Have you seen the devil? I owe them some souls.

centaurianthropology: olderthannetfic: maleccrazedauthor: bonibaru: naamahdarling: sulphur-creste...

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 04:20:27 -0400

olderthannetfic:

maleccrazedauthor:

bonibaru:

naamahdarling:

sulphur-crested-cocktease:

shidgephobe:

wrotemyown:

araceil:

denaceleste:

nwcostumer:

wrangletangle:

beatrice-otter:

tomato-greens:

joestrummin:

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!

although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.

you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.

this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.

but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.

eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.

THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.

AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.

LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.

IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.

I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.

In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.

Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.

Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?

1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.

2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.

3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.

Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:

1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.

2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.

3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).

Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.

Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.

We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.

During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.

If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.

reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.

AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.

This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.

^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary

Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.

tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.

This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.

And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).

You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!

I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!

People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.

LJ was, for many people, central.

It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.

Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.

You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.

I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.

I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.

That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.

That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.

That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.

When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.

Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.

“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.

But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.

“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!

But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.

And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!

I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.

All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.

Fine, I don’t like it either!

But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.

Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.

Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.

The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)

Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.

I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.

An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.

I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.

Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.

If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.

Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.

When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.

Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.

How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.

And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.

At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.

Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.

One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.

I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.

Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.

So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.

I like this last addition.

When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)

We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.

So we did.

Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.

Photo

Wed, 09 May 2018 00:41:06 -0400

chibeast: bogleech: So, wait They JUST caught one of this country’s biggest all-time rapists and...

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 17:39:32 -0400

chibeast:

bogleech:

So, wait

They JUST caught one of this country’s biggest all-time rapists and serial killers over forty years after his rampaging

It was suspected even back then that he may have been a cop, and it was noted that he had a knack for evading his victim’s guard dogs.

And it turns out he was indeed a cop, who was fired from his cop job mid-way through this murder spree, because he was caught shoplifting dog repellent.

NOBODY investigated that any further at the time??

It’s also worth pointing out that Michelle McNamara’s book about the Golden State Killer, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, just came out recently. Michelle researched tirelessly to investigate this serial rapist and murderer, and after her death, her husband (Patton Oswalt) made sure her work was published.

It is NO COINCIDENCE that the surge of interest in this case, and the ultimate action and arrest by the police is due entirely to Michelle’s work. And the police refuse to acknowledge it. They are patting themselves on the back for finding and catching this man when it’s clear that they sat on evidence implicating him for years - because he was a cop.

Patton has said (via twitter) that Michelle was not interested in fame or glory - that she would just be so proud to see this man finally being caught and made to pay for his crimes. But I think it’s worth acknowledging her work. (and, as Patton pointed out, the police are now using the name she coined for this killer - but, you know, she had ‘nothing to do with it’ 9_9)

important

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 08:46:56 -0500

smeefus:

so there’s this blog that wants to take down a kid’s animation channel

and they literally want that kid to kill themself

https://end-birdie.tumblr.com/

But not only wanting to end the kid “birdie”, they also threatened Princechain, stole his speedpaint,and hoped him to burn in hell. That is not okay.

Please report this blog if you can, the animation community is going to shit because of this and i’m fucking tired

kyst-myst: the remastered version of all trolls in one long...

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 12:59:47 -0500

kyst-myst:

the remastered version of all trolls in one long post

2d x 3d hiveswap featuring every troll featured so far

this took me so long :) hope you guys like it.

bogleech: Was just a total weirdo with possible compulsive symptoms of something or did anyone else...

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:41:27 -0500

bogleech:

Was just a total weirdo with possible compulsive symptoms of something or did anyone else spend hours, I mean HOURS as a kid just pacing or sitting around imagining your dream cartoons or games or toy lines in such fine detail that you plotted out every attack animation of every character or every accessory of every action figure basically organizing huge mental catalogs of it all whether or not you had any intention of writing or drawing it down?

I never let people see me do this or talked about it because if they’d walked in at that point they’d have found me probably walking circles in my room making weird hand gestures and mouth noises and I’d have been way too embarrassed to explain that I was trying to correctly visualize exactly how an enemy I made up for a nonexistent video game would rear up and spit fireballs.

YEs.

glitchedpuppet: ALERT! NEW VISUAL NOVEL DETECTED....

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 23:40:46 -0500

glitchedpuppet:

ALERT! NEW VISUAL NOVEL DETECTED. BZZT!

“PRACTICE RUN” v4.3.1 BY OPA-OPA AND GLITCHEDPUPPET (WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM EEVEE TOO) IS NOW RELEASED.

SPEND “HEART’S DAY” GOING ON A VIRTUAL DATE. BEEP!

FREE DOWNLOAD LINK TO “PRACTICE RUN”.

-CHIP THE MICROCAT

brehaaorgana: shut-up-hippie: glumshoe: frosttrix: glumshoe: I just saw the weirdest ad on...

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 02:06:36 -0500

brehaaorgana:

shut-up-hippie:

glumshoe:

frosttrix:

glumshoe:

I just saw the weirdest ad on YouTube. I thought it was for a new WWII video game, but it didn’t seem to be selling anything - it looked like some kind of weird pro-Poland propaganda and just said “Poland did a lot to save the Jews” and then ended with a hashtag about Germany.

What… what did I just watch, and why was it on a YouTube video about sea slugs in America?

as far as I can tell, poland has made it illegal (!) to accuse them of being complicit in any nazi activity which occurred on polish soil, most sensible people objected to this, and the polish government are now putting weird propaganda ads on american youtube for unclear reasons

Hey… Poland? What the fuck?

Yeah they’re basically pulling all the propaganda out that they can saying that they weren’t AT ALL complicit in the murder of Jews and Roma along with the Nazis.

This is a part of Poland’s massive push to erase their own complicity in the Holocaust, and in post-Holocaust antisemitic violence. It is part of Poland’s rising antisemitism. It’s not just American youtube, however. It’s also Israeli youtube. So essentially, Poland is targeting the two countries in the world which have the largest Jewish populations today with this propaganda campaign.

There are multiple advertisements doing this.

I have yet to see one, but I will report any if they show up while I’m watching youtube.

Basically, here is a quick timeline of current related events which make this propaganda campaign terrifying:

60,000 far-right nationalists march on Poland’s independence day, Novermber 2017. chanting “Pure Poland! White Poland!” [Whoops, guess they forgot Nazi Germany saw them as Slavs and therefore lesser? Oh right, re-writing national myth is a part of fascism.] Demonstrators were highly antisemitic, one claimed he was marching against “Jewry.” Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Polish government seemed to praise the event: “It was a beautiful sight,” the interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, said. “We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”

Late Jan 2018: Poland’s senate passes on a bill proposing a ban on phrases like “Polish death camps,” - and proposes jail time for the use of such language. The law also seems to ban “people from accusing Poland of Holocaust atrocities committed by the Nazis,” even when complicity in atrocities is historical fact.
The text is as follows:

“Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich… or for any other offenses constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes, shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to three years.”

Discussion of ANY Polish complicity in the Holocaust is therefore also part of the proposed ban. Punishment can be jail time, fine, or “restriction of liberty.” Supporters of Polish President Andrzej Duda urge him to sign the bill regardless of strong objections from both the United States, Israel, and the academic community/Holocaust scholars. The measure passed through Parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan 27th 2018. This causes Israel to postpone diplomatic meetings with Polish representatives, and both Israel and the USA voice objections to the measure.

Immediately after this, Feb. 2nd 2018: ISRAEL’S EMBASSY IN POLAND RECEIVES WAVE OF ANTISEMITIC MESSAGES AFTER HOLOCAUST BILL

The Polish President signs said bill into law, provoking another objection from Israel, and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson releases a critical statement on the law.

February 6th, 2018: an article which asks an important question – Poland wants to outlaw blaming Poles for Nazi atrocities. But what about the Jedwabne massacre? To cut to the chase, in an occupied town of Poland in 1941, the Polish residents rounded up the town’s Jewish population, and then willingly (and freely) slaughtered an estimated 400-1,400 of their Jewish neighbors [numbers are estimates as the site was not fully excavated, but rather exhumed in a controlled section], as German forces looked on. The Germans had even refused to let them use firearms, and so the gentile Polish residents of Jedwabne used farm tools as their method of execution.

Following the end of the Holocaust is another example people are worried is banned from discussion. In 1946, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Polish gentiles in Kielce held a pogrom against Holocaust survivors returning home. They murdered 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Then, as of this Shabbat (Saturday, Feb. 10th 2018), jumblr users begin to post warnings about Americans seeing these Pro-revisionism Polish videos on youtube. Others confirm Israelis have been inundated with these videos as well. Although I don’t know if it began earlier, I have noticed that people started first seeing these ads introduced on the Jewish weekly holy day/day of rest, and I do wonder if slipping them in when many Jewish people wouldn’t have noticed was intentional, which feels especially sinister.

Today, Feb 12th 2018, Jerusalem Post asks: WHY IS THE POLISH GOVERNMENT TARGETING ISRAELI WEB USERS? The only other article I’ve found that is also about this new propaganda campaign is on a site I am unfamiliar with called Sputnik International News: Poland Rolls Out Social Media Campaign to Justify New Holocaust Bill.

Oh and to TOP IT ALL OFF, this is all now followed by Poland attempting to further restrict/ban Kosher (and by extension, Halal) slaughter. Because the fast way to criminalize being Jewish or Muslim is to criminalize how we eat.

Please do me a favor and reblog if you LIKED The Last Jedi

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:19:09 -0500

hexmaniacmareen: republicansareahategroup: justsomeantifas: lol ...

Sat, 02 Dec 2017 20:12:34 -0500

hexmaniacmareen:

republicansareahategroup:

justsomeantifas:

lol

Reblog in 30 seconds for good luck

my favorite song

jambo–mrembo: caram3lk1ng: okprofessor: ojiisanholic: facingthewaves: “I want to speak to a...

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 14:22:41 -0500

jambo–mrembo:

caram3lk1ng:

okprofessor:

ojiisanholic:

facingthewaves:

“I want to speak to a manager,” the middle-aged woman said in her stern I-used-to-be-a-soccer-mom-ten-years-ago voice, looking down at me over the top of her Gucci reading glasses.

A wicked grin split across my face and the gates of Hell opened up behind me, releasing a gust of hot wind that whipped my apron around my body and forced the woman to shield her face. Demons came forth, dancing around in flames with songs of, “She wants to speak to a manager. Did you hear that? She wants to speak to a manager!” before erupting into earsplitting shrieks of laughter, none louder than my own cackling.

I took in the woman’s look of utter horror before my eyes rolled back into my head and I growled,

“I am the manager.”

a thing for one of my favorite posts on this site

Never not reblog. Also, I totally imagined Death Note music.

💯

My favorite post in all of the universe is back

The internet just changed: Net Neutrality is dead.

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 16:27:53 -0500

The internet just changed: Net Neutrality is dead.:

artzom-b:

gentlesoulfoxy:

nicterhorstsketch:

jestre:

nerdfaceangst:

nerdfaceangst:

cthulhu:

chairhiro:

feigenbaumsworld:

The FCC sided with Comcast and decided to let ISPs censor the internet. The Internet needs to stop this from happening: http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/tellfcc/

Last Wednesday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced a proposal for new rules that would allow for a “ fast lane” of Internet traffic for content providers who are willing (and able) to pay a fee. [1] The proposal reverses the FCC’s previous commitment to net neutrality and open internet and allows ISP’s like Comcast or Verizon to slow down and censor services that don’t pay the toll.

We have to be totally honest, this situation is seriously grim. But there is still hope. The FCC already knows that the Internet community wants net neutrality, but they think they can put their spin on these new rules and sneak them through. If we can prove them wrong right now with a massive public outcry, we can literally save the Internet once again.

We need to stop the FCC now. Big business groups are already ramping up lobbying efforts with the FCC in swarms since Wednesday’s announcement in support of censoring the open Internet and to ensure this dangerous proposal moves forward. [2]

This is a critical moment. In the last few weeks more than 65,000 people have taken action with us. Can you help us get to 80,000 by the end of the day today?

[1] Gautham Nagesh. “FCC to Propose New ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules”.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304518704579519963416350296

[2] Edward Wyatt. Edward Wyatt. “Lobbying Efforts Intensify After F.C.C. Tries 3rd Time on Net Neutrality” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/business/lobbying-efforts-intensify-after-fcc-tries-3rd-time-on-net-neutrality.html?hpw&rref=politics
- Fight For The Future

we’re almost ¾ of the way there!! c’mon guys, every bit counts!

will it ever stop

fucking signal boost

IF YOU ARE NOT SIGNAL BOOSTING THIS YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.

IF THE U.S. FALLS TO THIS IT WILL OPEN OTHER DANGEROUS DOORS INTERNATIONALLY.

Start a civil war against the US government.

Signal boost for my us followers

I try to keep the things I reblog as blog/mun-centric as possible, but this is something I just can’t let slide.

I’ve been following this cause since last year. I’ve signed petitions, I’ve called representatives, I’ve been to protests, the whole nine yards.

This right here? This is not a joke. This is seriously happening, guys.

Remember the Wikipedia shutdown? That was to protest this right here. If you haven’t taken action against this yet, frankly, what is wrong with you? If this doesn’t get stopped, we’re going to lose the thing that brings us all together unless we shell out huge sums of cash to these corrupt bastards.

Do not just sit there and keep browsing.

Do not scroll past this.

Fight.

I’ve been reblogging every single Net Neutrality post

I may think its useless but I also believe in HOPE so KEEP TRYING

bipolar-bubbeleh: returnofthejudai: One function of antisemitism is to protect established elites...

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:44:07 -0500

bipolar-bubbeleh:

returnofthejudai:

One function of antisemitism is to protect established elites from revolutionary movements. Directing left-wing sentiment at the Jews as a collective has protected abusive authority for millennia. Left-wing antisemitism is fundamentally misdirected and self-destructive.

lefty goyim: reblog this shit

maggie-stiefvater: I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy. I didn’t think I had much to...

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 02:16:59 -0400

maggie-stiefvater:

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house.

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well.

It is only about two statements that I saw go by:

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing.

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously.

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers.

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half.

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing.

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy.

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought.

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out.

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story.

chlmera: cancerously: I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should...

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 06:04:50 -0400

chlmera:

cancerously:

I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.

this is great!

thebeldamsbuttons: damianimated: LETS PLAY A GAME. It’s...

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 11:23:11 -0400

thebeldamsbuttons:

damianimated:

LETS PLAY A GAME. It’s called: Who directed it TIM BURTON or HENRY SELICK

We’ll start with the 2009 Laika film Coraline based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Do you know who directed it? Burton or Selick?

Did you guess yet?

If you guessed Henry Selick, you would be correct. Tim Burton actually had absolutely nothing to do with Coraline at all in anyway ever. Reminder: Tim Burton has NOTHING to do with Coraline. At all. But that was an easy one. Let’s go to the Walt Disney Pictures adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, James and the Giant Peach next.

Think you got it? Are you sure? Better double check…

Oh, look. It’s Henry Selick again! Tim Burton actually interacted with this project, though only as a producer. Bet that was tricky… Next one! Let’s go to the Disney/Touchstone Pictures film Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Have you guessed it correctly? Have you really?

Yep that’s right. Even Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was directed by Henry Selick. Though Burton wrote the poem and created the characters in which Nightmare was based he didn’t have much interaction with the project beyond that. At the time he had already signed off to direct the film Batman Returns and did not want to be involved with the “painstakingly slow process of stop-motion animation.”

Looks like it was a trick quiz. But now you know Henry Selick, whom people rarely know of is responsible for many of the most well known stop-motion animated films. The more you know!

This isn’t even being qeued. This is just being reblogged, because some of you still don’t understand who directed Coraline.

dragginage: dragginage: please please please teach your children to cook while they still live...

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 02:02:01 -0400

dragginage:

dragginage:

please please please teach your children to cook while they still live under your roof. even the most elementary things can’t be overlooked. because i just had to show my 24 year old boyfriend how to use a potato peeler and now i need to lay down for an hour

i hate this post because it just proves that like.. no simple statement can just be absorbed and the general population of tumblr go ‘yeah that sounds about right.’ i’ve had nazis say it’s a woman’s job to cook, terfs say that it’s only ‘males’ who don’t know how to cook, people have accused me of being classist because some people don’t own potatio peelers, called a bitch for airing out my boyfriend’s dirty laundry (which if the most embarrassing thing i can procure about the guy is that he’s not great in the kitchen i’d say he’s okay lmao)

just shut up and teach your fucking children to cook holy shit dude

spartalabouche: god i love homestuck

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:21:03 -0400

spartalabouche:

god i love homestuck

trisketched: Magic users Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 23:47:42 -0400

trisketched:

Magic users

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

black-love-unity: ithelpstodream: Isiah Lopaz is a black...

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 23:41:19 -0400

black-love-unity:

ithelpstodream:

Isiah Lopaz is a black American college-educated artist and writer living in Berlin.

http://himnoir.com

A lot of yall “allies” gonna act like yall never seen this post and keep scrolling cus yall see a shirt that has something you’ve said and still believe