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would-this-pokemon-be-a-friend · 5 months

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I'm not sure they'd get a good score given their gremlin nature, but how about morgrem? I think they'd be neat to keep around if you've got a black thumb (like me lol), but idk.

Let me preface this by saying that I also love morgrems. I love the whole evolution line. That being said, I’m not so sure that keeping a morgrem as a pet would be the best idea.

Morgrems are a good size for a pet, pretty lightweight for their height. Unfortunately, they don’t seem particularly friendly. Disingenuous is the word I’d choose. These mischievous pokémon are quite intelligent, using their charm and crocodile tears to lure people into a false sense of security before striking (Shield, Sword). They are known to falsely apologize for attacking targets in order to bring them in close enough to stab with their “spear-like hair” (Sword). They also have a bit of a history of disappearing people into the woods for unknown reasons (Shield). Unfortunately, morgrems draw strength from negative emotions (Violet). This has made them pretty popular with trainers who tend to think on the gloomy side, but it also incentivizes them to keep an owner in a bad mood. They’re anti-emotional-support pets.

There is one silver lining to morgrems, which you pointed out in your request. Morgrems are said to have a peculiar ability to make crops grow (Shield). This will no doubt make them popular among those who struggle to keep plants alive (those with black thumbs, as you put it), who are willing to look past the species’ antisocial tendencies. This isn’t a very kind-hearted species, so they would likely need some coercion through treats and prizes to get them to help you. I’d say there’s probably other pokémon who would make better gardening partners, but if you love morgrem like I do you’ll be willing to look past that.

Thankfully, morgrems aren’t particularly lethal pokémon. There’s a reason that this species relies so much on trickery to get by: they’re not very confident in their combat abilities (Scarlet). Like the other species on their evolution line, morgrems have sharp, hardened hair that they can use as a weapon, specifically through the spear-like length on the back of their heads. Using this makeshift weapon, morgrems can use a variety of dark-type moves like Foul Play, Assurance, and their signature move False Surrender to menace enemies. We don’t really know if morgrems go out of their way to harm humans through violence, but we do know that you’ll never know when they’re tricking you into a false sense of security to strike. To put it simply, it’s difficult to trust a morgrem. They could hurt you pretty badly if they wanted to.

Morgrems are, at the very least, an acquired taste. While they seem to have the ability to help plants grow, they are sneaky tricksters with a spear built into their hair. My cat often goes into goblin-mode, but adopting an actual goblin might be a step too far. But hey, I love goblins. If you really want to make a pet morgrem work, you could, but they’re certainly not going to be the best fit for every home.

#pokémon #pokemon #morgrem #pkmn irl #PR-C

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bijoumikhawal · 11 months

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Also, since I mentioned it but haven't talked about it, let's examine "with sentiments like those you wouldn't last 5 seconds on Cardassia" through the Garak as mixed race reading we get from A Stitch In Time- and, because Julian's there, and I can't really talk about this interaction without it, reading Julian through a Jewish lens. (CCing: @nebulouscoffee as they asked the inital question)

Background contextualization once more: in the play The Nexus, there is an interaction which frankly, reveals itself as deeply cruel and mean-spirited. And, heads up, I will be discussing antisemitism and my criticism of the Federation.

BASHIR: When you were truly free. We so often only ruminate on the sad memories. When, if ever, have you felt like Elim Garak? GARAK (warms as he remembers): I used to perch on the edge of a dirt cart, drinking cool Ribexa, watching my “father” - Tolan - gently knead the soil around newly transplanted orchid bulbs. He used to talk to his patients, softly reassuring them that they weren’t lost or in danger. He was completely oblivious of me - but it didn’t matter. I lived through him, Doctor, and I lived through those orchids, imagining that I myself was being carefully tucked into my own bed. When all the talk was of war and mayhem, I would wait till all was quiet in the house and go sit beside the planted bulbs, digging my toes into the moist earth, looking up at the stars… BASHIR: Like your regnar. GARAK: Mmm? BASHIR: Transforming yourself, becoming at one with your environment. Isn’t that what happened to you in your early training at Bamarren? When you leaned to be somewhere without being noticed. GARAK: I was sent to Bamarren to learn how to kill...cleanly, dispassionately. To be part of a team that kills without question. But that tiny creature was my lifeline. Literally, my line to life. Through Mila, this regnar, I could still remember what it was like to be alive for life’s sake. BASHIR: L’chaim! To life! An old earthen sect called Jews used to say l’chaim to salute each other in celebration. No one says it anymore. GARAK: No, I’m sure they don’t. The Federation don’t approve, do they, Doctor? Sectarianism is divisive, is it not? How ironic. How Cardassian! Everyone surrenders their individual culture for the greater good of the whole. BASHIR: It evolved out of our choice, Garak. We have freedom of choice, and choice has kept us free. GARAK: Of course you call it choice. Coercion would have been too Borgian, certainly not the Federation style. Assimilation by consent is much better. Keep the grass green on my side of the fence and simply wait for everyone to come on over. Sometimes, Doctor, choice is the last thing we need. Ask any child to make a choice, and he or she will invariably make a regrettable one. We’re all such children. BASHIR: Considering your support for democratic principles on Cardassia, I’m rather surprised to hear you say this. GARAK: You wouldn’t be, my friend, if you saw how some people are using these democratic principles. But perhaps they’re simply following the Federation example. Perhaps Federation democracy is the most subtle, the most devious tyranny yet conceived.

This is a very long section, but I feel the whole of it is relevant. Let's break down the major takeaways I have:

Garak is at a point in his life where he very openly is criticizing Cardassia's policy of cultural assimilation and supremacy. He could not do this before without facing extreme legal and social reprocussions, and even though he's still doing this to Julian- someone who wouldn't care- the kind of person he is during the show would not do this.

The Nexus is presenting the Federation as a logical conclusion of a specific permutation of anti-theism popular with certain "progressives", and in my opinion the Federation has expressed characteristics of European Secularism (see: Bajorans being made to remove their earrings while serving in Starfleet while others in Starfleet are allowed to wear other items of cultural significance).

Julian is putting forth the company line on that front, which is suprising given he and Jadzia are the more respectful members of the senior staff towards Bajoran religion.

This whole scene must be contextualized in that gardening/connection to "soft, green" things and Tolan, are connected to Garak’s sense of Hebitian identity, and that Garak is criticizing Cardassia and the Federation from the perspective of someone coming to terms with his Hebitian identity, and that that is an oppressed identity.

On my first reading, I'll be blunt: I completely despised this line from Julian and was willing to pretend I never read it. It does, on some level, make sense for him without adding any extra dimension of cultural context beyond what we're explicitly told, but it is a very nasty belief to espouse. However, upon receiving the trivia that the actor who plays Julian's father is Jewish, I found myself turning it over in my head again, and a question that I think is very relevant to Julian: what does it mean to assimilate and how does it fuck with you? Regardless of what you believe, what is it safe to do (Orthodoxy vs Orthopraxy)? Both are also, relevant to talking about Garak and what it means to be Hebitian.

and let's return to the scene in the show that we're examining.

GARAK: It all comes down to a question of loyalty. My dear Doctor, Yiri had to choose between protecting his brother and protecting the state. He chose the state, as would I, every time. BASHIR: I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But then again, before you can be loyal to another, you must be loyal to yourself. GARAK: And who can we thank for those misguided words of wisdom? Sarek of Vulcan? BASHIR: Actually, it was Bashir of Earth. GARAK: With sentiments like those, you wouldn't last for five seconds on Cardassia. BASHIR: Would you? GARAK: Fishing again, Doctor?

The script adds a direction before Garaks last line here: "Garak is a little taken aback. Bashir's question cuts right to the heart of the cat-and-mouse game that the two of them have been playing for months."

Obviously with the biracial reading from ASIT the joke is: no, Garak wouldn't. He didn't. Once he stepped too far out of the line, that was betrayal, and you can draw a straight line from his betrayal to his exile (though we never actually get an explanation for why he was exiled, and are left to draw our own conclusions). And the precise reason he didn't last is arguably BECAUSE he was crossing the line of self loyalty, bringing him out of step with loyalty to the state. He didn't chose the state. You can even directly point to him contemplating turning in the Oralian Way meeting in ASIT and not doing it as a parallel to the situation the two are discussing. He had the choice to protect the group or the state, and through inaction, ultimately chose the group.

And the joke with the Jewish reading brought on by the Nexus: Julian isn't loyal to himself, and his disloyalty makes him more loyal to the Federation. Julian is of course, a walking disloyalty, he's an Augment. And because this is a reading based on very little information, we can't say why he's disloyal to himself. Are his parents assimilationists? It wouldn't be suprising: he talks with a much more posh, distinctly British accent than them both (Amsha doesn't have a British accent, to my ear, and Richard's sounds more working class), which potentially indicates they put effort into him not talking like them. Was assimilation a choice to avoid already being seen as odd and disloyal in an attempt to avoid examination of background and discovery of his Augmentation? How does the Federation talk about Jews, educate about them, how is Jewish history viewed?

No one says it anymore- but you, Julian Bashir, just said it. Where did you learn it? Did your grandmother still say it? Did you read it in class? Did you seek out reading it yourself? Was it in a play, a movie, a novel? Did you ever say it before now? Did you say it to your father?

Were you told the lie that the second exodus of SSWANA Jews during the mid 20th century was gleefully undertaken? Were told to be relieved, as Garak implies, that yet another vector of sectarianism was gone? Were you told to be relieved people could not be made to suffer through that avenue anymore? Were you told to think of it as a mercy killing? You were certainly told it was a choice, freely made.

We end up with a scene where a man who chose loyalty to himself and was punished (would have always risked punishment because the requirement of loyalty is against something he was born as) denies he ever made such a choice, and a man who is not loyal to himself calling self loyalty a pre-requisite for loyalty to a state he inherently cannot be loyal to, while questioning the first man what called his state loyalty into question. Men in intersecting lines.

#cipher talk #ds9 #Julian Bashir #ASIT #Elim Garak #Bashir fan club #Bashir fanclub #Edosian melancholies

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swearyshera · 1 year

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Reliving this is a trip. I was an interesting feeling the first time thru, and I'm not saying that to humorously downplay a horrific situation. It drew out a little bit of sympathy for Catra I really thought I'd used up by that point, if only cuz what Prime does is really that vile. That's super unusual for me. I went in rooting for Adora to take back someone she cared about, not necessarily cuz it was Catra specifically if you know what I mean, but this got me to want Catra rescued weirdly well. I almost never feel for villains at their nadir like this.

Twisted how empathetic paragon heroes like Adora are among my most treasured characters in fiction, yet I suck at extending the same sympathy they can. You're supposed to see characters like Catra (or Azula or Bakugou or whoever you please) going thru awful things as flawed people with interior lives and subject to exterior circumstances that the heroes are kind/strong/savvy enough to see and incorporate into their responses and my knee jerk is still "fuck off with the pity party, get to the atonement." Or in a lot of cases to laugh while they're down. I always sabotage myself by seeing the author making horrible things happen to the rival/villains, and contrasting them with worse villains, as a cynical tactic to get me and the heroes to sympathize before they've started changing for the better.

It helped that Catra already saved Glimmer at her own peril, and Adora already would've saved Catra no matter what, but still. This is a big reason why villain mind control is one of my least fave tropes. Manipulation and coercion are all good because meaningful agency and responsibility are still there even if characters can't see it, and that is everything in my eyes. To me mind control is the writer hitting pause on a character's growth til a more convenient time in the plot. Or just forever. *cough*🌊🦂🧙‍♂️.

Most of my appreciation for pre-s5 Catra only built up in retrospect through meta-posts and following fanworks like this. So seriously thank you for this series; it's like experiencing the series as it was intended for the first time, weird as that sounds.

You're version of this sequence is as skin-crawling as I think we all could've hoped/feared. Prime is the worst kind of living scum. Great work. Now I can start counting down to the "you miscalculated." scene. Aimee Carrero crushed that line. Can't wait for your version. Positively dancing with anticipation.

It is - at least to me - a really interesting point for Catra to be at, narratively speaking, because it shows the dialectic in her journey. She both did and didn't "bring it upon herself" - yes, she tried to get in Prime's good books, but no, she didn't ask to be chipped. Yes, she saved Glimmer against his instruction, but no, she didn't know the full consequences of what that would do. And when you get people on different sides of the argument, some saying "poor meowmeow didn't deserve this" and others saying, "She's reaping what she's sown", actually they're both right, in this way.

I don't think it would have worked going straight to the atonement, anyway. We don't have these scenes to revel in the depth of her lowest point, we have them to show how bad, how inescapable it was - and then we set up to escape them!

The whole story with Prime has been an interesting writing journey, too. Every time I review the lines, I tweak them to make them that little bit more realistic, that little bit more uncomfortable. I'm painfully aware that we're seeing a lot of similar rhetoric flying around from real people in the media these days (particularly with anti-trans bullshit), and it's no coincidence that Prime is a reflection of this. But my focus isn't on "Oh look, doesn't this character sound like the person trying to destroy our lives", it's on "This character, like the people you've seen on the news, might think they're right but they will never win. They will never defeat us."

Indeed, the Save the Cat books (yes, this episode did remind me of them... It's probably where the name is from) talk about the 'All is Lost' point and the 'Dark Night of the Soul' - this is where we're at right now. It's bad, it's the worst - but it's going to get better.

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bi-kisses · 8 months

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I'm very skeptic about anything that is anti sex work and real life porn in general. Like, I can understand how sex work in general is shit, porn industry is kinda fucked up, etcetera. I'm also skeptical about people who keep pushing "sex work positivity", but I'm more of pro sex work and pro RL porn. The skepticism is less on the "radical feminists and trads are stupid", but it's because anti-sex work people opinion feels like more about "women's worth degrade if they are sexualized" less of "concerned about risky job".

Cause I have seen people lump "women who anonymously sell feet picts and socks" with "women who sell their whole nude body with their face on the internet" and it's weird that the take of "anti sex work" is that feet picts should be a regretful thing and "it's basically rape/revenge porn" when the regret came in. Which is weird? Because it's... Feet? One of your least private part of your body. Why should this women feel guilty ever have their feet shared anonymously because men will jerk off to anything (privately in confined space). Yes, I understand it's a shit system that women (or anyone really) in porn can't suddenly take their stuff down from the internet when they regret it, but I feel like the more that I think about it, is it about "the risks" or "the value of the women before they get sexualized"?

Anyway, maybe I'm just an ex religious conservative who is already tired about "women value degrade when men see their body because the men will come home and have sexual thoughts about them". Also, the idea that men having sexual thoughts then act on it on private without bothering anyone should not be an issue for me, for everyone, and for themselves.

This is actually a great point about a lot of anti sex work/anti porn positions!

I'm anti real life porn industry for the reasons relating to abuse and coercion, but I don't inherently believe that porn itself (or making porn) is degrading.

I have a lot of mixed thoughts and feelings about how society interacts with sex conceptually, I refuse to make any insinuations about how watching porn makes you into a rapist or some shit, but I think sex work as a whole is either 1) treated like the absolute worst possible thing a woman could be subjected to (never mind the men, never mind those who actually are happy with their choice) or 2) considered immune to criticism because any attempt to point out how over 80% of sex workers wish they could leave the business is clearly an attack on every other person who is making money off of anything vaguely sexual.

The truth is that people will always want to pay for sex. There will always be people willing to accept money for sex. No one should be forced into that position (see: places where women are refused unemployment money for not wanting to be prostitutes). It's a complicated issue and it feels good for people to have a blanket good/bad stance, it's easier, it removes all that nasty gray area.

#anonymous

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rsadelle · 4 months

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The best books I read in 2023

I read 85 books in 2023, which is about two-thirds as many as I read last year. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Twitter thread where I recced things as I read them. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.

Top 11 fiction books/series I read in 2023

Major Bhaajan series (Undercity, The Bronze Skies, The Vanished Seas, The Jigsaw Assassin) by Catherine Asaro - This is a very fun sci fi in space series about a woman who was in the army but is now a PI who also leads her looked down upon people. It's a spinoff from the Saga of the Skolian Empire, but you don't have to read that (or remember anything about it if you have read any of it) for this to make sense. Also, you can skim a lot of the technobabble. My mom also read them and was irked by the gender politics of the world; they make more sense if you know that they're part of the established Skolian Empire, which Asaro started publishing in the mid-90s. Content notes: genre typical violence, somewhat of a military is good vibe.

Before She Finds Me by Heather Chavez - This is a really good thriller with alternating points of view between a pregnant assassin with a moral code whose husband took a job without telling her and a woman whose daughter was shot (but not fatally). Content notes: gun violence, murder.

Alias Emma by Ava Glass - This is a very well done action thriller about a spy taking an asset across London in one day - without getting caught on any of London's cameras. It would make an excellent movie.

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin - This is the sequel to The City We Became, which was one of my best books of 2020. Jemisin originally intended this to be a trilogy but made it a duology instead, so you no longer need to wait to read the whole story. I loved everything, but also cared absolute most about the Manny/Neek romance. Content notes: eldritch horror, real-world racism and injustice.

Wild Massive by Scotto Moore - This book is ultimately a little forgettable, but it is also a super fun read. If you have watched or know about any long-running sci fi/fantasy TV series (Supernatural fans, I'm looking at you), you will probably enjoy the meta of it all. This was a sci fi book club choice, and people's responses ranged widely from loved it to couldn't finish it and included everything in between.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley - This is a very enjoyable book that plays with alternate history and time travel and is also queer. I loved it and when I was thinking about what I read this year that was definitely going on my list, this was one I immediately thought of. It also helped me develop my theory that "genre bending" in the description of a book actually means "this is a very specific type of story, but telling you the specific kind is a spoiler." Content notes: death/disappearance of people in different timelines, war-related violence, off-screen/past sexual coercion

When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson - This is more or less a thriller, and also funny. It's set in a future repressive anti-AI state in an otherwise benevolent AI-governed world, and has one of the funniest navigating bureaucracy scenes I've ever read. Content notes: repressive state violence.

Lay Your Body Down by Amy Suiter Clark - The book cover calls this "a novel of suspense," which I disagree with. This is a solid mystery in a small town with a megachurch and a former member of the church both investigating and confronting her own past. Content notes: all kinds of harm to women and girls in that kind of environment

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara - This is a completely compelling queer story. The worldbuilding and the place of kink within it are much better done than in his first book, which I read two years ago and still occasionally think about. I loved the ambiguity about whether or not the magic was real. Content notes: cults and all kinds of physical and sexual abuse, including rape. It also has some Harry Potter references, which made me twitch. Szpara is trans and in the acknowledgements, he talks about fandoms, not necessarily creators/original stories: "To Drarry but not to JKR."

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - I loved this book. This is another one that immediately came to mind when I was thinking about this list. I thought Tesh did such a good job of putting the reader in the character's worldview, the worldbuilding was interesting, and parts of it were funny even inside a serious story. The rest of my sci fi book club disliked both the main character and everything else I liked and thought worked well, so it may or may not be your thing. Content notes: all kinds of fascism related horrors

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel - This was a completely engrossing story. It did a good job building the characters and their stories, and I did not see the ending coming (in a good way). Content notes: a cult, self-harm as performance art, death.

Top 5 books/series I read and then thought about a lot in 2023

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker - This was so well-written, and I got completely absorbed in it. It is also about the sexual assault and forced pregnancy of young teenage girls (the protagonist is 14) in a cult in a drought in central California, and I kept thinking about it after I read it.

Adrift by Lisa Brideau - This is a thriller involving amnesia set in a climate change-devastated near future. It starts out a little slow, but I kept thinking about it after I read it and I enjoyed the building a new life aspect of the story. Content notes: climate change, storms, genre-typical danger.

Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons - A big part of why I kept thinking about this is that I had a lot of complaints about it that I was prepared to share at book club, and then everyone else liked it. The plot had potential, but what I found most annoying about it was that the author seemed to smugly think his ideas were new and revolutionary, which they are not.

Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This was on my best books of 2021 list. This year, I watched all of Black Sails and wanted to read some other twisty plotting, and ended up rereading this whole trilogy twice. I still love it, and reading it closely twice means I started to see that some elements of both the worldbuilding and writing style start to fall apart if you think about it too hard. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.

Cover Story by Susan Rigetti - This is an Anna Delvey-inspired story that's built around diary entries, emails, etc. I don't know how much I enjoyed reading it in the first place, but the final reveal at the end recontextualized the parts I thought were boring enough to skim and made me keep thinking about it.

Top 2 nonfiction books I read in 2023

"You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon - I sat down on a Saturday morning planning to read just the beginning of this and finished the whole book by lunch. I found it much more accessible than her first book, while still being grounded in facts and pointed toward justice. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in social justice and/or the science behind weight. I do have two criticisms: 1. There's a heavy reliance on the implicit bias tests, which in my understanding are not fully scientifically validated as useful. 2. The last chapter is dedicated to pointing out all the other kinds of discrimination that are alive and well in our world today, which is great! Except she leaves out antisemitism, which seemed like a bad thing to leave out.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan - I was glad I bought a copy of this instead of trying to get it from a library. It's very good and also very intense, so I needed time to recover between chapters and it took me almost four months to read. I greatly appreciated her voice as a fan of TV wrestling with some of the same issues I've been working through, and her turns from thoroughly reported facts to conversational opinions. I do think she lets Damon Lindelof off too easily - sure, he says the right things now, but has he changed his behavior? Content notes: All kinds of interpersonal, institutional, and systemic injustices, harms, and crimes.

The authors I read the most in 2023

There wasn't anyone whose books I read in large amounts this year. I read four or six books by a few people, and they're worth mentioning because they're representative of the kind of easy reads I read a lot of this year.

Jessie Mihalik - I read a total of six of her books in two trilogies. They're sci fi romances with political intrigue and space adventures. I liked the Consortium Rebellion trilogy better than the other one I read. The content notes for these sound very serious, but they're mostly just adventures with space ships. Content notes: genre typical violence, past intimate partner violence, results of nonconsensual human experimentation.

Annabeth Albert - She was one of the authors I read the most in 2021. This year I read the four books in her Hotshots series, which are m/m romances about smoke jumpers in Oregon. I continue to appreciate the diversity of relationship dynamics in her books. One of these deals with disability issues, including sexual functioning after a spinal cord injury, in a way that seemed respectful to me. Content notes: grief/mourning, injury.

A.M. Arthur - I read four of her books this year, and I've read several others before. She writes basic contemporary m/m romances, which is sometimes all I want to read. Content notes: explicit sex, various past traumas.

#books #book rec

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maipareshaan · 1 year

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Adam Lanza on culture as coercion- I find his usage of words very interesting in how extreme the language is, we all at some point say or feel like we are forced to do things in society but i don't think we equate it to rape.

-Youtube video SomethingSea Response (Part 1/2)

'But I basically perceive culture the way that a normal person would perceive rape, and all of these abstractions are … the incurable STDs in my mind'

'Culture, the only way that culture can spread is through coercion.

-Youtube video (Pointless) CulturalPhilistine The Movie (Part 1/6)

'All interaction is innately coercion and . . . well yeah it is, I guess that’s just synonymous with interaction, coercion.'

-Youtube video (Pointless) CulturalPhilistine The Movie (Part 2/6)

'...family is coercion.'

-Yotube video (Pointless) CulturalPhilistine The Movie (Part 3/6)

'...there’s no such thing as love deepness. There’s just positive affinity, and that positive affinity is coercion and manipulation, exploitation.'

-Document titled 'Me'

'Coercion is endemic to parenting in general.'

'Honestly, doctors touching my penis when I was a child was worse than it would be if I consented to an adult in a loving relationship with them. I don't see how I and every child was not raped by doctors: We did not consent to it.'

-Youtube video 'Suffering is life-affirming; Life is suffering'

Calls therapists 'TheRapists'

-Youtube video titled 'A few things'

'But that … doesn’t address what culture is. I mean I’ve been raped every day of my life and this STD of culture is oozing around everywhere.'

'...you can’t have a violent revolution and expect there to be an egalitarian society afterward. That’s what culture is, when you rape me, what do you expect me to be other than to be fucked up?'

Also worth noting his usage of the words 'baby raping orgy' as culture

'Being told to be productive to me … has always sounded like being told to join in on the baby-raping orgy. Um … I don’t want to siphon anything; I don’t want to be productive because I’ve never wanted any of this.'

'What is a person from a pre-agricultural society supposed to do when someone throws them onto the baby-raping orgy and they aren’t raping fast enough, so you say, “You’re not being aggressive enough, you’re enjoying the benefits of raping these babies but you, there you are slacking,” it’s not that the person is slacking, it’s that the person doesn’t want to be in the baby-raping orgy at all.

-Youtube video title 'Strange Dream #2: Which side of the door, again?'

'Anywhere where I’m a child and there are adults around. [sigh] So . . . all of that “it gets better” nonsense, no it doesn’t getbetter. It just gets to the point where you have the chance to . . . rape children just as youwere raped by culture and I don’t really want to do that, so I guess it’s not going to get better, in my perception.'

-Youtube video 'Done with Youtube'

'...trying to rape their own values onto me.

Because that’s what culture done — that is what culture has done to me, I’m afraid of socialinteraction. Well, not really social interaction, I have no problem with that it’s just that … I imagine it as [laughter]..." (doesn't explain further)'

Context is him talking about fearing seeing a response to a comment he left, basically about discourse or interaction on youtube comments.

-Youtube video 'To the pro-culturalists (Part 1/3)'

"He’s representing the entire enculturation process, that’s what I’m feeling — I’m feeling the enculturation and he’s just the conduit of it. I mean if you were just insulting the way I looked or something like that it would be different but he’s taking anti-cultural arguments, anti-rape arguments and … he’s raping me with them. And he opposes this rape metaphor that I use which doesn’t make any sense because he advocates a system under which rape exists both as a consequence of life existing and as a consequence of sex being artificially scarce, because of enculturation. So actually, he’s literally advocating a system by which rape is prevalent, literal rape is prevalent and he’s criticizing me for . . . talking about metaphorical rape. And . . . [sigh] you have to look at what rape is, why is rape harmful? Ask yourself that. And I know that he won’t ask himself that, he’ll just insult me but why is rape harmful? It’s because it’s an imposition contrary to the fulfilment of . . . well actually the contrariness doesn’t matter, it’s just . . . it’s an imposition of suffering and that’s exactly what he’s doing."

"...That’s what culture is, it … it’s not trying to help people, it’s trying to rape their values onto other people."

Context: A person was trolling his videos and Adam Lanza is reacting to it.

" He doesn’t address the arguments, culture doesn’t address the arguments, culture is rape."

-Youtube video 'To the pro-culturalists (Part 2/3)'

". . . And in my “A Few Things” video he says, “You were never raped you are trivializing that word” . . . I’ve already addressed this, but in case I decide to cut that out at the beginning. You’re the one who advocates a system by which rape can propagate. There would be no rape if there were no life, you’re defending life, you defend rape. And you defend culture, rape is . . . rape is, rape isn’t just something which happens to exist."

-Youtube video 'To the pro-culturalists (Part 3/3)'

"It’s not this person right now who’s bothering me, it’s an amalgam of people I’ve seen on the internet who say that I’m the authoritarian for opposing the imposition of life. [sigh] You’re the one who sees children as your property. You don’t like me to use the word rape because you have this cultural delusion where … I don’t want to get into this, but you’re the one that advocates rape, literally and metaphorically."

"And just as I said to Myrmidon, you’re the one who advocates a system by which rape can — rape can propagate. You’re the one who advocates this, what the fucking hell? And all that you’re saying right now is “Accept value, accept value, accept the rape” .. . you’re just trying to call it by another name. Bet you’re a pedophobe, too. God . . . you fucking piss me off,"

"You don’t care about children; I do care about children. You’re the one who wants to rape children; I’m the one who wants to save them from a life of suffering that you want to impose onto them. You’re the one who sees them as your property; I’m the one who wants to free them."

"If you really cared about children then why are you advocating civilization? Civilization is the systematic rape of — mind-fucking of the children, of children’s minds but you don’t care about children, you don’t care about that because you want to propagate your own values onto them! You’re angry at me because I want to free children from you. Because, I don’t, want to allow you to have children be your property."

#Adam lanza #sandy hook #True crime #Added #Rape cw #For language

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florenceisfalling · 10 months

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"religion, mermaids or antiaverage."? hun i can do even better. come, take my hand. we're putting it all in one.

mermaid au of antiaverage, but with a priest! twist on anti. it's a cult, obviously, and he's using it to manipulate chase. anti is the sole voice of this god (god up to your discretion bc i don't know enough about ocean gods) and will pass on "gods will" to chase, often orders that chip away at his moral integrity slowly and subtly until he's - you guessed it! - a mindless puppet to anti. it starts small, but eventually chase is being commanded to drag poor sailors down as sacrifices to anti's "god". i now release this au idea into your hands i know you'll take good care of it <3

anon this is so sweet i love that u combined them. u love me. i love u. what a wonderful world

i really like to think abt mermaid religions/cultures so this is v interesting to meeee! also murder through coercion/manipulation/force is a fave trope of mine, so chase being a little hunter for anti is a wonderfully twisted image <3

id quite like the idea of anti as an anglerfish mermaid here, not only because of the parallel of luring chase in with a false idea, but also because of the imagery of the glowing fin ray looking a lot like a fake halo over anti's head.... oh honestly i might incorporate a religious anglerfish concept into an oc. thats cool. thank u for sparking my brain there

bonus points if chase actually has siren capabilities, so anti has a tactical reason for picking him alongside the gay gay homosexual gay. chase being part siren and not wanting to hurt anyone but being easily pushed by anti into using his untapped powers for unspeakable violence really is 1.) a good image and 2.) reminds me of canon and chase's interesting supernatural sensitivity or whatever tf hes got goin on lol

especially if that part-siren-ness means he doesnt Need to consume human flesh but can still go a little feral once anti gets him to try it. like a dog getting a taste for blood and never being able to go back, not out of necessity but rather an old instinct surfacing <3 its got my vibe (cannibalism) combined with the chase vibe (addiction) so its fun :3

also bonus points if chase was more wary of hurting anyone at first until anti put him in an intentionally dangerous situation encountering humans. no iris foundation this time, just some careless fishermen who got him trapped and afraid and hurt by mistake. so anti gets to nurse chase back to health after helping him escape and saying, oh, see? aren't those wretched sailors awful? aren't you glad i was there to save you? aren't you happy to return the favor and deal with them for me, too?

thanks for sharing, anon. i like your mind a lot :)

#my ego posts #hmmm lets make a tag for this one....#anglerfish au #antiaverage #cannibalism tw #manipulation tw #violence tw #religion tw #cult tw

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trueishcolours · 2 years

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No no no I really want to hear your full thoughts on consent! But I'll wait for the post :D As for all the rest. Yeah. Exactly. All of it. The episode 6 apologies make me want to trust the show to handle this new mess well too, but at the same time my trust issues are also immune to waterfall kisses, so. I'll wait and see. And like, not to be extremely shallow, but even if they mess everything up after this point, at least we got to see some really attractive dudes :|

Yay! Now thanks to you I get to post this in response to an ask as though I were a popular blog whose opinion people were clamouring to read, instead of just yelling into the void like I normally do!

Before I launch into why the Bathroom Handjob Scene was super-duper not consensual, I want to be clear that I am not criticising anybody who enjoyed the scene, or criticising the showrunners for writing the scene the way they did. I did not start watching the Mafia Show about Mafia Men doing Mafia Things because I wanted to see characters who were models of good behaviour. In fact I thought the scene was excellently done and part of the point of this post is to praise that! But I do think we all ought to be clear about what we are watching, and what we are not watching is ethical sex.

So, in the discussion around sexual ethics, people have come up with a lot of features of what true consent should look like. Off the top of my head, consent should be enthusiastic, specific, ongoing, fully informed and freely given. I think some fans of the show have noticed the enthusiasm of Porsche’s consent – he clearly likes having sex with Kinn, a lot! – and are skipping over the ‘freely given’ bit.

What does ‘freely given’ mean? Put simply, if you are under any pressure or coercion to consent – if something bad might happen to you if you don’t give your consent – then your consent is not valid. And Kinn and Porsche’s relationship has been coercive from the get-go when Kinn kidnapped Porsche, and has not got less coercive since. Again, this is a feature of the show, not a bug! The imbalanced power dynamic of the mafia-boss-and-bodyguard relationship is what makes it tasty, and the question of whether Kinn and Porsche will eventually be able to overcome this power imbalance is the driving force of the show! But for now, the relationship is coercive, and consent can’t exist in a coercive space.

I am going to belabour this point just a little more, because the claim that somebody can say they want sex, and enjoy the sex, and yet not have given valid consent, sounds counterintuitive and honestly a little patronising. ‘They said yes but they didn’t really mean it and we can’t believe them?’ Sounds like some anti-kink nonsense! But the thing is, if you’ve created a situation where a person might reasonably be afraid to say no to you, and then they say yes to you, you can’t actually know whether they really mean it, or whether they’re lying to protect themselves. If you proceed in the face of this uncertainty, you are behaving unethically. And if you’re the person being coerced, you may not actually be aware of how much pressure you were under until much later, because your brain will do what it thinks it needs to do to help you survive the situation, including suppressing feelings of fear and going along with whatever it thinks is the safest course of action. I think we can see Porsche doing this in ep. 7 with regard to all the torture and killing. In ep. 3 he was very upset at being present during torture and eventually being the one to shoot the victim; in ep. 7 he didn’t turn a hair. But I don’t think this means he has become truly okay with it. I think his brain has realised that there’s no getting out of participating in torture and killing if he wants to stay safe, and so is supressing all his qualms about it. For now.

Jesus Christ, that was a long preamble about the nature of consent. On to the Bathroom Handjob Scene!

So, Vegas is just getting his own sexual assault plan started when Kinn bursts in and kicks him out. Rather than assuming, ‘my evil cousin was harming my crush,’ Kinn jumps straight to ‘my crush was cheating on me with my evil cousin.

Kinn is holding a gun. Even if Porsche did not have Vegas’ story about Kinn shooting his ex fresh in his head, even if Kinn wasn’t a proven killer who once shot an apple off Porsche’s head just to make a point, the presence of the gun alone would be enough to make me question whether Porsche’s consent could really be ‘freely given.’

Kinn then uses aggressive body language, hemming Porsche in against the sink and introducing some actual violence into the situation by slapping Porsche in the face. But Porsche is much, much braver than I am, so instead of giving in to the man with the gun, he pushes him away, slaps him back, and then attempts to storm out of the bathroom.

Kinn grabs him and drags him back.

For me, this is where he crosses the line from ‘creating a coercive atmosphere where consent cannot be freely given’ to ‘actively violating Porsche’s consent.’ Okay, he had a gun, but maybe he didn’t intend to use it. He backed Porsche against the sink, but maybe he didn’t realise how aggressive that seemed. But now there’s no doubt: Porsche tries to leave and Kinn won’t let him.

Porsche doesn’t give up, though! He turns his back to Kinn, wrapping his arms protectively around himself. I honestly wanted to cheer for him at this point, because this posture is both physically defensive – it’s how you’d protect your neck and vital organs from an attacker who you couldn’t escape – and emotionally defiant. Fine, he’s saying, you can force me to stay, but I’m not going to look at you. I’m not going to give you access to the parts of my body that you clearly so desperately want to touch. I’m going to give you the cold wall of my back and nothing else. This has honestly been Porsche’s attitude all along – you can make me stay, but you can’t make me cooperate. You don’t own me.

So then Kinn whispers ‘sorry’ in his ear and Porsche turns around and they open each other’s pants and jerk each other off.

Listen. When you’re with a person you like and find attractive, and that person starts violating your boundaries, there comes a point when you ask yourself,

Am I really going to stick to my guns and continue denying this person and making us both miserable, when I could just give in and give us what we both want?

Is it really that important to me that they ‘ask nicely?’ Does my boundary matter that much actually?

If I keep refusing, maybe they’ll finally respect my no, or maybe they’ll hurt or assault me. Whereas if I give in, I can tell myself that surely they would have stopped if I’d kept refusing. Do I really want to find out the truth?

God, this situation where the person I like is violating my boundaries is making me miserable. I could really do with some comfort, reassurance and positive touch from a person I like. Oh look, there’s a person I like right here, and they will stop making me miserable and give me positive touch instead if I just consent!

It can feel awful, deciding to give in to an abuser’s coercion before they go on to outright harm you. You can feel as though a ‘real victim’ would have said no no matter what, and because you said yes in order to avoid harm, you kind of sort of more or less consented. You can feel like you’ve let down rape and abuse survivors everywhere by not holding your attacker to a higher standard of behaviour. You can feel like you’ve let yourself down. And I think that’s why the timing of Porsche’s softening and giving in is so telling and well-written. He resists until Kinn says ‘sorry,’ and then he unbends. What, exactly, is Kinn sorry for, and how does he plan to amend his behaviour going forward? As an apology, his sorry is pretty much meaningless, but what it does is give Porsche an out. He can now tell himself, ‘well, I didn’t let Kinn scare or force me into having sex. I haven’t been raped. I resisted until he apologised, and then I changed my mind.’ But in fact there hasn’t been nearly enough work done to remove the atmosphere of coercion, in the scene and in their relationship as a whole.

I’ve tried to describe some reasons why a person in Porsche’s situation might want to have sex. It’s also worth mentioning that sex in this situation could be a fawn response. People often talk about the ‘fight or flight response,’ but I’ve also seen it elaborated to four options – fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Freezing is literally going still, in the hope of going unnoticed, not provoking an attack, or simply because you’re at a loss for what to do. Fawning is an attempt to appease an attacker so that they’ll decide not to hurt you. By the time they get to the handjobs, Porsche has already attempted fight (pushing and slapping Kinn), flight (trying to leave the bathroom) and freeze (turning his back and hunching in). What other option has he got left but fawn? Moreover, as a fawn response, the handjob is incredibly effective. Kinn goes from angry and violent to distracted and adoring in record time, causing some fans to comment on how much power and control Porsche has in the scene. Which, yes, he does, but using survival sex to gain power in a relationship where you might otherwise be powerless is, how you say, not good.

I’m definitely not saying that Porsche was standing there all calculating like, ‘quick, jerk him off before he shoots me!’ I think Porsche’s conscious thought process was ‘yeah, sure, he’s hot, let’s have sex.’ I think Porsche wanted the sex, and I don’t think he’s going to experience it as a violation in hindsight. But I do very much think that all the factors I’ve outlined were there affecting his decision-making process. As long as the person is thinking, ‘sure, I’ll have sex, it’s better than the alternative,’ the atmosphere is coercive and the consent is dubious at best.

And let’s not forget that during this entire scene Porsche is staggering-drunk.

As a bit of a side note, I’ve come across as pretty harsh on Kinn in this whole post, so I want to add here that I think a lot of his behaviour is completely understandable. He starts by blaming Porsche because he suffers from paranoia and is terrified of the people he loves betraying him to his enemies – something that has happened to him before! He prevents Porsche from leaving the bathroom because he realises the interaction has gone pear-shaped and wants the chance to fix it. But a difficult truth, a truth this show tackles well, is that most people who will violate your consent are not doing it for ‘evil reasons.’ They’re doing it because they’re worried, because they just want to talk, because they’re sure you’d like it if you gave it a chance. But it’s still not acceptable to violate someone’s consent, no matter the justification. I think Kinn knows that its next to impossible for him to treat Porsche well for as long as they’re both in the Mafia – as is so often the case, the problem is not individual but systemic. That’s why in ep. 6 he tried to do the right thing and remove Porsche from the system altogether. Now they’re both back in the system, and Kinn is mistreating Porsche again. When he scolds and slaps him, he actually does pretty much exactly what Korn had him did in ep. 5 – punish Porsche for ‘allowing’ himself to fall prey to Vegas and thereby making Kinn look weak. What else can he do, as long as he’s living in this cut-throat world where the only way to stay safe is to ruthlessly project power? He and Porche are going to have to break out of the system, and right the power imbalance in their relationship, if they’re going to get their happy ending, and they’re not there yet.

So, why this long post about coercion and consent? I’ve said that I think it’s totally fine to create and enjoy this kind of scene, and I stand by that, but what does make me uncomfortable is when creators or fans think they’re portraying something that would be ethical in real life, when in fact they’re not. I’m fairly sure that the creators of KinnPorsche know what they’re about, but there’s still that little dash of unease. I think this is why I’ve actually been shipping VegasPorsche much more than KinnPorsche. Partly because I’m a contrary bitch who never ships the canon pairing, but also because Vegas is the villain and is framed as the villain, and therefore I can be positive that I, the creators and my fellow fans are all on the same page about his actions being bad. Whereas when the romantic lead does something bad, there’s always that little moment of, ‘wait, was I meant to read that as good because he’s the romantic lead? I wasn’t, right?’

This is also why I liked it better in ep.5 when Porsche was totally taken in by Vegas, than in ep. 7 where he seemed mistrustful of him throughout. I mean, partly because I wanted to watch him feel BETRAYED when the man who seems friendly turns on him, and it’s less fun if he’s suspicious of Vegas from the get-go. But also because it really drove home the message that Kinn needs to do better. So far, he and Vegas are very similar. They’re both members of the mafia, they’ve both killed people and condoned torture, they’ve both violated Porsche’s consent and autonomy. The only difference between them is that Kinn feels conflicted about his actions and carries the potential for change – but his conflicted feelings don’t mean jack to Porsche unless and until he actually follows through on them. The way Vegas was able to win Porsche over with a little fake kindness underscored that if Kinn wants to be better than Vegas, he has to do better than Vegas. Meanwhile, in ep. 7, Vegas was still performing his nice-man role perfectly – being a considerate host, an effective planner, a team player, a brave fighter; yes he was doing torture and murder but everybody including Porsche was joining in with that – and yet was met with constant distrust from Porsche, while Kinn, who was still behaving badly, was met more favourably. It started to feel very slightly as though the difference between them is not who behaves better, but rather who is The Love Interest and who is The Villain. And because Kinn is The Love Interest, he is allowed to do things, like kissing drunk!Porsche in bathrooms, that are Bad when The Villain does them.

Overall this is a very fiddly nitpick and I think there are plenty of in-universe justifications for Porsche’s discomfort around Vegas that aren’t ‘Porsche has fourth-wall-breaking-knowledge of who the villain is.’ I just have an insatiable hunger for Porsche smiling all gooey at Vegas before he gets betrayed.

Anyway, I hope I have not flown too close to the discourse-sun with this one. Let’s end with something that I, anon, and any readers can surely all agree on: that we did indeed get to see some really attractive dudes.

#kinnporsche #porsche pachara #kinn theerapanyakul #vegas theerapanyakul #monstrous blogs #monstrous conversations #rape cw #violence cw #long post

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aethernightmare · 1 month

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My ex-partner actually did have a lot of influence on how I designed my characters in games, because I'd get ignored or ghosted in regards to the hobby entirely if I didn't make a character that was hyper-feminine / conventionally attractive enough. Which is true of my actual appearance as well, I'm loathe to admit in hindsight.

As while he'd never say it to my face, because something like that would have garnered an immediate breakup, the manipulation was still there, even if it was subtle. If someone is only ever complemented or praised on things they dislike (or even hate) doing, and brushed aside or put down for things they like or makes them feel comfortable, it messes with their head and can often lead them to subconsciously adjusting their behavior. Even if it ultimately makes them more unhappy in the end. This is especially true if the coercion is coming from a long-term romantic partner, or only starts happening multiple years into an established relationship like mine did (romantic or platonic). Heck, he many not have even fully realized he was doing it, because nobody else in his life checked him on these kinds of behaviors. Meaning any observation I made towards my treatment always got drowned out by everyone else in his life calling it "normal". (Parents, co-workers, his friends, media, etc.)

So if you suddenly realize I'm making a lot more masculine, feral, and "scrunkly" OC's for my playthroughs as of late, that's just me going back to my own preferences, rather than taking any of his into account.

My super-scaley, short-haired, masc-coded Final Fantasy 14 character was the first one I made after he left. Almost out of retaliation, really. As I had to discard the old character with hundreds of hours on the account, that I created specifically to play with him, to even clear up the name slot again. Even though I'd already finished all job quests and most of ARR. (Also yes, I know I could have just used a potion of fantasia, but the old character felt tainted at that point).

Prior to that, we were actually supposed to go through the game together, but at that point he was making almost zero time for me. And then one of the few times we did meet up in-game to do stuff, was when I discovered he was cheating. As not only did he invite his most-current affair partner along (which would later lead me down a rabbit hole to finally discovering the others), but she understood the whole cheating dynamic long before I did, and so like a cat who was proud of eating the family canary, she was downright supercilious and haughty towards me about it behind his back. (To this day, I still don't think he knows how I found out. Fun fact, people who willingly have an affair with cheaters tend not to be good people in other aspects of life either lmao.)

Worth noting too, this character I use now is based on an OC I used to use for everything prior to even meeting him. Way back since like 2004 (middle school), at least. So it's not just an amalgamation of "picking traits he hates". It's more me than it is 'anti-him'. It's just that being myself by default, sadly, fits that criteria. Which honestly should have been a red flag much sooner. But it's hard to see those behaviors for what they are, when they're coming from a person you used to trust, heart and soul, for over a decade.

And I'm doing the same of my appearance in real life now as well. I've already started to focus a lot more on working out, weight training, and gaining visible muscle-mass back. And I've started to wear my old, more practical/masculine styles of clothes. Heck, some of the more "dainty" outfits don't fit my arms or shoulders anymore already, which is a good sign. I used to be absolutely ripped in high school, and I want to regain some semblance of that physique again. (My current form isn't unhealthy, but it's not as strong as I want to be either).

So for anyone who comments thinking I'm just making "mistakes" in character creators for what traits I choose - no, I'm not. Let people be in charge of their own appearance, and don't attempt to re-style someone to fit your preferences. If it's such a big deal to you, then find someone who already enjoys being in that form to begin with. On top of that, because I rarely go into detail about my sex/gender, especially in this political climate, and because those things shouldn't be necessary to determine whether or not you like or agree with someone on a non-related topic, like hobbies, there's a really good chance people have already made some incorrect assumptions to begin with.

I don't mind strangers who barely know me assuming one way or the other, as long as they're polite about it. And I don't like going into full detail online. But what I can't tolerate is people projecting their own insecurities, or trying to persuade me into becoming their version of head-cannon, in order to make themselves feel more comfortable. No matter who you meet in life, always remember to address them as a human being. Don't forget etiquette just because someone might not tick all the check marks of your initial assessment of them.

TL;DR: Gonna start being gayer and put up with less shit on main.

#bren talks irl

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messengerhermes · 1 year

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The Main Categories of Abuse

So, I used to work in domestic and sexual violence advocacy, and don't think most folks are familiar with what different categories of abuse can look like. Here are the main categories anti-abuse advocates use when we're teaching about the dynamics of abuse and trying to highlight examples of abuse outside of physical:

Using Coercion and Threats: This doesn't have to look like "Do this or I'll hurt you/someone you love." This can be "I'm throwing out your bookshelf knick knacks if you insist on keeping them on our common rooms shelves because they're embarrassing junk." Or it can be "You know I have a hard time getting off on my own, don't you care about my pleasure?" Using Reproductive Coercion: This can look like: -sabotaging birth control -pressuring you into having sex without birth control -taking off condoms during sex -refusing to get STI screenings/preventing you from screening yourself -if you're pregnant, preventing you from accessing abortion or pressuring you into an abortion against your will -If you are pregnant, preventing you from accessing pre-natal care Using Isolation: This can be physical isolation--moving you away from people you know. But also mental and emotional isolation: -making you feel like your loved ones are a threat to your relationship -convincing you loved ones don't really care about you -convincing you loved ones can't understand so you stop talking to them about important things -demanding to go through your phone -getting angry/sad/shaming you anytime you're out with others and don't tell them exactly where you are and when you'll be home -constantly asking you who you're talking to and what you're saying to them Using Economic Abuse: -Denying you the chance to set up your own bank account -taking credit/loans out in your name and tanking your credit score -stopping you from keeping a job -pressuring you to spend outside your means Using Loved Ones As Leverage: If you have kids, this can mean using your children against you by either threatening to withhold whatever support they're giving (maybe they're paying for the kids' lunches or clothes). This can also look like threatening to harm your children, or telling your children that you are the bad person making these things happen. This can also look like making you feel that you can't parent on your own. This can also be done with elders or relatives you're responsible for, or nonhuman loved ones like pets. Using Gender Dynamics: This will vary depending on the genders of everyone involved. But this can look like degrading you by saying you're not a "real" man/woman (or if you're nonbinary like me, saying your gender isn't real at all). This can look like: - pointing out the ways you "fail" to live up to your gender -making fun of insecurities you have about your body and behavior in terms of your gender, etc. -Humiliating you in front of others around your gender (how your voice sounds, how you dress, how your body looks) If you're trans this can also look like blocking your access to gender affirming care, outing you, or putting you in danger specifically in regards to gender things Using Intimidation: This can look like -crowding into your space -slamming doors -banging things around -yelling -generally doing things that send the message "I am bigger, stronger, and meaner than you" On the emotional and verbal front, this includes saying things that make you feel small, unintelligent, weak, or like you're failing. Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming: This is where "gaslighting" falls. If, every time you bring up a way you've been hurt by this person's actions they pull a "lazy susan" and turn things back around to how you're not understanding the situation, actually you made them do this it's your fault, or you really aren't remembering things right, that's this. Yes, someone can disagree with your interpretation of a situation and name their intentions in what they did, but they should still be interested in making amends for hurting you, not getting out of consequences scott free. Blaming your poor mental health, your prior trauma, or your "oversensitivity" for you being hurt by their actions also falls under here. Abuse is unacceptable and there is nothing you can do to "earn" being treated badly by another person.

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crossguild · 3 years

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kepler: - after being told that hera prefers 'hera' and 'she/her', never once deviates from that even when pryce, cutter, and young are calling her 'it' or '214' and insisting that everyone else do the same (including rachel giving him shit for it) - refers to people by their titles and honorifics more than he ever calls them by name or nicknames - defers respectfully to maxwell on AI matters, and puts lovelace in charge of crew discipline - very quickly and naturally accommodates pryce's blindness without comment or complaint in 'crash and burn' - is a hardass and a douchebag, but has probably sat through and designed every conceivable HR training seminar as part of his background of having 'worked in nearly every department' - he WILL make you feel like shit about not turning in your report on time, but any implication that he's a transphobe, misogynist or otherwise bigoted has been repeatedly and explicitly refuted in the canon jacobi: - portrayed minkowski as a vapid airhead in 'all things considered' - repeatedly called for maxwell to replace hera with a dummy program but thought it was really messed up of pryce to do functionally the same thing to humans because he doesn't actually see AIs as people - his clone with his exact same memories and personality called perseus an 'it' (which, all things considered, made me wonder if outside jacobi wasn't the real one) - 'broadway baby' 'pill popper' 'insensitive android' rip to everyone who thinks this man has compassion for other people's struggles, but i actually listened to the podcast eiffel: - literally every episode before shut up and listen, and also shut up and listen hilbert: - literally everything he's said and done to and about hera

my point here isn't that kepler is actually good person and the other men are actually bad people, because even lovelace says some really messed up stuff to hera and so does minkowski (and do i even have to mention young, riemann, cutter and pryce??)

and obviously people are free to have any headcanons they want... but it's just interesting how characters people like and perceive as 'good' seem to get a pass on all the messed up stuff they say and do, while stuff like bigotry is projected on characters like kepler (man from chicago illinois who loves funk and is always hyperaware of the levers of power at play in any situation... but kepler of color is a conversation for another day) who are antagonists, but have always taken care not to dehumanize others

it's 100% a manipulation tactic to get them to trust him and do their work, but i'm ngl, i really enjoy not being dehumanized. if my boss was manipulating me into doing my job by being anti-racist and treating me like a person, i prefer that to bosses and coworkers who mean well but microagress me constantly

i think there's this idea that bad people are bigoted and good people never are, but the truth is that there are plenty of people who are accidentally bigoted but mean well and would never hurt you, and also plenty of people who are always aware of their language around marginalization but who are willing to do heinous things. i'm not making a judgment call here about who's good and who's bad and who's better or worse

but the text of the canon says that kepler and maxwell are the only two people in the cast who never dehumanize hera and always respect the identities and limitations of others (coercion and manipulation are things they do to humans all the time, after all), and that says a lot about their principles even though they're like. bad people who are willing and able to hurt others for their own gain LMAO. that's enough grounds to hate them. why make shit up?

#wolf 359 #every day chu incites me to violence #every day people try to categorize ppl as good or bad #when that's not the point at all #and maybe if u all read one piece you'd pull ur heads out of ur asses

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actualmermaid · 2 years

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I've posted before about how I don't think that Jesus was the overtly anti-Roman insurrectionist guerrilla freedom fighter that a lot of liberal Christians like to paint him as, but I ALSO don't really get it when people interpret "render unto Caesar" as an implicit endorsement of Roman rule (usually as part of an attempted "debunking" of Christian ideology)

In context, it seems more like he's saying "you have an earthly overlord, and that sucks, but don't confuse his authority with God's."

He holds up a coin as he says this, pointing out that the coin has Caesar's face on it and is therefore his property, when someone asks him whether he approves of the Temple tax or not. It seems clear to me that he disapproves of the whole political-religious-financial complex that was 1) enriching the ruling classes, 2) contributing to the poverty of the lower classes, 3) compromising the people's devotion to God, and 4) creating a culture where privilege was being confused with holiness

You can see parallels to this over and over again in Christian history, basically ever since the Church hierarchy got tangled up with Roman authority. When church, state, and money get entangled with each other, it breeds oppression and violence against critics, dissenters, and "heretics." It enables coercion and mistreatment of vulnerable people. It compromises the integrity of the message and corrupts the mission.

Absolute power corrupts, no matter what ideology is behind it.

#christianity

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers

It's a zombie economy. For 40 years, we've eroded the wages of workers and transfered their share of profit and productivity to owners of capital. This is a problem, because people need money to buy things, and if they run out of money, they stop buying and profits vanish.

Time and again, capitalism has kicked any reckoning over this down the road. First came the great liquidation: pension cashouts, raided savings, reverse mortgages. Then came consumer borrowing, a tidal wave of unrepayable debt.

That's the zombie part: all the unpayable debt, which has been turned into bonds that enrich debt-holders. As Michael Hudson has told us again and again, debt that can't be paid, won't be paid. Our debt-based economy is the walking dead, a zombie.

We can either stabilize the economy (by forgiving debts, so that producers can pay for necessities and go on producing); or we can stabilize finance (by coercing debtors into destroying their lives in order to keep up on payments):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Think of the loan-shark's arm-breaker: he wants to collect on debt, so he threatens to break your arm. You steal your kid's college fund. You secretly mortgage the house. You sell your wedding-ring. You end up divorced and homeless. You still owe. So he breaks your arm.

Now you're divorced, homeless, and you've lost your ability to earn, and you've got medical bills. He threatens to break your other arm. You start breaking into cars to steal the toll money in the ashtrays. You go to jail. Finally the arm-breaker and his boss are out of luck.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. But as loan-sharks know, fortunes can be collected by applying the right incentives.

Give debtors the choice of immediate ruin from nonpayment, and making a payment today and ruining their lives tomorrow, and they're pay.

They'll pay...until they can't. Because debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

The zombie economy is the subprime economy. "Subprime" came into collective consciousness thanks to the great financial crisis, where banks tricked poor homebuyers into predatory loans.

The banks knew that the loans couldn't be repaid - they had "balloon" clauses that jacked up payments beyond the borrowers' ability to repay a few years into the mortgage - but they also knew that threats of homelessness are powerful motivators.

The inscrutable equations used to "guarantee" subprime bonds all shared an unspoken assumption: people who face homelessness will go to extraordinary lengths to pay their mortgages. Behind every subprime loan is an arm-breaker.

The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent, low-quality deathtraps.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds, backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit out of anyone who stops paying.

America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the eviction epidemic.

It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.

Improvements to arm-breaking processes - cost-savings on traditional coercion or innovative new forms of terror - are powerful engines for unlocking new debt markets.

When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly "smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker. Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but they really took off in 2008.

That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.

They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard them with earsplitting overdue notices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.html

If they didn't pay, you could remotely cut off the ignition and send a precise location to your repo man.

Smart killswitches let you impose fine-grained control over debtors - say, enforcing a rule against driving over the county line.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to another desperate person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding constellation of devices, like laptops.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

Rent-to-own subprime laptops were tepicenter of innovation in digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation of cameras and mic and access ot files.

That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!

They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords, read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spying

To make a good digital arm-breaker, you need always-on network connectivity, a device that people really depend on, and a strong presumption that the device has core software that its owner is never allowed to remove.

Basically, a smartphone.

Mobile carriers were early to this party. They collaborated with device manufacturers to create a "subsidized phone" market. They would "give" you a phone in exchange for a long-term, abusive contract, and then repo it by terminating service if you missed payments.

This was only possible because the manufacturers helped, creating phones that could be locked to a single network, so you couldn't un-repo your phone by sliding in someone else's phone.

They relied on the "anti-circumvention" laws that the music industry lobbied for in the late 90s (like Section 1201 of the DMCA) to make it a felony to unlock these phones. Arm-breaking is a lot easier if it's a felony to evade the arm-breaker.

The smarter the phones got, the more subprime opportunities there were. Remember, there's a new market in every arm-breaking innovation and in every arm-breaking efficiency.

Which brings me to India.

India has a huge subprime market. As one of the world's inequality capitals, whose national government runs on performative culture war bullshit and giveaways to the super-rich, it's a land ripe for subprime innovation.

Phone manufacturers like Samsung are key to India's vast collateralized subprime smartphone market: first-time buyers get their phones on the installment plans at predatory interest rates so high that most will default

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Remember: subprime isn't about debts being repaid in full. It's about making borrowers so desperate that they ruin their lives to make payments before they default.

Samsung's uninstallable arm-breaker app allows lenders to brick a smartphone without help from a carrier.

Writing for Rest of World, Nilesh Christopher describes an "escalating series of annoyances" culminating with a full lockout for failure to repay:

* audiovisual prompts in regional languages as reminders

* changing the wallpaper on their cellphones

That escalates to coercion based on analysis of the users' device activity:

* For "a prolific selfie-taker," notifications every time the camera is invoked

* frequently used messaging and social apps like Facebook or Instagram are progressively blocked

One step at a time, the phone is made progressively less usable, until it is fully bricked.

It's a fully automated, self-configuring arm-breaker, one that substitutes a thug's unscientific ladder of mounting terror with bloodless, statistical science.

This is probably a good point to mention the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve: any disciplinary technology is tried out on powerless people first, and gradually works its way up the privilege gradient to encompass the whole world.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Debt, after all, is consuming all of us except for the lucky few at the very top of the wealth distribution who have not faced wage stagnation and forced liquidations.

The covid crisis pushed whole countries into subprime status. Pfizer has told poor countries that they can only get access to vaccines if they stake their sovereign assets as collateral to settle claims related to its products:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal

And the shitty-tech adoption curve is putting arm-breaking tech into every kind of device, spreading with alarming speed from the bottom of the social order to its apex.

Miss your Tesla payments and your car will lock itself, summon a repo man, back itself out of the parking lot, honk its horn, and unlock its doors for the repo man.

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

As subprime climbs the shitty tech adoption curve, it gets a new name: "software as a service." In a SaaS world, you cannot own the tools of your profession. Adobe Photoshop becomes Adobe Creative Cloud, and any designer who stops monthly payments becomes economic roadkill.

What's more, software is the ghost in the shell, the animating spirit within physical devices. Remove software from a smart device and you don't have a dumb device, you have a brick.

This lets the arm-breakers exert pressure over larger, more powerful entities...like Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken had a payment dispute with the software vendor for its robotic parking garage, so the vendor bricked the garage and took all the cars hostage.

https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71554-0.html

The strange mutations of arm-breaker tech bodes ill, especially in light of Chekhov's Law: "A phaser on the bulkhead in Act One will go off by Act Three."

The universal spread of devices *designed* to be remotely repoed - bricked, downgraded, turned into surveillance tools - means that oppressive governments that coerce manufacturers will have the power to reach into our homes, cars and pockets to attack us.

Same goes for unscrupulous insiders - like the subprime laptop jokers making nonconsensual sex-tapes with their customers' webcams - and criminals who can pressure insiders into acting on their behalf.

Nevertheless, subprime arm-breaking is bound to spread, and spread, and spread. Covid forced millions to liquidate everything, left them in precarious, sub-minimum-wage gig work, and there's the millions of evictions waiting for the moratorium to end.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. And yet, people must participate in the zombie economy: they're not going to dig a hole, climb in, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves. There is strong demand for credit on any terms. Any.

Arm-breaker tech unlocks new markets by delaying defaults on unpayable debts. The zombie economy shambles on.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

Sachab (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/sachab/1422847855/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Kat Northern Lights Man (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/orangegreenblue/11375767914/

CC BY-NC: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

#pluralistic

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young-dumb-and-vaccinated · 3 years

Text

Cult Girl: Doctorate (Hannibal x Female!Reader) pt. 7

Hemorrhage

Cult girl visits the doctor and deals with the reality of being pregnant.

@wisesandwichshark

Trigger warnings: pregnancy, scary medical terminology, mention of alcoholism

The plan was simple, but could go wrong at any turn.

Step one: confirm with the gynecologist that you were, in fact, pregnant. While you were there, you made sure to get a new prescription for birth control.

"It's absolutely certain." The nurse midwife said, pulling off her plastic gloves. "You are, without a doubt, expecting."

"Thank you." You responded, lowering your head to obscure your face.

She sat down in her swivel chair and leaned forward with her elbows against her knees. Open, comforting body language. "Now we should discuss what's next. Have you taken some time to consider your options?"

You nodded. "I think I'm going to see the pregnancy through and put the baby up for adoption."

"I see." The nurse midwife stood up, looking concerned. "At the risk of being intrusive, may I ask for the reason why?"

You had forty-five million reasons, but none you could articulate. "I'd rather you not."

"Let me rephrase the question." She clutched her clipboard. "Is somebody coercing you into carrying out this pregnancy against your will?"

Does bribery count as coercion? You thought.

"No." You lied.

"It's just that pregnancy is a very invasive, life-altering process." She rationalized. "A woman at your stage of life shouldn't feel obligated to go through it unless she really wanted to."

Thinking on it for a minute, what she said made sense. By all accounts, you'd be the perfect candidate for an abortion. You were a damned doctoral candidate in the middle of your graduate program. But sometimes, money spoke louder than reason.

"I'm sure." You said, before you could change your mind.

"In that case," She scribbled something down on her paper. "We will be seeing a lot of each other over the next forty weeks."

"Forty weeks?" You repeated.

"You're only a few weeks along, so we'll schedule an appointment to check up on you early next month." She continued. "At that point, we can bring the father in to discuss any potential problems. But you're young and healthy, so this should be a fairly low-risk pregnancy."

"The father?" You said, almost making it sound like an objection.

She gave you a disarming smile. "I'm sorry, I should have asked. Is the father in your life?"

"Oh, yeah." You nodded, realizing what you accidentally implied. "It's my fiancée. We've been living together for, like, three years now. It's just that-"

She raised an eyebrow, urging you to finish your thought.

"He's also a doctor." You said. "A male one. Y'know how it can be annoying when another doctor is in the room, trying to mansplain everything to you?"

You stopped talking before you could dig yourself into a deeper hole.

Great work, [F/N]. You thought. Now your doctor thinks you're dating an anti-choice chauvinist asshole.

Her mouth turned into a smile, but her eyes asked if you needed help. You probably did, all things considered.

"That won't be a problem." She assured you. "Do you think I made it through medical school without learning how to handle sexist male doctors?"

"I guess not." You shrugged.

She cleared her throat. "Let's talk a bit about what to expect."

"Oh, yeah." You said, remembering where you were.

She pointed to your lower abdomen. "Your uterus is about the size of your fist. But as the baby grows, it will grow with it."

You made noises of agreement as you followed along.

"Right now, what you have inside you is an embryo." She explained. "At the end of twelve weeks, it will be a fetus. At that point, most of the major organs and muscle tissue will have developed-"

She dumped so much information that you couldn't even begin to process it all. You tried to keep bullet points in your head, but your brain kept fixating on the scary verbs like "stretch" and "rip".

"Is the third of February good for you?"

You snapped back to reality. "Huh? Oh, yeah."

"Great." She scribbled on her clipboard again. "I will see you then."

She shoved several handfuls of colorful printouts and infographics into your arms before seeing you out.

Before climbing into the car, you sent Hannibal a text.

[F/N]: Definitely, 100% pregnant.

You expected him to take his time, but your notification sound chimed before you could even start the engine.

Hannibal: That is to be expected. I'm rarely wrong about this sort of thing.

You rolled your eyes and fired off another message.

[F/N]: You did this to me and I'll never let you forget it.

Hannibal: I could live with that.

At home, you sat at your computer, trying to familiarize yourself with every unknown word the nurse midwife threw at you.

“Hey babe?” You called out.

“Yes, dear?” Hannibal cooed back.

“How do you spell ‘hemorrhage’?” You asked. “Is there an ‘ae’ or not?”

Hannibal stepped out of the bathroom, wearing a towel around his waist. “I think it’s spelled with an ‘ae’ outside of the United States. Why?”

He peered over your shoulder at the search results for ‘antepartum hemorrhage’. He wasn’t fazed in the slightest by the results, but could sense your discomfort. You clutched a stray pamphlet titled ‘First Trimester Dos and Don’ts’ in a tight grip.

“Are we having second thoughts, my love?” He asked, with no indication of whether this was a good or bad thing.

“I don’t know.” You sighed, closing the laptop in frustration. “I don’t know if I’m just emotionally numb or in complete denial, but all these scary medical disasters don’t scare me as much as having to give up wine for the next nine months.”

“And sushi, most organ meat, and charcuterie.” Hannibal added. “Also, anything too high in caffeine.”

You threw your head back and groaned. “Kill me.”

Hannibal smirked to himself. You turned on your swivel chair and glared up at him.

“Enjoying my misery?” You asked, folding your arms.

“Just admiring the fact that in the face of life-threatening medical emergencies,” He placed his hands on your shoulders. “Your biggest concern is not being able to partake in the culinary adventures to which you’ve grown accustomed.”

You turned back to your computer. “I’m sure, one way or another, we’re going to come across some fresh meat. I’ll just have to pair it with Sprite or something for the time being.”

“The infographic doesn’t say anything about properly-prepared human meat, does it?” He tilted his head.

You leaned back in your chair. “Nope.”

#hannibal lecter #hannibal nbc #hannibal #hannibal x reader #hannibal x you #hannibal lecter x you #hannibal lecter x reader #cult girl #cult girl 2 #more cult girl

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