#we would have accepted fascist

[pharmaciacatholica]

poor choice of words

the tiktok ban just reinforces the fact that if there was even the smallest amount of will on behalf of the legislature we absolutely could ban pornography effectively overnight

[badolmen]

Some of you think a Fascist™ country is defined by an oppressive dictatorship that results in a greyscale dystopian society and it shows.

[lord-squiggletits]

It's not that what you like in fiction = what you approve of IRL or that consuming media = a meaningful form of activism, but I do think that to an extent, the way people analyze and talk about media can be revealing about what their personal beliefs are. And tbh the way some people in fandom talk about certain social issues I pray that they're never in a position of social influence or power over other ppl bc yeesh

[amplexadversary]

.

[testostergnomes]

Tags courtesy of @streetsandsodiumlights

Mom they're gentrifying disco elysium

[ceilidhtransing]

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.

[qqueenofhades]

I just feel like even if we all vote and Biden wins, Trump won't accept the loss, and eventually they'll just put him in anyway. And then there won't be another real election. Even if Biden wins and somehow is actually confirmed (which again, I think is unlikely) we're going to have to do this for 30 more years because of the SC, and that isn't at all sustainable.

All this isn't to say I won't vote but I just think people are being way too optimistic about what happens if Biden wins. I don't think him winning will keep Trump out or the horrible fascist future at bay.

Look, I get the fear. I do, I do... but this is also one of the times when you have to ask if it's actually telling you something true, or if it's just preying on that generalized feeling of doom to make everything seem hopeless even if we win again. And that is... there is absolutely no actual mechanism for Trump to be installed as president if Biden wins the Electoral College (since as we have repeatedly seen, the popular vote is immaterial). SCOTUS is horrible and evil and are trying to interfere as much ahead of time for Trump as they can, but part of that is because they can't simply issue an order for Biden to be removed and Trump to become God King By Fiat. That is not how it works. If Biden wins in November, he will be president until his term ends, he steps down, Kamala takes over, or anything else.

Trump tried a coup with all the entire overwhelming might of the US government as the sitting president last time; fortunately, it failed. Reforms to the Electoral Count Act have been made to prevent another January 6. The Department of Defense and the military are still under (and would be on another January 6) Biden's command, not Trump's. That's not to say that Trump won't try some shit with his insane cult followers, but he is just a late 70s conman from Queens out on bail and under sentence for a criminal trial, who is already the biggest and most disgraced loser and asshole in American political history. He is so desperate to cheat his way back into power because in a real sense, this IS the last-chance saloon for him. He can't put off the legal proceedings, however long they take, for another four years. He's losing his marbles at a rapid rate. I'm just saying: we don't know what or when, but there will be (and already have been) real consequences for him. That is why he is scrabbling so hard.

"Even if we vote, nothing matters and Trump will win anyway" is another of those insidious lies that works to make you feel as if the battle is endless and pointless and none of its victories matter. Of course it will not all be magically fixed forever if Biden wins. We will still have to figure some godforsaken fucking way to expand SCOTUS or kick Alito and Thomas off it. But we will have bought ourselves, our democracy, our country, and the world time to do that, and put another nail in Trump's coffin. That matters. It matters a lot.

Fascism wants to present itself as overwhelming, irresistible, inevitable, and ready to happen no matter what you do, and that's what your brain wants you to buy in now. But that's not the case, Trump is not inevitable or some all-powerful monolith (in fact, another of the debate takeaways seemed to be that Biden looked bad but people still hate Trump too much for it to really shift anything). He is a loser, a fraud, a conman, a liar, and a crook, and he WANTS you to fear him like an almighty god. Don't give him or the MAGAGOP the satisfaction.

Frankly, having to endure another four months of this might kill us all, and I know that we are tired and scared (me too). But IT IS NOT INEVITABLE THAT WE ARE DOOMED. Not at all. Let's hang onto that and tell that anxiety doom voice to shove it.

Hugs.

[innuendostudios]

this is the final Alt-Right Playbook. it's called The South Bank of the Rubicon.

thank you for watching this series the last eight years. I'm not going anywhere, but I'll be turning my attention to topics other than conservative rhetorical strategies; going forward, I don't see our battles being fought with rhetoric.

support my work on Patreon and/or subscribe to me on Nebula. transcript below the cut.

The Rubicon is a river in Italy. The story goes that, at the end of the governorship of Julius Caesar, he was ordered to disband his army and stay north of the Rubicon. When, instead, Caesar marched his army across the river and towards Rome, it was considered an act of treason, and the beginning of the Roman Civil War, at the end of which Caesar would reign victorious. It is said, as he forded the Rubicon, Caesar declared, “The die is cast.”

In today’s vernacular, we refer to a metaphoric Rubicon as the point of no return. Children “cross the Rubicon” into adulthood, isolationist governments “cross the Rubicon” into international politics. Each of us will cast the die several times in our own lives. But we say also that movements, that people, cross the Rubicon when they become irredeemable.

When times are bad, we wonder anxiously how far from the Rubicon we are. When does an insurgency become a war, a demonstration a riot? When is the moment an economy in danger becomes one in collapse? We scan the horizon for the riverbank, hoping we didn’t cross it some ways back.

The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is it’s rare to know where they are until they are some ways behind you. The Rubicon is not the Mississippi; it is a muddy little creek history lost track of for centuries.

In the United States, we are increasingly comfortable saying that our democracy is “under threat.” That we are “at risk” of descending into authoritarianism. Few are ready to say that the threat has arrived. And I’m referring to myself as I say that: I’m not ready to say it’s arrived. No one wants to call it prematurely. The Right screams that “the Left” - Black Lives Matter or Antifa or some thinly-veiled caricature of The Jews - are ready to kick down your door and bash your teeth in. And I talk about why they say this, their need to exaggerate the threat from the Left, so that, when they aggress against us, it seems like self-defense. So that we are to blame for any violence we suffer. I talk about the danger of this thinking being accepted. I say the way mainstream conservative politicians and media legitimize these arguments is “worrying.” But I don’t say “they are saying this in preparation to kick down your door and bash in your teeth.” I want people to listen to me. I don’t want to sound irrational, and I don’t want to sound like them. And… I don’t want it to be true yet.

Say, for the sake of argument, you are, at this moment, ankle-deep in the water, desperately wondering how many paces you are from The South Bank of the Rubicon.

There was a time when any number of things would have been the moment. If you could go back to 2015 and ask, “Is a candidate promising to jail his political opponents, or a president building concentration camps at the border, or a lame duck provoking an insurrection to overturn a vote, the moment where you would unequivocally call him a fascist?” And we would have said, “No question.” But those moments came, and they went, and we called them troubling, we called them dangerous, but it still seemed alarmist to call them fascist. Journalists and policy wonks still reacted with surprise if you came anywhere near the word. You could still run a campaign on “reasoning with the Right.” Republicans have made great strides by being so blatantly horrible that accurately describing their behavior sounds like hyperbole.

It seems we are always approaching the other side of the Rubicon, never arriving. We can turn back. The north is still the nearer bank.

There is a knack to this. Everyone expects it to happen all at once. That one day we will wake up to swastikas and kids in cages and unmarked vans disappearing people off the street. But those all happened on different days. And the swastikas were a natural extension of the barely-coded language of the Administration’s supporters, the cages were the next step after their family separation policy, and the vans were not a surprise after years of police militarization. You don’t have to cross the river quickly, just steadily. So that every step makes the last one seem inevitable and the next one obvious. The people who say “this will never happen on our watch,” they will divert the river south to make it true.

It’s losing a little ground on a dozen fronts every day. It’s seeing so many lines crossed you can’t even remember where you used to draw them. It’s the readiness to give up on things being better and just wanting them to be quiet.

I can’t tell you if that moment has come. I don’t know how to call it any better than you. So, instead, I’m going to ask you to do something: I want you to decide, at this moment, what the Rubicon is for you. What is that undeniable instant where, if something drastic does not happen immediately, your rights and freedoms are forfeit. And don’t show up in my comments saying it happened years or centuries ago - you’re not wrong, but cynicism is acceptance. I’m asking when would be the time to act. Write it down. Put it on your phone or your dry erase board or a post-it on your bathroom mirror. So when that moment comes you will remember that this was your Rubicon, because it won’t feel like it anymore. It will feel like the next logical step.

And ask yourself, when that moment comes, what is the right thing to do? You don’t have to have an answer yet. But think on it. Cuz we haven’t been doing it.

As a leftist, the futures I envision are full of possibility. I am fond of saying “there are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.” So many things we could try if we allow ourselves to let go of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy. Imagining the future is a kind of world-building. To be on the Left, at least the way I try to do it, is to desire a spreading out, a pluralizing, an abandonment of hierarchy and a sharing of power between us all. I don’t know if that future is likely, but I know it’s possible.

That’s not how things look on the Right. For the Right, left to its own devices?

All roads lead to Rome.

[calder]

Released in 2010, Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas actively concerns itself with the realities of gay existence, and is widely recognized as a noteworthy work of queer science fiction. New Vegas extensively examines social attitudes towards homosexuality among the game's major factions, and primarily conveys this lore through gay and bisexual characters describing their own experiences. It also allowed the player to mechanically set the Courier's sexual orientation. By taking both available perks, the player character can be bisexual. By choosing neither, the player can opt out of seeing flirtatious dialogue options.

Uniquely, Fallout: New Vegas explores homosexuality in the context of wasteland societies, and touches upon related issues. The core theme of New Vegas is that the desire to recreate the past is driven by irrational nostalgia, and any endeavor to manifest past glory is dangerous and doomed. The social issue of homophobia is used as a demonstrative example. The resurrection of corporate and military power structures presents new avenues for Old World problems such as institutional homophobia to reemerge. One of the many issues that divide the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion is the latter's open persecution of gay people. The NCR is described as tolerant and even accepting of same-sex relationships, though acceptance tends to fall off the further one moves away from the developed, urbanized core of New California. In recent years, the Republic's rapid economic transformation has led to an unforeseen erosion of the humanitarian ideals which it was founded to serve. In practice, to recreate America was to take on its shortcomings and its sins. As subsistence scavenging has dried up, the people of the NCR increasingly turn to wage labor, entrepreneurial venture, or military enlistment to keep their families fed. Meanwhile, their government enacts morally corrosive imperialism (narrative verbiage), their dominion expanding indefinitely as their infrastructure crumbles from within. This has led to a profit-based imperial monoculture which must conquer, consume, and coerce to perpetuate. As personal politics and service labor grow in importance, people find themselves more inclined to present as "normal" in the interest of financial stability and political expedience. A loading screen visualizes this culture of artificial social normalcy: the portrait of President Aradesh on the NCR 5$ bill neglects to depict his unibrow, earring, and facial scarification, overall portraying the once-chieftain so cleanly-cut as to be unrecognizable at first glance. He also appears to be wearing a collared shirt or suit as opposed to the robe he wore in Fallout.

In the Legion, Caesar has mandated that every legionnaire take a wife and produce children, citing high infant mortality rates and the constant need for soldiers, and going as far as instituting child quotas. He treats human beings as a resource to be exploited for war. Ostensibly in this aim homosexuality has been declared a capital offense punishable by death. Historically, routine demonstrations of violence towards women and gay people are a deliberate feature of fascist societies, the only logical cultural conclusion of a government devoted entirely to war and control. In Forlorn Hope letter 9, an NCR soldier wrote wrote the following to his boyfriend:

Dearest Andrew, Writing this seems pretty morbid, but tomorrow we march into the no man's land between our camp and Nelson, which is crawling with Legion. The Major insisted I write this damn "if you get this, I'm dead" letter so here it is. What a crock. I have the luck of the devil and your love on my side, so I'll be home soon. Keep the porch light on for me. We'll party in New Vegas when I get back. I love you. —Devin

Devin believed he would prevail over the Legion because his love would keep him safe. He was found dying or dead on the battlefield, the letter was found on his body. In a post-release patch, the injured soldiers were removed from the battlefield for performance reasons, and never re-implemented. Driven largely in reaction to the Legion's hyper-masculine posturing and misogyny, rumors persist across the Mojave that gay male relationships are not only common within the Legion, but condoned. These rumors are repeated commonly in NCR society. A closeted NCR Major mentions that the Legion is "a little more... forgiving" about close male "friendships," speaking in a hushed tone to avoid suspicion. At the same outpost, the player can encounter Cass, a bisexual civilian woman. She may flirt with a male Courier, who may imply they are gay, prompting her to imply gay men are more common in the Legion. Even as gay men fight and die in the name of love under his command, NCR General Oliver may remark to Courier Six at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam: "If you think after all that's happened, I'm going to grab my ankles and take it like the Legion..."

This writing pertains to institutionalized homophobia which manifests in practice though power structures and social interactions without being written into law. Simply put, in his derogatory remark, the general expresses to his army that military surrender is gay, much like their gay enemy. From the brevity and bluntness of this remark, it's clear that this sentiment is already well understood among his ranks. Logically, to project strength in the eyes of such a leader, one might also project homophobia by scrutinizing and harassing one's peers and subordinates. In this atmosphere, the expression of homophobia is not only normalized, but materially incentivized. For the ambitious, it becomes a tool, and a way of casting shame upon rivals. For the closeted, homophobia becomes a survival tactic, hoping to throw scrutiny off oneself. This is why Major Knight is immediately frightened when a male Courier flirts with him. He is so profoundly alienated that he romanticizes life as a gay man under the Legion. The Legion punish homosexuality with death, and yet Knight characterizes them as more "forgiving" than the NCR. Through these apparently disparate events, the audience can trace how a distorted perception of gay people emerges among insecure men in a military environment, and subsequently becomes ingrained in the corresponding civilian culture. At the 188 Trading Post, a lesbian from the Brotherhood of Steel named Veronica also wryly remarks that she believes legionaries have gay sex about as often as straight sex. She also notes that this only applies to men, as women have no rights whatsoever in Legion society. In this aside, she conveys a pre-existing frustration with lesbophobic social norms. Veronica also mentions that the people of her bunker would rather she remain on the surface. The Mojave Brotherhood of Steel has no official policy prohibiting homosexuality, but an implicit attitude among its dominant members that their limited numbers require everyone to have children to avoid extinction. Numerically, this may seem logical on the surface, given their reluctance to recruit outsiders. However, given their tiny population, this is an ineffective countermeasure, as they do not have nearly enough members to maintain genetic diversity for more than a few generations. This approach is not universally supported by all family units within the Brotherhood, but every individual is ultimately at the mercy of the elder. Veronica was in a lesbian relationship, but they were quietly separated by Elder Elijah, due to the dominant culture of enforcing heterosexual pairing among their population.

Caesar's law has not ended homosexuality within his domain. Despite the obvious risks, some legionaries have continued to pursue relationships behind closed doors, especially given their access to slaves. So long as members complete their societal obligations and fulfill the child quotas, they are able to pursue romance with other men in secret. Homosexual relationships in the faction are noted as being relatively equal compared to the average Legion husband and wife, in a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" sort of open secret policy. Gay legionaries must always make sure to keep their activities hidden. A centurion was once almost caught fraternizing with the teenage boy he had chosen to tend his tent. Despite previous "romantic" intentions, he quickly resolved to dispose of the slave to dispel suspicion. Had they been caught together, the centurion would have been charged with homosexuality and sentenced to death. This story is only known because the enslaved young man, Jimmy, managed to escape execution. Further illustrating the cruelty intrinsic to Legion governance, it's stated that homosexuality was the crime, and not the rape of a young slave; in fact, it seems Jimmy was forced to contribute to the child quota despite being a gay teenager, and the experience left him traumatized. He has resolved to never have sex with another woman, as the very notion triggers memories which fill him with disgust, and (in his own words) makes him feel like a slave all over again. The Strip is indifferent to gay people, viewing them as another opportunity to make caps. Both the Gomorrah and the Atomic Wrangler are interested in maximizing profits, and their prostitution services cater to clients regardless of their orientation. The openly gay Jimmy works at nearby Casa Madrid, but there is some tension among his peers due to his co-worker Maude's blatant homophobia. She supposes he's "okay, for one of those," and if propositioned by a female Courier, Maude will direct them to Sweetie for such "perverted" services. Pretty Sarah must regularly intervene to keep the peace among her staff.

The Followers of the Apocalypse, well-read punks who seek to embody healing through anarchistic values, are not concerned with gender. Most are openly and casually sexually active. Upon meeting Courier Six, Arcade Gannon offhandedly makes his gayness known, unprompted. The audience must face the fact that Arcade's apprehension of the Legion is far from abstract; under Legion law, he would be put to death. One possible ending gives further insight into Caesar's hypocrisy: should the player sell Arcade into slavery and leave Caesar alive, he will keep Arcade as a personal physician and philosophical advisor. They intellectually spar at length, and Caesar grows singularly fond of him. Accordingly, Arcade imitates the historic suicide of Cato the Younger by disemboweling himself. The Legion's remaining medics attempted to save his life, but none were Arcade's equal. Caesar understood his doctor's final gesture of contempt, and mourned him for months.

New Vegas ventures further into themes of healing from the trauma of sexual violence, from the perspective of a lesbian character. Corporal Betsy, an NCR sharpshooter, is a rape survivor, and suffers with PTSD from the incident. Her unprocessed trauma has manifested as a maladaptive tendency to aggressively and explicitly proposition the women she encounters, in an effort to reassert a sense of control. This defensive hypersexual impulse has negatively impacted her ability to connect with other women. A male superior officer notes that her behavior is inappropriate for anyone of her stature, but abstains from disciplining her out of sincere concern for her mental health. The Courier can help her begin to recognize these problems, and convince her to seek treatment from Doctor Usanagi at the New Vegas medical clinic, which proves helpful to her as she processes and heals from her trauma.

In Old World Blues, the Think Tank are five floating brains in jars who express themselves by waving robotic arms bearing screens depicting facial features. Before the War, they were federal scientists who committed crimes against humanity in the name of weapons development. Each is stuck in some sort of neuro-bionic feedback loop which prevents them from moving forward with their projects, mentally binding them to their central laboratory. Walking through their homes at Higgs Village, it's clear each was deeply neurotic before they were transformed into floating brains. Now without bodies, they attempt to maintain the illusion that they are exempt from sexuality as purely mental beings, but each displays obvious interest in the human form. They have codified this shaming with the term "formography." Most of the men are obsessively defensive over their complete disinterest in penises, which they talk about constantly. However, the shameless Dr. Dala shows overwhelming interest in observing and recording any and all human functions. Already androgynous in her pre-War life, Dala has taken to self-identifying as a "gender neutral entity" (though she is not known to use they/them pronouns). Regardless of the Courier's gender, they may coquettishly scratch themselves, clear their throat, and stretch in front of Dala until her biomed gel decoagulates. Dr. 8 also responds positively to graphic masturbation advice from Couriers of either gender. The X-8 research facility is ostensibly a massive immersive shrine to Doctor Borous's hatred of Richie "Ball-Lover" Marcus, a long-dead child who bullied Borous centuries ago. He also clings to his resentment of one Betsy Bright, who refused to attend a dance with him, supposedly so she could "go smoke with RICHIE MARCUS." Clearly arrested in development, Borous has literally built a temple to the fantasy of torturing his adolescent romantic rival and feeding him to dogs. His frozen, static characterization of the jock Richie Marcus as a "pinko-commie" who "likes balls" reflects the shallowness, pettiness, and overall misanthropy underlying his patriotic identity. It remains apparent throughout Old World Blues that the Think Tank are all chronically sexually repressed, which is inseparable from the values of the violent and judgmental pre-War culture which created them. With time and isolation, this ingrained repression has manifested as various intense and deranged psychosexual behaviors, including rage-fueled homophobia, voyeurism, and the obsessive performance of puritanical pretense.

____

“Although I’ve been out for a very long time, I made a conscious effort to be out with relation to this project, as I wanted to be visible as a lesbian in the game industry. New Vegas itself is, I think, one of (if not the) best games out there in how we treat homosexuality – and all of that is very intentional.”

“If my work on FNV, if my being out has helped even one gay person, then I have succeeded.” — Tess “Obsidian’s Gay Cowgirl” Treadwell

____

written (with help from other editors) for fallout.fandom.com/wiki/LGBT_representation_in_the_Fallout_series criticism welcome

[autolenaphilia]

God I think I actually prefer explicit fascist transmisogyny in comparison to the disguised dogwhistly liberal transmisogyny.

Like the people who openly call me an autogynephile and other various slurs and tell me to kill myself are at least being honest. They don't bullshit me about hating my very existence and wanting me to die.

It's all the faux-loving forms of transmisogyny that really make me angry. Like it makes my skin crawl in its dishonesty and hypocrisy. And it takes so many forms. Like the transmisogynist christian "hate the sin, not the sinner" approach where they claim to love me and just want me to accept Jesus in my heart. The necessary condition for accepting their version of Jesus however is me detransitioning, and that would kill me.

There is the terfy "people with gender dysphoria are suffering and they need help but we can't endanger women's sex-based rights for them." i've even seen in arguments about legal gender changes the following: "of course trans women deserve to use women's spaces, but if we allow legal gender self-id evil cis men will take advantage of that. So trans women will have to have their rights restricted." Even J.K. Rowling used it in her terf manifesto.

It makes one yearn for the days of the ur-terf book "The Transsexual Empire" which had the "shemale" slur in its subtitle and in which the author Janice Raymond argued trans women rape real women by the fact of their very existence. That kind of brazen transmisogyny at least had some kind of honesty about it.

There is also the transmisogynist callout culture fandom, or as the japanese fittingly call them: the american feelings yakuza. They callout transfems for problematic kinks like at least once a week but deny transmisogyny. "oh we don't believe all transfems are evil predatory sex perverts, it's just that this particular transfem is."

Their evidence for her being sexual predatory is that she ships two fictional siblings. Or in meatspace meetings, things like her having "bad vibes" ("bad vibes" or "gut instinct" are polite words for what more sensible people call "ingrained bias") .

And they suspiciously keep on making callouts for transfem after transfem in a neverending series, trying to ruin her reputation and socially exile her, but of course they are not transmsiogynists.

There is also the sofboi transandrobro type of transmisogyny. They spread the vilest transmisogyny but always falls back on a terfy bioessentialism to claim ontological innocence and perpetual victimhood in all situations. I've literally seen someone say "how can i be a misogynist, i'm literally afab." These people will not say directly "shut up about your oppression, stupid tranny", but say it in coded form. I had one guy traumadump to me about his rape in vivid detail to make the point that (trans)men suffer more and imply that transfems don't suffer from sexual violence.

And that's the crux of the issue. Open hate barely fazes me anymore, unless there is an immediate threat of physical violence. But being condescended to, being emotionally manipulated, being faced with people veiling their hatred of transfems behind a veil of superficially loving rhetoric, that does make me angry. And these people always use my anger against me. "Why are you so angry when these people are being so polite and nice to you?" And that's because the point of these rhetorical approaches is to have plausible deniability for your bigotry and make transfems look crazy when they point it out.

Yet it's the same bigotry as the explicit version, it's just more dishonest about it. Like if had the They Live glasses and looked at the rhetoric, it would just read "exterminate all transfems." All those polite liberals believe the same thing about transfems as the neo-nazis openly calling for us to be hanged, they just lack the virtue of being honest about it.

[disteal]

yknow it’s more than a little sad that every artists ‘hand-wringing panicking’ about what ai would do to the industry and how it would replace a lot of the already slim meat-and-potatoes jobs we rely on to survive were overwhelmingly proven true months after the technology really became widespread. It’s sad that convention space is being taken up by enormous booths full of cheap ai prints soaking up the limited space and money available at cons, it’s sad that competitions are getting flooded with ai generated pieces, it’s sad that i’ve seen a lot of ‘man. i’m just gonna go work at target, i can’t compete with this.’ from ppl who have been working in the industry for YEARS.

But it’s INFURIATING to see supposedly leftist game devs and indie ttrpg makers on here try and astroturf a PR campaign for ai to make using it for their projects more socially acceptable, and in order to do this paint artists as pearl clutching hysterics. As if anyone would blink on here if factory workers threw a brick through a window when they were being replaced by automation, but because art is never respected or treated like actual labor our industry collapsing is just kind of a big joke.

Like I saw someone compare the gay sex cats to Duchamp LIKE NO!!!! THEYRE NOT!!! The people who would get pissed off at Duchamp’s fountain are a very specific demographic!!!! Namely fascists!!! Like the implication of a statement like that is actually absurd. who is the fascist in this analogy, 25 year old nonbinary artists?? If you don’t want to pay artists to do your backgrounds for your indie game like just SAY it. (edit: additional context bc this got out of hand but I’ve looked at the blog of the person who said this and i’m walking back the salt I expressed here. It’s a nuanced take that wasn’t expressed super clearly in the post that went viral and he’s elaborated on it a lot in a way that makes me feel this was an unfair interpretation of his words. My bad)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

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

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[eugenedebs1920]

There are some on the right, the pro-fascist side, who would claim Dems, liberals are the establishment.

First I would like to start out with the definition of liberal. Liberal: Willing to listen to, or accept ideas and opinions different from one’s own. Open minded.

Now let’s take a loo at conservative. Conservative: Adverse to change or innovation. Holding to “traditional” values.

When one thinks of movements that have bettered humanity, and the world at large are these done in the name of tradition? Are these done by the ideals of old?

Tradition in this country can be rooted back to slavery, back to a time when white people lorded their superiority over others based solely on the color of their skin. It can be traced back to the most wealthy among us, exploiting workers to enrich themselves with as much as possible while no care is given for the health and safety of those who make their wealth possible. Tradition can be traced back to voter suppression and Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising the votes of those who don’t fit their socioeconomic standards, who don’t fit their color code.

This tradition can be traced back to TODAY! Because this tradition of disenfranchisement is happening TODAY! Nearly every state with a GOP majority has done, and is doing all it can to drop voters off the roles. Pretending there’s some kind of fraud. This fraud is simply the poor, those of color, and those who don’t fit a white Christian mold, that they seem to think this country is.

Through years of scheming and planning, through a lack of foresight from our founding fathers, trying to appease slave states. The GOP has found a way of minority rule over the vastly diverse country America is. This minoritarian rule can be seen clearly in SCOTUS, it can be seen in the senate where millions and millions of Americans have little to no say on the goings on in government. Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, all those states combined don’t have the number of citizens California does. All those states are “conservative” states, but California gets 2 representatives, the collective there is 10! A 10-2 vote with not nearly as many constituents. There’s the house though!? Some may argue. The house is a joke! So gerrymandered, useless idiots like Margery toilet Greene will keep her seat for decades to come. We outnumber conservatives in the real world but are trampled by them in representation.

We are the revolutionaries! We are the fight against the forces of old and evil! We are the fight for change! For a better America, for a better world where ALL have equal rights! Where ALL get the same shot at the American dream! Where ALL are treated as members of this country despite their origins or preferences or religion! We are the rebellion against “tradition”. A tradition that seeks to benefit one sect of peoples. We are the other sect and we will not be gaslit to think otherwise.

All of us in the pro-democracy movement are the heart of this nation. The liberals who will take the pinnacle of diversity and thrive with the ideas of all! We are the change. We are the next generation. We are love! We are hope! We are the open minded, accepting, tolerant, compassionate, ever learning, ever growing liberals of the United States of America.

[burst-of-iridescent]

well since i can already tell that we’re all going to be subjected to the same old tired mai & mai.ko discourse for the foreseeable future, let’s get it clear right now that the atla comics have never been, and will never be acceptable mediums of character development, and here’s why:

1. the comics are given the benefit of hindsight, which impairs organic character growth.

it’s become extremely clear over the last few years that many of the comics are made as, or include, direct responses to criticisms of the original show — especially when it comes to katara, mai, and the canon pairings. aang didn’t ask katara for consent? look, he’s checking if he can kiss her! mai doesn’t care about fire nation imperialism? here, she’s an anti fascist! iroh was a creep to june? don’t worry, here he is apologising!

many of the things the characters do or say in the comics feel unnatural because they are not written as characters, but as mouthpieces for the creators to address fandom complaints from the original show.

“but that’s good, right? they’re trying to make it better!” i mean… sure? it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s damage control, and that no matter what stories span the middle, the arcs of these characters still begin and end with avatar: the last airbender, and the legend of korra, both of which are fixed and immutable. the comics cannot retroactively fix the issues of either show, because they’ve already been defined as the goalposts of the characters’ lives, and there is no way to undo that.

it’s like if you eat a meal that isn’t to your satisfaction, and maybe the chief makes you another dish, which is all well and good — but it doesn’t fix the fact that the original meal still sucked! sometimes, accepting criticism means accepting that there’s no way to go back and fix it but to do better next time, with the next story you wish to tell.

if the legend of korra didn’t exist, and the arcs of the characters were left open after atla, then maybe there would be for the room for the comics to function as character development if not for the fact that…

2. the comics are intended for a very different audience than the show.

it’s obvious that the audience for the original show vastly outnumbers the audience for the comics, likely by thousands, if not millions. this isn’t the mcu, where the installation of any atla property is vital to understanding the next, and so on. you can skip the comics and miss nothing whatsoever (and honestly your life would be far improved by doing so).

those who read the comics are likely only the real diehard fans of the show — and the creators know this, which is why we have the whole issue of point one above. but this difference in audience matters, because it reflects the significance of the story being told, and how important it is for the audience to know it. this is why, if the characters’ development and storylines in the comics truly, genuinely mattered, it would have been in the show already.

i’m not saying that the gaang wouldn’t have continued to grow and change post-atla, but generally stories exist as closed circuits, self-contained within themselves. when you end atla, you’re meant to believe that those arcs are finished. that’s the whole reason the comics deal mostly with fun silly adventures, or with quick, temporary conflicts instead of grand, overarching narratives, because they are not truly meant to function as a continuation of the story of atla, or its characters.

(if you ask me frankly, they’re meant to be nostalgia cash grabs, but that’s neither here nor there.)

creator intention matters with the atla comics (or any atla property, in fact), because creator intention was the subject of criticism for the original show in the first place. why must we rely on the comics or the cookbook or avatar legends to tell us that katara did things with her life outside of aang? why do we need to turn to something released nearly two decades after atla to find any evidence that mai denounced the fire nation’s imperialist indoctrination, when she’s romantically involved with one of the show’s most important characters? why are these stories relegated to a medium with far less reach, far too late?

the answer is that the writers didn’t find those stories to be originally worth telling, and that is the real problem fans have been pointing out since 2008.

so, tldr:

[germiyahu]

There's such an intricate interplay between antisemitism and islamophobia from the slacktivist left. For every reason they can think of to delegitimize the Jewish People's connection to Eretz Yisrael, it's propped up by some Noble Savage presumptions about Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims.

Since Jews in America are seen as a model minority, seen as having accessed whiteness and privilege, and "antisemitism" is at worst having to explain what Hanukah is to clueless Christians, the Left is confused as to exactly why Jews care about Jerusalem and the Land of Israel so much. Shouldn't they be above such petty and barbaric and outdated concerns such as a dusty old book from 2,000 years ago?

They should be more enlightened than that. They're all rich suburban secular Democrats. They're the leftist religion, according to bloggers on this very platform. There is no room for Judaism to be a religion, there's no acknowledgment of ancient customs, rituals, and the deep mysticism that's still alive and well in the Jewish community. There's no attempt to understand Jewish history and culture and why a group of people you think shares your vaguely atheistic vaguely liberal (and not in the Tankie sense) vaguely smug detached Western worldview... is more complex and unique than that.

Jews should be happy living in Diaspora because clearly the problem of antisemitism is fixed now, and never really was a problem in America. There must be something sinister behind a desire to reestablish a country by and for Jews. There must be something colonial, oppressive, European and White about it. Because why else would they do it? They have it good here. And no we won't acknowledge where Israelis primarily descend from because that requires us to do research and have a shred of nuance and integrity when it comes to Jews. No thanks!

A lot of the modern left is nonconsensually dragging Jews kicking and screaming from their own unique demographic toward the banal Norm. To themselves. But not totally. See they think they relate to Jews and vice versa, but not enough that when they think Jews should "know better," or haven't "learned their lesson," from the Holocaust, it engenders a deep seeded disgust and mistrust and rage that's not felt for actually privileged mainstream dominant society.

Conversely, the slacktivist Left sees Arabs as savages. Silly desert people who eat sand and worship a big black cube and cover every inch of their bodies for some reason. How quaint! When the Palestinian/Arab/Muslim cause explains that Jerusalem is important to them, the White Western Leftist nods sagely and says "Your culture is so valid queen," because they don't care. They just accept that Muslim society would be willing to fight over an ancient city proscribed as holy in dusty old tomes. Because that fits the narrative already surrounding Muslims.

They're seen as backwards, but the Left, reacting to their conservative parents and the Bush era, see "Muslims are backwards," and says not "No actually they're modern groups of people with practical geopolitical goals," but instead "Yeah and that makes them better than us!" Especially with this new crop of baby Leftists who think Islamo-Fascist "Feudalism" or whatever the best term would be, is aspirational or at least harmless... because it's not capitalism :)

So Muslims are infantilized and condescended to because the Western Leftist is still just as racist as their parents, but they feel guilty about their parents without considering their contribution to White Supremacy and the Post Bush surveillance state. And all the while Jews are reprimanded and held to an impossible standard because the Western Leftist, again, rejects their conservative parents' philosemitism, and decides that Jews Must be Punished when they step off the pedestal that Suffering the Shoah placed them on.

Jews should be above nationalism, Jews should know that demurely suffering pogroms and ethnic cleansing and genocide and general inequity and humiliation will earn them their divine reward in the end. Muslims should not be above nationalism, because they're not capable of being above it, and can't we throw them a bone, after all Obama was the worst president in history because of the Drone War and let's not mention George W Bush at all :0

Hot take, but I believe this is an essential underpinning of where the average disaffected White millennial/zoomer Leftist's head is at with regard to Israel and Palestine. They won't acknowledge it of course, but I can generally see through things like this.

[kropotkindersurprise]

if everyone voted in EVERY election in the US, not just the presidential, it wouldnt be a choice between 99% hitler and hitler. but when it gets to that choice, that 1% saves 1% of life, at least. its a choice between a democracy and 20% rise in hate crimes. Between voting next election, and trump being a a fascist for "only the first few days".

No it doesnt "save 1% of life". it just moves the window so that next election 99.5% Hitler will be acceptable to you. If you never withhold your vote, if you can never tell them theyve gone too far (even when theyr committing genocide!), you're just telling them they can keep moving to the right forever, as long as the Republicans are 1% more right-wing.

It needs to stop at some point, and if "we enthusiastically support genocide" isnt that point i dont know what to tell you. you are a bad person and you would have kept you head down in Nazi Germany and pretended nothing was going on.