LIFE IS NOT A WAITING ROOM

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.

Anyways. What kicked off the whole thing was Bricks and Minifigs corporate taking over the franchise in Keizer, Oregon. The owner Chrystal notified them that she wanted to sell, since they were moving overseas, and the next day and without any notice they showed up saying that they're taking the store from her and if she doesn't leave immediately, they're calling the cops. And because they didn't hold up their end of the contract and give her the lease on the building (among other things! they blame her for violating the contract but they didn't do a lot of the things they were required to do and that caused many of the issues they say they had with her), they could do that. They could say she was trespassing.

As she lays it out, she missed payments on the lease because the lease wasn't in her name AND corporate didn't hand over the bank account like they were supposed to so the bank froze it, so payments that were supposed to be made failed. And that's what corporate used to justify taking the store over, even though it was all their fault and Chrystal was working with them to rectify it.

Oh, also, Bricks and Minifigs corporate admitted that a month before they took the store over, they were investigating specifically the inventory. So they knew the store had at least $100,000 in inventory. Likely they knew about the consignment deal and that much of the inventory hadn't been paid for. It's hard to just say outright that they were planning to steal it, because that's such an insane thing, but that's absolutely what it looks like. And they knew that she was moving overseas so her ability to fight them would be greatly hindered.

This is pretty egregious behavior if you have just one example. Except that another store owner has gone public on YouTube with his story about how the exact same thing happened to him. And a lawsuit has been located with another example. And like, three examples is a trend, especially for such a small franchise. But in an interview yesterday Chrystal said she's in contact with four other ex-store owners in the same situation, two of which may be going public soon (and two of which are staying quiet because they basically had their lives destroyed by Bricks and Minifigs corporate).

Survivorship bias is such a huge factor when it comes to which queer narratives and stories survive the march of time. For transmasculine people, the challenge has always been not only overcoming anti-queer sentiments of the day, but also contending with a lack of legal and societal personhood that put them in a position where telling their story- or even discovering themselves- was literally impossible. The level of risk involved in even just exploring your identity in secret, let alone finding community and recording your experience, was astronomically high when you were considered another person’s property, largely uneducated and expected to not communicate with anyone other than your husband, relatives and children. I’ve seen mentioned how many societies outlawed and punished gay (mlm) relationships but not lesbian ones, but the rather obvious conclusion to that is because it was seen as such a non issue that it was beneath notice, due to the lack of cis women’s ability to exist outside of the constant control and supervision of her male relatives. To say they were “privileged” for not being legally barred from sapphic relationships would be silly, because legally speaking they would’ve been at the total mercy of their owners (male relatives) if discovered, which served as punishment in itself.