Oh My Goodness Gracious, Ive Been Bamboozled!

MR. SPIRO: Do you give these lectures at all of your depositions? MR. BANKSTON: I do, and you can watch them.

is ESPECIALLY hilarious to me having listened to multiple depositions Mark has had to take in the Sandy Hook case, where he has needed to lecture EVERY. SINGLE. ATTORNEY. at some point in the case about how they're violating Texas Rule XYZ, because they all, to a one, did something seriously ethically questionable during the deposition.

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

Shame and guilt are not conducive to growing as a person and not conducive to accomplishing anything. Unfortunately there's a very large chunk of the movement that is running around telling people they need to purify their minds of corruption; I would even say it's the majority of the mainstream antiracism movement.

It is hope and love and compassion that saves each character individually, and because of that, the world. Frodo fails in the end, but his acts of compassion from earlier in the story save the day. And even as the world is saved, it is acknowledged that Frodo failed—without judgement, without blame. He fails, and he is still loved.

And like what can happen in the real world, he is still irrevocably changed by his trauma. But there is still hope—he has to leave, but he leaves with the promise of healing, and the promise that his ever-faithful Sam will follow.

Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo, Sam; each and every one of the characters are driven by their love of the people around them and their hope for the future. They cling to that love and hope throughout their trials, and that bears them through.

Of course people are watching it for comfort!!!! Lotr is eternally consistent in its promise, which Sam articulates so clearly in The Two Towers: “Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it’ll shine out the clearer.”

Absolutely incredible

Saying teenager who was murdered "got himself killed" because he made a decision to approach his mother and was tricked "isn't victim blaming". Okay. Sure.

Even if Jason hadn't been tricked, he didn't "get himself killed". A man killed him.

(This is from the same person who hates Steph, and I happened to see it when checking if someone else had blocked me out of curiosity)

This entire ask answer is in order to exonerate Tim from victim blaming, of course. Because Tim is not allowed to have flaws.

For the record, I do think a lot of Jason fans can put way too much emphasis Tim's victim blaming in particular out of their beef with him-- I've seen a claim Tim "does it to Jason the most" which is not true. as someone who went through all the comics that mentioned Jason post death on that doc, no, that's Bruce, followed by Dick.

And I do honestly give Tim the most grace for it too, because 1. He was a kid, while Dick and Bruce were grown men and 2. He didn't know Jason, and only has Bruce and Dick's take on him to go off of. He absorbed what they told him, and took it to heart. That's what kids do. Meanwhile, Bruce and Dick did know Jason and what he was actually like (especially Bruce), which makes their active rewriting of him feel grosser.

But his version of Jason saying "I killed myself, I thought I was [tons of wild inferences] is yeah, victim blaming. It doesn't make Tim a horrific irredeemable person. He's a kid with flaws who's mirroring rhetoric from adults about a kid he didn't know, definitely out of fear he'll meet the same fate as Jason.

(And then he goes and defies orders immediately but it's okay when he does it because DC said so)

It's just a shame DC thinks he's right, so those flaws can't be seriously reckoned with or explored in an interesting way. Tim learning that his impression of Jason has been warped could have been interesting. Dick and Bruce having to face the fact they said awful things about Jason in order to give themselves semblance of control-- that something was wrong with Jason and as long as Tim's a good boy the same won't happen to him-- would be interesting.

And since of course we bought Steph into it- it's not about making Jason or Steph perfect victims. It's about how apparently they need to be perfect victims in order to be children who aren't routinely blamed for their own murders. They aren't allowed to make any choices without having those choices used against them in an argument they were the ones to blame for their deaths.

Shifting any responsibility off the adults in their lives and their actual murderers in order to make it about their choices is wrong.

It's not that Steph and Jason don't have agency. Both of them do. Both of them made choices within the narrative. It's just that their choices aren't given any grace by the narrative, or treated in a normal way.

Jason was doing what pretty much any hero who wanted to save a loved one would do in his situation. Tim and Dick disobeyed similar orders and it turns out okay and is treated as heroic and because the narrative says so. I do not believe either of them would have waited around for their Mom to be in danger from a killer either. I believe they too would try to convince her to come with them.

(And as if to further prove my point some person tried to 'gotcha' Jason with 'why didn't he question why his Mom was allowed to take a smoke break'....why would he? She wasn't being tied up, she was being blackmailed, but she was with one of the most volatile killers on the planet and that could easily change if she stayed, Jason was pretty clearly trying to tell her he could help (as Robin) and they could leave together with him protecting her, And even if it was that Jason didn't put two and two together...how the fuck would that make him any more responsible for his own death. Are you trying to say he deserved to die for not noticing something???)

Stephanie made a reckless choice, and I would never deny that. It was something she should have put more thought into. It's something she regrets in the narrative itself.

(I hate to bring up my stupid fanfic, but that's why I have Steph hate when people to act like she didn't make her own choices in my own work. It's hard to balance acknowledging outside forces and manipulation vs knowing she was not completely helpless against the circumstances.)

But not ignoring how she was failed and mistreated by the adults around her and driven to desperation isn't removing her agency, it's holding a grown-ass man accountable, and questioning the framing of the story and how it treats women.

Because it ISN'T just Stephanie the narrative shifts the blame onto to absolve Batman. It's Leslie too. The narrative throws an important figure in Bruce's life under the bus, going against all previous characterization, to make it so Bruce faces less guilt. We have to make sure only women are responsible for Stephanie's death, and only women face consequences. If that didn't make it clear that the story has a misogynist agenda, that the character's actions are not about telling a good story, nothing will.

And, like with Jason, when similar choices are made by another character- the many times Bruce has accidentally gotten people killed with his plans ACTUALLY going out of control (Failsafe OMAC etc etc infinity)- he's not punished with death, there's no implication he is an irredeemable screwup destined to die for this.

DC doesn't tell these stories with no agenda. DC has reasons to frame these deaths that way, reasons they wrote it that way. They admit to hating Jason and trying to "make Jason unlikable", they now have a need to explain how Tim is better and different.

Steph was going to die no matter what at their hands. They faced pushback like Devin Grayson questioning them why they always kill off female characters and characters of color in meetings they ignore or laugh off. They have Dylan Horrocks report that the meetings were gross and seeing them plan Stephanie Brown's torture and death made him feel sick and he felt vindicated when Girl-Wonder called it out. They made Steph and Gavin the sacrifices for very specific reasons, their choices were motivated by racism and misogyny.

So they need their own characters to justify their hatred. They have them victim blame and the audience is supposed to agree. Analyzing that, saying "what this character says is fucked up but the narrative supports it, let's talk about why that is" it's part of engaging with media. Even when your fav is one of the characters.

Also from a different poster:

Insane thing to say. People victim blame without actively making the culprit less culpable all the time. They can still say the serial killer is culpable while saying 'that kid got himself killed by getting in the car with that killer'. It's a horrible thing to say irl, it is victim blaming. It happens with rape all the time too 'hate that guy but you did this to yourself by taking a drink from him" that sort of thing.

Often the culprit is treated like a force of nature, something horrible that can't be helped and could easily be avoided, like the victim intentionally walked into a hurricane or something, and clearly wanted to die, and that's pretty much like how the Joker is treated. He killed Jason, and we hate him, but he's just what he is, so let's blame Jason for being near him instead.

Gobsmacked by this. Really shows how real life beliefs play into how we talk about these characters.

rest of the ask under the cut so if this gets back to someone nobody can claim its out of context.

Do you think grief and love can not be yielded from abusers? How easy it would be to walk away if that were the case. If only abusers were all bad people. If only all good fathers were never abusers.

The only thing that will happen is that more innocents will die and Israel will be incentivised to more aggressively eliminate threats. The iron dome is what allows it to have MORE restraint.

I keep thinking about this quote from the Politico article:

that's fine, I even agree, but it's not what's being done.

for example:

x

Israel is not being treated like other countries, and not being held to a standard set for other nations, including for the United States itself. instead, it's being held to a much higher, much more exacting and demanding one, and the threats against it are minimized or legitimized as Israel itself becomes seen as a global pariah.

I don't absolve or excuse Netanyahu and his right wing government for their actions and contributions to that, but the problem is...even if he were a dovish prime minister, in the aftermath of 10/7, I believe what we've seen happen in the world would still be the response, no matter what Israel did. we saw this in the reactions beginning on 10/8. because it's not about Bibi, it's far more existential than that. if it weren't, these politicians would support defense apparatus (the Iron Dome isn't even a weapon, it's a shield. it just stops more civilians from being killed), and they wouldn't align themselves with virulent antisemites or support an isolationist's bill that would even negatively impact aid for the people they pretend to care about. the dignity and safety of Palestinians is not their driving motivation.

Nothing to do with him being Mayor of one of the largest Jewish communities of the world.

Nothing to do with him agreeing with anti-Jew protestors

Nothing to do with antisemitism being so high

Nothing to do with being scared for our loved ones

Nothing to do with not trusting someone who uses not just dogwhistles but full on rhetoric from the 30s.

And nevermind all the commentary and protest that people like Platner get. It isn't happening. Every Jewish person embraced Platner and doesn't speak against his ilk.

Its because of his religion that most of the posts never mention, if the posters even know about it in the first place.