#wto oc

[tomatikoma]

She's never afraid to get her hands dirty. Time after time, she dips her fingers into the darkest corners of the souls. Maybe that's why she likes hands so much. Especially the big, strong hands that... Ahem. On the other hand (sorry... I just... it's stronger than me...), it's part of her job to help wraiths maintain the remnants of sanity in this ruthless and insane world. But... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? OC belongs to @malky-tea <:3

[malky-tea]

Another picture in WoDzine, though I don't remember if it was in the first or second issue :D

Whoever I consider in the World of Darkness, vampires, demons, changelings and so on, I will ALWAYS have fortune tellers or necromancers (if the setting allows for such) at the top of my list. When it comes to ghosts, necromancy falls away on its own for obvious reasons. But fortune-telling is much better. I love the Spooks guild immensely, with the Oracles guild coming in a close second place.

And today I'm going to show you a soothsayer. Alas, he was not a member of the guild and is actually a renegade. But his main Arcanos is Fatalism, so that's fine. His name is Jonas and he has been wandering the Shadowlands for over a hundred years. A long time ago he suffered at the hands of the Oracles guild. Driven by revenge, he founded a renegade circle called "The Eye". There he takes in similarly unfortunate wraiths with a similar fate. His style of divination is divination by the wraith's Corpus and their Plasma. Yeah, it's a little violent. Often, however, when we struggle with someone, we become like them, if not worse. There is an attractive drama in that.

Jonas has appeared twice as an antagonist at my games. Oh, the players had to hate him a lot, because it was the Oracles who starred. Strangely enough, despite all the misfortune they caused each other, they found common ground with him and became buddies. Amazing result, I thought he would be destroyed.

[beanphomet]

My tabletop charas (minus my mage because I haven’t played her yet)

More about them under read more.

Camila: Lasombra antitribu from atlanta. Left the sabbat after literally so much shit happened and she got offered a place with the camarilla in london. Master of insane dice rolls and a broken character sheet.

Frankie: Kiasyd, technically independant, from deen haag. Currently on the run from their sire and hiding away with their corterie. Used to be a journalist and a changeling. Has like 1 strenght dice, once tortured a man.

Charlie: Toreador anarch (and also my first character) american who lived in glasgow for a while. Decided to become an anarch after being menaced by a cammy brujah elder long enough to flee the country and switch sects. Wants to be a magician so fucking bad.

Ethan: Wraith who got is face crushed by a collapsed shelf in a warehouse. No alignment yet. Has a sock puppet called doctor Richard and first character to get laid.

Salomina: Sabbat Nossie from atlanta, pyromaniac and pyrophiliac. Helped Camilas old pack get out of atlanta. Has a malkavian gf and befriended a rat. Clan over sect (has a cammy sire and ‘sibling’)

Mara: Cammy dominate malk. Is a nurse in a kindred psychiatric hospital and looks a bit like a manequin. Fought a werewolf with the girlies once and really wants her own domain.

Henry: Imbued Martyr from Mariposa. Died after falling into a cave full of nosferatu because i thought it was funny. Was just a little guy

Miranda: Imbued Avenger from Mariposa. Henrys ex wife. Decapitated a vampire once and causes her team mates horrible heart ache and personal traumas. Still tries her best.

Erik: He/Him lesbian who is wanted by the goverment for treason because he tried to expose illegal weapon trades. It didn’t work out. Thinks the solution to meeting the paranormal is to simply say No. Met a demon once and didn’t like it.

[dushpshpsh]

A birthday present for a friend🎲🃏💚

[spectrolitha]

The afterlife smells of freshly cut grass.

[crownedinmarigolds]

*swings around phone like a sloshing wine glass* Just felt like sharing some personal VTM lore!

So we were on a VTM RP discord server where the ST was one guy so we just mostly did our own scenes and character write ups so I of course monologued and made up my own scenes as my Hecata Noa all the time. I had big dots in spirit servant - and her powerful wraith was the elder brother she'd killed (to protect him it's a whole other story) who the ST mixed in rules from Wraith the Oblivion with. A lil op but I was responsible enough to be allowed to have it. 🤭 Wraith brother had dots in the arcanoi: possession. So he could take things over and eventually control people after enough points were put in. One thing that happens to wraiths with possession is that they begin becoming an amalgamation of what they possess often.

So! Noa was introduced to a nice government official through a mutual friend, whom she began dating so that she would have a safe body for her wraith servant brother to use without fear of being caught. (Obviously by being a vampire blood-bonding and using domination if needed) The official was an overweight gentleman, nothing that mattered to Noa, he was very reliable and she's not wholly a sexed up person anyway. She liked him a lot, for a human. However her brother is scum and judgemental and rude, and demanded he break up with this official because - low and behold - he was starting to lose his gym bro body due to the morphing nature of being a possessing Wraith.

So I had to lose a faithful and high ranking government servant because my spirit servant couldn't handle being chunky. RIP it sucks to suck. This is why we got stuck with useless but beautiful Julian! (This probably saved that official's life in the long term but that post break up blood bonding detox probably sucked)

(So much context is missing for many things but haha!)

The brother in question. Asshole!

[freequizbank]

Chinese ambassador says wine tariff review on track _ FreeQuizBank.com - Free Exam Practice Questions for LANTITE Numeracy, Mathematical Reasoning - OC, Selective and Scholarship Tests @acereduau #NSWeducation #AusEdu @AusGovEducation @ServiceNSW

[vprogresseducation]

Chinese ambassador says wine tariff review on track _ FreeQuizBank.com - Free Exam Practice Questions for LANTITE Numeracy, Mathematical Reasoning - OC, Selective and Scholarship Tests @acereduau #NSWeducation #AusEdu @AusGovEducation @ServiceNSW

[bollytollykolly]

At WTO meet, India calls out trade masquerading as environmental protection | Mint - Mint

https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMifGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmxpdmVtaW50LmNvbS9uZXdzL2F0LXd0by1tZWV0LWluZGlhLWNhbGxzLW91dC10cmFkZS1tYXNxdWVyYWRpbmctYXMtZW52aXJvbm1lbnRhbC1wcm90ZWN0aW9uLTExNzA4OTYzNzcwMDc1Lmh0bWzSAYABaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubGl2ZW1pbnQuY29tL25ld3MvYXQtd3RvLW1lZXQtaW5kaWEtY2FsbHMtb3V0LXRyYWRlLW1hc3F1ZXJhZGluZy1hcy1lbnZpcm9ubWVudGFsLXByb3RlY3Rpb24vYW1wLTExNzA4OTYzNzcwMDc1Lmh0bWw?oc=5&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[wlwdarlingcharming]

ever after high: welcome to oz

IN WHICH the children of the most prominent ozians must go back home to save the emerald city from their evil friend, while their ever after high squad tags along.

STARRING:

ELIAS WYKKYD, SON OF ELPHABA, THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST

GODIVA SOUTHGOOD, DAUGHTER OF GALINDA, THE GOOD WITCH OF THE SOUTH

ROWAN GALE, SON OF DOROTHY GALE (ft his dog, africa)

ÉMELIA RAHLD, DAUGHTER OF THE WIZARD OF OZ

[tomatikoma]

"Oh, ma chère, what I've learned about people in my long existence is that they love comfy chairs! Even if they're dead. People, I mean. Well, the chairs, too! Oh... someone's here, I gotta go." A charming ghost emerges from the shadows, his smiling mask facing the visitor. "Salut! Would you like to place an order?"

[malky-tea]

Lonely star, calm and distant. She had once been a lively and perky girl, but now all that was left of her was a shell filled with starlight. It's not sad, it's what she wanted.

Her name is Apus. She's an old wraith from a fairly large Necropolis, a member of the Haunters guild. One of her duties is to help the younger wraiths settle in, guide them, and teach them. Within the guild, she is a member of the Order of the Glass Menagerie. The long use of Pandemonium and Phantasm changed her Corpus beyond recognition, making her what she is now. Change of appearance, personality, name… However, something remains the same. She's always loved the stars…

[let-me-love-you-loki]

Okay so question for you : how the idea of a polyamorous story came into your mind ? (I love these kind of story) Still for you : did you plan on writing a Reader (or OC whatever you prefer) X Roman Reign ? And same with Drew McIntyre ? Question for Seth from Welcome to Oblivion : how did you fall in love with Addy ? Question for Seth from Waking up in Vegas : you twat, why did you let Mera go ????

(I’m going to break these up by doing one Seth, then author questions, and then the other Seth)

WUIV Seth: (Scrubbing his hands over his face) Look, I’m an ass. I’m the biggest ass in the entire universe. I get that. And I was a selfish ass. Mera gave up so much so that I could follow my dream of being a pro wrestler and main eventing Wrestlemania. But when I got there--the fame and all that shit just went to my head. (leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees and sighing) I’d always had Mera. That was a given. And now... all these women were just throwing themselves at me. I got antsy, I guess. I loved--love--Mera so much, but it wasn’t enough to stop me being selfish. So... yeah... I didn’t let her go so much as shoved her away. And she left. 

Q1: How did the idea of a polyamorous story come into your mind?

Me: Honestly, I’ve questioned before if I might be poly. I’m genuinely open to the idea of dating or being with more than one person at a time. And I think there aren’t enough stories that normalize poly relationships. Also, just in general, it’s really hard for me to pick my favorite Buck (but if I had to, Nick, all the way) or my favorite member of The Shield (that’s so hard... probably Ro). A poly story made it easy to not have to pick. 

Q2: Do you plan on writing a Reader/OC x Drew McIntyre or Roman Reigns story?

Me: Here’s the thing. I have so many plot bunnies running around in my head. And I’m pretty sure that there’s a request that got lost in the chaos of the last few years that was an OC/Roman story. Am I open to them, absolutely. Hell, I think I have an OC x Elias story in a file somewhere. So the real answer is I would, but they aren’t currently on the plan. Mostly because I’ve not been watching WWE that much, so I’ve kinda fallen away from them. Plus, Ro’s been out with the twins. 

WtO Seth: (looking thoroughly shocked) What? Me and Addy? Hell no. I get she’s with Ro and Dean--which was fucking weird to get used to at the beginning--but that doesn’t mean I’m into her. Not like that anyway. We’re friends. I’ve never met anyone who can put away coffee like me. She’s cool, but we’re just friends. That’s it. 

[arcticdementor]

In 2016, voters on both sides of the Atlantic shocked the political establishment by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. In the eyes of their critics, these movements represented the resurgence of dan­gerous forms of populism and nationalism. Combined with earlier “nationalist-populist” victories in central Europe, and rising support for populist parties elsewhere, commentators at the time predicted—or, in most cases, feared—that a populist wave could soon sweep across the West and beyond.

Four years later, such a wave has not materialized, though popu­lism has hardly disappeared. Andrzej Duda recently won reelection in Poland, while Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has held on to its super­majority in parliament, and populist parties represent significant vot­ing blocs in legislatures around the world. After a three-year interlude, the United Kingdom has moved forward with Brexit under the premiership of Boris Johnson.

Today, as another U.S. presidential election approaches, it is worth taking stock of the transformations that have—and have not—oc­curred within American conservatism during the last four years. If Trump goes down to defeat this November, some will suggest that any attempted reconfiguration of the American Right provoked by his 2016 election was a misbegotten effort, and that, after a four-year hiatus, global liberalism can now safely resume. But a closer examination of right-wing populism’s trajectory, both within and outside the United States, suggests that such a return to Bush-era conservatism is unlikely. Regardless of what happens in the November election, the gaps between conservative ideology and practical realities will continue to push right-wing parties in postliberal directions and will continue to favor political, if not necessarily partisan, realignment.

…

Michael Lind has described the situation as a new class war. “A trans­atlantic class war has broken out simultaneously in many Western countries,” he writes, “between elites based in the corporate, financial, government, media, and educational sectors and disproportionately native working-class populists. The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and out­siders.”3 Lee Drutman’s much-discussed analysis of the 2016 elec­torate in the United States indicates how this reconfiguration has begun to unfold. Comparing the social and economic views of voters for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Drutman found, not surprisingly, that traditionally conservative voters favored Trump and traditionally liberal voters favored Clinton. What propelled Trump to victory was his three-to-one win over Clinton among populist vot­ers—those liberal (i.e., Left) on economic issues and con­servative on social questions and matters of identity. Most strikingly, populists made up 28.9 percent of the American electorate in 2016, whereas libertarian voters—those conservative on economics and Left or lib­eral on social questions—were only 3.8 percent of the electorate.4

It was Trump’s performance among the large number of populist voters and Trump’s disregard of libertarians that shocked the Ameri­can Right in particular. Ever since Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley patched together “fusionist” conservatism in the 1950s and ’60s, the American Right has combined social and cultural traditionalism with a broadly liber­tarian economic outlook. The terminology has long been confus­ing, as American conservatives have typically held views called liberal or neoliberal in the European context: they argue for a small state with minimal intervention in the private sector; they favor (at least in theory) the privatization or elimination of many government services; and they are suspicious of public benefits as well as public services, but they make an exception for a strong military. This alliance was driven by the turn of the Democrats toward the Left, although the Democratic Party had previously been home to socially conservative Catholic immigrants who favored the corporatist agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

…

One additional factor is needed before explaining how the Repub­lican Party and American conservatives responded to Trump’s vic­tory. Tocqueville was correct when he observed that America was a society full of associations, with citizens constantly forming new groups to push for political and social changes of every variety. Over the second half of the twentieth century, however, many of these associations changed from organic expressions of citi­zen concern to large foundations which advanced the agendas of their donors. On the right, this change meant that conservative think tanks, activist groups, and the like adopted an almost universally libertarian viewpoint—as the donors endowing these foundations held libertarian views on economics—albeit under the banner of “fusionism.” Consequently, at typical conservative conferences for university students, socially con­servative students are imbued with libertarian free market doctrines (though rarely any serious empirical study of modern markets and firms).

…

The end of the Cold War and the success of Bill Clinton’s neo­liberal presidency—during which he incorporated welfare reform, free trade, and stricter criminal justice policies into the Democratic platform—convinced libertarians and neoliberals on the right and left that their moment was at hand. The Republican Party came to power in the U.S. Congress in the 1994 elections on a mission to slash government spending and welfare benefits. “The era of big government,” said Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union, “is over.” While the GOP did not achieve all its dreams (it had also hoped to eliminate numerous federal agencies like the Department of Education), free trade agreements such as nafta and Chinese accession to the WTO were signed with bipartisan support. During this period, the United States conceived of a future economy that would combine the mone­tization of internet technology and a transition from heavy manufacturing employment to a service-sector economy (hospitality, etc.). With a few exceptions, American conservatives had little or nothing to say about this change, even as the manufacturing core of the American economy was hollowed out. Fusionist conservatives had outsourced the economic portion of their thinking to libertarians, and they mostly professed their desire to “allow market forces to work.”

In the absence of an economic policy that would help middle- and working-class Americans, however, conservatives’ insistence on con­serving traditional family structures became hollow and moralistic. Many otherwise socially conservative black and Hispanic voters have avoided the Republican Party for precisely this reason. But socially conservative white voters, even those whom Republican economic policies do not help, have stayed with the party in the hopes that Republican presidents would appoint socially conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts. A tipping point during the 2016 campaign was Trump’s decision in May of that year to release a list of possible Supreme Court picks in order to reassure pro-life voters of his sympathy with socially conservative causes.

Yet Trump’s appointees have largely disappointed social conservatives with their recent rulings. It seems increasingly clear that, over a period of four decades, the conservative legal movement’s primary success has been to keep Republican voters engaged in a Sisyphean task. America’s underlying liberalism, as Adrian Vermeule put it re­cently, has meant that “in critical cases, involving central commitments of the unwritten constitution, it is highly likely that one or more of the middling conservative justices” will defect.5 Conservatives have pinned their hope on institutions designed to fail them in critical moments.

…

Following the shock of 2016, American conservatives have divided into three main categories: (1) those who opposed Trump, still oppose him, and hope to regain control of the Republican Party on the stand­ard pro-business, laissez-faire platform of recent decades; (2) those who were initially skeptical about Trump but have rallied around the cause of nationalism; and (3) those who have used the occasion of the Trump presidency to push for a new Right. Let us take a brief look at these three groups.

…

The great hope of the Never Trumpers seems to be that a Trump loss in November, especially a decisive one, will revive their fortunes within the Republican Party. But their political prospects seem lim­ited even in this scenario. Despite advertising themselves as responsible centrists, they have shown essentially zero interest in serious policymaking, focusing almost entirely on Trump’s character, per­sonal scandals, their preferred vision of “American values,” and so on. Meanwhile, the few areas of potential bipartisan collaboration have shifted, for the foreseeable future, mainly to issues of industrial policy and technological competition with China—issues the Never Trump­ers have totally ignored, both during the last few years and throughout their entire careers. It was Republicans like Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley who recently cosponsored the American Foundries Act with Chuck Schumer, for example. And now that Democratic nom­inee Joe Biden has made issues like industrial policy and “Buy American” key aspects of his campaign, any Republican cooperation with a Biden administration will likely be led by the economic pop­ulists. The Never Trumpers are simply irrelevant on these issues, and their actual records when in government remain glaring liabilities for anyone associated with them. Donors and media out­lets might have some use for them, as they apparently do today, but neither the Biden administration nor the post-Trump Republican leadership are likely to have much interest in these figures.

Unlike the Never Trumpers, the second group of conservatives have embraced Trump’s “nationalist” rhetoric, but they have other­wise left traditional (anti-statist) American conservatism intact. Among voters, these were Americans who gravitated to Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” along with immigration restrictions and a rejection of globalism in economic and foreign policy. Some conservative intellectuals embraced the nationalist framework from the beginning, such as Michael Anton, whose article “The Flight 93 Election” starkly contrasted the options of Trump and Hillary Clin­ton. Writing in 2016 at the ironically titled blog Journal of American Greatness under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (a blog to which I contributed as well), Anton excoriated “checklist conservatives” for having stuck with free market ideology and neoconservative foreign policy even in the face of repeated failures. This group of nationalist conservatives have congregated around the Claremont Institute and its Claremont Review of Books and affiliated publications. Aside from becoming gen­erally more nationalist on foreign and immigration poli­cy, however, this group has had little to say about the implications of broader political realignment.

In summer 2019, the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony launched a conference in Washington under the name “National Conservatism,” aiming to gather intellectuals and politicos who reject the Never Trump framework. Hazony’s own defense of nationalism, published in the 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, is itself sui generis. In Hazony’s account, nations are the permanent opposition to empires, against which they always find themselves locked in struggle, though it is difficult to fit into this framework nations that became or ac­quired empires (what would anti-imperial nationalism say about Algeria, for example?). Hazony’s view of nations is based heavily on the Old Testament and the experience of Israel and England, as well as a pecu­liarly English view of conservatism as subrational and tra­ditionalist. National Conservatism is also markedly Protestant in an old-fash­ioned way, as Hazony has promoted the view that Henry VIII’s actions constituted the first Brexit in resistance to ecclesiastical imperialism. While openly aligning itself with European populists and nationalists, however, National Conservatism has had little to say about the sources of continental right-wing thought, from Roman law to the Catholic Church, or about the conservative use of the state.

…

The difficulty facing National Conservatism, however, is that it is primarily oriented toward rethinking conservatism itself rather than thinking primarily about the challenges of contemporary politics. National Conservatism and (anti-Trump) Principled Conservatism are both arguments over the content of conservatism. In the Anglo-American context, National Conservatism, as Hazony frames it, high­lights historical empiricism (or traditionalism), nationalism (i.e., against imperialism), religion, and limited executive power. While the “na­tionalism” element of National Conservatism is transferable to other countries, historical empiricism and limited executive power are not the most pressing political concepts, particularly in times of economic crisis and emergency.

…

Thus most of the conservative activists wearing MAGA hats at Trump rallies or conservative political conventions are simply anti-immigration libertarians. Talk to them about the need for the state to support domestic manufacturing, or the need to boost family for­mation through a Hungarian-style benefit program, and they will probably call you a socialist. In general, aside from opposition to immigration and support for the American military, they have no vision of how the government is to be used at all. In different cir­cumstances, they would revert to an anti-government stance along with opposition to increases in federal spending.

…

The third group of conservatives are those who take Trump’s election, Brexit, and the rise of populist political movements in Eu­rope to demonstrate that the configuration of politi­cal ideologies immediately prior to 2016 had fallen out of step with conditions on the ground. As it is to this group that I myself belong, I transition here from describing the circumstances of Ameri­can con­servatism to outlining, however briefly, an argument for this vision of the Right.

American conservatism has been anti-statist since it coalesced in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansionary New Deal during the Great Depression, and particularly in its formulation after World War II. Even among conservatives who are not anti-statist per se, hostility to and skepticism of the federal government runs deep. The state is considerably less visible in daily life in America than else­where: health care is privately administered, public universities are not free, taxes are not suffocating, and labor is more lightly regulated. Yet most American conservative intellectuals, activists, journalists, think tank staff, and the like still act as though the primary enemy is the federal government, or use alarming rhetoric about taxation that has not been changed since the days of much higher tax rates before Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 and 1986.

From the standpoint of the postliberal Right, the liberal view of the state as a keeper of the peace and preserver of individual liberties—the view of most American conservatives before Trump—is not an adequate answer to the present situation. A correction in the direction of the state is needed. On this point the American Right has much to learn from the European Right. And as discussed above, the constituencies that delivered the Re­publicans to power in 2016 would likely agree. According to a major March 2019 survey of U.S. adults, pluralities of respondents favor increased federal spending in almost every category: education, veterans bene­fits, rebuilding highways and bridges, Medicare, environmental pro­tection, health care, scientific re­search, Social Security, assistance to the needy, domestic anti-terror­ism, military defense, and assistance to the needy in the world. Only in the category of assistance to the unemployed did respondents favor keeping spending the same (43 percent) rather than increasing it (31 percent).6 Trump’s victory additionally suggests that there is a majori­ty of Americans who favor increased state intervention to align eco­nomic production with the national interest, and who favor an end to the increasingly punitive and destabilizing form of cultural pro­gres­sivism domi­nant at present, and a correction in favor of the family.

The way to view this movement is that a maintenance or increase of state power in the United States is going to continue. The question is simply whether the Right is willing to use power when it has access to it, and use it for the sake of the common good. Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and liber­tarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises, the loss of U.S. manu­facturing, and a completely demor­alized society. Yet many conservatives continue to speak as though libertarianism is the solu­tion.

…

If we consider the policy areas that can and should drive political change in the United States, two areas stand out for the new American Right: family policy and industrial policy. On the first, merely speaking about the cultural pressures that families face, as American conservatives have typically done, is not enough. Too many families cannot afford children, and all the factors hindering the choice to raise children are only becoming exacerbated in the post-Covid-19 world. The United States has the fiscal resources for a family policy, like that pioneered in Hungary and elsewhere, that would meaningfully sup­port the formation of families—and the creation, for conservatives, of a stable electoral base. In the fall 2019 American Affairs, I outlined what a FamilyPay proposal should look like in the United States, cen­tered on an annual $6,500 benefit for married couples with one child, $11,500 for two, and so on. As the response to coronavirus shows, rapid political change is possible under extreme circumstances, and the Right must be ready to go with spending plans that buoy Ameri­can families during a time of severe economic distress.

…

The second area of advance in conservative thinking concerns industrial policy. In the United States, industrial policy largely dis­appeared from public discourse after the end of the Cold War and the worldwide trend toward liberalization. During that time, though, the United States arguably implemented a different kind of industrial policy—of moving labor off­shore and transitioning to a digital and service-sector economy. Since 1990, China in particular has rapidly increased its share of value-added in high-tech manufacturing, while U.S. manufacturing produc­tivity growth has stalled. American com­panies have become less inno­vative, not more; they do less investment, not more; and many spend a significant portion of their profits boosting their own stock prices. The result is that the number of low-wage, low-pro­ductivity service sector jobs has in­creased, while many critical manu­facturing sectors have slumped.

Politicians like Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton, in particular, are putting industrial policy back on the map, arguing that national security requires us to maintain industrial capa­city, not only through Trump-style trade actions but through direct­ing American investment toward strategic sectors. Government re­ports from Rubio’s office have emphasized the need to counteract China’s plan to dominate world manufacturing by 2025, a view which has since become something of a bipartisan consensus. While indus­trial policy has often been thought to be more appropriate for de­veloping economies, the frightening reality is that Western economies are or soon will be merely “developing” compared to Chinese ad­vances in 5G communications, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. The coronavirus crisis has also highlighted Ameri­can dependence on Chinese-manufactured pharmaceuticals and medical equipment; the pressing need for an American industrial policy can no longer be ignored.

Moreover, the postliberal priorities of industrial policy and fami­ly policy are complementary. A comprehensive family policy will give statesmen on the right the stability from which to implement an ambitious industrial policy (and pursue concomitant goals of stronger labor policy and workforce skills development).

…

What the Right has not yet found is an ideology through which to integrate these elements of a new politics that takes advantage of the state for the sake of the common good. Indeed, the Right has implau­sibly convinced itself that modern conservatism is not an ideology at all. As the reaction against liberal democracy’s system of separations implies, however, majority or potentially majority constituencies across the West want their nations to be integral wholes: to have con­trol over their borders, an economy put in the service of the com­mon good, the ability to raise successful families, and the capacity to main­tain their strategic advantage in the face of rising adversaries.

The discovery in 2016 of voters with morally right-wing and eco­nomically “statist” views has been mirrored elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, this group turned out in force, both in the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the December 2019 elections that were in effect a second referendum on Brexit. The same voter group has kept Victor Orbán in power in Hungary, and has established and expanded a right-wing majority in Poland—most recently sending Andrzej Duda to a second presidential term, even in the face of a concerted international campaign to delegitimize his election in advance. Coun­tries previously thought to be immune to populism, like Spain, show growing movements in this direction. Italy has grown even cooler toward the European Union since the EU effectively hung it out to dry during the Covid-19 crisis earlier this year. And while the French Right is politically divided, a union of right-wing forces there would be politically formidable. While the circumstances are different, each of these changes follows a similar path. At some point along the way, an enterprising right-wing party realizes that liberalism has become an exhausted ideology—exhausted because it is incapable of clearly articulating what the common good is, and incapable of inspiring the loyalty and shared sacrifice that nation-states require to function.

Everywhere that the Right is successful, it is shifting toward a postliberal political stance to reintegrate society, economy, and the state. To do so, it must begin with a base of socially conservative vot­ers, since voters split more strongly on social issues than on economic ones. Instead of trying to turn these voters into economic liberals, the Right should give them what they want: an economy oriented toward the nation by employing the means of state, and a society that is supportive of family life. Internally, this move will require the Right to change itself markedly. However important the traditions of Anglo‑American conservatism may be for some strains of conservatism, the moment is one in which politics and the state must reassert themselves against the attempt to dissolve them into markets and a borderless globalism. That will require the Right to become more corporatist in its approach to directing busi­ness activity in the na­tional interests, and more integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good. The word integralism has come back into vogue in English, not to posit some immediate union of church and state, but to argue that the liberal separation of politics and the common good is unsustainable and must be reintegrated. Whatever word we use to label it, the policies of the next Right are already in evidence: it will use the power of the state to coordinate business and industrial enterprises toward the common goods of peace and strength, while pursuing macroeconomic policies that shore up the cultural base required for any functioning polity. In doing so, moreover, the Right’s focus will inevitably shift from internal debates over the content of conservatism to external coalition building and effecting a larger political realignment.

[spectrolitha]

I've been sooooooo artblocked lately, it's awful. So I drew my ttrpg OCs from all over the place in fancy (or not) outfits referenced from Pinterest

And then I proceeded to forget to post it. Yay.

Short overview of folk here, from left to right:

- Claude from Wraith: the Oblivion. He led quite a miserable life and ended up in the Legion of Paupers, but not before spending some time as a thrall. He had only recently caught some semblance of a break. Yeah.

- Ruben, son of Aphrodite from Scion: becoming as gods ttrpg. He is pretty grim, despite his looks and heritage, but not without a reason. He's also aroace.

- Sharla, my Promethean: the Created girlie. Made by her creator to serve as a protector, she still fulfills her role – just in another group of people.

- Adlar, King of Summer in my Changeling: the Lost freehold. He hasn't actually been to Arcadia, but because he is a son of mortal woman and banished Gentry (so-called Charlatan) (a fact Adlar abhors and hides to the best of his ability) he is still technically a Changeling stuck in this whole changeling business

- Arcuvol, my good drow™ from DnD, because whenever I see some sort of evil faction I have to make a non-evil OC for it. (I'm never showing my Warhammer OCs to the world... Okay, they are still kinda evil when they should be). I was trying to make my own setting with DnD mechanics, but it's kinda dead now, so I don't know what to say.

[brannahgirl]

hi umm are you a furry and if so can u help me in some tips on how to get one...…?

Hello !! There are many ways to make or get a fursona or furry OC

1) Making your own Furry OC / Fursona

If you don't want to or don't know how to draw an anthro / furry character, you can find free furry / anthro bases on tumblr, deviantart, etc. You should be able to make your own character using the base, you just need a program to edit it in. Just be sure to follow the rules the artist wrote about the base.

2) Adoptables

You can find adopts here on tumblr if you don’t want to go to another site, just search "furry adopt" or something along those lines. You'll see varying prices for these characters, but if you're looking for a free character, or a character you can adopt WITHOUT spending money, I'd recommend searching thru deviantart's adopt groups. There are lovely artists who offer characters for free, or do "WTO" (Write to Adopt) or "DTA" (Draw to Adopt) options for their creations.

I hope this answers your question c: