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missmentelle · 3 years

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Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.

The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:

Sandy Hook conspiracies

Gamergate

Pizzagate

The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements

anti-vaxxers

flat-earthers

the birther movement

the Illuminati

climate change denial

Spygate

Holocaust denial

COVID-19 denial

5G panic

QAnon

But why do people believe this stuff?

It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.

So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:

Our brains are built to identify patterns.

Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.

The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.

A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.

Our brains love proportionality.

Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.

Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.

These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.

Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”

Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.

The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.

Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.

Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.

Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.

Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.

Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).

The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.

Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.

Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.

Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.

These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.

A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.

And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.

We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.

There is a strong community aspect to these theories.

There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.

Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.

#missmentelle #askmissmentelle #conspiracy theories #cults #psychology #science #neuroscience

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jessikahathaway · 5 years

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Cold Chinese Part I

Oh hey, I’m updating again before a four month hiatus?

This is just a little two part series I wanted to get out. I’ve been working on it for a while and just thought that maybe I’d like it better in two parts.

But, please enjoy this story.

ISSA RIDE LEGGO.

As per usual, pic ain’t mine.

Pairing: Seokjin x Reader x Jungkook

Words: 7,823

Genre: Sexuality Exploration, Slight Crack, Smut (Oral; male receiving), romance if you squint till you’re blind.

Summary: Jin and you had been friends for a while. Nothing was asking too much, until Jin asks you for a favor. But, how were you to know it was to fuck his boyfriend?

Honestly, you knew something was wrong when your long time friend Seokjin asked you to a meal... Where he would be paying...

You sat down in the nice cafe at around 10:00 in the morning on a bleak Sunday. You watched the outside as cars passed and rain trickled down the window. Days like today made you really wish your extentric friend hadn’t practically demanded he meet with you for coffee. Which he said coffee but there were muffins in that display case that were going in your stomach whether it was from his pocket or not.

The jingling of the front door bell brought your eyes forward, and you couldn’t help the giddy smile that took over. Jin was there, dressed head to toe in the most comfortable yet chic outfit you’d ever seen. Of course this lil fuck would be looking incredible so early.

Standing up you made your way over before smiling and wrapping Jin in your arms. “It’s so good to see you,” you gushed. Holding onto him you took a deep breath in, smelling his cologne. Jin always smelt so good. Like he’d just gotten done sampling the finest of male scents before coming to hang out.

“It’s good to see you too, you’re really growing up.” He admired your frame and how you were filling out your proportions nicely.

“Nah, I’m just getting thicker for winter. Safety precautions,” you stated, feeling slightly self conscious about your tummy and thighs being slightly bigger than the last time the two of you saw each other.

“You know I like you softer, makes you better for hugging,” he laughed, keeping you trapped in his arms. You blushed and looked at the baristas who were simply grinning at your display of affection.

“If you aren’t careful they’ll think we’re together, wouldn’t want that getting back to your boyfriend there,” you teased. Jin released you as you went towards the front to order your coffee and food.

“Can I please have a white chocolate mocha with two extra shots and coconut milk?” you asked.

“Certainly, what size?” You flushed, knowing that you shouldn’t get the Venti, it was really a lot of calories for right now and since you were heading into winter without excersi-

“She wants a Venti. I’ll have the same with whole milk instead though,” Jin smiled, pulling out his wallet. “Did you want something to eat? Those muffins are tempting me in ways that should be illegal,” Jin commented. He sent you a wink before selecting the carrot cake one with cream cheese frosting and the double chocolate.

“Jinnnn~” you complained as you sat down at your table.

“Yes, you’re welcome from saving you from your indecision,” he teased. You frowned before picking up your drink and savoring the beautiful caffeinated craft.

“Why are you bribing me, Seokjin?” you asked, not looking up from your coffee.

The classic sputtering sound made you grin. You were right, he did want something from you.

“How dare you assume that I only called you to this meeting of great minds-”

“Of a great mind and a slightly above average mind,” you corrected.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” You rolled your eyes. “Anyways, I hate for you to assume that I only call upon you when I need you, but, I have found myself in a smidge of a predicament,” he bites his lip.

“Careful Jin, I’m practically broke,” you reminded,

“No no, dear, nothing like that. I’d never,” he said firm. “Actually, I have a small favor to ask of you,” he tested.

“What kind of favor requires payment upfront?” you asked, lifting your coffee to your eyes. It was bribery coffee... But that didn’t make you enjoy it any less... For now.

“Well my dearest Y/N, you know my boyfriend-like relationship I’ve had for a while?” he quizzed.

“Yeah, of course. You talk about him a lot. He sounds sweet,” you smile. “I have to meet him one of these days.”

When Jin didn’t answer with his usual gushing of, ‘Absolutely!’ ‘Please? He’s going to love you!’, fear settled into your stomach. Looking up from your muffin you found Seokjin’s eyes to be scarily serious.

“What’s with the Cat looking at a Parakeet glare you’re giving me right now? Freaking me out dude,” you said, shifting in your seat uncomfortably.

“His name is Jungkook,” he said.

“S’cute,” you slurred, almost dribbling coffee down your chin.

“He’s gay,” Jin added.

“I figured as much,” you responded.

“But,” Jin said, pushing all the plates and cups aside. “I’d like for him to try pussy once before he dies if he’s up to it.”

It was a shame, you really liked the sweater he was wearing too. The barista’s heads rose in alarm at the sound of your intense coughing as Jin tried to shush you.

After a few moments a cup of water was placed down next to you, a worried looking girl behind it. “Please be careful, miss. The drinks are hot,” she offered before walking back behind the counter. You gulped some of the cold liquid and tried to find relief while you also gave Jin a watery grimace.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, pouting.

“Don’t look at me at all. In fact, don’t talk to me either,” you warned, wiping your mouth and trying to salvage the muffin you soaked.

Jin was quiet as you cleaned up, finished your water and refocused on the prior statement.

“What in the actual fuck are you talking about, Jin?” Your tone was soft but the incredulity behind it was clear as a bell.

“Remember when we were in our late teens and were incredibly horny and just wanted to shag something to get it out of our system?”

You quickly blushed at the memory. You and Jin were a couple years apart to begin with, but you had grown up around and knowing of each other. So, when you both found yourselves at the same party, too much alcohol running through your systems one thing led to another and you kinda fucked.

“We don’t talk about that night Jin, remember it was-”

“You’re first time I know,” he said. “I remember it well.” He winked, unintentionally sending a shock of warmth through you.

“You could barely remember your name the next morning, I’m sure you don’t remember taking my virginity,” you sneered.

“How could I forget such a tight pussy?” His crude words made your face hot and you fanned yourself with a napkin to try to distract from the incredibly inappropriate conversation.

“I remember it Jin, what about it?” Jin smiled before taking your hand in his.

“I want you to be Jungkook’s first girl,” he pleaded. You gaped at him, wondering what in the fuck had gotten into the man in front of you.

“Jin, you can’t just decide if I’m going to be Jungkook’s first girl, what if he doesn’t find me attractive? Do I need to remind you that your partner is gay? Of the homosexual persuasion. Anti Vagina Club that meets in the middle?” you said, taking your fingers and poking at them to mimic male on male sword fighting.

“Really, Y/N? That’s how you’re choosing to mime that?”

“I failed drama class.”

“Anyways, I’ve been watching Jungkook recently and he seems to be interested in females, at least a little bit. The boy saw Yerin dancing and practically begged me to fuck him into the mattress later that night.”

“So he even bottoms? Dude, how do you think he’s going to have sex with a woman?”

“I’d be there to help him, of course,” he said as if you were stupid.

“Absolutely not,” you crossed your arms.

“What? But he’s my boyfriend, don’t want your magic cunt stealing him from me,” he pouted.

“Jin!” you scolded, raising an eyebrow. He seemed to get the hint and cleared his throat.

“Listen, I really think he’d like it. Fuck, I was certain I was gay until I fell into bed with you! After you I came to realize that, sexuality is such a gray area. You can have a general idea of what you like, but forcing yourself to only look at one gender, one space of the plane... It feels too restrictive for me. That’s why I just like seeing who I vibe with. I’m pretty sure if Jungkook got his hands on you, he’d lose it.” Jin smiled.

He was really serious. He really wanted you to fuck his boyfriend... And he wanted to watch. You’d had sex since Jin, but it was all kind of uneventful and sort of boring. You could count on one hand how many people you’d had in the years since the tryst with Jin.

“D-Do you really have to watch?” you asked, rubbing your shoulder and looking towards the windows. Far too embarrassed to look him dead in the eyes.

“I mean if you wouldn't be comfortable with me joining in then no, but Jungkook is always begging for a threesome. However, those are generally with him being the sub and-”

“Great, great, thank you for that,” you complained, rubbing your forehead.

“Listen, Y/N. There’s a party tomorrow night and I want to introduce you to Jungkook. We’ll test the waters, see how you both feel about it, and we’ll go from there. Sound good?”

You rubbed your elbow and nodded slowly. “Yeah, I would be okay with that,” you said.

“Are you sure?” Jin held your hand.

“Yes Jin, I would be okay with that.” He smiled brightly before bringing you in for a delicate embrace.

What had you just agreed to?

* * *

The next night you sat in your living room staring at two dresses with a critical eye. Did you go for your dark burgundy one that shifted to a light purple in the right lighting? It was skin tight, but you weren’t exactly feeling that adventurous tonight.

Jin said tonight was for seeing if either of you were interested. Feeling each other out. Your cheeks flushed at the thought. You’d never even seen a picture of the man in question. Although, if Seokjin was fucking him then he was no doubt gorgeous...

You decided on your shorts and long sleeve black shirt. A choker was put around your neck and simple make up was done. You sighed, looking at yourself in the mirror.

You really had no idea why Jin was set on you being the one to give Jungkook his first ride in a vagina... but you could help but feel moderately inadequate. You weren’t skinny, nor were you athletic. You liked foods that were bad for you and had a nasty caffeine habit...

A knock came from your door. Was Seokjin here?

Heading towards the sound, you opened your front door to see Jin standing with a gorgeous man at his side. “Y/N!” Jin yelled before engulfing you in his arms. You huffed from his attack, giving who you assumed Jungkook a smile before Jin decided to throw you around, making your shorts ride up slightly.

“Jin, my shorts,” You whined.

“Sorry sorry,” he apologized. You straightened yourself out before offering your hand to Jungkook. Jin rolled his eyes before shoving you towards the male.

“Oof!” You gasped as your hit his solid brick chest. This boys was made of muscle. Jesus fuck...

“Y/N, this is Jungkook,” Jin said from behind you.

“It’s a pleasure,” Jungkook said. He helped pull you away from his chest.

“The pleasure is mine,” you said with a soft smile. Jin came up and wrapped his arm around your shoulder.

“You guys ready to party?!” Jin squealed. You rolled your eyes before shoving his arm off your shoulder.

“Smothering me,” you whined. “I’m in it for the booze,” you stated.

“You will dance with me before the end of the night,” Jin warned.

“I might need to be pass out drunk then,” you said. A soft giggle echoed through the air. You turned to see Jungkook giving you both a soft smile.

“Hyung was right,” Jungkook said.

“Hmm?” You asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re really funny,” he said. You flushed and grinned.

“You’re just as cute as he said. Maybe more so,” you winked. Jungkook bit his lip before Jin interrupted.

“Let’s go, I don’t wanna have to park three streets over.”

Jin lead the two of you to his pick up truck. The one that legit has two seats. You scowled. “Kim Seokjin, why did you bring the only vehicle you own that has less than three seats?” You questioned.

“Oh sorry, Namjoon borrowed my car to head home for the weekend. So, truckie here was all I had,” he lied. You sighed and rubbed your forehead.

“You realize it’s illegal for me to sit in the back right?”

“Who said I was going to have you sit in the back? You can sit on Jungkook’s lap.” Jin shrugged.

“Jin,” you started.

“It’s alright,” Jungkook said, heading towards the truck and climbing in.

“He seems to like you,” Jin whispered before going for the drivers side. You blushed before following in Jins wake.

Jungkook was already buckling himself in as you cautiously came forward and looked at Jungkook with hesitance. He adjusted himself and looked at you expectantly. “You can sit down, I don’t mind,” he smiled.

“Jungkook I don’t know I’m really heavy and I don’t want-”

“It’s fine, Y/N, I’m tough.” You nodded and tried to keep your blush under control.

“Pardon me,” you excused. Climbing into the truck you settled into Jungkook’s lap. Jin buckled himself and adjusted the steering wheel.

“Jungkook, if you don’t hold onto her she’s going to fall into the dash,” he teased. You were about to retort when you felt Jungkook’s arms wind around your waist.

“Yes, hyung, I’ll make sure she doesn’t get hurt,” he promised. You licked your lips at the sensation of his strong arms encircling you. Jin looked at you for a second, sending you a quick wink.

“Off we go then!”

Jin hit the gas pedal and you were pressed into his lover’s chest in such a way that made your blood run hot in your veins. Jungkook’s hand was resting right above your hip bone and it made your body shudder with pleasure.

It almost made you feel guilty knowing that you were going to try to seduce this sweetheart... But, if he truly didn’t want to engage in that sort of activity with you, then it was just going to be moderately heart wrenching. Just looking at this guy you knew that he was your type.

Soft cheeks, sculpted jaw... Perfect skin, save for a few red spots that were probably faded acne. And who didn’t get a pimple once in a while? His brown eyes made your heart ache, like they were so full of life and curiosity.

It made you want to watch them light up as you undressed yourself before him. You wanted those adorable brown eyes to be raking over your body with abandon. Hungrily absorbing every inch of your naked skin as he would finally discover the one area on your body he’d never seen in perso-

“Am I uncomfortable or something? Do you need to adjust a little bit?” Jungkook asked, bringing you out of your depraved daydream.

“Oh, no, just... shorts are really short, fabric is kinda pinching a bit,” you excused away. Jin scoffed under his breath, barely hiding his obvious amusement at your pitiful lie.

“Maybe if you just took off the shorts all of your problems would be solved,” Jin suggested, putting his blinker on.

“Jin!” you yelped. Scandalized.

“Hyung tells me you two have been friends for a while.” Jungkook attempted some small talk. Grateful for a distraction from Jin’s not-so-subtle pushes towards intimacy, you accepted.

“Yeah, Jin and I have been friends since around senior year in highschool,” you acknowledged. “I knew him when he had really bad back-ne.”

Jin almost drove off the road.

“You take that lie back right now!”

“I’m not saying you have it now! Jesus, plus I think I was the only one to see your bare back for the first two years out of highschool,” you laughed.

“I like your back, hyung,” Jungkook soothed, rubbing his lover’s shoulder.

“At least somebody in this car appreciates fine beauty,” Jin dramatically sighed.

“I appreciate it too,” you confirmed, turning to look at Jungkook. “I’m appreciating it right now.”

Jungkook blushed and looked out the window, keeping his touch on your body feather-light. Pride filled your stomach at the fact that you had lifted that reaction from the beautiful boy.

The rest of the ride was spent reminiscing with Jin about late night drives out in the country, blaring the most obscene music that no doubt had corrupted some cows. Jungkook was quiet, but he pitched in a witty one liner every now and again.

You began to realize why Jin was really into Jungkook. He was so sweet and would send him endearing looks across the vehicle. And the fact that Jin’s constant self praise was tolerated by somebody was impressive. You loved the guy, but while losing your virginity he cried out his own name after finishing. Hopefully, that action was also quelled by Jungkook.

Sitting on Jungkook’s lap made your heart race. Everytime Jin hit a bump, your rump hit Jungkook’s front. Jungkook was nothing if not respectful. It kinda bummed you out if you were honest. You wanted to feel Jungkook’s hand wander a little lower than what was proper. You wanted his hand to slip into your no doubt damp panties as his lover drove his car.

Pulling up to the party, you were reminded heavily of why you didn’t like these affairs.

Too. Many. People.

Jin parked his car and got out, watching as you delicately slid off of Jungkook’s lap. When Jin came around to place his hand on the small of Jungkook’s back, you couldn’t help but feel a little unincluded. He’d invited you to try to get with his boyfriend after all...

The music was blaring when you walked in, almost overwhelmingly so. The kitchen was full of people doing shots and making poor decisions, as well as someone you recognized.

“Jimin!” you smiled, making your way over to a former tablemate of yours from Anthropology 101. His head turned and an effortless smile took over his features.

“Y/N!” he said, coming towards you. Jungkook and Jin held back, waiting for your introduction.

Jimin smelt incredible as he pulled you into a hug. His arms were warm and it made you miss the contact of another human that wasn’t doing it to be friendly. The underlying sexual tension from the semester still alive in well.

“You look incredible,” he complimented. HIs eyes wandered down to your legs and then made their way behind you to greet your companions for the night. “I’m being rude. Hi, I’m Jimin.”

Jin reached forward and gave his hand a shake and a soft smile. “I’m Jin, friend of Y/N. This is my partner, Jungkook,” he smiled, proudly showing off his lover to Jimin. Jungkook came forward and shook the older man's hand with a firm grip.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, keeping his face neutral.

“Same here,” Jimin agreed easily.

“How do you know, Y/N?” Jin asked.

“Ah,” you responded. “Jimin and I had Anthro 101 together. Mr. Kang was such a hardass, but we managed.” Jimin’s bell like laughter came through your ears.

“No doubt, if it wasn’t for Y/N I wouldn’t have passed. I owe you for that, don’t forget. But, there’s plenty of booze, music, food and people to get your fill of. So, enjoy. And, Y/N?” You turned to face Jimin, getting a soft peck on the cheek in return. “Save a dance for me, yeah?” You flushed and nodded, mimicking Jimin’s smile.

With a final nod to Jin and Jungkook, Jimin headed into the crowd of people. Swallowed up by the sea of grinding that was happening on the dance floor.

“He seems to like you,” Jin said. Knocking your shoulder with his you scoffed.

“Doubtful, Jin. He’s distracted by my obviously incredible legs,” you boasted. Jin laughed and placed a playful swat on your upper thigh.

“Hyung-”

“Jin-hyung?” A deep voice shouted over the innocuous bass. Turning his head Jin’s face erupted in a smile. “Namjoon!”

A silver haired beauty approached, wrapping Jin in a comfortable hug. “Never thought I’d see you again,” Namjoon stated.

“Neither did I man! What are you doing back from the States?” Jin asked.

“Missed it here, wanted to be home for a while before I started another stretch of producing,” he explained. You and Jungkook stood awkwardly behind him as he went on and on about his life.

“Hang on Joon, let me introduce you to my friends here,” Jin commented.

“Oh, shit, sorry. I’m Namjoon,” he introduced, reaching for your hand then Jungkook’s.

“Y/N,” you smiled.

“Jungkook,” he nodded.

“Hey, Jin. I know it’s a bit rude of me to ask for your company, but I’ve got some friends I’d love for you to meet outside,” Namjoon asked, raising a brow. If they were outside they were probably smoking. Something you definitely couldn’t partake in. “Of course you both are welcome to come with.”

“Ah, she can’t,” Jin said. Saving you the millionth explanation, he continued. “She’s allergic to cigarette and pot dude.”

“Oh, fuck... Well then I guess, I-uh,” Namjoon floundered.

“It’s alright, I’ll get a drink and hang out in here,” you said, sensing Namjoon’s disappointment.

“No no, don’t let me ruin your guy’s night-”

“Well, I came with two lovely people tonight. No doubt they can keep each other company while we go outside and catch up?” Jin suggested, looking as if he was pleading with the two of you.

“I don’t mind,” you said.

“Yeah, come on Y/N, let’s get a drink,” Jungkook smiled. “Bye hyung, nice to meet you Namjoon!” Jungkook said, taking your wrist and leading you towards the kitchen.

You both found a secluded section of the kitchen that had a bottle of Vodka being passed between you both.

“Are you okay with sitting in here with me? You don’t have to,” you said. Jungkook shook his head.

“Nah, smoking hasn’t ever been my thing. Hyung doesn’t do it, but it doesn’t bother him either. But I’ve never heard of someone being allergic to it before, that must be hard,” he conversed.

“Well, I have a sort of salve that I can put on in the morning to keep unavoidable exposure bearable. But if someone blows it right into my face then I go into an asthmatic fit and get hives. It’s not a good look, but Jin seemed excited to see him... So I wanted him to have some fun. And, this way, we can get to know each other.”

“There’s perks to everything,” Jungkook smiled.

‘See how you both feel...’

Jin’s words echo in your mind. You also had a mission tonight. To see if Jungkook would be interested in being physical with you. Your mind was made up, you wanted to have sex with him. But it all came down to his consent and what he was comfortable with.

Looking towards the crowd of people dancing, a sensual song came over the surround sound. Your eyebrows lifted in interest. “Do you want to dance?” you asked, looking towards him.

Jungkook shrugged. “I mean, yeah I guess.”

Placing the vodka bottle on the counter, you took Jungkook’s hand and lead him towards the floor. Couples bumped into you and gave you dirty looks before becoming absorbed in one another again. You made it to a more open space towards the back window where you could see Jin outside talking with Namjoon and a bunch of people in a circle smoking.

“How do you wanna-”

“We can do this.” Jungkook said, wrapping his hands around your waist and making you put your hands across his shoulders.

Gently swaying to the seductive chords made your body thrum with excitement. Jungkook’s hands were frozen in their spot and it frustrated you. You wish he would just put his hands on you already...

But, you kept yourself contained. If he was comfortable, he’d make the move. However, the vodka was running rampant in your mind and Jungkook was a beautiful specimen of the opposing sex. You kept your eyes trained on his face as the two of you swayed to the music. Without giving it much attention your sight wandered outside.

Jin was standing there, staring at the two of you with an eyebrow raised. He seemed to be daring you.

‘I bet you won’t.’

As if God was listening, the song changed and a dirtier, more raunchy song blasted through the speakers. Jungkook flushed and you could feel his grip tighten on your sides.

Partners turned around and respectively began to grind on each other. One couple was even swapping spit in the opposite corner to you and Jungkook. He swallowed thick and you saw his discomfort. “Did you want to stop?” You asked, bringing your hands down from his neck.

Jungkook sighed. “I dunno, parties aren’t nearly as fun when you’re sober,” Jungkook complained.

“You’re so cute,” you said aloud. Jungkook's eyebrows shot up. You realized your mistake. “I-I’m sorry I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” you apologized. When he didn’t answer you chanced a look at his face.

He had the sweetest smile painted on his perfect lips. “Hyung was right, you really are a great person.”

You floundered. The genuine compliment there you off your seductive game. Horrendously sober you had to think of a response. “Thanks.”

Great fucking answer...

The crowd started getting closer to you and Jungkook, making you a little woozy. Gripping onto Jungkook's hand you swallowed hard.

“You okay?” He asked, sensing your distress.

“Yeah, just, lots of people,” you whispered.

“If you don’t like crowds then a party was a bad plan, especially a dance floor at a party,” Jungkook stated.

“Let’s dance it’ll help me keep my mind off of it,” you declared.

“Sure-” You backed yourself up against his body after one couple got a little too close for comfort. “Oh...”

You turned your head to find Jungkook against the wall and your ass fitted right against the dip of his pelvis. You blushed, but stayed there. Jungkook had a dreamy expression on his face. As if he were confused yet not upset.

“Can I grind on you?” You asked, bringing his hands to your hips. Jungkook bit his lip and seemed to think about it.

“I-I guess? Um, never been grinded on, always been the grinder,” he joked breathlessly.

“Oh, my treat then,” you smiled before pulling him off the wall and beginning to move your hips with the beat. Jungkook kept his pace slow, bending his knees slightly so you were more so sitting on his lap while wiggling your hips. Jungkook wrapped one arm around your waist and pulled you closer to his front.

You were going to say something when you noticed... he was competing with the other couples.

He wanted the two of you to look the best on the dance floor. The thought of it made you want to laugh. It was such a childish competition... but it made your blood boil knowing he wanted to keep going. That he enjoyed being against your body, even if it was just a little bit. Jungkook’s arms tightened around your body and brought you in closer.

Your head lulled back against his shoulder, fitting against the dip of his neck comfortably. Jungkook moved his hands to your stomach, pushing his hands against your soft skin. You squealed and gripped his palms, making him released the tender flesh there.

“You’re really soft,” Jungkook murmured against your head. You flushed, biting your lip and rolled your hips to the sway of the music.

“Mm, you’re a good dancer,” you complimented.

“I have a great partner,” he said easily. You chuckled when you felt something a little different on your lower back. It wasn’t hard per se, it was more of just a poke that you were aware of. Maybe his zipper was a little loose.

“Jungkook, you might want to fix your zipper it’s digging into my back,” you said. Jungkook nodded and moved away to fix his pants when you saw all the color drain from his face. Concern flashed through your body as you held his head in your hands. “Are you alright? Did you drink too much?”

Almost ripping your hands away from his face, he stared at you with scared eyes before running off of the dance floor. You watched as he ran and disappeared into the crowd.

Confusion wrapped around your mind.

Until it hit you.

Jungkook was hard.

The uncomfortable sensation in your shorts confirmed your issue as well.

You were wet, and you really were considering that threesome now...

* * *

The morning after the party Jin messaged you.

JINGLE: Heyoooo!

You: Excuse, I was still sleeping.

JINGLE: Sorry beetch, but just wanted to thank you for riling Jungkook up so bad last night. Boy couldn’t get enough.

You: Brb, gonna drink an entire gallon of bleach.

JINGLE: But seriously, Y/N. I could’ve sworn when he fell asleep after, like, round four or something? He mumbled something that sounded like your name.

You: ....

JINGLE: I saw you two dancing. Ya nasty kids were getting down hard, and y’know, Jungkook got hard too.

You: JIN!

JINGLE: I’m just being honest. Did you feel anything with him last night?

You: I mean, he’s cute...

JINGLE: Did you get wet while you were grinding on him?

You: I’m not having this conversation.

JINGLE: So that’s a yes.

You: OK, but he ran off once he figured out he was hard. He literally looked like he saw a ghost and then bolted. Boy fucking dipped.

JINGLE: I remember being terrified when I woke up the morning after sleeping with you! When you realize that you aren’t certain of something that is already so up in the air to begin with, you sort of spiral into your own thoughts. He just needs some time.

You: Do you think he’ll be alright?

JINGLE: I think he’ll be fine. Just gotta think it out, maybe jerk it a few times to some straight porn.

You: I’m done with this conversation.

JINGLE: Would you be okay with us coming over next week sometime? I don’t want him to think that you hate him. Knowing Kookie he’ll blame himself for running out on you last night.

You: Yeah, and then I had to sit on your nasty lap the whole way home.

JINGLE: EXcUSe mE? MY LAP IS PRIME REAL ESTATE I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW!!

You: There was a housing crash, srry.

JINGLE: Fuck you.

You: You wish.

JINGLE: Actually wanna set you up with my boyfriend.

You: I’m gonna leave you on R if you don’t stop motherfucker.

JINGLE: That’s a new kink.

JINGLE: Wait, holy shit you were serious?

JINGLE: Y/N, are we good to come over next week thought?

JINGLE: Y/N I’m serious.

JINGLE: I’m assuming your silence is a yes, so see you like Thursday night.

* * *

You worked your normal week and found that your boss had graced you with the glorious two days in a row off.

Maybe his new wife was going to make him less of an asshole.

But you had those hopes with the last seven. Lucky number eight?

You got out of your shower after work Wednesday night and stepped into your fogged up bathroom. Reaching for your towel you heard a knock come to your front door.

Oh fuck! Did chinese get here early?

Fuck nuggets.

Maybe if you showed up in your towel you’d get a discount or something. Saying like you didn’t have an extra pocket to hold the cash in...

Creeping out you grabbed a twenty and headed towards the entryway. Opening the door instead of a teenage delivery boy you found a very tired looking Jungkook and an excited Jin standing behind him.

“Hi Y/N-whoa, did you pre plan this for us?” Jin said, licking his lips. You shrieked and slammed the door in their faces.

“WHAT THE FUCK IT ISN’T THURSDAY!” you yelled.

“IT’LL BE THURSDAY IN ABOUT FIVE HOURS CUT ME SOME SLACK, YEAH?”

A few aggressive knocks came from your door and you rolled your eyes, opening the door again. “I don’t want any,” you said.

“Too bad, it’s a two for one special,” Jin grinned. You smiled at the sleepy Jungkook and got a shy grin in return.

“I’ll take the sleepy one for full price, the loud obnoxious one can fuck right off,” you snorted. Jin made a sound of offense before you turned to let them come in.

You went to your room and pulled on some comfortable clothes, next brushing your hair before heading out into the living room with your wet hair framing your face. You found Jin sitting on your couch playing on his phone with Jungkook laying in his lap. You sat down next to Jin and leaned your head on his shoulder, gazing at his memes.

“Bruh, that flaming Kermit meme is my mental state at all times,” you laughed. Jin chuckled and agreed.

Soon you felt your phone vibrating. Picking it up it was the chinese place that you’d ordered your food from.

Apparently their only delivery vehicle had broken down and they were taking half of the price off the meal if you were still interested in coming to pick it up.

“Oh fuck me,” you groaned, resting your head back on the couch.

“Spread your legs then,” Jin answered. You punched his shoulder before throwing your phone on the couch.

“God damn it, my craving for mediocre chinese food can’t be quenched tonight,” you sighed dramatically.

“And why not?” Jin questioned, running his fingers through Jungkook’s hair in a way that made your heart melt.

“Their delivery vehicle broke down and now if you still want your food you have to go pick it up,” you groaned.

“That’s bullshit,” Jin commented.

“Eh, it’s half off but-”

“Wait what the fuck? And you’re not going to go get it?”

“That chinese place is near that fucking intersection that literally fucks you in the ass with no lube and then spits on your mom. No food is worth that kind of pain for me,” you stated firm.

“Then I’ll go get it,” Jin said, already moving to stand up. Jungkook made a whimper of displeasure at being jostled.

“But he’s sleeping Jin, just let the boy sleep,” you scolded.

“Here, scoot closer,” Jin said, pulling you further in.

“H-huh? Why?” you asked. The warmth of his thigh made your head go a little dizzy.

“Here, you just let him sleep on your lap and then I’ll go get the food. Jungkook had a tough day at work today and he’s tired, so you can be his pillow while I’m gone. I’ll even pick up some dumplings as compensation for your thigh going numb,” Jin pleaded.

“Fine fine, yeah, knock yourself out,” you said. Pushing your way in Jin successfully deposited Jungkook in your lap. He gripped your hip and pulled you closer, resting his head dangerously close to your crotch. Jin smiled down at the two of you.

“You look so cute,” he grinned.

“Shut up and get me dumplings before I get mad,” you warned. Jin smiled and headed towards the door.

“I’ll probably be a while, it’s club hopping time at this hour.”

“You’re a brave soul,” you commented.

“Have some fun while I’m gone.” He winked and headed out the door, leaving you with his boyfriend sleeping in your lap.

Grabbing your phone you decided that you would just scroll through tumblr or instagram, finding amusement in the cute dog pictures and cats being startled by various vegetables.

You felt Jungkook shift every once in a while, so you started running your fingers through his hair to ease his fit. He seemed to relax after that.

Time moved rather slow as you waiting for Jin to return. Your stomach wanted food, but Jungkook was sleeping peacefully on your thighs. The Doritos you had sitting on your counter mocked you.

“Mmm,” Jungkook hummed in his sleep. You smiled and continued to play with his hair. A soft whine came from his lips and you watched as he wrapped his arms around your waist. You huffed as his strength pulled the air from your lungs. Also making your empty stomach pissy.

“Jungkook,” you started. However before you could continue Jungkook lifted his face from your lap and buried it in your stomach, forcing you to lie back on the couch. You tried to wriggle away, but to no avail. The boy was like steel bars around you body.

Even though the shift made your heart race, you continued your phone game. You texted Jin and pleaded for him to hurry up.

He merely responded that traffic was stupid but $2 gyoza was worth every penny.

Setting your phone down you felt the familiar pressure in your crotch. You had to pee. Looking down at Jungkook fast asleep on your stomach, you felt uncertainty bubble up.

Surely Jin wouldn’t be too long, and then Jungkook will get up for Chinese anyways...

Right?

Ten minutes later you were certain your bladder was going to make you regret being born. But just as your were about to get up and throw Jungkook on the floor, his head came up off your stomach pudge.

“Y/N? Where’s Hyung?” His voice was so soft it made your teeth hurt.

“Out getting food, traffic is really bad so he might be a while,” you explained. Jungkook blushes when he saw where he was.

“Sorry, I cuddle when I sleep.” You smiled and patted his cheek.

“It’s alright Kook, no harm no foul. But I need to use the restroom, one second.”

You hustled to the bathroom just in time and felt a wave of relief. You pulled your panties back up to feel a harsh cold touching your heated center.

You were wet.

Upon further inspection, you were incredibly wet. Like, needed to be sorted out wet.

You flushed and hurried to clean yourself up to the best of your ability before going towards the sink and washing your hands.

When you opened the door you found Jungkook leaning against the back of the couch, resting his eyes. Was he asleep again?

“Jungkook?” you asked, approaching him carefully. carefully. He appeared so peaceful, as if he had no care in the world. You smiled as you stood before him. His lips stood out to you, plump and pink in the dimming light of your apartment.

When you examined his skin you found there to be no flaws, just two cute moles dotting his rounded face. You bit your lip as you found yourself wanting to get closer, to be closer.

Jungkook’s breathing was soft against your face...

“Noona?” He asked, his eyes peering into yours.

You then realized how close to him you actually were. Perhaps an inch and a half away from his face. You flushed and tried not to make an unattractive sound and bail.

“Sorry,” you breathed, but you didn’t move away.

“Noona... I...”

You licked your lips, flashing him a sign of your desire to plant a kiss right on his pouting lips.

“Jungkook we’re the same age,” you said softly.

“But do you mind if I call you Noona?” He asked.

“I didn’t mind earlier,” you said.

“Noona,” he started. “The other night, Hyung and I were having sex.”

You bit your lip and tried not to imagine Jungkook, bent over and pleading for Jin’s cock. The momentary thought had you clenching your thighs together again.

“Jungkook,” you whispered.

“Hyung was fucking me so hard... but all I could think about was you... kissing you, and you sucking my dick while Hyung fucks me,” he panted. You felt a shiver of pleasure go down your spine.

However, you still hesitated.

Even if Jungkook was interested in you, Jin was his boyfriend. And Jin mentioned that he wanted to be there if the two of you had sex. Although the idea made you uneasy at first, right now you wanted to watch Jin fuck the younger male hard as his face was buried between your thighs. Should you wait for Jin to get back so you all can discuss this? Everything was going rather fast and it made your stomach flutter with nerves.

“I-I don’t know what you-”

“Can I kiss you Noona?” Jungkook asked, staring at your lips. “Your lips look so pretty and pink... So soft, I just want to kiss you so badly,” he whispered.

Hearing these compliments you bit your lip without realizing it. Jungkook found this undeniably alluring. You pulled at your flesh with your teeth and you then understood how desperately you wanting him to kiss you.

“Just a peck... Nothing more than that,” you compromised.

Jungkook wasted no time swallowing your lips with his own. You tried to keep your mind straight while his lips moved against yours.

Pulling back you gasped against his moist mouth. Jungkook moves to kiss you once more, but you placed your hand on his chest.

“I said a peck,” you warned. Jungkook huffed in displeasure.

“Your lips taste so good, please let me taste more,” he begged.

You frowned and tried to reason with yourself. Jungkook was in a relationship and even though his partner already spoke to you... you still couldn’t bring yourself to do it.

“J-Jungkook I can’t,” you whispered.

“Is it because of Hyung?” He asked.

You nodded sheepishly. “It feels wrong when you’re with him. If we talked about it maybe-“

“I’ll call him,” Jungkook said. You made an ugly squeak while he stood up.

“B-b-b-but Jungkook hang on!” You yelled, chasing after him.

“Hyung~” Jungkook’s voice echoed through the house.

“Please Jungkook!”

“I want to kiss Noona is that alright?”

You almost collapsed in embarrassment. The boy was learning things from Jin. You’d have to talk with him about that.

“I’ll be good to her till you get back.”

Hold up.

Till he got back? The fuck did that mean?

“Noona~” Jungkook sang. You bit your lip as he approached you like a panther.

“Y-yes Jungkook?” You answered.

“Hyung said it was okay for us to play, if you want to,” he smirked.

Your foot caught on the edge of the rug and you you sent falling backwards. Hitting the fabric of your couch you noticed your position. Your one leg hooked over the arm of the couch and the other landing against the soft cushions.

Jungkook stated at you before falling to his knees and crawling forward. “Noona, we don’t have to play if you don’t want. But the way you look right now, I’m already so hard,” he whined.

Biting your lip, you thought of the young man coming towards you. Jin did say he was comfortable with the proceedings. And you were in desperate need of sorting out. And looking at Jungkook right now, made you even more desperate.

“I-I want to play,” you consented. Jungkook smiled and crawled between your thighs, moving up to capture your lips. You wrapped your arms around his neck and brought him closer to your frame.

Jungkooks kisses were so needy and deep it made your head spin. You’d never been kissed with such enthusiasm before. “Noona, your mouth feels so good,” Jungkook whined.

A sharp grind into the couch made your body flush with heat. Jungkook climbed up and pushed you back onto the cushions. You bit your lip as he looked down at your body beneath his.

“God I could just devour you,” he moaned, licking a stripe from the hollow of your throat to your chin. You whimpered at the action, making your thighs clench together painfully.

“Hurry,” you pleaded.

“What do you need, Noona?” Jungkook whispered. You looked down and saw Jungkook’s pants tightening over his groin. Your mouth watered at the thought of his cock on your tongue.

“Let me suck you off,” you begged.

Jungkook blushes and bit his lip. “I-i can’t remember the last time I had someone suck my dick,” Jungkook smirked. “You want my cock in your mouth?”

“Yes, yes please let me taste you,” you pleaded.

“Get on your knees,” Jungkook smiled.

Flying out from underneath him you got on the floor. Jungkook sat down on the couch and pulled his zipper down. You were practically humming with desire for him.

It felt like an eternity before Jungkook brought his throbbing cock out before you. Licking your lips you reached forward and took the hot member in your fist. Jungkook hissed and rested his head on the back of the couch.

Watching a bead of precum move down his shaft you quickly licked it up. You smirked as Jungkook tensed at the sensation. Jungkook didn’t strike you as an intense bottom or a dominant top. But Jin more than likely did a majority of the fucking in their relationship.

So, being able to pleasure him in this way made your heart flutter in your chest.

Taking his length in your hand you leaned over his cock and let a string of hot spit dribble over his throbbing tip. Jungkook arched into your touch, keening at your attention. You bit your lip and began pumping your hand up and down.

“Mmm, fuck that feels so good,” he groaned. The compliment made you flush, and struck a chord within you to work harder. Making you want his cum so badly.

Your panties were stuck to your center uncomfortably. You shifted in your seat and Jungkook took notice.

“Are you wet? You should run your fingers over your pretty pussy just to see how wet you are,” he purred.

Obeying, you slowly eased your hands in you pajama bottoms. Jungkook watched with bated breath as you found your drenched folds.

“I’m soaking,” You whimpered, rubbing your fingers over the heated skin of your arousal.

“Are you? Then let me-”

“Yah! Get out here before the fucking food gets-oh...”

Fuck...

647 notes · View notes

theliberaltony · 5 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The narrative after the 2016 Democratic primary was that black voters overwhelmingly chose Hillary Clinton in part because they didn’t like or connect with Sen. Bernie Sanders. That dislike for Sanders was often attributed to his focus on inequality based on class rather than race and to his sometimes clumsy comments about racial issues. That narrative never really went away, and we’re already seeing coverage of his 2020 campaign that suggests he has a problem with black voters that he must fix if he wants to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But while some black political activists may dislike the Vermont senator,1 there is little evidence that black voters do. Polls suggest black voters liked Sanders in 2016 and like him now. Rather, if 2016 is any guide, the barrier to Sanders winning black voters will be whether another candidate comes along who black voters like even more.

During the 2016 primary process, exit polls found that Clinton won almost 80 percent of the black vote overall, and she romped through Southern states with large black populations because of that strength. That advantage in the South and with black voters overall (they were about 25 percent of the Democrat electorate in 2016) were huge factors in Clinton winning the Democratic nomination.

But I believe that strength was likely built more on pro-Clinton votes than anti-Sanders votes. Here’s some data that points me toward that conclusion:

In a Gallup poll conducted at the beginning of 2016, 53 percent of black Democrats had a favorable view of Sanders, while only 16 percent had an unfavorable view2 — +37 is a good net favorability rating. In fact, Sanders’s net favorability rating was about as high among black Democrats as Clinton’s was among white ones.3 But Clinton was really popular with black Democrats, with a net favorability rating of +70 points (82 percent favorable, 12 percent unfavorable).

A poll conducted by Survey Sampling International during those same months showed a similar dynamic. Asked to rank their feelings about Sanders on a scale from 0 (very unfavorable) to 100 (very favorable), black voters gave the Vermont senator a 58, on average. That’s not great, but it’s not bad either. For context, Donald Trump averaged a 22, and Sen. Ted Cruz a 36. Again, Clinton was notably higher at 72.

In a March 2016 poll, the Pew Research Center asked registered voters if various candidates would be a “great, good, average, poor or terrible president.” Among black Democratic respondents, 67 percent said Clinton would be good or great, while another 25 percent said average. Sanders also had fairly high marks: 62 percent said he would be good or great, 27 percent said average.

And young black voters actually liked Sanders more than Clinton by some measures. A Gallup survey from April 2016 suggested that Sanders’s favorability rating among black millennials (67 percent) was higher than Clinton’s (60 percent.) And this was borne out in the results. Among black voters under 30, the two candidates split the vote about evenly in 2016. But older black voters were a bigger part of the electorate the 2016 primary (suggesting they were most likely to turn out and vote), and they leaned heavily toward Clinton.

I’m not saying that Sanders was beloved by black voters in 2016, or that he couldn’t have done a better job of appealing to them. But I think an accurate reading of what we know from 2016 is that black voters liked Sanders — just less than Clinton.

You can see all this in recent polling too. Sanders remains fairly popular with African Americans. A December 2018 Quinnipiac poll found that 55 percent of black voters had a favorable view of Sanders, while 26 percent had an unfavorable view. (Clinton was at 62-22.) Most more recent polls didn’t publish candidates’ favorability with specific demographic groups. (Often the sample sizes aren’t big enough for the results to be meaningful.) But we reached out to Morning Consult, which is doing regular polling of the 2020 race and so amasses fairly large samples of racial and demographic groups. According to their national polling conducted March 18-24, 71 percent of black Democrats had a favorable view of Sanders, compared to 10 percent who had an unfavorable view.

“Duh,” you might say, “Sanders is a Democrat4 and about 90 percent of black voters back Democrats, so of course black people are favorable toward him.” And you might ask: “Why does it matter if a group likes a candidate if they won’t vote for him or her?”

It matters for two reasons. First, understanding this dynamic between Sanders and black voters should influence media coverage. If Sanders’s problem with black voters in 2016 was about Clinton, not him, the media should probably not cover Sanders with the assumption that he has a tense relationship with black voters or doesn’t understand them. Secondly, it complicates what approach Sanders and his campaign can take to win over more black voters. The Vermont senator is making outreach efforts to black Americans a part of his strategy from the beginning of his campaign in 2020 in a way he did not in 2016. But these efforts may not amount to much if the issue isn’t Sanders’s flaws but his opponents’ strengths. In fact, he may need to attack some of his potential rivals who appeal to black voters. And some Sanders allies have been doing just that over the last few months, in particular highlighting Sen. Kamala Harris’s controversial record as prosecutor.

Who should Sanders be worried about beating him with black voters? The obvious answers are Sens. Cory Booker and Harris, the two prominent black candidates in the race. But the Democrat who is really popular with African Americans right now is former Vice President Joe Biden. In the recent Morning Consult polling, Biden was viewed favorably by 77 percent of black Democrats, with just 8 percent viewing him unfavorably. He’s the only potential candidate who had a better net favorable rating than Sanders with black respondents. Booker (45 favorable, 11 unfavorable) and Harris (48-13) are popular too, but a lot of respondents either don’t know who those two senators are or don’t know them well enough to have an opinion of them yet.

Morning Consult found Biden getting 40 percent of the vote among a national sample of about 2,900 black Democrats, with Sanders at 24 percent, Harris at 11 and Booker at 6. A Quinnipiac poll conducted from March 21-25 similarly found Biden with 44 percent support among black Democrats, with Sanders in second among the 2020 candidates at 17 percent.

In the Morning Consult data, Biden gets a bit more support among black voters than he does from the electorate overall. Harris and Booker overperform a bit with black voters too. Notably, while Sanders doesn’t overperform with black voters, he doesn’t underperform either.

In any case, it’s way too early to predict which candidates will ultimately do well with black Democratic primary voters — or primary voters overall. We don’t know even know yet if Biden is running. Still, I don’t think we should completely discount Biden’s early strength with black voters either.

Looking to next year, you could imagine five or six candidates (or more) staying in race through the first dozen primaries or so. Maybe several of them, including Sanders, get significant chunks of the black vote and no one really consolidates it. That’s a good scenario for the Vermont senator if he maintains his base of younger voters. Or maybe Sanders could gain support among black voters — they already have pretty favorable views about him and he is trying hard to appeal to them. That’s an even better scenario for him.

But Sanders could face the same problem he did in 2016 if the race comes down to say, Sanders vs. Biden or Harris — a candidate who most black voters just like more than the Vermont senator. Either way, there’s little evidence that black voters start off the 2020 race hating him.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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lilicivi1976-blog · 5 years

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lushscreamqueen · 3 years

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THE KILLER SHREWS on the Schlocky Horror Picture Show

August 03, 2008

OPENING: Hello, good evening, and welcome to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. I'm your host, Nigel Honeybone. As the 1950's grew to a close so did the era of the giant radioactive beast. Spawned from the nuclear fears stemming from World War II, the movies saw dozens of animals super-sized due to one of the popular catch words of the time: Radiation! By decades end, just about every manner of giant beastie had been seen. Lizards, spiders, ants, grasshoppers, the list goes on. The major studios had lost the inclination to finance such projects, and gradually re-focused their attention on new trends like nudies, bikies and gothic horror. That is not to say that movies with ginogorous critters didn't exist. It's just that, more often than not, it was left to the little guy, the independent producer or filmmaking rookie to unleash such monsters. Witness tonight, if you dare, as a group of people trapped on an island during a storm must contend with a bunch of whippets in wigs, in the 1959 anti-classic, Attack Of The Killer Shrews! BREAK: Don't go away, we'll be right back with more dogs In drag, and then after the ads we'll get back to the movie. MIDDLE: Welcome back to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Attack Of The Killer Shrews, also known as just Killer Shrews, was the brainchild of Texas millionaire Gordon McLendon. Born in Paris, Texas in 1921 he would go on to win a nationwide political-essay contest, attend Yale University where he studied Far Eastern languages, work for the campus radio station, and served as business manager for the Yale Literary Magazine, all before the U.S. got involved in World War Two. After the war he bought an interest in a radio station and built up a following for his live baseball game broadcasts. Having built up quite a name for himself as a pioneer in the radio field, McLendon now turned his attention to film...a regrettable decision for producer and audience alike. He and his family owned several drive-ins and theatres. Like many drive-in owners discovered, their outlets for screening films were considered the bottom of the barrel by the pretentious lot in Hollywood and many in tinseltown tried their darndest to keep their films out of the drive-in chains. This only led to the drive-in owners taking the next logical step, they financed their own films. In 1959 McLendon financed three films: The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster, and My Dog Buddy, none of which are remembered as sterling examples of cinematic skill, if they're remembered at all. James Best, known far and wide as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on television's original Dukes of Hazzard, plays Thorne Sherman and captains his own ship. Sounds cool, but sadly it isn't any bigger than the SS Minnow, and the only person he has to boss around is Rook. He's a glorified gopher, delivering supplies out to Doctor Craigis on his island. Sherman is a man's man, which by 1950s terms means he drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, has an appreciative eye for the ladies and is ready for a fistfight on a moment's notice, the kind of simplistic brute we are gradually evolving away from, a little too slowly if you ask me. His Honour Judge Henry Dupree plays Rook Griswold and looks like he could have played the title role in that live action Fat Albert movie: Hey, hey, hey! He's Sherman's sole crewman, although the two seem to share a real friendship rather than just bossy Captain/abused crew dynamic. Poor Rook is the first person to bite it in The Killer Shrews, or more accurately, the first to get bitten. Repeatedly, as a matter of fact. In this way this film helped start the stereotype of the token black character becoming the first victim in horror films. You may think films like Night Of The Living Dead and Alien were breakthroughs for the token black character in American horror, but a pessimist might say they simply get more screen-time before being killed-off. Baruch Lumet plays Doctor Marlowe Craigis. He may not seem like much, but he fathered one of Hollywoods greatest producer/directors, Sidney Lumet, famous for

Twelve Angry Men, Failsafe, The Pawnbroker and Dog Day Afternoon. Speaking of dogs, he also directed the all-black musical The Wiz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Nobody's perfect. Anyway, Craigis says he hails from Sweden, and has come to the island of The Killer Shrews to further his scientific work, but you and I both know it was to keep his sexy daughter out of the Swedish porn industry. Craigis wants to shrink people, or at least slow down our metabolisms so the Earth's resources will last longer when overpopulation becomes a big problem. I think a bigger problem might be smarmy foreign scientists who screw around with Mother Nature... Swedish-born Ingrid Goude, a former Miss Universe, plays Ann Craigis, Doctor Craigis sexy daughter. She claims to be a zoologist, which is about as convincing as Nicole Kidman playing a brain surgeon. Though to be honest, I wouldn't mind checking-out her knowledge of biology, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ann serves no purpose here other than to scream on occasion, and to provide Captain Sherman with a new First Mate, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ken Curtis, another famous redneck, plays Jerry Farrell, part of Doctor Craigis research team. Curtis was inducted into the Hall Of Great Western Performers in 1981 for his performance as Festus in almost 300 episodes of Gunsmoke. Jerry's vital role in the mission is whining, cowering, boozing it up and generally being a waste of skin. He despises Sherman from the start, probably because he recognises that Sherman is much more of a man than he ever will be. I wouldn't get attached to Jerry if I were you. Played by Gordon McLendon, the Texas millionaire responsible for this mess Doctor Radford Baines is another one of the scientists helping Doctor Craigis with his work. This guy is really devoted to his work. In fact, he can hardly think of anything else and walks around muttering things like "Hematoxic Syndrome." His last moments on Earth are spent in devotion to science and furthering the understanding of mankind, instead of doing something really important like trying to get laid or run away. Unknown Alfredo DeSoto plays Mario. Despite the Italian name, Mario is apparently Mexican. He's most likely a servant of some kind, though his main duty seems to be as a device to advance the plot. Whatever he does, it doesn't involve too much physical labor, as Mario's mid section is expanding faster than a balloon. He isn't around much. Just long enough to say things like "Si, senor," "No, senor" and "Aaaahhhh!". It also explains why the shrews ran out of food. Mario doesn't look like he was missing any meals... Attack Of The Killer Shrews gives real meaning to the phrase Low Budget. Filmed on a mere handful of sets and featuring scene after scene of people talking, often with their back to the camera, with little in the way of action, and one could easily dismiss this as pure manure. The fact that the giant shrews are played by dogs in drag when they're not being represented by clumsy puppets, and one could not be blamed for turning up their nose at this movie. If there is a saving grace, it's the short running time. So yes, there's lots of boring talk, but there is also enough monster action to satisfy fans of such schlocky goodness. Besides, I shouldn't have to explain how funny it is to watch somebody scream in terror at a Collie wearing carpet remnants, when the dog is rolling over on his back obviously expecting a belly rub! And it's with that thought in mind we now return you to the carnivorous canine creepiness that is Attack Of The Killer Shrews! CLOSING: It's alright, you can open your eyes now. How exactly do Killer Shrews assimilate poison into their systems, anyway? For instance, I love to drink Absinthe, and I do mean Absinthe, not that over-the-counter swill. I've consumed hundreds if not thousands of litres of it over the years, over three thousand litres just in the last fifteen years, but I still haven't started frothing with green poison yet. If I can't assimilate my own favourite

beverage after drinking thousands of bottles, how can the shrews do so with poison after just one sampling of it? Anyway, please join me next week so I can poke you in the eye with another frightful excursion to the backside of the Public Domain, filmed in glorious 2-D black & white Regularscope on...The Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Toodles!

by Lushscreamqueen

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hydrus · 7 years

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Version 242

youtube

windows

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os x

app

tar.gz

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tar.gz

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tar.gz

I had a great week, getting a lot done. I've fixed a bunch of bugs and the new dupe stuff now shows something interesting.

This is a big release. tl;dr is that I am firing on all cylinders but sankaku downloading is broken for now. On v245, the hydrus network protocol will update, so check back in around then if you try to upload some tags and get an error.

you can now see some duplicates

I've polished all the duplicate code. Maintenance and searches run smarter and faster and you can control what gets run in idle time (including finding potential duplicate pairs) using the cog icon on the duplicates page.

You can also finally see some duplicates! I've added a prototype 'show some pairs' button that'll show you a random group of pairs just as simple thumbnails. I would like to eventually have a more contextual presentation for the future filter, but do check this out--I think it is pretty neat seeing the different kinds of dupes there are.

The only real job left for duplicates is to make the ui workflow to quickly process them. I would continue to appreciate your feedback now and as it rolls out. You will probably be telling the client 'file A is (no different to|better than|an alternate of) file B' and telling it to merge tags and ratings and optionally deleting bad files.

The feedback from last week was very helpful. Most users are seeing lots of duplicate pairs--typically, the raw number found is about 5-20% of total files (For my 290k client, I have something like 28k 'exact match' duplicate pairs). I dreaded this at first, thinking this would mean a huge workload, but as I thought about it more, I realised this number is inflated--if two files look similar, they make one pair, but if three look similar, there are three pairs discovered, and four make six, five ten, and so on. If you have ten or twenty files that all look the same, this will inflate the 'potential duplicates' number significantly. My workflow will use a bit of logic to collapse these redundant pairs (if you say A is better than B and B is better than C, it can infer that A is better than C).

Anyway, the duplicate stuff is going great, is the main point. It is almost at 1.0.

some downloader issues

The sankaku downloader exploded this week. Several users reported that it gives 503 errors. I looked into it, and I think the problem is due to cloudflare. Either sankaku have chosen to increase their protection level or some anti-DDoS system is kicking in automatically, but the upshot is that hydrus isn't being polite and browser-like enough about its requests so cloudflare is blocking it. Several other script-based downloaders have apparently been similarly affected.

I have paused all sankaku subscriptions and removed the sankaku downloader for new users for now. If the problem magically fixes itself, then we can go back, but I suspect the ultimate solution here is to wait for the downloader overhaul, which I will be working on after this dupe stuff, which will make hydrus act much more like a nice browser and respond more professionally to various server requests and error states.

In a not-dissimilar vein, I have removed the danbooru entry for new users and removed the hentai foundry unnamespaced tag parser. Danbooru has been giving sample sized files for a while, and the artist-created hentai foundry unnamespaced tags are frequently complete garbage. Both issues will be more tacklable under the new downloader engine, so please hang in there until then.

bandwidth limits and network upgrade

My PTR server is probably going to hit 256GB bandwidth (my limit on how much I can give it) for the month in the next couple of days. This is a nice problem, as it means it is doing a lot and lots of people are syncing with it, but it has happened quicker than I expected.

I re-tested the bandwidth exceeded error code this week, but I can't be absolutely confident it will look completely pretty in the real world when it happens. Your sync downloads should pause silently, but I think you'll get an error popup if you try to upload tags. Please wait until the 1st of Feb for the clock to reset.

I have had this problem in the back of my mind for a while. As I've said before, the system that worked for 10 million tags is struggling at 114 million. The update system is very inefficient. There is a longer term plan in the works to P2P a lot of this stuff, but I also have a plan to reduce bandwidth significantly. With this bandwidth problem, I have decided to move this latter overhaul up and also do some other important code and database cleanup.

So, while I will do some general tying-off work next week, for v244 I will concentrate on reducing the size of the database and then in v245 I will overhaul the update protocol. I expect to get about a 30% reduction in db size and quite a bit more on the network end. After that, I will be back to finishing off the dupe stuff.

misc stuff

I have fixed the garbage gif rendering on Windows. It was a build problem.

You can now assign a shortcut to an 'unclose_page' action. It undoes the last page close, and for new users defaults to Ctrl+U.

You can now sort thumbnails by width, height, ratio, and num_pixels!

As I've talked about in recent releases, the hydrus client-server interaction is now exclusively https.

If you import files with neighbouring .txt files and have the original files set to be deleted on successful import, the .txt files will now also be deleted.

When exporting neighbouring .txt files, you will be asked to select which tag services' tags you wish to include!

full list

optimised 'exact match' similar file queries to run a lot faster

optimised similar file queries in general, particularly for larger cycle queries

optimised hamming distance calculation, decreasing time by roughly 45%!

the similar files tree maintenance idle job will not trigger while there are phashes still to regenerate (this was redundantly and annoyingly blatting the new dupes page as soon as phash regen was paused)

removed similar files tree maintenance entry from db->maintain menu, as it can be done better from the new dupes page

adjusted the duplicate search and file phash regen progress gauges to reflect total number of files in cache, not the current batch job

all maintenance jobs on the duplicates search page will now save their progress (and free up a hanging gui) every 30 seconds

the duplicates page's cog menu button now lets you put phash regen and tree rebalancing on the normal idle routine, defaulting both to off

the cog menu can also put duplicate searching on idle time!

added a very rough 'just show me some pairs!' button to the dupe page--it is pretty neat to finally see what is going on

I may have reduced the memory use explosion some users are getting during file phash regen maintenance

wrote an unclose_page action and added it to the shortcuts options panel--it undoes the last page close, if one exists. ctrl+u will be the default for new users, but existing users have to add it under options

added ascending/descending sort choices for width, height, ratio, and num_pixels

the client can no longer talk to old http hydrus network servers--everything is now https

in prep for a later network version update, the client now supports gzipped network strings (which compress json a lot better than the old lz4 compression)

fixed gif rendering in the Windows build--I forgot to update a build script dll patch for the new version of opencv

the export file dialog's neighbouring .txt taglist file stuff now allows you to select a specific combination of tag services

if an hdd import's original file is due to be deleted, any existing neighbouring taglist .txt file will now also be deleted

the inter-thread messaging system has a new simple way of reporting download progress on an url

the handful of things that create a downloading popup (like the youtube downloader) now use this new download reporting system

sankaku seems to be 503-broke due to cloudflare protection--I have paused all existing sankaku subscriptions and removed the sankaku entry for new users (pending a future fix on my or their end)

I've also removed danbooru for new users for now--someone can fix the long-running sample size file issue in the new downloader engine

removed unnamespaced tag support from the hentai-foundry parser--maybe someone can try to fix that mess in the new downloader engine

menubuttons can now handle boolean check menu items that are tied straight into hydrus's options

menus launched from the newer frame and dialog code will now correctly display their help text on the main gui frame's statusbar! (at least on Windows! Linux and OS X remain borked!)

fixed a unicode error parsing bug in the gallery downloader

the server stop (or restart) command now correctly uses https!

the server test code now works on https as appropriate

fixed some misc server test code

misc fixes

misc cleanup

misc layout cleanup

next week

I had actually already scheduled a smaller network improvement for v245 before this bandwidth issue came up, so that's why I am sticking with that for the bigger overhaul. I think the db collapse (which is best done beforehand) will take a week, so I still have next week spare. I will try to tie-off the biggest outstanding cleanup and fixing jobs and not burn myself out so I can concentrate for two weeks.

#release

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gliddenqpmelgarxn59insuranc-blog · 5 years

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cheap insurance 25 year olds

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robertkstone · 6 years

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2019 BMW 330i Prototype Review: The Ultimat3?

Our incessant bleating about BMW’s lamentable deviation from its “ultimate driving machine” ethos appears to have at long last spurred some action. The niche M5 drives pretty ultimately, and now the chassis development team for the crucial G20-generation 3 Series sedan seems equally determined to return the iconic Dreier to the top of its highly competitive heap.

So eager is the team to get this right and shut down the haters that a select few of the loudest complainers were invited to the Nurburgring for an intense day of public road and closed ’Ring driving of early 2.0-liter turbo prototype cars. Note, these versions were equipped with the M Sport package, and there’s still time to tune and tweak some of the final calibrations before the new 330i goes on sale early next year.

A quick summary of the key changes: Examine the undercarriage, and you won’t notice anything radically new, and yet every part is significantly revised—geometry, elastokinematics (bushings and bump-stops), spring and damping rates, and damper internals. Of course, the most crucial chassis component is the body structure itself; it’s stiffened by 25 percent in overall torsion, and the areas where the front and rear suspensions mount are about 50 percent more rigid.

The switch to aluminum for most of the front body structure contributes to an overall weight reduction of 120 pounds, which improves agility by lowering the polar moment of inertia, and helps deliver a 50:50 weight distribution (measured with full fluids, 300 pounds of front-seat passengers, and 31 pounds in the trunk). The center of gravity on all 3 Series models drops by 0.4 inch (the sport suspension drops the body another 0.4 inch), and the track widens by 1.2 inch.

That added rigidity around the suspension mounts better resists vibration, so the suspension bushings can be stiffened to deliver more road-feel to the steering rack (for the first time on a BMW, the sport suspension gets unique bushings). Front and rear suspension geometry is revised to lower the roll centers slightly and to make the rear more neutral. With improved front grip, we’re promised, the result is reduced understeer and increased agility.

The front struts feature new internal hydraulic rebound stops that dramatically increase the damping force in both directions near the top of the travel (the old internal rebound springs stored energy as the body rose and released it on the way back down, skewing the effective damping rates). The rear shocks include a similar function operating at the bottom end of travel, where a second, smaller piston enters a narrower cylinder that increases the damping rate by 50 percent. This improves body-motion control when the vehicle is heavily loaded and when it traverses bigger dips and bumps. The base and sport suspensions both utilize this technology, using different damping rates. (The optional adaptive sport dampers do this and more using external bypass spool valves.)

The base steering rack uses a fixed ratio, and sport suspensions get a variable rate with a more gradual (less noticeable) quickening of the ratio at higher steering angles. And—hallelujah!—the utterly unpredictable and truly hateful Active Steering has been banished to a special circle of hell (at least for the G20).

BMW did not share the specific spring and damping figures with us, but base car tuning is very slightly stiffer, and the sport suspenders are about 12 percent stiffer than the outgoing sport setup, meaning the gap between base and sport roughly doubles in this generation. The anti-roll bars have been tweaked very slightly to maintain similar control working in conjunction with the new spring rates and geometric roll axis. Tires remain the same size but are re-engineered for less rolling resistance and noise transmission.

In the braking department, both base and sport models get four-piston front and two-piston rear fixed calipers, but the sport models boast larger-diameter discs and caliper pistons front and rear, with a unique booster and proportioning valves to match. The last piece of the dynamic handling puzzle is the sport suspension’s electronically controlled limited-slip diff, which is entirely controlled by the chassis computers and works just like the ones in M cars, but with two fewer clutch plates.

My first drive is in an electric power steering–equipped development prototype with BMW steering guru Mischa Bachmann riding shotgun. As I steer through the twisty lanes, he taps away on a laptop altering various parameters, like an optometrist working a refractor. “Do you like this one, or is this better?”

Bachmann starts me out with his leading calibration for “comfort” steering,—light on center, effort builds naturally off center, and there’s never any sensation of effort being added for sportiness’ sake. I like it. He lets me sample higher steering effort levels and various damping rate profiles (these affect how quickly you can steer the car and how it returns to center). By comparison with the baseline’s low, natural effort, all seem worse. Other journalists at the event preferred some of Mischa’s tweaks. But what do they know? Do any emulate the feel of a Porsche Boxster or E39 5 Series? No. Mischa’s setup is superbly precise, utterly predictable, and makes the car do exactly what I ask of it. Bravo. It still lacks the feel of those benchmark cars—because it’s so darned hard for road forces to fight their way past the torque of an electric motor twisting a second pinion on the steering rack, which then flows up the main pinion and shaft to the steering wheel rim.

Next we set out on an hour-plus route used by the development team. It offers a brilliant mix of twisty, hilly, and straight country roads with widely varying surfaces, village roads, and unrestricted autobahn stretches. Application driving dynamics boss Jos van As notes that the test cars are the “worst case for ride”—sport suspension and lowest-profile run-flat tires. Yet body motion control is impeccable, and the vehicle absorbs the sharpest impacts with trademark vintage-BMW suppleness. I can only imagine how cosseting the base car on taller sidewalls will feel. Even when those bumps occur in the tightest of corners, they’re absorbed without deviating from the driving line. The e-LSD axle can be felt helping dig the car out of the tightest corners when the throttle is open. In a few hard hairpin corners that clearly involve steering-ratio variation, the effort and motion feel entirely natural. And at 155 mph on the autobahn, the solid on-center feel inspires confidence.

The time arrives for two hot laps of the Nurburgring behind van As in an M2 serving as my driving-line coach. The new 3 feels right at home here—no surprise, given that it’s logged thousands of miles, 12.9 of them at a time, on this 73-turn circuit. A bit more surprising is how quickly this chassis makes a ’Ring virgin like myself feel comfortable probing eight- and nine-tenths of this chassis’ limits, maintaining small-slip-angle drifts and trusting the brakes to do their thing harder and later in the turns. (I did detect a bit of brake vibration at the end of one long braking zone, however.) The steering totally disappears here, drawing no attention to itself.

The session ends. I struggle to think of constructive feedback for the chassis team. My criticisms are all for other 3 Series engineers. The transmission’s sport-mode tuning needs a lot of work. It was forever grabbing high gears at the wrong time and it too seldom downshifted appropriately while slowing for a corner. The shift paddles and manual-gate shifter work great, except the thin red line in the cluster that blinks at redline is too faint to get my attention. I’d also love to see some improvement in the sound of the engine/exhaust at lower revs. It sounds great at full boil, but it’s still plagued by that dieselish clatter at idle and low cruising speeds. (The only other news we received during this chassis-focused trip about the 2.0-liter turbo engine is that it will gain about 7 hp and 37 lb-ft of torque.)

Over dinner we chat about benchmarks, and I ask whether the Alfa Romeo Giulia warranted special attention. “It is a great car, but it is not a BMW,” says chassis integration guy Robert Rothmiller. In his team’s experience, Rothmiller finds that although the Alfa’s ultimate capabilities may be impressive, that car makes its driver work harder than a BMW driver should have to in achieving them. So will this be the ultimate-driving 3 Series? The essential elements seem to be here—provided Mischa doesn’t act on those other journalists’ steering recommendations and ruin his years of development work.

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mindthump · 6 years

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How Big Is the Alt Right? Inside My Futile Quest to Count https://ift.tt/2vTchfH

How many white nationalists live in the United States? It’s a question I’ve been trying to answer on and off for years. In particular, I’ve tried to quantify the group’s web-based wing—the slippery, meme-slinging trolls who call themselves the alt-right. I’ve worked a lot of angles: totaling the populations of subreddits, counting up the unique visitors to various websites, comparing the number of times Twitter users invoked alt-right hashtags to the times they had more wholesome things to tweet about. (For the record, #dogs beat out #cuck and #whitegenocide every time.) I have squinted at blurry aerial photos of far-right rallies, trying to separate protestor from counterprotester.

None of this produced satisfying answers.

But as we approach the anniversary of the far-right protest that introduced this group to the national conversation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the death of anti-racist counterprotester Heather Heyer, it’s again become a question worth asking. This weekend, Washington, DC, will host a second Unite the Right rally, this one nominally in protest of the alleged abuses suffered by far-right activists in Charlottesville. The organizers can call it whatever they like, but in reality this anniversary rally is one thing only: a public exhibition of the state of the movement.

It’s important that we gain a sense of this group’s scale. So much of the alt-right movement takes place online, where a handful of aggressive netizens can have the impact of an army. The alt-right has been been consistently successful in drumming up media attention for its online activity, so when they venture off the web to protests like the Unite the Right rally, it’s easy to project online might onto whatever crowd gathers. But numerically, those offline crowds have been small, and when it comes to voting and purposeful activism—the kind of activities that transform a group of heinous trolls into a political movement, capable of inserting their ideology into laws and elected officials—real-life size matters.

And so I began to count.

Alt-Right Ambiguity

When trying to quantify the members of a movement, the first question is: Who counts? Where the alt-right is concerned, there is no easy answer. So I sat down with a piece of paper and tried to diagram it out. The alt-right includes white supremacists, white nationalists (basically, white supremacists who think white people deserve their own country), neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neo-reactionaries (who are anti-democracy), neo-fascists, nativists, men’s rights activists and anti-feminists, fundamentalist Christians, nativists and Islamophobes, homophobes, Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites...the list goes on. But identifying with the alt-right doesn’t necessarily mean you identify with any of those groups, and vice versa. And within the alt-right, there are micro-communities like the alt-lite (who love trolling and hate being called racist). So my diagram—which was starting to look like a Final Fantasy bracket from hell—wasn’t very useful.

I needed a new way to capture what made the alt-right the alt-right, and it couldn’t be these fuzzy ideologies. “These are the same ideas the extremist right has been kicking around for the last 150 years or so,” says Phyllis Gerstenfeld, who teaches courses on online hate crimes and criminology at Cal State Stanislaus. “It’s the methodology that’s changed.” A few decades ago, extremists had to rely on IRL word of mouth to spread their ideas, and some incumbent extremist groups (like militias or the KKK) often still do. Maybe I could get some sense of the alt-right’s scale from measuring their twist on the far-right recruitment strategy: digital savvy.

But the dynamics of the internet make traffic data, tweet impressions, and subscriber counts meaningless. The alt-right has been on the receiving end of a years-long signal boost, even as the media—myself included—struggle to figure out how to cover the activities of these groups without amplifying their message. Yet traffic metrics don’t differentiate between the die-hards, the joiners, the hate-readers, and lurkers like me. Tweets might be coming from bots, or a single human helming dozens of accounts, or a small coordinated group of humans who may or may not be tweeting in earnest. And in our polarized digital culture, all hashtag campaigns are destined to be co-opted by the opposite side, for mockery purposes.

Traffic metrics don’t differentiate between the die-hards, the joiners, the hate-readers, and lurkers like me.

Some researchers overcome these opaque numbers by turning to an unlikely group: anti-fascists, whose databases are brimming with names they’ve hacked or tricked out of white nationalists But that’s hardly a representative (or neutral and unbiased) sample. Back in the day, KKK-style self-reported memberships allowed researchers to roughly track these groups as they would with a voting roll, but today those lists are as outmoded as David Duke. These days, groups form loosely organized local chapters, or stick to private servers: much harder to track, and much harder to quantify. According to Gerstenfeld, your best chance of a solid estimate would be to take a random survey of a representative sample of people and hope they answer your questions honestly. Which is basically setting yourself up to get trolled.

Your best chance at a meaningful sense of scale is at rallies. Meaningful, but not conclusive: Real life gatherings tend to draw out more paramilitary types than meme lords, and because these rallies often turn into riots, crowd estimates are hard to come by. Still, the point of protest is to show your numbers to the world, a kind of head count of those you can count on to support a movement in the open air. In Charlottesville, the best estimates put rally participant numbers between 500 and 600 people. For context, that’s five times as big as any far-right rally in the last decade, but is still only a tiny fraction of what you’d expect from their (inflated) digital footprint.

It’s also two hundred times smaller than 2017’s March for Science, and a thousand times smaller than 2017’s Women’s March. All signs point to an even lower turnout for Unite the Right in DC.

Perhaps Bigger, But Not Bolder

So what’s going on here? Well, there’s little indication that Charlottesville helped recruitment at all. Two major groups involved in the original rally no longer exist: the organizers, Vanguard America, and the Traditionalist Workers Party, which collapsed after some spectacularly silly internal battles. Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says that surviving groups like Identity Evropa and Patriot Front may have increased their numbers when the others collapse, but that’s overflow, not growth.

And that’s big, according to Hankes, because those still left are not down with the rally. Many posts about DC’s Unite the Right rally call it a “lawsuit trap.” Remember, there was a civil rights suit brought against the organizers of Unite the Right, and the has judge issued an opinion that the organizers had conspired to violate the civil rights of Charlottesville citizens, a conspiracy that could legally be tied to the death of Heather Heyer. “If I were the folks thinking about participating, I could be quite worried that my participation could link me to violent activity that violates civil rights,” says Richard Schragger, who specializes in Constitutional and local government law at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Even if you’re exercising your First Amendment rights, you’re responsible for the outcomes.”

The DC Unite the Right rally is shaping up to be a public announcement of a new, more cautious alt-right zeitgeist. It’s fuchsia and teal website looks like an ‘80s video game. The organizer, Jason Kessler—who, according to Hanke, is now something of a pariah—has banned the swastikas and the other symbols of white supremacy that so many objected to at the last rally. Kessler is trying to massage the movement into something (somewhat) more palatable, similar to the surviving organizations Identity Evropa and Patriot Front. Identity Evropa claims to protect cultural heritage, Patriot Front claims their prejudice is patriotism, and Kessler claims to be a civil rights advocate for white people.

All of which are lies that tell the truth: the open racism we all saw at Charlottesville is being slowly pushed underground.