Welcome To My Swamp

The smallfolk aren’t a background mob this time they’re the moral barometer. Their fear, anger, and desperation are responses to noble violence, not some random cruelty. Aerion isn’t a “tragic misunderstood prince” he’s an example of exactly why unchecked nobility is dangerous. The fact that the smallfolk turn on him isn’t savagery it’s consequence.

Dunk & Egg shows us a world where nobility is already morally hollow where common people are crushed under the consequences of decisions made by dragonlords long dead. Dunk exists to show how unjust that system is from the ground up. Egg grows up with the smallfolk watching this and realizes that kingship without justice is meaningless, which is why his reign later tries and ultimately fails to reform the system peacefully.

👉 Just sayin' 👀

yeah this is where this was always gonna fuckin go, unfortunately

While going through her medical history, the physician told her that because she was unwed, they didn’t feel comfortable treating her, because it went against their values and she should seek care elsewhere. At the time of the appointment, the woman believed she was about four weeks into her pregnancy.

Now, she’s traveling out of state to Virginia to receive prenatal care.

This is the first reported case of a woman being denied prenatal care for being unmarried in the state of Tennessee. 

Christians love doing stuff like this and making such a person the face of their religion then turn around and get mad when they're (correctly) seen as insufferable.

it was a 0 out of 25 points. that's not even a huge deal.

she only wrote 650 words.

the girl didn't do the actual assignment; she just wrote what she felt like and submitted it.

the class was a PSYCHOLOGY course yet her essay was about her religious beliefs and provided no citations or psychological basis. she simply insisted her argument was true because the bible supposedly says so.

her entire essay is a mindless rant about how strict gender roles must be upheld and trans people are "demonic"

her writing—and i cannot stress this enough—is on par with that of a child who doesn't want to do an assignment. it's so bad i genuinely thought i was reading a satire article.

the student is a fucking college JUNIOR writing like a 10-year-old. she is also a psychology MAJOR who thinks everything in the bible is literal and that her religion is the only source anyone needs. this is someone who intends to go into mental health care. she is dangerously bigoted and ignorant, and her professor saw this and was punished for grading accordingly.

here's a line from her essay:

"Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty."

here's her teacher's reasoning for the grade:

“[I am] not deducting points because you have certain beliefs" but rather because the paper "does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class and is at times offensive."

the girl is a hate-filled bigot. she is a white christian girl who is now being championed by fox news and turning point usa while her professor sits on fucking forced leave. this is disgusting.

our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.

“Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated, but I’m overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist.”

and

"Republicans and especially the Trump administration are working very hard to make the US a fascist dictatorship and are steadily chipping away at the democratic process and the safety of citizens not just in the US but around the world"

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.

Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World's End with the death of the kraken:

Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world's still the same. There's just... less in it.

The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack's compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma's map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.

Those very zombies in the show: *can fucking run*

Me:

hearing about this, i was immediately paranoid about reblogging literally anything from anyone i don’t talk to on a regular basis.

Leave a comment on every chapter of my fic in the same day? You’re my goddamn hero and have given me that many more reasons to smile at once. (seriously, SERIOUSLY, never think it’s annoying to do this. I will worship you for an entire week for that kind of validation)

Retweet/reblog everything at once? Yes, take my grubby little posts and smear them all over your timeline, we’re in this mud pit together. 

We vibing across time

Do you or somebody you know have PCOS? You are banned from international womens athletics because you are supposedly in posession of an unreasonable advantage in sports.

Folks disqualified for hyper-androgenism in womens athletics.

Francine Niyonsaba

Caster Semenya

Dutee Chand

Margaret Wambui

And more

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Why are those disqualified overwhelmingly black and brown? Because testing is case by case when an athletes performance “raises suspicions”. They overwhelmingly test athletes of colour, for being too fast and not meeting white expectations of femininity.