but with non stop reboots and having likely less resources in what I went for school with if Veilguard did amazing numbers which it’ technically decent, yet not Ea corporate level decent cause they all crazy. I feel EA would’ve still done this, the amount of money they wasted cause they couldn’t make up their minds it was likely just well this what you get it’s your fault to the studio. Greed has just ruined everything it touches I hate it last I’m talking about this