Now Cracks A Noble Heart

My main account got @-ed on this scam (no I won't say which one), and it occurred to me that some of the people here might not realize this is a scam.

me, an elder fandom veteran, suddenly having anne rice flashbacks:

no.

NO.

starting to rock back and fourth.

you do not understand.

you were born into an age of peace. i was there Gandalf. i was there three thousand years ago. i remember the cease and desists. i remember authors hunting fanfic writers for sport. i remember when every fic opened with a disclaimer because we genuinely thought it might protect us.

we do not charge money for the copyrighted gay wizard stories.

do not tempt fate youngling.

step away from the paywall.

that is how you summon the ancient evils.

No "buy me a kofi"

No links to patreon or other money-making sites or apps

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Don't let fear or feeling doomed stop you. If you're overwhelmed that's okay, but take a break, take a breath, talk to someone about how you're feeling, and continue.

Next time you’re watching any news show or political coverage see how many of these you can spot:

Quick rundown of each propaganda technique:

• Glittering Generalities: Using vague, emotionally appealing words (like “freedom” or “justice”) that sound good but lack specific meaning.

• Transfer: Associating a person, idea, or product with something already respected or disliked (like using a flag, religion, or celebrity image) to carry over those feelings.

• Name-Calling: Attaching negative labels to an opponent or idea to create fear or distrust without real evidence.

• Card-Stacking: Presenting only positive information for one side and leaving out or distorting the negatives.

• Testimonial: Having a famous or respected person endorse an idea, product, or cause.

• Plain Folks: Presenting the speaker as an “ordinary” person to seem relatable and trustworthy.

Shane: baby, of course. I would take such good care of you. Get you the nicest dirt I could. & I’d bring you to the rink every day so you could wiggle around on the ice :)

Ilya: okay :D would you still love me if I was bad at hockey?

That’s one question to ask, sure.

But when a little boy is being told by his mother to suck it up or else he’ll never be a real man?

That’s a woman placing that system’s constraints upon her son. She didn’t set it up any more than her son did, or her father did. But she is being the enforcer of the system.

We need to stop talking about patriarchal systems as though the current men who live under it made it, and we also need to stop talking about patriarchal systems as though they are ever only enforced by men.

from The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

When a man earnestly tries to verbalize the immense pain and suffering he experiences under patriarchy, and your response is a witty quip that shifts the conversation away from vulnerability towards mockery and blames him for the existence of the system both of you were born into without choosing, you are acting as a patriarch would like you to act: man up, shut up.

this is also not true btw. everyone needs to get more kyriarchy in their feminist analysis.

there is no "ongoing collective permission of men," because patriarchy is not a fucking democracy. it is one element of an entire matrix of domination (to use Patricia Collins' term from Black Feminist Thought) and the majority of man are, at best, foot soldiers and cannon fodder for the (white supremacist imperialist eugenicist cisheteroperisex-)patriarchy.

patriarchy, as all systems of oppression do, creates an illusion that the majority of people have some inherent connection with those in power, in order to convince them to support the system and so that they do not recognize how the system truly works. when you say shit like this, you are buying into that patriarchal illusion.

and like, yes, if all men / the majority of men suddenly developed a feminist consciousness and became dedicated to anti-patriarchal action, obviously that would be a massive blow to patriarchy and kyriarchy as a whole. but realistically, that will never happen in a way perfectly removed from everyone else? there is no way the majority of men will become anti-patriarchal without it having anything to do with women. there will never be a world where men simply decide that patriarchy is bad and deconstruct it while all the ladies sit around a pool drinking cocktails.

the system of white supremacy, of imperialism, of ableism, etc. could not exist without the participation of white people, citizens of the imperial core, abled people, etc. which is why these systems do not ask permission from these groups, they construct institutions and social worldviews which manufacture these groups & their participation in the system. these institutions and worldviews are difficult to separate oneself from, hard to even fully understand in the first place. it will NEVER ever ever ever ever be as simple as "everyone who is classed as the dominant group one day simply decides to reject it and then the whole system crumbles and everyone celebrates." liberation will always require solidarity. which itself requires emotional intelligence, conflict resolution skills, and not waiting for the people one suffers alongside to be ideologically perfect/ly aligned with you before they "deserve" your solidarity.