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#narratively made vulnerable

hecatesbroom · 11 days

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I hope you don't mind the influx of GG/Dorothy asks you've gotten because I really love your takes and your fics really touch upon a more vulnerable part of Dorothy that I feel was rarely fully explored but was very much present. I was watching recently an ep where Dorothy says she thought her father didn't like her or love her and Sophia cracked that he always talked her up ... to try and sell her to gypsies. Dorothy says "do you know how much that hurts me when you say things like that?". It's one of those lines that's never really followed up on or given a big moment but it stays with me.

Not at all!! I love hearing from you! <3 (and if you ever feel up to it, feel free to send me a dm as well! I'd love to hear more of your thoughts!)

Thank you so much :') I started writing Golden Girls fics precisely for that reason: Dorothy's vulnerability is left so underexplored in the show, even in the moments that (in my opinion, anyway!) presented the perfect opportunity to delve a little deeper into her feelings. I had to give her a moment to shine haha.

That line is the perfect example of what I'm talking about, actually! They throw in those really poignant lines or moments (or even just looks, at times) that hint at so much going on beneath the surface, but it's never expanded on. The only emotional moments she does get, that are fully followed up on, are those relating to Stan -- and even there I feel like a lot is glossed over (often by Dorothy herself, first and foremost).

I could probably write an essay on this but I'll spare you, but I think Sophia's often treated much the same -- if slightly differently -- in the show! And I mean, considering she raised Dorothy, I'm pretty sure she inadvertently ended up teaching Dorothy that covering up your vulnerability is the only way to deal with it. Sophia covers her feelings with quips and jokes, Dorothy does it through dismissal.

And because both of their methods for covering up are very convenient for a sitcom (I can drag Blanche into this as well, by the way. But I promised not to write an essay) it's *so easy* for the narrative to just. go along with their own dismissal of their feelings. Have Sophia distract from her feelings with a funny joke, and the audience is on the floor. Have Dorothy dismiss her feelings with a Look, and there's another opening for someone else to keep up the pace and move the scene along into lighter territory.

#they did only have 24 minutes to tell a story after all!#so if you have characters who will conveniently cover up their vulnerabilities then you won't have to take up all that time to explore that #and you can move on to the driving factor of every sitcom: the plot #they fit *so much* story into that short runtime it honestly kind of makes sense #i feel like all the girls have those moments where there's clearly something else going on but it's never explored bc the plot moves on #but it's easier to put blanche or rose in an emotionally heavy plot than it is for dorothy #i think #because blanche does keep up a facade as well but she *cannot* let go of it #she puts up a performance but she's *putting on a performance* (constantly). so there's enough of a base for the narrative to focus on #rose even actively looks for support. i'd argue she handles vulnerability very well! so again: easier to centre a plot on #dorothy though?? dorothy will probably go on like nothing's wrong #and *that* doesn't make a compelling central plot in a sitcom #(which is part of why i love 'sick & tired' so much! dorothy has to be vulnerable there because she *cannot* run this time)#oh no i'm so sorry. i went on a tangent in the tags #anyway THANKS for this ask anon! you made me very happy with the opportunity to talk about this haha #the golden girls #ask #anon #dorothy zbornak

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mla0 · 19 days

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shaun and habit for the ship game??

nowadays the only circumstance where i "ship it" is the idea that habit might try to do something like this as a way to manipulate shaun and turn her against her brother(s)

i think habit could maybe be fucked up enough to treat someone desperate to be loved again (shaun had just lost her partner) with affection, just to reach its own goals ie killing patrick, and i think shaun could be in a bad enough mental state to kinda just allow it and cling to anyone who supposedly loves her. habit would probably try to mold her and get her desensitized to hurting other people. whether habit does actually love her to some degree is up for debate. i think once it tried to fully turn shaun against her siblings, she would end up snapping out of it and running away, or possibly being straight-up rescued/someone helping her escape (i have my own take on how it'd happen, but this answer is already very long)

it's not a wholesome thing to me. it's horrible, but it IS interesting to explore, because it can create a good story/narrative. in terms of what's healthy for her though, i ship shaun x getting the fuck away from that thang. i'm much more interested in the aftermath and recovery of it from shaun's end than i'm actually interested in the pairing itself, tbh

#ask #Anonymous #this is why i circled the ''i could write an essay on it''#narratively interesting but in canon-compliant contexts if it was made into something cutesy i might simply die #i also think this would especially fit with the time-loop thing #if habit figured out shaun is able to remember previous loops. even though it isnt part of the timeloop itself #it'd probably try to go for the angle of getting her on its side and using her like a tool because she's very uninformed and vulnerable #can you tell i think habit is truly the worst

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nunyabznsbabes · 5 months

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Katniss is like Lucy Gray this, Katniss is like Sejanus that, and yes fine that's all good and true and lovely but Katniss Everdeen is also a direct parallel to Coriolanus Snow and people NEED to start talking about this because it's driving me crazy.

Think about it: they both grew up poor and deeply vulnerable, losing parents at a very young age, with a matriarchal adult (Katniss' mother and Coriolanus' Grandma'am) who fails to provide for them emotionally and physically. They intimately understand the threat of starvation, even developing with stunted growth because of it, and their narrations in the books share a fixation on food. Throughout their childhoods, both experienced constant fear and suffered a fundamental lack of control over their circumstances. Because of this, they're inherently suspicious of the people around them. They resent feeling indebted to others, especially those who have saved their lives. They're motivated almost entirely by family and deeply connected to their communities. Both are used and manipulated by the Capitol, both are forced to perform to survive and despise every inch of it, both are thrown into the Arena and made to kill. Both have a self-sacrificial, genuinely sweet sister figure acting as their conscience. Peeta and Lucy Gray - performers and love interests with a fundamental kindness and sense of hope about them - fulfill markedly similar roles in their narrative. Both contribute to the development of the future Hunger Games, Snow throughout tbosas and Katniss towards the end of Mockingjay.

It's easy to ignore these similarities because, as mirrors of each other, they are exact opposites. Katniss is from District 12, viewed and treated as less than human; Snow is the cream of the Capitol crop, given the privilege of a name with social weight, an ancestral home, and the opportunity of the Academy despite having no more money than a miner from 12. Katniss has no agency over her life, and responds by being kind whenever she's able, while Snow justifies horrendous evils in order to continue his quest for complete control. Katniss does everything she can to protect her family; Snow does everything he can to protect his family's image as an extension of his own ego. Katniss loves her District and connects with its inhabitants on a meaningful level, but Snow is indifferent at best to his peers - the apparent "superior people" - and only engages with his community for personal gain. Katniss emerges from the Arena horrified at herself and the system, but Snow takes his trauma and turns it into an excuse to perpetuate the violence with himself at the top. Katniss cares for Prim until her death and then snaps at the loss of her little sister, while Snow survives on Tigris' blood, sweat, and tears and then torments and abandons her, presumably because she calls him out on his insanity. Snow actively adds to and popularizes the Hunger Games because of his vendetta against the Districts following his childhood wartime trauma - Katniss briefly agrees to a new Hunger Games in the pursuit of vengeance, but later stops them from happening by killing Coin and choosing a life of peace and privacy. Snow is obsessed with revenge, but Katniss empathizes with the Capitolites and does what she can to keep them from suffering. He exists in a cruel system and selfishly upholds it; she exists in a cruel system and works to dismantle it for the good of her family and community, at great personal cost. And Peeta and Lucy Gray are incredibly similar, but Katniss and Peeta forge a relationship of genuine love and understanding that shines in comparison to Coriolanus' obsessive projection onto Lucy Gray.

So, yeah, Katniss is Lucy Gray haunting Coriolanus. But I bet you anything that eighty-something year old President Snow looks at her, the girl on fire, bright and young and brilliant, emerging from a childhood of starvation with a relentless hunger for success, a talented and charming performer helping her win the Games, and he sees the ghost of his own past. And that's why he's so afraid of her! Because if he sees himself in her, then he's up against his own cunning, his own talent for manipulation, his own charisma, his own genius. He's up against the version of himself that he once wished to be, with the nightmare army of his childhood at her back and her star-crossed lover at her side, spewing Sejanus' truths in his own voice. This isn't to say that Katniss ever achieved the level of power and agency that Coriolanus did during her time with the rebellion, but it is to say that Snow was taken down by what truly terrified him - his own morality, come to finish the job.

#the ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas #katniss everdeen #coriolanus snow #president snow #lucy gray baird #peeta mellark #everlark #tbosas meta #the hunger games #thg #snowbaird

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angorwhosebabyisthis · 1 year

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[talk of real-life and in-narrative anti-foster/adopted child sentiments, violent ableism, and child abuse/neglect/homicide cw, as well as mentions of racism.]

i think probably the biggest reason ivan's narrative makes me so goddamn angry is that not only was it hateful toward foster/adopted kids and disabled ND kids; it tries to take the intersection of those two, which gets children neglected, violently abused, and Straight Up Fucking Murdered at sky-high rates even compared to NT foster/adopted kids, and spin it as privilege. a novelty adoption by an explicitly abusive parent, no less.

and to make it even worse, they repeatedly and explicitly try to use his body type to go 'well i mean technically he's a kid but he LOOKS like an adult because he's Big and Threatening, so we're just gonna ignore that and judge him by adult standards.' which, for one thing, hi that is an extremely racist idea to perpetuate, even when you try to trojan horse it by applying it to white kid characters. fuck outta here with that. but it's also vile because 'big scary brutish violent neurodivergent boy who can't be meaningfully controlled through anything but more violence' is--surprise!--a piece of rhetoric that results in violence toward neurodivergent kids, autistic ones in particular. guess the fuck what ivan is coded as. 🙃

like. i cannot overstate that kids like ivan are at enormously high risk for severe abuse and outright murder. they do not get privilege handed to them on a silver platter, and they certainly don't get to lord it over the '''real''' children in the family. and it's fucking sinister that the authors try to make you sympathize and side with the '''real''' child in this scenario, who is constantly spouting off exactly the ideas that get foster/adopted kids killed, by making him the Good Nice One and ivan the Evil Mean One, and contriving a situation where there's on any level a power imbalance in ivan's favor.

fuck these books, man. how are these writers' arms even long enough to punch down that far.

#lorien legacies #ivanick shu-ra #adamus sutekh #cws in post #LL tag #LL crit tag #like we get it you were jealous of your stepbrother growing up.#how about you don't take it out on one of the actual most vulnerable demographics on the earth #amazed they had the restraint to not find an excuse to make him a POC lmao #this kind of shit is just. why i have been so increasingly soured on adam over the years #even his Kind Benevolent Heroic Qualities are a vehicle for so many absolutely horrific and frighteningly violent rhetoric and ideas #and when the narrative /does/ do anything like acknowledge his more negative qualities it either just gets brushed off #or it's an excuse to strawman things like him going 'hey so uh we are fucked and the entity's made of nothingburgers. it's not gonna help'#by throwing in him being a callous piece of shit about the loric genocide so six and marina can call him on it #it really really sucks because adam has been a favorite of mine for over a decade and he got me through some rough shit #but i've increasingly come to realize over time that his role in the narrative is so poisonous it leaves an awful taste in my mouth #and not in a way i feel like rehabilitating #this does not begin to scratch the surface #just. yeah.#anyway. fuck these writers lmao #dyn: so glad you're awake #fuck off adam

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

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

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

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whateversawesome · 3 months

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Spy x Family's Secret Story

A few days ago, I learned something interesting at school: some stories have secret stories.

Hopefully, I can explain it: a secret story is what is not told explicitly in the narrative, but that the reader can understand by the character's behavior, thoughts or actions.

The most interesting part is that this secret story is, in many cases, what pushes the main story forward.

So, of course, I had to apply this to my sxf brainrot 😏 It took me a while to figure it out, but I think I got it...

Remember this panel?

It's one of the most celebrated panels in the manga. We finally got to see Twilight shirtless 😎 and we've enjoyed countless fanarts of it (thanks to all the wonderful artists 👏) Well, it was precisely this panel and the timing of it what made me realize about Spy x family's secret story.

This is the first time we see Twilight naked, right? This was also the first time he realized he was vulnerable.

Here, Twilight, master of disguise, best spy of Westalis, rips his disguise, admits that he has weaknesses and shows us that he's injured because of this vulnerability.

Think about the symbolism of it; a person is at their most vulnerable when naked and we didn't see him in this state until he had that conversation with Yor. Even though the arc was about catching Wheeler, the secret story of that arc was about weakness. Wheeler himself mentioned it several times and it's not a coincidence that in this arc Twilight shows weakness not once, but three times:

1. By not killing Yuri (and getting shot)

2.By getting hurt during the confrontation with Wheeler and lastly...

3.When he sees Yor again!

It's also not a coincidence that he got physically hurt because he showed weakness. I suspect it won't be the last time this happens. Keep that in mind for the future...

All this is related to that secret story l mentioned at the beginning. I think SxF secret story is precisely that, not weakness, but vulnerability.

That conversation he had with Yor was about that; she was trying to convince him to be vulnerable with her (more on that here). And his thoughts were about that too; he's telling Yor in his mind he lives in a world where he cannot be vulnerable.

And that last line!!

It's exactly what secret stories are about: unsaid things.

The fact that an arc about weakness and vulnerability started and ended with Yor and where Twilight acknowledged his weakness is very significant. Do you see it too? All this happened because of her and I think he knows it too.

Twilight's struggle with vulnerability is what pushes the story forward and ultimately what makes so many of us connect with the characters. Clearly, he's losing the battle with himself and he's trusting and relying on his wife more every day; we see it in his behavior. We all want that to happen too!

Because, what is more human than to become vulnerable because of love?

#spy x family #twiyor #loid forger #yor forger #sxf #spy x family analysis #spy x family meta #loidyor #loid x yor #spy x family manga #spy x family anime #spy x family theory

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whatbigotspost · 11 months

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Every time I hear someone much older than me talking about how their shame about their bodies and weight have robbed them of all kinds of fun experiences and simple joys and delights in life, it breaks my fucking heart. Older women, in particular, have been shamed into and forced into (and perpetuated themselves) so many stupid narratives about what one "can't do" if you look a certain way. Sometimes they don't even notice it...they'll just casually be saying something like, "I would have loved to play volleyball back in school but this big ass wasn't going to look right in those shorts tee hee" and I'm like that's??? actually??? tragic???????? Especially when it's something they COULD still pursue or try but they've got a fixed mindset about it.

My 84 year old aunt really spent all of her 30s-60s believing that she COULDN'T just put on a swimsuit and enjoy the water in the summer. I have so many memories of this mindset affecting her all summer. Just casually existing by a pool in a swimsuit was something that women who looked like her Could Not Do. This is someone who broke so many gender barriers in her field, who was a pioneer and a bad ass, but who held herself back from something she truly enjoyed for DECADES because she's fat. A couple of years ago she told me how stupid she feels having thought like that now that her age has changed her mobility and safety in going to a pool and it's no longer literally possible for her to do so.

She bought the bullshit and deprived herself of happiness when it was possible, so she lost her chance at hundreds of moments of simple enjoyment she now looks back on sadly.

Really sadly.

I think this is a topic where we can literally see a huge generational change among society right now. The bitchy boomer who says something like, "oh she should NOT be wearing that" when a happy, chunky Gen Zer bops by in a crop top sounds like the death rattles of an ancient relic to most of us in younger generations. After we get over the overt hate that surges when we hear things like that, most of us can see right through that prickly exterior into the deeply damaged, sad, and vulnerable person inside who is the one that's the real problem in the equation.

And yet, while it can be easy to think, "Thank god I'm not like THAT" none of us are truly immune to the messages that are blasted in our faces all the time that still shame fatness and make us feel like we owe society a certain kind of "beauty."

Just keep an eye out for any limiting beliefs you have that are depriving you from joy and delight you want and need. As anyone like my aunt could tell you, you won't someday look back and think, "I sure am glad I didn't do what made me happy all those years!"

#fatphobia #misogyny #body acceptance #body neutrality #advice

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zahraaziza · 2 months

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news flash: palestinians don't want this

the part that fucks me up the most about all of that's been going on is, that palestinians would never in a gazillion fucking years wanna be put on display, for everyone to see like this.

all of the indiscribably horrific footage and imagery coming out of the occupied palestinian territories is deeply and utterly humiliating.

do you think, that for a split second, anyone, regardless of their background, would want to have someone record you literally blown to pieces?

do you think, that anyone in their right frame of mind would want someone to post videos of them crying, calling out for help, lying unconscious, having their own organs spilling out of their bodies?

do you honestly think, that they enjoy seeing the unimaginably horrifying footage of their own people, their own families and friends, their own blood, getting rounded up like animals, stripped naked against their will, tied up, beaten to no end and raped?

but this is what 76 years of their suffering has come to.

the world hasn't listened. the world has deliberately turned a blind eye. the ones in power purposely flip the script and adjust the narrative to their liking, knowing that you and people in your circle will willingly believe and eat it up.

after all, they have successfully run the campaign of "dirty, barbaric, war mongering arabs that have got nothing on their minds, but to blow themselves up and slaughter their own" for decades now.

palestinians are forced to expose themselves in the most vulnerable, raw and primitive manner, because they see no other way out.

this is their last resort, because the ones in power have made it theirs.

palestinians have been served on a silver platter and humiliated on the world stage, yet people still find ways to look away, because this imagery, they would've never wanted to be exposed to billions of strangers, makes these exact people uncomfortable.

shame. shame. shame.

palestinians do not want you to see them like this. they don't want you to fucking see them mourning yet another loss that adds to their list of millions of martyrs. they don't want you to see their men, women and children exposed and quite literally stripped from their dignity. they don't want you to fucking see their men blown to bits. they don't want you to see their family crushed under the rubble, that they once called their home.

but the world has left them no other choice. shame.

#free palestine #free gaza #free west bank #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #save gaza #save palestine #important #israel #anti zionisim #zionistterror #[♡ᵎ] 𝐳𝐚𝐡𝐫𝐚 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬

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