#v;Warring States | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hatredcurse · 9 months

Text

⛓ [ArrangedMarriage] — Hashirama and Mito || @senjufound

During such a turbulent period of militant struggles and noble establishment, marriage into a high clan was often a princess' dream. Oh, how girls would scuttle about within the hidden chambers hiding about the pagoda of their fathers' estate, whispering and giggling to each other about which high lord they would take. It's a behavior encouraged by their affluent mothers and equally smitten elder sisters who experience such luxury all the same.

Princess Mito, hailing from a family rather exclusive to the coast. Their rapturous weather and strict shrine-like culture didn't participate in high society quite like their sister clans did. Often would the matriarchs and mistresses within the lord's chamber travel to allied lands under the Daimyo control and host these tea ceremonies, serving a location for unrestricted gossip. Mito's mother was one of many that did such things. Mito herself, not so much.

At young age, while the eldest of many Uzumaki daughters, was born under an important star. A divine appointment granted by the heavens to imbue her with immense strength, resolve, and most importantly, duty to manage the affairs of the preternatural; the unknown, the living, the dead, and the beastial.

As her sisters would dress in elegant, restricting kimonos. White powder on their faces, their eyebrows plucked thin, and their long, burgundy hair wrapped painfully into a crown, Mito only participated in such formalities on the occasional important holiday or pinnacle event. Immensely blessed and full of heart to see her sisters enjoy their eloquent lives, Mito, herself, was equally happy attending her many duties as High Priestess.

Everything was written in the cards for her: hone her technique, build an immense spiritual foundation, creating the Grand Barrier, and seal all the demonic forces ravaging the land to ruin in the world. It was a perfect plan set into motion the moment she had turned 17.

However, those incredible, awe-inspiring talents were the same abilities that would land her in the spotlight where even her sisters did not shine— right into the watchful, calculating gaze of the Senju High Lord.

Thinking that she could easily decline such advances and pass along the duty to one of her many sisters ( those of which were more than happy to marry into one of the strongest, military shinobi clans at the time ), her father declined her refusal. The Senju Lord was strict on the conditions and would not allow substitute: it was Mito Uzumaki, or nothing at all.

Enraged by the contractual agreement, Mito spat in the face of her father, denouncing him and his merits as Lord Patriarch of Uzushio. Refuting any and all goodwill he may host for their land and its preservation. Unfortunately, all these criticisms fell on deaf ears.

Within the fortnight, Mito was packaged up in the same ornamental gowns that ought to be dressed on her sisters, her hair twisted in beautiful sacred braids with all the golden pins and talismans that as Shrine Maiden should never be without. Her eyelids shine with a deep, jade green with her lips painted a dark cherry rouge. With any luck, she was granted one female attendant for her travels and comforts; a meek young girl who could no more than squeeze her mistress' hand and affirm that this was only a meeting visit and that if his lord does not see fit, then she'll sooner be returning back to the Land of Whirlpools than she could blink.

Not exactly the words that she wanted to hear, but she won't dispirit the girl for trying.

At the Senju gates, their white-golden Palanquin lowered before the brooding iron doors, yawning open upon their arrival. The attendant was out first, opening the door for her highness, along with ensuring her outfit slipped out beautifully with not a detail out of place.

Once out, Mito did not bow, instead waited to for whoever to come towards her and lead her inside.

#Mito ic #.closed starter #.ask #v. DESCENT INTO THE COILS OF LEVIATHAN (Warring States Period)#senjufound #q

8 notes · View notes

rabbitcruiser · 2 months

Text

Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender in World War II and the Emperor records the Imperial Rescript on Surrender on August 14, 1945 (August 15 in Japan Standard Time).

2 notes · View notes

woodblxssomcrowned · 20 days

Text

Gorgeous gorgeous girl love of my life

#ws!au kana hits different #literally. the yin seal is one heck of a booster #;;kaname #;;my art #v; warring states #Naruto oc #Senju oc

27 notes · View notes

justinspoliticalcorner · 5 months

Text

Jill Filipovic at Slate:

Should the very state of being pregnant place women in a subclass of citizen, vulnerable to criminal prosecution or civil penalties for behavior that would be perfectly legal from a nonpregnant person? Judging by their proposed legislation and various legal antics, the anti-abortion movement says: Yes. Pregnant women simply should not have the same rights as any other U.S. citizen. Take, for example, efforts to criminalize the crossing of state lines for abortion. There is a very, very long tradition in the U.S. of allowing people to travel out of state to access medical care, and it’s so deeply ingrained we barely think about it. Consider, for example, the businesswoman who lives in New Jersey but works in New York City and so goes to the dentist in midtown Manhattan, or the dad who lives on the Kansas side of Kansas City but takes his sick kid to a specialist at a hospital on the Missouri side. A great many Americans don’t think twice about crossing state lines for health care. Abortion opponents are trying to change that for one group of people: pregnant women.

Conservative legal groups are already drafting model legislation to prevent pregnant women from traveling for abortions by legally penalizing anyone who helps them, a strategy used by the state of Texas in one of its abortion bans, which allows anyone in the U.S. to sue those who assist women with abortions—and be rewarded with a bounty paid by the state. The architect of that Texas abortion bounty law was Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion activist (and Donald Trump lawyer) who is currently representing a Texas man in his quest to probe into his ex-girlfriend’s abortion, which she allegedly sought outside of their home state. Mitchell filed a petition to learn the details of this woman’s abortion for, he says, a potential future lawsuit. But to be clear, the woman in question did absolutely nothing illegal: Traveling out of state for health care, including abortion, is not against the law in Texas or anywhere else. It’s just that Mitchell and other abortion opponents would like to change that—and are apparently happy to represent controlling (and, in another case Mitchell took on, allegedly abusive) men to do it.

They’re also happy to reclassify pregnant women as a kind of sub-citizen who, by simple virtue of their pregnancy status, are not entitled to the same legal freedoms and protections as anyone else. A Texas woman who goes to a Colorado abortion clinic is being treated differently from any nonpregnant person who travels for a medical procedure—and you can bet that this categorization of pregnant people as suspect, should they travel out of state, will lead to all sorts of investigations and abuses.

Take this hypothetical: Say the anti-abortion movement succeeds and makes it a crime to travel out of state for an abortion. Say a woman in Idaho (where abortion laws are so extreme, they have no exceptions for saving a woman’s health) travels to Washington state, where abortion is legal, and gets her hands on abortion-inducing drugs. Say she’s not pregnant. Say she takes the drugs anyway. Has she committed a crime? Or, to use a more likely legal model, say Texas makes it a crime to help a woman travel for an abortion, and a Texas woman goes to Colorado, gets abortion-inducing drugs, and takes them, despite not being pregnant. Is the friend who helped buy her plane ticket still liable? Presumably not: No pregnancy means no abortion, which means no violation of an abortion ban. But if the two women in these scenarios had been pregnant, the legal calculus would be entirely different.

Or to use a perhaps more realistic scenario: Mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, is also commonly used to treat Cushing’s syndrome, and researchers say it has tremendous potential to treat other illnesses, too, from various cancers to PTSD. Under an anti-abortion legal scheme, if a Texas woman with Cushing’s syndrome travels out of state, gets mifepristone, and takes it, she (or those who help her) would face potential legal consequences only if she’s pregnant. It’s her status as a pregnant woman—not the act of traveling or even taking an abortion-inducing drug—that is the problem. And generally, the law frowns on making a person’s status—rather than their actions—the basis of a crime or a lawsuit. That’s part of treating all people equally under the law, and offering all people the equal protection of it.

Preventing pregnant women from crossing into a state for a legal medical procedure isn’t the only way in which the anti-abortion movement is attempting to curtail basic rights and protections for anyone carrying a pregnancy. Earlier this year, abortion opponents argued before the Supreme Court that pregnant patients should be treated differently than nonpregnant ones in cases of serious medical emergencies—that doctors and other health workers should be permitted to give pregnant women a substandard level of care, and to essentially refuse to appropriately stabilize them. If a woman comes in and is very ill, she’s entitled to one standard of care; if she comes in and is very ill and pregnant, that standard of care is lower in states that criminalize abortion.

At issue in the Supreme Court case, a ruling in which is expected early this summer, is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a law initially written to prevent hospitals from dumping seriously ill patients who couldn’t pay. Pregnant women in particular were often coming into hospitals in labor, only to be refused care; there were stories of women birthing in hallways and cars. EMTALA says that any hospital receiving federal Medicaid dollars (which is most hospitals, both public and private) must provide lifesaving care to anyone who walks through their doors, regardless of their ability to pay. That means that hospitals have an obligation to stabilize ill patients. (If they don’t have the ability to appropriately stabilize a patient, they must move the patient to a facility that does.)

Jill Filipovic wrote in Slate the insidious trend of anti-abortion hardliners making pregnant people 2nd class citizens by enacting laws criminalizing access to out-of-state abortion services (this is also applicable to gender-affirming care).

#Jill Filipovic #Slate #Abortion #Pregnancy #War On Women #Anti Abortion Extremism #Texas SB8 #Jonathan Mitchell #Criminalization of Abortion #SCOTUS #EMTALA #Moyle v. United States #Idaho v. United States #Mifepristone

95 notes · View notes

dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

Text

Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in the Trump White House who is at the forefront of the Republican march toward hard-right populism, is throwing his weight behind a movement to radically rewrite the US Constitution.

Bannon has devoted recent episodes of his online show the War Room to a well-funded operation which has stealthily gained ground over the past two years. Backed by billionaire donors and corporate interests, it aims to persuade state legislatures to call a constitutional convention in the hope of baking far-right conservative values into the supreme law of the land.

The goal is, in essence, to turn the country into a permanent conservative nation irrespective of the will of the American people. The convention would promote policies that would limit the size and scope of the federal government, set ceilings on or even abolish taxes, free corporations from regulations, and impose restrictions on government action in areas such as abortion, guns and immigration.

“This is another line of attack strategically,” Bannon told his viewers last month. “You now have a political movement that understands we need to go after the administrative state.”

By “administrative state”, Bannon was referring to the involvement of the federal government and Congress in central aspects of modern American life. That includes combating the climate crisis, setting educational standards and fighting health inequities.

Mark Meckler, a founder of the Tea Party who now leads one of the largest groups advocating for the tactic, the Convention of States Action (COSA), spelled out some of the prime objectives on Bannon’s show. “We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’,” he said.

Meckler went on to divulge the anti-democratic nature of the state convention movement when he said a main aim was to prevent progressive policies being advanced through presidential elections. “The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains. So you do the structural fix.”

The “structural fix” involves Republican state legislatures pushing conservative amendments to America’s foundational document. By cementing the policies into the US Constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge.

Were a convention achieved, it would mark the zenith of conservative state power in American politics. Over the past 12 years, since the eruption of the Tea Party, Republicans have extended their grip to more than half of the states in the country, imposing an increasingly far-right agenda on the heartlands.

Now the plan is to take that dominance nationwide.

Article V of the Constitution lays out two distinct ways in which America’s core document, ratified in 1788, can be revised. In practice, all 27 amendments that have been added over the past 244 years have come through the first route – a Congress-led process whereby two-thirds of both the US House and Senate have to approve changes followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states.

Meckler, working alongside other powerful interest groups and wealthy rightwing megadonors, is gunning for Article V’s second route – one that has never been tried before. It gives state legislatures the power to call a constitutional convention of their own, should two-thirds of all 50 states agree.

The state-based model for rewriting the US Constitution is perhaps the most audacious attempt yet by hard-right Republicans to secure what amounts to conservative minority rule in which a minority of lawmakers representing less-populated rural states dictate terms to the majority of Americans. Russ Feingold, a former Democratic US senator from Wisconsin, told The Guardian that “they want to rewrite the constitution in a fundamental way that is not just conservative, it is minoritarian. It will prevent the will of ‘we the people’ being heard.”

Feingold has co-authored with Peter Prindiville of the Stanford constitutional law center The Constitution in Jeopardy, a new book that sounds the alarm on the states-based convention movement. “Our goal is not to scare people, but to alert them that there is a movement on the far right that is quietly getting itself to a point where it will be almost impossible to stop a convention being called,” he said.

His urgency is underlined by how active the movement has become. A convention resolution framed by COSA has passed so far this year in four states – Wisconsin, Nebraska, West Virginia and South Carolina.

The group has also been busy around November’s midterm elections, using its muscle and some $600,000 (£528,252) of its reserves to support candidates amenable to the idea. “We have built the largest grassroots activist army in American history,” Meckler told Bannon, probably hyperbolically.

Bannon’s other guest on the War Room, Rick Santorum, a former Republican US senator from Pennsylvania who advises COSA, told Bannon: “This is something that can happen very quickly. We are a lot further along than people think.”

They are also much better funded than people might think. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which monitors the constitutional convention movement, estimates that it pulled in $25M (£22M) in 2020, the last year for which figures are known.

The funds were split between COSA and other influential groups on the right. They include the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a network of state politicians and corporate lobbyists which has taken up the cry for a constitutional amendment to force balanced budget restrictions on Washington.

Much of the income is dark money, with the origins hidden. CMD has managed to identify some key donors – among them the Mercer Family Foundation set up by reclusive hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, and a couple of groups run by Leonard Leo, the mastermind behind the rightwing land grab in the federal courts.

More than $1m (£880,265) has also been donated in the form of Bitcoin.

The attraction to these groups and donors of pursuing a states route to rewriting the US Constitution is easily explained. Over the past 12 years, since the eruption of the Tea Party in 2010, Republican activists have deployed extreme partisan gerrymandering to pull off an extraordinary takeover of state legislatures.

In 2010, Republicans controlled both chambers of just 14 state legislatures. Today, that number stands at 31.

“Republicans are near the high watermark in terms of their political control in the states, and that’s why the pro-Trump rightwing of the party is increasingly embracing the constitutional convention strategy,” said Arn Pearson, CMD’s executive director.

Should a convention be achieved, the plan would be to give states one vote each. There is no legal or historical basis for such an arrangement but its appeal is self-evident.

One vote per state would give small rural conservative states like Wyoming (population 580,000) equal leverage to large urbanized progressive states like California (39.5 million). Collectively, small states would be in the majority and control would tip to the Republicans.

Last December Santorum spelled out this minoritarian vision at a private ALEC meeting. In an audio recording obtained by CMD, Santorum said: “We have the opportunity, as a result, to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

Pearson decried such thinking as “a profoundly anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic strategy that gives small rural states most control”.

With the counting system skewed towards the conservative heartlands, the list of amendments that might be pursued is disconcertingly large. Though Meckler and his allies largely avoid talking about culture war issues, it is quite conceivable that a nationwide ban on abortion and a rescinding of gay marriage would be on the table.

More openly, advocates have talked about imposing balanced budget requirements on the US government that would dramatically shrink federal resources. Some have even proposed making income tax unconstitutional.

One of the more popular ideas circulating within rightwing constitutional convention circles, initially floated by the talk show host Mark Levin, is that states should grant themselves the ability to override federal statutes and supreme court rulings. It is hard to see how the federal rule of law could be sustained under such an arrangement with its unmistakable civil war undertones.

Under Article V, 34 states would have to call for a constitutional convention to reach the two-thirds requirement. COSA has so far succeeded in getting 19 states to sign up, with a further six in active consideration.

ALEC, which sets a narrower remit for a convention focused on its balanced budget amendment, has gone further with 28 states on board.

Either way, there is a shortfall. To address it, constitutional convention leaders have invented increasingly exotic mathematical formulas for attaining the magic number, 34. “We used to call it fuzzy math, now we call it wacky math,” Pearson said.

Advocates filed a lawsuit in Texas in February that tried to get the courts to force a constitutional convention on grounds that they had reached 34 states already – they cobbled together unrelated state convention calls, including some dating back to the 1800s. In July two bills were also introduced to the US House requiring Congress to call a convention immediately.

David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said the willingness to adopt outlandish logic should sound further alarm bells. It raised the stakes even higher for the November elections.

“The midterms are crucial,” Super said. “Changes at state-level matter, but will not get them to 34 states. If they can take control of Congress, they could bridge the gap.”

Paradoxically, what happens to Congress in the midterms could have the biggest impact on the future prospects of a states-based constitutional convention. Should the Republicans take back control of the US House and Senate they would be in a position to advance radical Republicans’ demands.

“We’ve already seen a willingness to play fast and loose with the math on all sorts of things in Congress,” Super said. “I would not be surprised if they were to make a serious attempt to adopt one of these bizarre accounting theories should they take control of both chambers in November.”

That could mean a rapid dash for a convention before most Americans would have woken up to the danger.

“If the Republicans prevail in Congress, they could try to call a convention right away,” Feingold said. “People should know that when they go to vote in November – this could fundamentally undermine their rights in a way that is both disturbing and permanent.”

61 notes · View notes