#you spent thousands of dollars to try and be interesting! you damn loser!

[hecksupremechips]

Sometimes I think maybe I’m just not attracted to anyone at all but then I realize I’ve been looking at celebrities, people who are inherently unattractive and unfuckable

[cxmetery-gates]

OBSESSIVE TEACHINGS - DARK!TOM HIDDLESTON

CHAPTER FIVE: COFFEE AND TINDER

SUMMARY: Lynn and Gabriel have a heart-to-heart talk about her last lover, with Gabe offering barely-legal suggestions. WORD COUNT: 2.45k NOTES: Gabe is probably my favorite character WARNINGS: dark!tom hiddleston, teacher!tom hiddleston, mentions of past relationships, break-up talk, h*tler reference?? never thought i’d write that

OBSESSIVE TEACHINGS MASTERLIST

THE SOUND OF A BELL alerts the classroom that the period is over. Everyone had been already packed and ready to go minutes before Mr. Hiddleston even began wrapping up his lesson. Even when I suffered through chemistry or dragged my deflated soul through finance, I never thought of putting my notes and pens away so soon. I know more than one student saw the icy glare I sent across the room but, most importantly and unfortunately, I also know nearly all of them didn't catch the slight disappointment in Mr. Hiddleston's tone.

I truly despise most people.

From the moment class started, it's been so unmistakably clear how much he loves what he teaches, that he enjoys what he spent thousands of dollars on just to show people how great literature is. I understand that all too well— save the going into debt part. Teachers are often times so mundane with their knowledge, not realizing how the way they present the information affects our understanding and interest in such. This is why high school teachers are stereotyped as people who just want a paid summer vacation. However, Mr. Hiddleston really put effort into his theatrics, like his lecture was a play. People with a teaching degree should teach in this way— why else go penniless willingly? The overall excitement was entertaining. And for that, I have to give the man some credit.

"Alright, guys. We'll be diving into the second part of this lecture tomorrow. Have a good one, you are dismissed." I don't think Mr. Hiddleston needed to announce the last blip of his closing statement. As I said, people are so rude.

Ellie begins to shove her notepad and other items into her bag after our teacher finishes speaking, reminding me of my kind company. I, on the other hand, am scrambling to take the last bit of notes, trying to relay any possible concepts mentioned on to paper. While there might not have been much depth in today's class, jotting down every last tidbit of information could be life or death. Or perhaps I'm just anal-retentive when it comes to note-taking. By the time I finish the note, Ellie is already standing.

"Girl, hurry up. We gotta go!" She drags out the last vowel of the last word humorously.

I wave my hand at her, flipping pages and dodging paper cuts. "Go on without me. I'll be fine," I say, remembering that Ellie's homeroom is on the first floor and the farthest down the hall.

Rolling her big brown eyes, she sighs, walking backward. "I'll miss you poppet. I love you." Her fake British accent is terrible, but I don't bother enlightening her. Perhaps the slight discoloration in her cheeks and how fast she dashed out of the room was due to finding Mr. Hiddleston in ear-shot of her terrible accent. I bite my lip, forcing myself to look away out of sheer second-hand embarrassment.

Once all my belongings are together, I turn to leave.

"That truly was an awful mockery," Mr. Hiddleston says in my direction from the whiteboard. His long toned arms wipe the marker away as I begin to walk past him.

I chuckle. "I'll let her know you said that."

Mr. Hiddleston fakes a groan, placing the eraser on the marker tray then turning to face me with those oh-so-charming eyes. There's no other way to describe them other than mesmerizing. "Oh, don't tell her I said it. I like being liked."

"Being 'liked' is the least of your worries with these girls," I mumble, mostly to humor myself. However, I must have been louder than anticipated. The innuendo is heard and doesn't fly over his head.

A titter of a laugh is heard from the man, and I now regret the words I mumbled. "So I have been told," he replies, making a slightly uncomfortable face. I can't blame him; anyone would feel incredibly awkward if teaching a class full of people who would sell both kidneys just to see them without a shirt.

Not in my dreams would I have imagined having a conversation with Mr. Hiddleston about how everyone wants to nail him. While such a phrase hasn't been explicitly noted, I have a feeling both our minds are in the same gutter. And with that recognition, an awkward heat embraces me. I press my lips together tightly and offer a shrug. "I think the proper thing for me to say is good luck."

Seeming to take my word, Mr. Hiddleston passes me a smile. I can't read what the meaning is, but I'll take it nonetheless with a cough to clear my throat. "Ah, well, as much as I love juicy gossip and scandals, I've got a stuck up prune for homeroom, so I definitely need to get going." I send him a wave, making my exit as awkward as possible.

"Warntz?" He asks.

My nose wrinkles at the name. It eve sounds terrible, almost as terrifying as Trunchbull or Umbridge. "You betcha."

"Good luck, Lynn. You've got two minutes."

I want to give another sassy remark, but the teasing look I find when I look over my shoulder sends my body into another blush. Muttering something close to 'whatever,' I decide that leaving is for the best, even if that means awaiting an angry, shriveled up raisin.

══════════════════

Exiting the high school front doors a few hours before the final bell is like the biggest sigh of relief and 'sucks to be you' to everyone else. An arm wraps around my shoulder, one I embrace kindly.

"So, we've got an hour on our hands," Gabriel reminds me, hinting we'll have to come back to grab Ellie and River. As he speaks, I toss my head back on his toned bicep. I swear he works out too much for an unpopular loser. "What would you like to do?"

I groan, dragging my chin down to my chest. "Why do I have to decide? You know I hate making decisions."

"We're taking second lunch here, Lynn. It isn't life or death, you weirdo," Gabe chortles.

"Can we just go get a coffee? I feel like I'm about to pass out." For effect, I pretend to faint, nearly going complete limp before his arms can hoist me back up.

Rolling his dark eyes, my partner in crime pulls a set of keys from his pocket, swinging the lanyard around his fingers while we head towards a tattered white truck being held together by zip ties, duct tape, and love. "You and Elle with your coffee addiction."

"Could be meth," I retort.

Snorting, Gabe slips a key into the slit on the driver's side. I stand on the opposite, sending a humored smile. "Yeah, as if that's any worse."

We make it to the local coffee shop in no time. Luckily for us, the lunch rush hour in this town ends just as we hit the road if we avoid the main highways that is. Gabe's truck and the coffee shop have a similar aesthetic: crowded, old, falling apart with an overwhelming sense of home and personality. I can't count how many times I've broken down and received well off advice from him in both locations. It feels safe here and being around him. Gabe's like the much older brother (by a month) that I never had. We're both complete, utter assholes to each other about 60% of the time, enforcing the sibling-like bond we have.

"Thank you," I say sweetly to the barista as he places my cold brew in front of me and Gabe's hot chocolate in front of him. Mimicking my gratitude, Gabe gives his thanks as the employee shuffled away, awkwardly patting at his frizzy hair.

We both take a sip and visibly relax. "So, the first day of our last year of high school." Gabe is also the mom friend. "Tell me, dear, how were all your classes?"

"Oh, dearest mother, I feel so content with my choices," I reply with a vintage accent, acting as though my voiced popped in from the 1920s. "How ever will I pick a favorite?"

Wiggling his brows, Gabe replies, "I hear someone landed themselves in the hottest teacher's class."

Prompting to return to my normal voice, I roll my eyes, a huff expelling from my diaphragm. "He's definitely a piece of eye candy, I'll tell you that."

"Took four years to figure that one out? I didn't realize unobservant you are." Taking a pause, Gabe brings to smirk widely. "Maybe that's why you haven't asked River out yet."

My eyes grow wide, my skin goes red. Looking at anywhere other than Gabe's eyes and smirking lips is a must. "I don't know—"

"Lynn, everyone knows."

"Sure, but he doesn't." I pause. "Wait, does he?"

"Dude, no, of course, he doesn't. He still thinks you're heartbroken over Trinity."

Ah, yes, Trinity. Who knew a happy year and two months could be wholly demolished beyond reconciliation in a single weekend? Certain not I, as I have spent the past three months moving on and over the ordeal. An annoyed grunt leads my cheek to rest in my fist. "He thinks I'm not over it?"

Gabe leans forwards. "None of us do, Lynn."

I stay silent.

"What happened... you didn't deserve that. Hell, Hitler wouldn't have deserved that. Probably."

"Weeeeell—"

"Point is, I know you're still trying to find a way to heal. You've done a damn good job, duh. But River thinks you're still in love with her."

"Ugh. I'd rather eat hairy horse shit than see her ever again."

Gabriel nods, "I was hoping that would be the case."

Knocking my knuckles on the wooden table, I let out an exaggerated sigh. "Man, I'm tired."

"You know we're all here for you, right?" Gabe asks, leaning in just a few inches. I want to roll my eyes, tell him that he worries too much, but I can't. I can't tell him, not because I want him to shut up or to change the topic, but because he knows me. To Gabe, I'm an open book.

I run out of words to say relating to the topic. The breakup is old news, everything following the incident becoming irrelevant memories and irreplaceable time. I'm kidding myself when I say I've moved on entirely because Gabriel is right: I haven't. Sometimes my thoughts get stuck on what I could have done better or what I should have done to convince her to stay. Despite these annoying blips, I know deep down that it was inevitable, that her consistent cheating and the emotional manipulation would only surface for everyone to see in due time. If they hadn't— which I tried to keep from happening— I have a gut-wrenching feeling I'd still be in the situation. I had a feeling Trinity and me wouldn't last, but it wasn't until after things ended did I realize how well she had me wrapped around her finger. It's taken months to find my way out of her web, but I now face the scary journey of recovery. Thankfully, the process has not been as hard as I anticipated. After all, living two cities away certainly helps.

"Yeah, I know. I'm still going through the motions. I just want it to speed up, you know?"

Smirking and pulling his hand back, Gabriel replies, "Maybe a Tinder will help?"

My nose wrinkles at the mere consideration. Hooking up, dating apps, meeting strangers behind a phone— not really my thing. "Nah, I'll pass on that offer, thanks."

"Suit yourself."

"Hmm, maybe I'll look into a sugar daddy site. Money from older men might make me feel a bit better."

Gabriel takes a sip of his hot chocolate, grinning. "Well, you have an interesting way with teachers. If you're struggling in a particular class, maybe that little fantasy of yours will come true."

"Oh yes, I can't wait to hop on Mr. Riley's seventy-year-old dick."

"Mhmm, yummy."

At this, I bark into a laughing-while-painfully-cringing fit. Never being a fan of the phrase "yummy" and having it tied to a man that's so old he's basically decaying, I find every part of this new conversation revoltingly hilarious. I guess my sudden outburst of laughter caught Gabe off guard, staring at me with a shocked grin and fixing the infamous beanie he wears. I couldn't count how many times I've seen him without; you can't count to zero.

"It really wasn't that funny," he says with a small hiccup of laughter in his voice.

I settle myself now that I feel the eyes of everyone in the coffee shop staring. "You're right, but something about it made me crack." I flip my phone over to check the time. "Should we be getting back? They've got twenty minutes left."

Gabe nods and lets out a content sigh. "Yeah, I guess so."

We decide to chug the rest of our beverages quickly— now room temperature and not as satisfying— before heading back out into the world. Away in the parking lot, the truck seems to beckon us to its forty-year-old, duct-tape-bound seats. As Gabe unlocks the truck doors, I let out a content sign and stare up at the sky. Above, the sun beams down on us and, like an idiot, I managed to look directly into it. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust but by that point, a dark cloud rolled over the blinding, distant star.

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

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@khadineberry​

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[panharmonium]

@merlinobsessionist you understand me on a spiritual level

[putting the rest of this under a cut because it just ended up being me grumping at length about fandom trends - which, yes, i am well-aware is a silly endeavour in all cases, but sometimes you just gotta have your little grump regardless, you know, for health reasons. X)  and in this particular case the grumping is probably relevant/entertaining only to myself, and you, and one or two other people here, so, tucking it away to spare everyone’s dash :) ]

the other day i was exploring the mostly abandoned wasteland that is the merlin fandom on livejournal (since that’s my original fandom home and obviously i missed out on being involved in that particular niche of lj when merlin was active, so i was feeling nostalgic and kinda curious as to it had looked like) - i stumbled over a merlin fic-finders comm and looked up my boy william just for kicks, and surprisingly, a couple of the old requests sounded like maybe i WAS involved in the merlin fandom on livejournal back then and i just don’t remember it

i think i wrote this in a past life

this is an eleven year-old comment in a mostly defunct fandom community but i felt it in my BONES

oh, my dear commenter from 8 years ago, i WISH  XD

it made me laugh, and then it made me grumpy, because obviously there were very few suggestions offered in response to these asks - the fics just don’t exist, not in any numbers.

and like, the thing is, i don’t particularly care about the shipping side of things for the most part; i always lean towards gen and that’s mostly been it, for me; that’s always been my MO in every fandom i’ve ever participated in, but - look.  if i have to witness (*checks ao3*) 23,830 (twenty four thousand. twenty four THOUSAND!!!!) instances of merlin getting together with arthur hecking pendragon, over and over and over again, in every AU configuration under the sun, then you had better believe i am ready and willing to plead the case of the only person in the merlin-verse who did not think arthur pendragon deserved merlin’s entire life.  

and of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with arthur and merlin as an item, obviously (i mean, i can name a few things about it that don’t appeal to me personally, but that is not the same thing as a value judgment) and everybody should have fun with their own ships, always - but for me, personally, there is just...enough of that out there.  i have seen Enough.  it’s hard for me to even determine where the rest of the fandom is, under the ever-present spread of merlin/arthur content; a picture of merlin/arthur should literally be next to the dictionary entry for steamroller.

and of course, i knew it would be like this from the beginning, and i know complaining about the ubiquitousness of a particular ship in fandom is utterly silly, in the end, because it’s not like there’s anything wrong with something being ubiquitous - the whole point of fandom is to make what you love, and if that’s what everybody loves, well, hey, that’s just how it is!  that’s what people should be making - the stuff they love!  that’s what fandom is here for!  i only mutter to myself in the bubble of my own blog because the ubiquitousness makes it almost impossible for me to find what *i* love, because i don’t want to read about arthur/merlin in the first place, no matter who else appears in the fic, and also because my fave minor character, while he gets a pretty good amount of fannish screentime for someone who showed up in one episode, also suffers from the curse known as “virtually everything he features in is actually about merlin and arthur getting it on”

like - by the numbers, when you exclude merlin/arthur from will’s character tag, will retains less than 20% of his fics, some of which are already like...you know, he’s dead, or just mentioned, et cetera.  

and his poor ship tag...he and merlin have 136 fics in their tag, and at first you wanna look at that and be like - ‘hey, not bad, pal, that’s p. good for a rarepair!’  but in actuality, less than 20 of those fics are actually about him and merlin.  like...12% of his own ship tag actually belongs to him, and the rest is him being used as a plot device to get arthur and merlin together.

and i am sure that a lot of other side characters probably suffer from this, too, given the general fic distribution in this fandom, though the only person i’ve looked at for comparison purposes is freya, who is a (mostly) one-ep character like will.  she, despite that, doesn’t appear to get hit quite as hard - she seems to keep more of her fic for herself, which is nice (when i exclude merlin/arthur from the freya/merlin search, freya still retains about 65% of her fics, as opposed to will’s sad little 12%).  i’m glad for her, though - she of all people does not need to be losing fic to arthur; she has suffered enough. 

to put things in perspective, though - merlin and uther have more fics in their ship tag that earnestly focus on the tagged....hnhhmgnhn i can’t say it...relationship than merlin and will do - even filtering out every instance of dubcon/noncon.  

(and yes, i did in fact want to die when i had to actually click the merlin/uther tag on ao3 in order to check that factoid, thanks for asking.)

so, that said - i don’t generally read canon-era fic anyway, when i’m actively writing for a fandom, but since the merlin fandom sometimes feels like it consists solely of modern AU’s anyway, all i am trying to say is that it would be nice if i could pick up an AU including a character i enjoy without seeing him constantly reduced to:

merlin’s loser ex

merlin’s abusive ex (w h at)

merlin’s ex who’s kinda sorta tolerable-ish, maybe, if you squint, but just ultimately Not Right for merlin - holding merlin back, or being too overbearing, or too pushy, or Just Not Enough - or being someone who merlin stays with only bc he’s familiar and merlin’s settling for something safe and unrisky and stagnantly unfulfilling

the dude who merlin cheats on to be with arthur

the dude who cheats on merlin, bc the fic needed a reason to break up merlin and will so that white-knight!arthur could swoop in (cue me shouting ‘IN WHAT UNIVERSE DO YOU THINK WILL WOULD EVER - ’)

the dude merlin “makes mistakes with” when things with arthur aren’t going well

the friend-with-benefits who’s apparently chill with a casual arrangement, thus keeping himself conveniently out of the way of the oncoming merlin/arthur train

the friend-with-benefits who’s secretly NOT chill with a casual arrangement and who’s pining for merlin, except we all know that ain’t ever going anywhere because arthur exists, and in the meantime merlin only ever gets together with will to try and forget his problems

the friend-with-no-benefits who’s still pining for merlin (which situation, i might add, would be read completely differently if it were arthur in will’s shoes, because if that were the case then the audience would 100% be rooting for him)

the “best friend” whose only purpose in fic is to provide space for conversations/debriefs about merlin’s relationship/pre-relationship with arthur (like - i’m sorry, but there desperately needs to be some type of bechdel-esque test for will; e.g. do will and merlin have a conversation about something other than arthur pendragon?  if yes, u win, u may pass go, collect 20 dollars, congratulations)

the friend whose dislike of arthur always, ALWAYS ends up being framed as a mistake.  as will’s stubborn unwillingness to give arthur a chance, until at last will sees the light and succumbs to the irresistible beauty of merlin and arthur’s eternal love. -_-  there is vanishingly rare acknowledgement in fic of the fact that in the canon universe, all of the criticisms will makes about merlin and arthur’s relationship are not only accurate, but made in merlin’s best interests (and also, ultimately, proven right, by the end of the show - merlin tanks his whole damn life for a series of empty promises prophesying arthur pendragon’s future potential, and he gets NOTHING for his devotion.  merlin is more alone at the end of the show than he was at the beginning, when his only dream was to be loved and accepted by more than the two people who’d comprised his entire life up until that point.  and he spends at least half a decade in between the show’s hopeful beginning and its miserable end being told that he’s evil by the very person for whom he is expected to sacrifice his future.  

so what, exactly, makes will so wrong to be wary?  who among us wouldn’t be angry if we saw somebody we loved being forced to sacrifice themselves on an unforgiving altar like this?  

i don’t know the answer.  i’m not sure what it is that earns will his spot on the “destined to be shafted for arthur pendragon” list.  i don’t know if it’s an unconscious backlash to will’s refusal to hop on the arthur/merlin train, or if it’s just a superficial understanding/lack of genuine interest in his character, which, in that case, sure, i’ll give people that one, in all fairness; not everyone has spent a year picking his character apart (though i still don’t think it justifies tossing him in there just because the fic needs a random insert who can be positioned as inferior to arthur’s gloriousness).  either way, the end result is that we usually end up seeing a will who has very little in common with his source material, or who needs to ultimately step aside to make way for arthur - arthur, who never displays the same level of care toward merlin in canon that merlin shows toward him, and who actively oppresses merlin’s people for the entire duration of their relationship.  

like...it’s all just fic, obviously, and we can make characters as OOC as we want; have fun; go wild.  but at the same time, it’s impossible for me not to balk at how arthur in some of this fic is just - utterly unrecognizable.  in comparison with fic!will, arthur is the most Solicitous, Gentle, Understanding, Deeply Concerned, Invested-In-Merlin’s-Welfare-and-Inner-Thoughts creature you ever did see, and I’m just over here like - it is not like that!  it is NOT LIKE THAT!  IT HAS LITERALLY NEVER BEEN LIKE THAT.  arthur pendragon in fic sometimes interacts with merlin like - he tilts his head and listens like a therapist and affirms absolutely everything merlin says and tells him ‘gosh, i understand. tell me more. how can i help you’ - he goes about his day thinking about merlin and putting merlin first and i just - i literally have never seen this person before in my life.  who is this man?  who is this unbelievably attentive paragon of caring?  i’ve never met him before.

the entire running problem with merlin and arthur’s friendship in canon is that arthur, while he absolutely does care about merlin, tends to take merlin for granted.  merlin is just another feature of arthur’s landscape, until something dramatic happens and arthur has a little scare and saves merlin’s life, and then things go back to the way they were.  arthur doesn’t See merlin the way he should, not in the ordinary moments.  merlin goes home and spends his evenings thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person and to keep arthur safe and happy, but arthur just goes home and eats supper with his wife.  arthur does not go home and spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life.  he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’  he never feels like he’s supposed to be half of some two-sided coin.  i know people like to give arthur this quality in their fic - and that’s totally fine, of course, it’s fic, have as much fun as you want - but in canon, that is just not something arthur pendragon does.  it’s not who he is shown to be.  

and yet almost every time when i go to explore fandom, i find that the person who does put merlin first in canon is perpetually elbowed aside for this extremely generous interpretation of everyone’s favorite prince.  

and i just...i always try to find the good bits in everything, and i am sometimes willing to overlook a ship i don’t personally enjoy if there’s something else about the piece that i think is great, but there’s only so many times i can read the sentence “merlin had never felt like this with anyone, not even will” in fics where merlin and will are supposed to have been dating or even married/engaged, or “will was merlin’s best friend, but he just didn’t understand” (not like arthur, of course, who merlin literally just met a week ago), or “will was great, but there was only so much of him merlin could stand in one sitting/will was great, but he was best enjoyed in small doses.”  there’s only so many times i can read a hundred different variations of that before i start to get real grumpy.  and that’s not even touching the fics where will’s portrayed less favorably than that, even.  

so, you know.  i feel grumbly about it sometimes, how this particular character is trapped in a perpetual net of always being less-than, when one of the nicest parts of fandom for me is that every character/ship can have an infinitude of possibilities, even the ones i personally think are unbelievably bizarre (which category merlin and will do not even fall into, like - it’s not an incredible leap.  merlin/mordred is a leap, okay; mordred is like seventeen years old!  leon/morgana is a leap - how on earth did that become so popular??? - but will and merlin?  that’s not a leap.)

what is it about will that makes him so tempting to trample over?  will’s only sin in canon was to look at arthur pendragon and pronounce himself utterly unimpressed.  his only crime was to tell merlin ‘this dude isn’t good for you,’ about which fact he was CORRECT, by the way - he is the first person who ever chooses to care about merlin, the first person merlin ever chooses to trust, the first friend who loves real!merlin without needing to be coaxed and convinced and taught that it’s okay.  he is the only one who ever tells merlin ‘you deserve better than this mess,’ the only one for whom merlin has always been priority number one and in whose eyes arthur isn’t even on the map.  merlin’s friendship with will (and lancelot, afterwards) is the healthiest one merlin ever gets to experience, and i wish more fannish material acknowledged it as such, as opposed to using will to set up merlin and arthur’s epic romance.  

all of this, i suppose, is just a very long way of saying that now that i am no longer avoiding spoilers and have actually started testing the waters of the wider fandom, i have come to the obstinate, utterly inflexible conclusion that will deserves his own collection of happy endings, and i don’t care if i have to write them myself.  i’ve already got the gen angle covered.  and even though i’ve never written ship!fic in my life, the fact of the matter is that spite can be a hell of a motivator, and i will bite the bullet and learn how to do it if i have to.  if people can really be out here tagging their merlin/uther fics as “schmoop” (YES. REALLY.) then by GOD, i swear, there are no excuses - this fandom can accommodate literally anything; there’s no reason it can’t accommodate stories where will wins.  let this kid have his good ending.  arthur pendragon can fall in love with merlin 23,830 times despite his and merlin’s ship flying in the face of canon, and that means will deserves his own tiny handful of stories to be actually about him, without his and merlin’s relationship being used solely as a stepping stone on the way to merlin and arthur’s 23,831st triumph.

i am just saying - if uther pendragon can fall in love with merlin and have it tagged as ‘fluff,’ then for the love of all that is good, we can give will his moment.  let will enjoy the respect he should have earned from us when he died saving both merlin and arthur’s lives.  let will be a person in his own right, instead of a plot device sacrificed to the (in)glorious altar of merthur.  let will have an inner life of his own.  let will have a best friend who doesn’t treat him like an accessory to The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.  let will himself live out The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, for once.  let will get his guy.  i may tend to focus on friendship in my own work, but there are a lot of universes out there, and when it comes to someone who has always been so alone, and so singularly focused on merlin’s wellbeing, i’m not entirely sure if friendship even feels anything different to “in love” for will at all, in at least some of these places.

let will have his happy tags.  he’s been on his own for so much of his life - let him have his simple ‘friendship’, his ‘platonic love,’ his ‘found family.’  let him have his lovestruck ‘pining,’ ‘friends-to-lovers,’ ‘angst with a happy ending,’ too, and let him keep those tags for himself.  let characters who aren’t arthur pendragon have their love stories.

i may not care much for shipping, and i would rather read gen any day of the week, but let me tell you right now, i would rather write will and merlin settling down in a haze of domestic bliss 23,830 times before i would ever want to watch merlin ditch him yet again for a dude who never matched merlin’s level of caring and investment in the canon ‘verse.

[velmaemyers88]

A GOP senator just laid out his blueprint for theocratic segregationism – ThinkProgress

The frustrating thing about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is that he so often walks right up to the edge of an excellent idea, presenting a compelling case that he’s identified a problem that demands a solution — and then suddenly offers a completely ridiculous solution or nothing at all.

Such was the case at the “National Conservatism” conference, which took place in Washington, DC last week. Railing against the impact of globalization on many American workers, Hawley attacked the goal of “a global consumer economy” intended to “provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.”

Too many American workers, Hawley accurately notes, are left with “flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” America leaves behind workers without specialized skills. “We don’t make things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands.”

It’s a familiar grievance in the age of Trump. But it’s also not a frivolous one. If you want to understand why so much of America’s white working class abandoned liberal democracy and rallied behind a racist populist president, you’ll find part of the explanation in the elephant curve.

Today at PSE conference @ChristophLakner shows the so-called elephant curve from our paper with and without adjustment for top incomes. (Will have 2013 data soon too). pic.twitter.com/p94PY9h8FI

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) May 18, 2018

Broadly speaking, the elephant curve reflects the distribution of economic growth as borders open to trade. The bargain inherent in free trade is that the entire world’s economy is lifted by the open exchange of goods, but this growth is unevenly distributed. The “global upper middle class” — that is, working class individuals in wealthy nations — take it on the chin as less skilled jobs move to poorer nations. Meanwhile, the global middle class and the very wealthy benefit tremendously.

The sensible solution for a wealthy nation is to open its borders to as much trade as possible, but to tax the beneficiaries of free trade to lift up those who lose out. Indeed, after listening to Hawley accurately diagnose the impact of a “global consumer economy” on many American workers, it’s easy to imagine him pivoting to such a solution.

But, of course, he does not.

The only fully fleshed out idea mentioned in Hawley’s speech that offers even a modicum of help to the working class is a milquetoast proposal to — in the words of a Hawley press release announcing the proposal — “allow job training, apprenticeship, and certification programs to be eligible to receive Pell Grant dollars.” It’s an echo of previous proposals that treat job training as a panacea for communities that often have no jobs to offer even highly skilled workers.

No, Hawley’s speech is less a menu of solutions for struggling workers than it is an attack on the very idea that policy is the right place to look for solutions. The enemy is not, in Hawley’s eyes, an incomplete trade policy that lifts up many winners while failing to account for the losers. The enemy is a “reigning political consensus” which “shows little interest in our shared way of life.”

The enemy is a “cosmopolitan elite” that looks “down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

Hawley describes a nation much like the dystopia imagined in the Hunger Games — where wealthy coastal elites prey on the wide swaths of Americans living in the middle. But his solution is less policy driven than it is cultural. “We must work to raise up a generation united in a common love for our distinctive achievements as a people,” the senator proclaims. “We must teach our children who we are, without apology.” and we must “honor the claims of kinship and the covenant of marriage.”

America’s enemies, in Hawley’s vision, are not external. They are a fifth column of “cosmopolitans” — he uses that word over and over again, a word that often plays a starring role in antisemitic hate speech — who “dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” To thrive, America must become more chauvinistic, more insular, less open to diversity, and more tightly bound by “place and national feeling and religious faith.”

At the very least, Hawley’s vision of the ideal society is inherently segregationist — though not necessarily along racial lines so much as along religious and cultural ones. It entails a world where people stick to their own kind. “America,” Hawley claims, “is not going to become the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is not going to become America.”

Hawley’s speech, in other words, is nothing less than a direct attack on our national motto — E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. For Josh Hawley, America’s youngest senator, our nation’s original sin is its embrace of pluralism.

The second frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that he is a liar. As a candidate for the United States Senate, Hawley literally used his own son as a prop to deflect allegations that he wanted to strip federal protections from Americans with preexisting conditions.

Wanted to share a little about my family and our journey, and my commitment to protecting people with preexisting conditions — like my son #MOSen pic.twitter.com/g7u9RzN1iO

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 24, 2018

“Earlier this year, we learned our oldest has a rare chronic disease,” Hawley says while starting directly into the camera. Adding that he supports “forcing insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions.”

The problem with this ad is that it was a damn, dirty lie. At the time, Hawley was one of more than a dozen state attorneys general who joined a lawsuit seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. If that suit ultimately prevails — and two Republican judges who heard the suit earlier this month appear determined to strike down Obamacare — nearly 20 million Americans will lose health coverage. People with preexisting conditions will be stripped of protection. And an estimated 24,000 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived.

Ask yourself what kind of human being would use their own son as a human shield to deflect truthful allegations that they are trying to take health care away from millions of their fellow Americans. Now ask yourself what other lies they might be willing to tell in order to advance their vision of the right society.

Hawley, who spent four years working for the nation’s leading Christian conservative law firm, denies over and over that his goal is a Christian supremacist nation. “It is not the role of government to promote Christianity or any religion,” the senator claims in his National Conservatism speech. Seven years earlier, in a piece published while Hawley was still a law professor, Hawley similarly denied that his vision for America means “abandoning constitutional government in favor of theocracy or using the state to convert non-believers.”

And yet, the title of that piece is “A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics.” In it, Hawley writes that “government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its purpose” and that “Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God.”

That does not, in Hawley’s vision, involve using the awesome power of the state to force every American to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But it does involve using the state to build a society rooted in Hawley’s version of Christian values. “The mission of the state is to secure justice,” Hawley writes. But “justice” should be understood as “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

Similarly, while Hawley speaks eloquently of the plight of working Americans left behind by our modern society, the through-line in his policy proposals is not economic uplift for the victims of modernity — just ask the millions of Americans who will lose their Medicaid benefits if Hawley’s lawsuit succeeds. Rather, the unifying theme appears to be an effort to tear down institutions Hawley views as hostile to the social manifestation of the Christian kingdom.

Consider his proposals for higher education, for example. As mentioned above, one proposal is to make Pell Grants available for things like “employer-based apprenticeships.” The other is to require “colleges and universities to pay off 50 percent of the balance of student loans accrued while attending their institution for students who default.”

Both are interesting proposals, but it is far from clear that the latter, in particular, would benefit the most marginalized students. Indeed, if anything, it is likely to make it harder for such students to attend college. If a school faces potentially crippling economic sanctions if they admit too many students whose financial future is uncertain, that school is unlikely to take risks on such students. College will become even more of a haven for the “cosmopolitan elites” that Hawley purports to disdain.

The tell is how Hawley describes his higher education proposals. “It’s time to break up the higher education monopoly,” the senator claims in his press release announcing both of these proposals.

As the National Review’s Robert Verbruggen notes, “it’s an odd definition of “monopoly” that encompasses a sector with thousands of competing options.” What Hawley’s proposals could do, however, is undercut a sector that social conservatives frequently complain about as a bastion of liberalism.

Similarly, several of his legislative proposals target the tech industry, including a bill that would effectively impose the death penalty on companies like Facebook and Twitter if a government agency determines that those companies censored conservative viewpoints — or even if they refuse to publish content by literal Nazis.

In his National Conservatism speech, Hawley proclaims that America must invest “in research and innovation in the heartland of this country, not just in San Francisco and New York.” But Hawley’s tech proposals don’t try to foster investment in the heartland. Instead, many of them would impose crippling new burdens on a sector closely associated with west coast liberalism.

This is not uplift. This is Harrison Bergeron. It’s an strange theory of economic development that seeks to lift up rural Missouri by tearing down Palo Alto.

The third frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that it is difficult to report accurately about his views without using the kind of language that is often banished from polite political discourse — words like “theocracy” or “supremacist” or “fascistic.”

To those who maintain that these words must remain forbidden — for those who insist that America is somehow shielded from the tyranny that has, at times, overtaken other nations — I ask you to close your eyes and to entertain a thought experiment.

Imagine the person you were on January 20, 2009, the day that the United States swore in its first African American president. Now imagine that someone had told you, on that day, that eight years later the United States would swear in a explicitly racist former game show host who was caught on video bragging about the fact that he’s a serial sexual predator. Could you have imagined, in 2009, that our nation would fall so far as to place Donald Trump in the White House? Or would you have treated anyone who made such a claim as an object of ridicule?

It can happen here. The United States is no more immune to the siren song of a theocratic illiberalism than it was to slavery, Jim Crow, or Donald Trump. And we ignore our nation’s capacity for evil at extreme peril.

In a must-read piece on the National Conservatism conference, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argues that the views expressed at that event necessarily break down into a vile form of bigotry. “The conservative sacralization of Western culture and Christian heritage,” Beauchamp writes, “inevitably results in the denigration and exclusion of those who do not share it.”

Indeed, Beauchamp even quotes one speaker at the conference, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who makes the argument for a white-dominated society quite explicitly. “Conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that … preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” according to Wax. And the United States is “better off if we are dominated numerically … by people from the First World, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries.”

Hawley was less explicit when describing his own views about immigration at this same conference — but only slightly less so.

The problem with the “cosmopolitan elite,” according to Hawley, is that it “has lost touch with what binds us together as Americans.” It places “social change over tradition” and dislikes “the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” It cares too little for “things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

If America is to address this crisis, Hawley claims, we must have an “immigration system that rewards and nourishes American labor rather than devaluing it.”

But what would such an immigration system look like? If you believe, as Hawley does, that a society must be tied together by common bonds of tradition and culture and faith, then that necessarily calls for an immigration system that excludes people from cultural and faith backgrounds that are dissimilar to those of most Americans.

It’s a vision that gives primacy to Christians, to western Europeans, and to people who share Josh Hawley’s vision of a just society. As Hawley wrote in 2012, the government does not need to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. It merely needs to lay the groundwork for “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

There is a precedent for this kind of immigration policy. In 1924, at the urging of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress enacted an immigration law that assigned “quotas for immigrants in proportion to the ethnicity of those already in the United States in 1890.” Like Hawley, the lawmakers who supported this legislation believed that America must have a common cultural identity.

Hawley’s “kingdom politics” are more Christian nationalist than they are explicitly racist. But the vision that animates Hawley is the same vision that animated the 1924 immigration law. It’s a vision which teaches that sameness is strength, that diversity is dangerous, and that E Pluribus Unum is an abomination.

Credit: Source link

The post A GOP senator just laid out his blueprint for theocratic segregationism – ThinkProgress appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/a-gop-senator-just-laid-out-his-blueprint-for-theocratic-segregationism-thinkprogress/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-gop-senator-just-laid-out-his-blueprint-for-theocratic-segregationism-thinkprogress from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186468152687

[reneeacaseyfl]

A GOP senator just laid out his blueprint for theocratic segregationism – ThinkProgress

The frustrating thing about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is that he so often walks right up to the edge of an excellent idea, presenting a compelling case that he’s identified a problem that demands a solution — and then suddenly offers a completely ridiculous solution or nothing at all.

Such was the case at the “National Conservatism” conference, which took place in Washington, DC last week. Railing against the impact of globalization on many American workers, Hawley attacked the goal of “a global consumer economy” intended to “provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.”

Too many American workers, Hawley accurately notes, are left with “flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” America leaves behind workers without specialized skills. “We don’t make things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands.”

It’s a familiar grievance in the age of Trump. But it’s also not a frivolous one. If you want to understand why so much of America’s white working class abandoned liberal democracy and rallied behind a racist populist president, you’ll find part of the explanation in the elephant curve.

Today at PSE conference @ChristophLakner shows the so-called elephant curve from our paper with and without adjustment for top incomes. (Will have 2013 data soon too). pic.twitter.com/p94PY9h8FI

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) May 18, 2018

Broadly speaking, the elephant curve reflects the distribution of economic growth as borders open to trade. The bargain inherent in free trade is that the entire world’s economy is lifted by the open exchange of goods, but this growth is unevenly distributed. The “global upper middle class” — that is, working class individuals in wealthy nations — take it on the chin as less skilled jobs move to poorer nations. Meanwhile, the global middle class and the very wealthy benefit tremendously.

The sensible solution for a wealthy nation is to open its borders to as much trade as possible, but to tax the beneficiaries of free trade to lift up those who lose out. Indeed, after listening to Hawley accurately diagnose the impact of a “global consumer economy” on many American workers, it’s easy to imagine him pivoting to such a solution.

But, of course, he does not.

The only fully fleshed out idea mentioned in Hawley’s speech that offers even a modicum of help to the working class is a milquetoast proposal to — in the words of a Hawley press release announcing the proposal — “allow job training, apprenticeship, and certification programs to be eligible to receive Pell Grant dollars.” It’s an echo of previous proposals that treat job training as a panacea for communities that often have no jobs to offer even highly skilled workers.

No, Hawley’s speech is less a menu of solutions for struggling workers than it is an attack on the very idea that policy is the right place to look for solutions. The enemy is not, in Hawley’s eyes, an incomplete trade policy that lifts up many winners while failing to account for the losers. The enemy is a “reigning political consensus” which “shows little interest in our shared way of life.”

The enemy is a “cosmopolitan elite” that looks “down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

Hawley describes a nation much like the dystopia imagined in the Hunger Games — where wealthy coastal elites prey on the wide swaths of Americans living in the middle. But his solution is less policy driven than it is cultural. “We must work to raise up a generation united in a common love for our distinctive achievements as a people,” the senator proclaims. “We must teach our children who we are, without apology.” and we must “honor the claims of kinship and the covenant of marriage.”

America’s enemies, in Hawley’s vision, are not external. They are a fifth column of “cosmopolitans” — he uses that word over and over again, a word that often plays a starring role in antisemitic hate speech — who “dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” To thrive, America must become more chauvinistic, more insular, less open to diversity, and more tightly bound by “place and national feeling and religious faith.”

At the very least, Hawley’s vision of the ideal society is inherently segregationist — though not necessarily along racial lines so much as along religious and cultural ones. It entails a world where people stick to their own kind. “America,” Hawley claims, “is not going to become the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is not going to become America.”

Hawley’s speech, in other words, is nothing less than a direct attack on our national motto — E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. For Josh Hawley, America’s youngest senator, our nation’s original sin is its embrace of pluralism.

The second frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that he is a liar. As a candidate for the United States Senate, Hawley literally used his own son as a prop to deflect allegations that he wanted to strip federal protections from Americans with preexisting conditions.

Wanted to share a little about my family and our journey, and my commitment to protecting people with preexisting conditions — like my son #MOSen pic.twitter.com/g7u9RzN1iO

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 24, 2018

“Earlier this year, we learned our oldest has a rare chronic disease,” Hawley says while starting directly into the camera. Adding that he supports “forcing insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions.”

The problem with this ad is that it was a damn, dirty lie. At the time, Hawley was one of more than a dozen state attorneys general who joined a lawsuit seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. If that suit ultimately prevails — and two Republican judges who heard the suit earlier this month appear determined to strike down Obamacare — nearly 20 million Americans will lose health coverage. People with preexisting conditions will be stripped of protection. And an estimated 24,000 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived.

Ask yourself what kind of human being would use their own son as a human shield to deflect truthful allegations that they are trying to take health care away from millions of their fellow Americans. Now ask yourself what other lies they might be willing to tell in order to advance their vision of the right society.

Hawley, who spent four years working for the nation’s leading Christian conservative law firm, denies over and over that his goal is a Christian supremacist nation. “It is not the role of government to promote Christianity or any religion,” the senator claims in his National Conservatism speech. Seven years earlier, in a piece published while Hawley was still a law professor, Hawley similarly denied that his vision for America means “abandoning constitutional government in favor of theocracy or using the state to convert non-believers.”

And yet, the title of that piece is “A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics.” In it, Hawley writes that “government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its purpose” and that “Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God.”

That does not, in Hawley’s vision, involve using the awesome power of the state to force every American to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But it does involve using the state to build a society rooted in Hawley’s version of Christian values. “The mission of the state is to secure justice,” Hawley writes. But “justice” should be understood as “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

Similarly, while Hawley speaks eloquently of the plight of working Americans left behind by our modern society, the through-line in his policy proposals is not economic uplift for the victims of modernity — just ask the millions of Americans who will lose their Medicaid benefits if Hawley’s lawsuit succeeds. Rather, the unifying theme appears to be an effort to tear down institutions Hawley views as hostile to the social manifestation of the Christian kingdom.

Consider his proposals for higher education, for example. As mentioned above, one proposal is to make Pell Grants available for things like “employer-based apprenticeships.” The other is to require “colleges and universities to pay off 50 percent of the balance of student loans accrued while attending their institution for students who default.”

Both are interesting proposals, but it is far from clear that the latter, in particular, would benefit the most marginalized students. Indeed, if anything, it is likely to make it harder for such students to attend college. If a school faces potentially crippling economic sanctions if they admit too many students whose financial future is uncertain, that school is unlikely to take risks on such students. College will become even more of a haven for the “cosmopolitan elites” that Hawley purports to disdain.

The tell is how Hawley describes his higher education proposals. “It’s time to break up the higher education monopoly,” the senator claims in his press release announcing both of these proposals.

As the National Review’s Robert Verbruggen notes, “it’s an odd definition of “monopoly” that encompasses a sector with thousands of competing options.” What Hawley’s proposals could do, however, is undercut a sector that social conservatives frequently complain about as a bastion of liberalism.

Similarly, several of his legislative proposals target the tech industry, including a bill that would effectively impose the death penalty on companies like Facebook and Twitter if a government agency determines that those companies censored conservative viewpoints — or even if they refuse to publish content by literal Nazis.

In his National Conservatism speech, Hawley proclaims that America must invest “in research and innovation in the heartland of this country, not just in San Francisco and New York.” But Hawley’s tech proposals don’t try to foster investment in the heartland. Instead, many of them would impose crippling new burdens on a sector closely associated with west coast liberalism.

This is not uplift. This is Harrison Bergeron. It’s an strange theory of economic development that seeks to lift up rural Missouri by tearing down Palo Alto.

The third frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that it is difficult to report accurately about his views without using the kind of language that is often banished from polite political discourse — words like “theocracy” or “supremacist” or “fascistic.”

To those who maintain that these words must remain forbidden — for those who insist that America is somehow shielded from the tyranny that has, at times, overtaken other nations — I ask you to close your eyes and to entertain a thought experiment.

Imagine the person you were on January 20, 2009, the day that the United States swore in its first African American president. Now imagine that someone had told you, on that day, that eight years later the United States would swear in a explicitly racist former game show host who was caught on video bragging about the fact that he’s a serial sexual predator. Could you have imagined, in 2009, that our nation would fall so far as to place Donald Trump in the White House? Or would you have treated anyone who made such a claim as an object of ridicule?

It can happen here. The United States is no more immune to the siren song of a theocratic illiberalism than it was to slavery, Jim Crow, or Donald Trump. And we ignore our nation’s capacity for evil at extreme peril.

In a must-read piece on the National Conservatism conference, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argues that the views expressed at that event necessarily break down into a vile form of bigotry. “The conservative sacralization of Western culture and Christian heritage,” Beauchamp writes, “inevitably results in the denigration and exclusion of those who do not share it.”

Indeed, Beauchamp even quotes one speaker at the conference, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who makes the argument for a white-dominated society quite explicitly. “Conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that … preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” according to Wax. And the United States is “better off if we are dominated numerically … by people from the First World, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries.”

Hawley was less explicit when describing his own views about immigration at this same conference — but only slightly less so.

The problem with the “cosmopolitan elite,” according to Hawley, is that it “has lost touch with what binds us together as Americans.” It places “social change over tradition” and dislikes “the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” It cares too little for “things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

If America is to address this crisis, Hawley claims, we must have an “immigration system that rewards and nourishes American labor rather than devaluing it.”

But what would such an immigration system look like? If you believe, as Hawley does, that a society must be tied together by common bonds of tradition and culture and faith, then that necessarily calls for an immigration system that excludes people from cultural and faith backgrounds that are dissimilar to those of most Americans.

It’s a vision that gives primacy to Christians, to western Europeans, and to people who share Josh Hawley’s vision of a just society. As Hawley wrote in 2012, the government does not need to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. It merely needs to lay the groundwork for “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

There is a precedent for this kind of immigration policy. In 1924, at the urging of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress enacted an immigration law that assigned “quotas for immigrants in proportion to the ethnicity of those already in the United States in 1890.” Like Hawley, the lawmakers who supported this legislation believed that America must have a common cultural identity.

Hawley’s “kingdom politics” are more Christian nationalist than they are explicitly racist. But the vision that animates Hawley is the same vision that animated the 1924 immigration law. It’s a vision which teaches that sameness is strength, that diversity is dangerous, and that E Pluribus Unum is an abomination.

Credit: Source link

The post A GOP senator just laid out his blueprint for theocratic segregationism – ThinkProgress appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/a-gop-senator-just-laid-out-his-blueprint-for-theocratic-segregationism-thinkprogress/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-gop-senator-just-laid-out-his-blueprint-for-theocratic-segregationism-thinkprogress from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186468152687

[weeklyreviewer]

A GOP senator just laid out his blueprint for theocratic segregationism – ThinkProgress

The frustrating thing about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is that he so often walks right up to the edge of an excellent idea, presenting a compelling case that he’s identified a problem that demands a solution — and then suddenly offers a completely ridiculous solution or nothing at all.

Such was the case at the “National Conservatism” conference, which took place in Washington, DC last week. Railing against the impact of globalization on many American workers, Hawley attacked the goal of “a global consumer economy” intended to “provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.”

Too many American workers, Hawley accurately notes, are left with “flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” America leaves behind workers without specialized skills. “We don’t make things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands.”

It’s a familiar grievance in the age of Trump. But it’s also not a frivolous one. If you want to understand why so much of America’s white working class abandoned liberal democracy and rallied behind a racist populist president, you’ll find part of the explanation in the elephant curve.

Today at PSE conference @ChristophLakner shows the so-called elephant curve from our paper with and without adjustment for top incomes. (Will have 2013 data soon too). pic.twitter.com/p94PY9h8FI

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) May 18, 2018

Broadly speaking, the elephant curve reflects the distribution of economic growth as borders open to trade. The bargain inherent in free trade is that the entire world’s economy is lifted by the open exchange of goods, but this growth is unevenly distributed. The “global upper middle class” — that is, working class individuals in wealthy nations — take it on the chin as less skilled jobs move to poorer nations. Meanwhile, the global middle class and the very wealthy benefit tremendously.

The sensible solution for a wealthy nation is to open its borders to as much trade as possible, but to tax the beneficiaries of free trade to lift up those who lose out. Indeed, after listening to Hawley accurately diagnose the impact of a “global consumer economy” on many American workers, it’s easy to imagine him pivoting to such a solution.

But, of course, he does not.

The only fully fleshed out idea mentioned in Hawley’s speech that offers even a modicum of help to the working class is a milquetoast proposal to — in the words of a Hawley press release announcing the proposal — “allow job training, apprenticeship, and certification programs to be eligible to receive Pell Grant dollars.” It’s an echo of previous proposals that treat job training as a panacea for communities that often have no jobs to offer even highly skilled workers.

No, Hawley’s speech is less a menu of solutions for struggling workers than it is an attack on the very idea that policy is the right place to look for solutions. The enemy is not, in Hawley’s eyes, an incomplete trade policy that lifts up many winners while failing to account for the losers. The enemy is a “reigning political consensus” which “shows little interest in our shared way of life.”

The enemy is a “cosmopolitan elite” that looks “down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

Hawley describes a nation much like the dystopia imagined in the Hunger Games — where wealthy coastal elites prey on the wide swaths of Americans living in the middle. But his solution is less policy driven than it is cultural. “We must work to raise up a generation united in a common love for our distinctive achievements as a people,” the senator proclaims. “We must teach our children who we are, without apology.” and we must “honor the claims of kinship and the covenant of marriage.”

America’s enemies, in Hawley’s vision, are not external. They are a fifth column of “cosmopolitans” — he uses that word over and over again, a word that often plays a starring role in antisemitic hate speech — who “dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” To thrive, America must become more chauvinistic, more insular, less open to diversity, and more tightly bound by “place and national feeling and religious faith.”

At the very least, Hawley’s vision of the ideal society is inherently segregationist — though not necessarily along racial lines so much as along religious and cultural ones. It entails a world where people stick to their own kind. “America,” Hawley claims, “is not going to become the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is not going to become America.”

Hawley’s speech, in other words, is nothing less than a direct attack on our national motto — E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. For Josh Hawley, America’s youngest senator, our nation’s original sin is its embrace of pluralism.

The second frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that he is a liar. As a candidate for the United States Senate, Hawley literally used his own son as a prop to deflect allegations that he wanted to strip federal protections from Americans with preexisting conditions.

Wanted to share a little about my family and our journey, and my commitment to protecting people with preexisting conditions — like my son #MOSen pic.twitter.com/g7u9RzN1iO

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 24, 2018

“Earlier this year, we learned our oldest has a rare chronic disease,” Hawley says while starting directly into the camera. Adding that he supports “forcing insurance companies to cover all preexisting conditions.”

The problem with this ad is that it was a damn, dirty lie. At the time, Hawley was one of more than a dozen state attorneys general who joined a lawsuit seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. If that suit ultimately prevails — and two Republican judges who heard the suit earlier this month appear determined to strike down Obamacare — nearly 20 million Americans will lose health coverage. People with preexisting conditions will be stripped of protection. And an estimated 24,000 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived.

Ask yourself what kind of human being would use their own son as a human shield to deflect truthful allegations that they are trying to take health care away from millions of their fellow Americans. Now ask yourself what other lies they might be willing to tell in order to advance their vision of the right society.

Hawley, who spent four years working for the nation’s leading Christian conservative law firm, denies over and over that his goal is a Christian supremacist nation. “It is not the role of government to promote Christianity or any religion,” the senator claims in his National Conservatism speech. Seven years earlier, in a piece published while Hawley was still a law professor, Hawley similarly denied that his vision for America means “abandoning constitutional government in favor of theocracy or using the state to convert non-believers.”

And yet, the title of that piece is “A Christian Vision for Kingdom Politics.” In it, Hawley writes that “government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its purpose” and that “Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God.”

That does not, in Hawley’s vision, involve using the awesome power of the state to force every American to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But it does involve using the state to build a society rooted in Hawley’s version of Christian values. “The mission of the state is to secure justice,” Hawley writes. But “justice” should be understood as “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

Similarly, while Hawley speaks eloquently of the plight of working Americans left behind by our modern society, the through-line in his policy proposals is not economic uplift for the victims of modernity — just ask the millions of Americans who will lose their Medicaid benefits if Hawley’s lawsuit succeeds. Rather, the unifying theme appears to be an effort to tear down institutions Hawley views as hostile to the social manifestation of the Christian kingdom.

Consider his proposals for higher education, for example. As mentioned above, one proposal is to make Pell Grants available for things like “employer-based apprenticeships.” The other is to require “colleges and universities to pay off 50 percent of the balance of student loans accrued while attending their institution for students who default.”

Both are interesting proposals, but it is far from clear that the latter, in particular, would benefit the most marginalized students. Indeed, if anything, it is likely to make it harder for such students to attend college. If a school faces potentially crippling economic sanctions if they admit too many students whose financial future is uncertain, that school is unlikely to take risks on such students. College will become even more of a haven for the “cosmopolitan elites” that Hawley purports to disdain.

The tell is how Hawley describes his higher education proposals. “It’s time to break up the higher education monopoly,” the senator claims in his press release announcing both of these proposals.

As the National Review’s Robert Verbruggen notes, “it’s an odd definition of “monopoly” that encompasses a sector with thousands of competing options.” What Hawley’s proposals could do, however, is undercut a sector that social conservatives frequently complain about as a bastion of liberalism.

Similarly, several of his legislative proposals target the tech industry, including a bill that would effectively impose the death penalty on companies like Facebook and Twitter if a government agency determines that those companies censored conservative viewpoints — or even if they refuse to publish content by literal Nazis.

In his National Conservatism speech, Hawley proclaims that America must invest “in research and innovation in the heartland of this country, not just in San Francisco and New York.” But Hawley’s tech proposals don’t try to foster investment in the heartland. Instead, many of them would impose crippling new burdens on a sector closely associated with west coast liberalism.

This is not uplift. This is Harrison Bergeron. It’s an strange theory of economic development that seeks to lift up rural Missouri by tearing down Palo Alto.

The third frustrating thing about Josh Hawley is that it is difficult to report accurately about his views without using the kind of language that is often banished from polite political discourse — words like “theocracy” or “supremacist” or “fascistic.”

To those who maintain that these words must remain forbidden — for those who insist that America is somehow shielded from the tyranny that has, at times, overtaken other nations — I ask you to close your eyes and to entertain a thought experiment.

Imagine the person you were on January 20, 2009, the day that the United States swore in its first African American president. Now imagine that someone had told you, on that day, that eight years later the United States would swear in a explicitly racist former game show host who was caught on video bragging about the fact that he’s a serial sexual predator. Could you have imagined, in 2009, that our nation would fall so far as to place Donald Trump in the White House? Or would you have treated anyone who made such a claim as an object of ridicule?

It can happen here. The United States is no more immune to the siren song of a theocratic illiberalism than it was to slavery, Jim Crow, or Donald Trump. And we ignore our nation’s capacity for evil at extreme peril.

In a must-read piece on the National Conservatism conference, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argues that the views expressed at that event necessarily break down into a vile form of bigotry. “The conservative sacralization of Western culture and Christian heritage,” Beauchamp writes, “inevitably results in the denigration and exclusion of those who do not share it.”

Indeed, Beauchamp even quotes one speaker at the conference, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who makes the argument for a white-dominated society quite explicitly. “Conservatives need a realistic approach to immigration that … preserves the United States as a Western and First World nation,” according to Wax. And the United States is “better off if we are dominated numerically … by people from the First World, from the West, than by people who are from less advanced countries.”

Hawley was less explicit when describing his own views about immigration at this same conference — but only slightly less so.

The problem with the “cosmopolitan elite,” according to Hawley, is that it “has lost touch with what binds us together as Americans.” It places “social change over tradition” and dislikes “the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” It cares too little for “things like place and national feeling and religious faith.”

If America is to address this crisis, Hawley claims, we must have an “immigration system that rewards and nourishes American labor rather than devaluing it.”

But what would such an immigration system look like? If you believe, as Hawley does, that a society must be tied together by common bonds of tradition and culture and faith, then that necessarily calls for an immigration system that excludes people from cultural and faith backgrounds that are dissimilar to those of most Americans.

It’s a vision that gives primacy to Christians, to western Europeans, and to people who share Josh Hawley’s vision of a just society. As Hawley wrote in 2012, the government does not need to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. It merely needs to lay the groundwork for “the social manifestation of the kingdom.”

There is a precedent for this kind of immigration policy. In 1924, at the urging of the Ku Klux Klan, Congress enacted an immigration law that assigned “quotas for immigrants in proportion to the ethnicity of those already in the United States in 1890.” Like Hawley, the lawmakers who supported this legislation believed that America must have a common cultural identity.

Hawley’s “kingdom politics” are more Christian nationalist than they are explicitly racist. But the vision that animates Hawley is the same vision that animated the 1924 immigration law. It’s a vision which teaches that sameness is strength, that diversity is dangerous, and that E Pluribus Unum is an abomination.

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[cityofmorgantown]

Honesty Is Hard: Tom Bloom Edition

In Spring 2017, Morgantown was in the midst of its City Council elections. Candidates for office were filtered into two groups: those supported by Morgantown’s residents, and those supported by local landlording interests. That second group enjoyed powerful allies, including the Dominion Post, WAJR, and at least one County Commissioner: Tom Bloom. 

Tom Bloom has been around for a long time. He used to be a city councilor himself, and during his time in the job, he did nothing to protect Morgantown’s neighborhoods from the creeping threat of local landlords. Slowly but surely, those landlords consumed entire neighborhoods whole - Sunnyside, University Hill, Lower Woodburn, Lower Wiles Hill, and others - and left degraded wreckage in its place. 

Bloom’s love of landlords has never abated, so much so that he proudly brags about his landlording buddies whenever he has the opportunity to. Having friends is fine of course; everybody has friends. But Bloom’s interest in local landlords goes deeper. In spring 2017, as he had done in previous elections, Bloom advocated that Morgantown’s government should be owned not by the city’s citizens, but by its landlords. From his position as a County Commissioner, Bloom actively campaigned for the candidates that had been taking significant money from those same landlords. And when it was discovered that those candidates had been taking such significant money - literally, tens of thousands of dollars in total donations - Bloom pleaded with voters to ignore the findings. 

Voters, of course, ignored him, and all seven of the candidates Bloom’s wanted voters to support ended up (badly) losing. Bloom has barely made any effort since that election to acknowledge that city voters want very different things than he does, and so he has continued his petty war with the city, one that he started as soon as the city’s voters started to reject his good old boy candidates and their good old boy network. Bloom has, ever since, repeatedly lent his enthusiastic support to anybody opposed to Morgantown’s elected City Council. He has opposed an attempt to keep heavy truck traffic out of neighborhoods, he has opposed attempts to pay for better roads and more police, and he has lent his support to a bogus removal petition lawsuit specifically designed by some of Morgantown’s sorest losers.  

One of the things that really undoes Tom is whenever voters question his claims. He is very, very bad at dealing with disagreement, especially when all of the facts are stacked entirely against him. This is partially understandable. When he came up in local politics, the only people capable of questioning him worked at Raese/Greer media outlets, so he cozied up to them as best he could and has received largely enthusiastic coverage ever since.  But the world has changed, and voters can more easily reach their representatives these days. They can also more easily criticize them. This is particularly true on Facebook, where the County Commissioner is very active.  His, umm, unique responses to being challenged are always fun, as they were this morning, when Bloom was caught lying through his teeth to voters. 

Let’s go back to the spring of 2017. One of the biggest landlording interests funding the candidates that Tom Bloom was supporting were the Biafora brothers. They poured more than $10,000 into Morgantown’s City Council elections, a ton of money by any standard of local politics. The Biaforas were interested in owning the council so it could be used to prevent rental competitors from moving in Morgantown. The Biaforas have never been shy about this and have routinely used the courts to tie-up potential competitors in litigation. (Apparently, they are not very confident that their product can withstand competition.)

One of those lawsuits reached its logical conclusion today, as CA Student Living abandoned plans to build an apartment building at the corner of Spruce and Willey. There is a VFW located there now, and, cattycorner across the street, a building owned by the Biaforas. They had sued because they didn’t want a nicer, newer building in the neighborhood, and even though they repeatedly lost - in both circuit court and at the State Supreme Court - CA Student Living eventually withdrew, as it was spending too much time in courtrooms and not enough time building. This is a big win for the Biaforas (less competition) and a big loss for everybody else. 

This became a topic of discussion on Facebook today. If you would like to read the entire Facebook thread, you can do so here. In it, we see the traditional back and forth between people who believe deeply in the good old boy network and people who are reasonably troubled by its ongoing manipulation of our local community. This is what always happens on Facebook. 

But, you can also see this:

That’s me, pointing out that Tom Bloom and the aforementioned landlord watched election results come in together. Bloom and the aforementioned landlord did support the same candidates after all and do want the same things for the city, so it only makes sense that they would have spent time together watching results that night. There is nothing scandalous about the observation, or unreasonable, or, frankly, untrue. But here is Tom Bloom proceeding to melt all the way down about this entirely reasonable observation. 

Got that? We have all of the following: Tom Bloom calling a voter a “DAMN LIAR,” Tom Bloom denying that he was with “Mr. Biafora,” Tom Bloom challenging me to take a lie detector test (and then insisting that I pay for it), Tom Bloom promising to “drop being a County Commissioner,” and the repeated insistence that I must be lying about him, with the command that, “YOUIR LIES HAVE TO STOP NOW….” 

Here’s the thing: I definitely understand Bloom’s frustration with me. I routinely battle back-and-forth with him. I don’t like his war with the city and I don’t like his support of a pack of routinely dishonest candidates. I have never shied away from saying so. Furthermore, Bloom and I have been at this since the late 1990s. This is an old feud. 

But, here’s the other thing:

That’s a picture of Tom Bloom and “Mr. Biafora” watching election results come in together. Bloom’s claim that he spent the entire evening with Mark Brazaitis (one of the candidates who did win) is undone slightly by the fact that Mark Brazaitis is not in this photograph. “Mr. Biafora” is though. (Kinda neat how a local developer ranks a respectful “Mr.” but a sitting City Councilor doesn’t.) 

The oddity of all of this is how easy it is to be honest. All Bloom had to write was, “Mr. Biafora was one of many people I was with while watching election results roll in. He and I did support the same group of candidates because we both believe deeply that landlords are more important than city residents. And, because I didn’t get what I want from those same voters, I am going to continue my war with the city whenever they try to do anything, no matter what it might be.“ if he simply copped to it, what could anybody say in response?

Instead, he chose to lie. Explicitly. Shamelessly. Angrily. That is his decision of course, just as he also chose to make promises that he had no intention of keeping, like that one to “drop being a County Commissioner.” 

As of this writing, he has neither resigned, nor apologized.